In what amounts to an editorial, Bhaskar Sunkara and Micah Uetricht write in Jacobin, what I consider, an unnecessarily scathing, counterproductive, and silly take on the Working Families Party endorsement of Elizabeth Warren. Their editorial in some ways says less about the politics of WFP and more about the politics of the editors of Jacobin.

There’s nothing wrong with taking issue with the WFP’s decision, but that isn’t the issue here. It’s how the authors do it. I could mention their dismissal of Elizabeth Warren and her many supporters with faint praise, among other things, but I will offer only the editorial’s concluding paragraph.

“The Sanders base,” Sunkara and Uetricht write, “isn’t going away, whatever the election results next year. The future of progressive politics lies with them. The Working Families Party has waited decades for that future, but the party may have just written itself out of it.”

Wow! Somehow I missed the anointment of Sunkara and Uetricht as the arbiters of all things left and Sanders’ supporters as the lodestar of the left.

Much of the media assume without any evidence yet that Iran was the site of the attack on Saudi oil fields. We’ll see. If you step back from the present situation playing out in the Middle East, it hard not to see the hand of the Trump administration as the cause of the exacerbation of tensions and conflict in that region of the world.

Maybe a starting point to deescalate tensions is for the Saudis to stop their genocidal war against the people of Yemen and for Trump to end the punitive sanctions against the Iranians. And, even if it turns out that the Iranians were behind the attack, the first and subsequent steps should be diplomatic, not threats, saber rattling, and war.

After listening to early Dylan and then some of his later stuff on my recent road trip to Detroit, I couldn’t help but think that I’m so glad he went electric and had the courage to evolve as an artist, despite the pressure not to do so. That said, I have to admit I spent more time listening to Springsteen on my 12 hour drive.

I think I listened to Promised Land 10 times!

It is noteworthy that the New York Times — arguably the most influential media outlet — has launched an unprecedented series of articles and podcasts on U.S. slavery. The decision, I’m sure, was the result of many factors, but at or near the top, I bet, is the new dialectic of racism and anti-racism that erupted in the wake of the election of President Obama in 2008 and acquired a new intensity with the election of Trump eight years.

In the article below, the author contends that Trump’s narrative has become hegemonic, leaving little space for counter narratives. But this strikes me as overdrawn and one sided. Popular understanding and politics are more complicated and contradictory than what the author suggests. In fact, what is surprising about this moment, to me anyway, isn’t the assault on truth, but the scale and depth of the resistance to this assault by a far flung coalition of people, organizations, and media outlets.

https://eand.co/how-capitalism-made-america-the-worlds-dumbest-country-ed33f15d1100