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Their Brains Have Turned To Porridge!


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Remember when JK Rowling was a humble children's author with some reasonably middle-of-the road pro-Labour Party views before coming a diehard TERF?  Remember when Matt Le Tissier was a cult hero penalty taker and pundit before becoming an anti-vax podcaster?  Remember when Jim Spence wasn't far right?  

Sure you do!  So what happened?  Time moving on?  Spending too much time online during Covid and getting stuck down some Qanon rabbit holes?  Or were they always lunatics and we didn't realise?  Perhaps we could discuss some here and how it impacts you're enjoyment of whatever they used to do.

Have any PnBers gotten a Covid vaccine and now believe the Earth is flat?  Have PnBers had any friends that were previously normal before turning bonkers in the last couple of years?  Were any PnBers fans of someone but can no longer enjoy their music or writing due to their pro-Putin, moon landing truther opinions?

Edited by Highland Capital
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2 hours ago, Highland Capital said:

Remember when JK Rowling was a humble children's author with some reasonably middle-of-the road pro-Labour Party views before coming hammerer of the trans?  Remember when Matt Le Tissier was a cult hero penalty taker and pundit before becoming an anti-vax podcaster?  Remember when Jim Spence wasn't far right?  

Sure you do!  So what happened?  Time moving on?  Spending too much time online during Covid and getting stuck down some Qanon rabbit holes?  Or were always lunatics and we didn't realise?  Perhaps we could discuss some here and how it impacts you're enjoyment of whatever they used to do.

Have any PnBers gotten a Covid vaccine and now believe the Earth is flat?  Have PnBers had any friends that were previously normal before turning bonkers in the last couple of years?  Were any PnBers fans of someone but can no longer enjoy their music or writing due to their pro-Putin, moon landing truther opinions?

I appreciate the idea of the thread, but this bit in bold, being unable to separate the art from the artist is the calling card of a moron. I know you're not exaggerating though and I know people who don't listen to certain bands they loved because of the political opinions of the singer. Even worse are the folk who defend Lewis Capaldi's "music" because he's apparently a sound and funny fella. Baffling.

Anyhow, Steven Seagal, before social media and YouTube, was just a cool guy who did corny martial arts movies. Perhaps he was always a fruitloop and we just didn't know.

 

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Linehan. From writer of beloved sitcoms and comedy panel show regular, to being so obsessed by Trans people that his family have left him and he will get nowhere near a mainstream writing gig again. All because some people pointed to him that out that one episode of the I.T. Crowd was a bit iffy.

Just £200 a year will get you into his gang and get it right up The Woke Stasi.

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Eric Clapton on race relations in the 1970s

Quote

Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. I don't want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch's our man. I think Enoch's right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the w*gs out. Get the c**ns out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. Fucking w*gs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. b*****d w*gs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black w*gs and c**ns and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black w*gs and c**ns living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for f**k's sake? Throw the w*gs out! Keep Britain white!

 

Mel Gibson

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On July 28, 2006, Gibson was arrested by Sheriff's Deputy James Mee of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for driving under the influence (DUI) while speeding in his vehicle with an open container of alcohol. According to a 2011 article in Vanity Fair, Gibson first told the arresting officer, "My life is over. I'm fucked. Robyn's going to leave me." According to the arrest report, Gibson exploded into an angry tirade when the arresting officer would not allow him to drive home. In what Vanity Fair was later told was an attempt to commit suicide by cop, Gibson said to the arresting officer, "Fucking Jews... the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Are you a Jew?"

In July 2010, Gibson had been recorded during a phone call with Oksana Grigorieva suggesting that if she got "raped by a pack of n***ers", she would be to blame.

 

 

Edited by ICTChris
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5 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

Eric Clapton on race relations in the 1970s

 

He also sent a grand to wee anti-vax musicians in October 2021 and told them to keep up their good work. I don't think it's the case that Claptons brain has turned to mush, I think he's just always been a massive arsehole. 

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Lyrics to Ian Brown's single Big Seed Little Tree

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Masonic lockdown in your hometown
Masonic lockdown, can you hear me now?
From the top down, soul shot down
State shakedown, mass breakdown
Global orders, riding over borders
Get behind your doors for the new world order
Doctor Evil and his needle
Doctor Evil with a masterplan
A forced vaccine, like a bad dream
They'll plant a microchip, every woman, child and man
They plan to chip us all to have complete control
The land, the sky, your soul

Geoengineering
Making more than patterns in the skies

5G radiation
Beamed to Earth from space by satellites

The scientist and mediatrist
Trying to tell me two and two is five

'Scuse me while I mention the strategy of tension
Mass mind manipulation, psychological operation
The general population, hypnotised, right in front of your eyes
Drama and lies, look into my eyes

Put your muzzle on, get back in your basket
Get behind your doors 'cause living here is drastic
Doctor Evil and his needle
Doctor Evil with a masterplan

 

Ian Brown has history for strange views - during his solo career he was condemned for saying in an interview "violence comes from Nazis, Greeks, Romans - they were all homosexual".  He was subsequently convicted and imprisoned or saying to a BA flight attendent that if she touched him again he'd chop her hands off.

It's almost like spending your life taking drugs and being surrounded by people telling you how great you are ends up negatively impacting your critical thinking.

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There's a lot to be said for the pre-social media days when you didn't really know about what singers or artists thought about things.  They did interviews periodically when they had a new song or film or whatever out and didn't have a platform to spew out their thoughts on everything.

I think of a few bands who I like or liked as a teenager whose views and behaviour would now come under scrutiny.  Joy Division, for example, flirted with Nazi imagery and Ian Curtis frequently made racist jokes and remarks.  Primal Scream once dedicated a song to Arkan, Serbian war criminal and gangster.  Richey Edwards from the Manics spoke approvingly of the Sudanese Islamist government for chopping off thieves hands.  I am 100% positive that if Kurt Cobain had lived he would probably be a QAnon believer.  Joni Mitchell apparently at one stage bleieved she had Morgellons, a made up disease where people think that fibres are growing out of their skin.

I'm also 100% positive that loads of beloved artists from all era up until the 2010s are likely to have behaved in a very poor, often illegal, way towards women.  For example, David Bowie is univeersally recognised to have had sex with underage female fans yet everyone still loves him.  

Edited by ICTChris
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Roger Waters is another one who seems to have embraced his inner moonhowler in recent years.

A weird minor one is also universally-unloved former Rainbow singer Joe Lynn Turner - his tenure with the band was their shite AOR years - who also seems to have gone off the deep end. He covers most of the usual bases here:

 

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9 hours ago, Sherrif John Bunnell said:

Linehan. From writer of beloved sitcoms and comedy panel show regular, to being so obsessed by Trans people that his family have left him and he will get nowhere near a mainstream writing gig again. All because some people pointed to him that out that one episode of the I.T. Crowd was a bit iffy.

Just £200 a year will get you into his gang and get it right up The Woke Stasi.

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I do like the idea of being part of schemes.

The "get rich quick" kind as opposed to the social housingy kind if possible.

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9 hours ago, Sherrif John Bunnell said:

Linehan. From writer of beloved sitcoms and comedy panel show regular, to being so obsessed by Trans people that his family have left him and he will get nowhere near a mainstream writing gig again. All because some people pointed to him that out that one episode of the I.T. Crowd was a bit iffy.

Just £200 a year will get you into his gang and get it right up The Woke Stasi.

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With Linehan I suspect it wouldn't have taken much to tip him over the edge in the first place. I made the mistake once of having a half-hour to kill and turning on his commentary track on an IT Crowd DVD - I figured since he'd been at least partly responsible for that along with Black Books and Father Ted he'd actually be quite funny himself.

I was obviously wrong...he came across as a dull, miserable, self-absorbed over-analytical weirdo. If you own any of his series, have a listen yourself...the guy was an accident waiting to happen.

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One reason is that often comedians, writers, artists, singers, musicians are kind of weird and damaged people.  They exist in strange worlds where they are told how great they are and spend significant times in environments that aren't conducive to a calm, normal life - lots of disruption, substance abuse, poor behaviour reward etc.  A good example I think is Morrissey.  He's clearly a deeply odd man but given his life, who wouldn't be?  He is now in his 50s or maybe even 60s, and he's essentially famous for what he wrote as a teenager, teenage angst poems.  Spending your life performing things you did when you were a teenager isn't normal - people move on from their teenage life and become adults.  So it doesn't excuse Morrissey for being weird but it's kind of understandable how he ended up like that.

Edited by ICTChris
Removed stuff that wasn't relevant
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1 hour ago, ICTChris said:

I think one reasons why so many prominent people go off the deep end is Patreon, crowdfunding etc.  This means people can be captured by their audience and pushes them down the proverbial rabbit hole.  The sweet attention crack of Twitter and other social media accounts also pushes this and the media system of podcasts also provides positive reinforcement for people.  If you ever listen to the podcasts of people who hoof themselves up as free thinkers, hetrodox minds etc, they all just agree with each other about everything, for hours on end.  

Not something I had previously considered really but the crowdfunding thing is definitely the case. Social media is very obviously at the root of that, alongside a lack of trust in institutions - which I have some sympathy for. Citizen Journalism is a similar phenomenon, seen Musk talking that up recently but the outputs of that largely bleed into things like that citizen app which was incentivising people to find "criminals" or paedo hunters pouring petrol through middle aged lonely men's letterboxes. 

The addictive qualities of social media seem to be true across class and economic status, which has some very useful outputs. The  breakdown of trust in institutions is in part due to a complete impossibility of respecting people in previously respected professions due to their inability to stop posting. In my experience it's generally hard to find for example a broadsheet columnist, silk lawyer or political scientist who doesn't regularly post things which are unbelievably donkey brained. Not that they were necessarily considered geniuses but any mystique or sense that people in high status jobs are broadly cleverer than most has largely gone. Social media also showed everyone that these people do seem to genuinely act as a class, at least at times. Whatever you think of Corbyn for example, or Brexit it was fairly clear that there was a generalised (not sure you could say coordinated) campaign amongst that sort of institutionalised "take" class of people to override those more popular movements. I don't know that that's positive but in the context of the '19 election when you see them now looking around at "why is this government we worked so hard to have elected, in the knowledge that they were awful liars, slanderers and thieves (behaviour we encouraged), behaving like this" it is at least instructive.

I think the earlier years of twitter had more mainstream pop culture figures like Rowling or Linehan aspiring to become part of that group, for no reason I can understand, and they had early successes which would have given them the normal positive social media response on steroids. Rowling became such a big figure in the sensible anti-independence movement that she is genuinely pally with most of Scotland's awful political commentariat - Deerin and that fat lad whose name I forget are in a band with her homeopath husband and a similar, if less prominent, figure in Al Murray, and Linehan got a positive reaction on Gamergate. Trans issues really became a point of brain souping for both of them though, and that feedback loop starts acting in less helpful ways. I'm sure, for instance, that Rowling doesn't really see any difference in her initial genuine but misguided intervention and the poisonous nature of her current interactions with that discourse - to her she's walking on level ground instead of careening down a mountainside. Her ability to bed herself into that sort of Labour right, anti-independence part of Scottish and British civil society, as well as her wealth and level of fame, have kept her from having to go the crowdfunder route, whereas Linehan never really had that sort of backing and it was ultimately the sort of nerds he initially interacted with that turned on him. There's also just the scale of his nastiness, I suppose, as his views aren't really very far from the vast majority of the class I discussed earlier. 

I think your point more explains those who go the other way, like Brand, but to him in particular I'd attribute a greater sense of either cynicism or thickness. I guess as we said in the twitter thread there is ultimately an audience for anything. 

Edited by Genuine Hibs Fan
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Wings Over Scotland. Was he always a bat shit mentalist? He used to be a good source of information for pro independence types but he seems to have imploded over trans rights.

Edited by RiG
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2 hours ago, ICTChris said:

I'm also 100% positive that loads of beloved artists from all era up until the 2010s are likely to have behaved in a very poor, often illegal, way towards women.  For example, David Bowie is univeersally recognised to have had sex with underage female fans yet everyone still loves him.  

Aye. iirc the red hot chilli peppers song Catholic Schoolgirls Rule is about a teenaged/underaged groupie that at least one of the band was having sex with on tour.

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