psychology – Page 84

The Case For Cannabis: It’s Easier To Stop Using Cannabis If It’s Legal

Many people take an overly simplistic approach to cannabis law reform and assume that cannabis prohibition leads to less use and less desire to use. In truth, much like the fact that people don’t use more cannabis in places where it is legal, cannabis prohibition doesn’t even help addicts. As this article will show, it would be easier for people to stop using cannabis if it was legal.

The logic appears to be that making cannabis illegal will make people decide to stop using it. If it’s not possible to openly grow and sell cannabis, some people reason, then it won’t be as easy for a person to maintain a cannabis habit, and therefore people will be incentivised to quit.

Many people who support this theory seem to assume that cannabis users, many of who are using the substance for medicinal reasons, will just sit and mope for a while and then go and do something more productive. Not only does this ignore the obvious fact that it’s easy to get hold of cannabis pretty much anywhere in New Zealand, it also ignores human psychology.

The reality is, thanks to the wonders of something called variable interval reinforcement, prohibiting cannabis actually makes addicted cannabis users more addicted. Under prohibition, because a person can never be sure if they can maintain a supply, they come to cherish cannabis a lot more when they do get it. So when they do use it, the reinforcing effect is much more powerful.

There are two major reasons why legal cannabis would make it easier for those who are cannabis addicts to quit.

It might not be easy for the average educated, middle-class person to appreciate, but not everyone trusts their doctor or mental health worker. Just because the average Normie considers their doctor to be an intimate confidante doesn’t mean that the average cannabis user feels the same way.

Attitudes have changed sharply compared to some decades ago, but there’s still a lot of distrust on the part of many cannabis users towards health professionals. So if they are honestly advised to quit cannabis for good reasons, they are less likely to pay heed, because they can’t be sure if the advice is coming from a place of honesty or is a formality due to the law.

It’s not easy for a doctor to say that cannabis would be beneficial if it is not legal. For one thing, they don’t want to get a reputation for being the local cannabis doctor. For another thing, there are potential professional consequences. None of them want to explain to a professional board why they recommended an illegal drug to a patient.

If cannabis were legal, it would be possible to trust your doctor if they would say that you wouldn’t benefit from using medicinal cannabis. As it is, if your doctor does not recommend medicinal cannabis, it’s impossible to know if they say this because they believe cannabis would be harmful, or if they believe cannabis would be beneficial but are afraid of potential professional or legal consequences for saying so.

The second major reason is that legal cannabis would make it easier for a user, who accepted that they were addicted, to taper down their use with the intent of stopping.

This relates to the reinforcement schedules referenced above. In the same way that it’s better to use variable interval reinforcement to strengthen a response, it’s better to use fixed interval reinforcement to weaken one. This is because it leads to a gradual weakening of the craving, rather than taking it full force and risking a relapse.

Anyone who has tried to suddenly stop using tobacco or alcohol knows how difficult it is to just make a clean break with it. In most cases, if there is not an immediate threat of death, a person will be advised by their doctor not to quit cold turkey but rather to taper down over a few weeks or a month. As mentioned above, this is partly to avoid relapse, but it’s partly because this is less painful.

People who were interested in stopping their cannabis use could, if we had a sane system, get a prescription for a fixed amount of cannabis with a view to tapering off. They could be given a number of joints and told to smoke x for the first week, x-1 for the second week, x-2 for the third week – or whatever worked.

This would prevent the disaster scenario familiar to people who have tried to stop smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol, in which one sits there while the craving for the drug rises and rises, until one finally caves, at which point using it feels like a divine gift. As mentioned above, this variable interval reinforcement only makes it much harder to quit.

Legal cannabis would be much better for those addicted than prohibition is. It would encourage addicts to trust their doctors when they suggested that cannabis had no medicinal value for them, and it would enable those doctors (or psychologists) to provide a schedule of decreasing fixed reinforcement that would allow for a relatively painless transition to sobriety.

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.

How Mass Immigration Causes Us To Lose Freedoms, And Why It’s Being Pushed

The cultural tensions brought about by mass immigration have claimed several casualties over the past six weeks. From the 50 deaths in the Christchurch mosque shootings to the numerous losses of civil liberty at the hands of the Sixth Labour Government, much has been destroyed. This article explains how the people who advocated for mass immigration of incompatible cultures have provoked this, and by design.

There is now ample scientific research that increasing ethnic diversity has a negative effect on the society. Increased ethnic diversity reduces trust. Social trust is negatively effected by ethnic diversity. Increased diversity causes people to disengage from public life. Ethnic diversity causes people to trust their neighbours less. Even among children, ethnic diversity erodes trust.

The science is reasonably straightforward. Human beings naturally have in-group favouritism and out-group prejudice, and naturally see in-group members as more trustworthy than out-group members. The greater the number of encounters with out-group members, the greater the sense of distrust and suspicion. Increasing diversity then, leads directly to decreasing trust.

The big problem, though, is that decreasing trust leads to a measurably worse society. It leads to people disengaging from the political system, leading to a lower grade of politician, and to politicians with less oversight. It also leads to them disengaging from public life, and from the voluntary associations that society depends upon. These withdrawals mean that society becomes a much lonelier and more depressing and stressful place.

In other words, increasing diversity causes more suffering. However, just because increasing diversity causes suffering among the populations that are forced to become more diverse, doesn’t mean those those populations can avoid it. The diversity is usually forced on them by factors outside their control, such as people who benefit from exploiting those populations.

There are two major forces that benefit from the tensions caused by mass immigration. One is the Government, and the other is religion.

The Government knows that jamming incompatible cultures together will cause conflict. Any idiot knows this, because it’s a simple matter of looking around the world, either physically or through a history book, and one will see that wherever you have different cultures meeting you have violence. Unfortunately, the members of our current Government are autocrats.

Being autocrats, and being control freaks, they want to take as much freedom away from the population as possible. The more freedom we have, the less power they have. So events like the Christchurch mosque shootings are like lottery wins for the people in the Government. They make it possible for the Government to strip away any freedom they want, and anyone who disagrees is made to feel moral culpability for the 50 deaths.

The blueprint for this can be seen with the introduction of the Patriot Act in America after 9/11, which was widely criticised for its multiple civil liberty violations. No intelligent person can doubt that the Sixth Labour Government will use the excuse of white nationalist terrorism and possible Muslim reprisal terrorism to further chip away at our rights to privacy and freedom of association.

Theocrats are the other major group who benefit from “hate speech” laws. Muslims, for their part, know that hate speech legislation is an open door through which they can bring blasphemy charges on infidels. This they have already successfully done in Austria, where a woman was convicted and fined in a criminal court for saying that Muhammad was a pedophile.

Muslims in New Zealand are among the strongest supporters of destroying our tradition of free speech. Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand President Hazim Arafeh was instrumental in having Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux banned from speaking in New Zealand, and Manawatu Muslim Association President Riyaz Rahman is on record as saying “I think the freedom of expression that we have does not allow for hate to be curbed”.

Muslims would love nothing more than for criticism of their hate ideology to become illegal, and the possibility of sneaking in anti-blasphemy laws under the guise of anti-hate speech laws is also why Christians are broadly supportive of such laws. Every religious fundamentalist will be rubbing his hands at the thought of hate speech laws, because this would give them all a weapon to strike down any criticism.

A conviction for saying that Muhammad was a pedophile is only a tiny step away from a conviction for saying that the Pope protects pedophiles.

This means that New Zealand risks slipping into a double dark age. We have both theocratic authoritarians and secular authoritarians joining forces to destroy liberty among our people. Any real Kiwi ought to be extremely concerned by this alliance, because both parts are possessed of self-righteousness enough to justify any amount of cruelty.

The reality is that “hate speech” laws and blasphemy laws are essentially the same thing. The ruling classes get offended by anyone disrespecting their sacred cows, and so they make such disrespect illegal – it doesn’t matter if those ruling classes are theocratic, secular, or an alliance of both. The plebs shall not be allowed to criticise their betters.

As was the case in Austria, further mass immigration will provide excuses to strip more freedoms away. Even if there are no more mass killings in New Zealand, the control freaks will go after free speech, and greater ethnic diversity creates the distrust that makes it possible for them to do so. “Preserving the religious peace” will be one of the excuses used to crack down on criticism of religions and religious groups.

Fundamentally, it’s important to never forget that these freedoms were only lost because of mass immigration. Had we never opened the borders to cultures that did not respect our values of free speech, we would never have lost our right to practice it. There would never have been the tension that created opportunities for free speech crackdowns. We would never have lost the basic trust on which our society is built.

The worst part is that we were warned about this by intelligent people, and did not listen.

The only way to prevent further loss of freedom is to close the borders to incompatible cultures until such a time as all the people currently in New Zealand have learned to accept and appreciate freedom and liberty. This will mean a complete and total stop to the further immigration to New Zealand of men like Riyaz Rahman and those who share values with him. We’ve already lost too much.

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.

VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda VIII

This reading carries on from here .

The eighth chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘Propaganda for Education’.

Bernays opens this chapter with the contention that the public is yet to fully appreciate the value of education. Here he laments that the role of educator has not kept pace with social change, and is operating according to obsolete logic. This is a common theme throughout this book, which is striking for having been written in 1928.

Teachers ought to understand that they have a job as propagandist as well. This is not only in regard to what they teach, but they have to propagandise for the same reason as any other concern, such as a business: public understanding of the teacher’s role, and their acceptance and goodwill, is necessary.

This is not only of advantage to the teachers, who will get a higher salary if their work is more appreciated, but is of advantage to society as a whole, because the profession will be able to attract a higher grade of person. It is necessary to do this because the higher education system gets funding from central governments, and the actions of these governments are subject to public goodwill.

It’s important that institutions of higher learning don’t become dependent on endowments, because this risks that they lose political independence. If the funding is dependent on industry men, those industry men are liable to coerce the university into becoming closer to a polytechnic. As such, the cultural benefits of the institution are lost.

To this end, many of these institutions have employed public relations men. This is one of several points in the book at which Bernays appears to act as a public relations man for the public relations industry itself.

Propaganda can do more for the education industry than to simply raise its profile. Through using a public relations man to stay onside with the newspapers, and thereby establishing friendly relations with the public, the colleges and universities can make sure to attract the best quality of person.

All of the general principles outlined earlier in this book also apply to education. The fact that the public now takes an active interest in the affairs of the companies and businesses that share space with it is noteworthy. This has created a new demand for propagandists, whose job is to keep the public onside.

Bernays concludes this chapter with a warning. Propaganda can be abused. It can be used to create a false image of an institution in cases where such a false image is of benefit to that institution. In this sense, education is little different to business or politics. “There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.”

Clown World Chronicles: What is a ‘Baizuo’?

The English language has stolen another word, this time from the Chinese. ‘Baizuo’, pronounced ‘bye-tswaw’, translates directly as ‘white left’, and refers to a particular kind of ignorant and arrogant liberal leftist who seems too ridiculous to be possible, but who actually thrives in today’s world. This article explains.

Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create bad times, and bad times create strong men. This is the course of history.

We are currently at the end of the good times creating weak men phase of history. The West has been so prosperous for so long that most of us can no longer see reality accurately. This is because we are no longer punished for seeing reality inaccurately, because our wealth is such that we still have full bellies, shelter and entertainment – even if we make mistakes, and usually even if we make an endless string of mistakes.

This means that the natural corrective mechanisms that Nature uses to prevent people from becoming too dumb no longer function. Stupidity is allowed to flourish, because it no longer makes us suffer, go hungry or die. The stupid have therefore come to thrive under these new conditions – and stupidity has become the new normal.

Many Chinese Internet dwellers have noticed this in their online encounters with Westerners, and have become fascinated by the phenomenon, labelling those Westerners as ‘baizuo’. Baizuo mentality appears similar to the mindset of the Romans at the time of Nero. It’s a consequence of the decadence brought about by the presence of great wealth over several generations.

There are a large number of people in the West whose entire lives have been lived among plenty. They have no conception of how it is to grow up poor, and so they don’t understand the problems that come with being poor, which are little more than the problems caused by our metabolic needs in a state of Nature.

The major problem with growing up poor is that a poor life is unforgiving. If you damage or lose an item of clothing, getting a replacement is not a simple matter. Paying an unexpected bill doesn’t mean dipping into the savings fund, it means going without somewhere. And God help you if you damage anything valuable, for the punishment for that, usually from parents, can be swift and merciless.

But there is also a major benefit with growing up poor. This is, in the same way some amount of yang always exists even at peak yin, one is forced to see reality accurately. One can thereby develop a perceptual edge over one’s otherwise more privileged fellows.

The baizuos no longer see reality accurately, because they no longer understand Nature. As such, they no longer believe in Nature. They do not believe that men and women are different, and they don’t understand that the various groups of people around the world are different. The joke is that they think food comes from supermarkets.

The baizuo phenomenon is essentially the mass psychosis of a generation raised in such wealth that they could get away with losing touch with reality. Unlike generations raised in poverty – such as the Chinese – the vast majority of Westerners under the age of 40 have been raised in such a total absence of poverty that they have forgotten entirely that life on Earth is fundamentally an eternal struggle.

There are several facets of this phenomenon that the Chinese find especially fascinating, as does any rational Westerner trying to make sense of his fellows.

One is the obsession with political correctness, to the point of the baizuo’s own detriment. Whereas the Chinese loves to make jokes that defy the ruling authorities, and whereas most Chinese have a VPN to evade Government censorship, the humourless baizuo appears to desire more authoritarianism and more free speech restrictions and crack downs.

Another is the astonishing, almost child-like naivety when it comes to the dangers of the world. The majority of baizuos are asleep and dreaming when it comes to the issue of mass Muslim and African immigration. They absolutely refuse to listen to the experiences of people who have seen the deleterious effect of mass Muslim and African immigration on other nations, especially those in Europe.

Baizuos believe that all of the poor people of the world truly yearn for peace and tolerance and understanding for all, if only we would give them the opportunity to move to the West. That this has never been the rule in history doesn’t bother them, for they don’t believe in history any more than they believe in biology. They genuinely believe that all other groups of people are just like them, and think just like them.

A third is the arrogance with which the baizuo is stupid. In a state of Nature, stupidity is punished with pain, so that people who demonstrate stupidity soon become humble. The stupidity of the baizuo does not get punished, and, as a result, baizuos come to think they are right about everything all the time. Their arrogance is unchecked.

Whereas a well-travelled person could talk to a typical Chinese about the problems caused by Islam and be understood, the baizuo response would be to shout ‘racist’ and imply that the traveller must have been biased against Muslims all along, their observations merely confirmation bias. Most baizuos have never travelled outside of their own language zone, but are still conceited enough to think they know everything about the world.

The baizuo mentality, then, can be thought of as a form of slave morality. The baizuos are the weak men who lead to bad times, but their influence is already peaking. This means that the bad times are coming, and with their arrival the baizuos will disappear.