Idiotic exceptionalism

There is no great mystery to fighting COVID-19. Basic public health measures have been known for hundreds of years. During this pandemic, they were practiced across most of the world. White people were just dumb.

Bog-Standard Public Health

Painfully, over hundreds of epidemics, humans have figured out the tools of public health. Test and isolate has been known since Moses was in short pants. It’s in the Bible. Isolation treatment has been practiced in China for thousands of years. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) famously said in a hadith:

“If you hear of a plague in a land, do not enter it; and if it breaks out in the land where you stay, do not leave.”

Muslim scholars like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) came close to germ theory and proposed medical quarantines in the 1000s. Chinese doctors did crude but effective vaccinations in the 1500s. Indeed the rough idea of quarantine as ‘stay the fuck away from places where everyone is dying and don’t let them come here’ could be said to be instinctive. These ideas have been circulating since the BCs. It doesn’t matter where they came from. The point is that they’re known, and they work for any infectious disease, including COVID-19.

These ideas eventually came west through enough hands that they felt confident that they had ‘discovered’ them. Hence the Venetian quarantine and later smallpox inoculation that the Chinese had been doing for centuries.

Modern public health grounded in ‘western’ medicine has been well known since 1918 with constant crash courses across the world — SARS, Nipah, Ebola, etc. The WHO, which British dolts write off as ‘being for poor countries’, has been imparting this basic wisdom globally for years. They now provide test kits, training, and support to any country that accepts it.

This is bog-standard public health. It is known and practiced across the world.

Just not in the west.

To the white world, nothing can exist until they discover it, so they insisted on an ongoing debate about first principles. The Qing Dynasty could have told them about test and isolate. Ibn Sina could have told them about quarantine. Literally any peasant from the Justinian era to the Black Death could have told them to close their borders.

Non-Standard Being Stupid

Instead, they’ve tried to rediscover millennia of received wisdom through Op-Eds and closed meetings of (mostly) white men. Rather than heeding WHO advice or following China or Korea, they wasted time computer modeling white people. Rather than using WHO tests, they made their broken own. The results of this process have been novel ideas like:

• ‘What if we do nothing?’ (Sweden)
• ‘What if everyone just gets the disease?’ (UK)
• ‘What if we drink bleach?’ (America)

These are the grand contributions of western civilization. Oh, and the worst one. A form of human sacrifice that would horrify even the most brutal ancients— killing one's elders. I must note that ancient human sacrifice is vastly exaggerated, especially compared to European brutality.

These were all stupid ideas, and criminal in the fact that they predictably got tens of thousands killed. The right ideas were common knowledge, and ignored. Today you can just look around the world and see.

Almost everyone else has performed better not because we were lucky or even especially smart, but because we were simply not this dumb. It’s not that we’re geniuses, we’re just at the level of a medieval Vizier with a telephone. That’s the bar right now.

Yes, Korea and Taiwan executed sophisticated, high-tech responses, but the basic principles are the same. Even poorer Mongolia figured it out and ended up with zero local transmissions on their soil. Small nations like Trinidad & Tobago just did a series of non-stupid things and ended up fine.

This has happened all over the world. The western media treats success as the exception, but that’s only because they can’t see past Germany. If you literally pick a country at random they likely did better than the West. It’s really not hard. The question is not went right, this is not a mystery. The question is how the west got it so wrong.

With a few exceptions, the non-western, non-white world is fine. Europeans and their descendants in America and Brazil have been the total fails. 100% of this leadership is white. And New Zealand you say, the great white hope! Yes an exception, which happens to be in… Asia. Perhaps the miasma of stupid doesn’t reach that far.

A parable

Imagine that there’s a tsunami. Everybody runs, except for white people who sit there doing calculations and ordering drinks.

“The economy old chap, must think of the economy.”

Predictably, the tsunami comes and they find themselves underwater. Deeply confused, they ask:

“How did you model the tsunami, how did you time the impact, how did you account for fluid dynamics?”

The rest of the world just shrugs.

“We just followed everyone else and ran.”

The white people still can’t hear though, the cognitive dissonance is too loud.

“Aren’t they poor? What do they know? And the Chinese are obviously shifty and criminal, nothing to learn there.”

They look around until they see New Zealand.

“Yes… a white woman. That’s the secret.”

For the love of God you fools. How did you even colonize us? You’re so dumb.