One-off short comment pieces from CW contributors on newsworthy issues.

The white working class: a race apart?

Barking and Dagenham local authority's mind games with the electorate

I am nervous about this focus on residents’ alleged ‘world view’. It is a thinly veiled reference to the notion that the white working class think differently to everyone else because – damn it – they keep voting the wrong way.

The power is ours!

POWER2010 explained

Politicians offer up various reforms, seemingly plucked from thin air, which they offer as the palliative cure for restoring ‘trust’  in the political system (and, of course, trust in them, the political class that manages it). But, so often, these reforms are touted with little regard for how they affect our democracy as a whole and not even a flickering recognition that the people themselves may like more than just a walk on part in this important discussion.

The poverty of moral philosophy

Can philosophers rejuvenate ethical debate in the public sphere?

By declaring the ‘solution to the Palestinian problem [is] in no way complex’, Ted Honderich articulates a Western disengagement from ethical debate that has become depressingly mainstream.

Knowing me, knowing you

‘Therapeutic education’ and the human subject

If bourgeois liberalism is guilty of neglecting the complexities of human experience and the social constraints on individual subjectivity, today’s therapy culture, even when informed by supposedly hard science, is no less guilty of constructing an idea of human nature on the basis of partial and one-sided impressions.

It’s the end of the world (and I feel fine)

A London physics teacher champions CERN's Large Hadron Collider

The ease with which crackpot theories about black holes eating the Earth from the inside have found a purchase on our collective psyche tell us we are very uneasy about the use of science to explore nature. Prophesying the end of the world has become respectable even among scientists, who seem to believe this is the way to secure public support for science – or at least ’useful’ science.