Palestine Action members talk about their first year of direct action against Elbit.

Facebook is changing its name.

The reason? They’re not just a social media platform anymore. They’re so much more!

Definitely not the reason? Distract and distance from a whistleblower scandal, rampant fake news issues, and an evil reputation. No, really, it has nothing to do with those things…

Activist and writer Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, joins the Useful Idiots to discuss The Company Soon to Be Known As The Company Formerly Known As Facebook. We delve deep into the whistleblower’s findings, how Facebook has made free speech litigious, and its most recent laundry list of crimes against humanity. Plus what whistle blower Frances Haugen gets right and what she gets wrong.

We think we found a guest more “absolutist” (whatever that means) about the First Amendment than Matt is.

Evan asks the question: Can we see a world without Facebook? If the answer is yes, then it’s time to abolish it.

Plus, a final word on Colin Powell and Joe Manchin obstructs the Carbon Offset Consideration Kickoff. Yeah, he’s a real COCK block.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out. And stand by for the Substack-only episode in which Katie and Matt discuss potato chips and Evan discusses sex workers and the internet, which drops Monday.

Subscribe now

Author Mona Hajjar Halaby retraces her mother’s footsteps in Jerusalem.

At long last, we are finally tackling something related to The Sopranos. We discuss the many things wrong (and some things right) with the big-screen prequel THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK (2021); the spirit of American decline that The Sopranos captures at its best; and what the recent surge in prequels and reboots tells us about this world we live in.

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. To hear weekly bonus episodes, subscribe to the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus/

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Guest Liam Kofi Bright discusses Du Bois' ideal of value-free science and the place of science within his wider thought.

Tim Harper speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his Cundill History Prize-shortlisted book Underground Asia, which reveals how clandestine networks of anti-colonialist rebels operated across Asia in the early 20th century.

(Ad) Tim Harper is the author of Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Allen Lane, 2020). Buy it now from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imperial-Underground-Harper-Tim/dp/1846145627/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-viewingguide

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Jon Gruden's ugly emails and uglier defense of them. The Saudi royal family's purchase of Newcastle United to hide their crimes. Kyrie Irving's abstruse "the personal is political" defense of jobs over lives. Is there any thread linking these sad actors? Matthew and Jonah look for one in a wide-ranging conversation that probably raises more questions than answers.

Follow the Jacobin Sports Show on Twitter: @JacobinSports

Email us: jacobinsports@gmail.com

Democracy Now! 2021-10-19 Tuesday

• Headlines for October 19, 2021
• A Reluctant Warrior? An Examination of Gen. Colin Powell's Bloody Legacy from Iraq to Latin America
• "Second Chance": Deported to Haiti, Immigrant Activist Jean Montrevil Returns to U.S. on Special Parole

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“By the time Biden won the presidency, I was struggling to square what I was learning about the family's business dealings with the folksy image I had of him and his family. I just wanted to tell the story in full.”

Author Ben Schreckinger dug up the history of a family dynasty and put it into his book The Bidens, which explores the Biden family, Joe’s childhood, weird Delaware loyalty politics, the shady business dealings of Joe’s brother Jim, his son Hunter and, of course, the 2020 laptop story.

But what makes this book truly interesting? This tell-all book is inconvenient to both sides of the aisle because it’s just as critical of Trump, the Republicans, and even some Fox members (looking at you, Tucker).

Schreckinger is an equal-opportunity offender, and that’s part of what makes The Bidens such a great book.

As Matt Taibbi puts it: “This is reporting. This is what it looks like. I kinda forgot what it felt like. It’s a great book. And incriminating.”

Watch for yourself. Can you get a handle on what’s actually going on in the family?

Plus, drunk Kamala in space, Laura Ingraham’s kryptonite, and we take the Washington Post conspiracy quiz.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the republic that emerged from the union of the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th Century. At first this was a personal union, similar to that of James I and VI in Britain, but this was formalised in 1569 into a vast republic, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kings and princes from across Europe would compete for parliament to elect them King and Grand Duke, and the greatest power lay with the parliaments. When the system worked well, the Commonwealth was a powerhouse, and it was their leader Jan Sobieski who relieved the siege of Vienna in 1683, defeating the Ottomans. Its neighbours exploited its parliament's need for unanimity, though, and this contributed to its downfall. Austria, Russia and Prussia divided its territory between them from 1772, before the new, smaller states only emerged in the 20th Century.

The image above is Jan III Sobieski (1629-1696), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, at the Battle of Vienna 1683, by Marcello Bacciarelli (1731-1818)

With

Robert Frost The Burnett Fletcher Chair of History at the University of Aberdeen

Katarzyna Kosior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Northumbria University

And

Norman Davies Professor Emeritus in History and Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

This week: Isaac spends 30 minutes unpacking the 400+ page ramblings of a cranky retiree who died about 200 years ago, but whose polemics against his own society have a remarkable amount to teach us about one of the most important moments in Japanese history.

Show notes here.

We all do it. But is there anything philosophically interesting about complaining? Agnes Callard thinks there is. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast she discusses complaint with Nigel Warburton.

Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton speak with economist Michael Hudson about his book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire."

Professor Hudson just published a 3rd edition that updates his analysis for the 21st century, discussing the new cold war on China and Russia and the ongoing transition from a US dollar-dominated financialized system to a "multipolar de-dollarized economy."

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uiz934HVZjY

Michael Hudson's website: michael-hudson.com

Because there is no way to deny that Israel refuses to grant basic civil rights to millions of Palestinians in the territories it has occupied since 1967, the Israeli government and its supporters in the West reflexively smear anyone who refuses to ignore or excuse this injustice using a familiar set of lies.

That’s why the attacks on Sally Rooney this week, for refusing an Israeli publishing firm’s request to produce a Hebrew translation of her new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” to honor the Palestinian-led cultural boycott of Israel, were so predictable.

Rooney explained in a written statement that she was convinced that Israel’s unequal treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories was akin to the former apartheid regime in South Africa, justifying an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions like the successful one against that state.

“Earlier this year, the international campaign group Human Rights Watch published a report entitled ‘A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’. That report, coming on the heels of a similarly damning report by Israel’s most prominent human rights organization B’Tselem, confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying: Israel’s system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law,” Rooney wrote.

“Of course, many states other than Israel are guilty of grievous human rights abuses,” she continued, preempting one of the most common objections to the boycott campaign raised by supporters of Israel. “This was also true of South Africa during the campaign against apartheid there. In this particular case, I am responding to the call from Palestinian civil society, including all major Palestinian trade unions and writers’ unions.”

But before Rooney released the statement explaining her reasons for joining the boycott, she was accused of being either an antisemite, for singling out the world’s only Jewish state for criticism, or a hypocrite, for not taking similar actions to prevent translation of her work into the languages used in authoritarian nations.

“Sally Rooney’s novels are available in Chinese and Russian,” the literary critic Ruth Franklin tweeted. “Doesn’t she care about the Uighurs? Or Putin-defying journalists? To judge Israel by a different standard than the rest of the world is antisemitism.”

A London correspondent for i24 News, an outlet based in Tel Aviv, Israel, chimed in, asking, “Will she refuse Russian, Arabic and Chinese publishers, too?”

The next day, an app used by Israel’s government to coordinate the outrage of its supporters on social networks directed them to like a Facebook comment “saying that her decision reflects her antisemitic behaviour!”

Israel's anti-BDS app is directing users to post comments on social media accusing novelist Sally Rooney of antisemitism for boycotting an Israeli publisher. #SallyRooney #BDS @Telegraph pic.twitter.com/izx3Dw4hJr

— Behind Israel's Troll Army (@AntiBDSApp) October 12, 2021

The self-described Zionist music journalist Eve Barlow tweeted, despite a lack of evidence that Rooney had ever expressed any anti-Jewish sentiment: “I fully expect people like Sally Rooney to be antisemitic. It’s not a surprise. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t.”

Judea Pearl, an Israeli American computer science professor whose son Daniel was murdered by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002, responded to Barlow by baselessly accusing Rooney — who was an international debate champion before she turned to fiction — of having adopted an anti-Israel position without having given the matter any thought at all.

As one stunned Irish observer noted, Pearl added that he might have expected Rooney to be antisemitic based on his offensive, and shockingly inaccurate, caricature of what her background must have been as a typical Irish person: “alcoholic parents, fanatic teachers, bad neighborhood etc.”

Sally Rooney, like anyone who grows up in the “bad neighbourhood” that is *rural Mayo*, with “alcoholic parents” who *run a regional arts centre* and “fanatic teachers” at *Trinity College Dublin* can’t help being an antisemite.

But opposing genocide in Palestine?

Unthinkable! pic.twitter.com/20LefJeNZR

— Pádraig Mac Oscair ?? (@PMacoscair) October 15, 2021

Ignorance about the Irish was a factor of much of the criticism of Rooney’s decision on social networks. The thought that something other than antisemitism — like the sympathy of one formerly colonized nation for another — might explain widespread Irish support for the Palestinians seemed to be utterly lost on most of those dismissing Rooney’s stance.

More knowledge of Irish history might have made Rooney’s decision less shocking to her critics. None of them, for instance, seem aware that the battle of an indigenous population to regain control of its land from settlers who seized it as part of a violent process of colonization is far from abstract to the Irish. Just last month, Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, turned down an invitation to join the British queen at an event to commemorate the creation of Northern Ireland through the partition of Ireland along ethnic lines 100 years ago.

Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement, observed in an email interview that the “first significant instance of cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa was a 1964 declaration signed by twenty-eight Irish playwrights who committed not to permit their work to be performed before segregated audiences in South Africa.”

Barghouti also observed that the demand for Rooney to make her work available in Hebrew, or be branded an antisemite, “attempts to center the oppressor community and its privileged entitlement to read world literary works in its language intentionally de-center the oppressed, the Indigenous Palestinians, and our fundamental entitlement to freedom, justice and basic human rights.” (He might have added that the outrage at Rooney’s decision to not license a Hebrew translation is particularly odd given that just 8 percent of Jewish Israelis do not speak English.)

Then there’s the fact that Rooney is from Mayo, the Irish county where the term boycott was invented in 1880, during a popular struggle to regain control of the land from the descendants of English settlers.

It is also absurd to claim that Rooney somehow arrived at her decision on a whim. In 2019, she added her name to an open letter deploring a decision by the city of Dortmund to rescind a literature prize from the writer Kamila Shamsie “because of her stated commitment to the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.”

Earlier this year, she signed a “Letter Against Apartheid” that called on artists “to exercise their agency within their institutions and localities to support the Palestinian struggle for decolonization to the best of their ability. Israeli apartheid is sustained by international complicity, it is our collective responsibility to redress this harm.”

As the writer and activist Omar Robert Hamilton observed, Rooney was simply “following through” on those principles when she announced that she would stop working with the Israeli publishing house Modan, which published Hebrew translations of her two previous novels but also prints books for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, including an ethics guide for soldiers by the moral philosopher Asa Kasher, who helped craft the Israeli army doctrine that killing civilians in Gaza is acceptable to protect Israeli soldiers.

There was also support for Rooney. The novelist Michael Chabon told The Associated Press that “as a proudly Jewish writer who wants Israel to survive and thrive, and (and therefore) supports the Palestinian people in their struggle for equality, justice and human rights, I say yasher koach (Hebrew for ‘Good job’ or ‘More power to you’) to Rooney.” Chabon added that he might consider joining the boycott of Israeli publishers in the future.

On Twitter, Chabon responded to a defender of Israel who called Rooney’s boycott “silly” and ineffective by writing: “I commend her experimental spirit; intractable evils demand no less. Who knows what effect it will or won’t have? Not us.”

Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, mocked a claim from a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, who said that Rooney’s stance “impedes peace, dialogue, or any meaningful change.”

Because Rooney achieved fame in her 20s and has been marketed in ways that draw attention to her youth, such as “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,” supporters of Israel have also attacked her as a self-obsessed millennial, a young woman too naive to understand the conflict.

Jake Wallis Simons, deputy editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, accused Rooney of “making a statement against Jews” in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph headlined “Sally Rooney’s Israeli boycott is nothing but a futile millennial gesture.” On Twitter, he added: “if Sally Rooney really cared about human rights and the values of democracy, free speech, and the rights of women and minorities, she would *support* Israel and prevent her books from being translated into Arabic or Chinese.”

But Simons has been making exactly the same argument since at least 2014, when he was celebrated by pro-Israel activists for describing calls to boycott Israel but not China or Saudi Arabia as “ridiculously naive and even hypocritical.”

Because these same arguments have been made since the BDS movement was created by Palestinian activists in 2005, the late historian Tony Judt had time to debunk them thoroughly before his death. In 2010, Judt told the London Review of Books:

If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state.

In the same interview, Judt explained that economic and cultural ties to European nations were very important to Israelis. “The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East,” Judt said. “Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe.”

In 2006, Judt, who had been an idealistic supporter of Zionism in his youth, had warned in the pages of Haaretz that decades of occupation and military rule over millions of Palestinians had been “a moral and political catastrophe” for Israel.

“Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country’s shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world,” Judt wrote. “Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, ‘targeted assassinations,’ the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish – which means that Israel’s behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel.”

“The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts,” Judt added, while warning that such accusations, when made baselessly, would only erode Israel’s moral credibility.

Judt, who taught at New York University, also sensed that Israel’s brutal occupation was alienating younger generations. “Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust,” Judt observed. “Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint.”

Fifteen years later, Rooney, who was born in 1991, argued this week that the most relevant historical frame for understanding the Israeli occupation is apartheid-era South Africa.

Barghouti points out that Jews in Israel and abroad who support the BDS movement “play a significant role in exposing Israel’s regime of oppression and advocating for isolating it.”

“Younger Jewish activists there and elsewhere are increasingly abandoning Zionism and supporting Palestinian liberation,” Barghouti added. “They understand that there is nothing Jewish about Israel’s siege, ethnic cleansing, massacres, land theft and apartheid, and therefore there is nothing anti-Jewish per se in supporting BDS to end these crimes.”

One of the most prominent Jewish writers to endorse the BDS movement is Intercept contributor Naomi Klein. Klein explained in 2009 that in order to respect the boycott, her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published in Hebrew by a now-defunct publisher called Andalus which she found with the help of BDS activists. Andalus, as Klein explained, was “an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew.” In that way she was “boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.”

Barghouti also notes that the boycott of apartheid South Africa was “a key reference” for Palestinians who first called for cultural boycotts against in 2004. “This reference is neither coincidental nor rhetorical,” Barghouti says. “It stems from the many similarities between the two cases of colonial oppression, and it aims to highlight the effectiveness and moral unassailability of using the boycott in the cultural sphere to resist a persistent oppressive order that enjoys impunity and ample complicity from the powers that be around the world and to increase the isolation of oppressive regimes, like apartheid Israel.”

Rooney’s use of the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of the captive Palestinian populations in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, which was repeated on news sites worldwide this week, comes five years after the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee defined that term on the closing night of the 2016 Palestinian Festival of Literature in Ramallah.

Coetzee, who had just completed an intense weeklong fact-finding mission across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, began by saying that he had always been reluctant to use the word apartheid to describe what was happening in Palestine. “Like using the word genocide to describe what happened in Turkey in the 1920s, using the word apartheid diverts one into an enflamed semantic wrangle which cuts short opportunities of analysis,” Coetzee explained.

“Apartheid was a system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity put in place by an exclusive self-defined group in order to consolidate colonial conquest, in particular, to cement its hold on the land and on natural resources,” Coetzee said next. “In Jerusalem and the West Bank, to speak only of Jerusalem and the West Bank, we’ve seen a system of enforced segregation based on religion and ethnicity put in place by an exclusive self-defined group to consolidate a colonial conquest, in particular to maintain, and indeed extend, its hold on the land and its natural resources. Draw your own conclusions.”

The post Lies Are Being Told About Sally Rooney Because She Refuses to Ignore Israeli Apartheid appeared first on The Intercept.

REEES faculty profile of Attila Kenyeres on his research into media manipulation and "fake news."

The post REEES Faculty Spotlight: Attila Kenyeres appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Democracy Now! 2021-10-13 Wednesday

• Headlines for October 13, 2021
• Family Searching for Migrant Father Who Went Missing in Texas Desert as Border Deaths Hit Record
• "Missing in Brooks County": Thousands of Migrants Denied Due Process at Border Have Died in Desert

Download this show

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the race to build an atom bomb in the USA during World War Two. Before the war, scientists in Germany had discovered the potential of nuclear fission and scientists in Britain soon argued that this could be used to make an atom bomb, against which there could be no defence other than to own one. The fear among the Allies was that, with its head start, Germany might develop the bomb first and, unmatched, use it on its enemies. The USA took up the challenge in a huge engineering project led by General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer and, once the first bomb had been exploded at Los Alamos in July 1945, it appeared inevitable that the next ones would be used against Japan with devastating results.

The image above is of Robert Oppenheimer and General Groves examining the remains of one the bases of the steel test tower, at the atomic bomb Trinity Test site, in September 1945.

With

Bruce Cameron Reed The Charles A. Dana Professor of Physics Emeritus at Alma College, Michigan

Cynthia Kelly Founder and President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation

And

Frank Close Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Legendary socialist scholar Tariq Ali on the long history of Afghanistan: the 19th and early 20th-century wars against the British Empire; the communist coup, Soviet invasion, and US-backed mujahideen war; the rise of the Taliban; and the 2001 US-led NATO invasion through the recent US defeat and withdrawal. Plus, a lot about Pakistan. 

Pre-order Ali's forthcoming book The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold versobooks.com/books/3939-the-forty-year-war-in-afghanistan

Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and receive our weekly newsletter

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Guest: Dr. Isa Blumi. This is a wide-ranging discussion about the political realignments in the Gulf states, new partnerships in the Middle East and Africa, Qatar’s involvement in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, developments in Yemen, quiet military repurposing of strategic island of Socotra, the long and complicated exploitation of East Africa, the Red Sea region and Horn of Africa, the mass of military bases in Djbouti, the Turkey-Russia relationship and more.

For those listening to the audio version of this podcast, we have added many maps and other visual enhancements to the video version that you might find helpful during some of this discussion so if you are interested you can find those versions on Youtube and Rokfin right now and other video platforms in the not too distant future. 

Dr. Isa Blumi is an historian, an author and Professor of Global History, Islamic World, Ottoman Empire, Yemen, Albania. His most recent Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World tells the story of the wars in Yemen but also “ultimately tells an even larger story of today’s political economy of global capitalism, development, and the war on terror as disparate actors intersect in Arabia.”  He also authored the book Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World

FOLLOW Isa Blumi @IsaBlumi and find his work at Google Scholar and his latest book at UCPress.edu. 

Around the Empire aroundtheempire.com is listener supported, independent media.

SUBSCRIBE/FOLLOW on Rokfin rokfin.com/aroundtheempire, Patreon patreon.com/aroundtheempire, Paypal paypal.me/aroundtheempirepod, YouTube youtube.com/aroundtheempire, Spotify, iTunes, iHeart, Google Podcasts

FOLLOW @aroundtheempire and @joanneleon.  Join us on TELEGRAM https://t.me/AroundtheEmpire

Find everything on http://aroundtheempire.com  and linktr.ee/aroundtheempire

Recorded on October 6, 2021. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

1. Book: Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World

We have discussed many bad films on this podcast, but now we finally turn our attention to The Worst Movie Ever Made™. We analyze how Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1957) turns the movie industry's flotsam and detritus into a Hollywood dreamscape. PLUS: The Sopranos, Necromania, and Justin Trudeau's recent vacation.

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. To hear weekly bonus episodes, subscribe to the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus/

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Sean Larson, historian of the German Revolution and the Weimar Republic, joins Long Reads for a discussion about party politics and worker struggles during Germany's inter-war period. Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn.

You can find Sean's work on Jacobin, including his piece "When Germany's Social Democrats Made a Revolution by Half" here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/german-revolution-1918-review

Produced by Conor Gillies, music by Knxwledge.

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*We did Idiots Live this week instead of the Four Food Groups. Check it out here*

“We're at the beginning of the fourth quarter.”

This is what The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim predicts for the play unfolding in Washington: Will Biden get his bill passed?

He analyzes the major players.

1. The Dems. 48 of them want a bill that has free college and a whole bunch of other Sandersian provisions. This really confuses us after they spent the last two elections trying to bury Bernie and his ideas. Grim explains:

'“Hugo Chavez had this funny quote, ‘I saw a revolution coming and it was either going to wipe me out or I was going to carry out a revolution. So I figured I'd rather carry out a revolution.’” Maybe the Dems realized they were falling behind, so they (conveniently) changed their principles.

2. The Villains. Manchin and Sinema. Do they really oppose the bill or are they just cast as the foils for the Dems who don’t really want to pass their own bill?

3. The Republicans. Or are the Villains serious? Could Sinema switch to the Republican party? Will Manchin really defy Biden’s angry tirade:

“Joe, you're going to take my fucking bill down. You're going to destroy my fucking presidency.”

We’re closing in on the end of the infrastructure and spending bill saga. Maybe we’ll finally get some answers (and get to talk about something else.)

Plus, Ryan talks the two Useful Idiots unfairly stuck in prison, Assange and Donziger.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out now.

Subscribe now

elfeed is awesome!

I blogged about how I use elfeed to manage all my RSS feeds and read them in the distractionless Emacs window.

This post is about setting up elfeed.

In Doom Emacs. You just enable/uncomment the rss app in init.el, and configure the RSS sources either with the (setq elfeed-feeds ...) directly, or with +org and configure in ~/org/elfeed.org (I preferred the latter).

If you are not in Doom Emacs, follow elfeed doc to set it up. Their README is straight forward.

The usage is simple:

You can do instant search by pressing the s key, read a feed by pressing enter, or mark a feed as read, and press g to refresh the list.

One quirk I learned is that, elfeed don’t really delete your feed. If you don’t want to see them as again, just mark the feed as read, and refresh.

Happy reading!

A quick note that I thought might be interesting to document.

As befits a shell written in elisp, eshell is extremely easy to modify to your use. There are a few packages floating around that add autojump/fasd/z type functionality to eshell. These let you jump quickly to any previously visited directory. As it turns out it’s very easy to implement a more powerful version of this by piggybacking off of consult-dir.

Here’s a z command that lets you jump to any previously visited directory, as well as any bookmark, project or emacs-wide recent directory:

It’s a single function:

(defun eshell/z (&optional regexp)
    "Navigate to a previously visited directory in eshell, or to
any directory proferred by `consult-dir'."
    (let ((eshell-dirs (delete-dups
                        (mapcar 'abbreviate-file-name
                                (ring-elements eshell-last-dir-ring)))))
      (cond
       ((and (not regexp) (featurep 'consult-dir))
        (let* ((consult-dir--source-eshell `(:name "Eshell"
                                             :narrow ?e
                                             :category file
                                             :face consult-file
                                             :items ,eshell-dirs))
               (consult-dir-sources (cons consult-dir--source-eshell
                                          consult-dir-sources)))
          (eshell/cd (substring-no-properties
                      (consult-dir--pick "Switch directory: ")))))
       (t (eshell/cd (if regexp (eshell-find-previous-directory regexp)
                            (completing-read "cd: " eshell-dirs)))))))

Plus consult-dir, of course.

Note that if you provide input to the command instead, e.g. z doc, it will jump directly to the last matching directory you visited in eshell, i.e. ~/Documents/ or something like it.

The idea is simple, and it should be trivial to write something similar if you’re a Helm or Ivy user, as well as to write one for the comint mode M-x shell.

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

September 30, 2021 Patrick Wyman, author of this article (and this earlier Substack version) on provincial elites • Duc Hien Nguyen on queerness, social reproduction, and capitalism