The Minefield

The civilian massacres in Israel on 7 October and the devastation inflicted on residents of Gaza both make claims on our humanity, on our capacity to recognise and respond to the deaths of others — but some find these claims mutually exclusive.

One of the great paradoxes of democracy is that those who will have to bear the consequences of the political decisions we make now have little-to-no say in the decision-making process itself.

Most of us are aware of the environmental costs associated with international tourism. But have we considered whether travel enhances or diminishes our moral lives? 

Blame and forgiveness are two of the most natural responses to wrongdoing — and yet, increasingly, these responses are viewed with a degree of suspicion, if not outright hostility, due to the myriad ways they can go wrong.

Is there any way of retrieving the deliberative conditions under which democratic life is possible, when the social media cacophony makes hearing one another so hard?

We’ve reached the point in mass culture, to say nothing of the “higher culture” of academia, when criticism is the norm. To the point that we increasingly define ourselves by what we hate.

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s depiction of Saturn eating his son is a haunting portrait of lust and the fear of one’s own finitude. Christos Tsiolkas joins Waleed and Scott to look into that darkness, and discover what looks back.

Now that the PM has announced the date of the referendum, it’s worth remembering that the zero-sum nature of referenda can unleash the kind of bruising rhetoric that does lasting damage to a political community, no matter the outcome.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has recently reintroduced the prospect of nuclear power as part of Australia’s commitment to decarbonisation. But what is behind the push for nuclear, and does it make sense in a nation like this?

When Oxford University proposed to confer an honorary degree on the man who ordered an atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe condemned the decision as “shar[ing] in the guilt of a bad action by praise and flattery”.