angrysoba
Philosophile
Brand has always been an idiot conspiracy theorist and contrarian.
His "politics" such as they are, have always been stupid and puerile.
He became famous by telling people not to vote because voting makes no difference. This was during the Conservative-led government with their policy of austerity.
Voter suppression is often music to the ears of conservatives, so they must have very much appreciated him telling younger (and presumably more liberal/left-wing) people not to vote and leaving it to an older and presumably more conservative electorate to decide who runs the country.
And after the following election, the Conservative Party went forward with their promises of a vote on Brexit. People voted to leave. So the idea that voting makes no difference was falsified at least twice while this idiot blathered on self-importantly.
In this thread, it turns out that Brand was "open-minded" on 9/11.
There is a quote about Brand from David Aaronovitch...
Apparently in his book....
The book was written after the time that has been described in the recent allegations.
His "politics" such as they are, have always been stupid and puerile.
He became famous by telling people not to vote because voting makes no difference. This was during the Conservative-led government with their policy of austerity.
Voter suppression is often music to the ears of conservatives, so they must have very much appreciated him telling younger (and presumably more liberal/left-wing) people not to vote and leaving it to an older and presumably more conservative electorate to decide who runs the country.
And after the following election, the Conservative Party went forward with their promises of a vote on Brexit. People voted to leave. So the idea that voting makes no difference was falsified at least twice while this idiot blathered on self-importantly.
In this thread, it turns out that Brand was "open-minded" on 9/11.
There is a quote about Brand from David Aaronovitch...
One night, two weeks ago, the comedian and revolutionary Russell Brand attended a Guardian event where an Oxford-educated man with a Welsh name (Owen Jones) asked him nothing, and where he was loved-up by a simpering audience ("I've not got the emotional maturity not to fall in love with you," he was told by India from Brighton), and then went post-haste to the BBC Newsnight studio where he was asked gentle questions by an Oxford-educated man with a Welsh name, and shown a graph.
Perhaps the contrast between the two events was too sudden for a smooth adjustment. Brand was rude and surly. "This is the stuff people like you use to confuse people like us," he told the interviewer, Evan Davis, about the graph, and then added a complaint about "an Oxford-educated man being rude to me, an autodidact".
Having read his new book — which is uniquely worthless both as an exercise in writing and as a manifesto for social change — I feel able to dismiss Brand's new self-ascriptions, both as self-taught man and revolutionary. He is neither. An autodidact is not someone who, as Brand does, summons up a convenient line from Goethe cut and pasted from the endless shallows of Wikiquote (or, more probably, gets someone else to do it). An autodidact is, rather, someone who learns German and reads the original — as my father did. As to revolutionaries — successful ones tend, unlike Brand, to have plans and strategies, which is what makes them formidable, if no fun at orgies.
Far from being an autodidact, Brand creates a wall of sound and words designed to drown out the possibility of thought. He follows nothing through, sticks with nothing, but flits like a medallioned moth between sensations. Although he is certainly bright enough to learn difficult things in a rigorous way, he is nowhere near disciplined enough to do it. So you have to describe him as self-dumbed-down. He is, if you like, auto-plumbic.
Apparently in his book....
Brand believes in God. Or a god. And it's in a chapter based on a Brandian exegesis of the Lord's Prayer, that the reader can find both the best and worst of the author. There's an arresting and genuinely well-written passage about his feelings about taking two young women home, partying with them in his Jacuzzi and then discovering himself having sex with them. "Like perfumed and gloss vultures," he writes, "they peck my carcass and a petit mort is insufficient; I am like Frankenstein here, assembled from boneyard parts." I actually began to feel sorry for his alienation, until I remembered what it was he was actually describing. Then I started to worry for the vultures.
And then he adds, appallingly, "I don't want to be led back to that. I want to be delivered from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen." Psalm 23 would have been more appropriate: what to do when your rod and your staff comfort you no longer.
The book was written after the time that has been described in the recent allegations.