I’m banging on these days about the centrality of “Love” in so many humanist messages, whether philosophical or religious. The original “common ground” on all sides.
Given my opinion of the moronic Russell Brand (***), about whom I blogged several times earlier in the year when he hit the media with his half-baked guff about “the hegemony of the political classes”, I’m not about to send him or his publisher £13.50 for a copy of his book on the subject, of which the reviews and counter-reviews so far only confirm my opinion. His main qualification to speak on the topic seems to be the vague visual resemblance to Che Guevara(*). But kudos to the creativity of the front cover (**):
We need to help change our politicians and political process through …. love …. not revolution.
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding, Russell?
(If we drop the R, the same Love exists in evolution.)
(**)And of course the same visual word game in the title was used by Ron Paul in the US in 2008.)
[Post Note : (*) And how did I forget his @RustyRockets twitter avatar is a Che-a-like anyway. Only went to look at the progress of the PARKLIFE! trolling campaign, which I’d not noticed since the original tweet a couple of days ago. Magic. And for posterior completeness, the original Craig Brown review and the original original Earthman Johann tweet.]
[Post Post Note : and Brand hits back with his own witty self-deprecating you-tube parody. Look, fair play to Brand for getting the question of proper democratic participation higher on the agenda, though with devolution and reform agendas all around us in recent years, it was already there. However fucked-up typical western democracies are, non participation cannot be a healthy message – unless you have a serious alternative to offer, and love is a perfectly serious alternative of course.]
[(***) Post Post Post Note – Fair play to Rusty Rockets.]