Category: justice

The Consequences of Making All Fun Illegal in Nelson

This burnt-out stolen car has sat on the side of Maitai Valley Road for over a week. Actions that lead to the consequences shown above are often the result of boredom

In the words of Doug Stanhope: “Boredom is a disease. Drugs cure it.” This might be a throw-away line from a famously irreverent standup comedian, but it points to a truth that our society lacks the sophistication to debate: boredom causes legitimate human suffering, and this costs money and even lives.

Some psychologists are aware of the consequences of boredom. It’s now believed that boredom literally causes the brain to degenerate, as it requires a certain minimum amount of excitory stimulation to maintain the strength of existing neuron connections.

This is why it seems to actually hurt. The mental pain associated with boredom is the pain of your brain dying from a lack of stimulation, in the same way that a newborn infant neglected by its mother may die of hospitalism from a lack of oxytocin.

It’s not likely that anyone in Nelson will go as far as shooting someone out of sheer boredom, as happened to the unfortunate Chris Lane in Oklahoma. But the more boring this city becomes, the further we move towards forcing people to become violent in order to combat the pain that comes from so many fun things being illegal.

Boredom is a real thing that makes people misbehave. It has been observed in British prisons that boredom leads to misbehaviour.

When there are too many recreational outlets closed off by puritan laws, people naturally come to ignore them and may purposefully break any law just to relieve the boredom

The reason for this ought to be clear by now, especially if the reader knew any juvenile delinquents while growing up. Because boredom is painful, people suffer from it, and as a result of the suffering they become willing to destroy in order to alleviate it.

Almost everyone has done something recklessly stupid at some point because it felt good on account of that it relieved boredom.

Unfortunately, the people making the laws in New Zealand are whores, not psychologists. They have whored themselves out to the pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol industries, and these industries have commanded the politicians to make recreational alternatives to their products illegal for the sake of wiping out their competitors.

Neither is the Nelson City Council any better. They have proven themselves utterly incapable of taking care of a single homeless protester outside the Farmers building, so the expectation that they could comprehend an end to the War on Drugs is far too much to ask for.

Nelson, like all provincial New Zealand towns, is not an easy place to live in when a person is aged between 18 and 30 or thereabouts. If you’re a young person and consequently have a high point of homeostasis for excitement, there are not many really good options.

Cannabis is illegal, the drinking culture is violent and disgusting, the hookup culture is vile and depressing, and the control freaks have even taken away the simple pleasure of having a cigarette to relax by making it too expensive to be enjoyable.

Well, this is the price. This is how we end up with burnt-out cars sitting on the side of Maitai Valley Road.

As this column has previously argued, there ought to be cannabis cafes on Bridge Street. Giving the young people of Nelson greater recreational options than booze and television would result in less boredom, which would result in fewer burnt-out cars.

This would necessarily require a change to New Zealand’s cannabis laws, which would have ancillary benefits, not least putting a stop to the current wastage of $400,000,000 of tax money every year.

Perhaps some of the estimated $120,000,000 of Police funding that would be saved from cannabis legalisation could then be used to clean up the mess on the side of Maitai Valley Road, as it has been sitting there for over a week.

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.

Medicinal Cannabis Users in New Zealand are Treated Worse Than Animals

The above image is from the testimonials page of VetCBD, a medicinal cannabis product formulated specifically by veterinarians for conditions that might cause suffering to pets. All of the animals in the above image have been (according to their owners, at least) successfully treated with VetCBD.

Some Kiwis will be amazed, but this simple Californian website offering therapeutic treatment for pets actually offers more advanced and accurate cannabis science than you will get from a New Zealand doctor.

Namely, it will tell you that that CBD oil, an extract of one of the cannabinoids in the cannabis plant, is known to have considerable medicinal value.

No Kiwi doctor will tell you such a thing – if you ask them about CBD oil they will reflexively groan, zombie-like, “Cannabis causes braaaaaaain damage!”

Some pet owners in places with legal medicinal cannabis treat their pets with more compassion than Kiwis treat each other with

The website also lists a number of conditions that their product is believed to reduce the suffering associated with, in particular pain, anxiety, nausea and loss of appetite – in other words, the same things that human medicinal cannabis users use cannabis for.

Another way of putting this is: people in California treat their dogs with more compassion than New Zealand politicians and doctors treat their patients.

Yet another way of looking at is that medicinal cannabis users in New Zealand have cause to be envious of animals in more enlightened parts of the world.

Cannabis ought to work on pets if they have an endocannabinoid system, which all mammals do.

But whereas animals in over twenty American states can access CBD oil out of compassion for their misery, adult human New Zealanders cannot legally access it, as we have been commanded to go without this medicine for the sake of higher profits.

Next time you think you are living in a free country, Kiwis, just remember that there are places in the world where they don’t even allow animals to suffer to the degree that your own politicians and doctors will allow you to suffer if you have a condition that can be alleviated by medicinal cannabis.