Portside

There is growing fascination and nostalgia for dictators, extreme right-wing government in some countries and “illiberal democracy” in others. Why is this? What has happened to permit such a distortion of memory? How do myths replace reality?

Growing hardship is all but assured in 2023, and it will provide even more fertile ground for dangerous demagogues.

The American media needs to call this movement what it is, fascism, and demand accountability and answers from the thousands of Republican politicians nationwide who refuse to repudiate it.

DIY AI, more on Musk, and the NYT strike

The Holocaust serves, paradoxically, as an alibi for Europeans to assume they are morally superior to others,

"The masks have fallen. After the recent Israeli election, a new coalition with Netanyahu at the helm, supported by far-right parties with outright racist tendencies, represents one step further in the repression between the river and the sea."

While many observers have breathed a sigh of relief over the rout of extreme election deniers endorsed by Trump, and his seemingly deflated campaign launch, the revered sociologist Frances Fox Piven has a more sombre analysis

Less than half of US Jews had positive feelings for Mr. Netanyahu, according to a Pew Research Center study last year. Younger Jews, may not feel much connection with Israel at all - 27 percent between 18 and 29 said Israel was not important .....

Narrative story that reconstructs the astonishing resistance to Victor Orbán's authoritarian power-grab against universities in Hungary: students and faculty at the Academy of Theater and Film in Budapest occupied the school for 71 days...