Author: vjmp

Soft Prohibition is Still Prohibition, and It Will Still Fail

The New Zealand Government, in its limitless beneficence, has decided that we innocent Kiwis need to be protected from the insidious horror drug that is tobacco. The means they have chosen to protect us with is by taxing us more when we purchase cigarettes. Speaking honestly, this strategy could be rightly described as soft prohibition – and it’s just as stupid as hard prohibition.

The logic goes like this. A person’s willingness to buy a good such as tobacco is a function of the price of that good. Because tobacco is not considered medicinal, its use is considered to do nothing but cause disease. So, its use costs taxpayer money in the form of healthcare. Therefore, if you increase tobacco taxes, people will use it less and tax money will be saved on dealing with the effects of the diseases tobacco causes.

The fact that this had led to the absurdity of the Government claiming to impoverish tobacco users for their own benefit hasn’t stopped them from raising the taxes anyway.

The rise in tobacco tax has, predictably, led to a spate of robberies of dairies and other places selling tobacco. As Dan McGlashan has previously written for this newspaper, the majority of regular tobacco smokers were already doing it hard, even before the tax increases.

As this column has previously argued, tobacco ought to rightly be seen as a mental health medicine. The main reason it isn’t is because of the total dominance of materialist dogma in medical and scientific circles – the same materialist dogma that has created our prehistoric mental health system.

It doesn’t take a forensic psychology degree to be able to predict that making an expensive drug even more expensive, when many desperate people rely on it to cope with the stresses of the day, is going to lead to robberies and violence.

Ridiculously, if the Police were to apply the same logic to tobacco that they apply to cannabis, they would say that tobacco itself causes crime and that the dairy robberies are evidence that tobacco should be made illegal.

Obviously, alcohol prohibition failed and cannabis prohibition failed. Not only did they fail, but they did so at the cost of many billions of dollars, the destruction of many millions of lives, and the eradication of any faith that the younger generations may ever had had in the competence or good will of the Government or the Police.

So why on Earth would we want to repeat those two catastrophic errors with tobacco?

The most likely answer is that our politicians are as thick as pigshit and are either too stupid to learn anything from history or too arrogant to think that the laws of reality through which history unfolds apply to them.

Increasing the taxes on tobacco, with the intent of gradually making it prohibited, will increase the amount of violence and crime around the substance to a commensurate degree.

Just like prohibition did with alcohol. Just like prohibition does with cannabis. It will fail, just like prohibition always has done and always will do, because human nature will never concede that a bunch of old control freaks in Wellington have the right to prohibit the people from the free use of medicinal plants.

This won’t stop them from trying, of course. The politicians know that they are not affected by the consequences of the laws they pass. Thus, they know that it won’t be them getting robbed and slashed with machetes – they get their six-figure MP’s salary no matter what.

The real concern is what actions might be taken by those who are getting robbed. Already, dairy owners know that they are widely perceived as a soft target thanks to both not being armed and stocking large amounts of valuable tobacco.

The usual response to this degree of risk of violent robbery is for the dairy owners to start keeping firearms behind the counter.

Politicians in New Zealand don’t have the courage to admit that the Drug War they have conducted against the New Zealand people for 40 years has failed, so we know they will not have the courage to admit that their attempt to make tobacco illegal is also failing.

Probably they will keep raising the taxes until someone gets shot dead. After all, it’s neither them nor their families suffering.

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of Age

The electoral divide between Labour and National is usually characterised as one of wealth, and to a major extent it is. But it is also about age to a major extent, and some of the correlations between age and party allegiance are surprisingly strong.

The correlation between being in the 50-64 age group and voting for National in 2014 was a very strong 0.74. The correlation between being in this age group and voting Labour in 2014, by contrast, was also very strong but negative, at -0.68.

These correlations are especially strong if they are compared with the respective ones for the 30-49 age group. This age group is almost entirely indifferent to the mainstream parties. The correlation between being aged 30-49 and voting National in 2014 was 0.19, and for voting Labour in 2014 it was -0.04.

Really old people like to vote Conservative more than anything else. The correlation between being aged 65+ and voting Conservative in 2014 was 0.71. Even the correlation between being aged 65+ and voting National was weaker, at 0.65.

Some might be surprised to see that the correlation between being aged 65+ and voting New Zealand First was not near as strong – only 0.10. However, as mentioned in the section about the party, the association between crotchety old pensioners and New Zealand First support is mostly a fabrication.

Indeed, at the other end of the age range, support for New Zealand First was about the same level – the correlation between being aged 15-19 and voting New Zealand First in 2014 was 0.05. This suggests that the early signs of Generation Z being a conservative throwback to a previous mentality may well be replicated in New Zealand.

Young people, for their part, prefer to vote Green more than anything else. The correlation between being aged 15-19 and voting Green in 2014 was 0.22, and between being aged 20-29 and voting Green in 2014 it was 0.56.

The big two parties appear to have very little support among young people in general. The correlation between being aged 20-29 and voting National in 2014 was -0.34, and with voting Labour it was only 0.32. Worryingly for them, the correlation between being aged 20-29 and voting for a party as unlike them as ACT was 0.25.

Taking this into account alongside the strong correlation between being young and voting Green, it appears that the big two parties are fated to fall into ever weaker positions as the Greens absorb the discontents from Labour, ACT absorbs the discontents from National and New Zealand First absorbs the discontents from the entire system.

The very youngest two age brackets obviously does not tell us about the voting preferences of those aged under 15, but they do tell us about the voting preferences of their parents and therefore gives us a clue as to what influences will be at work on the next generation.

In particular, we can see the influence that the higher birth rate of Maoris has. All of the parties generally associated with a high degree of Maori support (Maori Party, Internet MANA, New Zealand First, Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and Labour) had correlations of at least 0.45 with both of the age groups of 0-4 and 5-14 years of age.

The Maori Party and the ALCP were the strongest of these, New Zealand First and Labour were the weakest, and Internet MANA was in between.

The degree of disenfranchisement that the young suffer can be seen from the fact that there is a very strong correlation of 0.77 between median age and turnout rate in the 2014 General Election. This correlation is so strong that it speaks of a widespread perception among the young that there really is no point in voting on account of that the entire system is set up specifically to serve people other than them.

The strongest negative correlation between median age and voting for any party in 2014 was with the Labour Party, which was -0.70. The reflection of this was that the strongest positive correlation was with the National Party, which was a whopping 0.81.

The only other party that generally appealed to old people was the Conservatives. The correlation between voting for them in 2014 and median age was 0.75.

Definitively underlining the fact that the stereotype of creeping swarms of pensioners voting New Zealand First every three years is totally false, the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2014 and median age was actually negative (although not significant) at -0.08.

The Greens, despite that they are the mutual nemesis of the New Zealand First Party, appeal to a similar average age of voter. The correlation between voting Green in 2014 and median age was -0.17.

Predictably, there were significant negative correlations between median age and voting for any of the minor Maori-heavy parties. These were Maori Party (-0.66), Internet MANA (-0.65) and ALCP (-0.55).

*

This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

The Many Manifestations of Kek

Kek is more than most people realise. He is not something that can be entirely understood with a five-minute Google. Very little is known about exoteric Kekism, even less about the esoteric forms. This essay is an attempt to share some insight into the esoteric elements of this tradition.

In the ancient Egyptian Ogdoad cosmogony, Kek represented the primordial darkness. Darkness is the colour used to describe the chaos from which the order of our reality arose, and Kek is therefore a chaos god that represents yin forces.

Kek is male, but in representing chaos he represents a female principle. This might explain why he is depicted in the form of a frog – because the genders of amphibians are extremely loose and indeterminate. Like a Bangkok ladyboy, the gender of a frog is not necessarily what a person might think it is.

This might also explain why the word ‘Kek’ is often used where one would expect a pronoun – because a gendered pronoun makes a firm decision about which gender the subject is and this is not appropriate for a frog chaos god.

The use of ‘Kek’ as an adjective, such as in the forms “Top Kek” or “Royal Kek”, is oddly similar in both sound and meaning to the Irish word craic, a catch-all term covering “news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation”.

There appears to be no actual link between ‘craic’ and ‘Kek’ despite the phonetic and semantic similarities. But that sort of weird maybe-coincidence maybe-synchronicity is just what one has to expect in one’s life as a follower of Kek.

All of this suggests that Kek himself is an original – perhaps even the archetypal – trickster god, and in this sense the cult of Kek has had many manifestations throughout history. It is said of the trickster gods that they “…violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.”

In Scandinavia, Kek manifests in the form of Loki. Loki is generally depicted as male, but little more than generalities are known about him. Fittingly for a chaos god, Loki “sometimes assists the gods and sometimes behaves in a malicious manner towards them.”

However, Loki is the also mother of an eight-legged horse, as told in the Gylfaginning. I think we can all agree that being a tranny who births octopedal horses is top kek.

Kek manifests as Maui in Maori and Polynesian folklore. His most famous exploit was beating the shit out of the Sun with a jawbone to make it go slower through the sky so that the people had more time to enjoy their day.

Maui also has a story in which he attempts to win immortality for humankind by transforming himself into a worm and slithering into the vagina of the goddess Hine-nui-te-pō, in the belief that if he can come out of her mouth then humanity would become immortal.

In the end, he is chopped in half by a set of obsidian teeth contained within the goddess’s pussy. Clearly, whoever dreamed this story up was touched by the spirit of Kek.

In Roman folklore, Kek manifests as Mercury, the patron saint of tricksters. Mercury was once tasked with escorting a nymph to the underworld but fell in love with her and ended up getting her pregnant. This is the sort of thing that regularly seems to happen to chaos gods.

Alchemically, Mercury represents the gender fluidity also represented by the frog god. Mercury is alchemically between the divine masculine represented by Gold and the divine feminine represented by Silver, and he is therefore also somewhere between the two commonly accepted poles.

In modern culture, Kek has manifested in the form of Pepe, the cartoon frog in the title image. Pepe, fittingly for a chaos god, has an unclear origin. He started to rise to prominence on 4chan and the Shroomery about a decade ago, finding a place in the mainstream consciousness in the lead up to the 2016 US Presidential Election.

He achieved this by being used in the Great Meme War that saw the defeat of Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton. It was believed by followers of Kek that Clinton represented the hateful, oppressive forces of the Establishment, and that the maverick Donald Trump getting into the White House would be top kek – and so it came to pass.

But in much the same way that Kek, as chaos God, was naturally opposed by the earthly interests that tried to oppress the citizenry with an excessive degree of order, so too has Kek in his manifestation as Pepe been designated an official hate symbol by those same control freaks.

But because the meme magic of the control freaks and the dominator culture is weak, we know that this action has merely assured the place of Kek in the hearts of free-thinkers around the world.

Perhaps we can all be glad that the spirit of Kek shines brightly through into our lives once more in his manifestation as Pepe.