bullshit artistry – Page 36

One Year of Rule by the Left Wing of the Capitalist Party: A Retrospective

The Labour faction of the Capitalist Party came to power at the end of 2017, taking over from the National faction of the Capitalist Party after that year’s general election. Even though everyone knew that the Capitalist Party would still be in charge, many believed that the ascendancy of the Labour faction would mean a new deal for the beleaguered Kiwi population. As this essay will recount, they proceeded to piss in the faces of the New Zealand working class in at least four major ways.

Despite a promise to not sign the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, the Labour Government did so to much fanfare on the 9th March. Thousands of people marched against the TPPA in 2016, in New Zealand’s largest protests in recent years. Then Labour Leader Andrew Little was quoted at the time as saying that “Labour was opposed to the TPPA because compromises to New Zealand’s sovereignty were not justified by the ‘meagre economic gains’.”

Most people in the New Zealand working class oppose such trade agreements because neoliberalism makes it easier for capital to bid down their wages. The Capitalist Party, on the other hand, represents major moneyed interests, and they welcome such trade agreements because they shift the power equation even further away from labour and even further towards capital. Therefore, the Labour wing of the Capitalist Party is happy to see the wages of New Zealand workers fall, and they happily pissed in the faces of Kiwi workers by signing the TPPA.

Related to this betrayal was a second face-pissing, when the Labour Government raised the refugee quota to 1,500. It’s well known that these people won’t be dumped in neighbourhoods where the rich live. The sex, violence and property crimes that they bring in their wake will not affect the wealthy, who live far away from the ghettos. It is the working-class suburbs that will be forced to absorb these human crime waves, not the rich suburbs in which Labour and Green Party MPs live.

Those wealthy will, however, benefit from the downward pressure that refugees have on wages. The greater the national pool of cheap labour, the lower wages will fall, therefore the more profitable local capitalist enterprises become. If the Labour Party represented the working class, they would not have raised the refugee quota – this would have had the effect of restricting the inflow of cheap labour and thereby creating upward pressure on wages.

The lying about legalising medicinal cannabis comprises the third major display of disrespect on the part of the Labour Party towards the New Zealand working class over the past year. Poor people in New Zealand are desperate for a substance that can help ease the pain of living in this failed society, but which doesn’t have the terrible side-effects of alcohol or opiates. The Labour Party have refused to budge so much as an inch on this issue, acceding only to allowing people who are dying an extra defence in court against a cannabis possession charge.

Although a clear majority of New Zealanders want some kind of cannabis law reform, and although outlets like VJM Publishing have been arguing in favour of cannabis law reform for years (most seriously from 2012, with the publication of our Cannabis Activist’s Handbook), the Labour Party had eight MPs that voted against Chloe Swarbrick’s medicinal cannabis bill, which would have allowed sick Kiwis to grow a medicine at home.

A fourth face-pissing, delivered today, was Labour’s plan to ban vaping. Predictably, the person pushing it – Manukau East MP Jenny Salesa – was one of the eight backstabbing scum in the Labour caucus who voted against Swarbrick’s bill. It seems that authoritarianism against working class practices are entirely acceptable for the Labour Party.

The reason for the vaping ban is not because of health reasons – vaping has led to many people, particularly working-class people, quitting tobacco smoking. The reason for it is that there is no national vape juice producers’ or vape manufacturers’ association to bribe the Capitalist Party, therefore the interests of the tobacco manufacturers come foremost. Unless you are in control of a large amount of money, the New Zealand Capitalist Party will not pass laws in your favour, and will be more than happy to pass laws to your disfavour if a large moneyed interest tells them to.

All this amounts to a lot of disrespect shown by the Labour Party towards New Zealand’s working class. The way that one can tell that the Labour Party is nothing more than the major left-wing faction of the Capitalist Party is because they have not acted in the favour of the New Zealand working class over their one year in charge. New Zealand’s capitalist class, on the other hand, have benefit greatly from the TPPA, from the cheap labour of “refugees”, and from retarding cannabis law reform and prohibiting vaping for the sake of of their investments in alcohol producers and pharmaceutical companies.

In summary, the past year of rule by the left wing of the Capitalist Party has gone much like the preceding nine years of rule by the right wing of the Capitalist Party. The Labour Party has, in the vast bulk of instances, taken measures that benefit wealthy capitalist interests at the expense of the New Zealand population, in particular the local working class.

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Bob McCoskrie Is An Absolute Fuckwit

Giving Bob McCoskrie a national platform to rant about “dope” and “Big Marijuana” is like giving your granddad a national platform to rant about Islanders after he’s had a few sherries on Boxing Day. Stuff did it anyway. This column will have a look at McCoskrie’s screed of fuckwittery, with the intent of responding to his shamelessly dishonest rhetoric with some facts.

One can guess from the title of the article (“Legalised dope is a licence for Big Marijuana to exploit young people”) that it is going to be crudely dismissive of the wishes of the New Zealand cannabis community. To have an article with the word “dope” in the headline is like publishing an anti-immigration opinion piece that had the word “niggers” in the headline. He has blatantly chosen the most inflammatory possible term to describe cannabis, one that associates cannabis use with brain damage.

In this piece, McCoskrie recounts his observations from a recent trip to Colorado, one that he undertook to “see first-hand the effects of legalising marijuana”.

His second paragraph mentions “a money-making industry of lobbyists and special interest groups putting profits over evidence-based policy protecting public health and safety, and ready to flout and challenge any regulations,” with the implication that this describes the industrial cannabis lobby, but this description more aptly fits the alcohol and timber industry lobbyists who agitated to make cannabis illegal in the first place.

McCoskrie gets hysterical about the high THC content of the cannabis products he spies in the Colorado “dope shops”, but the facts are that a high THC product actually makes the product safer. Like the fuckwit he is, McCoskrie is thinking about THC as if it was alcohol, so that a high-THC cannabis edible is somehow functionally equivalent to an absinthe or similar.

No-one has ever died of a THC overdose, so comparing it to high-proof alcohol is nonsense. Unlike alcohol, which kills people in New Zealand every weekend, cannabis doesn’t kill anyone. The most dangerous thing about cannabis is probably the long-term effects of regularly smoking it – and these are completely avoided by the edibles and vaporises that McCoskrie rants about. In other words, what he is railing against are the signs of people using cannabis more safely and responsibly to minimise harm.

Some of the paragraphs in this article are “Old man yells at cloud” level, and the reader can’t help but to wonder if McCoskrie has some kind of senile dementia that has caused him to see things that aren’t there. He decries people in Colorado “popping a handful of Gummi Bears containing 10 times the legal limit of THC per serving,” but there is no legal limit of THC per serving, any more than there is a legal limit of caffeine per serving. The sentence is simply nonsense.

McCoskrie is so hysterical that at some points in his screed he becomes completely detached from reality. The worst example is when he cites the existence of cannabis suppositories as proof that cannabis producers are deliberately targeting their product at the young. In fact, the vast majority of people who use cannabis suppositories are elderly ones who cannot use other route of administration because of the complications of old age. Perhaps McCoskrie should have tried a few while he was over there?

It’s noteworthy that at no point in his travels through Colorado did McCoskrie see anything untoward happen on account of cannabis legalisation. He talks about the terrible panoply of cannabis-related products as if it were Weimar Republic pimps selling children on a Berlin street, but can’t recall seeing any notable level of crime in Colorado or any homelessness in the streets, or any sign of social decay. This is striking, considering that the state legalised cannabis four years ago, which is easily enough time for anything of that nature to have occurred. McCoskrie is just a wowser.

No anti-cannabis rant would be complete without employing the slippery slope fallacy, and McCoskrie duly gives us the line “they will want legalisation not just of this drug but all drugs – cocaine, heroin, P”. By this he somehow draws a connection between people who want access to medicinal cannabis and people who go on methamphetamine benders, when the two people could hardly be more different.

It’s exactly this kind of rhetoric conflating people who need medicinal cannabis with reckless criminals that fuels the War on Drugs, which means that McCoskrie must share some blame for the suffering caused by cannabis prohibition. It’s because of people like him that people like Helen Kelly have to suffer needlessly as they die.

Predictably, McCoskrie gets savaged in the comments below the article. What he is writing might have been considered mainstream conservatism 40 years ago, but now it goes down about as well as other conservative ideas from 40 years ago, like whipping up hysteria about white people and Maoris sleeping with each other. It’s apparent from reading this article that McCoskrie doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about, and is panicking for no good reason.

The only thing this piece can be compared to is a sermon by a Third World religious fundamentalist, who has travelled to the West and seen dancing and intermingling between unmarried youths and shit their pants. McCoskrie is a religious fundamentalist – his Family First lobby group want to recriminalise prostitution and further restrict alcohol. Essentially, they are theocrats, and McCoskrie wants to prohibit cannabis for the same reason that the rulers of places like Iran and Saudi Arabia do.

The New Zealand Student Media is Just as Gutless as the Mainstream Media

It’s rare for a Kiwi to look towards the New Zealand media establishment with reverence or even anything approaching respect, on account of that the profession is little more than a bunch of corporate whores cheerleading for neoliberalism. Even so, it is sometimes astonishing to learn quite how gutless the New Zealand media is, as local anarchist Rick Giles found out earlier this week.

The depths to which the New Zealand yellow press is willing to sink can be observed by the treatment of Giles by Auckland radio station bFm. bFM had Giles on their live show, where he was interviewed by Laura Kvigstad. The segment was called “Anarchy in Aotearoa” and featured Kvigstad and Giles talking about Giles’s interest in anarchy and some of the realisations that had led him to anarchism, and some of the things that anarchism had led him to believe.

This was a part of a wider series called “Wire Worry Week”, which was a week at bFM dedicated to “focusing on the concept of anti government; expanding upon how movements that have worked against governmental systems have influence on the current state of the world.” Giles, as the man behind AnarKiwi, was invited onto the show to speak freely about his political opinions. Readers can listen for themselves to decide whether Giles said anything genuinely worthy of specific repudiation.

In response to – presumably – the shrieking of upper-middle-class Social Justice Warriors all over Auckland, bFM made the following statement:

NB: Following the broadcast of this interview it has come to 95bFM’s attention that the subject of this interview, Rick Giles, espouses political and historical views that the station finds particularly unsavoury. We will not be removing or editing the interview, but wish to make it clear to all listeners that 95bFM does not support or align itself with the personal politics of the interviewee. Our decision to provide Mr. Giles a platform during a week-long discussion on anti-government movements was one that, with hindsight, would not have survived greater scrutiny and vetting process. The station, its volunteers and wider associates do not wish to endorse Mr. Giles’ particular brand of historical revisionism in any way, shape or form and we sincerely apologise for any concern or aggravation caused via our negligence in this case.

It is an incredibly pathetic measure for a radio station to go to these lengths to repudiate a New Zealand intellectual who is guilty only of wrongthink. So gutless are bFM that even when they decide to specifically give a platform to the counterculture they can’t bring themselves to allow alternative points of view to pass without condemnation. Even worse, they are not even decent enough to say exactly which of Giles’s political opinions were so heinous as to be worthy of deplatforming.

What’s hilarious is that you know if Hillary Clinton wanted to appear on bFM to speak to the students of Auckland, they would fall over themselves to provide her a platform, despite that she has killed at least 2,500 more people than Giles, and that’s only counting one of her many crimes. After all, they’re happy to happy to give Peter Dunne a platform, despite the fact that the lies he told about cannabis and about synthetic drugs are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of young Kiwis.

The really terrible part about all of this is that bFM, and by extension the University of Auckland, have failed in their primary purpose of being a university. The primary purpose of a university is to provide a safe space for free-thinkers to discuss ideas that might otherwise be too controversial to discuss in public, on account of that the public would chimp out upon being asked to consider (not accept, just consider) some of the assertions that are necessary to discuss such things.

Apparently the fashionable trend in mainstream media circles right now is to take the exact opposite approach to VJM Publishing; we believe that dialogue is the way to destroy ignorance. The mainstream media don’t care about ignorance; they believe that destroying dialogue and virtue signalling is the way to greater profits. bFM, by making a statement repudiating Giles, are simply learning how to be good, obedient corporate whores. This is, after all, what they will be after graduation.

Part of being a corporate media whore is deplatforming anyone not part of the Establishment (such as Giles) while happily platforming anyone who is part of the Establishment, no matter how many people have died as a result of their negligence or dishonesty (such as Dunne). bFM are willing to give a platform to a Government agent whose ham-fisted cruelty caused New Zealanders to die, but Giles is “particularly unsavoury”.

What bFM did to Rick Giles is a microscopic example of what the mainstream media does to New Zealand all day, every single day. They take uncontroversial ideas, and they sell them as rebellious and controversial so that the desire of some individuals to portray themselves as free-thinkers can be satisfied. In every case, genuinely controversial ideas are ignored as “loony” and their purveyors deplatformed, as happened to Giles. They are a pack of absolute fucking whores, and the alt-media will continue to be a thorn in their side.

Why There Are No Honest People in Politics

Westerners have possibly never had less confidence in their politicians than right now. Confidence is so low that an ever-increasing number of people are losing their faith in democracy. Most people are aware that politicians are basically crooks, but it often hard to say precisely why. This essay explains why there are no honest people in politics.

The simple reason why there are no honest people in politics is because they are either filtered out before they get to the top representative level, or they are made to keep their mouths shut while at that level. This is achieved by a variety of mechanisms, some calculated and some incidental.

One of these mechanisms, a very deeply calculated one, was made apparent in New Zealand by the Jami-Lee Ross saga and the ensuing revelations about the National Party culture and its inner workings. It turned out that the National Party had taken six-figure sums worth of dodgy donations in exchange for pulling strings for those donors, and kept it secret. Many members of the National Party were aware of this corrupt conduct, but said nothing until Ross blew the doors open.

Getting to the top only sometimes involves demonstrating competence and winning the respect of your peers. Sometimes it involves finding out secrets about other people and using them to threaten those people into obedience. The value of a piece of information is inversely proportional to the number of people who know it, and therefore there is an incentive to keep secrets. If you can’t demonstrate that you can keep secrets, you can’t be trusted by the other members of your party – after all, the party will have secrets of its own that need keeping.

So not only do you have to keep secrets on the way up, but you have to keep keeping them while up there, otherwise the other people who are up there will throw you down. Jami-Lee Ross threatened to tell the country the secrets of the National Party, and he was swiftly ushered into psychiatric care. A similar fate awaits any other high-ranking politician who comes down with a sudden bout of honesty.

Of course, Jami-Lee Ross had a much easier time of it than Socrates did. Socrates once said “I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live,” which relates to the second of these mechanisms. Just as there is a mechanism from within a politician’s own party to lie, so is there a mechanism from other parties to do so (i.e. from within the political system). This mechanism has accounted for not only Socrates but also Jesus, William McKinley, Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, John F Kennedy, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

The people who are permitted to rise up from the masses into the ruling class are heavily vetted before being allowed to progress. The main objective of this vetting process is to determine their inclination towards obedience. The ideal candidate will be perfectly obedient to all those above them, and will demand perfect obedience from all those below them. To the degree a candidate deviates from this pattern, their advancement through the mainstream political parties will be hindered.

If a candidate shows signs of creative ability, or signs of any original thinking, they will find their progress blocked. This is why the current ruling class is full of lawyers, and almost entirely absent of writers or artists. Lawyer is an inherently dishonest profession (in contrast to novelist or poet), and this is seen by the incumbents in the ruling class to be a qualification for office.

The less honest you are, the more able you are to keep secrets by twisting and distorting truths and shamelessly dodging questions. Related to this is the fact that, if you go into politics, many of your fellow politicians will be absolute scum, and you will have to accept and account for this otherwise they will destroy you. Some of them, like Peter Dunne, are happy to kill people to advance their careers.

In 2002, Dunne forced the Fifth Labour Government to accept a confidence and supply agreement that promised no movement on cannabis law reform. As a consequence, many people died from either being unable to access medicinal cannabis, or from taking the synthetic drugs that Dunne did allow in lieu of natural cannabis. If Dunne is willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of Kiwis for the sake of his political ambitions, he’s certainly willing to have you killed for them.

A third mechanism serving to keep honest people out of politics comes from the nature of the whims of democracy. Politicians have to follow fashions, or they will rapidly be turfed out of office by the voters. The populace cares not for right or wrong, nor for any issue of justice: they merely get angry when they’re told to get angry. If the television tells them to get angry about apartheid, or the prohibition of homosexuality, or cannabis prohibition, they will do so.

Observe what happened to the individuals who spoke out about the issue of widespread clerical sex abuse within the Catholic Church before it became fashionable. Sinead O’Connor did it in 1992, and it was a career-terminating move. If something is unfashionable, a democratic politician will not support it: it’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter if it’s morally right.

Male infant genital mutilation, for example, is an obscenity, one of the most evil practices that the human species has ever devised, but Western politicians remain too cowardly to oppose it on account of that doing so is yet to become fashionable. You could bet money, however, that when opposing this practice does become fashionable, the politicians will claim to have always opposed it.

The opposite can be observed with the case of cannabis law reform. Until recently, a desire for reform was an exceptionally libertarian position for a politician to take, and only the real mavericks were willing to do so. The Cannabis Activist’s Handbook was published by this company in 2012, and copies sent to all of the political parties then in Parliament, but politicians remained resolutely silent on the subject until very recently.

Even though many people knew decades before the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook was written that cannabis prohibition was a complete sham, these politicians all calculated that it was in their best interests to maintain the net of lies. This even though it was killing their own people. If politicians are willing to yield to pressures like this, what hope is there that they will tell the truth about anything but the least controversial of things?

In summary, the reason why there are no honest people in politics is because both our culture and the political system itself weeds them out before they get to the top, or it destroys anyone at the top who reveals themselves to be honest. There are at least three major mechanisms by which this takes place, and the combination of all three means that our democratically-elected political class are some of the most pitiful, wretched and corrupt individuals that anyone could be burdened with.