I'm weeping. I'm hitting my head on the steering wheel. I've got a massive nose ring drilled through my septum. I have scarlet or green hair and black lipstick. I have a shaved head. I have creepy piercings all over my face, and facial tattoos. My earlobes are distended. I'm wearing make-up that appears to be the scribblings of a three-year old who found Mom's lipstick. And I want you to listen to me because I have something to tell you.
Thanks, TikTok, for a platform that let’s me air my grievances to the world.
Oh, but let's stop TikTok because it is a national security threat as the Chinese are collecting your individual data and will blackmail you when you, in 20 years, land that job at the NSA. “Hey look doofus, you jumped off a roof, hurt yourself, and cried like a baby. We have the video. You are ours now, lest we send this video to your supervisor.”
This nonsense is the crux of the TikTok “ban it or sell it” legislation, despite the fact that no TikTokker, as far as anyone can tell, has ever been blackmailed or exploited by the Chinese. This is especially true for the dancing dipshit teen girls showing us how they can “bust a move” as if it was 1974. And, by the way, gals, twerking is not attractive, nor a job skill.
The threat of TikTok is not a national security issue and you cannot defend it with free speech arguments, either. That's unless you consider that watching a dog knock over a cat is important free speech that needs protection. These issues miss the point.
The danger of TikTok and its copycat wannabee clones is that they are subversive by their very nature. They are particularly subversive in America because they hold up a mirror that forces the public to ask itself: what is going on here? Are these the children we've raised?
And while more than a few adults appear on TikTok with holes in their noses and disheveled purple hair highlighted with streaks of green, most of the performers on the platform are children. But make no mistake, this is not isolated to the USA. If you use a VPN, you will find that the app will think you are in that other country and the TikTok videos will show the local kids doing the same things. So it's a Western Civilization thing.
China will not allow this sort of screwball expression, claiming that it is bad for the culture and bad for society. And while they might be right, it is anti-humanist. People should be able to express themselves any way they want, says the Liberal West. Let's see how that is working out: enter TikTok with an algo that feeds you whatever you are interested in. And it does it over and over, exposing what amounts to personal gluttony. You can indulge to an extreme.
While some indulgence silos are inane and harmless, like endless videos showing cute dogs acting cute, many of the tracks are a dark indictment of the culture itself. This would be the queers complaining about the straights, the endless trans people complaining about being misgendered, the non-binary pronoun police flabbergasted that someone was unfamiliar with the pronoun Xir, the trad-gays complaining about the groomers, the Drag Queens complaining about who knows what.
They are all there complaining with many crying or aghast at their experiences with the normies.
In fact, TikTok, at its best, is an endless freak show that, at first amuses and then elicits pathos, then fear. The fear is the result of the realization that something is very wrong with the culture, or even Western Civilization as a whole.
Were these screwballs always a part of the system? Eccentricity was always around, as was same sex attraction. Actual freak shows existed in the carnival world, with the bearded lady and the contortionist. But this is different. Something has changed.
What changed is the end result of the introduction of the video recording smart phone, the Internet, and social media. These three developments combined to allow the creation of various platforms that can categorize and present short videos to an audience with a short attention span. The audience itself was created by the smart phone, Internet, and social media, feeding on itself like a snake eating its tail.
Without totalitarian control, you get the attention-seeking creeps rising to the top. This effect normalizes the freak show and freaks us out. This was an element in the election of Donald Trump, who likely realized this with his revised attitude towards the TikTok platform. The mirror has scared people away from liberalism and the Democrat party, which embraced the freak show and continues to do so. You will note that the freaks are all Democrats, too.
Democrats are oblivious to the negative power of the freak show. Highlighting the obliviousness were the Trump ads showing Kamala Harris promoting sex changes for immigrants in American prisons at government expense. This simple ad hit three or four hot points at once and then ignored by Democrat strategists. They did not see the freak show as anything but normal.
Biological men playing in women's sports, men in women's prisons, sex change operations on children, sterilizing drug therapies on the prepubescent, 72 genders, plus all the grousing freaks, creeps, misfits, and weirdos on TikTok: all normalized and defended in the Democrat party.
And this is the hill they are going to defend, thinking they are on the right side of history.
It's quite amusing to witness this blindness. The ability of TikTok to amplify the weird and make it look mainstream has done its job of tricking an entire political party.
So what to do about TikTok? There is nothing you can do. Just enjoy it, if you can. And assume that what comes next will be worse. — jcd