Portside

Voters reject EU austerity for radical alternative of far-left party. Upstarts fall two seats short of an overall majority. ‘Greece has turned a page,’ says 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras.

... the situation in Greece quite inspiring because you have here something really very rare in any country in recent years, which is an election in which the public is making a choice that matters. The outcome is not a question of some manipulation among existing political classes, or even the evolution of a previously existing party system, which was the case in Italy. They have a clear-cut choice, and they're making it. This is what democracy should be about.

His essays on police brutality still burn hot, but his understanding of sex, self-knowledge and power demand equal attention now. Baldwin does not say that systems of power are unimportant. He insists that liberation is also a mandate on individuality: how one separates oneself from the “habits of thought [that] reinforce and sustain the habits of power”—in essence, how one comes into his or her humanity.

We are all Roy Batty. All of our moments will be lost, like tears in rain…but weren’t they extraordinary moments?

Israel’s airstrike that killed Hezbollah and Iranian commanders in Syria last Sunday could be a highly risky pre-election gambit, designed to in part bolster Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral performance in 2015. And the predictable and possibly provoked Hezbollah response may set the stage for a direct Israeli confrontation with Lebanon.

Ukraine is an economic, political and military mess, and a major humanitarian tragedy. But, the New York Times and the U.S. media that follow its lead have provided us with only distortions, lies and omissions about the cynical U.S. role in creating and worsening the Ukraine crisis, and the calamitous global economic impact of the U.S. orchestrated sanctions against Russia.

Last October, Saudi Arabia’s Special Criminal Court sentenced Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a popular Shi’ite cleric and outspoken political dissident, to death. Now the fate of this Shi’ite cleric hangs over the Gulf like a sword of Damocles. Demonstrations demanding the death sentence be revoked have been held in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, and the United Kingdom, underscoring the international sensitivity surrounding al-Nimr’s imprisonment and death sentence.

Even as Israel is aggressively seeking to recruit French Jews to move to Israel, France is undertaking measures to stem the flow of young Muslims to the Middle East to fight with Islamist extremists in Syria and Iraq. There is much talk of restoring authority and “republican values” to the schoolroom. But French leaders need to take a hard look at their own totally incoherent foreign policy, and there is no sign as yet of that happening.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a Director’s Decision Friday rejecting an appeal by environmental watchdog groups to suspend operations at the nearly two dozen reactors in the United States that have the same containment system as the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan. Greenpeace charges the NRC is “backing off post-Fukushima fixes at reactors around the country due to fear that added regulatory costs would topple more nuclear plants."

It always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual soldier's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that.