The Minefield

Nov 20 2024 239 ep. 53 mins 1.6k

The Minefield Podcast artwork

In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

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Is a “digital duty of care” enough to protect young people from social media’s harms?

Nov 20 2024 54 mins

Since the start of November, the Australian government has made two significant announcements aimed at preventing the harms that social media platforms are causing to the mental health of adolescents — but are these measures enough?

How much control should corporations have over the speech of their employees?

Nov 13 2024 53 mins

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 be

The return of Donald Trump — do we know what it means?

Nov 06 2024 54 mins

“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

Is the concept of “evil” worth retaining?

Oct 30 2024 54 mins

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?

Should revenge have any place in our politics?

Oct 23 2024 54 mins

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 kn

Can democracy survive the perfect storm of disinformation?

Oct 16 2024 53 mins

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 t

What is “populism” – and what kind of problem does it pose?

Oct 09 2024 54 mins

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.

What is it that makes “negative gearing” such a divisive tax policy?

Oct 03 2024 53 mins

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.

“Truths that lie too deep for taint”: Wilfred Owen’s war poetry in our blood-soaked present

Sep 25 2024 53 mins

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 Stephen

Can modern politics avoid propaganda?

Sep 18 2024 53 mins

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 th