Portside

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.

Portside's posts did not go out as scheduled Saturday and Sunday. Our service provider, May First, upgraded all of their servers Saturday, to prevent coordinated hacking and DOS - Denial of Service attacks. Unfortunately there were conflicts between the new server software and the software that Portside uses to send posts. We have identified the problem, and are now working to correct it. Below is an Index of the posts that were posted to our website over the weekend.

Reader Comments: How Social Change Happens; Bernie, Hillary, Kissinger and Scalia; AFL-CIO Election Survey; DNC Lets Lobbyists Back In; Bernie as the Peace Candidate and Remembering 1972; Teaching - With Protest Music; Obama's Military Aid to Israel; Announcements - 50 Years After the Mississippi Summer Project; Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; Labor for Bernie and Beyond - National Meeting;

Sanders attended the 1963 March on Washington, but most of his work was in and around Hyde Park, where he was involved with the campus chapter of CORE in 1961. A group of apartment-hunting white and black students discovered that off-campus buildings owned by the university were refusing to rent to black students, in violation of the school's policies. CORE organized a 15-day sit-in at the administration building, which Sanders helped lead.

Reader Comments: What do Wealthiest Deserve?; Bernie or Hillary - Ben Jealous, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Lee Saunders; Teaching with Protest Music; Israel Crackdown on Palestinian Peace Activists; Uber Drivers; B-52's Failed Against Hanoi; Announcements: Rebellious Lawyering; "The Fight to Vote Resources: New York Times Spoof Site Back Up; New Rosa Parks website; Black History Month - A Bad-ass from History; Tufts University Study on TPP'; The Armenian Genocide

Rosa Parks was a lifelong activist who had been challenging white supremacy for decades before she became the famous catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott. We see a woman who, from her youth, didn't hesitate to indict the system of oppression around her. As she once wrote, "I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro." Today we honor her, as part of African American History Month.

Reader Comments: New Threat to Voting Rights before Supreme Court; The Portrayal of African Americans on Stage and Screen - Tonya Pinkins the Real Mother Courage; Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Oregon Thugs; Left Gains Ground, Can It Hold; Trump and Fascism; Readers Respond to poem about Berlin Wall - The GDR, A Different Perspective; The Real Northern Student Movement; Shostakovich; Vivian Stromberg Presente.(Sorry for length, three weeks since Tidbits last appeared)

If the state says you go to bed by 10 o'clock, then you should make sure that by 11, the streets of our cities are filled with human protest and bodies! The fact that some might have a restless night with the noise downstairs or find it inconvenient because people blocked traffic, well that's the point - to snap you out of your indifference! So those who are turned off by radical thinking, or radical behavior, well, as a matter of fact, in many ways, you are our target.

Reader Comments: Sanders forces question - Are You a Capitalist; Media and Country Debate Socialism like no time in a hundred years; Clinton; GOP Crackup; Afghanistan; Puerto Rico; Palestine; Leonard Peltier; Readers Debate Tipping; Rosalyn Baxandall Announcements: Marxist classes and book talks in New York; Paul Robeson play in Peekskill; Palestine Solidarity and Paid Family Leave events in New York