psychology – Page 78

Te Reo With Mnemonics: Time Words

Beginning – tīmatanga

A rugby coach is showing his new assistant the ropes. The assistant has a massive, hound dog’s tongue hanging out. The coach points to his team and says “To start with, I’d like you to give my team a tounging.”

End/cease – mutu

A man is auditioning for a stage role, and is demonstrating a wide range of barnyard noises: chicken clucks, pig oinks, sheep baas etc. The man running the audition says “Ok, enough, stop, end, cease! Can you moo too?”

in the future – ā tōna wā

A man looks into the future, and sees himself running. The future man suddenly pulls up lame and says “Ah’ve torn a – Waaah!.”

the Future/the time to come – ā mua

A father and son stands looking at a mooing cow in a storefront window. “One day in the future, in the time to come,” the father says, “that will be our mooer.”

right now/presently/currently – i nāia nei

An iron sculpture in the shape of the letter A is being appraised by a crowd. A woman says “Right now, this is an iron A, but with the right magic we can make it a silver or even a golden one.”

Past – pāhi

A woman meets a slim man and exclaims “Trevor! You used to be so fat!” The man replies “Yes, in the past I ate a pie every day.”

Time – tāima

Two terrorists are sitting on a park bench. One of them asks “What’s the time?” The other one opens up a suitcase containing a bomb to get a look at the timer.

before – i mua atu/nō mua atu

Two art patrons go to an art gallery, only to find that the walls are all blank and empty. One of them looks to the other “There used to be a lot more art before.”

during – ai

A cyclops is talking to a friend on a telephone. He says “Yes, it was during my eye surgery that I realised…”

after – i muri iho

A Maori man says “I yell into the hills, and after that I hear a Maori echo.” He faces the hills and yells “Ka mate!” and the hills echo back “Ka ora!”

since – mai rānō

An old man sitting on a tame rhinoceros tells a daring story about how he broke it out of captivity. He concludes with “ever since then, he’s been my rhino.”

long time ago – noa atu

A man is sitting on a bench when another man comes up to him, being closely followed by the R2D2 robot from Star Wars. The second man gestures to R2D2 and asks “Have you met?” The seated man replies “I’ve known R2 since a long time ago.”

This wordlist is an except from Learn Te Reo With Mnemonics, a book being compiled by Jeff Ngatai for an expected release at the beginning of 2020.

Why The Left Doesn’t Give A Shit About Drug Law Reform, Gun Rights or Free Speech

For many of us in Generation X, it was easy enough to associate the right with authoritarianism. The association was so obvious that it was near enough to a universally held belief for those born between the mid 60s and early 80s. As this essay will describe, the sands have shifted under us, and the left is now the authoritarian side.

In the 1990s, Christian fundamentalism still had a powerful grip on the moral consciousness of the West, especially the Anglo part of it. Age restrictions on television and movie content were standard. Music was made to carry labels that warned of explicit lyrics. Purchasing restrictions on alcohol were commonplace.

All of these restrictions were driven by a religious fundamentalist sentiment that not only believed that pleasure was sinful, but that those same religious fundamentalists had the right to force laws restricting those pleasures on the population at large. This self-righteous indifference to the will of others engendered a great deal of hatred for the right among those who grew up at the end of the 20th century.

Generation X hit adulthood, therefore, with the near-universal belief that the right wing, and anything associated with the right wing, was the authoritarian side, and the path to liberty and freedom lay in opposing them.

This worked out pretty good for about a decade. It inspired Generation X to resist the Iraq War, in part by organising history’s largest ever protests. It also inspired them to resist the PATRIOT Act, the West’s first example of true mass surveillance. By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, many had a sense that a golden age awaited the world once the Baby Boomers ceded power to the Gen Xers.

It wasn’t until Barack Obama was elected, ironically, that things really started to go to shit.

Obama was the first Generation X American President (more or less). He had taken office with a lot of fanfare about a new age of democratic politics, where Presidents listened to the people instead of mysterious, unelected advisers. Exemplifying this new era was a website where the American people could submit their concerns directly to the political class by way of Internet petition.

The most popular petitions on this site generally related to cannabis law reform, for the reason that cannabis prohibition is arguably the most egregious modern example of Western governments abusing the human rights of their people. To the surprise of many, Obama just completely ignored all of these pleas, and went about instituting the agenda that he had had long before running for the Presidency.

A recent mainstream media piece made an appeal to Helen Clark to intercede on the side of cannabis law reform. This appeal is misplaced, because the left hasn’t cared about freedoms for a long time. They didn’t have to, mostly because the right so conspicuously didn’t care for so long that the left won the libertarian vote by default.

The New Zealand Labour Party’s total refusal to campaign for the repeal of prohibition has astonished some and disappointed others. Many of us expected Clark to make a move on medicinal cannabis 20 years ago, when she was in power and had the chance. After all, California made medicinal cannabis legal in 1996 and the Fifth Labour Government came to power in 1999.

Their flat refusal to do is, however, just part of a wider pattern of leftist indifference to human rights. The left has now completely sold out to corporate interests, as evidenced by their support for the mass importation of cheap labour, by their working hand-in-glove with the corporate media and by their refusal to accept the result of the Brexit referendum.

When the Sixth Labour Government came to power, many had similar hopes for them to the ones they had for Obama. But like Obama, the Sixth Labour Government has done less than nothing to bring freedom to the people they represented. One can write ‘less than nothing’ because they have taken freedoms away.

Gun rights have been stripped, and the right to express political opinions without interference has been thrown out the window. Kiwis are now facing a protracted campaign of Police harassment for anti-Government posts on social media, so much so that one can now seriously ask if New Zealand is a police state.

The reason for all this is that the left, now being authoritarian, demands ideological purity with the same kind of bone-headed ruthlessness that the Nazis once demanded racial purity. Therefore, any and all measures that increase ideological diversity must be opposed. Anything that increases a person’s propensity to generate novel thoughts or ideas is right out.

They don’t want people using cannabis because then people come to think freely, and they want to be the ones dictating what people think (for the greater good, of course).

When the left champions diversity, they mean the sort of superficial diversity that makes a people easier to control. They mean the diversity that allows them to divide the population into numerous teams and to set those teams against each other through their control of the apparatus of propaganda, in particular the mainstream media.

They don’t mean ideological or intellectual diversity. This constitutes a threat, such that all ideological and intellectual diversity must be suppressed. This has reached its worst expression in countries such as Britain and New Zealand, where regular citizens face increasing Police harassment for the content of their social media posts.

In summary, the reason why the left doesn’t care about human rights any more is because they are now the authoritarians. One entire generation has passed since the right were the authoritarians, and now the political landscape is very different.

The right, for their part, have been extremely slow to capitalise on this by moving towards libertarianism. If the right would set its flag on the libertarian side of the fence, as a few politicians have done (David Seymour of the ACT Party being the most prominent), they could benefit heavily from it. If Donald Trump would call for legal cannabis, the right would achieve a masterstroke of propaganda.

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.

My Belief in The Supreme Being

In very simple terms, my belief is that the supreme being is one that not only knows all but understands all, as to simply know is not enough. While my belief in the supreme being is somewhat my own thing the closest person that comes to mind is Thoth the Atlantean who was hailed in Ancient Egypt as the God of writing, magic and wisdom. Coincidentally (or not) my plan in life is to become like him in that sense as much as I can, and I do this through continued study through every field prioritized by usefulness at present time against the potential value of understanding something, and then to some extent applying such information.

In my own reality, I classify the fields of acquiring knowledge into two categories:

Knowledge of the physical universe of matter, what we can observe
Knowledge of the spiritual and high universes, for most this, what we cannot observe in the present time

Knowledge of the physical universe is simply the world around us and what we can, in terms of the natural malleable environment. For myself, I go about acquiring this knowledge through continuous and rigorous study of the STEM sciences in order to understand more about the world around us and bring myself closer to the state of the supreme being. Science to learn about the various areas of the physical universe and specific knowledge of every area in existence. Technology to be able to apply any piece of man-made or other technology in the space of the various universes for the benefit of me and my allies. Engineering to learn how to control and manipulate matter and be cause to the world around us and Mathematics to be able to both understand the various rules of the universe and be able to communicate new ones in a clear cohesive manner to other scholars. While not strictly required, Education is good for being able to train others in each of these areas.

You can go about your entire life simply doing the above and make reasonable tracks whilst being validated at various steps of the way, there is no strict path to accomplish this. I myself traverse the world of academia and plan to study at least a Bachelor’s degree (with Honours) in each of the STEM fields and then perhaps subsequent Masters and Ph. Ds allowing me to both learn and contribute to the knowledge base for each one in my own time. This can take an entire lifetime to accomplish and is a ‘good enough’ purpose for one to truly bring themselves closer to understanding.

However, I myself yearn for greater pastures and in my risk-seeking nature opt for higher bridges of learning. Knowledge of the spiritual and higher universes consists of study into practices which involve those that are not necessarily observable. This may be controversial, but I take each area of spirituality as a viewpoint and then in my own reality I synthesize and bring them together to my own viewpoint, my own being something I would publish as my own area of study in maybe 20-30 years, once I have understood as many as I possibly could.

The controversial part being you could take and hold viewpoints in various spiritual practices, and then synthesize them based on what you have observed and what is useful. for example, Reiki, Bowen and perhaps one you may not have heard of, but I would recommend the Melchizedek Method which all has a primary component of application of the various techniques.

You may ask why I do this. Well, I have a high-risk band and I want to win. If something like levitation or teleportation is possible, I want to be the first one to do it. It either is possible in this form or not or maybe I have to take another form, who knows. I take pleasure in studying both classifications of knowledge, as the most obvious is that, even if taking the spiritual viewpoints to fall through, then I at least have a comprehensive understanding of the physical plan and can boast through my retirement years that I achieved a lot with this model I created while enabling me to take the risk of studying things which perhaps may not come to pass. I believe that there is a disconnect from, my own observation, that many spiritual people lack knowledge in the physical universe while many safe and risk-free individuals lack the bravado to venture into the realm of possibility and theory. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, but it could be better.

I personally have benefited from studying the various spiritual beliefs across the world and have personally observed these in action. However, the main limitation from studying these is that I cannot actively validate these for the average person, partially due to it being in another dimension and partially because some are incapable of observing such marvels in the present universe. One of my life purposes is to validate some of these on a physical level, perhaps I think levitation would be the honours and comparatively more realistic compared to teleportation, and, if not, then a measurable honours significant effect of using healing techniques could be achievable as time goes on.

In the end, you can take this viewpoint I have constructed as something that is self-evident but further as a viewpoint in a field of many. I believe one could follow this model and do no wrong save if they follow a school and become so focused on that one area that they neglect others, and to some extent, this purpose requires a lot of vigour and information to learn how to learn to achieve a high outcome in life. Me, I want it all, and my first objective is to determine how to live as long as I want to without my body deteriorating so I have control over myself, without having to commit bad acts.

Daymond Goulder-Horobin is an academic in Economics and Data Analytics and holds a Master of Business in Economics and a Graduate Diploma in Data Analytics. He is also an executive member of the Internet Party NZ and plans to follow them to the 2020 election.

The Alt-Centrist Response To Increasing Polarisation

No-one is in any doubt that political polarisation is increasing all across the Western World. The centre seems to be collapsing in every Western country, with the extremes of both the left and the right gaining in power. This essay describes the alt-centrist response to this increasingly apparent phenomenon.

Although America is usually given as the example of polarisation, with Donald Trump on one wing and Trump Derangement Syndrome on the other, they are still relatively civil compared to Europe.

In Germany, alt movements now have the support of at least 36% of the population. This is only including the alt-left Greens at 24% and the alt-right Alternative for Germany at 12%. If one adds the Left Party at 8%, then the alt movements are now getting more support than the Establishment.

In Sweden, the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats are now the second biggest party outright, with the mainstream Moderate (Conservative) Party continuing to fall away. The Sweden Democrats have been so successful that even more hardline neo-Nazi movements have started up to compete for that voting bloc.

In Britain, support for the mainstream Conservative and Labour Parties have collapsed in the space of one year, with both now polling below 25%, and the newly-founded Brexit Party coming from nowhere to poll 20%+. With four completely different movements all polling around 20%, it looks like the next General Election will render Britain all but ungovernable.

In France, the Socialist Party that ruled the country for decades has disintegrated. Their candidate now has a meagre 4% support ahead of the next French Presidential election in 2022. Marine Le Pen’s far-right nationalist movement the National Rally, by contrast, is polling at 28%. This is just barely behind the Establishment’s golden boy Emmanuel Macron, at 30%.

What it looks like, all over the West, is that the centre is collapsing and the extremes are growing. This pattern is easily recognisable as the terminal one that precedes almost every war, ever. This is to say, the West is headed for full-scale civil war. This is not because of any ill will on the part of any faction of actors – it’s simply a function of the growth rate of the various forces that underpin social cohesion (or the lack of it).

The Western World can be compared to a running washing machine, where someone chucked a brick called ‘neoliberalism’ inside the main chamber about 20-30 years ago and things are just starting to fall apart. This newspaper has already pointed out how similar the social and economic situation is to the 1920s in Central Europe. It will get worse.

Everyday rhetoric reflects this. Many people now feel that either the left wing has gone off the deep end and are calling everyone Nazis, or the right wing has gone off the deep end and are calling everyone Communists. It’s almost impossible to stake out a position in the centre, because the more polarised the environment is, the more likely either side is to see centrists as the enemy.

This is where the alt-centre comes in. A time of collapse and chaos actually benefits the alt-centrists, because it is then that we come into our glory.

The original right, left and centre represent a stable system, or one that’s at peace. The alt-left and the alt-right, by contrast, don’t care about peace – they want war. The alt-left want to smash down all borders by force; the alt-right wants to expel anyone who doesn’t fit in by force. In the eyes of the new positions, peace has failed, and the fault lies squarely on “them”.

The presence of the alt-right and the alt-left is a sign that the broader system is disintegrating. The presence of the alt-centre is a sign that this disintegration has passed the point of no return. We must now get used to living in a new paradigm. But first, we’re going to have to go through some pain.

When the broader system disintegrates, there are no longer any forces holding the victorious alt-left or alt-right factions to task, no matter which of the two wins. Whoever gains the ascendancy can all but wipe out their enemy. Those are extremely dangerous times, and we’re heading towards them.

The alt-centre, therefore, acts as a moderating effect in a time of increasing disorder. This is a rare quality, and and it is achieved by appealing to universal values such as truth. The intent of this moderation is not to help one side or the other to win, because the alt-centrist knows that the excesses of one age lead directly to the excesses of the next.

We’re not here to help one side or the other to victory. We’re not even the peacekeepers. What has to happen will happen, and we know that we’ll be there to rebuild on the other side.

The intent is to make the crash landing as soft as possible.

This makes the alt-centrist position a very interesting one to take. The alt-centrist must serve as a kind of undertaker to the remnants of the last age. The point of this, however, is so that the new age can begin in the right way. It falls upon us to understand how and why this collapse is happening so that we can organise things to resist collapse the next time.

The alt-centre, then, is the unwobbling pivot at the very centre of the taijitu. The right and the left will come and go, and will periodically destroy the entire world, but we in the alt-centre are the seed of a new philosophical order that will arise in the aftermath, one that promises less suffering than the one before it.

After the crash landing, the survivors will stumble out of the wreckage and ask “Now WTF do we do?” The pilot will be morally obliged to take command then, even if only for long enough to establish a new right and a new left.