TikTok's a bit of a Trumpy cesspool

I was surprised by how many far-right Republicans swarm TikTok's comments, with nary a liberal in sight.

Jun 22, 2021

I decided this past weekend to venture over to TikTok, the video-shorts app, and was surprised just how Trumpy it is. Not the videos themselves, but the comments. It’s far worse than Twitter once was — it’s YouTube bad. And equally sad, and annoying, the libs are nowhere to be found.

I set up my own TikTok channel, or whatever the kids call it, to do progressive politics news shorts. You can check them out here. As soon as my videos took off in popularity, they were swarmed with Trumpers, while there was a decided lack of comments from anyone on the left.

The right-wingers seem particularly upset about my video about Buffalo Bills football player Cole Beasley’s recent tweets about why he’s refusing to get vaccinated, and why he’s willing to lose his football career over it.

What really bothered me about Beasley’s tweets was the reasons he gave for forgoing the vaccine:

He wants to see family members “whose days are numbered,” and the current “protocol” won’t let him. So he’d rather skip the vaccine and go seen them.

What Beasley fails to understand is that the reason he’s not supposed to see those elderly or infirm family members if because HE’S NOT VACCINATED. If he simply got vaccinated, there’d be little risk posed to seeing them, and the “protocols” would be totally cool with a joyous family reunion. So the “protocols” aren’t stopping him from seeing family — his own anti-Vaxx intransigence is.
Beasley goes on:

”I’m not going to take meds for a leg that isn’t broken. I’d rather take my chances with Covid and build up my immunity that way. Eat better. Drink water. Exercise and do what I think is necessary to be a healthy individual. That is MY CHOICE based on MY experiences and what I think is best.”

Let me unpack this. First off, getting a Covid vaccine is not the same thing as taking pain relievers to relieve pain you don’t have. Vaccines prevent illness. You take them BEFORE you get sick in order to NOT get sick. The entire point of vaccines is taking them while you’re healthy.

Next, drinking water doesn’t prevent Covid. Nor does exercising or “eating better.” That’s just dumb.
I also love how the anti-Vaxx Covid types have now embraced the snowflake-messaging around the notion that we should embracing incorrect facts — lies — because if you FEEL that lies are true, then they are true! (The corollary to this is when people who are obviously wrong about something say, “but that’s how I feel,” as if their feelings somehow immunize them from being corrected.) Beasley’s “experiences” tell him that his Covid misinformation is accurate, and it’s what he “thinks is best.” So hey, who are 99% of the world’s scientists to argue with a football player’s feelings about the efficacy and necessity of immunizations?

Another point that a lot of Beasley’s besties raised is that it’s his “choice” to not get vaccinated, and since his choice doesn’t affect anyone else, who cares what he does?

First of all, he’s a celebrity with a large following, so his choices, and the misinformation he spreads, do and does affect others. Second, his choice not to get vaccinated, and to spread Covid disinformation, will help spread the disease, get more people sick, tax our health care system, and worst of all, it could help create new mutant variants of Covid that our vaccines won’t be able to stop. So there’s a very real risk to the rest of us when people don’t get vaccinated, and thus stop our country from reaching herd immunity.

But what really got to me was just how much he seems to care about all of this. Why get so upset about a vaccine that you feel compelled to go on a public rant that you admit might end your career? What is it with these people that makes them so easily-incensed by science, and so gullible?

Other Interesting Stuff

Football player Carl Nassib comes out as gay

Nassib is the first professional football player to come out on the job.

SportsCenter @SportsCenter

“I just wanted to take a quick moment to say that I’m gay. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now but I finally feel comfortable getting it off my chest.” Raiders DL Carl Nassib shared this video to social media and became the first active NFL player to announce he is gay.

Sand dunes on Mars looking all Star-Treky

It’s real. I googled it.

Antonio Paris @AntonioParis

Dunes in North Arabia Terra, #Mars. Credit: NASA/MRO/HiRISE

Bright, she ain’t

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Zachary Petrizzo @ZTPetrizzo

Longtime Republican operative Roger Stone is now calling on fans to "boycott" Parler - highlighting an increasing problem Parler faces: the MAGA faithful are leaving their platform.

The French far right falls flat

I know, 19% sounds a lot — and it is — but it’s a lot less than France’s far-right anti-immigrant party was supposed to get in this past Sunday’s elections. Perhaps this is a sign that the worldwide swing to the far-right is ebbing.