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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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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,

in a psychiatric hospital I used to work in (not the one I currently work in) during my brief time there there were two different accusations of rape by staff members against patients […] Now I know someone is going to say that blah blah psychiatric patients blah blah doesn’t generalize to the general population, but the fact is that even if you accept that sorta-ableist dismissal, those patients were in hospital for three to seven days and then they went back out into regular society

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.

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.

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.