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Tim Pool: Insightful Centre-left Independent Journalist or Right-Wing Pro-Trump Hack?

angrysoba

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angrysoba
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It's obviously the latter, and Timbah on Toast has created a beautiful takedown of this self-proclaimed left-liberal who somehow, for some unfathomable reason, seems to exclusively make videos that push an anti-Democratic, and pro-Trump and pro-right wing, and pro-reactionary voice in EVERY. SINGLE. VIDEO.

It's pretty amusing, and it also has a few hilarious points such as when discussing Tim's dating app theory and how it seems suspciously like he is creating his own dating app profile and signalling his own elegibility while doing so.

("I've got a converted recreational vehicle and we can watch the Netflix!")



It's over an hour long but worth it, in my opinion.
 
He's liberal the way Joe Rogan is liberal - that is, he's not, but he says he is for some reason. And all he ever wants to do is talk about cancel culture.

I've started backing slowly away from anyone who uses the phrase "the left" IRL. It's become a tell. Inevitably, the phrase is followed by bull **** about covid or BLM. Some online people still use it normally - "I consider myself part of the left," for example - but in meatspace, I don't even waste my time anymore.

Have I mentioned that I want off this planet?


ETA - I do like his beanie, though. He's a cutie, or he would be if he'd lie less.
 
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angrysoba said:
It's obviously the latter, and Timbah on Toast has created a beautiful takedown of this self-proclaimed left-liberal who somehow, for some unfathomable reason, seems to exclusively make videos that push an anti-Democratic, and pro-Trump and pro-right wing, and pro-reactionary voice in EVERY. SINGLE. VIDEO.

It's pretty amusing, and it also has a few hilarious points such as when discussing Tim's dating app theory and how it seems suspciously like he is creating his own dating app profile and signalling his own elegibility while doing so.

("I've got a converted recreational vehicle and we can watch the Netflix!")



It's over an hour long but worth it, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

Does Timbah have a bone disease?
 
I've never heard of Tim Pool but the video was a good rundown of how propaganda can be disguised as facts.

I did listen to the whole thing but actually one only need listen to about 15 minutes of it to get the gist.
 
I marched not 10 feet from Tim on a number of ocassions during the Occupy Wall Street protests and 2012 NATO Summit. He was something of an idol to me at the time and I'm not ashamed to say I was envious of his formidable kit and his incredible reach in viewer numbers.

I was quite dubious of some of his travelling companions/fellow livestreamers and even at the time he would diplomatically distance himself from some of the kookery.

I know he faced a number of very threatening encounters with police such as being surrounded by dozens of patrol cars, held at gunpoint and having his (and others') gear rifled through and damaged on the way to their hotel after the protest had broken up and they were done filming. I know he has been the target of violent attacks.

Perhaps that has contributed to a besieged mindset and, along with his continuing association with other conspiracy theorists and counter-culture figures, led him into the generic anti-authority realm and a willingness to connect otherwise meaningless "dots" into unsupportable narratives.

In any case, he joins a growing list of fierce, critical journalists I once strongly admired who have gone cuckoo for cocoa puffs (see also: Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi).
 
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Delphic Oracle said:
I marched not 10 feet from Tim on a number of ocassions during the Occupy Wall Street protests and 2012 NATO Summit. He was something of an idol to me at the time and I'm not ashamed to say I was envious of his formidable kit and his incredible reach in viewer numbers.

I was quite dubious of some of his travelling companions/fellow livestreamers and even at the time he would diplomatically distance himself from some of the kookery.

I know he faced a number of very threatening encounters with police such as being surrounded by dozens of patrol cars, held at gunpoint and having his (and others') gear rifled through and damaged on the way to their hotel after the protest had broken up and they were done filming. I know he has been the target of violent attacks.

Perhaps that has contributed to a besieged mindset and, along with his continuing association with other conspiracy theorists and counter-culture figures, led him into the generic anti-authority realm and a willingness to connect otherwise meaningless "dots" into unsupportable narratives.

In any case, he joins a growing list of fierce, critical journalists I once strongly admired who have gone cuckoo for cocoa puffs (see also: Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi).
Click to expand...

These are some good insights.

It is kind of weird that Pool is so anti-BLM now, when he himself knows first-hand how much the police can overstep.

Occupy was an odd time. Some of my super-commie friends from back then are Qanon-addled strangers now, and I really don't understand it. The best theories I can come up with are:

a.) Some people are drawn to extremism, regardless of "type"

b.) They weren't really politically left to begin with, just anti-establishment

c.) They were young then, and turned more conservative as they got older (but they are also kind of nuts, so they chose Trumpian conservatism on bad acid)

Pool does seem very angry to me, all the time. He can be compelling and well-spoken, but there is always a simmering rage under the surface, which is palpable. He is usually sporting a menacing scowl. It seems abundantly clear that, at some point, social justice crawled up his ass and started partying there 24-7. But why, exactly? That's what fascinates me.

Sorry, this post wasn't very focused.
 
I have particular contempt for this guy. Early in the Floyd protests, my gun-nut brother told me that BLM was making white people kneel and wash their feet, and police chiefs were surrendering to them. I asked where he got such groundbreaking journalism. He forwarded a link by Tim Pool (Timcast). Turns out Timmy outright lies and made it all up. The feet washing story had nothing to do with BLM, but was about a Southern church doing a reenactment of Jesus washing the feet (common church thing), and the chief surrendering was really a chief who laid down with his hands behind his back in solidarity with the crowd doing the same thing in support of Floyd.

Lying is the unforgivable sin for a journalist. Doesn't matter if he started well; he is the lowest of the low now.
 
Thermal said:
I have particular contempt for this guy. Early in the Floyd protests, my gun-nut brother told me that BLM was making white people kneel and wash their feet, and police chiefs were surrendering to them. I asked where he got such groundbreaking journalism. He forwarded a link by Tim Pool (Timcast). Turns out Timmy outright lies and made it all up. The feet washing story had nothing to do with BLM, but was about a Southern church doing a reenactment of Jesus washing the feet (common church thing), and the chief surrendering was really a chief who laid down with his hands behind his back in solidarity with the crowd doing the same thing in support of Floyd.

Lying is the unforgivable sin for a journalist. Doesn't matter if he started well; he is the lowest of the low now.
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I would say it is perhaps less a total embrace of social justice. Perhaps somewhat the opposite. Myself and many other advocates grew disillusioned by the presence of, shall we say, not-so-helpful radical zealots, to say nothing of backstabbers and informants.

This clarified a bit for me when I listened to "Master and Commander", the first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. Maturin, writing in his journal reflecting on various aspects of the French Revolution and Irish resistance movements, states his contempt for "men as part of a movement are inhuman to me, I care nothing for them..." (probably not an accurate quote). That entire passage quite resonated in me.
 
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A timely and in-depth profile:

How ‘Coward and Phony’ Tim Pool Became One of the Biggest Political YouTubers on the Planet

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-c...the-biggest-political-youtubers-on-the-planet

The chronicling of his failure at vice makes it seem most likely that Tim's increasingly radical right content was simply a business decision. Conspiratorial, far right content is a proven moneymaker.
 
The Buzzfeed article confirms a lot of what I already believed about Pool. He seems like he was always about getting attention rather than actually having any principles, being they journalistic or social. He got attention when he and his buddy put out compelling content when live streaming first took off. He seemed hip and cool to corporations trying to start up online news outlets.

When his career sputtered because he lacked the work ethic, courage, intelligence, and curiosity to be a professional journalist, he blamed "the left". The fact that the companies he worked for were run by rather conservative leadership simply looking to appeal to a demographic they thought he represented seems to be irrelevant in his mind.

Now, he gets marched around by other right-wing outlets as an example of a "former leftist" or some sort of reasonable voice from the left. He's one of several examples like Candace Owens and Dave Rubin. The problem is, none of them are particularly bright, Pool and Rubin are actually getting shut out by the larger mainstream right-wing outlets and personalities, and Owens is reaching the end of her shelf life. So, they have to get even more ridiculous and extreme in their statements.
 
Butter! said:
These are some good insights.

It is kind of weird that Pool is so anti-BLM now, when he himself knows first-hand how much the police can overstep.

Occupy was an odd time. Some of my super-commie friends from back then are Qanon-addled strangers now, and I really don't understand it. The best theories I can come up with are:

a.) Some people are drawn to extremism, regardless of "type" b.) They weren't really politically left to begin with, just anti-establishment c.) They were young then, and turned more conservative as they got older (but they are also kind of nuts, so they chose Trumpian conservatism on bad acid) Pool does seem very angry to me, all the time. He can be compelling and well-spoken, but there is always a simmering rage under the surface, which is palpable. He is usually sporting a menacing scowl. It seems abundantly clear that, at some point, social justice crawled up his ass and started partying there 24-7. But why, exactly? That's what fascinates me.

Sorry, this post wasn't very focused.
Click to expand...

I don't know who Pool is. Never heard of him. But I do agree with the highlighted part. As for Part (a), this is absolutely true. Authoritarians are attracted to both the extreme left and the extreme right. It's a horseshoe shaped phenomenon with the extreme ends closer to each other than the middle.

 
The first I heard of him at all was when YouTube started trying to push him at me. Back then, YouTube was routinely trying to push right-wingers at me, consistently enough for me to conclude that this guy I'd never heard of must also be a right-winger, because YouTube was trying to push him at me. (They've stopped that since then.)

On the idea of people shifting from the left to the right...

I've encountered the claim several times that they're getting paid a lot by right-wing donors, but I have no way to confirm or refute it.

Psychologists have found that a person who thinks conspiratorially about one thing is also more likely to think conspiratorially about other things, including when the combination might seem contradictory to others. I expect the same thing to apply to people who have an image of rebelling against something; they're more likely to develop an image of rebelling against other things too.

A non-political example that's stuck with me for years is Stephen Jay Gould. He tended to show signs of wanting to think of himself as, or be thought of by others as, a paleontological iconoclast, and sometimes it led him to positions that directly contradicted each other. For example, he was under the impression that lots of other people out there think of bigger animals as somehow better than smaller ones, and mammals as somehow better than non-mammals including dinosaurs. When he was writing about tiny Cambrian invertebrates, he'd argue against both of those ideas at once because they happen to line up with each other in that case, but, when he was talking about dinosaurs, he went along with the size thing to dismiss mammals as failures relative to dinosaurs because (holding his hands up) "they never got any bigger than this!". So size both is and isn't a determiner of a lineage's success or quality or worthiness or whatever; whichever one lets him demonstrate for us what an iconoclast he can be. Political characters like Pool may be simply the Goulds of politics.
 
Delvo said:
The first I heard of him at all was when YouTube started trying to push him at me. Back then, YouTube was routinely trying to push right-wingers at me, consistently enough for me to conclude that this guy I'd never heard of must also be a right-winger, because YouTube was trying to push him at me. (They've stopped that since then.)

On the idea of people shifting from the left to the right...

I've encountered the claim several times that they're getting paid a lot by right-wing donors, but I have no way to confirm or refute it.
Click to expand...

David Pakman has talked about being offered big money to become a right-wing conservative. He refused, saying he couldn't live with himself if he did so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd03OxfgG-M
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
A timely and in-depth profile:

How ‘Coward and Phony’ Tim Pool Became One of the Biggest Political YouTubers on the Planet

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-c...the-biggest-political-youtubers-on-the-planet

The chronicling of his failure at vice makes it seem most likely that Tim's increasingly radical right content was simply a business decision. Conspiratorial, far right content is a proven moneymaker.
Click to expand...

The August 4 edition of Jared Holt's podcast had a pretty good rundown of Tim Pool as well. Guest is Tim Campbell of Media matters.

https://shtpost.substack.com/p/fixed-audio-tim-pool-gets-his-profile

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sh-tpost/id1348573415?i=1000531142382
 
ZiprHead said:
David Pakman has talked about being offered big money to become a right-wing conservative. He refused, saying he couldn't live with himself if he did so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd03OxfgG-M
Click to expand...

I think certain people, particularly the ones I mentioned above, were never all that left to begin with. They were speaking the language because it helped them fit in and thought themselves cool for doing it. When they got rejected by other leftists, mainly for being lazy and not very bright, they abandon all leftist principles and started cashing checks from right-wingers.
 
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