Two smartest young men

I had previously nominated Mr. JAMES BRIDLE as the smartest young man in publishing. He still is – though, while trenchantly documenting hidden ills, Bridle needs to stop lying about obvious ones.

The asides I’ve kept in parentheses throughout, if expanded upon, would allow one with minimal effort to rewrite everything I’ve said, with very little effort, to be not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies.

He means “anti-White racism, Islam, mainstream-media lies, science denialism about biological sex,” and, I guess, 9/11 conspiracies. (I got an autoresponder when I ran most of those past him. He’s not going to bother replying in any event.)

Next we have Mr. TIM POOL. I will begin with a criticism that could be levied broadly – the first syllable of the video that autoplays on a YouTube page must not be “Hey.” (Usability of initial seconds of YouTube autoplay is a real issue, which sits in an unending to-do list for ’017 that will continue not to end. I did write him about that issue and got no response.)

I have known some smart journalists in my day (few can surpass Ms Jan Wong), but nobody at such a young age has demonstrated his degree of presence of mind, poise bordering on dead calm, and sheer articulateness in interviews. Pool’s tales of outwitting the cops (and sometimes losing at that), as told to Michael Malice, show a man wise beyond his years. He knows things about the Occupy movement that seemingly no other journalists do (and neither does Adam Curtis, who talks about Occupy at length and in many settings). Further, Pool does not deploy his multiracialism even defensively, let alone to score oppression points.

I would like to be Tim Pool when I grow up were I able to regress to his age.

(UPDATE, 2018.05.13) Rather oddly, the other night I had a dream in which Tim was overly friendly with me in an unmistakable way that I did not mistake. Before we ended our time together (at some form of outdoor event), I asked him out on a date. He pretended to be shocked and not to know what I meant. “I meant a date,” I said, with the further meaning of “following up on every signal you’ve been giving me all this time.” Meanwhile, in real life Mr. POOL is not a gay, and is half-Korean.