WTF happened to Russell Brand?

[username108]

I'm just watching his videos on Youtube and he seems (sorry) WOKE as fuck all of a sudden. WTF happened to him?!

Think you may also have some demons to address. That's me ducking out now. Good luck @todayisnottuesday

It's a feminist issue because women dont have to excuse badly behaved men. His misogyny is endlessly boring and we are allowed to say so.

@todayisnottuesday if you are behind the metoo campaign, why do you support Russell Brand?

He has said many times about him pushing women into things they do not want to do sexually

I was of the understanding that once upon a time woke ( woce) meant
Women Of Colour/ Ethnic minority, but has recently come to stand for anything regarded as politically correct, which is a treacherous mine field in itself.

How anyone can think he's attractive is beyond me

He's gotten even worse, now he's tiptoeing around Anti-Vax.

Also here:

www.thedailybeast.com/comedian-russell-brand-has-become-a-powerful-voice-for-anti-vaxxers?ref=home

@limpbizkit

It's because he's a recovered alcoholic and addict. He lives a 12 step spiritual programme. It's great stuff really

Yes, I'm really impressed. He's really turned his life around, and speaks some real sense. I used to find him irritating, but no longer do.

Good for him, I say :)

Love Russell Brand, love his podcast.
He generally asks insightful questions of those he’s interviewing and I find his respect towards those he’s speaking with quite humble.

He doesn’t seem to speak over those he’s with and takes a pause before responding which I like.

And I like that he’s changed from the person he was and seems to really appreciate his wife and family.

Seems woke but very mainstream opinionated on many subjects!

He's grown up and he's magnificent. His Youtube videos are fearless. Fair play to him.

He's been like this for ages.

Unpopular opinion on MN but I really like him, and have done ever since Ponderland came out. That's still one of my all time favourite shows. If I'm going through something really shitty and I'm desperate to have a laugh, I put that show on and it always does the trick.

However it started out, 'Woke' has been 'weaponised' by the far right to such an extent that it is generally weilded as a stick to denigrate opposing political ideologies. You can tell a lot about someone by their use of it.

Anyway, I like RB for the most part these days. 🤷‍♀️

I don't know anything about him except the Great Resignation videos, which make some great points.

I thought his treatment of Andrew Sachs was awful but I didn't know he had gone woke.

Anyway, sometimes people we don't like post interesting things.

Just to flag up this is a zombie thread.

The date of the first post is a week before the first lockdown was announced in March 2020.

Feels like a different world. I cringed at the word woke in the OP and then got confused when multiple posters said they didn't know what it means. Then more confusion when the antiwoke brigade didn't duly appear to stir things up. What a difference 18 months makes.

@manolantern I appreciate being reminded how much I love David Pakman but maybe next time start a new thread.

@ElliePhillips

There is a lot of misunderstanding amongst people about the word 'woke'. It comes from African American vernacular (I'm Black and first leant it from cousins in the USA - there was also a popular Erykah Badu song which contained it). It means (or meant to us) conscious, aware, well informed etc.

It has now been co-opted by mainly non-black, middle class people as a way to insult people who they deem to be self righteous.

Merriam-Webster explains it better than me:
"Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better. But stay woke and woke became part of a wider discussion in 2014, immediately following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action. Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke.

Like many other terms from black culture that have been taken into the mainstream, woke is gaining broader uses. It’s now seeing use as an adjective to refer to places where woke people commune: woke Twitter has very recently taken off as the shorthand for describing social-media activists."

This is important.

But before it became an insult it got co-opted by rich white kids. Many people use it now to insult people like Lena Dunham who stole the term.

RB is a massive cockwomble.

The trouble with people like RB is that whatever "journey" they are on, they don't seem to get that other people aren't necessarily interested in what they have to pontificate about, like they're the first person to ever, ever know what it is they're spouting on about, nor are people willing to be converted to their revelations. We're all on our personal journey, MrB and we don't need your opinions and inputs thank you very much.

Self-absorbed and up their own backside is possibly a good description.

@manolantern
Why didn't you start a new thread?

To me, woke means virtue signaller on steroids.

I'm not sure if that's mainly what he is though. He's just a massive, self absorbed ego who talks rubbish using fancy words and ornate sentence structures, mostly so incorrectly that people can't understand what he's saying anyway. Hence not sure if he's woke.

@limpbizkit

It's because he's a recovered alcoholic and addict. He lives a 12 step spiritual programme. It's great stuff really

And he’s still very handsome. Ooof

He's always been this way. I've been to a few of his talks before and he's incredibly intelligent. I think having children also humbled him and he comes across really self aware now.

Used to be called politically correct.

Woke extract from wikipedia (and it's a lot older than I realised)

Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, uses the phrase near the end of the recording of his 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys", which tells the story of nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women, saying: "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there – best stay woke, keep their eyes open." Aja Romano writes at Vox that this represents "Black Americans' need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America". J. Saunders Redding recorded a comment from an African American United Mine Workers official in 1940, stating: "Let me tell you buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer."

By the mid-20th century, woke had come to mean 'well-informed' or 'aware', especially in a political or cultural sense.The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest such usage to a 1962 New York Times Magazine article titled "If You're Woke You Dig It" by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley, describing the appropriation of African American slang by white beatniks.

He's not woke listen to what he says I absolutely love his videos. Such an intelligent man