With Corona-chan spreading her pestilent blessings far and wide at the behest of jolly old Grandfather Nurgle, it is worth asking a pretty important question:

The beginning of that video illustrates exactly how devastating socialism is to a country.

It does not matter whether we are talking about Germany’s awful experiments with “national socialism”, large parts of Europe’s romance with fascism, India’s attempts to implement swadesh (national self-sufficiency), or outright communism. The results are always the same in the end:

Misery.

Poverty.

Stagnation.

Disease.

Death.

Failure.

There are better and worse results from socialism, depending on where and how it is done. The Scandicucks are, supposedly, the best of the bunch, as they essentially have a generous social welfare net funded by a market economy. But in reality, even the Scandicucks saw their centrally planned economies stagnate and fail in the 1970s. The difference between them and most other failed socialist experiments is that they eventually reversed course in the 1980s and early 1990s, and today they have robust market-based trade and business policies that make them relatively good places to live and work.

China, on the other hand, started out in 1949 with not merely socialism, but a particularly virulent strain of that brain-rotting madness, communism. And not just any kind of communism, either, but grassroots, farm-based communism rather than the more industrial kind envisioned by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Mao Tse-tung’s essential philosophy of communism had to do with collectivisation of all farmland and the rapid industrialisation of the country through producing vast quantities of grain and iron. As with most intellectuals in love with their own ideas, Mao failed to understand that in a functioning economy, supply and demand determine whether something gets produced – whereas in his mind, supply creates its own demand, and one grade of iron is no different from another.

Just goes to show how smart those commie intellectuals actually are, to be honest.

Anyway, the results of Mao’s brainwave came about in the humanitarian, economic, and ecological catastrophe known as the Great Leap Forward.

To this day we still don’t know how many people died as a result of that particularly stupid idea. I remember reading estimates that it was about 20 million people back in high school. These days, estimates range from 35 million at the LOW END, to at least 50 million at the high end. The famines were so severe, and the results so horrifying, that nobody has ever really been able to keep and measure good records.

Instances of cannibalism were widely reported, though largely suppressed in Western media, and entirely so in the Soviet Union and within Communist China. Disease ran rampant, as it tends to do in times of famine and catastrophe, and weakened immune systems combined with extreme hunger resulted in widespread chronic plagues that killed off hundreds of thousands and even millions more than starvation alone managed.

I narrate all of that to point out that this is how you end up with a situation where a country makes the procurement and consumption of “exotic” foodstuffs normal.

Now, admittedly there is a lot of cultural relativism and chauvinism going on here. I’ve lived in an East Asian culture – Singapore, to be specific – and I generally like the Singaporean attitude toward food. Singaporean Chinese hawker centre cuisine is fast, delicious, healthy, and cheap, and like their mainland ancestors, the Singaporean Chinese folk use every part of an animal in their cooking.

This results in dishes that are downright weird to Western sensibilities. If you’ve never snacked on chicken’s feet or pig’s knuckles, well, I can tell you that it’s not nearly as disgusting as it sounds. And if you’ve never tried sea-cucumber stew or Singapore chili mud crab, well, you’re missing out.

The fact that the Chinese will eat just about ANYTHING, though, has clearly backfired on them extremely badly.

We know by now that the whole “bat soup” thing was probably apocryphal; the COVID-19 virus most likely did not jump from bats to humans via soup. Most likely the jump happened in a wet-market of the kind that is very common in the Dirt World. If you spend any significant amount of time in India, China, or much of the developing world, you will find that wet-markets are extremely common there, and that is where most of the population gets their meat and fish.

The highly sanitised Western understanding of food is precisely that – sanitised. This is why vegans, as irritating and annoying as they are, tend to be a Western phenomenon; such nonsense can only really thrive in societies that are wealthy and prosperous enough to avoid the need to be opportunistic eaters, and can focus most of their energies and efforts on procuring domesticated food sources.

The reality of food in the rest of the world is dirty and disgusting and bloody and nasty and smelly and sloppy and slimy and just plain EUGH. But, if you want to eat, you have to go get the food yourself. It’s just that simple.

Hunters in America, who go out at stupidly early hours of the morning (even by my standards) to blow Bambi’s mother’s head off and gut her and make Sloppy Does out of her, understand this. Your average Whole Foods shopper, not so much.

The fact is that the world around us is full of death. Killing, blood, guts, and nastiness are all a part of daily life. If you don’t like it, don’t eat. There is always a risk with every form of food that we put into our mouths that we will get sick from it.

That is not to say that all cultures and all eating habits are equally risky. They are not.

Take a look at the absolute worse public health crises over the past fifty years, and you will see a very clear pattern emerging.

The HIV/AIDS virus is thought to have originated in monkeys, and spread like the clap – quite literally – among a very specific community within the Western world. That is to say, it spread extremely fast among homosexual men, and even faster among homosexual injectable-drug-using men. And that is to say, it spread fastest among men living very high-risk, promiscuous, abnormal lifestyles that virtually guaranteed fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of nasty bugs.

Ah, but what about Africa? Surely, sneers the cultural relativist, you cannot explain the spread of AIDS through homosexual contact or sexual “degeneracy”.

Well actually, yes we can. AIDS in Africa may well have jumped from monkeys – not just chimpanzees, or apes, but actual monkeys – to humans. And it spread that way most likely because monkeys and apes are butchered for bush meat in areas where livestock is scarce.

From there, the rapidly mutating immunodeficiency virus made its way into the gay community, where it spread rapidly because of the extreme promiscuity of that subgroup. And from there, it spread to bisexuals and heterosexuals, through a number of different vectors – not necessarily sexual ones.

The best preventative measures against the AIDS virus are well known:

Don’t have a lot of casual unprotected sex;

If you do have a lot of casual sex, wear freakin’ CONDOMS;

If you are male, get yourself cirumcised, because that cuts down on your risk of infection by about 60%;

Be faithful to one woman and abstain for casual sex with hookers and sluts;

Don’t have sex with gay guys;

Don’t swap needles with junkies;

Don’t get injected with tainted blood supplies;

It’s not that hard to prevent such diseases. The preventions always come down to the same thing: DON’T BEHAVE IN DEGENERATE AND DANGEROUS WAYS.

That’s really all there is to it.

But even that is too much to expect in some groups and cultures. Asking African men to be faithful has proven to be, shall we say, challenging, and telling them to wrap their tools has had relatively limited success.

If we look at SARS and MERS, again, we see that unhygienic and dangerous opportunistic food practices are likely to blame. SARS most likely originated from bats, just like the current COVID-19 virus did, and jumped various species barriers until it was likely passed to humans through infected blood and excrement that passed from the hands of one person to another in a wet-market.

If we look at Ebola, one of the most truly terrifying diseases out there, the reason why it spread so quickly in Africa, is because of local customs that make it impossible for actual, sensible, clinical Western standards to work. With Ebola and Marburg and the potentially lethal rat-carried hantavirus, standard quarantine methods don’t work anymore, so you have to resort to extreme measures – because the person carrying those diseases is likely to DIE and will infect a lot of other people around him or her.

But African cultural norms and customs don’t sit well with Western medical and quarantine procedures. So Africans don’t listen to good advice from Western, and Western-trained, doctors, and instead insist on touching and staying close to their loved ones – when those loved ones are infected with an extremely virulent haemorrhagic fever that causes them to bleed out of their eyeballs and die within 2 weeks.

There is much to admire, or at least like, about African cultural quirkiness. Their refusal to listen to good advice in the face of a plague IS NOT in that list.

These are the kinds of cultural practices that the Western world abandoned over 400 years ago. There was a time when the Eastern world was far cleaner, better maintained, and less disease-ridden than the West. There are records of animal-skin condoms being used in the Far East going back to about the 15th Century, and while Europe was being ravaged by the Black Death due to extremely poor sanitation and hygiene, Eastern civilisations argued in favour of regular bathing, sexual abstinence, and relatively hygienic food practices.

Look, I’m just going to say it, because it needs to be said:

Some cultures are better than others.

Some food habits are better than others.

Some ways of handling a plague outbreak are WAY better than others.

That’s just the way it is. It’s not racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever, to point this out.

Also, while we’re on the subject of eating really weird shit, guaranteed to offend the hell out of anyone from specific parts of the world, let’s all take a look at that great scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that dumped half a hundredweight of horseradish straight into the shorts of every cultural relativist who ever watched that film:

A lot of brown people get really offended by that depiction of their culture. I just think it’s hilarious. And, seeing as how it is Right And Proper And Good to seek out permission from other cultures to appropriate their stupidities as your own, I hereby give any white person who watches that a Brown Person Blessing.

You may watch such silliness without worrying in the slightest about whether you shall offend anyone. Now go forth and remember, IT’S OK TO BE WHITE.

Amen.