Portside

Reader Comments: Celebrating International Women's Day (Bev Grant in song); Democracy Spring - call for national civil disobedience actions in Washington, DC in April; Trumpism - What it Means; Race and Representation; Stephen Hawking and Robots; In Memory of Dr. Quentin Young; Tech Workers and Unions; Report from Palestine; Leonard Peltier Film Series starts in New York.

Events in Germany are truly alarming - with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) moving up into third place and both the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) slipping. This is connected with the immigrant wave but laden with too many nasty memories - and there is rightward shifts in France, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark and Sweden.

In 1970, the United States Post Office Department issued a 6 cent stamp to commemorate the Stone Mountain Memorial. Ken Lawrence summarizes the historical and political background of the memorial and suggests that the stamp was veiled gift to Southern advocates of white supremacy.

Can disruptive social movements change the world or are we better served by take-it-slow, wait-a-year-or-more-to-speak-up, incremental change? Mark and Paul Engler make a case for the former, arguing in their new book, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, that supposed pragmatism often stands in the way of genuine progress. The grand slogan of Paris, 1968 -- "Be realistic, demand the impossible" -- is sage and sober advice.

The results prove it's far too early to declare the nomination contest over. As FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten admits, to find an upset on the same scale as what Sanders achieved in Michigan you'd have to go back over 30 years. Those polls that put Illinois and Ohio out of Sanders's reach look a lot less reliable today. And if Sanders wins in those states, it won't be his viability as a candidate that is in question.

A 2014 interview with renowned Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated last week.

There has been much said about younger women who do not support Hillary having not suffered the difficulties of the workplace yet. Once they do they will be on board, like their mothers, supporting a woman for president. But although this may sometimes be the case, I think something else is going on. It is called complex, multiple, feminist initiatives/alternatives.

The corporatizing of higher education is a national epidemic; community colleges are especially susceptible given their history as vocational institutions and the common misperception that this is their sole mission in a capitalist economy.

After she left office, Clinton criticized Obama’s quip that a central principle of his foreign policy was “don’t do stupid s---,” saying that “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Maybe so, but it reflects a common sense that Sanders and Obama exhibit, and Clinton consistently does not.

SCOTUS’s Feminist Half; Obama Busts Abstinence; The Incredible Trump; God’s Own Führer; Mad, Gifted and Jewish