This is a thread for discussing all things Russell Brand.
At the time of writing Brand's been accused of being a massive sex creep, a raper and an all round piece of shite. The shite community are up in arms at this comparison.
>Firms pull ads from Rumble platform over Russell Brand videos
>Burger King, Asos and HelloFresh remove ads from site in wake of allegations about comedian
So... they were content paying out their advertising money to all the right-wing fuckwits and hate speech peddlers who populate Rumble, but Russell Brand's alleged sex crimes were the step too far?
Imagine you work in the advertising department at Hello Fresh. You get an email from a journalist asking "do you advertise with Rumble?". You've never heard of Rumble, so you give it a quick Google. There are news articles about it being bad, so what do you do? If you'd like to still have a job next week, you send a memo to whoever manages your digital spend to add an "exclude:rumble.com" to your ad management policy and send a stock e-mail back to the journalist saying something to the effect of "Our adverts may have been placed on [insert site here] by a third party without our knowledge. As soon as this was brought to our attention, we removed all advertising from their site."
Of course, there's not much of a news story in "people whose job is to avoid bad publicity react cautiously when a journalist tacitly threatens to implicate them in a scandal", so it gets spun into some kind of ideological statement. The centre-right papers pitch it as "brands uniting against hate speech", the far-right papers react with "woke brands stifle free speech", but none of them actually talk about the deeper implications of ad-supported media, because they're ad-supported media.
It's all a game, nothing more. It means nothing. Everyone involved knows that it means nothing. It's just a petty power struggle between two sets of rich people, mediated by their overeducated lackeys. If it meant anything, they wouldn't print it, because it'd piss off someone who actually mattered.
Marketing departments of large companies normally know full well which media they are advertising their product in at a given point in time. I used to work in advertising, for a pretty small agency, but from what I learned in the business, I can tell you that somebody who oversees a million-quid ad budget isn't going to leave to chance how and where their products are advertised.
So far it probably hasn't mattered much that Rumble is an obscure soap box for fringe opinions that Youtube won't stand for. Because it's been obscure. But now suddenly Russell Brand has drawn much more mainstream attention to Rumble, and especially with Youtube now having demonetised Brand and all his other sources of revenue being cut off, some SJW busybodies will have complained to those companies that they're not toeing the line and breaking his cancellation. And you know how their lot get sand in their vaginas if you ignore them. The last thing any of those companies want right now is to be associated with Russell Brand in any way, especially by allowing him to keep getting ad revenue.
Which says loads about everybody involved, all in all.
>>41039 Perhaps they watched the video in >>41003 where he interviews Jimmy Savile and were as aghast and revolted as I was at how offensively he pronounces Pinocchio.
>>41042 I know people keep bringing up that video to make a point, but it's important to remember that presumption of innocence is a thing, and no charges have been brought against Jimmy Savile.
Those hundreds of children, severely disabled people, corpses, severely disabled children and child corpses might have just regretted it afterwards and changed their minds. We can't go about dragging people's names through the dirt just because of the overwhelming evidence against them.
>Leigh Francis, known for his outrageous alter ego Keith Lemon, is accused of making 'humiliating jokes' at Melanie Sykes ' expense while shooting ITV's Through The Keyhole. Speaking two years ago, Melanie alleged her complaints to telly bosses were 'ignored'.
>Melanie claimed Leigh made explicit sexual gags about her for three hours in front of a live audience in 2018. Including: "I bet your arsehole smells of flowers." The TV presenter says her concerns weren't acknowledged by production bosses at Talkback, founded by comedy duo Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
What is it classlad always says about political correctness basically being the chattering classes using their cultural clout to ensure the proles mind their manners.
I guess the entire industry is now going to lose its collective shit about even the tamest incidents. I don't see that as out of character for Keith Lemon. He can say much worse things.
It's as much about ego as money, strange as it might seem. Putting out the begging bowl gives your adoring fans the opportunity to prove how much they really love you.
He was on about NATO and Russia and Ukraine in today's video.
Just the same kind of nonsense as always. Lofty conspiracy theories, formulaic accusations against Big Government and the military industrial complex, and almost tourette-like exclamations of "Why is nobody else reporting this".
Good thing you can't be a youtuber (or rumbler) from prison.
>>41069 >Good thing you can't be a youtuber (or rumbler) from prison.
Not with that attitude, anyway. Drop the soap on the right place and you'll find plenty of rumblers, IYKWIM.
This is about as insightful as saying you don't like his face. You hate him, lad, we get it. Whether he's correct about anything is immaterial to you, because he shouts sometimes and it sounds a bit like something else you've been told not to like.
>Apparently the betting odds are on David Williams
Not sure how I feel about him. You shouldn't suspect somebody of being a wrongun just because he's a bit poofy and camp, but I wouldn't put it past him.
>>41118 Please no. He's just a bit of a popular LADZ comic but his heart's always been in the right place and he doesn't strike me as sinister in the least.
>The ex-CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch and his British partner face allegations of exploitation from men recruited for sex events they hosted around the world.
>A BBC investigation found a highly organised network used a middleman to find young men for the events with Mike Jeffries and Matthew Smith.
>Mr Jeffries and Mr Smith did not respond to requests for comment. But the couple's middleman denied any wrongdoing and said men went into these events "with their eyes wide open". Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) - which also owns the Hollister brand - said it was "appalled and disgusted" by the alleged behaviour. The BBC has now uncovered allegations that the fashion mogul exploited young adult men for sex at events he hosted in his New York residences and luxurious hotels around the world, including in London, Paris, Venice, and Marrakesh.
>As part of a two-year investigation, the BBC has spoken to 12 men who described attending or organising events involving sex acts run for Mr Jeffries, 79, and his British partner Mr Smith, 60, between 2009 and 2015. The eight men who attended the events said they were recruited by a middleman, who they described as having a missing nose covered with a snakeskin patch. The BBC has identified him as James Jacobson.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-66889779
Who cares, he's not a celebrity and the victims were men. That means two things- There's no money to be made pushing it all over the front pages, and simplad doesn't have any motivation to demand he be immediately jailed without trial.
>>41125 I have heard of the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch because he got in trouble a few years ago for saying ugly people shouldn't buy his clothes. This from a man who looks like Stevie Wonder's attempt at an Easter Island head. I would happily bite his cock off. He's a tit.
>>41125 Simplad here! I think, I dunno', I believe there are about three of us, but, regardless, I'll don this brilliant white suit of armour for moment to tell you this: all you've fucking done since the four years of investigations into Russell Brand were first revealed to the public is cry, moan and try to play the bloody martyr and I think it's very telling that within seven minutes of otherlad posting a story from an episode of Panorama I'm certain you haven't watched, you're bitching about the imagined opinions of others. As opposed, of course, to discussing anything to do with the story at hand. I intend to watch the Panorama episode before I go to bed tonight, and, if you like, I can berate you for minimising sexual abuse all over again tomorrow evening, because apparently that's how you get your jollies, you tedious prick.
It's ironic that someone who couldn't give less of a shit about victims of sexual abuse and exploitation has such a chip on his shoulder over getting, metaphorcally speaking, pansted on an anonymous imageboard, of all places.
I know this may sound weird, but can we realistically assume that there is a majority of celebrities who have never overstepped sexual boundaries as part of their existence as a celebrity? Somebody like David Mitchell is probably fine, I imagine he's far too uptight to even give a woman a lewd look. But it seems like every other month there's another celebrity sex scandal, and it's always along the same lines. Does being a celeb make you a latent wrongun, or do they get carried away with their celebrity status to such and extent that they just assume sexual entitlement? Does being a celebrity make you a wrongun, or is it just wronguns who always were wronguns abusing their status to facilitate their transgressions.
>>41136 One of the things I like about Rush is that for all the stories of similar bands and artists at the time of their peak, diddling and smashing things up on tour they were apparently good boys who stayed in with pizza and DnD. They get that reputation though because they were exceptionally unique in what was otherwise a stinking pit of shitbaggery from all our favourite musicians from the 70s and 80s.
I reckon things are slowly getting better but that a lot of celebrities get caught up in the ego-trip, the culture and just generally do enough drugs that they lose touch with reality. Think David Bowie doing so much cocaine he convinces himself he's a Nazi aristocrat. This was especially true in the past when everything was generally more carpet-baggery and we expected certain celebrities to behave a certain way - 'it was a different time' really being true to an extent.
I think it's a very philosophical thing to discuss really. There's no black and white line between what counts as just somebody "validly" using their status or their wealth or whatever to impress someone, versus what is somebody exploiting their position of power to coerce someone.
As much as we might not want to acknowledge it, I think there are a lot of cases of lasses shagging celebrities and then just feeling short-changed after when they realise they weren't actually special; but what if it had been any normal bloke who charmed them with his sharp suit, rolex, and smooth talk, and then ghosted them the next day? Did that bloke do anything wrong? It's debatable, but at that point we have to start thinking about the very concept of seduction itself.
This is something that came up when I was talking to my lassm8 about all this palarver. Essentially, nobody gets into somebody's pants without trying. As a lad, you can't just sit around and wait for sex to happen. And you're certainly not going to get it just by asking "excuse me ma'am, but may I have sex with you?" You have to impress them, you have to charm them. Nobody is showing their true, honest self at a date. So at what point does seduction cross the line into coercion? Isn't all seduction essentially slow-burn coercion if you think about it?
So what I am ultimately coming around to is that I don't think many celebrities start out as mega rapists as soon as they get a bit of fuck you money. I think the problem is that really, how would you even date and go about courting people normally when you are in that position? They're going to have a certain type of girl throwing themselves at them, and they're going to eventually become desensitised to it, and even when they do have a "normal" lass they are going to have gotten used to flashing a bit of cash and getting the girl in a limo with a load of cocaine, and before they know it they've lost sight of when that kind of behaviour becomes predatory. This is not to excuse any of it, merely that we should seek to understand how boundaries become blurred and slippery.
TL;DR Wealth and opulence in itself is immoral and leads to problems like this. Implement radical socialism and it would be solved. It's always about class, fuck you
