Oh! And another one of my ultimate idols RUSSELL BRAND has an AMAZING new book out called "revolution" this week! I CANT WAIT. Once I got to meet him and I actually told him he was like my yoda, he said he wanted to adopt me!
From here:
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsit...y-destroyed-the-lefty-weft/16081#.VFeLqGfDXWa
"
Has Russell Brand really destroyed the lefty weft?
Nope – he’s merely the bastard child of the left's own self-induced decay.
...
There’s a weird contradiction in the media mauling of Brand. On one hand they want us to believe he’s not a serious person, what with his stupid mockney wordplay and his penchant for thinking with his dicky wick, but on the other they tell us his wild political emotionalism is dangerous and destructive and could damage the left forever. You get the impression that what freaks them out most about Brand is that, because he’s a Sleb, which is basically a modern-day Saint, it’s possible the little people will heed his warped words.
We know he’s churning out populist codswallop, but do
they?
...
To accuse Brand of warping what it means to be left-wing, especially among impressionable yoof, is crazy. For in truth, Brand is merely a hall-of-mirrors version of what the left itself had already become in recent years: an illiberal, increasingly naturalistic outfit that has ditched its old demands of production and freedom in favour of calling on the Byzantine modern state to control corporations’ antics and curb ordinary people’s material desires. To put it in saucy Brandspeak, if the modernity-haters of the 1990s anti-globalisation movement held an orgy with the conspiratorial bank-bashers of the Occupy protests and the misanthropes of the environmentalism that is absolutely
de rigueur among every leftie on the planet, and one of them got preggers, Brand would be the baby. Far from fathering the decline of the left, Brand is the hollowed-out left’s bastard offspring.
All that Brand does is regurgitate to the twenty-first-century left, in super-flowery lingo, its own thoughtless prejudices and feeling of exhaustion with humanity.
...
The left once embodied a faith in mankind to use his mind and his hands to create a world of plenty, to exploit nature’s resources in the name of creating what Sylvia Pankhurst described as ‘plenty for all… a great production that will supply all’. Not anymore. Now the left demonises production (it harms the planet) and consumption (it makes us mentally ill) and has embraced the very naturalistic nonsense about scarcity and limited resources that a cockier left once explicitly challenged. And the left once trusted that the man in the street (and woman) was capable of determining his destiny without requiring the scaffolding of state or the moral hectoring of priests to constantly guide him on his way. Not anymore. From Brand’s concern that corporations have captured our minds to other leftists’ bleating about the brainwashability of the tabloid-reading hordes - whose minds are ‘orchestrated from the shadows’ - the left now libels the little people, believing they must constantly have their awareness raised by experts, celebs and advertising-immune Occupiers.
...
Far from destroying left-wing thought, Brand embodies the misanthropy and naturalism that were once characteristics of Romantics and the right but which now pass for ‘left-wing thought’. You’re a leftist who has been rattled by Russ’s book? Then pull up a chair, plonk it in front of a mirror, and take a good, long look. For it was your own movement’s jettisoning of its principles and positivity and progress that paved the way for the rise of the ugly misanthropy of Brand and all the rest who have turned ‘left’ into a codeword for anti-humanism.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of
spiked. He will be speaking at the debates ‘Should even hate speech be free speech?’ in New York on 30 October and ‘Press freedom in the twenty-first century’ on 5 November in Washington, DC, as part of Free Speech Now!’s US event series."
regarDS
