Pack your bags, Julian Burnside, your companion is ready

Also, things are looking up for Scott Morrison’s unicorns.

Also, things are looking up for Scott Morrison’s unicorns and Mark Latham finds his man.

Julian Burnside on Twitter on Sunday:

Bigotry creates terrorists, by radicalising people who were willing to see hope in everything

Rodger Shanahan (associate professor at the Australian National University’s National Security College, and research fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy) replying over several tweets:

Comment from someone not very well travelled nor versed in areas in which he prognosticates. Am sure that the people killed (in) Nairobi mall, Paris, Brussels, New York, Ankara, Istanbul, Bali, Tunis etc were questioning their bigoted past before they were killed. Travel in some hard parts of the world, economy class by foot may expand your rather closed mind. I know your “thing” is to be controversial and eloquent, but some real life experience may temper your strange world view. Possibly. Education is supposed to allow discernment. Tempered by real life experience it is powerful. Alone it is like an empty vessel. Methinks you are an empty vessel railing against things about which you have theoretical learning but nil practical experience.

But Shanahan doesn’t just come bearing criticism, he brings a solution, too:

I would recommend a holiday to real world. Happy to travel with you. Warning: may involve real-life ­experience.

The Australian on Thursday:

The Prime Minister is also understood ... to have asked the Treasurer to pull back on his media commitments, concerned at his poor performance that week at the National Press Club and in a series of talkback radio interviews, where he spoke about “unicorns” and “pixie horses” …

SFGate.com on Monday:

A study published by the American Journal of Applied Sciences is drawing a lot of attention for positing an exciting theory: unicorns might have been real, and they may have shared the earth with humans.

Definitely not a pixie horse, though. SFGate.com continues:

Basically, it was an enormous rhino with a death stick on its forehead.

Mark Latham in The Daily Telegraph yesterday:

From an Australian perspective, there’s another sound reason to ­ignore the hysterical clamour about (Donald) Trump. His foreign policy is in our national interest.

A bit of foreign affairs, Trump style. Max Fisher picking through the tangle at Vox.com yesterday:

Trump wants to sanction and punish Iran, but he also wants to open up more trade with it, all within the same paragraph. This is the reasoning of a person who lacks something more fundamental than detailed policy knowledge — he lacks an understanding of how foreign policy itself, at a fundamental level, functions.

But things are looking up in some areas. BuzzFeed yesterday:

Donald Trump said in an interview on Monday that he was just joking when he made demeaning comments towards women in the past.

George Christensen’s website yesterday:

The idea of a separate state for North Queensland should be determined by a referendum of North Queenslanders only, and I will write to all MPs, senators and mayors who represent areas above the Tropic of Capricorn to invite them to be part of a concerted push for such a move.