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I just can't decide on him. Sometimes I think he's quite funny, and has that English eccentricity that the yanks love, I also like somebody that is eloquent and well spoken, regardless of it being an act (if it is). But another part of me thinks he's a tw@t and a bohemian show off. Mostly I like him, but even when he kissed Big Fat Sam he was looking staight at the camera when he did it, and whilst it's commendable to highlight issues of disparity between rich and poor and talk about the capitalist 1%, etc, there's a lot of hypocrisy there, as highlighted above.
Agree with this - I liked his book, searingly honest and open about how much of a scum bag he can be, funny as well, but I can't stand him when he bleats on about politics. Some of his tv shows when he first started - real low budget stuff were good - did one on the BNP from memory and another one on his relationship with his dad then when I've seen his stand up lately it's been self indulgent dog sh*t.
Still however you look at it he's a character!
If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. PG Wodehouse
Sorry, he's a complete tw@t and hypocrite, spouts simplistic, meaningless drivel about 'revolution' whilst riding around in chauffeur- driven Mercedes and shagging supermodels.
Really don't like him. I just don't find the guy funny.
As amusing as genital warts,Hare Krishna!
Eat your hearts out Rio and HR this guy really knows how to sell books - however bogus,meretricious,self-aggrandizing,empty,weak,emperor's new clothes & vacuous the product.
All over all media like an open necked tarty lank haired syphylitic rash .. impossible to avoid... Financial Times big lunch full page interview,MOTD kissing Big Sam,Start The Week on Radio 4 usually a great wee programme but spoilt and made unbearable by this interrupting ranting rude egoist who thinks he's so much cleverer/interesting than he really is.
He seems to bully women,thick or bright, into mute adoring subjugation with his irresistible touchy-feely hands or lips on charm in much the same bullying power trip way as Jimmy Saville did with teenagers.
The usually sensible Lucy Kellaway,The Financial Times interviewer finishes her profile thus:
"Your boy will want a photograph won't he? I think he'll be wanting us to have a mouth kiss." I assure him my son won't want any such thing but Brand is already coming over to my side of the table,putting an arm around me and moving his lips towards mine,while I swerve out of reach. After this embarrassing little skirmish I ask if it is the first time a woman has cringed as he tried to kiss her. He shakes his head and insists I didn't cringe. "Your body language looked half-hearted and your face changed colour." When I get home I look at the pictures on my phone. Paxman (in his Newsnight Brand encounter) couldn't help himself when faced with this charismatic,ranting revolutionary and neither,it seems,could I. The camera doesn't lie. I am blushing and smiling as I duck.
End of FT feature. Pass the sick bucket Alice RB is only the new DLT.
Ok Johnny Rotten might be seen as a butter-selling sell-out hypocrite by some and many on here will hate The Guardian and Polly Toynbee analysis but all the same JR's spot on when specifically attacking the blithering self-regarding vain poltroon. 'Don't vote but follow me' laughed the Pied Piper. A banale empty risible contemptuous philosophy.
[Post edited 13 Nov 2014 2:00]
'I'm 18 with a bullet.Got my finger on the trigger,I'm gonna pull it.."
Love,Peace and Fook Chelski!
More like 20StoneOfHoop now.
Let's face it I'm not getting any thinner.
Pass the cake and pies please.
Apart from Tony Blair and Ed Milliband is there a bigger c..t on the planet than this cretin.
West ham really are collecting some right celebrity twunts as supporters Jermey Kyle , Brand & Dyer also add that stupid bubble machine and you have a real tw&t of a club , which is a shame as I never used to mind west ham
And Bowles is onside, Swinburne has come rushing out of his goal , what can Bowles do here , onto the left foot no, on to the right foot
That’s there that’s two, and that’s Bowles
Brian Moore
Eat your hearts out Rio and HR this guy really knows how to sell books - however bogus,meretricious,self-aggrandizing,empty,weak,emperor's new clothes & vacuous the product.
All over all media like an open necked tarty lank haired syphylitic rash .. impossible to avoid... Financial Times big lunch full page interview,MOTD kissing Big Sam,Start The Week on Radio 4 usually a great wee programme but spoilt and made unbearable by this interrupting ranting rude egoist who thinks he's so much cleverer/interesting than he really is.
He seems to bully women,thick or bright, into mute adoring subjugation with his irresistible touchy-feely hands or lips on charm in much the same bullying power trip way as Jimmy Saville did with teenagers.
The usually sensible Lucy Kellaway,The Financial Times interviewer finishes her profile thus:
"Your boy will want a photograph won't he? I think he'll be wanting us to have a mouth kiss." I assure him my son won't want any such thing but Brand is already coming over to my side of the table,putting an arm around me and moving his lips towards mine,while I swerve out of reach. After this embarrassing little skirmish I ask if it is the first time a woman has cringed as he tried to kiss her. He shakes his head and insists I didn't cringe. "Your body language looked half-hearted and your face changed colour." When I get home I look at the pictures on my phone. Paxman (in his Newsnight Brand encounter) couldn't help himself when faced with this charismatic,ranting revolutionary and neither,it seems,could I. The camera doesn't lie. I am blushing and smiling as I duck.
End of FT feature. Pass the sick bucket Alice RB is only the new DLT.
Ok Johnny Rotten might be seen as a butter-selling sell-out hypocrite by some and many on here will hate The Guardian and Polly Toynbee analysis but all the same JR's spot on when specifically attacking the blithering self-regarding vain poltroon. 'Don't vote but follow me' laughed the Pied Piper. A banale empty risible contemptuous philosophy.
[Post edited 13 Nov 2014 2:00]
Nice of John Lydon to take time away from selling butter to comment.
Loved his recent interview with Jon Snow (I think) talking about his book and his parents, etc. It was excellent.
Eat your hearts out Rio and HR this guy really knows how to sell books - however bogus,meretricious,self-aggrandizing,empty,weak,emperor's new clothes & vacuous the product.
All over all media like an open necked tarty lank haired syphylitic rash .. impossible to avoid... Financial Times big lunch full page interview,MOTD kissing Big Sam,Start The Week on Radio 4 usually a great wee programme but spoilt and made unbearable by this interrupting ranting rude egoist who thinks he's so much cleverer/interesting than he really is.
He seems to bully women,thick or bright, into mute adoring subjugation with his irresistible touchy-feely hands or lips on charm in much the same bullying power trip way as Jimmy Saville did with teenagers.
The usually sensible Lucy Kellaway,The Financial Times interviewer finishes her profile thus:
"Your boy will want a photograph won't he? I think he'll be wanting us to have a mouth kiss." I assure him my son won't want any such thing but Brand is already coming over to my side of the table,putting an arm around me and moving his lips towards mine,while I swerve out of reach. After this embarrassing little skirmish I ask if it is the first time a woman has cringed as he tried to kiss her. He shakes his head and insists I didn't cringe. "Your body language looked half-hearted and your face changed colour." When I get home I look at the pictures on my phone. Paxman (in his Newsnight Brand encounter) couldn't help himself when faced with this charismatic,ranting revolutionary and neither,it seems,could I. The camera doesn't lie. I am blushing and smiling as I duck.
End of FT feature. Pass the sick bucket Alice RB is only the new DLT.
Ok Johnny Rotten might be seen as a butter-selling sell-out hypocrite by some and many on here will hate The Guardian and Polly Toynbee analysis but all the same JR's spot on when specifically attacking the blithering self-regarding vain poltroon. 'Don't vote but follow me' laughed the Pied Piper. A banale empty risible contemptuous philosophy.
[Post edited 13 Nov 2014 2:00]
love listening to john lydon (even if i don't agree with everything he says). the bit from 5.00 on about Brand is spot on, 'he's preaching all this from a mansion'.
that guardianista was saying that the time when we were most equal was 1977, wasn't that when everyone was broke, the country was bankrupt and everyone was on strike?
Apart from Tony Blair and Ed Milliband is there a bigger c..t on the planet than this cretin.
West ham really are collecting some right celebrity twunts as supporters Jermey Kyle , Brand & Dyer also add that stupid bubble machine and you have a real tw&t of a club , which is a shame as I never used to mind west ham
Eat your hearts out Rio and HR this guy really knows how to sell books - however bogus,meretricious,self-aggrandizing,empty,weak,emperor's new clothes & vacuous the product.
All over all media like an open necked tarty lank haired syphylitic rash .. impossible to avoid... Financial Times big lunch full page interview,MOTD kissing Big Sam,Start The Week on Radio 4 usually a great wee programme but spoilt and made unbearable by this interrupting ranting rude egoist who thinks he's so much cleverer/interesting than he really is.
He seems to bully women,thick or bright, into mute adoring subjugation with his irresistible touchy-feely hands or lips on charm in much the same bullying power trip way as Jimmy Saville did with teenagers.
The usually sensible Lucy Kellaway,The Financial Times interviewer finishes her profile thus:
"Your boy will want a photograph won't he? I think he'll be wanting us to have a mouth kiss." I assure him my son won't want any such thing but Brand is already coming over to my side of the table,putting an arm around me and moving his lips towards mine,while I swerve out of reach. After this embarrassing little skirmish I ask if it is the first time a woman has cringed as he tried to kiss her. He shakes his head and insists I didn't cringe. "Your body language looked half-hearted and your face changed colour." When I get home I look at the pictures on my phone. Paxman (in his Newsnight Brand encounter) couldn't help himself when faced with this charismatic,ranting revolutionary and neither,it seems,could I. The camera doesn't lie. I am blushing and smiling as I duck.
End of FT feature. Pass the sick bucket Alice RB is only the new DLT.
Ok Johnny Rotten might be seen as a butter-selling sell-out hypocrite by some and many on here will hate The Guardian and Polly Toynbee analysis but all the same JR's spot on when specifically attacking the blithering self-regarding vain poltroon. 'Don't vote but follow me' laughed the Pied Piper. A banale empty risible contemptuous philosophy.
[Post edited 13 Nov 2014 2:00]
fk me.. genius again from the boards number one sensi of the lfw dojo...
russell brand the new DLT. couldnt have put it better myself.
Eat your hearts out Rio and HR this guy really knows how to sell books - however bogus,meretricious,self-aggrandizing,empty,weak,emperor's new clothes & vacuous the product.
All over all media like an open necked tarty lank haired syphylitic rash .. impossible to avoid... Financial Times big lunch full page interview,MOTD kissing Big Sam,Start The Week on Radio 4 usually a great wee programme but spoilt and made unbearable by this interrupting ranting rude egoist who thinks he's so much cleverer/interesting than he really is.
He seems to bully women,thick or bright, into mute adoring subjugation with his irresistible touchy-feely hands or lips on charm in much the same bullying power trip way as Jimmy Saville did with teenagers.
The usually sensible Lucy Kellaway,The Financial Times interviewer finishes her profile thus:
"Your boy will want a photograph won't he? I think he'll be wanting us to have a mouth kiss." I assure him my son won't want any such thing but Brand is already coming over to my side of the table,putting an arm around me and moving his lips towards mine,while I swerve out of reach. After this embarrassing little skirmish I ask if it is the first time a woman has cringed as he tried to kiss her. He shakes his head and insists I didn't cringe. "Your body language looked half-hearted and your face changed colour." When I get home I look at the pictures on my phone. Paxman (in his Newsnight Brand encounter) couldn't help himself when faced with this charismatic,ranting revolutionary and neither,it seems,could I. The camera doesn't lie. I am blushing and smiling as I duck.
End of FT feature. Pass the sick bucket Alice RB is only the new DLT.
Ok Johnny Rotten might be seen as a butter-selling sell-out hypocrite by some and many on here will hate The Guardian and Polly Toynbee analysis but all the same JR's spot on when specifically attacking the blithering self-regarding vain poltroon. 'Don't vote but follow me' laughed the Pied Piper. A banale empty risible contemptuous philosophy.
[Post edited 13 Nov 2014 2:00]
You may have a point about the sexism business. I've heard him acknowkedge it as an issue before, I hope he works on it. He has a packet of flaws, but who doesn't?
But Lydon is talking nonsense about the whole Don't Vote issue. It is the worst kind of simplification jumped on by those who, understandably, are not particularly fond of Brand.
It seems that much of the country is finally coming round to the fact that there is not much difference between the main political parties that we are presented with to 'choose' from every 5 years. I think most of us know what New Labour really is. Thus the sudden rise of UKIP as they have, laughably, been presented (by the system) as the party who will fix the current malaise of UK politics and give a Real Voice to The People. As though they themselves are not born, funded and beholden to that exact same power structure.
Quite the opposite of suggesting apathy Brand suggests people become far more politically active than just ticking the box next to the name of whichever System Puppet (you can tell them apart by their lovely different coloured rosettes) is offered before you every 5 years. He constantly encourages people to join in, help and support local or wider community causes that they feel passionate about/interested in. To organise, communicate and just, well, do something.
Sure I see how easy it is to dislike him but at least he's got something interesting to say. He doesn't claim to be perfect or have The Answers. But he's always naming people and organisations who know more than he does on subjects and suggests people investigate and explore further. Quite the opposite of apathy. He suggests they join groups or organise things themselves, NOT FOLLOW HIM. And he uses his celebrity (however ill earned some may say it is) to help highlight causes like the Newham women being made homeless and the recent Firefighters Tour (largely ignored by the mainstream media) to fight massive cuts to the fire service. I see all that as positive.
Compare that to the ageing Butter Salesman who thinks if young people aren't happy with David Cameron and his society they should just tick a box next to one of Ed's people. Great.
You may have a point about the sexism business. I've heard him acknowkedge it as an issue before, I hope he works on it. He has a packet of flaws, but who doesn't?
But Lydon is talking nonsense about the whole Don't Vote issue. It is the worst kind of simplification jumped on by those who, understandably, are not particularly fond of Brand.
It seems that much of the country is finally coming round to the fact that there is not much difference between the main political parties that we are presented with to 'choose' from every 5 years. I think most of us know what New Labour really is. Thus the sudden rise of UKIP as they have, laughably, been presented (by the system) as the party who will fix the current malaise of UK politics and give a Real Voice to The People. As though they themselves are not born, funded and beholden to that exact same power structure.
Quite the opposite of suggesting apathy Brand suggests people become far more politically active than just ticking the box next to the name of whichever System Puppet (you can tell them apart by their lovely different coloured rosettes) is offered before you every 5 years. He constantly encourages people to join in, help and support local or wider community causes that they feel passionate about/interested in. To organise, communicate and just, well, do something.
Sure I see how easy it is to dislike him but at least he's got something interesting to say. He doesn't claim to be perfect or have The Answers. But he's always naming people and organisations who know more than he does on subjects and suggests people investigate and explore further. Quite the opposite of apathy. He suggests they join groups or organise things themselves, NOT FOLLOW HIM. And he uses his celebrity (however ill earned some may say it is) to help highlight causes like the Newham women being made homeless and the recent Firefighters Tour (largely ignored by the mainstream media) to fight massive cuts to the fire service. I see all that as positive.
Compare that to the ageing Butter Salesman who thinks if young people aren't happy with David Cameron and his society they should just tick a box next to one of Ed's people. Great.
No sexism isn't the problem ,sexual harassment is. Very different things. There's no 'working on it', there's just simply refraining from it. Stop bullying by touch NOW,Brand. I can see no difference between his behaviour and unacceptable touchy feely invasion of personal space and Dave Lee Travis's
Simplification? "Don't pay tax?" and who would that benefit? From Revolution: "The economy is just a metaphorical device,it's not real,that's why it's got the word con in it.' That's a bit of a simple statement isn't it? Very sixth form from the lazy clever kid taking drugs at the back.
Au contraire he does think he has The Answers; the solution he proposes is 1)buy my book $20 from all good bookstores -the first 80 pages all about Brand talking about Brand 2)don't vote 3)don't pay taxes 4) have a personal revolution within, just like Russ and a credible coherent political programme can be magically extrapolated from one's own journey. and 5)get down the local krishna consciousness temple so you can meditate control your wide desire and enjoy the same kind of revolution Russell has. Glib? yes! Patronising? yes! Simple? yes!
The rich can buy anything in Britain, and they have now brought us their own opposition. Russell Brand is the voice of the discontented wealthy. He tells us that money can’t buy you love — which I already knew — and that only the complete overthrow of the existing system and embrace of mysticism can take us from “the shallow pool of the known” to the “great untamable ocean” beyond.
I was prepared to dismiss Revolution as the swollen ramblings of a jaded celeb. Brand leaves you in little doubt that he is trying to escape the ennui that follows trying everything once except incest and folk dancing. “It’s only because I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing eating, self-pleasuring, drinking, consuming and getting famous that I was forced to look at spiritual alternatives.” Inspiring a revolution — for such is his ambition — is one of the few thrills to have escaped him. “The revolution cannot be boring,” he says as he encapsulates his thoughtlessness in one phrase. “We’d all be a bit disappointed if utopia and ditching capitalism boiled down to ‘We want to be a bit more like Germany’ — fook that.”
His writing is atrocious: long-winded, confused and smug; filled with references to books Brand has half read and thinkers he has half understood. At one point, he discusses whether our perception of reality is a mentally constructed illusion (don’t ask me why). “So,” Brand says in a conclusion worthy of a Thought for the Day vicar, “when Elton John said Marilyn Monroe was ‘like a candle in the wind’ he was probably bloody right, and if he wasn’t we’ll never know.” At another, Brand argues that spirituality is the road to revolution, a belief that would have baffled every revolutionary leader in modern European history. “We’re all doing the same thing, dreaming the same dream, in the words of Belinda Carlisle,” he announces in a sentence that is so syrupy a Barbie doll might have written it, and worse — much worse — misquotes Ms Carlisle.
For all that, Brand is worth taking notice of because he is the nearest Britain has to a revolutionary populist. The right and far right have Nigel Farage. The Islamists have George Galloway. Scottish nationalists have (or had) Alex Salmond. These demagogues boom out certainties that make the tentative policies of conventional leaders appear pale and timid. “Get out of the European Union.” “Get out of the Muslim world.” “Get out of Britain.” Get out, and with one convulsive act of renunciation, you can escape the complexity that blights your lives.
Television news producers are as world-weary as any burnt-out celebrity. They want Brand to be their new Farage and draw hundreds of thousands to their failing programmes. I am not saying that there is not a need for a left populism to confront financial power and environmental degradation. But Brand is a religious narcissist, and if the British left falls for him, it will show itself to be beyond saving.
His book tells us much about him and little about the rest of humanity. Brand says that he is qualified to lead a global transformation, not because of the quality of his thought, but because he has transformed his private life. “I may not have overthrown a government. But [I have] navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and drugs were my only solution to a state where I never drink or take drugs.” It is perhaps too easy to reply: “Well, bully for you.” I accept that freeing yourself from addiction and finding inner peace can have more beneficial effect than any political programme the powerful can implement. But Brand is offering his Beverly Hills Buddhism as a political programme, not a self-help guide. Everything is corrupt, his theory runs. All politicians are the same. Reforms won’t do, and no one can expect him to relinquish his fortune until there has been “systemic change on a global scale” (a useful condition that last one).
The systemic change that means the most to Brand is an embrace of meditation and pantheism. The greatest villain of Revolution is not a super-rich financier but Richard Dawkins. Brand denounces him as a “menopausal” proponent of “atheistic tyranny” because Dawkins denies the existence of the supernatural. He pulls a succession of shabby tricks to bolster his claim that religion does not authorise oppression. Anyone who claims that Jesus, Allah, Krishna or the fountainhead of any other religion endorses homophobia instead of the “union of all mankind” is “on a massive blag”, he says. Brand has to ignore Leviticus’s edict that the punishment for men who sleep with other men is death, St Paul’s hysterics about lesbianism and the hadiths that have Muhammad saying that the punishment for sodomy is death by stoning. In other words, he has to ignore several millennia of real and continuing religious repression, so he can make his spiritualism sound emancipatory rather than cranky.
Comrades, I am sure I do not need to tell you that no figure in the history of the left has seen Buddhism as a force for human emancipation. If it were, Sri Lanka would be a paradise rather than a site for ethno-religious slaughter. Nor has any revolutionary leader said that atheists will be the revolution’s first target. In our times, only Islamist counter-revolutionaries dream of their suppression.
Brand might have designed the political programme that follows to discredit leftwing thought. The revolutionary state should revoke the charters of corporations with revenues larger than the nation with the smallest gross domestic product. According to the World Bank, that nation is Tuvalu in Polynesia with a GDP of $37m — which means that Brand wants to close all large and many medium-sized businesses. Food production must be localised and organic — which means Brand wants hyperinflation, starvation and the bankrupting of African food exporters. And personal debts should be abolished — which means that Brand wants to crash the credit system and return us to a barter economy.
In an unintentionally revealing moment, Brand describes attending a trade union march against austerity. He complains that the protesters are not like Islamic State terrorists but “flaccid” and placid. He has a case. For all its many faults, the British left does not imitate Isis. It does not commit genocide and practise sexual slavery. Its “revolution”, when and if it comes, will consist of boring, gradual attempts to restrain an economic system that is running amok. Russell Brand will want no part of its tedious reforms and will go off in search of bigger thrills.
Russell the latest trendy thing dismisses and ignores the long struggle for global universal suffrage i.e. the right to vote.And the institution,groups,organisations and parties that were effective and continue to be so in that struggle:
'I'm 18 with a bullet.Got my finger on the trigger,I'm gonna pull it.."
Love,Peace and Fook Chelski!
More like 20StoneOfHoop now.
Let's face it I'm not getting any thinner.
Pass the cake and pies please.
I heard him on Start The Week too. I was a bit more impressed than you, probably because I expected him to be sh*te, but I agree he stopped other people saying interesting things. And I think he's just wrong on the don't vote thing and Lydon is right. I don't see that his approach and voting are an either/or; you can want to change the whole way society operates but still exercise your vote to choose the least worst option, as Andrew Marr said, in the meantime.
But I was having that discussion with a friend recently and he was making the point we all agree on that all the current leaders are pretty poor. I replied on the "least worst" lines and said that Syrians or the Hong Kong protestors would love to have our problem. I started to list other examples - China, all of Africa, all of the Arab world, Iran, Indonesia etc. It's easy to say "well those places are nothing like us" but that's most of the rest of the world. It's not a given that we should be different or better off, it has to be worked for. Then I started to think about democracies. We're better off than the USA where only someone with massive corporate support can even think of running for President. We're better than France - fancy choosing between Hollande, Sarkozy or the National Front, anyone? Better than Italy, where their most successful politician ever is in jail and should have been there a decade ago. Better than Greece, obviously. We must be better than Easstern Europe or they wouldn't all want to come and live here. Better than Israel where the old testament is seriously regarded as a basis for policy by parties who are in government
I started to think of countries who *do* have better political leaders than us. Germany, defo. Probably the Scandinavians, though I don't know the details. Netherlands maybe. New Zealand seems well run. That's about it. That puts us in the top 10 countries for best politicians in the world. I'm starting to think that the "our politicians are all terrible" line, which I've subscribed to as much as anyone, is maybe just the whining of spoilt babies
No 18 Stone he doesn't think he has all the answers and he repeats that often when he speaks. As I said he names and publicises all kinds of groups, thinkers and organisations with alternative ideas whilst stating that people should investigate things for themselves.
Odd and interesting that you should feel the need to post all the links pertaining to the fight for suffrage. As though the very existence of that past means that the current manipulation of the system by those at the top via the presentation to the public of supposed opposing parties should be accepted and joined in with without questioning as though it holds the valididty of true democracy that those very movements would have been fighting for. Clue - it doesn't, it's a f-ing farce. If you can find a political party that genuinely reflects your views then good luck to you. I, and an increasing number of people, can't. He's not ignoring "the long struggle for global universal suffrage", he's saying those at the top have manipulated it to the point where it has become a near pointless exercise of ticking a box next to the name of puppets belonging to parties who will ultimately do pretty much the same thing in deference to those with the real power.
Genuine question, do you think the sacrifice those who fought for suffrage made is honoured by the system and the choices that it currently offers up?
He's right about the economy being an illusionary metaphorical device. Numbers on a screen subject to permanent manipulation.
We do need to raise our consciousness individually and collectively otherwise no matter what system we try and introduce we'll just drag it down with our same old shite!
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