Brennan Lenin Mulliganin
Idk why I get bad vibes from him. Is it the theatre kid vibe? Improv guy vibe? Or that I’ve been burned by everyone in entertainment presenting themselves as left but not explicitly communist (and some of them, too)?
No one on this website has ever seen a single westerner that they couldn’t find some way to be dubious of the politics of, so it’s not surprising you feel this way.
We’ve been burned a lot
I’d say that if you got Brennan in a room he would be some flavor of Anarcho-Communist. The issue is that he will never make that public because he is far too savvy an operator to do that. He has somehow (honestly through lots of luck, perseverance, and massive amounts of talent) gotten himself onto the gravy train, with a wife and kid, and he isn’t going to knock himself off of it until he is good and ready to.
I think he’s pretty open about being some kind of anarchist. He has characters he puts in to basically give his politics and he explicitly calls them anarchists (I believe that he’s speaking in-character here as one of those)
Know-it-all improv guy vibes I think. But out of all the comedy drop-out people, he’s the one that never misses an opportunity to make a anti-cop, anti-capitalism or communist reference, whether in scene or out of it, or really whether anybody wants to hear it.
And that does strike me as a very communist thing to do.
He’s giving regular run-of-the-mill vocal US leftist. He still hates on Stalin, the USSR, China and so on, but his politics are otherwise decent.
I don’t have the clip on me, but he was doing that on some podcast about a year ago.
Unlike most of those types he doesn’t spend a bunch of time whining about those projects though, so he’s better than most, but he’s still thereWow this is long but the title intrigues me. Is it a short story, or an autobiographical piece of writing from him?
It’s worth a read
Autobiographical short story
I read it. It’s pretty great!
I get the vibe that most leftists are “theater kids” in some form, as in artsy types. They’re sure as hell not jocks, and tho we like to flatter ourselves I doubt most would fit in at a punk show either.
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I think that might be more of a this website thing than a leftist thing
Me, using deductive reasoning after a few years on hb dot net:
“Leftists love beans”
No lies detected
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MLs are all some degree of nerd, we do homework for fun
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What? Punk and leftist politics are deeply intertwined. I don’t really know how it is in the USA I guess. Maybe it’s more divorced from politics there. I suppose most leftists aren’t punks but wherever I’ve lived most punks are sure as fuck leftists.
OG
Punk was reactionary, though not in the political sense. It was a retvrn to the simplistic structures and unpolished sounds of Rock & Roll from the 50s and early 60s, launched in reaction to the overproduced Psychedelic/Progressive/Hard Rock that emerged towards the start of the 70s. However, they mostly steered clear of any sort of politics. Much of the discourse from those early days was about whether or not Punk should even have a political stance. It eventually coalesced around vague anti-war and anti-corporate ideas. Sometimes with a bit of feminism and pro-lgbt+ when a scene supported women and queer folx, but not every scene did. Punk didn’t really get political until it crossed The Pond, and that’s because it caught on with art school students in 
I’m not sure that’s a very useful application for the word reactionary because it would apply to basically all art movements ever. But I appreciate the context on the American history of punk, thanks!
Is it, though? Punk in the US was a rejection of modern and progressive rock and a return to the older sounds. That’s also a big part of why it caught on with white supremacist skinheads in the UK.
You probably want the word “reactant”
A lot of punk is left or connected to leftism, but lots of leftists would struggle to be further from punk (I am one of the latter).
I played hockey
When you’re playing with the puck, you’re playing with
C O M M U N I S M
Last pig destroyer show i was at had a lot of acab type patches around. Not punk but i think some of us are still cool
erm, I played varsity for years and years back in the day. I am not artsy. get wreked
Actually, I’m more of a rivethead
You’d be shocked at how many punks are just former theater kids
Some of us are just dorks.
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I think he’s fine. He’s an anarchist but that’s better than most of his fellows in popular-ish media, and his heart is surely in the right place.
He’s my problematic fav
Y’all wanna make some bacon?
7/10 of this website is ill prepared. The other 3 are likely feds.
It’s a quote from the clip. The character he’s playing is a mild mannered older man, until he finishes his speech and gets a molotov cocktail from his bag to throw at cops.
It’s such a good bit
A lit Molotov cocktail mind you. “Was that already lit!?” Someone asks.
Speak for yourself, I’m ready to
right now!There we go! It’s voting time.
I distinctly remember him saying some anti-Stalin shit somewhere, but overall he’s got pretty good politics. He’s an incredibly funny and creative guy.
He’s a pretty standard western radlib “socialist”. Saying “capitalism bad” doesn’t mean much at this point if you don’t also say “anti-imperialist states good”.
I watched his Wired tech support video about D&D and he managed to sneak in some agitprop and was like “I don’t know if you’ll leave that in.”
Also, I watched a Wired video of a “China expert” think-tank ghoul and it was the most inane, tired old propaganda about Taiwan and tankman and it didn’t seem like anyone was buying it in the comments.
Those wired ones are a real mixed bag
“socio-economic ethnic group” kind of makes sense as a concept to combine the systems of capitalist and white supremacist (or otherwise ethnic/racial) oppression but it is unclear and he should’ve just said “ruling class” here.socio-economic ethnic group
It’s a standard phrase in Britain, used by government reports. He’s not really intending much by it other than using a phrase everyone in the UK hears all the time. Example:
Ah crap, that’s my bad. Thanks.
I get the same with phrases that are uniquely american and not used over here at all, like houseless. There’s a whole range of culturally unique phrases for social problems that aren’t standardised across english speaking countries.
The euphemism treadmills are on overdrive and they’ve started to diverge across space.
It seems like over a long enough period of time, any given word or name or symbol will start to be viewed as problematic or stigmatized, and a replacement comes along. Maybe it really just happens because people feel like it’s stale.
(not relevant to your overall point but) I don’t think houseless is a commonly used phrase, in the U. S.; it’s anecdotal but I’ve never heard it used.
I heard it used a fair amount in 2021-2023 ish, the point of the term was to decouple the stereotypes and stigma of homelessness from the material reality of not having a house. The term “rough sleeper” has a similar origin. Basically, just because someone doesn’t have a house doesn’t mean they don’t have a home, they could sleep in their car, a shelter, or some other arrangement.
Oh; maybe unhoused? Heh, it’s entirely a difference of formation but I legitimately didn’t recognize it, because of that.
I get what you mean, now.
When I was studying housing we used unhoused for the most part. It’s definitely the preferred term for progressives in the US.
The “house” part makes it weird in the US, at least, where the highest unhoused populations are also in places where the majority of dwellings are apartments and not house-houses. If you break “houseless” down to its component parts, I’ve been houseless virtually my whole adult life despite an unbroken streak of leases.
“Unhoused” is less “house”-dependent because there’s no separate verb form; you’re housed in your apartment because what else could fill in that blank, and that’s the one that’s in much more common use in coastal cities in my experience.
Well he was saying it in character as a halfling…
What’s this from? The only thing I’ve watched if his so far was the three part Cataclysm special for Critical Role.
I believe its from the first season of Fantasy High. I’m certain about the Fantasy High part, less sure about the season.
This is correct
It’s from Dimension 20: Fantasy High
what about the people’s laws
Only possible with a DotP
who?
Comedian and D&D show guy
no wonder i never heard of him
I know, I’m a nerd.
I have a lot of theatre kid friends, unfortunately
You have good taste
I recognize him from all those shorts I instantly scroll past on youtube.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
