Re: Coup shame fame?
"he was chatting to guests about Plato and the school of Socrates."
The thing is, once again, if you remove all the flowery language from Brand, you quickly realise that he has only a very limited grasp of what he's talking about, and doesn't appear to understand how to read critically. I don't think he's thick, necessarily; I just think he doesn't have the critical thinking skills necessary for serious social analysis. As a result, he reads one book on a subject, believes it unquestioningly, and then starts spouting off about it to everyone who'll listen like a 15 year old who's just read the Communist Manifesto.
So rather than producing an actual critical analysis of modern voting systems, Brand uncritically read someone else's critique (judging by the contents of the frankly dull 'Revolution', probably Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent), failed to understand any of the technical details which made the original actually make sense, and then mindlessly parroted his very simplistic understanding until Ed Milliband sat down with him for ten minutes and pointed out the numerous flaws in it, where upon he instantly recanted and told everyone to vote Labour instead. Rather than, say, having anticipated even the simplest of objections to 'his' ideas and having thought of a single counterargument.
This is not a Great Thinker, but his use of ludicrously ornate speech patterns hides the fact he's often just recycling someone else's opinion on a topic. As such, he's not a smart person (since a smart person would be capable of coming up with and then defending an opinion on a topic, rather than just borrowing someone else's and then instantly abandoning it in the face of questioning), but he's a stupid person's idea of a smart person, since he uses long words to describe things he pretty clearly doesn't really understand himself.
And this is where we get back to Johnson; he too simply uses very elaborate verbage to hide the fact that what he's saying isn't actually very highbrow. He dresses up his fairly basic arguments in the kind of language that people who barely completed high school imagine academics use, but which have none of the subtle differences in meaning or specific definitions that real academic language contains (though there's plenty of academics who fall into this particular trap, too, mind). And so there's no big clever original ideas hidden in there - it's just fairly ordinary Thatcherite Tory dogma presented in a particularly waffling manner, just as Brand's tedious diatribes are a 14 year old's understanding of libertarian socialism dressed up in the language of a particularly irritating 17th century poet.
There's an old saying: "A good academic makes the complicated seem simple, a bad academic makes the simple seem complicated." Both Johnson and Brand are very much in the latter camp.