Category: psychology

If Cannabis is a Mental Health Medicine, Then We Are Killing People With Prohibition

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High in the news at the moment is the story that six young people have killed themselves in three months in the town of Kaitaia, population 5,000. Kaitaia is in the search for solutions; so far suggested is a youth space and more streetlights in some back streets.

Predictably, no-one in the New Zealand ruling class has the courage to suggest the legalisation of cannabis.

According to a study by Montana State University, suicides among men aged 20 through 39 years fell roughly 10% after medical cannabis was legalised compared to those states that did not legalise.

The study says that the lower rate of suicide in states that have legalised medicinal cannabis “is consistent with the hypothesis that marijuana can be used to cope with stressful life events.”

This is something that almost every young person in New Zealand knows! Almost 100% of New Zealand youth know that cannabis should not be illegal. They’ve seen most of their parents smoke it and they know it’s less dangerous than alcohol. I personally can credit the use of cannabis with saving me from a desperately dark psychological situation.

But the ruling class puts young people in prison for this medicinal plant that saves lives, and then says the problem is a lack of streetlights! The fact that the ruling class is so appallingly out of touch is another reason why it’s so difficult to be a young person in New Zealand.

How stupid are they? Why don’t they ask the young people with mental illness what they want, instead of assuming that because they are mentally ill they can’t possibly know?

85% of Kaitaia live on some kind of benefit. If you are on the benefit in New Zealand and don’t have cannabis, then insanity is never far away. Being a young person in New Zealand is difficult, due to the almost total absence of stimulation.

Being a young person on a benefit in economically depressed small-town New Zealand is an extremely difficult psychological challenge.

If a person doesn’t understand that, then they don’t have the empathy necessary to be involved in the process about how to solve our mental health problems.

Mike King has it right when he said “If we’re going to put a dent in these appalling numbers we have around suicide then we’re going to have to start listening to communities,” he says.

Well, at least 90% of these young people want the right to relax, to calm down, and to stimulate their artistic and creative endeavours by smoking cannabis. Are you going to listen to that?

This is what the community is saying: smoking cannabis takes our suffering away. Cannabis prohibition takes away a mental health medicine that we could be using to make our lives better. It’s even backed up by the statistics.

Young people are dying because you’re not listening.

The Auckland Housing Crisis is Because New Zealand is a Pack of Whores

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Every day, someone is pointing a finger at someone else to blame them for the unaffordability of New Zealand housing. Many fingers are pointing in many directions: at John Key, at Chinese investors, at developers, at Auckland Councils, at greedy speculators and at the world economy.

What the media isn’t willing to admit is that the housing crisis is a natural consequence of the culture of New Zealanders. What we have to accept is that we’re not actually a very nice people.

This country was essentially founded by the sort of person who sells other people’s land out from under their feet, and the sort of person who buys the land anyway. Some parts of Wellington were ‘sold’ by people who didn’t even live there. We’re still like this – when we sell a house, we don’t give a fuck who is moving into our old neighbourhood, as long as they bring the cash.

Our current record immigration levels are also a natural consequence of our culture. The land-owners are in power, so if we open the floodgates to everyone demand for housing will increase, which means the value of the land-owners’ assets increase, which means they can sell them for the highest price.

We’re a pack of whores in this country. Let’s just accept it so that we can make sense of what’s happening.

Nowhere is the short-sighted, greed-crazed mentality that defines the New Zealander of 2016 more evident than in Auckland. The “Auckland housing crisis” (as it is dubbed by the Auckland-based media) is an outgrowth of that same mentality that South Islanders refer to when they say that Auckland has no soul.

Because it doesn’t. It’s just a bunch of whores trying to get rich at each other’s expense. Auckland is like Los Angeles: a superficial, shallow plasticland of hustlers, grifters and straight out bullshitters. No-one there trusts anyone else, and neither should they. Pull out a bunch of cash in either city, though, and you can have someone sucking your dick within seconds.

New Zealanders are whores because we treat each other like whores.

We don’t build decent houses because that costs more money, so we let our kids get asthma instead.

We don’t have a capital gains tax because that would inhibit our ability to get rich from property speculation, so we have empty houses owned by foreigners while our young people live in cars.

We close down rape crisis centres and slash mental health funding because we’d rather have tax cuts.

If we take an honest look at our own culture, we have to accept that there is no real housing crisis in Auckland – it’s merely another great chance for some of us to get rich at the expense of other New Zealanders. If we are honest we have to accept that we want it that way because it gives us profitable avenues through which we can exploit our countrymen.

Weekend at Hillary’s

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The black comedy Weekend at Bernie’s was the story of two young insurance agents whose boss dies. For a variety of reasons, all related to the agents’ short-sightedness, stupidity or naked opportunism, they have to pretend he is alive, at a party hosted by him, for the rest of the weekend.

The outcome of the current political shitshow in the USA, to be decided in November, may be that Hillary Clinton becomes President. If this happens – and at the moment the outcome is only paying $1.31 on BetFair – then she will assume the Presidency at the age of 69. In all of American history, only Ronald Reagan was that old when he became the President.

This is bad because Ronald Reagan was crippled by Alzheimer’s by the middle of his tenure, and was basically brain dead by the end of it.

Hillary Clinton’s physical health is not believed to be the best, as is suggested by the attached image of Clinton’s assistants helping her stand and negotiate a set of stairs. She is widely thought to be an alcoholic, which, to be fair, is common of political types.

As for Clinton’s mental health, let the following clip – in which she talks about the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was sodomised to death with a knife after a US-led invasion not long after announcing plans to expand a billion-dollar national engineering project that was not funded by borrowing from international banks – summarise her personality.

Hillary is clearly not a woman in good health. 69-year old alcoholics don’t tend to live much longer, and there is a very real chance that Hillary will die on the job.

Would the Establishment let Hillary simply die? Or would they, in preference to the instability created by a change in leader, keep Hillary Clinton’s body alive?

It ought to be possible to hollow a person’s body out and replace the bones and muscles with a robotic endoskeleton, which, when combined with modern audio technology and AI controlling for realistic facial expressions, could create a realistic imitation of a human being, especially when viewed through a television.

Those of us out here in meatspace now have to contend with the very real possibility that the US President is some kind of android, and will simply do and say what it is programmed to do by unseen handlers. The suppliant mainstream media will naturally go along with this, as the few of them with the wit to see through it will be paid off like the whores they are.

Bonus:

If You Have Ever Obeyed an Authority Figure, You Are Capable of Murder

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The title of this article is the subject of today’s psychology lesson. When we read about history, and we read about the sort of thing that humans are capable of doing to each other, we often come to ask ourselves how it came to be that humans are so willing to do terrible things to each other, and if there is any way that the rest of us could prevent it.

Almost implicit in this line of reasoning is that we, ourselves, would of course not have done such terrible things had we been there. We would not do those evil things because if an authority figure told us to, we would simply refuse. Simple as that, right?

Evidence suggests that this line of reasoning is based on a flawed understanding of human psychology. When it comes down to it, the vast majority of people will obey almost any order given to them by someone they consider an authority figure, even if that order is to directly cause the suffering of another human being. This was demonstrated by the Milgram experiments conducted in the 1960s.

The most surprising thing about the Milgram experiments may not have been how willing people were to hurt other people on command from an authority figure. Arguably more surprising was the fact that very few people, not even those with an education in psychology, anticipated this result. The vast majority of people believed that very few experiment participants would go as far as inflicting a high voltage electric shock to someone who had already been electrocuted unconscious, merely because the person telling them to do so was wearing a lab coat and therefore looked like an authority figure.

The truth is this: human beings are, for the most part, craven, arse-licking cowards. Mostly it’s our own egos that prevent us from accepting this fact.

If this argument is not fully convincing, consider the following thought experiment.

You are at war. You have not slept for 72 hours as you have seen constant combat. Your body is agony from adrenaline shock. The inside of your pants are covered in sticky shit, as you shat yourself when a shell went off near you yesterday and the shockwave almost stopped your heart, and you haven’t had a chance to do anything about it. Every time you catch a moment to breathe, you see an image of your buddy who had his head blown off about 200 metres back.

Your squad has taken some men captives, and your officer is trying to work out if they are combatants or the civilians they say they are. The people you have detained are young men, some probably teenagers, just boys.

Then a message comes through the radio. Your forces have suffered a setback on a nearby ridge and your company is to be pulled out from their current location to plug the breach. There is no longer any time to determine if the men are combatants or not, and if you let them go they might come back and kill you or your buddies.

Your commanding officer decides that most of them are of fighting age, and those who are not soon would be anyway. The next thing you know, the captives are up against a wall, you’re looking at them over the barrel of your rifle, and your commanding officer gives you an order to fire. The last thought you have before you hear the order is that there are certainly some innocents among them.

In that situation, do you pull the trigger?

If you know much about human psychology, you will know that fewer than one person in ten thousand would refuse to pull the trigger in a situation like that. Not out of hatred, not out of sadism, not out of inherent malice or anything like that.

Because it isn’t hatred that leads to mass murders. It isn’t prejudice. It isn’t things like saying that blacks have low IQs, or that Asians are cruel, or that Europeans produce an inordinate amount of sex offenders.

The human quality that leads to millions of innocent people being stuffed into gas chambers is obedience.

If you believe that any other person has the right to decide who you should kill and when, you are already a murderer in potential if not in deed.