The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Nov 04, 2013 5:28 pm



The Irish Banking Revolution: It Is Time to Free the People from Corrupt Banks and Illegal Debt
PL Chang | October 22, 2013


21:08) – Today
'They don't want you talking about fracking, they want you talking about twerking'

'When I grew up in a hum-drum town, like a Morrissey lyric, I wanted to be rich and famous. But I have been inside now, I have been through the looking glass, and I feel empty inside," Brand admits.

His politics is fuelled by a sense of optimism about human nature. "I think we are basically alright, human beings. Whenever there is a disaster we help each other out. Why dont we cultivate those instincts?

Capitalism doesn't have to exist, says Brand. "Capitalism is held in place by lies, police and military. it is held together with fear."

People vote for it though, says Mehdi. "Well, stop it, stop voting."

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10 ... on-twitter
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 04, 2013 6:28 pm

The Consciousness Revolution By Graham Hancock


Here's the full text of the article Russell Brand kindly invited me to contribute to last week's issue of the New Statesman. The article, entitled The War on Consciousness, had to be shortened to fit the space available in the magazine, but I reproduce the complete unedited text here.

Why we should rethink what we've been told about consciousness
If we as adults are not free to make sovereign decisions – right or wrong – about our own consciousness, that most intimate, that most sapient, that most personal part of ourselves, then in what useful sense can we be said to be free at all?
BY GRAHAM HANCOCK PUBLISHED 31 OCTOBER 2013 13:33

New Statesman
Our brains and our conscious lives: how do they relate? Image: Getty
Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science – perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we dream, when we savour tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we fall in love: it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can claim to have understood and explained it completely. There’s no doubt it’s associated with the brain in some way but the nature of that association is far from clear. How do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have experiences?

David Chalmers, a professor at the Australian National University, has dubbed this the “hard problem” of consciousness; but many scientists, particularly those who are philosophically inclined to believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that any problem exists. To them, it seems self-evident that physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a generator produces electricity – that is, consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” of brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such things as out-of-body experiences or the conscious survival of death, as both consciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the brain dies.

Other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy – that the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like that of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case, when the TV set is destroyed – dead – the signal still continues.

Nothing in the present state of knowledge of neuroscience rules this possibility out. True, if you damage certain areas of the brain, certain areas of consciousness are compromised, but this does not prove that those areas of the brain generate the relevant areas of consciousness. If you were to damage certain areas of your TV set, the picture would deteriorate or vanish but the TV signal would remain intact.

We should remember that what seems obvious and self-evident to one generation may not seem at all obvious and self-evident to the next. For hundreds of years, it was obvious and self-evident to the greatest human minds that the sun moved around the earth – one need only look to the sky, they said, to see the truth of this proposition. Those who maintained the revolutionary view that the earth moved around the sun faced the Inquisition. Yet the revolutionaries were right and orthodoxy was terribly, ridiculously wrong.

The same may well prove to be true with the mystery of consciousness. Yes, it does seem obvious and self-evident that the brain produces it (the generator analogy) but this is a deduction from incomplete data. New discoveries may force materialist science to rescind this theory in favour of something more like the TV analogy, in which consciousness is recognised as fundamentally “non-local” in nature – perhaps even as one of the basic driving forces of the universe. At the very least, we should withhold judgement until more evidence is in and view with suspicion those who hold dogmatic views about the nature of consciousness.

It’s at this point that the whole seemingly academic issue becomes intensely political. Modern technological society idealises and is monopolistically focused on only one state ofconsciousness – the alert, problem-solving state that makes us efficient producers and consumers of material goods and services. At the same time, our society seeks to police and control a wide range of other “altered” states of consciousness. I refer here to the so-called war on drugs, which is better understood as a war on consciousness and which maintains, supposedly in the interests of society, that we as adults do not have the right or maturity to make sovereign decisions about the states of consciousness we wish to explore and embrace.

This extraordinary imposition on adult cognitive liberty is justified by the idea that our brain activity, disturbed by drugs, will adversely impact on our behaviour towards others. Yet anyone who pauses to think seriously for even a moment must realise that we already have adequate laws that govern adverse behaviour towards others and that the real purpose of the “war on drugs” must therefore be to bear down on consciousness itself.

Confirmation that this is so came from the last Labour government. It declared that its drug policy would be based on scientific evidence yet in 2009 it sacked Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, for stating the simple statistical fact that cannabis is less dangerous (in terms of measured “harms”) than tobacco and alcohol and that Ecstasy is less dangerous than horse riding. The present coalition remains just as adamant in its enforcement of the so-called war on drugs and continues to pour public money into large, armed law-enforcement bureaucracies that are entitled to break down our door in the dead of night, invade our home, ruin our reputation and put us behind bars.

All of this, we have been persuaded, is in our own interests. Yet if we as adults are not free to make sovereign decisions – right or wrong – about our own consciousness, that most intimate, that most sapient, that most personal part of ourselves, then in what useful sense can we be said to be free at all? And how are we to begin to take meaningful responsibility for all the other aspects of our lives when our governments seek to disenfranchise us from this most fundamental of all human rights and responsibilities?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Nov 04, 2013 7:11 pm

Easily the best thing I've read yet about all the pseudleft pifflers and liberal hacks pissing on Brand:

http://www.spyghana.com/russell-brand-taking-smug

It comes from Africa, where very few people can afford to piss about or to take pissers seriously.
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Nov 04, 2013 8:26 pm

Paxman: Brand was right over public's disgust at 'tawdry pretences' of politics

Newsnight presenter, who berated Russell Brand for never voting, admits 'green-bench pantomime' also stopped him once

John Plunkett

The Guardian, Tuesday 5 November 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/n ... and-voting
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby Hammer of Los » Tue Nov 05, 2013 12:51 am

...

Holy Mother of God!

I can't believe they are publishing Hancock speaking on such matters in the New Statesman!

And Russell Brand is on side!

Ha ha ha.

You gotta laugh.

I bin sayin' fer years one day the world will catch up wid me.

...
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Nov 05, 2013 9:11 am

Full interview:



(Don't know why the sound cuts out a couple of times; it did so even during the live broadcast. Censorship? Glitch? Libel fears? Who knows. Anyway, the interview is superb.)
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Nov 05, 2013 2:11 pm

John Steppling deconstructs (dismantles/demolishes) the pseudoleft pissers & their pseudoleft "discourse":



Meanwhile, Brand himself reflects on last week's Paxman interview & responses thereto:

Russell Brand: we deserve more from our democratic system

Following his appearance on Newsnight, the comedian explains why he believes there are alternatives to our current regime

Russell Brand

The Guardian, Tuesday 5 November 2013 17.57 GMT
Jump to comments (739)

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... -newsnight

Image
Jeremy Paxman interviews Russell Brand on Newsnight. Photograph: BBC

!'ve had an incredible week since I spoke from the heart, some would say via my arse, on Paxman. I've had slaps on the back, fist bumps, cheers and hugs while out and about, cock-eyed offers of political power from well intentioned chancers and some good ol' fashioned character assassinations in the papers.

The people who liked the interview said it was because I'd articulated what they were thinking. I recognise this. God knows I'd love to think the attention was about me but I said nothing new or original, it was the expression of the knowledge that democracy is irrelevant that resonated. As long as the priorities of those in government remain the interests of big business, rather than the people they were elected to serve, the impact of voting is negligible and it is our responsibility to be more active if we want real change.

Turns out that among the disenchanted is Paxman himself who spends most of his time at the meek heart of the political establishment and can't summons up the self-delusion to drag his nib across the ballot box. He, more than any of us is aware that politicians are frauds. I've not spent too much time around them, only on the telly, it's not pleasant; once you've been on Question Time and seen Boris simpering under a make-up brush it's difficult to be enthusiastic about politics.

The only reason to vote is if the vote represents power or change. I don't think it does. I fervently believe that we deserve more from our democratic system than the few derisory tit-bits tossed from the carousel of the mighty, when they hop a few inches left or right. The lazily duplicitous servants of The City expect us to gratefully participate in what amounts to little more than a political hokey cokey where every four years we get to choose what colour tie the liar who leads us wears.

I remember the election and Cameron didn't even get properly voted in, he became prime minister by default when he teamed up with Clegg. Clegg who immediately reneged (Renegy-Cleggy?) on his flagship pledge to end tuition fees at the first whiff of power.

When students, perhaps students who had voted for him, rioted, they were condemned. People riot when dialogue fails, when they feel unrepresented and bored by the illusion, bilious with the piped in toxic belch wafted into their homes by the media.

The reason these coalitions are so easily achieved is that the distinctions between the parties are insignificant. My friend went to a posh "do" in the country where David Cameron, a man whose face resembles a little painted egg, was in attendance. Also present were members of the opposition and former prime minister Tony Blair. Whatever party they claim to represent in the day, at night they show their true colours and all go to the same party.

Obviously there has been some criticism of my outburst, I've not been universally applauded as a cross between Jack Sparrow and Spartacus (which is what I'm going for) but they've been oddly personal and I think irrelevant to the argument. I try not to read about myself as the mean stuff is hurtful and the good stuff hard to believe, but my mates always give me the gist of what's going on, the bastards. Some people say I'm a hypocrite because I've got money now. When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter, now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want inequality on the agenda because it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

It's easy to attack me, I'm a right twerp, I'm a junkie and a cheeky monkey, I accept it, but that doesn't detract from the incontrovertible fact that we are living in a time of huge economic disparity and confronting ecological disaster. This disparity has always been, in cultures since expired, a warning sign of end of days. In Rome, Egypt and Easter Island the incubated ruling elites, who had forgotten that we are one interconnected people, destroyed their societies by not sharing. That is what's happening now, regardless of what you think of my hair or me using long words, the facts are the facts and the problem is the problem. Don't be distracted. I think these columnist fellas who give me aggro for not devising a solution or for using long words are just being territorial. When they say "long words" they mean "their words" like I'm a monkey who got in their Mum's dressing up box or a hooligan in policeman's helmet.

As I said to Paxman at the time "I can't conjure up a global Utopia right now in this hotel room". Obviously that's not my job and it doesn't need to be, we have brilliant thinkers and organisations and no one needs to cook up an egalitarian Shangri-La on their todd; we can all do it together.

I like Jeremy Paxman, incidentally. I think he's a decent bloke but like a lot of people who work deep within the system it's hard for him to countenance ideas from outside the narrowly prescribed trench of contemporary democracy. Most of the people who criticized me have a vested interest in the maintenance of the system. They say the system works. What they mean is "the system works for me".

The less privileged among us are already living in the apocalypse, the thousands of street sleepers in our country, the refugees and the exploited underclass across our planet daily confront what we would regard as the end of the world. No money, no home, no friends, no support, no hand of friendship reaching out, just acculturated and inculcated condemnation.

When I first got a few quid it was like an anaesthetic that made me forget what was important but now I've woken up. I can't deny that I've done a lot of daft things while I was under the capitalist fugue, some silly telly, soppy scandals, movies better left unmade. I've also become rich. I don't hate rich people; Che Guevara was a rich person. I don't hate anyone, I judge no one, that's not my job, I'm a comedian and my job is to say whatever I like to whoever I want if I'm prepared to take the consequences. Well I am.

My favourite experiences since Paxman-nacht are both examples of the dialogue it sparked. Firstly my friend's 15-year-old son wrote an essay for his politics class after he read my New Statesman piece. He didn't agree with everything I said, he prefers the idea of spoiling ballots to not voting "to show we do care" maybe he's right, I don't know. The reason not voting could be effective is that if we starve them of our consent we could force them to acknowledge that they operate on behalf of The City and Wall Street; that the financing of political parties and lobbying is where the true influence lies; not in the ballot box. However, this 15-year-old is quite smart and it's quite possible that my opinions are a result of decades of drug abuse.

I'm on tour so I've been with thousands of people every night (not like in the old days, I'm a changed man) this is why I'm aware of how much impact the Newsnight interview had. Not everyone I chat to agrees with me but their beliefs are a lot closer to mine than the broadsheets, and it's their job to be serious. One thing I've learned and was surprised by is that I may suffer from the ol' sexism. I can only assume I have an unaddressed cultural hangover, like my adorable Nan who had a heart that shone like a pearl but was, let's face it, a bit racist. I don't want to be a sexist so I'm trying my best to check meself before I wreck meself. The problem may resolve itself as I'm in a loving relationship with a benevolent dictator and have entirely relinquished personal autonomy.

Whilst travelling between gigs I had my second notable encounter. One night late at the Watford Gap I got chatting to a couple of squaddies, one Para, one Marine, we talked a bit about family and politics, I invited them to a show. Then we were joined by three Muslim women, all hijabbed up. For a few perfect minutes in the strip lit inertia of this place, that was nowhere in particular but uniquely Britain, I felt how plausible and beautiful The Revolution could be. We just chatted.

Between three sets of different people; first generation Muslims, servicemen and the privileged elite that they serve (that would be me) effortless cooperation occurred. Here we were free from the divisive rule that tears us apart. That sends brave men and women to foreign lands to fight their capitalist wars, that intimidates and unsettles people whose faith and culture superficially distinguishes them, that tells the comfortable "hush now" you have your trinkets. It seemed ridiculous that refracted through the power prism that blinds us; the soldiers could be invading the homeland of these women's forefathers in order to augment my luxurious stupour. Here in the gap we were together. Our differences irrelevant. With no one to impose separation we are united.

I realised then that our treasured concepts of tribe and nation are not valued by those who govern except when it is to divide us from each other. They don't believe in Britain or America they believe in the dollar and the pound. These are deep and entrenchedsystemic wrongs that are unaddressed by party politics.

The symptoms of these wrongs are obvious, global and painful. Drone strikes on the innocent, a festering investment for future conflict.

How many combatants are created each time an innocent person in a faraway land is silently ironed out from an Arizona call centre? The reality is we have more in common with the people we're bombing than the people we're bombing them for.

NSA spying, how far-reaching is the issue of surveillance? Do you think we don't have our own cute, quaint British version? Does it matter if the dominant paradigm of Western Capitalism is indifferent to our Bud Flanagan belief in nation? Can we really believe these problems can be altered within the system that created them? That depends on them? The system that we are invited to vote for? Of course not, that's why I won't vote. That's why I support the growing revolution.

We can all contribute ideas as to how to change our world; schoolboys, squaddies, hippies, Muslims, Jews and if what I'm describing is naive then you can keep your education and your indoctrination because loving our planet and each other is a duty, a beautiful obligation. While chatting to people this week I heard some interesting ideas, here are a couple.

We could use the money accumulated by those who have too much -- not normal people with a couple of cars, giant corporations -- to fund a fairer society.

The US government gave a trillion dollars to bail out the big five banks over the past year. Banks that have grown by 30% since the crisis and are experiencing record profits and giving their execs record bonuses. How about, hang on to your hats because here comes a naïve suggestion, don't give them that money, use it to create one million jobs at fifty grand a year for people who teach, nurse or protect.

These bailouts for elites over services for the many are institutionalised within the system, no party proposes changing it. American people that voted, voted for it. I'm not voting for that.

That's one suggestion for the Americans; we started their country so we owe them a favour now things are getting heavy.

Here's one for blighty; Philip Green, the bloke who owns Top Shop didn't pay any income tax on a £1.2bn dividend in 2005. None. Unless he paid himself a salary that year, in addition to the £1.2bn dividend, the largest in corporate history, then the people who clean Top Shop paid more income tax than he did. That's for two reasons – firstly because he said that all of his £1.2bn earnings belong to his missus, who was registered in Monaco and secondly because he's an arsehole. The money he's nicked through legal loopholes would pay the annual salary for 20,000 NHS nurses. It's not illegal; it's systemic, British people who voted, voted for it. I'm not voting for that.

Why don't you try not paying taxes and see how quickly a lump of bird gets thrown in your face. It's socialism for corporate elites and feudalism for the rest of us. Those suggestions did not come from me; no the mind that gave the planet Booky Wook and Ponderland didn't just add an economically viable wealth distribution system to the laudable list of accolades, to place next to my Shagger Of The Year awards.

The first came from Dave DeGraw, the second Johann Hari got from UK Uncut. Luckily with organisations like them, Occupy, Anonymous and The People's Assembly I don't need to come with ideas, we can all participate. I'm happy to be a part of the conversation, if more young people are talking about fracking instead of twerking we're heading in the right direction. The people that govern us don't want an active population who are politically engaged, they want passive consumers distracted by the spectacle of which I accept I am a part.

If we all collude and collaborate together we can design a new system that makes the current one obsolete. The reality is there are alternatives. That is the terrifying truth that the media, government and big business work so hard to conceal. Even the outlet that printed this will tomorrow print a couple of columns saying what a naïve wanker I am, or try to find ways that I've fucked up. Well I am naïve and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don't mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don't mind giving my life to this because I'm only alive because of the compassion and love of others. Men and women strong enough to defy this system and live according to higher laws. This is a journey we can all go on together, all of us. We can include everyone and fear no one. A system that serves the planet and the people. I'd vote for that.


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... -newsnight
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby vanlose kid » Tue Nov 05, 2013 8:14 pm

"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread: Russell Brand & others.

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Nov 06, 2013 3:17 am

Nordic » Thu Oct 24, 2013 5:47 pm wrote:if they can't utterly discredit him that way, they'll shut him up some other way. You know, he'll tragically die all -too-young of a sudden cancer or maybe his car will explode while driving down Sunset Blvd.


When Nordic wrote this two weeks ago I kind of pooh-poohed his concern, but I wish I still felt as confident now. The stronger and less dismissable Brand gets, and the more support he gathers (see the comments under his latest -- superb -- Guardian article on this page), the more Oscar Wilde and John Lennon keep coming to mind, not to mention Wilhelm Reich and Martin Luther King. None of them were politicians either, and all of them emerged from nowhere to disturb the sleep of their respective cultures, and all of them ended up conveniently dead long before their time.

Russell Brand, on Nov 5th, wrote:The people that govern us don't want an active population who are politically engaged, they want passive consumers distracted by the spectacle of which I accept I am a part.

If we all collude and collaborate together we can design a new system that makes the current one obsolete. The reality is there are alternatives. That is the terrifying truth that the media, government and big business work so hard to conceal. Even the outlet that printed this will tomorrow print a couple of columns saying what a naïve wanker I am, or try to find ways that I've fucked up. Well I am naïve and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don't mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don't mind giving my life to this because I'm only alive because of the compassion and love of others.


If they don't literally kill him I fear they will try very hard to cripple him, one way or another. The clerks and the hacks and the pseudoleft timeservers are not just lining up to offer their services, they're already doing their damnedest to belittle him and piss on him and put him in his place. Russell Brand will soon be judged literally intolerable.

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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby gnosticheresy_2 » Wed Nov 06, 2013 5:04 am

MacCruiskeen wrote:If they don't literally kill him I fear they will try very hard to cripple him, one way or another. The clerks and the hacks and the pseudoleft timeservers are not just lining up to offer their services, they're already doing their damnedest to belittle him and piss on him and put him in his place. Russell Brand will soon be judged literally intolerable.



I've read his autobiography (My Bookywook - it's very funny) in which he cheerfully admits to all the drug and sexual shenanigans he got up to so if it's a smear campaign it won't be about that (we're talking about someone who went into work at MTV on Sept 12th 2001 dressed as Osama bin Laden :lol: ). More serious attacks like attempting to frame him for paedo stuff I think are unlikely, if only because it would be so obviously bullshit. Taxes? he says he pays his, if there is anything used against him for financial impropriety it will be something minor blown up out of all proportion. The Daily Mail already got him sacked from the BBC so it's not like they can hurt his career. After that it's the familiar parade of morbid methods which we know so well.
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Nov 06, 2013 6:18 am

gnosticheresy, just after listening to 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' for the first time in years, I clicked on that Guardian article. It now has 2224 (!) comments, overwhelmingly in Brand's favour, and the very newest one says:

unlearned wrote:06 November 2013 9:58am

The day he does expose the truth he will be crucified... !

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... mentpage=1


Of course he's "exposed" it already. So presumably he'll be done for indecent exposure.
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby slimmouse » Wed Nov 06, 2013 10:10 am

Im of the distinct impression that Russell Brands message lies deep, inherant in the hearts of all of us but has been systematically perverted by you know who.

I currently reside in a country, where, were it not for poverty, there would I believe be practically zero crime . Given that there is no need for such poverty other than that imposed upon humanity by we know who, I can assure you that Brands message is inherent in the hearts of my local community at least - none of whom have ever heard of him, Ghandi, Che, or anyone else you care to mention.

He's certainly one Brand we can all truly relate to, if we put our minds to it.
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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby tazmic » Thu Nov 07, 2013 5:59 pm

MacCruiskeen » Mon Nov 04, 2013 11:11 pm wrote:Easily the best thing I've read yet about all the pseudleft pifflers and liberal hacks pissing on Brand:

http://www.spyghana.com/russell-brand-taking-smug

It comes from Africa, where very few people can afford to piss about or to take pissers seriously.

If it wasn't for these two words, it may have passed me by:

"Off of..."

Like a sore thumb.

And then, US centric, calling them Brits. No name...

http://my.firedoglake.com/natparry/2013/10/31/russell-brand-bashing-and-the-lefts-preferred-powerlessness/
http://essentialopinion.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/russell-brand-bashing-and-the-lefts-preferred-powerlessness/

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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Nov 07, 2013 7:15 pm

Ah well. Good on Parry for writing it, and good on SpyGhana for picking it up and reprinting it! (People in Ghana are masters at skilfully recycling useful stuff.)

When the corpse of capitalism is finally buried, Ghanaian undertakers should be invited to design the coffin.

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"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: The Revolution-Now Thread (Russell B. & others).

Postby smiths » Thu Nov 07, 2013 8:32 pm

whilst i dont agree with everything in this article ...

Talkin’ bout a revolution
(BY OZFENRIC on NOVEMBER 2, 2013)
http://theaimn.com/2013/11/02/talkin-bout-a-revolution/

Russell Brand’s basic contention is laid out in the first few paragraphs of his editorial.

Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites… I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance.

The editorial is well worth reading. It’s amusing and insightful, and it’s attacking the wrong target.

In his Newsnight interview, Jeremy Paxman asked: ”You want a revolution to overthrow elected governments, but what sort of government would you replace it with?”

Brand’s answer is illuminating. “I don’t know,” he replied. “But I’ll tell you what it shouldn’t do. It shouldn’t destroy the planet, it shouldn’t create massive political disparity, it shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people.”

The problem is that what Brand is actually complaining about is not democracy. He is, instead, complaining about capitalism, and in this he is not the first.

Like socialism, democracy as a concept is good, it’s effective, it’s egalitarian and it works. It provides all citizens with a voice in how they should be governed. It is inherently equalising; whilst minorities of sexual preference or colour or social class may find their specific desires thwarted by the views of the majority, equally the rich, the powerful and the venal should find themselves constrained. Democracy gives us a chance as a society to force those at the top of the tree to support those at the bottom (force, because it is unlikely that this will happen without enforcement). Democracy is a good system of government. As Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

In practice, democracy is poisoned by capitalism ...

Regardless of which side of politics you favour, however, all can see that our politics is broken. The argument is about degree. Whether you’re talking about the tendency of the right to remove any constraints that prevent the rich from subduing the serfs, or you’re bemoaning the latest revelations of cronyism within the left, modern politics is driven by the capitalistic system. Corruption, infighting, backstabbing, pandering and political inconsistency – these are driven not by public good, but by pecuniary self-interest. The corruption of politicians will occur as long as capitalism drives people to greater wealth, as long as it encourages people with wealth to even greater excesses, and as long as there’s a buck to be made.

By conflating democracy – a force for great good, rule by the people for the people – with capitalism – the benefit of the few at the expense of the many – Brand spoils the reputation of the one and gives the other a free pass. He is turning people off the one part of our current society that might possibly have a chance of addressing the very disparity he rails against ...

In calling for a revolution, Brand has no alternatives to offer. “I don’t know,” he says, when asked what he would replace it with. As history has shown, time and again, overthrowing a system of power without having clear ideas of what should replace it leads to bad outcomes. Ambitious, grasping people will always seek to fill the holes; nature abhors a vacuum. If you replace your democracy, what you get will perforce be a government by the few at the expense of the many. In the current world where capitalism has so much sway, the likelihood of this coming to a good outcome is pretty much nil.

The need for some kind of revolution is evident, but it’s a revolution against capitalism and consumerism, rather than against democracy. Do I have an answer, an idea for a replacement? I do not. Democracy in my opinion is still the best form of government. Does this mean an overthrow of the capitalist system is required? Possibly, possibly not. Capitalism has some benefits that should not easily be dismissed; it is in untrammelled capitalism that we find the problems.

What we ideally want is a democracy that is free of the pernicious influence of capitalism ...


the writer of the article is a bit harsh on Russell i think, but i agree with the main contention, the revolution needs to be against unrestrained capitalism that parasites democracy and kills it

i suppose its confirmtion bias on my part but it confirms what i felt on the second page of this thread

In our creeping slouch towards a new kind of technocratic fascism we are not just attacking the elites that are oppressing us, we are condemning the best institutions we have ever created for the defence of freedom.

I want to overthrow the big business stranglehold over global society, i want to overthrow the corrupt and cynical political elites who act as facilitators,
but i don't want to overthrow the brilliant democratic institutions that were built in the last three centuries


targets need to be clearly understood, and so does the rationale of the movement

(it is worth considering that if a global wave of disaffected youth and middle aged people smashed up democracy the main immediate beneficiaries might easily be the diverse sprawling capitalist entities with their extensive steel gloves)
the question is why, who, why, what, why, when, why and why again?
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