Category: history

The Left Needs to go Back to Its Working Class Roots

The sentiment expressed here – that if you do a working class job you must be a piece of shit – is depressingly common among people who claim to be leftists

A common sentiment among many leftists today is that the working class is fundamentally deplorable, as if everyone who works with their hands or rides the bus is something out of Romper Stomper, just waiting for the chance to bash some poor transsexual or Muslim and get away with it.

These regressive leftists even use codewords like “fascist” to disguise their contempt for the working class. That this has been allowed to happen is the reason why left-wing politics are in such a state of complete disarray in the modern West.

In many ways this is deliberate. The children of the political elite know that the more effectively they can destroy working-class movements, the more power they will inherit when they inevitably do inherit it, and so they have gone to some effort to cause them to rot from within.

This is why social justice movements are so often full of middle-class people who aren’t really serious about the issue. It’s also why so much mainstream media attention is given to leftists who are fighting for issues that only, or primarily, affect the middle class.

Essentially, the middle and upper classes have infiltrated the political and media structures that used to give a voice to working-class people, and have twisted them to middle-class interests, or simply destroyed them where this was not possible.

This is how we have ended up with a situation where the white working class votes for a Republican like Trump, and those claiming to be in favour of the disadvantaged force those same disadvantaged to compete with refugees for housing, jobs and public space.

No-one in the working class could give a damn about gay adoption, or Syrian refugees, or transsexual toilet rights, or global warming.

If you’re hungry, the only thing you care about is food.

If you’re sick, the only thing you care about is medicine.

If you’re cold, the only thing you care about is shelter.

If you’re broke, the only thing you care about is money.

If you’ve had a hard day, the only thing you care about is chilling out for a bit.

Watching Jacinda Ardern on television passionately arguing the need for homosexuals to be allowed to adopt kids, while her party has gone silent on meaningful questions like cannabis law reform and the TPPA, is a disgusting sight to the working-class people who used to be represented by the Labour Party.

As mentioned above, much of this is deliberate. The Labour Party are, despite their rhetoric, ultimately as conservative as National, because ultimately they are part of the same establishment. Just look at the ease with which Shane Jones shifts from one wing to the other if you doubt that the ruling class is on the side of the ruling class and the rest of us are on our fucking own.

Ardern’s objective, as it was for the multimillionaire David Cunliffe, is to waste the energy of the people who wish for social change, and to misdirect it to where it can do no damage to the establishment.

This is why the Labour Party promotes gay adoption, which affects perhaps a hundred Kiwis, and ignores cannabis law reform, which affects four hundred thousand.

After all, fucking another man in the arse does not generally bring about patterns of thought that are dangerous to the control systems of the establishment, whereas taking psychoactive chemicals regularly does.

A far higher proportion of cannabis users than prospective gay adoptive parents are societal outcasts, which is hardly surprising when you can be put in prison for being one.

Until such a time as the left goes back to its roots – which is giving a voice to the truly disadvantaged, not merely to whoever’s cause is the most fashionable this moment – it will continue to lose influence.

The Use of Major Psychedelics in Healing Psychological Trauma

At some point in the near future, the potential for using psychedelic medicines to help heal the major psychological traumas that cause most mental illnesses will be a hot topic. Unfortunately, we will have to begin almost from the beginning, as the bulk of our historical knowledge about these substances has been destroyed.

Despite this, there is still a considerable amount of shamanic knowledge in the underground culture, certainly much more than what exists in the mainstream medical establishment, for whom the retarded calculus of “drugs = brain damage” still dominates thinking.

The essential thing that has to be understood is that psychedelics, like cannabis, serve to decondition the mind and brain, only in a much deeper and more sudden way than cannabis.

Deconditioning is here used in the clinical psychology sense to mean a process of unlearning – in particular, of unlearning involuntary subconscious reactions to things that may have been useful to deal with the problems of the past but which no longer are.

This is principally why the psychedelic experience is so difficult. It is also why the psychedelic experience is so exhilarating. One sees things as they actually are, as one did when a child, without the experience being filtered through hundreds of layers of conditioning collected over many forgotten years.

It is possible to condition oneself into a mental illness by thinking too hard about things, because the brain (crudely speaking) works like muscles in the sense that the more it is exercised the stronger it becomes.

Because anxiety and depression are often little more than a habitual fixation of thinking on either the future or the past, respectively, a psychedelic experience often has the effect of deconditioning a person from thought patterns that made them unhappy.

This is why a lot of practiced psychedelic users take them when they feel it’s time to reset the thinking. Usually this is after a certain amount of time has passed since the last experience.

Likewise, many people have suppressed traumatic memories. The suppression often makes good short-term sense in that it allows the damaged person to deal with their immediate problems of survival, but it often makes bad long-term sense in that the warping effect it has on someone’s personality magnifies over time.

This points the way to the major positive use of psychedelics in healing mental illness. Any mental illness that has been caused by overconditioning in an area of the brain/mind could be helped by a medicine that deconditions a person from the thoughts they did not want to have.

It could also give them an opportunity to bring up the suppressed memories and to consider them in a new light, free of the conditioned anxiety response that usually accompanies recollection of past traumas.

Where more research will be necessary is to make sure that the patient does not lose conditioning in areas of the brain/mind that actually helped them in their life.

There are many concepts and habits that people have learned for good reasons, in particular concepts around good social conduct that make life much easier for all of us. An 18-year old adult will have been conditioned for almost their entire life about many things.

So in order to be able to use these tools effectively, mental health practitioners will have to educate themselves past the barbaric superstitions that currently inform our approach to pre-pharmaceutical medicines.

Much of this will involve sitting down with drug users and talking to them to discover what benefits they have found in the use of various substances in their explorations of the mind.

This cannot happen until society comes to appreciate both that psychoactive drug users are people who have followed the prehistoric shamanic path, and that this path is still necessary in our society to protects us from the excesses of groupthink, of tradition and of mindless, knee-jerk programmed reactions and thinking.

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of Asian New Zealanders

Asians represent the fourth major wave of immigration to New Zealand, and, partially as a consequence, their voting patterns are the least well understood. What makes it especially difficult is that “Asian” covers a very large number of people, many of whom are very distinct from some of the others.

The most striking thing about Asian New Zealanders is their love of the ACT Party. The correlation between being Asian and voting ACT in 2014 was an extremely strong 0.85, which is enough to suggest that most ACT voters are Asians (note that it does not mean most Asians are ACT voters, because the population of Asians is many times higher than the number of ACT voters).

As is described elsewhere, the highly educated class tends to split into a right wing that votes ACT and a left wing that votes Green. If the correlation between voting ACT in 2014 and being Asian is so strong, one could predict that there were fewer educated Asians left to vote Green, and indeed the correlation between voting Green in 2014 and being Asian was 0.00.

Also because of the extremely strong ACT support, one could predict that there was little conservative sentiment left over for supporting the National Party. This is indeed the case – the correlation between being Asian and voting National in 2014 was 0.09. There was even less for the real Conservative Party, voting for which in 2014 had a correlation of -0.07 with being Asian.

The correlation between being Asian and voting Labour, by contrast, was 0.17. Some might be surprised by this, given that there are a large number of Asians attracted to the ACT Party. The explanation is that most of the ACT-voting Asians are from Far East Asia and the many from India, Thailand, Malaysia etc. are more likely to have social democratic sentiments.

Given that Maoris were the first wave of immigrants and Asians the most recent, it’s not really surprising that being Asian had a significant negative correlation with voting for any of the four Maori-heavy parties. Being Asian had a correlation of -0.23 with voting Internet MANA, one of -0.30 with voting Maori Party, one of -0.50 with voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and one of -0.60 with voting New Zealand First.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of the Non-Christian Religious

The voting patterns of the non-Christian religious in New Zealand reflected that many of them were immigrants

The Parliamentary Profiles contain information on all manner of religions. Even though India and China are much closer to the New Zealand than the Middle East is, the Middle Eastern religions have a much higher profile here than the Oriental ones.

The vast majority of Kiwi Buddhists are Asians, despite the number of Kiwis of European descent that the reader may have met claiming to be Buddhists. Being a Buddhist in New Zealand has an extremely strong correlation, of 0.87, with being born in North East Asia.

This third factor of being Asian explains why Buddhists love the ACT Party. Being Buddhist has a correlation of 0.85 with voting for ACT in 2014, although there is nothing obvious in Buddhist doctrine that would lead a person towards supporting the ACT Party.

Probably also because of the third factor of being Asian and an immigrant, there was a correlation of -0.66 between being Buddhist and voting for New Zealand First.

Of the other three major parties, Buddhists are indifferent. None of the correlations between being Buddhist and voting National in 2014 (0.15), voting Labour in 2014 (0.08) and voting Green in 2014 (0.12) were significant. This might suggest that Buddhist immigrants to New Zealand have generally peacefully integrated.

There were significant negative correlations between being Buddhist and voting for the other three Maori-heavy parties. With voting Internet MANA in 2014 it was -0.26, with voting Maori Party in 2014 it was -0.33 and with voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party it was -0.52.

Perhaps most fittingly, Buddhists were perfectly indifferent to the idea of voting in general – the correlation between being Buddhist and turnout rate in 2014 was 0.00.

Hindus followed the general pattern of demographic groups that have a high proportion of immigrants voting ACT out of a lack of solidarity with other Kiwis – the correlation between being Hindu and voting ACT was 0.50.

This absence of solidarity is not something that we can say is a general rule for all Hindus – the correlation between being Hindu and voting Labour in 2014 was 0.47. This might reflect that many Hindus are from Fiji and therefore will be attracted to Labour in the same way that other Pacific Islanders are.

Probably reflecting that many of them are immigrants, there were significant negative correlations between being Hindu and voting for three of the four Maori-heavy parties in 2014.

With voting for New Zealand First it was -0.40, with voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party it was -0.40, and with voting for the Maori Party it was -0.24. Only for voting Internet MANA in 2014 was the correlation with being Hindu not significant – and it was still -0.19.

If the Hindu left likes Labour and the Hindu right likes ACT, we can predict two things: a negative correlation with being Hindu and voting both Green and National in 2014. Indeed, the correlation for the former is -0.09 and for the latter it is -0.13.

Perhaps reflecting a minor degree of disenfranchisement, there is a negative but not significant correlation between turnout rate in 2014 and being Hindu: this was -0.17.

Muslims were very similar to Hindus on most counts, probably reflecting the third factor of a shared South Asian origin. The correlation between being Muslim and voting for a particular political party was identical to the Hindu one in the case of both voting ACT (0.50) and voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party (-0.40). In the case of the others it was very similar.

It was more positive in the case of Labour (0.51), Green (-0.05), Maori Party (-0.23) and Internet MANA (-0.16). It was more negative in the case of National (-0.17), Conservative (-0.16) and New Zealand First (-0.46).

Taken together, this group of correlations suggest that Muslims are generally in the same voting bloc as Hindus, but they have slightly more leftist sympathies. The correlation between turnout rate in 2014 and being Muslim (-0.21) is also slightly more strongly negative than the correlation with being Hindu. This may reflect that Pakistan is a considerably less wealthy nation than India.

The voting patterns of Jews reflected two things: that they are generally in high socioeconomic categories and that they have very, very little nationalist sentiment towards New Zealand. These factors are reflected in the correlations between being Jewish and voting Green, ACT or New Zealand First.

Like other highly-educated demographics, Jews appear to eschew the everyday Labour-National paradigm. The correlation between voting Green in 2014 and being Jewish was 0.43, and the correlation between voting ACT in 2014 and being Jewish was 0.42. These two correlations reflect that there is also a moderate positive correlation between being Jewish and being born overseas.

Being Jewish was negatively correlated with voting for any of the parties that traditionally appeal to less educated people. The correlation with being Jewish and voting Labour in 2014 was -0.25, and with voting Conservative in 2014 it was -0.15.

If globalist sentiments are so widespread among Jews, then it comes as little surprise that being Jewish is negatively correlated with the four Maori-heavy parties, and especially so for New Zealand First, voting for which in 2014 had a correlation of -0.57 with being Jewish. For voting Internet MANA it was -0.15, for voting Maori Party it was -0.18 and for voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party it was -0.31.

Reflecting a low degree of disenfranchisement, mostly on account of that many Jews are highly educated and work as professionals, there was a correlation of 0.30 between being Jewish and turnout rate in 2014.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.