Once upon a time I actually liked Russell Brand. Thought he was intelligent and quite in touch with the ways of the world despite his eccentric character. He truly lost the plot when covid came around, although it wasn't the first time he'd talked absolute shite.
In hindsight, it's not really a surprise that he'd be this kind of person.
Yeah, I know a lot of people thought he was a reasonably smart dude with some interesting insights. But when you think about it he’s always been very superficial. There’s not much depth to any of his takes. He’s just charismatic and speaks like he keeps a pocket thesaurus in his jacket.
When I was poor and I complained about inequality they said I was bitter. Now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm starting to think they just don't want to talk about inequality. —Russell Brand
Still one of my favorite quotes, it’s unfortunate that I won’t really be able to use it any more.
Brand used to be a legit socialist back in the day. The longer he had money, the harder I think was for him to continue to understand the struggle of the common people. Either that or its audience capture like what happened to Dave Rueben.
The YouTube channel the Kavernacle has done some good coverage on his drift to the right.
He definitely didn't come up with that line, I'm sure you could find an attribution to something virtually identical said a century ago, and several times since.
I just watched a program about this, and he was a creep from the get go.
A guy vaguely understanding class struggles doesn't make him a socialist nor a good guy.
Marx was an utter piece of shit in many ways. He just had some very good ideas. I've always wondered how many of them can be attributed to Engles though.
I appreciate that you didn't mean to, but making it about him and whatever good he supposedly did, in a conversation about the several women he raped (and however many more he "just" assaulted), is at best highly inappropriate (and at worst is a well known derailing tactic used by those looking to defend a rapist and/or discredit his victims). Deleting the thread probably won't do much, but learning from this for the future will.
Part of rape culture is the massively false idea that "nice guys" don't rape, ignoring the fact that many rapists and abusers are experts at manipulating everyone around them (rapists "infiltrating" leftist circles, especially feminist ones, to gain access to victims, as well as the language to disarm their defences, is sadly not at all unusual).
I would highly recommend watching the Dispatches episode that aired about this last night if you can. In several of his performances/appearances he basically admits to putting an act on to get people to ignore how shitty he really is (as well as graphic descriptions of what we now know were some of his assaults, which he used as part of his comedy routine).
I never liked him much, and that's not a "I knew he was out there raping", that I didn't know. But personality-wise he was basically an egocentric rockstar who thought he knew it all and everyone not agreeing with his views and sense of humour were just too stupid.
And turns out, he is behaving even more like a 80s rockstar than I thought.
Yeah, it's also why his movie career (at least as a comic lead) started in 2008 and was dead by the middle of 2011. He's got no range and audiences were only willing to pay to see Russell Brand being "Russell Brand in a different outfit" so many times before he wore out his welcome.
He lost the plot well before Covid, it's just that it wasn't noticed outside the UK as it largely revolved around our election in 2015 when he was encouraging people not to vote, then when he realised at the last minute this would just lead to he Tories winning by default, backed labour at the eleventh hour, leaving a lot of his followers confused and aimless so the alt-right could swoop in and win them over.
The amount of vegan, organic, health-obsessed, non-GMO twats I know, who happily snort coke or do ecstacy during the weekend is huge.
I can only surmise they're not true believers, they're just boring people who think going on about it makes them more interesting than they actually are.
I'm just waiting for the study that shows COVID infection makes certain people less empathetic and more paranoid. There's just too much of it happening to not be biological IMO.