“Comedian” and conspiracy theorist Russell Brand has been accused of rape and abuse by multiple women, according to an extensively reported story in the Times (UK).
Somehow this doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
Here’s a summary of the charges as reported in the story:
The comedian and actor Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse during a seven-year period at the height of his fame.
Four women have alleged sexual assaults between 2006 and 2013, while he was a presenter for BBC Radio 2 and Channel 4 and then an actor in Hollywood films. Others have made a range of accusations about Brand’s controlling, abusive and predatory behaviour.
Brand denied the allegations and said his relationships have all been consensual.
The findings come from a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4 Dispatches.
Some of the details:
One woman alleges that Brand raped her against a wall in his Los Angeles home. She was treated at a rape crisis centre on the same day, according to medical records. Text messages show that in the hours after leaving his house, she told Brand that she had been scared by him and felt taken advantage of, adding: “When a girl say[s] NO it means no.” Brand replied saying he was “very sorry”.
A second woman alleges that Brand assaulted her when he was 31 and she was 16 and still at school. She said he referred to her as “the child” during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months, and that Brand once “forced his penis down her throat”, making her choke. She says she tried to push him off and said she had to punch him in the stomach to make him stop.
A third woman claims that he sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Los Angeles, and that he threatened to take legal action if she told anyone else about her allegation.
The fourth described being sexually assaulted by Brand and him being physically and emotionally abusive towards her.
The story paints a picture of an absolute monster of a sexual predator, sordid detail after sordid detail.
So here’s an open thread to discuss these allegations (or whatever else you want to talk about).
@grumpycatisagirl; @Snowberry:
One of the less commonly used definitions of baroque is “anything extravagantly ornamented, especially something so ornate as to be in bad taste” (I wasn’t sure how to describe it, so I copy-pasted it from Dictionary.com). A guess on my part, it’s possible he meant that all the details which make it sound like he did bad things are unnecessary and inflammatory, and what really matters is that he doesn’t feel like he raped anyone, so he didn’t.
@Lorna:
“I lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till reluctantly she removed her bra, I used tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers.”
Which strikes me as a pretty baroque way of stating, “I browbeat and manipulated a girl into sex.”
(Any of Brand’s future “conquests” are welcome to evoke the sort of Pan deployed by Disney’s Rapunzel:
http://media.tenor.com/bjxy1pcj8jkAAAAC/rapunzel-frying-pan.gif )
@Surplus to Requirements:
Was this asshat in any show or movie I might have seen?
Since I don’t have a spreadsheet of the shows and movies you’ve seen, here’s Brand’s IMDB page: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1258970/
Not looking good:
https://www.alternet.org/revealed-the-magat-republicans-three-step-plan-for-classic-fascism/
Or Princess Peach.
Don’t have a link but apparently Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have come out in support of Brand
@ Fabe
Oh there’s a surprise!
He’s another man who never really grew up to take full responsibility for his actions, of course Tate, Carlson and Musk support their fellow whining toddler/teen.
I have read a theory that suggests current/former addicts are emotionally stuck at the level they were when they first got hooked. Add to that the SWM of it all (like his supporters, which also — no surprise) and he’s an example.
In his case, he started using a variety of drugs no later than age 16. And indeed, his sense of humor and how he relates to others, especially women, is the affect of a teenage boy.
Well, on a completely different topic, has anybody else heard about this?
https://www.popsci.com/technology/3d-printed-salmon-revo/?ref=futurecrunch.com
Yup, “3D-printed salmon.” Or as Star Trek fans might say, “replicator salmon.” What I found interesting is that the main motivation doesn’t seem to be vegetarianism or veganism, but capitalism – we can’t farm enough salmon to meet the demand, so a new supply is needed.
@Victorious Parasol:
I hadn’t heard of that one yet, though I would likely have eventually – these sort of things tend to find their way into the type of news I read sooner or later. But there’s been a lot of research on “traditional meat alternatives” going on since the past decade at least.
There are basically three prongs to this – bioreactor meats (AKA “lab grown meat”), insect-based proteins, and making plant/fungus-based pseudo-meats more “accurate” looking/tasting/textured substitutes to common things like pork/chicken/beef (and now salmon, apparently). I wouldn’t be surprised if all 3 eventually became alternatives to each other. The general motivation behind this research is not to make people go vegan, but to eliminate factory farms, with all of its cruelty, disease potential, potassium wastage, and methane emissions; with an extra bonus where, assuming the population peaks at 10 billion, some of the land dedicated to raising livestock can be subject to rewilding.
But of course, so long as we live under capitalism, there does need to be a capitalistic motivations to produce/buy/sell such things, otherwise they would never get off the ground. Also of course, there is opposition to this. Some on the far Right see it as a threat to their freedoms and/or traditions, some on the far Left see it as disconnecting people from nature by making our food supply more artificial, and some of those deep in conspiracy theories see it as an attempt by our overlords to further dehumanize people by replacing our “real food” diets with fake “slave diets”.
I do wonder if it might be seen as a severe encroachment on tradition and/or society to the point of being “soft colonization” in some parts of the world though. I’m thinking of the role cows play in traditional Hinduism, for example, though admittedly from the perspective of a semi-ignorant westerner looking in.
@Snowberry
Good points, all. We’ve also been seeing (for the last 3-5 years, I think?) a move to advertising a food as being “plant-based” rather than “vegetarian” or “vegan.” As far as I can tell, “vegetarian/vegan” is marketing poison, but “plant-based” is more acceptable to advertisers.
I gotta admit, I have my own concerns about 3D-printed food, and it’s about carbs. As a diabetic, I gotta watch my carb count, and while I can eat salads and other veggies without a care in the world, not all veggies are created equal. Eating a Boca burger is possible, but if I eat a burger made with animal protein, I can have other carbs to round out my meal. I’d be perfectly happy to eat a “fake” protein that didn’t require me to do the math, so I’m interested in meat substitutes that aren’t made of peas. (I really miss peas, not to mention corn, raisins, fresh oranges….)
Ugh, my comment is awaiting approval, too many links, I guess.
Shorter me: real meat/fish is still way cheaper than fake, and largely tastes better. I’m waiting for vat-grown meat myself.
My kitty wants I should open a new can of meat by-products. Being a cat, he has no moral qualms about eating other animals.
GSS ex-noob:
With regard to addicts, I’ve seen this, though I’m sure it’s not true in some cases, e.g. addicts able to spend a good chunk of each day not-high/whatever…come to think of it, I have known an evening drinker, pretty definitely physically addicted but goes through his day sober, who seems like a fairly normal person his physical age.
@Gerald Fnord: Oh, sure, we’ve all known alcoholics who still act like adults. But they generally have 9-5 jobs, families, and so on.
But this (expletive) left home at 16 — probably taking drugs before that — and living rough, then being in the itinerant showbiz life where you only have to perform a few hours a night and can sleep late, plus nearly everyone’s on something. We know drugs are very bad for people under 18 since their brains aren’t fully formed yet.
So yeah. I believe he’s stuck as a teenager.
I am morbidly curious to see if Katy Perry ever says anything. She’s hinted at it, but not spoken lately.
@Snowberry: I’ve tried some of the fake beef, but the salt and fat are off the charts. Plus they have a plastic aftertaste; my bestest vegan buddy says some things with soy in them taste plasticky to her too. And neither she nor I can figure out what they think they’re achieving with the fake “blood” — that’s most people’s least favorite part about raw meat, even if they’re eating meat every day.
The fake salmon seems more promising, but I did the math and yikes, I can get wild-caught for that price sometimes.
I need to learn how to make seitan. I’m not sensitive to gluten, but holy cow (LOL, no pun intended) buying it is expensive and the pre-made has ginormous amounts of salt. I rinsed the heck out of the last can of mock duck I got, and it was still too salty.
The Muslims in India are being abused horribly because they have the temerity to say Allah says it’s fine for them to eat cows. And the fascist Hindus have said they won’t allow fake beef to be sold either. I just wanna give all the Indian Muslims a halal burger apiece.
@GSS ex-noob:
I have some interest in this area, not because I’m a vegetarian or vegan, but because I do a lot of experimental cooking as a hobby. Personally I’m not interested in near-perfect replicas of existing ingredients but ones which are new or a bit different. So as an example, I don’t care too much about some “fake” beef which is close enough to the real thing, beyond the general principle of less harm, but a sorta-beef-like-but-different product which is decently good in its own right is up my alley. At least until it becomes old hat and I decide to find something new to play around with… I don’t experience this “plasticky aftertaste” and don’t worry too much about salt (because my body has some difficulty retaining salt) so that’s been helpful.
Likewise, presuming no-kill cloned meat (yet another name for the bioreactor/lab-grown stuff) lives up to its promises, I’m not really into vat beef or anything similarly common beyond the less harm principle, but would be into cheaper and more accessible version of the more unusual things. Like, I don’t know, elk or bear or ostrich or crocodile or something, anything which has a taste and/or texture different enough from the usual.
I’m also not squeamish about eating bugs, and not just in the “ocean crustaceans are bugs” sense, and find things like the idea of a lover and I cloning each other’s hearts for consumption to be both intimate and amusing, because I’m just that much of a weird hedonist I guess.
(Not to sound like a total carnivore, that also goes with just about anything edible. It’s just staying on topic.)
I have no interest in Brand since he pontificated about not voting some time back. I already want him to rot in hell, this just cranks up the thermostat.
@Snowberry: Carnivores usually don’t taste too good, but maybe that’ll be different if it’s lab-grown. In any case, I’ve had actual elk, ostrich, and alligator (which tastes like a combo between chicken and fish). I’m told kangaroos are tasty. Rich people would be cloning the meat of dodos or whatever.
Anyone here ever read Arthur C Clarke’s Food of the Gods? Seems very on topic.
https://bestreadables.com/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-food-of-the-gods/326/
Indeed I have. Vat meat, of course, calls back to Pohl and Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants”.
@GSS ex-noob:
Vat meat, of course, calls back to Pohl and Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants”.
And, in turn, to the monstrous Chicken Heart of Bill Cosby infamy; the original 1943 Lights Out radio episode survives only as a fragment. Chicken Little might well be a controlled version of the same experiment:
@FM Ox: Indeed it does go back to that lost radio show, I’m sure. Pohl and Kornbluth probably heard it when it aired.
I remember the Cosby routine. We really enjoyed his work until,,, Too bad, “I Spy” was in reruns here but I can’t watch it any more. It does seem to be off broadcast and cable. At least nothing’s come up about Robert Culp, right? Please?
(ba-dump ba-dump, eating Cincinnati)
@GSS ex-noob:
(ba-dump ba-dump, eating Cincinnati)
Whereupon I had to check; the Chicken Heart might well have passed through nearby Mason, Ohio en route to Cosby’s native Philadelphia, but it couldn’t have attacked the Eiffel Tower replica at Kings Island amusement park in 1943—neither the park nor the tower were available until 1972.
(Please excuse my weirdly specific moment of expat(1) Buckeye butthurt: is Flyover Country [a dismissive epithet that, incidentally, wouldn’t have been possible without Ohio] not good enough for giant monsters?)
(1) For a number of reasons including illness, the sudden gentrification of my old neighborhood during quarantine, and relentless family pressure, I now reluctantly inhabit America’s phallic gun butt.
@FMO:
IIRC one of the MUTOs crosses it in the 2014 Godzilla film. Of course we still only see action involving mass destruction at the coasts …
There’s also Tremors. And 50s B-movies like Them! and The Blob had them emerge from or land in some spot in the interior at least somewhat often …
Meanwhile, I have questions. Unrelated to that. Like: Where the heck is the fall 2023 TV season? The only thing other than pink slime to have debuted a new episode so far is Star Trek: Lower Decks. I don’t see any of the innumerable dead body shows or hospital shows (sick body shows?) premiering yet. Sure, a lot of them typically wait until early October but usually at least a few premiere between Labor Day and then. This year, nada.
And … what on Earth is with online video providers these days? Both dedicated ones like Youtube and Vimeo and non-dedicated but video-hosting platforms like Facebook. I now frequently run across videos, linked or in my feed, that don’t provide most of the normal playback controls (draggable seek bar, pause, volume, etc.) and sometimes not even a visible but non-interactive progress indicator; usually there’s just a mute button and it may pause and unpause if clicked on, without giving any indication of this functionality on mouseover. These aren’t ads (which I block, religiously) but content, but they’re being presented in the kind of stripped-down player widget normally used for video ads.
It’s not like the platforms have somehow lost their fuller-featured player widgets. Most of their video content still plays in a normal player widget with all the usual options (resolution switcher, seek, volume control with more granularity than just “0” and “full volume”…) so why not play all their video content in the normal, full-featured widget? The same videos often also do bizarre shit when you so much as slightly nudge the scroll wheel, like zoom a whole page down and then lose the part of the page that is above the top edge of the screen so you can’t undo this short of a full page reload. WTF? Facebook’s version of this is also a resource hog. Just having one of them scrolled to at least partly-visible in a group or your newsfeed, without initiating playback, is enough to make the browser noticeably sluggish and the resource monitor memory, CPU, and network utilization graphs all jump significantly, and the extra network use continues for several minutes even if you scroll it back out of view again.
And then there are the ones that autoplay with muted audio by default, don’t have an easy way to rewind to the beginning, and therefore don’t have any way to not miss the first second or two of the audio. That drives me up the wall.
What is the point of forcing some videos into these weird, feature-impoverished, resource-hungry playback widgets when one has already developed much more usable widgets and could just continue using those for all video content on one’s site?
Facebook has done some other bizarre usability-damaging things lately too. For example, they now use technical measures to strongly discourage having multiple FB tabs open simultaneously: if you open a second tab, sometimes your existing one will self-lobotomize in some manner and most of the stuff on it stops working unless you reload it, and very often chat messages will get stuck “sending” if you have more than one tab open at once. None of this used to happen. The newsfeed no longer updates some things automatically: make a post there and it will stick showing a time posted of “just now” indefinitely, whereas it used to change over time to 1m ago, 2m ago … 1h ago etc. without a reload. It’s not just the video players; at FB, the whole thing is slowly getting dumber and losing features. Why? It’s one thing to be too lazy or skinflint to implement something to begin with, but if you already have it why not keep using it? Copy and paste is broken too: those very same timestamps get turned into alphanumeric gobbledegook if you copy and paste them. It’s like some bizarre sort of copy protection, and applied only to the least-copyrightable part of the post.
Adding to the ridiculousness, some FB stuff (including, natch, videos) will automatically open in a new tab if you go to view them … for which FB might then punish you by obstructing your chat sends or lobotomizing your existing tab. Which might have other videos or things on it you wanted to check out next, and which will replace all of those with new items if you reload it.
Google, meanwhile, keeps nerfing its image search. First they added that Lens thing, which you had to make an extra click to go past to the regular old reverse image search results. Then they removed the link to do that, so now you needed a third party browser extension to auto-bypass Lens and go to your search results. The extension sometimes screws up and sends you to the Google Images front page instead of the search result page, though it rarely does it twice in a row so if you wait for your search to upload a second time you will usually get the correct result and not have to do it a third time … and then Google removed the little “…” from image search results (and only from image search results) that let you get at options like the all-important “cached”, in case the site happens to be down when you do your search, and the information you need is there but not in the excerpt text. Now you have to right click, copy URL, paste in google input after “cache:”, and hit enter, rather a bunch more work … and it doesn’t always work, sometimes giving a 404. Even earlier than that they’d removed the direct links to the images themselves from reverse image search (you can laboriously work around that starting with the “all sizes” link at top … if more than one size of the image was found).
Tineye is now considerably faster (no Lens-then-extension-triggered-auto-redirect, for starters), and still links directly to the images as well as to the pages on which they were found, but does not display excerpt text from near the image on the page, and of course does not have “cached” links. I think Tineye might also actually be the more comprehensive index now, though it is the case that both sites can find sources for some images the other fails to. And it promises superior privacy. I’m using it rather more than I used to, and considering using DDG over Google for non-image-related searches more as well (I already do for anything medical or otherwise potentially sensitive).
That last is because Google’s flagship product, the regular good old fashioned “type some text and get web pages back” search, is also getting crappier. The results contain more and more clutter from what I consider to be “useless” hits. First you have Pinterest and clones and similar sites that are either fully login-walled or nag you and eventually stop working if you try to browse them as a guest. Then there are a whole passel of “computerhelp247.xxx” type “tech support” sites that are chock full of poorly- (or maybe even bot-) written articles that just go over the usual suggestions (reboot the device, reload the page, etc.) and have a noticeable tic that identifies them reliably: an article with a name like “How to fix framistat not unfidgerating issue” will have sections like “3. Try restarting your wobbler.” with text like “Restarting your wobbler will often fix framistat not unfidgerating issue”, etc., with the title just copied and pasted even where it’s awkward and a human writer would have said “Restarting your wobbler will often refidgerate it on the spot” or something like that instead. It’s clear these articles are poor quality junk being generated by, at best, a form-letter template system or similarly (and they are strictly poorer than ChatGPT output). These often crowd out better results such as Reddit threads and human-written articles at Computerworld and Tenforums. And then there’s these sites with excerpt text that looks very promising, but when you click through to them they’re blank, and when you disable CSS either they’re still blank or full of disjointed phrases that seem like someone threw the information you need and five or ten other books or websites through a shredder and then glued them all back together randomly. If they’re still blank and you wonder where Google got the excerpt text, no worries, Google’s cache will show you what was there when Google crawled it but was apparently deleted since then, and it will again be Website Papier-Mâché(tm). Of course there are no links to the original source documents (such as the one the promising excerpt text came from, which presumably is the website that will actually answer your question), and those documents are lost in the clutter of papier-mâché results and indistinguishable from them since the excerpt text will be the same on all of them. The only way to find the right page is to click, back, click, back, click, back … several zillion times until you reach it somewhere around page 974 of the results.
Speaking of which, Google has changed its search results from paginated to infinite-scroll, which means if you were around page 50 (let alone 974) and hit “back” to return to them, it spins and thinks a noticeable amount of time before you’re looking at where you were again and can click the next vaguely-promising link. You also can’t get a URL for page 50 anymore, to jump directly back there, only for page 1. And of course they implemented this thing nobody asked for halfway-well for the regular web search results but shittily for reverse image search results, where you no longer have numbered page links or infinite scroll but a “click for more” button that will get you from page 1 to page 2 but no further. You can semi-fix this by changing the text component of the search (to a common letter like “e” or word like “the” if need be) and resubmitting; the result of that will have a different-looking “click for more” button that loads the “more” in-line instead of loading a separate page 2, and that remains at the bottom of the page until you’ve actually loaded all of the search results rather than stopping after only the second batch.
Just one more reason to prefer Tineye now, IMO.
So, the burning question here is: Why are these major platforms (particularly Google and FB) removing features or making harder-to-use, both general navigation features and specifically in their video players (and then only for a selected subset of videos)? I don’t see any obvious profit in reducing the usability of your products in ways that don’t look like the sorts of corner-cutting that would reduce labor costs. If anything some of these changes increase labor costs, both at the help desk (oh wait, neither of these companies offers that, nevermind) and in having to maintain two different versions of some things (the video players, and also two different search result page codes, in Google’s case, just to take the “cached” link away from people who somehow sneak past Lens to do a genuine reverse image search and to stick them with a cruddier pagination mechanism than straight web searchers).
Now, if someone makes something shittier for other people in a way that increases their costs, the obvious thought would seem to be “moralizing punisher”. But these particular instances don’t make sense as that, either. Penalizing certain video uploads by presenting them in “the shitty player” instead of “the normal, full-featured player” is just weird, versus not allowing the unwanted videos on one’s site at all or demonetizing them. And penalizing people who bypass Lens makes less sense than just removing the non-Lens reverse image search completely. Both of the latter reduce labor costs compared to the things being actually observed, notably. Removing things uses little labor and reduces down-line maintenance labor, versus adding a second version of something which is labor-intensive and increases down-line maintenance needs. And giant corporations usually don’t do “moralizing punisher” anyway; all they do is self-maximize (in a blinkered, short-term, hyperbolically-discounting sort of way that tends to end up having been penny-wise and pound-foolish once all is said and done). Though, sometimes rich individuals might do so. I think that might be why Musk bought Twitter and then ran it right into the ground: out of hate rather than as a money-making scheme. But the weird stuff at Google and Facebook does not seem to fit that scenario, either. Neither has (to my knowledge) been recently taken over by new management, and the weird things that are happening do not fit with either “massively cutting the technical staff” (again, they must have increased labor costs!) or “deliberately sabotaging things out of spite (why not use the crappy stripped-down video player widgets on all videos, or much more thoroughly wreck the main Google web search, etc.? Twitter’s decline is far more pervasive, swift, and severe than the spotty weirdnesses at either Google and FB.) No, this is something else.
Perhaps it’s as simple as the changes being the result of some highly-placed boss’s-nephew having had a “brilliant idea” and no one being willing to just come right out and repudiate it, so the results have both been rolled out and partly mitigated by confining them to subsets of the affected site or material. Or something like that. Some sunk cost fallacy or not wanting to admit that a trialled change was an unmitigated disaster or whatever, so they can’t bring themselves to completely undo it and settled for weird half-measures. Something.
@Full Metal Ox
Outside of election years, Ohio fades from existence.
(Fellow Ohioan here.)
Tommy Wiseau should run for Governor of Ohio on a platform of changing the name to Ohimark.