Portside

Most Americans keep getting kicked in the assets.

Dildos are about as effective as guns when it comes to preventing shootings, protest organizers say.

The real choice in the future is either a hugely expensive for-profit oligopoly with the market power to charge high prices even to healthy people and stop insuring sick people. Or else a government-run single payer system.

The alt-right is a fringe bolstered by decades of Republican politicians—yes, even those that Clinton has extended a helping hand to—engaging in dog-whistle politics, cozying up to nativist movements, and guilt-tripping the poor and downtrodden.

Protests at Standing Rock. Van Jones: Trump #KoolAid. Our Revolution Launch. Hillary's Email Scandal Continues. The Exoplanet Next Door.

Even in the era of the Beatles and Motown's roster of stars, the brilliant James Brown established a place that was his alone. His was not about magic, it was about power that could not be denied by anyone brought within its field of influence. What the book's author also finds is a wary solitariness that paradoxically found its fullest expression in Brown's ability to give himself so completely in performance to suggest a generosity approaching self-immolation.

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The Turks don't want a Kurdish mini-state on their frontier any more than the Syrians want to lose territory to the Kurds (and neither do the Iranians, nor do the Russians want a Kurdish state on their border). And, Turkey is warming up to Russia and Iran in a bid to exit before a total rout of its proxies in Syria. Here Robert Fisk and Vijay Prashad present two nuanced perspectives.

Critics of solidarity between the Movements for Black Lives and the Palestinian struggle miss how concepts like apartheid are not meant to apply only when there is perfect equivalence between two situations. They also apply when the experiences of two oppressed groups share common features.

Trump's nationalism is absolutely about ethno-purity and an element of populism as well, although it's clearly a misdirection...it's largely about wounded national pride which has been a potent motivating force on the American right for a very long time. The reason Trump is now playing the conservative anthem "Proud To Be An American" at his rallies is: Good old fashioned jingoism - the one thing that brings the old right, the new right and the alt-right together.