The Implications Of Having Two Referendums At The Same Time As The General Election

At time of writing, there are two referendums scheduled to take place on the same day as the 2020 General Election. The referendum about cannabis law reform was scheduled long ago, but this week saw the news that there would also be a referendum about euthanasia at the same time. What will this mean for the election? Numbers man Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, looks at the statistics.

What these two referendums mean, in short, is that a number of people who wouldn’t otherwise have gone to the polling booths on Election Day will do so. While there, they are very likely to cast a vote for a party in the General Election. Those parties, therefore, will get boosted by the extra turnout caused by the referendums. This article looks at which parties are likely to be the beneficiaries of the fact there are two referendums at the same time as the Election.

Let’s deal with the cannabis referendum first.

The cannabis referendum will predictably bring out the sort of voter who votes for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party. Some people will make the lazy assumption that, because the Green Party has been the one most visibly championing the cannabis law reform issue, many of the people brought to the polls on Election Day will vote for the Greens. This assumption is likely false for at least one major reason.

The foremost reason is that the people who vote Green already vote in large numbers. There are strong correlations between both having a university degree and earning six figures and being a Green voter. There are also strong correlations between all of these things and turnout rate. Therefore, the sort of person who was likely to vote Green probably already did so in the previous election as well, and so a cannabis referendum won’t change much for them.

I refer to this principle as the General Disenfranchisement Rule. This states that the more a person is disenfranchised (by major measures of social status), the less likely they are to vote. Therefore, moves that enfranchise previously disenfranchised people (such as referendums) tend to bring out people from the lower social echelons. They don’t tend to bring out new National, ACT and Greens voters.

These people from lower social echelons are the sort of person who, as mentioned above, tend to support the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party. In Understanding New Zealand I showed who these people are. As a general rule, ALCP voters are heavily Maori and are much more likely to be on the invalid’s benefit. They are doing it worse than supporters of any other party.

In other words, they are from categories that are hitherto heavily disenfranchised. For many of these people, deep resentment has built up regarding the cannabis issue, and if the referendum brings them to the polls they will not vote for Establishment movements. It follows, then, that there will be a considerable boost to the sort of party who already champions the underdog.

The ALCP, Labour, New Zealand First, TOP and the Greens will all split this vote (with the foremost named taking the most).

Regarding the euthanasia referendum, overseas research has shown that supporters of euthanasia tend to be young, left-wing and atheist. This means that this referendum will bring fewer otherwise disenfranchised people to the polling booths than the cannabis one.

The euthanasia idea deeply upsets elderly Christians, who, for whatever reason, feel that the terminally ill ought be forced to suffer as long as possible. However, the vast majority of these people would have come out to vote National or Conservative anyway. Therefore, holding a euthanasia referendum will not bring many extra voters to the ballot boxes on the conservative side.

On the other hand, many of the people who support a euthanasia referendum will be the sort of person who is appalled by Christian morality. These people tend to be young and educated, which means that they are on the margins of voting or not voting. They are less likely to vote Labour and ALCP, but will be more likely to vote Greens and for The Opportunities Party.

Many of these young people will be educated and, therefore, not as severely disenfranchised as the less educated voters who will come out for the cannabis referendum. This suggests that the overall electoral effect of the euthanasia referendum ought to be smaller than for the cannabis referendum.

The combined effect of these two referendums will be to bring a number of young, atheistic people in particular to the ballot boxes.

If the cannabis referendum induces young Maoris to vote and the euthanasia referendum induces young white people to vote, we can predict that this combined youth effect will see increased support for the Labour Party and the ALCP, with minor boosts to the Greens, The Opportunities Party and New Zealand First (who are falsely characterised as an old person’s party).

How large will this number be?

The correlation between turnout rate in the 2017 General Election and voting ALCP in 2017 was -0.63, which speaks to heavy disenfranchisement among cannabis users. Many of these people would not vote under ordinary circumstances. Because the cannabis referendum appeals directly to these heavily disenfranchised people, it could have a noticeable effect on turnout.

This suggests that the combined effect of the two referendums on otherwise disenfranchised voters will be enough to shift the electoral balance towards the centre-left by one to two percent, perhaps accounting for a couple of extra seats for the centre-left bloc. It’s not likely to be enough to decide the balance of power, but if the margins were otherwise thin enough it could be.

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).

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Clown World Chronicles: The Great Awokening

For thousands of years, intellectual and spiritual humans have dreamed of an age where people would come to cherish truth and wisdom – a Great Awakening. Such a golden age would bring peace and harmony to the entire world. Unfortunately for us, we’re not getting such a thing. Even worse – we’re getting a sickly, plastic, pallid imitation of it – The Great Awokening.

“Wokeness” is one of the foremost sociological trends of our time. This refers to a particularly shameless form of virtue signalling that has become extremely common today. The point of it is to present oneself as morally superior to ones fellows – more sensitive, more refined, more enlightened.

There is little more to wokeness than the usual ego-driven posturing and oneupmanship that has depressed honest people since before civilisation. At its core, it’s a desire for the little dopamine hit that comes with triumphantly rubbing another person’s face in the shit. The sort of person who participates in the Great Awokening is generally incapable of doing this to a person physically, so they do it metaphorically.

One notable thing about wokeness is that it is equally as hateful and discriminatory a philosophy as anything that has come before. Wokeness has its ingroup and its outgroup, and the ingroup is fully encouraged to shun, bully and abuse the outgroup. In this sense, it can be said that wokeness, and SJW culture more generally, is like a sort of cult. As with other cults, abusing outgroup members can strengthen solidarity among ingroup members.

The outgroup of the Great Awokening are the unwoke. In theory, the unwoke are those without the moral strength to act with compassion. The woke believe that the moral values held by the unwoke are primitive, backwards and animalistic. The unwoke have failed to undergo the necessary self-reflection to achieve wokeness, and therefore any abuse one feels to give them is justified. The unwoke are the untermensch, the infidel, the goyim, the heathen.

In reality, wokeness is not based on any transcendental truth but is rather based on whatever is fashionable in the moment. It was once woke to oppose Islam on the grounds that it was cruel to women and homosexuals – now it’s woke to support Islam on the grounds that Muslims are non-white. The same people who were praised for an enlightened attitude to Islam are now excoriated for being Nazis – without changing a thing.

Likewise, the unwoke are bullied for little more than being unfashionable. This is one reason why people from the working class are seldom considered woke – it takes a lot of leisure time and a lot of socialising with the right people to learn the right values. Because these values can change on a whim, knowledge of them has to be maintained via continual access to the high priests. Poor people don’t have this access.

The Great Awokening could be described as the grand climax of the worldwide epidemic of virtue signalling that has now run for some years. Never before has the world been this pretentious. Never before have people at large made such a strenuous effort to create a false image of themselves for the sake of preening their egos. Never before have the social stakes been so high, and the error margins so thin.

The problem is that we’ve started to believe our own lies.

For decades now, we’ve been blaming everything on white men because it was the woke option. White men had most of the power, therefore it stood to reason that they took most of the blame. No-one woke could oppose this because the woke attitude is that all wealth was earned by theft, and all privilege stolen from someone else. Opposing this meant to believe that non-whites and women deserved their relative poverty – a horribly unwoke position.

This has led to a situation where if you don’t openly hate white people now, you’re unwoke. The paradox of claiming to be the least racist person while at the same time hating white people is an example of the doublethink that is now everywhere. The Great Awokening doesn’t worry about contradictions like this because the most important thing is the intention. Hating white people isn’t racist if you do it for the right reasons.

The hypocrisy is how the highest echelons of woke can get away with jetsetting around the world to browbeat us into reducing our carbon footprint. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle represent the most vomit-inducing excess of unearned wealth. They are triple distilled privilege. But for them, the Great Awokening is an opportunity to market themselves as enlightened world leaders.

The Great Awokening is why comedy is essentially dead today. In order for humour to exist, someone has to be willing to tell the truth. Humour is when needles of truth prick the balloons of falsehood, and laughter is released as a form of catharsis. It has been a fundamental part of civilisation forever, but today people are so afraid of getting a moral browbeating that they’re less willing to crack jokes.

The Great Awokening is essentially the final victory of slave morality over life on this planet. Resentment now has free rein, and the slaves are trying to rip down everyone and everything in the world. The total victory of slave morality means that everything of value in the world is to be destroyed, and the weakest and most execrable aspects of humanity are to be held up as exemplars.

As there is always a seed of yang even when yin appears to be triumphant, so is there a seed of truth within the bullshit of The Great Awokening. That seed is the small number of truth-tellers who are not tempted into telling lies, despite the social pressure of the woke hordes. The longer the Great Awokening goes for, the more ridiculous it will become, and eventually it will become so ridiculous that the merest whisper of truth will cause the music to stop.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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The Cult Logic Behind Modern SJW Culture

A 1981 entry in the Harvard Mental Health Letter describes the basics of cult psychology. Describing cults as “ideological fundamentalism”, the letter by Dr. Robert J Lifton lays out the characteristic qualities of cult psychology and cult formation. As this essay will examine, there are many parallels between cult psychology and the psychology of modern Social Justice Warrior culture.

According to the Lifton paper, “milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, a cult of confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence” are the typical ways that cults seek to control the thoughts of their acolytes. An investigation into the nature of the SJW culture shows that it tries to achieve exactly the same thing.

The desire for milieu control involves “the control of all communication within a given environment”. This is commonly referred to as ‘brainwashing’ because it features the targets being soaked in cult propaganda. Cult members must be exposed to lectures, seminars, news reports, websites and Internet forums that all say the same thing. This milieu control makes it possible to normalise any idea, no matter how crazy.

Modern SJW culture achieves this through Internet echo chambers. Websites such as Reddit commonly ban anyone who thinks differently, which creates communities of people who continually reinforce each other’s prejudices by parroting back to them everything they say – an echo chamber.

This is also achieved through the common cult tactic of excommunication. People who deviate too far from the SJW orthodoxy are shunned, their reputations smeared and their social support networks deliberately destroyed. This creates a fear of wrongthink among cult members. This fear of wrongthink prevents them from disrupting the milieu with novel thoughts.

Many SJWs are astonished to meet a person who believes, for example, in the genetic basis of intelligence. Despite the fact that the science clearly demonstrates that intelligence is mostly hereditary (i.e. genetic), the milieu control of SJW culture means that few of them have ever been exposed to the actual science. Consequently, they respond to people who talk about the science with mockery and abuse.

The demands for purity can be seen in the never-ending escalation of virtue signalling. Inside SJW culture is a constant struggle for social status, where the most pure of heart is thought to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Indeed, the great conceit is that the top of the SJW hierarchy is also the most virtuous, and not the one who most successfully lowered the social status of their competitors by shaming them into submission for wrongthink.

Because the Nazis were nationalists, purity of thought requires that SJWs be globalists. Consequently, any kind of national loyalty must be completely rejected. Open borders must be embraced, because any nationalist sentiment is impure. The strongest bonds of loyalty, in SJW culture, are with those as different to you as possible. This is as true of race and religion as it is of nation.

SJW culture has gone so far in its demands for ideological purity that they even attack people who say it’s okay to be white. Even expressing a will for the continued existence of white people is equated with supremacism and a desire to exterminate other races. This bizarre logic inevitably leads to a purity spiral, and this inevitably leads to cult members becoming unhinged from reality entirely.

Part of this drive for purity is emphasis on confession. This is the origin of the commonly expressed sentiment that “we’re all a little bit racist.” The purpose of saying this is to instigate a moral self-flagellation session. One confesses to harbouring lingering racist sentiments (or other wrongthink) as a kind of public ritual humiliation. These ritual humiliations serve to strengthen the bonds of solidarity among people who have been through them.

The irony, of course, is that the only other people who think like this are other people in the SJW cult. The demands for purity are so stringent that only those with plentiful leisure time to devote to understanding the ins and outs of the etiquette can ever meet the standard. This has led to the absurd outcome of SJWs who virtue signal all day hanging out only with other white and middle-class people.

SJW culture also has its own sacred science. This sacred science has a number of cherished truths that cannot be questioned (lest one get shamed into silence). These cherished truths often run entirely contrary to the established science, because they are determined by expedience, not by truth (here it is meant expedience to globohomo values).

Actual science, which states clearly that intelligence is mostly hereditary and therefore genetic, is rejected. The sacred science of SJW culture dictates that evolution stops as the neck. The great variety of physical environments, although they have clearly led to a great variety of physical expressions, have not led to a commensurate variety of psychological expressions. All human subgroups are precisely identical in every behavioural measure.

Likewise, the sacred science of SJW culture dictates that the mass importation of cheap labour has no impact on the wages of the native working class. Despite the fact that a high schooler could tell you that increasing the supply of cheap labour will reduce the price of said labour – in other words, it will destroy working-class wages and the ability of working-class people to have families – SJWs are happy to support it.

This suicidal masochism is perhaps the defining feature of the cult mentality that possesses the average Social Justice Warrior. In any case, it’s clear from looking at the logic that underlies religious cults that the entirety of SJW culture follows it. Not only do they practice milieu control and possess an obsession with purity, but they also have their own sacred science distinct from mainstream science.

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The Truth May Incite Racial Hatred

Otago University professor James Flynn has had a book about free speech, In Defence of Free Speech, scheduled for and then pulled from publication by British publisher Emerald Press. A representative for Emerald Press wrote to Flynn and said the book “could be seen to incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law.” This essay examines whether or not the truth itself incites racial hatred, and if so what we can do about it.

Professor Flynn is by no means a racist. There are many former students of his willing to attest to his sparkling intelligence and deeply thoughtful nature. He has never been accused of treating another person with disrespect on account of their race, and has never even been accused of making a racist remark. Measured in terms of hate for other races, Flynn is an entirely decent person.

Professor Flynn is, however, a scientist. This means that he is passionately committed to discovering the truth, and to helping the truth shine through from among all the misconceptions and lies. Being good at science means being able to tease out strands of truth from the tapestry of confusion that forms the background of our lives. A really good scientist will be able to do this even in the face of social pressure pushing them to lie.

Something known to all scientists is that there are no two identical things in Nature. There are no two identical mountains, no identical trees, no identical snowflakes. No two identical dogs, no identical cats, no identical people. This is true at all levels of nature, from stars down to ants, and is even true across the dimensions of space and time.

The fact that there are no two identical things in Nature is so deeply understood by real scientists that they even understand the laws that explain how this has come to pass. Gause’s Law, or the competitive exclusion principle, describes how no two identical things can exist in ecology because they would compete for the same niche and thereby destroy one another.

All of this means that the idea that all races must have the same IQ can be dismissed right off the bat. There is no reason to think that all races must have the same IQ any more than there is to think that all families or professions must have the same IQ. The way that intelligence is measured doesn’t matter in this regard.

This logic deeply upsets the many who passionately believe in racial equality. Those who cling tightly to the belief that all races are precisely equal in all non-physical characteristics tend to become enraged at the assertion of scientific evidence that suggests otherwise. Their position is known as equalitarianism, and the assertion that all races are the same in all intellectual and behavioural measures is known as the equalitarian dogma.

Social justice warriors have pushed for decades the idea that questioning the equalitarian dogma is the same thing as spreading racial hatred. This lazy, self-righteous line of thinking claims that the only reason a person would want to talk about racial differences is if they were a racist trying to sow discord between peoples, or to exclude or exterminate some disfavoured races. This tactic is, in reality, an example of the broader authoritarian strategy of silencing all opposition by whatever means necessary.

A 1994 article in the journal Intelligence by IQ researcher Philippe Rushton describes the same thing that happened to Flynn last month happening to Rushton 25 years ago – and to Hans Eysenck 20 years before that. Already in 1994 it was possible to state, of the documented difference in average racial IQ, that “Today the evidence has increased so much that it is almost certain that only evolutionary (and thereby genetic) theories can explain it.” But evidence does not appease the mob.

The abuse that Rushton documents in the linked article is eerily reminiscent of that facing scientists today. Eysenck was physically attacked in 1973 by activists marching under the slogan “Fascists Have No Right To Speak.” In 2019, Jordan Peterson comes in for similar treatment for similar reasons (a phenomenon this newspaper has previously described as Peterson Derangement Syndrome).

The Emerald Press decision might be ideosyncratic, but it also reflects the prevailing attitude among those who control the apparatus of propaganda. The world’s ruling class is implacably committed to the doctrine of globalism, for a variety of reasons. Globalism is a lot easier to accept if a person already assumes equalitarianism, because such an assumption implies that borders are arbitrary and people interchangeable. Therefore, assertions of other doctrines are suppressed.

The difficulty is that the science itself demolishes equalitarianism.

Books like IQ and Global Inequality, published in 2006, conclusively demonstrate that the average IQ of a population is the primary factor that determines that population’s standard of living. The fact that IQ predicts future wealth and earnings is one of the best documented phenomena in all of psychology, both at the individual and the group level. The higher the IQ, the wealthier is all but a law.

This suggests that allowing people from low-IQ countries to immigrate to the West is a recipe for lowering the standard of living that the West currently enjoys. Because intelligence is mostly hereditary, low-IQ immigrants will have low-IQ children, who will then grow up to make low-IQ decisions, thus impoverishing and lowering the living standards of those around them.

Unfortunately, this entirely reasonable position is equated, by the globalists who control the apparatus of propaganda, with the position that all races need to be segregated from one another, or worse. This deliberate conflation means that it’s all but impossible to discuss the science of race and intelligence without being accused of being a Nazi, supporting Nazis, furthering Nazism, or dogwhistling to Nazis.

All of this means that we are presented with a dilemma. We either speak honestly about the science of race and intelligence, which means that we expose ourselves to being attacked by hysterical mobs of virtue-signallers shrieking about Nazis, or we don’t speak honestly about the science of race and intelligence, which means that the superstitious fools who think with emotions and their authoritarian puppetmasters win the day.

Perhaps the best move, as has been discussed here previously, is to pull back to the secret societies who meet behind closed doors for the purposes of being able to discuss taboo subjects, safely away from hysterical moralisers. This is supposed to be what the universities are for, but now that the university culture has been corrupted by the mass entry of plebs it may be necessary to reform it under new conditions.

It’s either that or hope that the sands of public opinion shift to supporting free speech and free inquiry.

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