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Most of us are aware that the emergence of social media platforms and their omnipresence in our lives have fractured public discourse and undermined the conditions of democratic deliberation.
But we are only now beginning to grapple with the way corporations — having already decided to make “values” and “ethics” central in their self-presentation to consumers — have become increasingly susceptible to public pressure to deal harshly with employees who express controversial, distasteful or simply divisive opinions.
As a result, limitations on the speech of employees are being tolerated that would rarely be accepted within a democratic society.
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“Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” Such is the assessment of Peter Wehner — a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, and an outspoken critic of Trump himself — in the aftermath of the former president’s thundering re-election victory.
It was not an electoral college landslide of the order of Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1996. But it was sufficiently decisive as to command a reckoning. Perhaps most obviously, his victory relegates the Biden presidency to a kind of hiatus within what may well prove to be Trump’s twelve-year dominance of American politics.
The fact that Trump survived all the forces arrayed against him — political, legal, economic, cultural, popular — reinforces the power of his “persecution” narrative, and will likely only deepen Americans’ disdain for democratic institutions. One of the live questions of this election is whether Trump’s resurgence will encourage the would-be-antidemocratic leaders of other nations to follow his playbook.
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One of the defining features of the last century is the fact that “evil” has become more vivid to our imaginations and common in our language than “good”. Stan Grant joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether “evil” is, in our time, a concept worth holding onto. Or does its use and misuse in our public discourse cause more harm and confusion than good?
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There is something undeniably satisfying about revenge. When we feel we have been aggrieved, harmed or humiliated, it is natural to want payback. In ancient Greece, to inflict such an injury was conceived of as incurring a debt — and the only way to make the perpetrator “whole” was to have the injury repaid in kind.
The paradox — as Socrates, Sophocles and Euripides all knew — is that revenge, though it is desired, is never satisfying, because it gives rise to a perpetual cycle of hit-and-retaliation. The future is thereby foreclosed by the need to repay the past. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”
In democratic politics and geopolitical conflict, the language and logic of revenge have begun to reassert themselves. What can be done to break out of its hold?
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Just weeks before a US presidential election, a combination of political mendacity, the perverse incentives offered by social media platforms, and opportunism on the part of content creators/consumers, have come together to form a perfect storm.
The tragic irony is that the devastating consequences of these forces have become apparent in the aftermath of two hurricanes which hit the American south-east in quick succession.
With state and federal elections around the corner, and little more than a year after the failed Voice referendum, can anything be done in Australia to stem the tide of online mis/disinformation? Legislative attempts to hold social media platforms to account are undoubtedly important — but the more urgent task may be addressing democracy’s current “trust deficit”.
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After the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the outcome of the Brexit referendum, “populism” became the catch-all diagnosis for everything the ails democratic politics. But its polemical use has tended to obscure rather than clarify the meaning of the term.
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The policy of negative gearing — which gives the owners of investment properties an unlimited ability to deduct losses from their overall taxable income — has come to symbolise the disparity between the different ways Australians see home ownership: for some, it is a means of wealth creation; for others, it represents the ever-receding promise of shelter, stability, security.
It is unsurprising, then, that the policy would evoke such strong feelings whenever it re-enters public debate.
Will changes to negative gearing solve Australia’s housing affordability crisis? No. But inquiring into why it elicits such powerful emotions can help us think more clearly about the moral dimensions of our relationship to housing and home ownership.
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The war poetry of Wilfred Owen refuses the comfort of hollow consolation in response to the mass loss of life — it also urges the sacrifice of the kind of bellicose pride that sees nothing but territorial gain and national self-interest, and is prepared to offer up the lives of the young to these ends.
In a time of heightened violence and bloodshed, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens – along with acclaimed concert pianist and award-winning writer Simon Tedeschi – attempt to recover the rhetorical power and moral significance of two of Owen’s best-known poems, “Strange Meeting” and “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”.
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With the US presidential election on the horizon, to say nothing of a number of Australian elections, our airwaves, news sites and social media feeds are filled with political rhetoric.
Many of us have come to accept political rhetoric — with its obfuscations, generalisations, exaggerations and outright evasions — as the price of doing business with democratic politics.
Is there a meaningful difference anymore between political rhetoric and propaganda? What disciplines and constraints must political rhetoric adopt in order to keep itself free of the propagandistic temptation?
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Given the dependence of many Australian universities on international student fees, a significant drop in enrolments with no corresponding increase in government funding will likely yield a decline in the quality of teaching and research, a reduction in academic staff, and a precipitous tumble down the world university rankings.
This would do considerable damage to Australia's fourth largest "export". If the forecasts are accurate, why would the federal government embark on legislation that amounts to an act of national self-harm?
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One of Australia’s greatest strengths has been the remarkable diversity of its multicultural society. But is this also a potential source of weakness? In this live recording at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, along with guest Stan Grant, explore the internal and external forces that risk undermining our sense of social unity.
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Even for a nation obsessed with the concept of “freedom” — or perhaps it would be better to say, concepts, not all of them easily reconciled, some of them utterly incommensurable — the prominence it was given during the recent Democratic National Convention was arresting.
It was as though the Democratic Party vaulted the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alike — both of which used “freedom” as a mantra, a talisman, a point of vital differentiation over against communism and terrorism — and return to the muscular wartime rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt, with his vision of domestic or civic freedom.
But are these competing visions of freedom not doomed to remain in an untenable tension without a mediating or underlying conception of freedom’s nature and limits?
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In democracies with a history of racial injustice, are “colourblindness” and recognition of a “common humanity” — which were at the heart of the moral philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. — desirable as expressions of our commitment to justice as equality?
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When the first episode of Seinfeld went to air in 1989, it faced stiff competition from a packed field of American sitcoms. By its finale in 1998, the “show about nothing” had redefined the sitcom genre and conquered comedy. Critical to its success was the unlikely alchemy of the four central characters — their navigation of the interpersonal conflicts and petty irritations of New York City life, and their heedless disregard for conventions of morality.
That was the trick: the situations they found themselves in had to be relatable, but the characters themselves could not be sympathetic. They had to be superficial, selfish, inconstant, immature, monstrous — which is to say, “Bizarro” — versions of themselves. As co-creator and executive producer Larry David put it, the guiding philosophy was “no hugging, no learning”.
But, as it turns out, there may just be a kind of moral seriousness lurking beneath the mania.
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In one form or another, comedy often proceeds from a certain exaggeration of life — exaggerated bodily movements, or facial expressions, or scenarios, or reactions. These exaggerations have an unreality to them, but still maintain an uncanny relationship to more “normal” life. Put another way: sometimes comedy is just plain silly, the art of relishing the fun of suspending our expectations and upending our social conventions.
What is happening when performers give free reign to the silly? Does it cut the cords of empathy and invite the audience to become mere spectators — whose enjoyment is vicarious, but not really participatory? Or does silliness bind performer and spectator together, inviting them to see reality in a different light?
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Immanuel Kant called laughter a form of the disappointment of the understanding — which is to say, surprise — for which the body then compensates: “Whatever is to arouse lively, convulsive laughter must contain something absurd … Laughter is an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into a nothing.”
But surprises, it turns out, come in many shapes and sizes — from a slip or a fall, to a near-miss when you expected an accident, to an uncanny coincidence where you expected randomness. Does our laughter, then, express delight at the surprise, or a desire to set things straight?
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The attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump, while undeniably shocking, was not altogether surprising. It was just the latest blow in a steady drumbeat of political violence that has only grown louder over the last decade.
This reflects the fact that political violence is “in the air”, and is increasingly being regarded by many Americans — and citizens of nations around the worlds — as a justifiable response to political disagreement.
What does it take for such violence to become thinkable? Do we possess the democratic antibodies to resist the contagion of violence?
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Comedy happens when something occurs that makes visible just how futile are our most earnest efforts, and how superficial are our solemnities, our moments of greatest seriousness and decorum — hence the deep connection between comedy, absurdity and tragedy.
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