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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.
He a junkie you would see rambling at a bus stop incoherently. The difference is an expanded vocabulary and a he's been on TV.
He was funny at one point. But he never grew past the need for the attention and didn't branch out of teenager years.
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.
I’m pretty sure he described himself as a socialist once upon a time. I’m not one to gate keep what people call themselves.
But yeah just because he’s a socialist that doesn’t make him a good person. Marx probably had an unclaimed child with his servant girl.
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.
Hitler called himself a socialist too, that's a pretty low bar.. 🤦♀️
All you've done so far is attempt to derail the conversation about Brand being a rapist..
I’m sorry that’s not my intention. Do you think it would be best if we delete this thread?
I was just working through how my perception of him had changed over the years. I don’t want to downplay his alleged crimes.
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).
He used to eloquently talk about more straightforward issues to do with class struggle. The problem is when he decides to take that approach to science but then found himself going against it, and doubling down.
It's basically how a lot of commentators get into a bizarre rabbit hole and come out with some wild ideas. It's a basic trap that many of them fall for.
But that said he's always had a reputation for being a "playboy", so this isn't really a surprise. Lots of dudes from back when he was on top have turned out to be really shitty.
So many people I used to watch on youtube lost their fucking minds in 2020.
This is shit he was doing more than ten years ago.
You can't blame this shit on lockdown, he's always been a failure of a human being, it's just now we're finding out details.
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.
Perfectly cast in Get Him to the Greek, but at the time I thought it was acting, not just rolling out of bed.
Yeah I always thought he was hilarious because he was doing a shtick but as it turns out, that's just him.
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.
I noticed that people who are using recreational drugs are disproportionally concerned about vaccine safety, which I find quite amusing.
I think you'd find higher rates among Christian Conservatives and they're a pretty anti-drug group.
I never said that's the only group though.
It is just surprising to me that you would get concerns about injecting yourself with not well tested medicine from that specific group.
I find it entirely unsurprising.
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.
It's just that out of the various things about Russell Brand, the recreational drug user is going to be one of the lesser reasons why he went into anti-vaxx territory.
Not that he's a Christian Conservative but he's adopted a parallel to their ways of regarding medical science, where it's a lot of sealioning questions, little actual medical journal research, and all the confidence of a SAHM Facebook mom who gets all her information from Facebook.
High people not thinking things through?
Hmm, maybe you're on to something.
Fair trade cocaine and organic crystal meth are a thing.
Religion is their drug, which is way stronger than conventional drugs.
Yeah I've seen this as well, all the drug users I know went hard on the conspiracy train.
I liked his old podcasts back when he was still on drugs but pretending he was clean.
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.