Last Updated on 2021-10-27 , 7:41 am
Tired of games like Fortnite and Minecraft, some people have started playing the Covid-19 blame game.
The rules are simple. To play, all you need are an unpleasant personality and someone to blame.
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And the great thing about this game is that once it starts, it never ends.
Trump first blamed China, China then blamed Trump, then some people blamed bats, the bats blamed civets, the civets blamed pangolins, and the pangolins blamed Nas Daily.
Why do pangolins blame Nas Daily for Covid-19? I’m not sure, you’ll have to ask Nas or a pangolin about that one.
Whatever the reason, it’s Nas Daily’s turn to blame someone, and you may not like who he’s chosen.
Nas Daily Releases Controversial Video That Blames Meat-Eaters for COVID-19
For those who don’t know, Nas Daily is a guy named Nuseir Yassin, a popular blogger who used to post 1-minute videos of his travels on Facebook, mostly focused on other people and their lives.
And with over 15 million followers, it’s not an understatement to say he’s pretty damn popular.
The travel blogger recently moved to Singapore, which prompted some Singaporeans to start a petition to ban him from entering the country. (We have a rocky relationship with him, to say the least).
Yesterday (18 May), Nas posted a video on Facebook about something a little different: the Covid-19 crisis. While scientists are still arguing over which animal first transmitted the virus to humans, Nas believes there’s only one group of people at fault.
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People who eat McNuggets.
Okay, I don’t just mean people who eat McNuggets, of course. I mean meat-eaters in general. (So, that would exclude people who eat McNuggets)
Yes, Nas Daily blames meat-eaters for the Covid-19 outbreak.
Why?
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Nas’ Argument
Early in the video, Nas says that “scientifically speaking”, the virus came from us eating animals. He says this while a disturbing, slowed-down video of him chewing into a seekh kebab while maintaining eye contact with the camera plays.
Nas says that animals have “millions of viruses inside of them”, and each one of them “can kill us”.
He notes that we got Ebola from a bat, MERS from a camel, HIV from a monkey, and H1N1 from a pig.
He says that because so many people died from “animal diseases”, he stopped eating meat and became a vegetarian.
However, the blogger also makes it a point to say that he’s not telling us not to eat meat, but to eat clean meat.
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According to my brain and not a recent google search, clean meat, or cultured meat, is meat that is grown in cell culture, rather than in an animal’s body.
Essentially, it’s meat that’s grown in a lab.
After advising viewers to eat clean meat, Nas cites the “thousands of lives” and “trillions of dollars” lost to the Covid-19 outbreak and says it all happened because we like the “taste of an animal”.
And after interviewing some people from a vegan village in Israel, Nas ends the video with a simple question: Why the hell do we put viruses in our temples?
Reader: Who the hell is placing viruses in temples?
Oh, by temple he means body.
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Reader: Oh.
Yes.
Counterarguments
Now, while Nas made some good points in his video, there were a few questionable assertions.
Firstly, according to National Geographic, there are more than a “quadrillion quadrillion” individual viruses chilling on Earth. In fact, there are more viruses on Earth than stars in the universe.
They can be found in every aspect of our natural world, like seawater, the soil, and animals.
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But NatGeo says that “only an infinitesimally small fraction of the viruses that surround us actually pose any threat to humans.”
So, when Nas says that all animals have millions of viruses, all of which can kill you, it’s not exactly true.
Plus, he didn’t become a vegetarian because of the Covid-19 crisis; Nas became one in 2019 because he believed it’s “healthier” and “better for the world”.
Moreover, there’s no conclusive evidence that Covid-19 came from a bat in China. Scientists are still trying to figure that out.
Yet this is not my main gripe with Nas’ new video.
An Important Conversation, Sure, But Not the Way to Go About It
See, the conversation about whether eating meat is moral, healthy, or good for the environment is an important discussion to have.
But if Nas Daily really wanted to change people’s minds about vegetarianism, why is he blaming the very group of people he is trying to inform?
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When humans are told we’re wrong, our first instinct is to defend ourselves, even if we’re actually wrong. It’s just how our brains are wired.
Arguments and discussions are more fruitful when we have an open and polite dialogue free from blame and accusations, where both sides try to understand each other.
Because if you make a video about how meat-eaters caused the Covid-19 pandemic, all you’ll get are comments like these:
There were some positive comments too, of course; the internet will be divided over every single issue.
But if Nas truly wanted to open up the conversation about vegetarianism vs meat-eating, he should have done it in a less accusatory manner.
As a meat-enthusiast, I’m more than happy to admit that eating meat may not be good for many reasons, but at a time where people are dying by the thousands, losing their jobs, and getting stressed, playing the blame game isn’t what we need right now.
Let’s leave that to our top scorer:
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