Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. I don't have anything much to say about the catastrophe in Sydney over the weekend. It's obviously heartbreaking. The only things that I could say would be platitudes.

It's interesting to notice one's emotional roller coaster as the facts come to light and the sense of relief that it's not ethnically motivated,

that it's not evidence of some kind of problem with Australian multiculturalism,

some kind of cultural schism, some sort of religious

backlash, some kind of importation of foreign feuds, ancient rivalries onto Australian shores,

that it's not an act of jihadist terrorism or, I don't know, ultra-Zionist extremism.

And yet, when all of that has been ruled out, and all you're left with is a 40-year-old

schizophrenic man who currently doesn't have a permanent address coming from Queensland into Sydney, renting

a small storage locker, and subsequently entering a shopping mall with a huge knife and

slaughtering, mostly women,

injuring a nine-month-old baby,

killing her mother.

The mother threw the baby to a bystander to save its life.

And then the incredible courage of a female police officer

who ran into the melee

and instructed the gentleman to drop his weapon

and when he refused and apparently lunged at her, she shot him dead.

When you strip away all the fears about it being part of some grander plot,

targeting specific communities.

What are you left with then?

Is it a more reassuring picture of the world?

That random psychotic barbarism just unleashes itself occasionally in these very normal safe spaces? Or is it less reassuring? There's been so much nonsensical

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