My Gripe.  I have never thought that Russell Brand was even remotely funny.  His stand-up routine of promiscuous and misogynist “jokes” were distasteful to say the very least.  What I found interesting about him was the way that he was enabled by the media, the same media that now vilifies him.  Undoubtedly, his niche worldly outlook appealed to the peculiar tastes of a very broad sector of the market.  Why else would he have been given the oxygen of publicity and media air-time?  Now the same powerful “faceless suits”, who use the media to control and commodify public opinion, have decided there’s more money to be made demonising him, rather than cultivating his pathetic brand [pardon the pun] of toxic masculinity.  I watched the C4 documentary, which supposedly highlighted the evidence against Brand.  It seems quite clear to me that he is guilty of having consensual sex with a sixteen-year-old child, if you can call having sex with a vulnerable young person consensual.  However, from what I have seen in the C4 documentary, the rest of the evidence against him is debatable.  Let me be clear: I certainly do not condone rape or any other forms of sexual and emotional violence against women, children or even men for that matter.  However, we will never really know what took place between Brand and his accusers in private.  The accusers all had sex with him, which is without doubt, but the circumstances are contested.  Apparently, Brand has been sacrificed by the media on the altar of public opinion and found guilty without a trial.  If he really did what he is accused of, then he should go to prison, but to incarcerate him there has to be evidence. I’m not sure if having sex with a sixteen-year-old minor is an imprisonable offence; if it is, then lock him up.  What’s Your Gripe?

All this fuss about artefacts stolen from the British Museum is simply the chickens coming home to roost.  It’s ironic as the institutions, organisations and individuals who donated those valuable artefacts to the British Museum, stole them from various nation states in the first place.  No country has ever asked the British Museum, or any other museum for that matter, to “take care of” their historic and valorized symbols of nationhood, as if they were somehow incapable of doing so.  Most of the artefacts in UK museums, presented as belonging to Britain, were taken by force and people were killed in the process.  

Do you think that it is time for the British museum, and the institutions built on colonialism and the theft of resources from colonised nations, acknowledge the wrongs committed in the name of Empire – and the impact they continue to have on racialised groups?