Category: justice

New Zealand Political Journalism Is Such Absolute Garbage

Presstitutes like Patrick Gower would have us believe that the above line – representing a nine percent loss of support in six months – is a sign that the National Party is in the ascendancy

The standard of mainstream political journalism in New Zealand is worse than school newspaper level. This is not because of a lack of English language skills, but because our journalists are bought-and-paid-for whores who will say absolutely anything if the price is right. Examination of a recent propaganda piece on Newshub shows how dire the situation is.

Patrick Gower, who wrote the article, is well representative of the kind of arse-licker that infests the New Zealand Lugenpresse. Enchanted by wealth, Gower has produced a piece intended to create the impression that the conservative National Party is doing a great job of governing and should be re-elected later this year.

Referring to supposedly leaked poll results which “show [Labour] is in big trouble, two-and-a-half months out from the election,” Gower has penned a piece intended to give the impression that the Labour Party is falling to pieces (and, by elimination, National must be the best choice for running the country).

Gower writes that “National is chugging along as usual – currently on 42 percent”, but this statement is absolutely false on its face.

National has no real coalition partners, apart from the “Hemorrhoid of the House” Peter Dunne, the fake libertarian David Seymour and the race traitors in the Maori Party. These three groups only draw five seats between them, which required National to win 47% of the vote in the 2014 General Election to have the numbers to govern.

So 42% is far from “chugging along as usual” – in fact, it represents a fall in support which would see it kicked out of power if an election were to be held today.

Gower writes about a “fascinating trend” from the last six months, in which “Labour is crashing down and is at pretty much its lowest point since Andrew Little took over after the last election.”

So poor is the level of political journalism in this country that the graphics supplied for the article contradict Gower’s own statement. The natural oscillations of the poll results suggest that Labour is currently in a lull – but the graphic in the same article shows that they were on 26% six months ago, and are on 26% now.

Considering that Labour won only 25% at the last election, it’s apparent that Gower has deliberately selected an extremely small section of the polling graph and omitted the rest, in order to give the impression that this short-term fluctuation is really a major trend.

The very same graphic shows that support for National is, in fact, crashing down – from 51% as recently as the start of the year to 42% now.

So even though the line graphs supplied in the article show that National has fallen 9% since the start of the year and that Labour has remained steady, Gower, in his shameless, ham-fisted propagandising, has spun things to make it sound as if the exact opposite is true.

Unfortunately, this is the standard of political journalism in New Zealand. Presstitutes take corporate money to write propaganda pieces favouring moneyed interests, and then these lies are pumped through the national consciousness via every possible medium, until every retard in the country bleats them out mindlessly all day.

Worst of all is that the more dishonest a journalist is, the more likely they are to be given a public platform, for the reason that this dishonesty means profit for those pushing the propaganda.

Beneficiaries Are The Only True Environmentalists

The only truly environmentally responsible way of life is to consume less than a sustainable level of the world’s resources. In the West, it’s mostly only those on welfare who manage this

Humans now need the equivalent of 1.5 planet Earths to sustain our current level of consumption, and if we all lived like Americans it would take four. In 2013 we reached “Earth Overshoot Day” – the day by which we had used an amount of the Earth’s resources equal to what it can replenish in a single year – by August 20, and every year it draws closer.

The reason why we would need four Earths to all live at the same standard as Americans is because Americans consume so much more of the planet than the average human. The average American consumes 25 tons of the world’s natural resources every year, and they operate 25% of the world’s motor vehicles, despite only being 4% of the population.

This is broadly true of Westerners in general.

We buy big cars, often with every family member having their own, we buy boats, we go on overseas holidays, we buy enormous amounts of plastic, especially in packaging, and we recycle electronic appliances well before they become obsolete.

One thing can be said for certain about all this consumption – namely, that it will end. The planet is finite whether we like it or not. Sooner or later, like sand through an hourglass, the supply will run out and activity will diminish.

Let’s be honest: we don’t work to live anymore, at least not in the West. Technological advancement has made it unnecessary. The average Westerner has so much accumulated capital increasing the value of their labour that a surplus exists easily large enough to feed us all.

We work because we want more stuff. Fuck Earth Overshoot Day! We want an even bigger car, the latest Playstation, and to upgrade to a McMansion – and we want it now!

We could collectively cut down to working half the number of hours that we do, but we won’t, because the need to accumulate stuff is its own moral imperative.

The GDP per capita in America is around USD57,000 per year, which is close to $75,000 in New Zealand dollars. If Americans use four times as much of the Earth’s resources than what the Earth can sustain, then we can put a dollar figure on the upper bound of possible consumption.

One quarter of $75,000 is $18,750 per year. This figure represents the maximum level of consumption that humans would have to limit ourselves to in order to collectively avoid ecological collapse.

Curiously, $18,750 is a level of consumption roughly equal to what New Zealand beneficiaries are already forced to live on, which raises an interesting point – in the long run, environmental laws dictate that the average person on Earth cannot be any wealthier than the average New Zealand beneficiary already is.

In other words, almost every Westerner with a job – who in almost every case will be spending far more than $18,750 a year – is consuming an amount of the world’s resources that is not sustainable in the long run.

In the long run, the average person cannot consume the world’s resources at a rate greater than that of the current average New Zealand beneficiary.

Considering that all of us will eventually have to cut down to this level of consumption, whether we like it or not, the people who are currently beneficiaries are actually giving us a glimpse of what level of wealth is realistically sustainable.

In that sense they are harbingers of the future, unlike the rest of us currently consuming an unsustainable amount of resources. Thus it could be argued that beneficiaries are the true environmentalists.

Should Kiwis With Historical Cannabis Convictions Be Compensated?

Now that the New Zealand Parliament has officially apologised to Kiwis convicted of historic homosexuality offences, the day when they apologise to medicinal cannabis users draws ever closer. So in much the same way that there are calls for gay men convicted for homosexuality offences to be compensated, there will also be calls for people convicted of medicinal cannabis offences to be compensated.

This isn’t necessarily a brand new idea – Article D of the twenty-six point plan in the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook calls for compensation on the grounds that a criminal record for a medicinal cannabis offence severely impacts the sufferer’s social and financial standing.

It’s easy for most to agree that a person’s rights to cultivate a herbal medicine are in the same category as their rights to have sex with another man. There is no good reason to sic the Police on people who do either, because neither action causes harm to anyone else.

And so it’s straightforward to accept that there is a genuine case for compensation for harm done to the victims of the Police and Justice systems. After all, putting someone in a cage for an action that harms no-one is itself a crime.

There are life-long consequences to getting a criminal conviction, such as extreme difficulty in finding a job, getting a loan or being accepted to an academic course. The financial losses to these three consequences alone might add up to half a million dollars or more over the course of a lifetime.

So most of us can accept that it’s fair that the Government pays money to put right the damage that it caused to its own people by effectively conducting a war on them without their consent.

If a person wants to make the argument that compensation should be denied because the offences were technically crimes at the time they were committed, they ought to ask themselves if they would be happy with a criminal conviction for reading this VJM Publishing article in a dystopic future where websites without state approval were considered pirate media.

Because it’s very easy to dismiss the psychological damage caused by arbitrary misapplications of judicial power when it doesn’t happen to oneself.

What ought to happen is, first, that it be written into the New Zealand Bill of Rights that actions that do not have victims cannot be crimes. This will not only entrench the legality of both homosexual activity and medicinal cannabis use, but it will also make it impossible for any future offence in this category (i.e. victimless ones) to be pushed into law.

What needs to happen, second, is that a commission is put together to calculate – using the same evidence-based methodology that is being pushed by some with regards to cannabis law reform – an accurate dollar figure corresponding to the amount of suffering caused by being persecuted by this law.

Possibly the fairest way would be to declare a set sum of compensation per conviction and per day in jail if there was a custodial sentence.

For example, we might say that the amount of personal damage inflicted on a person by giving them a criminal conviction was equal to $25,000, with a further $250 for each day spent in prison.

And third we need to decide if we’re actually going to pay this compensation or if we’re going to just say “Fuck ’em”.