Skip to main content

Tidbits - November 16, 2017 - Reader Comments: Sexual Predator on the loose in Alabama; North Carolina Black Church vandalized; Worker Abuse, Sexual Abuse; Russian Revolution; Muslim Ban - new resource; Announcements; and more....

Portside
Reader Comments: Sexual Predator Against Prosecutor of KKK in Alabama; North Carolina church vandalized this week by KKK; Picketing Kennedy White House against nuclear weapons; Worker Abuse and Sexual Abuse; Looking back - 100th Anniversary of Russian Revolution; Readers catch errors in Portside posts; How Should Progressive Talk About Muslim Ban - new resource; Announcements - New York City politics; Anti-Semitism today; Asian dance benefit for Puerto Rico; and more..

Trump's Itchy, Twitchy Finger

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
Focusing mainly on Trump's first year in office, the authors emphasize what they call a pattern of systematic reaction, where growing voter frustration regularly drives each party in and out of control. Trump arrived with scant political capital, amassed little and appears to have no strategic competence going forward. While the authors believe Trump can develop one, the essayist faults the authors for offering nothing but wishfulness to back up the assumption.

Weinsteins in the Workplace: Will Unions Be Part of the Solution Or the Problem?

Steve Early The Stansbury Forum
It takes continuous organizational effort—in the form of training and recruitment, new leadership development, and structural change–to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the “house of labor” too.

Can My Children Be Friends with White People?

Ekow N. Yankah The New York Times
As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal.

What to Black People is the National Anthem?

Lisa Brock Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership
On Veterans day, the idea of the veteran was touted by POTUS and his supporters as an emotional counterweight to the protesting athletes. Dr. Lisa Brock reminds us that African Americans have historically had a conflictual relationship with US militarism.

Year One: When Black Women Lead

Steven W. Thrasher The New York Review of Books
Black women have long known that America’s destiny is inseparable from how it treats them and the nation ignores this truth at its peril.

50 Years On, Steinbeck’s Classic Still Packs a Punch

Barry Healy Green Left Weekly
This year marks the 50th anniversary of John Steinbeck’s great mythic novel of alienation under US capitalism, Of Mice and Men. The story is of lonesome labourers, reeling from the Great Depression, wandering from farm to farm seeking respite from their endless oppression.

The Death of Christianity in the U.S.

Miguel de la Torre Baptist News Global
As a young man, I walked down the sawdust aisle at a Southern Baptist church and gave my heart to Jesus. But I can no longer allow my name to be tarnished by that political party masquerading as Christian.

Yanis Varoufakis’s Doomed Fight Against Austerity

Emmett Rensin The New Republic
This volume is an insider's account of Greece's recent struggle to preserve the general welfare of its people in the fact of the belt-tighening demands of the managers of the international financial system. Reviewer Rensin offers an assessment.