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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28508 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I'm curious to see how this plays out.

As of now Pool seems to be turning on his handlers

I know nothing about the guy, what's his deal?

As of now Pool seems to be turning on his handlers

Is he though? Russia doesn't give a shit if we think they suck donkey balls or that Putin is a scumbag. They care that we keep funding Ukraine and sanctioning their economy.

what's his deal?

It's a long story but basically: street journalist millennial covers Occupy Wall Street, gets into the burgeoning journo outlets of the era (Vice when they were hot shit) doing real investigative journalism, leaves them exactly as they go woke because he can see the writing on the wall, plays the youtube game hard (and I do mean hard, the guy used to publish news videos every day essentially by himself) at the right time. Makes a ton of money by catering to disaffected liberals, libertarians and other people thrown out of the left wing that aren't straight unadulterated MAGA and ends up at the head of his own small media empire, which includes his own news website and a couple of podcasts.

It's surprisingly not that uncommon a route, in retrospect I can think of two other guys who fit the bill. But Tim's special sauce is that he's a shrewd businessman from the school of hard knocks. He's got the most boring inoffensive content relative to how political commentators usually are but he knows how to position and market it very well.

This makes this particular thing a bit surprising because if there's anyone I would expect to properly vet funding sources it's him. He's been cultivating his reputation over the years to appeal to a particular demographic and he had some run ins with shady people in the past (who can forget the Jack Murphy drama?).

You can see him in this tweet executing a very competent defense in my opinion, but someone in his org fucked up, this is going to do permanent damage to his brand.

As for whether he's bought and paid for, I doubt it. Tim isn't the sort of person you can buy with money. You can fund him because he's useful for you to be around and you can nudge him towards particular things because he will follow algorithmic trends and rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and propaganda, but the guy that sacrificed his entire career to build his own thing for independence's sake isn't going to so directly sell out.

I used to like his street journalist content a long time ago, but he turned into the single worst thing you find on Youtube outside of Elsa/Spiderman content: "read alongs" w/ commentary on news articles. Louis Rossman also turned to the same, to my chagrin. I imagine it's a steady source of easy and cheap content that can be churned out daily, but my god does it feel dumb and insulting to me. It reminds me of school and reading along a text with the teacher.

The sirens of slop are hard to resist. He got from living in a van to owning a compound out of it, so while I do find the click bait titles cringe and his commentary and guests mediocre, it's easy to understand why he did it. You can't really fight the algorithm if you want to make money.

I do miss the old YouTube free for all where people tried the wildest things just to see what sticks.

Remember that one girl that did reply videos to every single popular thing with barely any other content than her cleavage in the thumbnail? People look dumber playing NPCs on TikTok but the game was rigged from the start.

The reply girls are arguably a big part of the reason why modern YouTube isn't what it used to be--the company changed the algorithm to punish reply girls, but it also punished non-garbage content in the process.

I don't exactly respect Tim Pool's political commentary, but I respect him a lot as a person and take this as a demonstration of how easy it is to be caught up in accusations of foreign influence, spying, etc.

Yeah, I know nothing about him. I'm just surprised to see an apology so fast, when anyone familiar with the dynamics here knows that denial is typically the dominant strategy.

I don't think "You can eat my Irish ass" is really an apology.

Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.

I guess apology might not be the correct term, but he's not denying that it happened, merely that it influenced him in any way. Nowhere in there does he actually deny that it happened, he throws his handlers under the bus.

So yes, he's an edgy boy using naughty language against journalists. But he starts by basically admitting the allegations before backtracking to say that they're just allegations. He doesn't defend against them or deny or go on the attack.

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