Category: bullshit artistry

The Lesson of ANZAC Day is to Not Follow Leaders

The reason why ANZAC Day is so important to the nations of Australia and New Zealand was that it was the day we became aware of exactly how little regard we were held by the British commanders. It was therefore the day we decided to look to ourselves for self-regard: the birth of the national consciousness.

This is why ANZAC Day is celebrated to the degree that it is in both New Zealand and Australia even today, a century after the landings at ANZAC Cove.

The day marks the moment that we decided we were good enough to stand on our own merits as New Zealand and Australia, and not merely as colonies of Britain, because the British did not hold us in the regard we deserved.

The difficulty is this – a century later, our own leaders, despite being elected from among ourselves, treat us with equally little regard. In fact, our own leaders treat us so poorly that we’re now doing worse than many of the countries we have defeated in war within the past century.

Germany and Japan today both have a higher standard of living than the Anglosphere – their defeat in World War Two made it possible to clean out the entrenched corruption in the political systems of these countries, laying the foundation for socio-economic success.

Contrast that to the West, where the victory of World War Two was taken as a sign that God had blessed us. Not only were we correct, but our entire social order was perfect, right down to the degree to which labour relations favoured capital interests.

The symbol of ANZAC Day is the poppy, the reason being that the poppy is used to make morphine, and morphine was raised to an almost holy status after World War One because for an injured soldier its administration was like a gift from heaven.

For the soldiers who risked so much to bring freedom to people, and who felt first-hand the degree to which medicine can prevent human misery, it must be a bitter pill to swallow that the governments they fought for are putting their descendants in cages for exercising their right to use medicinal plants.

In much the same way that morphine brought relief to those whose bodies had been shattered by bullets and shrapnel, other plant medicines bring relief to those whose minds have been shattered by abuse and neglect.

Cannabis is now legal in 29 American states as a recognised medicine, including for post-traumatic stress disorder, the mental illness that the ANZACs would have called shellshock. But the New Zealand Government will not even discuss changing the cannabis laws here.

MDMA is also being currently trialled after showing promise in treating PTSD, psilocybin is currently being trialled after showing promise in treating death anxiety, ibogaine is currently being trialled after showing promise in treating drug addiction and ayahuasca is currently being trialled after showing promise in treating depression. But anyone using any of these plant medicines in New Zealand risks getting put in a cage for many years by the Government.

It’s hardly plausible that the men that signed up to fight Hitler did so to protect a political system that would put their grandchildren in cages for using medicinal cannabis. Yet, here we are. We would have more freedom today if the ANZACs had shot a few of their own politicians.

The lesson of ANZAC Day is this. Never, ever follow the dictates of people who claim to rule you and who claim to be in charge of you, no matter how urgent the need is claimed to be, no matter how many flags they wave, no matter what authority they claim to be speaking with, no matter how malicious the enemy is claimed to be, no matter how much jeering, threatening, mocking, insulting and coercing they do.

Anyone who is not willing to treat you as an equal is your enemy.

Is There A Crypto-Conservative in Your Midst?

The phenomenon of rich kids pretending to be working class because it’s fashionable – satirised in The Young Ones by Rik Mayall – is not a new one

With all the bullshit being produced nowadays, it’s sometimes difficult to spot new patterns or sources of it in all the noise. One of the most interesting new patterns (or, more precisely, resurgent patterns) is that of middle-class kids pretending to be working class, and flooding into leftist politics: the crypto-conservative. This article tells you how to spot one.

In order to understand what a crypto-conservative is, it is necessary to understand recent Western sociological history.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western liberal capitalism surged to triumph in the Cold War. No longer facing an outside threat, the Western Establishment immediately shattered, but not, as many had expected, into the rentier class and the working class.

It shattered instead into the rentier class and their offspring, who gravitated towards the left out of rebellion towards their parents.

The actual working class were progressively driven out of the left until we arrived at the situation we have today, where it is almost entirely comprised of the offspring of the rentier class, and the social considerations upon which it was founded have long been forgotten.

Thus we have arrived at a definition: a crypto-conservative is literally a natural conservative pretending to be left-wing – usually a young, middle-class person who has infiltrated the working class movement and is acting, wittingly or otherwise, to destroy it from within.

The easiest way to pick one is that they don’t care about issues that affect the actual working class, like getting a fair wage for a day’s work.

Often they are obsessed with issues that literally destroy the working class, like mass third-world immigration (which tips the balance of power between worker and boss back towards the boss).

Other times they are obsessed with issues of no particular importance to the working class – it’s genuinely difficult to see anything necessarily working class about homosexual law reform, for example.

In another time and place it could just as well be the left wing making homosexuality illegal over inflated fears of STD infection or psychological predation upon minors. It was after all left-wing hysteria that led to the failed experiment of alcohol prohibition.

The striking thing about the middle-class crypto-conservative is that all of their political ideology will benefit them as soon as their parents die and they inherit their property.

So it’s actually in their own interest to act as a cancer within honest working class movements – and they may or may not know this.

This is the secret to identifying a young conservative that is pretending to be working class. They will not care about working class issues like a fair wage for a day’s work, but seek to instead divert attention from this to meaningless trivia in the hope of appearing fashionable.

Obviously, a young person will not care about a fair wage for fair work if they just bludge off their wealthy parents, so anyone claiming to be left-wing while bludging off their wealthy parents is very likely to be a crypto-conservative.

Likewise, a young person who does not work will not care about the fact that allowing large numbers of unskilled refugees into the country will remove any leverage the working class may have had over their bosses. After all, they are unlikely to live in the same neighbourhood as the refugees (at least not after they “settle down”), and in any case the refugees are unlikely to be competing for middle class jobs.

Ultimately, though, the most effective way to pick a crypto-conservative is from their anemic lack of conviction and passion when they are discussing working class issues.

If a person looks sheepish or embarrassed when talking about the need for adequate wage compensation, or the need to build quality houses instead of the third-world shacks we have, or the importance of not sending kids to school without food or shoes, but becomes loud when talking about the gender wage gap or Israel-Palestine, then that person might not be trustworthy.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Fundamental Conceit of the Mental Health System

Being forced to try to fit into our extremely unnatural society causes all kinds of mental health problems

The strangest thing about being a mental health patient is that the mental health services act as if fitting into our society in a productive capacity is natural and normal, and that anyone who cannot do this for whatever reason must be abnormal.

The attitude that fitting into our system is natural and normal is the fundamental conceit of the mental health system.

The truth is that the human animal has evolved to fit an ecological niche that is almost nothing like the lives we actually live today, which are as artificial as Disneyland.

Humans have evolved to suit a reasonably specific set of social conditions. In the biological past, it was rare to live in a group of people larger than about 150. This was because the nomadic lifestyle that was the norm back then could not support larger groups, primarily because of the absence of agriculture.

In these groups of 150 or so, there was very little in the way of social order. In this chaos, however, there was a degree of freedom that humans have adapted to. There was never an authority that made some behaviours against the “law”, as there was no agricultural surplus and therefore no way of maintaining an enforcer class.

As a consequence, humans were able to live in accordance with the natural curiosity that has provided our species with a decisive survival edge.

This is not an argument for anarcho-primitivism and is not intended to romanticise the past. The point is simply to describe the distance between the degree of freedom that we have evolved to consider natural and the degree of freedom currently afforded to us in modern society.

Perhaps the most unnatural thing about our society is the nuclear family. When there were tribes of 150, young children had almost infinite access to social reinforcement – it was possible to play with cousins of a similar age, and to talk to people much older than one’s parents, at almost any time one wanted.

In modern society, the early social development of a child is restricted to what they can get from the nuclear family unit. So instead of playing with cousins they watch television or go on the tablet, and instead of listening to stories from their elders they watch more television.

This means that almost everyone in our society grows up with a grossly unnatural deficit of both quality and quantity of social contact.

Because social contact is necessary to release oxytocin, and because oxytocin is necessary for proper brain development, the inevitable consequence of the nuclear family model is an increase in social retardation, reflected in our skyrocketing autism rates.

Neither is it at all natural to be forced to wake up early in the morning from the age of four so that one can go to school.

The natural sleep-wake cycle of a child is similar to that of a cat – one sleeps when one is tired, and is awake otherwise. In a state of nature, a child will nap frequently throughout the day.

This is not permitted under the mass education model. Under our model of schooling, even five year-olds have to stay awake all day uninterrupted, which is extremely unnatural. Should this cause them sleep deprivation they just have to suffer it.

Perhaps the worst is that it isn’t natural to not be able to discuss these things. If you go to see a psychiatrist in our mental health care system it is not possible to discuss whether these problems have been caused to you by our culture.

The attitude, which cannot be questioned or discussed, is that our culture is perfect; any problems you have fitting into it are yours and yours alone.

If sleep deprivation makes a child misbehave they just have to go on sedatives. If it causes an inability to concentrate they just have to go on Ritalin. Should it be so bad that they start to hallucinate they just have to go on anti-psychotics.

This conceit alone makes for terrible treatment outcomes for patients. Because the mental healthcare system may not acknowledge the real cause of the suffering of its patients, neither can it actually treat that suffering. The best it can do is to treat the symptoms by dishing out mountains of highly profitable pharmaceuticals.

How the Ruling Class Stays in Power

If a person is slapped awake for even the briefest of moments they might come to look around and ask why a parasitic class of politicians wields power of life and death over them despite a total lack of historical evidence that they are wise enough for the responsibility or even intelligent enough to comprehend that it exists.

The truth is that the ruling classes maintain their position in every time and place in the same simple way, and have done so ever since the first chimpanzee established a dominance hierarchy in the primeval jungle: by taking rights away from the people they rule, and then giving some of them back in exchange for submission.

This essay will describe the method of enslavement known as “democracy” – a method that has reached acute levels of sophistication in the modern West.

As described above, the essential pattern is bipartite: first, take rights away from the people; second, promise to give some of those rights back to the people in exchange for their submission.

What’s crucial to understand is that the relationship described here is that of the rulers towards the ruled. Which flavour of political party the rulers use to swindle the rights of the ruled away from them is not relevant, as all political parties are tools of the ruling class.

Any political party is capable of taking rights away and giving rights back, because in a democratic system the masses have submitted to the rulers of that party. All that matters is that more rights are taken away than are given back.

This can be seen when the National Party takes away people’s rights to use medicinal cannabis, but gives them back some of their right to keep the money they have earned.

The Labour and Green Parties, by contrast, will promise to give you your rights to use medicinal cannabis back, but they will take away some of your right to keep the money you have earned.

And both parties will team up to give you back your rights to have sex with people of the same gender as you, but will team up to take away your rights to recreational use of tobacco and alcohol. At least today – it was the other way around 80 years ago and probably will be again in 80 years’ time.

The trick is that as long as both wings of the political machine take away more rights than what they give back, the machine itself can stay in power forever, because there will always be an unjust deficit of rights somewhere and therefore always grounds for a politician to come in and start promising things.

Helen Clark, for example, knew that she could not make any progress on cannabis law reform between 1999 and 2008, because then the Labour Party would not be able to gain votes by promising to look at reforming the medicinal cannabis laws in 2017.

Likewise, Andrew Little in 2017 knows that, if he is to be elected to power, he must make the smallest possible amount of progress on the issue.

This is why he only makes vague mumblings about sorting out medicinal cannabis, but will not under any circumstances discuss the incredible success of the Colorado model, and how adopting it in NZ would save us $400,000,000 per year.

That is something that has to be left to Jacinda Ardern’s Seventh Labour Government in 2035 or so. If the Labour Party gave too many rights back to the people too quickly, they would lose the leverage that they are currently exploiting to stay in power.

Unfortunately, New Zealanders (like voters everywhere) reward this kind of carry-on by continuing to vote for whichever of its number the ruling class puts forward to rule them that electoral cycle.

After all, it doesn’t matter which party a politician claims to represent – as long as they are from the ruling class, nothing will change.

It can confidently be predicted that many New Zealanders will vote for the Green Party this year for the sake of relief from cannabis prohibition, and that little thought will be given to the people who will lose rights under a Labour-Greens Government – namely, taxpayers.

And it can be confidently predicted that the National Party will rely on the outrage of taxpayers to get back into power in 2026.

Likewise, it can be predicted that any rights that Kiwis can claw back from the ruling class regarding the use of cannabis will be outweighed by the loss of rights to access alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational alternatives.

As before; so after – the Hermetic axioms apply to time as well as space.