One of the smartest and most incisive remarks I've come across during this crazy time, a nice change from the sad and crazy time we're going through, where opinions and remarks are flying around us like manure through a stable.

Strangely it appeared on Twitter, not always the place for reasoned comment. Not strangely, it came from Adam Liaw, the rather brilliant former lawyer, Masterchef winner, TV presenter and author.

He said: "One thing this pandemic has made clear is just how many people are used to living their lives doing whatever they like entirely free from any significant consequences arising from their actions. I'm not even judging. If anything I'm a bit jealous."

As Queensland ramps up full beast toad mode on the two, or perhaps three, 19-year-olds who went to Melbourne, had an illegal party, got COVID, flew home, lied about their movements, then cruised around from restaurant to cocktail bar to bubble tea house across Brisbane spreading it around, Liaw's comment echoed.

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What makes them tick? I find it hard to understand how people can as selfishly reckless as those two from Brisbane. But I should understand it better by now, given how often we see it.

From the crowd of 20-somethings in Thirroul who staged a party in a park BBQ shelter when the first lockdown happened, to the gang of four young women at Woonona pool last week sharing their lip balm around, the crews out to dinner together squeezed into small tables, even the friend who insists on shaking hands when you try to dodge it ... what makes you tick?

Back on Twitter there's a bleeding-heart brigade who are saying it's unfair to have identified the Brisbane pair, that shaming them will only bring more harm, and could mean people avoid getting tested.

I think the opposite. These selfish dunces brought the virus back to a state that had cleaned it up, and lied about it. The public shaming is appropriate. As we know well at the Mercury, where people call demanding we take down the court report from their drug deal or domestic violence conviction, many people seem to care less about the legal consequences than they do about whether it's made public. Perhaps the fear of public shaming is the best consequence.

Then there's the drongos who do it deliberately as some act of resistance, filming along the way. From "Eve Black" (actually Eugenie someone) in Melbourne who thinks you have to "consent" to laws for them to be enforceable, to the Canadian clowns in Kiama Heights who insisted on a policeman giving them details of his public liability insurance, to the woman at Bunnings who thinks freedom from masks is a human right, and the goose in his car trying to tell the police that "statutes" have different effects from "laws".

Don't trust the media, they say. If it's been researched and written by trained journalists with a code of ethics, don't believe it. If you see it on Facebook, in all different fonts, from someone nameless overseas, with crazy claims about the Magna Carta, then it's probably true. Don't be a sheep - just follow me and swallow that stuff whole.

Thank goodness I don't have any space left here for them.

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