Rationale’s top reads of 2023

Published: Wed, 01/03/24

Hi ,

From the Voice referendum, to Christianity's dominance of Army traditions, conflict in the Middle East, male circumcision, and neo-Nazi extremism – we published on a wide range of topics in our Rationale magazine in 2023.

So which articles resonated the most? Click here for last year's top reads.

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Si Gladman
Editor

Among the top reads of 2023

Russell Yardley

Phillip Hoglin

Paul Monk

Meredith Doig

Jonathan Meddings

The moral case for the Indigenous Voice (September 2023)

By Russell Yardley and Ian Robinson

The question of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia is fundamentally an ethical matter, though opponents often frame it in political or legal terms to avoid facing the moral issue. Australia’s colonial history has resulted in the disenfranchisement of its original inhabitants – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – by taking their lands without consent. The ethical solution, since returning the land is impractical, is to compensate and give a voice to the original possessors.

Read the full article

Why the Army’s choice to serve God comes at a cost to the nation (August 2023)

By Phillip Hoglin

On 8 July 2023, the Australian Army, specifically the 1st Armoured Regiment, had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to march through the streets of a major capital city, display its military hardware and inspire the next generation of potential recruits. The Army had a chance to display that it was not a conservative and traditional Army but was instead a progressive, multicultural, diverse and technologically advanced organisation. It had a chance to market itself to a broad demographic that it was representative of the nation’s population. In doing so, it could have hoped to secure the next tranche of recruits that would be responsible for the defence of the nation. Instead, it squandered an opportunity.

Read the full article

Thinking clearly about the Gaza problem (October 2023)

By Paul Monk

Truth, an old saying has it, is the first casualty in war. Why would that be? Because the universal tendency of human beings to partiality and confirmation bias, fueled by fear and rage, reinforced by the propaganda of warring state authorities and their policies of censorship and secrecy, serves to undermine both dispassionate thought and fearless reporting from the front. It astonished me that, in the immediate aftermath of the appalling razzia – a French word derived from the Arabic word ghazah, meaning violent raid – by Hamas terrorists on 7 October, so many people celebrated both the massacre and indiscriminate brutality of Hamas and called for support of ‘Palestine’ and its liberation, while denouncing Israel.

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Rationalists and circumcision (April 2023)

By Meredith Doig

Conscious that circumcision is a sensitive topic and that, as a woman, I have no personal experience of it, I invited readers to send me their thoughts. I was surprised. I would have thought Rationalists would judge this issue from a disinterested perspective and comment on the principle of whether it’s morally acceptable to cut off parts of another human being’s body, particularly when they are in no position to provide consent, and when these days there is no compelling reason to do it, the hygiene reason having been pretty much rebutted in recent years. Instead, I got generalisations from personal experience, with the message being, “Doesn’t worry me, my sex life has been fine thank you very much.”

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In the face of extremism, liberals must snap out of their complacency (April 2023)

By Jonathan Meddings

Several years ago I found a copy of Mein Kampf in a second-hand bookstore in country Victoria. Better my bookshelf than a neo-Nazi’s, I figured, so I coughed up the $90 asking price. I confess I thought about burning it, but the irony of doing so would have simply been too much. I didn’t think it was possible to like Hitler any less, but the preface in which he wrote “every great movement on earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers” did the trick. His diatribe now sits alongside other reference texts filled with hateful nonsense that condone genocide, and which so happen to prove Hitler was wrong about the power of the written word to change the world — the so-called ‘holy books’. It’s no coincidence that political and religious ideologues inevitably find themselves bedfellows.

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