Reading List: December 13, 2016

More than two for Tuesday.

Alana Hope Levinson, at Gizmodo, takes the opportunity provided by insufferable embarrassment Eric Garland to fight against “manthreading.”

The content of Garland’s self-proclaimed “<THREAD>” isn’t really important, as most aren’t. They are typically “intellectual” dribblings from men who love Explaining Things To Me (essentially a subtype of Online Mansplaining). These are people who want their ideas to take up the absolute most space possible. Like Manspreading, but of digital space.

Over at The Concourse, Ashley Feinberg celebrates Donald Trump’s appointment of Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy.

Rick Perry, a swaggering idiot who found a pair of glasses on the street one day, is about to become the head of the Department of Energy, according to CBS News. The Department of Energy’s job right now is to develop the next generation of nuclear weapons. What this means practically speaking, of course, is that we are spectacularly and incontrovertibly fucked.

Jeff Kunzer writes about fake news at Media Roots. Our inability to trust the media or US institutions is a learned and logical behavior, he argues.

When the fourth estate loses its grasp over the pulse of America, and fails to provide answers for the misery millions of Americans face in their day to day toils for a system that actively disregards their despair, the people will look elsewhere. The rise of Breitbart, Alex Jones, and other misinformation despots say there is an answer — these demagogues paint a picture of nefarious masterminds who have manipulated America into servitude, and only you, the loyal viewers at home, are privileged to understand what is really going on.

And Fredrik DeBoer looks at post-election liberalism and sees parallels with the birther movement.

I have asked this question before, of Democrats, and I’ll ask it again: if, after losing a close election, Republicans responded by insisting that the outcome was in fact the result of a conspiracy between a foreign government, a non-state actor that has leaked information that was damaging to both parties in the past but which is now alleged to have particular allegiance to one, and an American intelligence service, all working together to install a Democrat… what would you say? Would you really take that seriously? Do we really need to pretend that the answer might be yes?

Hasta manana.