The Off Topic Topic

[Valmy]

Not sure the best thread for this--but our boy Rudy Giuliani was just hit with a 150 million dollar judgment in his Georgia defamation case.

His downfall has been quite a spectacle to watch.

He associated himself with Trump.

And I used to marvel at how toxic being associated with Bill Clinton was. Being one of Trump's people will destroy your life faster than heroin.

[The Minsky Moment]

The big story out of Iran is the demonstration of popular support for a 70 year old taxi cab driver, whose Instagram page was shut down after he posted videos of his singing and dancing: https://iranwire.com/en/news/123392-iranians-dance-in-solidarity-with-uncle-sadegh/

Iranians are posting videos of themselves dancing in solidarity with an old man, dubbed "Uncle Sadegh," whose Instagram page was shut down by the authorities after a video clip of him dancing on the street in the northern city of Rasht had gone viral.

Iranians are posting videos of themselves dancing in solidarity with an old man, dubbed "Uncle Sadegh," whose Instagram page was shut down by the authorities after a video clip of him dancing on the street in the northern city of Rasht had gone viral.

— IranWire (@IranWireEnglish) December 11, 2023
In the videos, men, women and girls can be seen dancing on the streets and indoors in a show of defiance toward the Islamic Republic's security apparatus.

Last week, a message appeared on the Instagram page of 70-year-old Sadegh Booghi reading, "This page was blocked due to the publication of criminal content."

Police said that "12 Instagram page managers" were arrested for sharing the footage showing Booghi dancing.

The man had 128,000 followers.

There is an important point to be learned here about 20th century history.

The Iranian mullahs were so busy plotting revolution against the Shah that they never learned the most important lesson of the 1970s.  When people just want to dance, you can't stop the Booghi.

[HVC]

Footloose, the country.

[DGuller]

Not sure the best thread for this--but our boy Rudy Giuliani was just hit with a 150 million dollar judgment in his Georgia defamation case.

Is he good for it?

Not in the slightest.  He's been struggling to pay his legal bills.

Is Trump going to help him out?

[Barrister]

Not sure the best thread for this--but our boy Rudy Giuliani was just hit with a 150 million dollar judgment in his Georgia defamation case.

Is he good for it?

Not in the slightest.  He's been struggling to pay his legal bills.

Is Trump going to help him out?

What do you think?

[Jacob]

If I were to bet on it, I'd wager "no".

[Sheilbh]

Random question - putting together a costume from a movie for a party. What are those metal things on the tips of collars that American cops/paramedics etc wear?

[Grey Fox]

Collar brass.

[Admiral Yi]

You're so vain you probably think this throwaway line is about you

I think it's safe to say you're not a centrist dad or the type of person I think there's half a point about (which is always generalising anyway). Although I think on the American side it would maybe be the "Resistance" types who got a little overinvested (I was guilty too) in Mueller.

I'm trying to understand two things: what exactly your description means, and whether it is a literary construct or an observation of behavior in the real world.

[Sheilbh]

I'm trying to understand two things: what exactly your description means, and whether it is a literary construct or an observation of behavior in the real world.

I think it's based on the real world - I'm describing it badly there are loads of articles about this and, as I say, I think the critics have half a point. In particular I think there is something reactionary in the "centrist dad" world - it's all about restoring the status quo ante Brexit without acknowledging the problems there or that political world created the conditions for Brexit. All we need to do to return to the 1990/2000s is re-join the EU and follow the Blair style policies - without any sense of how that world was also politically contingent and has gone:
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/08/britain-reactionary-centrists-mad-conspiracies

I also think there is a big of conspiracy mindedness and paranoia going on there - and there's a centrist entertainment complex of social media figures, talk radio hosts and podcasts who exist (and profit) from their rage:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rage-is-swallowing-even-the-middle-ground-9s0lg2nf0

And that there's something to this critique of self-identifying centrists and what that can mean:
https://www.ft.com/content/ab7efc0a-06df-40e9-8681-8f2e9443e5c0

I don't agree with all of it but I think there is fair criticism here. I have less issue with the ideological centrists - a la Blair and Macron but as I say that might be because I sympathise with their radicalism. Also many "centrists" find Starmer very frustrating because he doesn't talk enough about Europe and Brexit - he appears to be accepting the current status quo. I think that's broadly positive and I think Starmer is clearly on the centre left but is, in my view, looking at the world as it is now including how it's changed rather than simply trying to restore Cool Britannia.

[Admiral Yi]

Paywalled.

[Sheilbh]

As I say - don't fully agree with eitherr and I think there is a place for centrism as an ideology that has done some of the hard yards of thinking through what they want (again Blair and Macron spring to mind). Also these are from 2023 to show where we are now - but we've been having "centrist dad" discourse since 2016 (e.g. the BBC explainer from 2017: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41413937).

FT piece (Edit: Also I wildy disagree with the headline and the conclusion though):

Why it is better to be moderate than centrist
We should engage with political arguments rather than simply rejecting any ideology as too extreme
Jemima Kelly JULY 27 2023

The centrist dads are back in town. The British granddaddy of so-called centrism, Tony Blair, all but formally anointed prime-minister-in-waiting Keir Starmer as his political successor during a love-in at the Future of Britain summit last week. Elsewhere, his erstwhile spin-doctor Alastair Campbell has been busy — along with former Tory Rory Stewart — taking the top spot in the UK news podcast charts and selling out West End theatres.

Former chancellor George Osborne and former shadow chancellor turned Strictly Come Dancing star turned morning TV presenter Ed Balls, meanwhile, are launching their own podcast in the autumn. "Ed and I are frenemies — once bitter foes, and now firm friends," said Osborne. It's all so breezy and self-assured. Almost as if everything that shook the establishment to its very core in 2016 has already been forgotten.

On the other side of the Atlantic, things are moving in a less chummy direction. In next year's election, Joe Biden — a natural centrist who has embraced a more progressive ideology during his presidency — looks very likely to face a twice-indicted (and counting) man who still calls the 2020 election a "massive fraud". The two other frontrunners are the Florida governor waging a "war on woke" and a man who airs conspiracy theories about Covid-19 having been "ethnically targeted". 

But some believe America's cure also lies in centrism. Step forward No Labels, a political organisation that supports bipartisanship and centrism. Last week, the group said it would consider fielding a third-party ticket in 2024 and published a 72-page manifesto entitled "Common Sense" — a favourite term of centrists, because how can anyone disagree with that? This offered lots in the way of problems and little in the way of solutions. Its big "idea" on abortion, for instance: "America must strike a balance between protecting women's rights to control their own reproductive health and our society's responsibility to protect human life". (Why did nobody think of that before?)

I have sympathy for many of those who either call themselves centrists or else appeal to the "centre ground" of politics — indeed, I share many of their views. I am critical of illiberalism on both the left and the right and I often (though not always) favour moderate political candidates. I consider trying to find some kind of balance between clashing value systems and interests very difficult but incredibly important. And yes, I too wish we could all just get along.

But centrism is not going to get us there. For one thing, it's not very interested in getting stuck into the arguments — centrists tend to think of themselves as above all that messy wrangling. Their "common sense" doctrine suggests that incredibly complicated problems have obvious solutions that all "sensible" people would surely agree with.

Centrism is really defined only by what it is against. Leon Trotsky, writing in 1934, was right when he said that centrism is "characterised much more by what it lacks than by what it holds", and that it leads a "parasitic existence". Without all the hard-fought intellectual battles around it, centrism — which dismisses some of those arguments without taking them on — couldn't exist.

Centrists tend to stake a claim to a space in the political middle that is not actually there. Nietzsche wrote that "truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force". Where is the centre when the political spectrum has become more horseshoe-like than linear? Where is it when no one can agree on what is truth and what is fiction?

"There's this idea that you, as a centrist, have an overview of the whole system and so you can see where the centre is," Christopher Clark, regius professor of history at Cambridge university, tells me. "You've navigated it all and you've created a kind of cartography of politics in which you occupy this space of virtue. There's a kind of arrogance about it." Centrists often have a reputation for being smug, and they have earned it.

I would much rather think of myself as moderate: a more modest and less fashionable appellation. A moderate might sometimes find themselves agreeing with those who claim to occupy the centre ground but they arrive at their positions after having considered and engaged with the arguments rather than simply rejecting any ideology as extreme or non-"sensible". Furthermore, because being moderate is an approach rather than a fixed position it does not lend itself to groupthink or to tribalism — a scourge even when the tribe is made up of nice middle-aged men.

[email protected]

And The Times - again disagree with points here, especially flattening all that is bad to "populism" but captures some of the same thrust:

Rage is swallowing even the middle ground
An emerging brand of centrist populism can be traced back to liberal frustrations over Brexit
James Marriott
Wednesday June 21 2023, 5.00pm, The Times

Not very long ago the idea of a centrist zealot would have seemed a paradox of nature, like a killer sheep or a highly motivated koala bear. Who could be less susceptible to partisan fury than a person soberly committed to an ethic of moderation?

But in the last decade we have witnessed the birth of what I think of as a sort of populism of the centre. A politics that proclaims the values of rationality, moderation and reasoned debate but which is just as prone to tribalism, conspiracy thinking and righteous anger as any other political affiliation. Its symptoms are everywhere.

On LBC, James O'Brien — the world's angriest centrist dad — warns that Britain is moving in a "fascistic direction". On their podcast The News Agents, which reaches an audience of millions, the former BBC correspondents Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall revel in the hostility of their political opponents, recently debating which of their enemies' insults they should have printed on their hoodies. A far cry from the BBC impartiality of old. Last year Alastair Campbell, a co-host of the country's most popular podcast The Rest is Politics, wondered aloud (on the basis of no evidence) whether the fact that Boris Johnson was sniffing a lot during a press conference meant that he was on drugs.

Objecting to this stuff is difficult. In many ways, angry centrists are my people. Much of their rage is justified. I agree that our ethic of public service has been debased, that many modern politicians are distressingly amateurish and that Brexit was a disaster. Perhaps the problem is one of tone rather than content. There is an edge of irresponsibility, even cynicism, to some of the new fury emanating from the centre. Justified vigilance about political norms too often slides into unhelpful paranoia. Is Johnson really as imminent a threat to democracy as Donald Trump? Never mind. Many profitable careers now depend on sensationalising the news. Politics as soap opera sells better than politics as policy debate.

The problem is most stark in the lower, murkier ecosystems of social media centrism. Twitter personalities such as Russ Jones and Tan Smith have built online followings numbering hundreds of thousands on their incessant, zanily verbose criticism of politicians. In these strange times, a sensible, mainstream cause like Remain is capable of attracting a figure like Steve Bray, the anti-Brexit activist who stands outside parliament screaming into a microphone — the sort of behaviour traditionally associated with cranks on the political extremes.

The radicalisation of the centre dates to the Brexit vote, which unleashed new and unaccustomed feelings of powerlessness and anger among educated liberals. But it is also the product of a changing media landscape. Twitter has made outrage and fury ubiquitous across the political spectrum. Angry centrists — a high-information, high-earning demographic attractive to advertisers — are catered for by myriad podcasters. Indeed, in my role as this newspaper's podcast critic I am presented with a new show by a frustrated liberal virtually every week. The Rest is Politics, The News Agents, Pod Save the UK, Oh God, What Now?, The Power Test. None of those podcasts is a problem on its own. I enjoy several of them. But I worry about the overall trend.

As the BBC declines (the Today programme's audience shrank by 12 per cent last year), the corporation's patient, painstaking, flawed attempts at balance are being replaced by the more immediate emotional attraction of a less complex centrism. The political scientist Rob Ford described to me the "sugar-rush" appeal of tribalism. Faced with the Frosties and chocolate biscuits served by O'Brien, the BBC is stuck patiently trying to feed its listeners the disagreeable vegetables of original reporting and contrasting opinion.

Traditional broadcasters and newspapers (the targets of much contempt from their new media rivals) spend a lot of money posting correspondents around the world. Shows like The News Agents hand their stars huge salaries but pay no foreign correspondents or specialist reporters. The result is often a shallower, more parochial perspective on current events. In recent weeks, The News Agents have offered "What's up with Boris Johnson's WhatsApps?", "Lords, Ladies and Boris Johnson's Honour", "Sunak v Johnson: It's War", "The Many Lies of Boris Johnson" etc. O'Brien is a similarly relentless critic of the former prime minister.

And look, I too dislike Johnson. But figures like O'Brien exist in an unacknowledged symbiotic relationship with him. He is good for their ratings. The country would be better off refusing Johnson the oxygen of publicity but the ad-driven business models of the new media demand that he is turned into a lucrative obsession. Meanwhile, policy, deep reporting and original thinking too often take second place.

It should be acknowledged that of all the forms of populism, the centrist kind is probably the least damaging. Perhaps the phenomenon irritates more than it should because its proponents continually harp on about their respect for debate and seriousness while themselves indulging in the kinds of emotional politics they purport to transcend. The passions of the political fringes are important but a sane, moderating centre matters too. I am not against principled anger but cynicism and rage are dangerous forces in politics, especially in excess. A centrist should understand that better than anyone.

Edit: And worth pointing out these two articles are from relatively centrist commentators - not the right or left complaining about what's happening there.

[Admiral Yi]

Man that's a lot of air in there.

OK, one thing I can relate to is anger about people who lie or who operate on false facts.

Everything else sounds as if pulled from ass.

[Legbiter]

Big eruption very close to Grindavík. Started about 5 minutes ago. 

[Legbiter]

From Reykjavík.