psychology – Page 83

The Case For Cannabis: Legalisation Would Not Increase Drugged Driving Deaths

The resistance that many people have towards cannabis law reform is fear based. Like a panicky chicken, the prospect of any change at all is met with terror. One of the fears that people have at the thought of cannabis legalisation is that it will lead to carnage on our roads. As this article will examine, these fears are misguided.

As with many of the misgivings that people have about cannabis law reform, the fear of an increase in drugged driving deaths is based on a misconception about how dangerous cannabis is. This is partially based on ignorance, and partially based on the idea that being high on cannabis is like being drunk on alcohol.

The idea seems to be that perfectly otherwise normal people will smoke some cannabis and, because cannabis makes you go crazy, they will get in a car and drive like a crazy person. This perception has been stoked by sensationalist media reporting involving headlines such as “Stoned driver faces jail” when the driver in question had also been smoking methamphetamine.

The idea that cannabis legalisation will lead to more road deaths is not accurate for three major reasons.

The first is that it ignores the substitution effect (for the sake of argument, let’s agree here with the lazy assumption that legal cannabis will lead to more use). An individual driving under the influence of cannabis might not be as safe as a sober person. But evidence from elsewhere shows that, if cannabis was legalised, a proportion of incidents of drunk driving will be replaced with incidents of stoned driving, which are safer.

Research has shown that rates of alcohol use fall in places where recreational cannabis is made legal. This is because cannabis and alcohol serve as substitutes to a large extent. Because rates of alcohol use fall after cannabis legalisation, rates of drunk driving also fall, and this means that traffic fatalities also fall – significantly.

It’s better for a driver to be sober, but if they aren’t going to be sober, it’s better for them to be stoned than to be drunk. It’s a grim calculus, but if legalising cannabis would lead to twenty extra drugged driving deaths but would prevent fifty drunk driving deaths, it would be a worthwhile move.

The second is that the actual science is inconclusive as to whether being stoned impairs driving safety. Various studies have provided contradictory results. The lazy assumption is that being under the influence of any psychoactive drug, including cannabis, will make a person worse at driving. The reality is that stoned drivers take a variety of measures to reduce their risk of crashing.

Part of the problem is that unregulated cannabis contains a great variety of various cannabinoids, and these cannabinoids can be present at a great variety of frequencies. Studies appear to be clear that high doses of THC impair driver safety, which follows logically from the fact that THC is known to have a psychotogenic effect, but there is no such evidence suggesting the same about high doses of CBD.

It also appears to be true that, unlike alcohol, cannabis tolerance has an effect on whether it impairs driving performance. For many cannabis users, cannabis is merely a background substance that quietens distracting thoughts. All these reasons mean that, although no responsible person would advocate driving after using cannabis, a person who has just smoked it is not necessarily unsafe to drive.

The third is that it is irrelevant. Like with many arguments against cannabis law reform, focus on the specifics misses the bigger picture.

Not everyone trusts the Government when it says that cannabis is a substance that isn’t safe to drive on. As the linked articles above demonstrate, there are indeed instances when a person who has consumed cannabis is not safe to drive. But why would a person trust a Government public safety notice on the subject, when they have previously lied about cannabis full stop?

Over recent decades, governments all over the world have denied that cannabis was medicinal. But because people all over the world knew that it was medicinal, the end result has been decreased trust of governmental pronouncements, particularly when they relate to cannabis. So if the a government would give the perfectly reasonable advice to avoid driving within two hours of smoking, it might well be ignored.

If cannabis was legal, and if the Government spoke to the public honestly about it instead of lying, users might trust them when giving intelligent and prudent advice about smoking cannabis and driving. This would save many more lives in the long run than could possibly be saved by putting cannabis growers and users in prison.

The idea that cannabis legalisation will lead to a spate of fatal traffic accidents is fearmongering. It’s the same kind of fearmongering that claimed that legalising homosexuality would lead to everyone dying of AIDS. The experience of overseas territories that have legalised cannabis shows that these fears are little more than hysteria.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

The Government And Mainstream Media Work Together to Control The Narrative

A recent Stuff article reported that mainstream media outlets are colluding to censor reporting of Branton Tarrant’s trial. Stuff, TVNZ, Mediaworks, NZME and RNZ have agreed to not mention Tarrant’s name, nor will they quote from his manifesto. As this article will show, this is far from the good news it’s being portrayed as.

Purportedly, their reason for doing so is to not allow “white supremacist or terrorist ideology to be championed”. The image they are painting of themselves is one of honourable restraint in the service of the public good. In reality, they are simply doing this to further the globalist agenda of their owners.

They have made a special effort not give airtime to Tarrant but, incredibly, they are happy to give plenty of airtime to Hillary Clinton, the Butcher of Libya. Clinton’s orchestration of the 2011 destruction of Libya may have led to 100,000 deaths in the ensuing chaos. The clip of her gloating about the murder of Gaddafi is one of the most grotesque displays of psychopathy ever captured on film.

How can it be that a man who kills fifty is too evil to mention and must be deplatformed to the maximum degree possible, whereas a person who kills a hundred thousand is not only given a regular platform but is spoken about as an innocent victim being oppressed by the Trump Presidency?

The answer is that Clinton’s actions please the international banking and finance interests that own the mainstream media, whereas Tarrant’s (like Trump’s) do not.

The Government of Muammar Gaddafi had completed a project called the Great Man-Made River, which had been achieved without any financing from foreign banking interests. This was of great concern to those interests, who see self-funded infrastructure as a threat to their profits, in much the same way that a slave escaping the plantation is a threat to the plantation owner’s profits.

Clinton’s destruction of Libya, therefore, taught everyone a lesson about building infrastructure without giving a cut to the banking mafia.

Branton Tarrant, on the other hand, raised racial tensions at a time when the globalists are trying to import as much cheap labour as they can in the guise of things like helping refugees. Now that society is based on the idea that consumers are assets and consumption the engine of economic activity, the desire of the ruling classes is to grow their population as high as possible, in the same way that cattle ranchers seek to grow the size of their herd.

The problem with this approach – although this is still denied – is that jamming together incompatible cultures from different parts of the world inevitably leads to some level of conflict. This is especially true when members of some cultures gang together to rape hundreds of local children, as occurred in Rotherham. The Rotherham rape gang was one of several Muslim rape gangs mentioned in Tarrant’s manifesto as an impetus for his action.

More globalism, while it means more profits for the international banking and finance interests that service the housing industry with mortgages, also means more ethnic tension and less social cohesion. Even though this damages the nation, it makes it possible to extract more wealth from the nation, and so there are several forces that work in hand to suppress the tensions that arise from globalism.

The Government is full of people who are bought and paid for by big business and finance interests, and so is the mainstream media. They are therefore directed to work in concert, and this they do obediently. The mainstream media supports the Government by propagandising for it, and by arguing for its policies, and the Government supports the mainstream media by giving them exclusive access to what politicians have to say.

The mainstream media has changed role. Where it was once a critic of the Government and the people’s voice holding that Government to account, now it’s an entity that works alongside the Government to manage public perceptions. John Key was portrayed as the financial genius that shielded the nation from the Global Financial Crisis, and Jacinda Ardern is portrayed as the angel that is shielding us from white supremacist terrorism – two personality cults deliberately created by propagandists.

The brutal reality is that the mainstream media and the Government are working side-by-side, as proven by the fact that the former was given a top secret list of the 100 or so people being surveilled by the Police in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings. This is also why the mainstream media refuses to mention the name of Vinny Eastwood in the hit pieces that target him, despite that Eastwood is responsible for the deaths of no-one.

Anyone who questions the agenda needs to be terrorised into submission and silence. Eastwood questions the narrative, and in doing so weakens its propaganda power, and therefore he’s a bad guy. The article above refers to him as a “conspiracy theorist” – a loaded term chosen to delegitimise. Leaking a list of surveillance targets to the media intensifies the pressure against those people and increases their sense of paranoia.

In accordance with this, the mainstream media will work to negate anything Tarrant might say that goes against the agenda. They will certainly not report on the fact that Tarrant was motivated to action by the various Muslim rape gangs in England and by the Drottninggatan truck attack, because they don’t want to legitimise anti-immigrant sentiment. They will say nothing that goes against the story that Tarrant was driven mad by his own moral failings.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is terrible for business because it both limits the importation of cheap labour, which means that wages go up, and lowers demand for housing stock, which means that rents and mortgages go down. It is because of these crude economic concerns and the marriage of convenience they create, and not because of Jews or any Marxist conspiracy, that the Government and the mainstream media are working so closely together.

The simple truth is that, being owned by the same international finance and banking interests, the New Zealand Government and the mainstream media work together to serve those interests. Individuals in both institutions must do so or they will be fired. This they do by passing laws and broadcasting propaganda intended to serve the globalist agenda of open borders and the destruction of national and regional cultures.

This is why they collude to prevent the spread of terrorist propaganda when it supports a nationalist narrative, but are happy to spread terrorist propaganda when it supports a globalist narrative. Perhaps the most awful example was the weapons of mass destruction lie promoted by Jacinda Ardern’s mentor, the Iraq War criminal Tony Blair, a lie which killed a million people and for which no-one was ever held to account.

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.

New Zealand Still Runs on A Spoils System

There are many different kinds of corruption in the world’s various political systems. One of the most blatant is the type known as a spoils system. Although this is commonly believed to be a corrupt form of government that we have now moved past, New Zealand still runs on a spoils system, as this essay will examine.

A spoils system is when the victorious party gets to dish out government posts and gifts from the treasury as if they were the spoils of war. Like a conquering Roman legion, all the treasure and booty are piled in a big heap, and then apportioned out by the leaders to their lackeys.

When the spoils system was blatantly in play, an incoming Government would remove many of the previous Government’s supporters from any influential positions so as to install their own. Back then, there wasn’t a public taxation fund to pillage, so the spoils of victory mostly involved jobs in central Government. The position of regional postmaster was a particular favourite.

Although the New Zealand Government would like to give the impression that it fills its positions based on merit and that this merit has been determined after great thought and dutiful application of philosophy, it also runs on a spoils system.

Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter is married to a man named Peter Nunns, who is a principal economist of a transport consultancy firm named MR Cagney. Since taking power in 2017, Government spending on hiring this particular firm has leapt from around $50,000 a year to $246,000 a year, with this money coming from 18 different contracts.

Incredibly, none of these contracts were even put up for tender. The linked article lists a range of excuses for this supposed coincidence, but all of them are just red herrings. The simple fact is that MR Cagney had money being piped into it from the central government, and that the victorious Green Party increased the flow of money fivefold as soon as they were able.

Shane Jones’s $3,000,000,000 Regional Development Fund is another example of the spoils system at play. Jones found himself in charge of the treasury, helped himself to a few billions, and now he’s doling it out in exchange for future favours. Like a jolly brown Santa, he descends from the skies to bring gifts to those who have behaved correctly.

The reason why it’s purely a regional development fund is because that will best reward New Zealand First voters. According to Dan McGlashan’s Understanding New Zealand, there is a correlation of 0.60 between voting New Zealand First in 2017 and living in a rural electorate.

The only other party to come close to this is the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, at 0.40. New Zealand First is, therefore, very much the party of the countryside, and this $3 billion fund is little more than payback for the support of the countryside at the last election.

Treating New Zealand as the spoils of war is far from something the Sixth Labour Government invented to keep coalition allies onside. It didn’t matter to John Key and Bill English that over two-thirds of the country explicitly said ‘no’ to asset sales, because the majority of National voters fell into the one third who said ‘yes’. The Labour, New Zealand First and Greens voters that made up the two thirds didn’t support National, therefore didn’t get any of the spoils of the National victory.

In a sense, democracy can’t avoid being a spoils system because if the winning party doesn’t reward its voters, it may not get voted in again. The Labour Party rewards Maoris, not because they are communists, but because Maoris vote for them in great numbers: Dan McGlashan found a correlation of 0.58 between being Maori and voting for the Labour Party in 2017.

If voting for the Labour Party didn’t have some kind of payoff, perhaps people wouldn’t do so again. This is more important the more marginalised your voters are, because these are the most likely to abstain from voting. Therefore, whichever party wins the election is all but obliged to dish out the spoils to those who voted for them, because if they don’t then the other side will, and then the other side will stay in power for longer.

There are several problems with this, however. One of the most obvious is that, once it’s apparent that it’s a spoils system contested by Team Rich and Team Poor, there arises a great incentive to disenfranchise Team Poor.

There will always be more poor people than wealthy ones, and so the obvious move for the wealthy, from a game theory perspective, is to demoralise the poor so that they don’t bother to vote. Widespread use of this strategy can have a devastating effect on social cohesion, as America has demonstrated. It could be argued that it was this phenomenon that led to the rise of Hitler during the Weimar Republic.

The only way to get around this is to increase the solidarity of the nation, and the strength of the bonds between each person. This cannot be achieved until the rotten, half-collapsed structures of the previous age are finally razed to the ground. From the ashes, a true spirituality can arise, and this will inspire us to make the right moves elsewhere.

How FaceBook Censorship Radicalises Young Men Into Violence

My first ban from FaceBook was for writing the phrase “But Hitler didn’t do anything wrong”, which in context was obviously a joke response to a troll. It lasted 24 hours. I then got a three-day ban for quoting someone else who said the word “faggot” and then a 7-day ban for posting an image of an SS soldier with the caption “Begone Degenerate” in response to someone advocating pedophilia. During this 7-day ban I discovered a place called /pol/.

Having grown up in a generation where everyone called each other “faggot”, and where it was taken in good humour, getting banned from FaceBook for it generated some resentment. Although it was only a small amount, it emphasised the open welcome I got from /pol/. Whereas FaceBook made me feel like a morally defective subhuman that needed to go into a gulag, /pol/ made me feel normal and among friends.

The same sentiments that got me excommunicated from Mark Zuckerberg’s platform were expressed by many on /pol/. I naturally, therefore, decided that it was a great place full of honest, brave and intelligent people. Others will no doubt disagree – most will say that /pol/, like 4chan, is a cesspit. Anyone who does think this, however, might want to think about how FaceBook censorship drives people to places like it.

What happened to me is far from unique. Many people who like to discuss politics, but who got banned from FaceBook, came to feel the same way about /pol/ as I did. If free speech is censored on the grounds that certain political opinions make other people feel bad, this will lead inevitably to those banned people finding company in places where they feel welcome.

Let’s not forget that censorship isn’t just the banning of ideas. It’s also the banning of the people who express those ideas. Censorship doesn’t merely say that a particular idea is unwelcome; it also says that people who express those ideas are unwelcome. If you have those ideas, no logical argument is entered into. You are simply banned.

For paranoid individuals like an Anders Breivik or a Brenton Tarrant, it’s not easy to handle getting banned from FaceBook for making a joke, when openly genocidal comments go unpunished if made by the right people. This is precisely the kind of thing that convinces people that an overarching leftist conspiracy to destroy white people exists.

There appears to be a great and terrible delusion on the part of many leftists.

The delusion is that they are entrusted with some kind of teacher role and the rest of the world are moral reprobates in need of correction. They seem to imagine that getting banned from FaceBook for 30 days means you have to sit in the naughty corner and think about what you have done. In reality, it’s closer to getting kicked out of the classroom and smoking cigarettes with the truants behind the bike sheds.

Banning people from FaceBook has a similar effect to banning people from civil society and sending them to prison. In much the same way that prisons often serve as “universities of crime”, so can the darker regions of the Internet serve as centres of radicalisation. Censoring social media, far from inspiring people to investigate themselves for moral weaknesses, simply pushes them into the company of people who make no effort at all to hide their hatred.

The worst thing, however, isn’t that naughty people might be forced into the company of other naughty people and have their naughtiness normalised. It’s the resentment that such heavy-handed tactics create among those rejected. This resentment is truly dangerous.

There’s an African saying that has it “If a child is not embraced by the village, he will burn it down to feel its warmth.” For all the damage that might be done by exposing young shitposters to radical Nazis, it’s much worse for those young men to get jettisoned from the arena of public debate, because this makes them hateful.

In such an atmosphere, a person banned from FaceBook could come to see genuine Nazis as fellow victims. Worst of all, they might come to relate to the kind of resentment that inspired the Christchurch mosque shooting. If honest people get banned and end up on /pol/, and then end up shooting people, then maybe shooting people is the path that honest people get forced down?

FaceBook censorship plays a direct role in the radicalisation of young men like Tarrant and Poway Synagogue shooter John Earnest. This censorship plays a direct role in feeding the sentiments that make these young men feel that they have the whole world against them. The sense that free-thinking people are being persecuted by an inhumane and tyrannical neo-Communist shadow regime becomes entirely believable when FaceBook bans people for making slightly off-colour jokes.

The answer is not to ban places like /pol/. For one thing, that could never work in the age of VPNs and Tor browsers. The answer is to normalise the idea of free, intelligent and respectful political discussion in all places. This way, men like Tarrant, who have legitimate grievances and fears about the way his nation is going, can express those grievances instead of feeling forced to pick up a rifle.

If it’s possible to lay out the welcome mat to Islam, an ideology of hate that has killed hundreds of millions of people, then it must also be possible to allow discussion about controversial political topics such as ending Third World immigration. It must surely be possible to lay out the welcome mat to our own working class, and listen to their misgivings about the way the world is going. This would work much better than more bans.