Portside

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.

"Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, which observes the amount of time it takes the average black woman to earn the same pay that the average white man earns in one calendar year." Black women only make 60 percent of what white male counterparts make. This is a clear example of the importance of race and gender in determining salary.

By all means, look to the past. Learn and be inspired, but do not try to turn the clock back. The ultimate aim of socialism should be the abolition of capitalism — anything less than this is reformism in the service of capital. Socialists may disagree about the pace of transition, or the means of enacting revolutionary change — but their ultimate aim must be the end of capitalism.

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.