Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

[Luther Blissett]

Where should we talk about the riots on the streets of London and the subsequent media blackout?

[brainpanhandler]

There are riots in the streets of London?

[Luther Blissett]

Yes, some large scale anti-Tory protest that turned violent. No apparent corporate media coverage.

[Iamwhomiam]

RocketMan wrote,
But this is just truly stupid. He just validated the most insipid criticism of himself regarding the not voting issue.

I agree RocketMan, and I also agree with Jack, who wrote,

It's such a simple answer, really. Vote or don't vote, but minimize fights over voting. In some places, there are actual choices in elections thanks to proportional representation systems or real left parties. Brand, who's been so good in his speaking generally, was wrong to make not voting into the all-or-nothing stance. In the U.S. waste no time in protracted debates and splits over the spectacle - expose it, then organize. Spend an hour a year voting, say, for the guy who promises you six wars in the Middle East, so as to stopthe one who promises you nuclear war with Iran. Or don't. But don't spend months and years yakking about it either way. Choose your struggles and work for them. In our situation, organizing movements outside the parties and media outside the corps is everything. It's not party activists who saved net neutrality and may stop the TPP.

Advising people not to vote is foolish and unhelpful to those seeking to displace the powerful. I do understand the frustration of those seeking change who ask, "what's the use?", but the only meaningful change one can effect is on the local level, at least in my experience. Sure, some local actions result in broader impact, like our cement kiln suit, which is being challenged by Obama's Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, Laurence Tribe, and others. (Tribe was granted intervenor status to represent Peabody Energy in support of petitioner Murray Energy. Oral arguments were scheduled to be heard on April 16, 2015. Decision expected in June.)

I don't remember ever before hearing of Janey Godley, the Scottish comedian. She was interviewed on NPR about the election results and she's not only hilariously funny, she's smart as a whip! The podcast should be listened to. The text http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-08/possibly-our-last-vote-and-we-re-going-out-vote-snp is incomplete.

[BrandonD]

Advising people not to vote is foolish and unhelpful to those seeking to displace the powerful. I do understand the frustration of those seeking change who ask, "what's the use?", but the only meaningful change one can effect is on the local level, at least in my experience.

I would agree that voting makes a difference at a local level. But as the scale grows it becomes less and less relevant, and on the level of president it is entirely a false spectacle. I do not have first-hand evidence of this but it seems fairly obvious - there is an observable straight line of progression that this country has travelled for the past few decades, regardless of whom is president. The average man is unable to see this, even though it is staring him right in the face. This straight line makes it apparent that the real power in this country cannot be "voted out of office".

[American Dream]

https://afed.org.uk/russell-brand-is-a- ... -bastards/

RUSSELL BRAND IS A WANKER AND ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

23/06/2015 · by afed

This morning, a video has been doing the rounds on facebook where Russell Brand calls on the young working class to #lovethepolice and implores us to take to the streets to defend cops *boak*

His argument is that they are just “ordinary working people trying to do a job” like everyone else. In return they don’t get paid overtime normally, they are feeling unhappy about being outsourced to Securicor and G4S (poor diddums), and that the way forward is to help push for them to be able to form a union. He refers to them as “our police” and refers to a time where police were integrated into our communities. This outlook comes, he says, comes from having talked with lots of police (perhaps while being called a turncoat and told to “fuck off back to Miliband” at the weekend?), taking inspiration from the Situationists (???), all before butchering N.W.A.’s Fuck tha Police.

The truth is that police were never part of our communities in the first place and have always been (as Russell puts it) the “henchmen of the establishment”. There is a world of difference between working for a living and enforcing the laws created by the ruling class to maintain power over us. Police are the physical protection of private property and so ensure the theft of wages from billions of workers, the incarceration of millions inside of jails, state sanctioned murder, starvation, poverty… the list goes on.

The truth is we don’t need the police. We can focus on systems of justice that do not focus on punishment or detention. This will require the complete reorganisation of society – a social revolution.

Russell Brand is a wanker and all cops are bastards.

"ACAB" - New video from Bristol Hip-Hop duo-Qeld



When a person becomes a policeman, he has sold his class interests, he has crossed a class line, he is in the paid employment of the ruling class, he is a part of the private army of the ruling class which exists for the sole purpose of defending private property and profits."
[Jenre]
Every day man, they're looking for a hoodie to pull
It must be that the fuckery were bullied in school
And as you live you get colder
So they put the police number next to the chip on their shoulder
No Scully or Mulder, they're cold and they're corrupt
They hide behind their badge when they roll like little thugs
So it's bound to erupt, and when the pigs just flip
The 999 turns 666
Reminds me of the world that we live in again
Police get holidays for killing innocent men
It's just age old power, blood, greed and lust
MPs they protect these thieving fucks
While they demonise benefit cheats & such
Preaching guff
Like how the filth are gonna clean us up?
Acting mean & tough, it's so feeble
They even turned man's best friend on the people

ACAB
ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS
ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

[Bob Savage]
...Yo, bored to a standstill
Wile E Coyote rap, ordering anvils
Your evidence mountin' is more of an anthill
I'll torture the kop like four-nil at Anfield
Leave police forces corpses on landfills
French Revolutionaries, Storming La Bastille
Yo... it's unpleasantly surprising
The 21st Century peasantry uprising
Farm hands go in mad heavy
Nestor Makhno with plans ready
Framed by the state, Sacco & Vanzetti
Bebop or Rocksteady, Splinter your group
Leave lots of shops sweaty, stinking of zoot
...Bobby Charles De Menezes
No smiley culture, I snarled when I said it
Watch Prince Charles get beheaded, now start running cops
Ian Tomlinson's back, with Mark Duggan socks!

ACAB
ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS
ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

[Jenre]
I had a vision of more
I feel like living's a chore
I make beats, write bars, never written a score
All they give us is war
Stealing's only a sin if you're poor
The rich don't get pigs who wanna kick in their door
It's overcorrupt
They say the system doesn't work, but you know that it does
They get richer every day, we get totally fucked
That's design, that ain't broken or bust
Now they're hoping to crush...
...and take back what remains
of hard-won and now forgotten gains
I see a lot has changed
It's not the same, but we don't wanna return
Just rebuild stronger from lessons we've learned
Shit I gotta admit, I got a deep yearning
To see PCs and MPs burning
In the world that we make, there'll be no work for a wage
A world that makes every dead cop turn in their grave

ACAB
ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS
ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

[coffin_dodger]

I can't detect which of your posts are real and which are satire any more, AD.

[seemslikeadream]

All I know is Russel really likes David Icke

[American Dream]

Tragicomic

posted by Richard Seymour

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the day the Beautiful Soul entered Russell Brand. It began to slowly cannibalise his innards, metabolising them into an oddly potent type of spiritual ordure.

At first, he seemed to welcome it, and the ecstasy of its sweet ministry. How could he resist? The oneness of all living things, upon which it staked its colonising zeal, appeared to be the most perfectly sublimated narcissism. The sheer monstrosity of the thing was not yet plain to view. Not until it had metabolised almost every bit of him. Even his previously versatile voice, which slipped effortlessly between Kenneth Williams camp and Joe Pasquale red coat cheer, was gradually usurped by a wheedling undertone.

By the end, he was just a shape of skin; its form preserved, like that of a rubber glove, by that which occupied it. The parasite within gazed out of blank, dark eyes, looking for more bodies to consume.

One day, his cavernous lantern mouth cranked open, and it spoke through him. "Wotcher kids," it offered in a hollow mockery of the host's estuary accent, "the cops are avin a reeeaally hard time, right? It seems like all they see is hate and conflict, yeah? And ah fink, right, what we as a community need to do right is give em a right big ol hug, yeah? What we desperately need is more love in this greed-driven, fear-addled society, so please..."

And as it spoke, mesmerised bodies huddled before their screens and began to hashtag frantically to social media contacts, ‪#‎lovethepigs‬ and ‪#‎giveanofficerarimjobtoday‬. And as they did, it passed into each of them, guzzling and regurgitating them all into a perpetually enlarging, pulsing sac of sanctimonious hippy shit.

The final, terrifying denouement: it shed the carcass, a flimsy paper thin greased exterior by this point, and emerged triumphant and terrible, singing its holy glory across the land in a Latin skewed by unintelligible diphthongs.

That was when I knew it had Charlotte Church in its sights.

[Harvey]

The opinion in the article is essentially describing itself and it's own appropriation activities, just as it accurately describes one aspect of the Brand dynamic. You're not wrong, but there are other things going on beside the attitude to authority trope. Even Christ contradicted itself regularly, speaking with many voices as 'he' did, forcing any true Christian to create their own unique synthesis of the 'message,' and a resulting comprehension of the essential truth, what is effectively multiple concurrent and overlapping realities, and from there to pinpoint the real nature of 'God'. Of course, many of the aspects of the message were winnowed out of the picture during the Roman appropriation of Christ, that phenomena itself incorporating diverse tropes, some of them already Roman.

And on it goes.

[Searcher08]

The opinion in the article is essentially describing itself and it's own appropriation activities, just as it accurately describes one aspect of the Brand dynamic. You're not wrong, but there are other things going on beside the attitude to authority trope. Even Christ contradicted itself regularly, speaking with many voices as 'he' did, forcing any true Christian to create their own unique synthesis of the 'message,' and a resulting comprehension of the essential truth, what is effectively multiple concurrent and overlapping realities, and from there to pinpoint the real nature of 'God'. Of course, many of the aspects of the message were winnowed out of the picture during the Roman appropriation of Christ, that phenomena itself incorporating diverse tropes, some of them already Roman.

And on it goes.

The opinion in the article is essentially describing itself and it's own appropriation activities, just as it accurately describes one aspect of the Brand dynamic.

Cheers, Harvey.

Whenever I see someone being called out as being a sanctimonious shit (or a person posting, uncommented, an article that broadcasts these emotions), I always want to see what else the person has written - and the person who posts it has posted, and in the case of both Richard Seymour and this article's context-free re-transmitter, one might wonder if one is being given a bastardised 'Spiritual Autobiography'...

I remember meeting a 'friend of a friend' who was, at least to me, quite an advanced soul. He had been a well known musician in the 60s. I asked him if he gave it up. He said it was a conscious decision after having become a Sufi. He worked just doing service in the community around them - not through charity or an organisation, but just listening for conversations 'where old Mrs Jones might be ill and then visiting her'. I saw him run his business and each action was cleanly completed, there was no 'residue' being built up. My sense was that a big enabler to this 'flow state' was the fact that he was utterly anonymous, living in the mile after unending mile of anonymous upper working class council estates in the sprawl of the Essex.

Brand, OTOH, has no such anonymity, whether through choice or fate. He is in a place where his actions are almost set up to have great 'residue'. Was he actually correct - that Milliband would have been better? Given the Tories are intending to fuxor the welfare system waaaaaay more than even THEY said, it is a very uncomfortable point.

Also, given the militarisation of the police in the UK, the fact of huge cuts in their budgets, that they are 'Braziled' with paperwork, that corruption is rampant, that racism is endemic, that the service is full of players, that working with braindead, chav, entitled, morality-free scum day in day out would probably make Buddha punch a granny, an appeal for kindness and connection would appear quite sensible. Instead we get an incredibly Othering process, similar to AD's ongoing Red Guard People's Re-education programme here at RI.

Underneath the role and uniform is a person; if those persons are not treated as human, then people will not be able to see difference between making that human connection vs sanctioning / accepting their behaviour. Which is fundamentally de-humanising.

I imagine in response, they would invoke some self-serving neo-Buddhist 'lipservice' BS:
"Of COURSE we know police are humans - and we chant for the liberation of their souls monthly. That doesn't stop us, mind you, seeing them as pigs to smash when the revolution comes. No to Anti-Semitism! Down with Settler Colonialism!!etc etc"

[coffin_dodger]

It appears AD has a new ideaology - kill the fascists, kill the hippies, kill the police.

Who's next?

Kill all anti-semites, perhaps?

[Searcher08]

It appears AD has a new ideaology - kill the fascists, kill the hippies, kill the police.

Who's next?

Kill all anti-semites, perhaps?

I certainly dissociate myself from what he is putting forward and his (at least to me) "R.I. Re-education Camp" activities here.

[Harvey]

@Searcher08:

Good summary, thanks. And I appreciated the anecdote about the 'friend of a friend.'

one might wonder if one is being given a bastardised 'Spiritual Autobiography'

Yes. I've done that myself on RI.

[seemslikeadream]

Tragicomic


That was when I knew it had Charlotte Church in its sights.

again with the Charlotte church

is every thread on this board going to have something to do with Charlotte now?