Reading List: December 11, 2016.

Sunday!

We’re in an age of anger according to Panjak Mishra. Mishra, at The Guardian, writes that Trump’s election is the culmination of years of rage.

We find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities. What used to be called “Muslim rage”, and identified with mobs of brown-skinned men with bushy beards, is suddenly manifest globally, among saffron-robed Buddhist ethnic-cleansers in Myanmar, as well as blond white nationalists in Germany. Violent hate crimes have blighted even the oldest of parliamentary democracies, with the murder of the MP Jo Cox by a British neo-Nazi during the venomous campaign for Brexit. Suddenly, as the liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “Enlightenment humanism and rationalism” can no longer adequately “explain the world we’re living in.”

The largely Anglo-American intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos — and so we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” — “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”

Alex Thompson reports for VICE that Trump and Clinton supporters live different lives online.

“All of this paints a bleak picture of online political discourse,” said John West, a data journalist at the MIT Media Lab who worked on the study. “It is one balkanized by ideology and issue-interest, with little potential for information flow between the online cocoons — or between the loud and important cluster of exclusive Trump followers and the institutionalized media users that are supposed to be political discourse’s immune system.”

Hannah Gais spent an evening with Nazis. Newsweek has the story. A real rogue’s gallery was in attendance.

As we sidled up to the bar, we made note of the online and alt-right celebrities: Charles C. Johnson of doxing and Twitter-ban notoriety; Matt Forney, a writer for the Return of Kings, a “men’s rights” website; Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE.com; Kevin MacDonald, a noted anti-Semite and editor of a white nationalist publication, The Occidental Observer.

Finally, a Seattle dispute between two Democrats at an organizational meeting continues. Andre Roberge has the story at Progressive Nation.

Earlier this week, the Progressive Armybroke the story about the controversy surrounding the King County Democrats’ reorganizational meeting that occurred last weekend. At the meeting, 36th District State Rep. Noel Frame publicly accused chair candidate Majid Al-Bahadli of assaulting her at the Democratic National Convention over the summer. Al-Bahadli was running for Chair of the King County Democratic Central Committee but did not win.

More at the link. See y’all tomorrow.