Tim Pool vs. Michael Malice

Michael Malice made an impression when he appeared on Tim Pool's Timcast IRL podcast. Wikipedia describes the smart, outspoken Malice as "a New York City-based author, anarchist, columnist, and media personality." He had plenty of interesting things to say on Tim's show, and as some commenters wryly observed, he's one of the few guests who managed to put Tim in his place, shutting Tim down every time he tried to do his ego-inflated shtick. Of course, Malice himself hasn't an ounce of humility in him, either, so this was a sort of low-grade battle of the egos. That said, the actual content of the exchange was more important than the ego-jousting subtext. Here are three videos of Pool and Malice talking over a range of interesting topics. First up: how Trump breaks old paradigms:


Next: Malice on "the church of leftism":


My inner religious-studies student perked up during this exchange, which goes deep into the idea that what we're seeing, especially from the far left, has all the trappings of a religion. As when Michael Crichton spoke and wrote about how environmentalism is a religion, the word "religion" is here being used to mean something like "institutional Christianity," even when Tim Pool describes today's leftism as "a nontheistic* religion."

Finally, Pool and Malice discuss the evil nature of The Atlantic:


Sorry for the pun, but the above was all news to me. Malice has apparently done his homework. In one of the above interviews, he also mentioned having "written the book on North Korea," so I'd be curious to look up what he's done. (Ah: he's written a book titled Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography [sic] of Kim Jong-il. See here.)

You'll have noticed that Malice wears a ridiculous propeller beanie during the interview. As he says at one point, the beanie acts as a filtering device to separate deep people from superficial people: if you can't get past the beanie to hear and take seriously the content of what Malice is saying, then sorry, but you're not among the deep.

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*My own background in Buddhist studies makes me uncomfortable when people use "nontheistic" in this manner. What regular folks mean by "nontheistic" is probably closer in meaning to a term like "atheistic," i.e., godless. The non- in "nontheistic," however, is taken by those of us in Buddhist studies as referring to a nondualistic reality. The example usually given, to describe a particular philosophical spectrum, is that of the rational, the irrational, and the nonrational. From a dualistic perspective, the first two terms make sense, but the third term makes sense only when you step off (or out of) the bipolar spectrum into a reality that transcends dualistic divisions between this/that, yes/no, you/me, etc. According to that way of thinking, Buddhist tradition and practice point you toward the nontheistic: there is no obvious "yes/no" answer to the question of, for example, whether God exists.