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Notes -
Russell Brand Accusations
Russell Brand has been accused of sexual misconduct and/or rape by four women in a large exposé by the Sunday Times [2]. The mainstream consensus online is that the testimony of these women is absolutely correct. I wonder, though, how many false accusers we should expect given the context of Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is not just some guy, he was at one point a party icon in the UK. As such, he has slept with 1000 women. And these are not just some women, just like Brand is not just some guy. This is not a sample size of the median woman in the UK. The women he slept with would differ psychologically from the average woman: more likely to make poor choices, more likely to be partying, more likely to be doing things for clout (like Russell Brand), more likely to be involved with drugs and mental illness. A study on the lives of “groupies” in the heavy metal scene found that groupies were more likely to use sex for leverage, to come from broken homes, and to have issues with drugs and alcohol. (This is not a one-to-one comparison; heavy metal is different than the rock n roll persona of Brand).
Scott has written that up to 20% of all rape allegations are false. But with Brand, we have a more complicated metric to consider: how many false accusers will you have sex with if you’ve had sex with one thousand women who make poor choices? Scott goes on in the above article to note that 3% of men will likely be falsely accused (including outside of court) in their life. If this is true, we might try multiplying that by 125 to arrive at how many accusers Brand should have. That would bring us to four, rounding up — but again, this would totally ignore the unique psychological profile of the women he screwed.
There’s yet more to consider. Brand is wealthy, famous, and controversial. His wealth and stature would lead a mentally unwell woman to feel spite, and his controversy would lead a clout-chasing woman to seek attention through accusation. What’s more, (most of) these allegations only came about because of an expensive and time-consuming journalistic investigation, which would have lead to pointed questioning.
All in all, it seems unfair to target a famous person and set out your journalists to hound down every woman he had sex with. It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women, which would be a large chunk of the women Brand bedded. Of course, this cohort appears more apt to make false accusations. Quoting Scott,
I'm surprised no one has commented on the far more ominous and frightening thing happening here. The very obvious political motivation behind the hit pieces.
Brand has been a, "rock star" sex pest and drug addict for pretty much ever. More recently however he's become increasingly disillusioned with the establishment and used his platform to criticize everything from vaccines and the covid response to russiagate. I don't follow him much, but it seemed to be around the 2020and covid when he fully divorced from his controlled opposition, Bernie Sanders with a bit of anarchy, type politics and started interacting with the Assange, Greenwald, Tucker style deplorables. It appears that in response to this the same media that gave him a platform for years and cheered on his lifestyle started calling up every one of his "1000 women" in order to get dirt on him.
This to me is far more frightening than the rapes, assuming they happened. It's more evidence that we live in a fully captured regime. Even if Brand were an out of control rapist existing in a world that had no modern safeguards against crime, at most he could harm, what? a few hundred or so? Before a ticked off relative is going to smash his skull in. The increasing merger between the political class, media and intelligence agencies in the west has, based off historic examples, the potential to get millions abused or killed. The sense of entitlement journalists seem to believe they have to "the narrative", history, truth, culture, etc. is rape on an industrial scale.
Come on, there have been political motivations for rumors, true and false, since the first city and the invention of large-scale politics. And even before that, hunter-gatherers in bands of twenty levied rumors against each other. Romans accused political enemies of sexual misconduct. It's absurd, lacking even historical context of the past ten years, to consider this evidence of 'a fully captured regime'. It isn't even particularly partisan, Republicans will jump on anyone in democratic media accused of sexual assault or pedophilia, too. Just googling, what about this CNN talking head, a dem?
"Increasing". Do you have any evidence that 'accusing guy on the other team of sexual assault' happens more than it did 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, or 320 years ago? I'm confident if you look into any of those timeframes, it'll happen just as often (when you adjust for the volume of reporting available, there just wasn't as much news in 1700 as there is today)
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Bingo -- the similarities with the Assange story are right there in our collective face.
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Orrrr, Brand knew the allegations would surface at some point and cultivated a following that believes in conspiracy theories and doesn't condemn men for sexual misconduct.
Brand larping for years as an alternative media icon in order to get ahead of potential rape allegations is a level of 5D chess that I find difficult to accept.
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It's absolutely wild, the article doesn't hide the vast scale of the investigation in any way, and even almost suggests that it kicked off as he shifted into this latest persona.
Why should they hide it? It works just as well if they do it out in the open, and is better at inspiring fear that way.
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Whilst I can identify with the sentiment in your post it's also a weird position to be in.
I don't have anything in common with Brand. He seems like an extroverted weirdo with enough self awareness and sociopathy to do some real damage on those who are more earnest and innocent in their social life. At the same time I probably have very little in common with the kinds of people Brand hangs out with. Given a lot of them are probably no sheep when it comes to malicious social games. For some reason, however, I find myself siding with the guy just because enough journalists don't like him.
I have no dog in the fight. I don't even seen much utility in guys like him espousing their rhetoric. Why do I feel like his fight is being foisted on me?
As much as I want some sort of signal out there that goes against the mainstream lunacy, I don't want to become a golem that gets animated into the opposite direction of the mainstream just because. Opposition for the sake of opposition just isn't enough. It turns you into the mirror image of a progressive like Vaush or similar where nothing matters except surfing the wave of the current media hype. I can see how obviously ridiculous people who do that look. I'd prefer not becoming one even if I feel the emotional pull to side with Brand because of who seems to be gunning for him.
The thing is that everyone has a dog in the hunt when it comes down to political persecutions, simply because it makes everyone that much less free. Letting then get away with silencing dissent simply means more and bolder suppression of dissent.
I have really come to dislike this particular framing/phrasing. If someone were to, for example, talk about how the ordinary people of North Korea "let the Kims get away with oppressing them," I imagine most people would see the problem with that. To say that Alice is "letting Bob get away with X" implies that Alice has a meaningful ability to stop Bob from doing X. But that is not always so, and is, IMO, the sort of thing that needs established first. Otherwise, it results in shifting some of the blame for a thing onto those powerless to do anything about it.
So when you talk about "[l]etting the[m] get away with silencing dissent," just who is it that you think has the power to stop "them," but isn't exercising it?
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Yep. There are tons of people I don’t like (rather agnostic about Brand — I did like him in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) that seemed to have a coordinated media smear. I hate the coordination because it suggests when the eye of Sauron turns on you (for political reasons) none can withstand. I would give the devil the benefit of the law for my own sake.
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It's a bit of a first they came for Russel Brand feeling situation I guess? Though we're well past 1st.
I think pushing back against power is just a constant. Everyone has their grand solutions for the perfect political system, but none of them actually are perfect. Eventually loopholes are found and power begins to accumulate. I don't think it's wrong to always be opposed to that and it's different from just always being contrarian. It's why people like Tucker and Brand can find common ground despite having very little in common ideologically.
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Russell Brand is an idiot and we're better off not hearing from him. One of the most annoying and vapid commentators around.
More effort than this, please.
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Once you just start looking for a crime, you’ll find something. Really is disgusting UNLESS the article is poorly written and some allegations happened first followed by investigation.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but notice the man hours spent by the media to try to prove this yet the amazing lack of curiosity into Joe Biden’s corruption.
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Russell Brand is a far-left anticapitalist. Yeah, he went a little Greenwald re. Ukraine and Covid (although that's less uncommon on the hard left than you think), but Brand built his political reputation as a hardcore Occupy Wall Street, pro-Corbyn, end capitalism, mass redistribution of wealth, "nationalize all corporations" type grift. He reaps, in part, what he sowed.
Isn't Greenwald that as well? I mean maybe not as far left as Brand. Brand always seemed more of an anarchist to me, anti corporation but anti-state as well, so I don't see it as reaping what he sowed, as he was opposed to communist style centralized power iirc. I mean he was a celebrity not a politician though so I don't know how consistent he was with his ideology.
Yeah Greenwald has always been far left and still is. He ‘associates’ with Tucker’s crowd to some extent because he hates American foreign policy, but he is still literally a gay Jewish Marxist, he’s not joining the hard right lol.
I do think Greenwald is becoming…more conservative. His core convictions relate to free speech and military isolationism. Hanging out in that crowd has I think impacted some of his views on other things making him a bit more rightist compared to where he was a decade ago (though he did publish even in Cato like 20 years ago so he was never opposed to working with more libertarian publications that were outside the mainstream left wing publications).
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