Portside

Scott McLemee predicts another round of slamming/defending Nazi-tool philosopher Martin Heidegger with the forthcoming English publication of his The Black Notebooks...l'affaire Heidegger has been recycled on at least three or four occasions. It's as if the shock of the scandal was so great that it induced amnesia each time. Trashing Heidegger distracts us from our own appalling national stupidities and our galling national avarice -- our own little darkenings.

Diagnosed with cancer in 2014, he was a leading figure in Nordic noir, and a social activist, best known for crime novels made into the TV hit, Wallender. Last year he wrote: it is possible to live with cancer. It is possible to fight against it. Nothing is ever too late. Everything is still possible. My stance is to do ultimately with what cancer has not taken away from me. It has not robbed me of my joy at being alive, or my curiosity about what tomorrow has in store.

Reader Comments: Ethel Rosenberg Celebrated in New York City; Elizabeth Warren and #BlackLivesMatter; The Obama Presidency - Afghanistan; Arne Duncan and 'Educational Reform' - Not; Racist Violence-Kansas; Syriza and its 'Left' Critics;

An alliance of Irish trade unions is determined to end the island’s draconian ban on abortion. The denial of the right to an abortion is not about morality, the law exists to target and punish working-class, poor and migrant women for daring to think they deserve equality and control over their own lives and bodies.

It may seem as if Christian conservatism, as a social movement, has always been with us. However, as Kim Phillips-Fein observes in this review of Kevin M. Kruse's history of the phenomenon, much contemporary conservative Christian discourse reflects "specific politics of the post-New Deal era, and the effort to shore up Christian commitments to capitalism as opposed to the welfare state."

The TPP is still secret and according to the terms in this year's fast-track legislation it will remain secret for 30 days after the president formally notifies Congress that he will sign it. That could be a while still, as the agreement's details need to be "ironed out." After that 30-day wait the full text has to be public for 60 days before Congress can vote. Expect a massive and massively funded corporate PR push. The biggest corporations very much want TPP.

In a speech challenging both national and global inequality, with a particular focus on France and South Africa, economist Thomas Piketty concluded with calls for taxes on wealth, and a public global registry of financial assets to make that possible. The speech evoked a frenzy of comment - from praise to denunciations of Piketty's analysis as Marxist or alternately, unrealistic, to those who criticized him for having a flawed analysis that disregarded Marxist insights.

According to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally. There’s no point in progressives seeking any “compromise” with them on gun issues. They can only be defeated by a true mass social movement supporting reasonable gun regulation.

The decision to release 6,000 federal prisoners before the end of their sentence is a sign of the failure of the "war on drugs." But it’s no substitute for systemic reforms that cut off the cycle of mass incarceration. Congress still needs to pass comprehensive criminal justice reform," said Michael Collins, policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance.

Grace Lee Boggs died yesterday at the age of 100. Boggs' love for humanity ran strong and deep, serving as a generative force for creating change. She was not a part of an elite intelligentsia. She lived in a modest little house on an even more modest income. She never held a tenured university job. She believed that ordinary people, not academics, had the power to understand their lives and to change the world with that understanding.