Just because face-eating zombies (aka artificial intelligence agents) sometimes escape the lab and maul civilians, that does not mean we should stifle innovation.
Our most potent national myth, the Anzacs, is a story about dying for each other. It has little to say about living together.
Fact-checkers declared Peter Dutton’s claim that Labor would scrap the CGT discount false. The truth is slippery. That’s why governments shouldn’t be in the business of ruling on it.
Sure, travel hacking isn’t free, and it isn’t as easy as taking gifts from Qantas, but it’s more dignified.
Holding all men to a higher standard feels right. But communal blame awakens demons that were best left asleep.
Do not get cast as a representative of your identity. Assert your glorious human messiness. Defy the whole sanctimonious circus.
As go the arguments about the blockbuster movie, so go our conversations about fairness, gender, race and immigration. And so go our elections.
Liberal-minded folks have failed. We got so obsessed with presiding over the match that we came to see ourselves more as referees than as players on the field.
The political elite’s refusal to acknowledge demographic and economic realities has driven the electorate into the arms of populists.
Strayans are not pitted against foreigners. The mob we’re pitted against is each other.
To demonise Zionists on the technicality that not all Zionists are Jewish is not the guilt-free kick they think it is.
Maybe the treasurer didn’t have the luxury of shooting for brighter stars than the taxation of assets. This thing is, it might be the only star he gets to hit.
Imagine knowing the exact date by which the other guy has to end the conflict and get petrol prices down, or he faces electoral annihilation.
Instead of rewarding psychological fragility, our government must stop incentivising young Australians to medicalise everyday struggles and anxieties.
Stripping festivals of religious rhetoric out of respect to minority groups denies our cultural heritage. Make this weekend about optimism, not dogma.
Rome didn’t fall because its engineers miscalculated the tensile strength of aqueducts. Countries fail when they cannot manage social, political or economic change.
The ballyhoo around America’s Iran campaign and Britain’s byelection is a glimpse into our future and the forces shaping the new hodgepodge political tribalism.
Instead of believing that ideas are strengthened by rational debate, much of our media and our online spaces behave as if ideas deserve to be insulated from criticism.
