justice – Page 118

Chains of Clay and a Universal Basic Income

A universal basic income could be expected to drastically reduce the number of women forced into prostitution by poverty

Some forward-thinking people are starting to discuss the idea of a universal basic income. This is the idea that the Government would make a small but weekly payment to each adult resident citizen, just enough to keep them alive but not enough for any luxuries or even any decencies.

Predictably, the idea that the Government might help the poor in some new fashion has resulted in cries of communism from those who expect to inherit large amounts of property.

But there are reasons to believe that bringing in a universal basic income, even if it was as little as the current unemployment benefit, would significantly raise the standard of living of the average New Zealander.

For instance, a universal basic income would, at a stroke, remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of desperate poverty.

One might object here that they would not remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of greed – and that’s true in some cases – but consider this.

Every great dictator or tyrant who convinced a mass of people to go against their better nature, and to later regret that they had done so, convinced those people by offering them money.

How?

They just looked for desperately poor people. Poverty is control. That’s the way it has to be understood for the psychological reactions of people to the question of a universal basic income to be understood.

Hitler could not have achieved what he did without the Great Depression and the economic restrictions imposed on Germany as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty.

People like to make a big deal about Hitler’s rhetoric and oratory skills, but the naked fact is that the NSDAP paid men to serve in the military, and they could pay a lot of men for not much money because those men were all as poor as shit.

This is why getting the rich to give up some of the money they have extorted out of the poor through their control of the Police and of private property is not a simple matter of appealing to the simple fact that it would reduce the sum total of human suffering.

One must also take into account the loss of power this entails.

Think of all the women in history who were forced to accept the sexual advances of a man they didn’t like because they needed the money.

Think of all the men in history who have wound up doing violence to strangers because they were forced to be obedient to someone violent for the sake of money.

Think of all the kings and queens who were able to raise an army to invade some other peaceful place because the peasants of their kingdom had no access to the commons on account of enclosure, and therefore were forced to take the monarch’s silver or starve.

Think of all the times a parent who, on account of stress from worry about where the next meal was coming from, took a short-sighted decision in the heat of the moment and came to regret it.

Go back as far in history as you like. How many robberies, how many burglaries, how many thefts, how many assaults and murders could have been prevented had we merely seen to it that people didn’t need to go hungry, and did so with a similar effort to what we already put into punishing and protecting ourselves from robbers, burglars, thieves and murderers?

We’re not talking about an equal distribution of luxuries, or even decencies. A person living merely on a universal basic income will be too poor to afford much beyond food and shelter – but at least they will not be so poor that they will take violent actions out of desperation.

One might raise an objection to this on the grounds that, if people were willing to look after each other enough to introduce a universal basic income, they would have done so already and would not need coercion through Government taxation.

This objection is only reasonable up to a certain historical point. When the productivity of the average citizen has advanced to such a degree that simply by pressing a button they can cause machines and computers to produce a million dollars worth of goods, there’s no reason barring a sadistic need for control to cut non-machine-owners out of this cornucopia.

Of course, much of this discussion is academic in the case of New Zealand, which is 20 years behind the rest of the world in progress on questions like this and getting worse. Medicinal cannabis was legalised in California in 1996 and we are yet to even have a proper discussion about it, so we will likely be several decades behind the rest of the world on the basic income question too.

Is It Time to Ban Male Infant Genital Mutilation in New Zealand?

On the face of it, it seems obvious that it should be illegal to mutilate a person without their consent in New Zealand. If the mutilation was done to a newborn baby without their consent, it seems even more obvious. But if the mutilation was part of a religious tradition intended to bind the child to a primitive male supremacist Middle Eastern cult, it’s fully legal.

Why?

We all know that the various cults of Abrahamism have the plebs of New Zealand wrapped around their little fingers, so much so that it’s only in recent decades that we have been able to stop them putting homosexuals in cages and from bashing their own kids, and we still haven’t been able to prevent them from doing the same to medicinal cannabis users.

Despite that, it’s obvious that the reasons people give for supporting male infant genital mutilation (or “circumcision” to use the religious terminology) are superstitious in nature, and that the decision to inflict the procedure upon an infant is not done with their best interests in mind.

The concept of cleanliness that a nomadic desert savage may have had 2,800 years ago is hardly the same as those of a modern nation with access to clean, fresh water and a ready supply of soap.

Getting mutilated for the sake of avoiding penile cancer, likewise, makes little sense when one considers the actual likelihood of that happening. It doesn’t make any more sense than chopping off your ears or lips for the sake of avoiding cancer, or gouging out an eyeball.

And the oft-touted idea that male infant genital mutilation could be a good thing because when the baby grows into a man he will “last longer” in bed is a bizarre and brutal enough sentiment that many women will shudder upon hearing it, especially those who feel that there’s more to lovemaking than just lying back and getting jackhammered.

The reality is that there are no benefits to the victim of male genital infant mutilation, as fits the otherwise widely-accepted general rule for cases of non-consensual physical mutilation of infants.

The major reason why this ritual continues, despite the denials, is religious. Jewish and Muslim groups were outraged when, in 2012, a court in Cologne deemed male infant genital mutilation to be equivalent to grievous bodily harm.

It has to be considered that the cult of Abrahamism still has a powerful grip on the minds of the weaker sort of New Zealander, which is why the last Labour Government ran out of political capital after it banned physical abuse as a behavioural correction mechanism on children.

Abrahamic puritanism still dominates our drug laws, which are now over twenty years behind where they are in places like California or the Netherlands that do not have societies riddled with religious fundamentalists.

Given that, it is impossible for Kiwis to expect that our politicians, whose cowardice is world-class, will do much about it.

If male infant genital mutilation is to be made illegal in New Zealand, it is best that it be done soon because of the degree of Stockholm Syndrome that the victims of this practice have with their mutilators.

It is well known that victims of male infant genital mutilation will passionately defend the practice as adults because the alternative is to face the shame of admitting that one has been mutilated with the consent of one’s parents. Few are capable of dealing with this magnitude of headfuck.

In fact, it’s arguable that the entire purpose of the procedure is to massively traumatise the boy in order to make him submissive and more obedient to the demands of his religious elders (after all, this is what it most effectively achieves, whether this is admitted or not).

If we are to go as far as making it illegal to genitally mutilate infant boys without their consent, we may also need to allocate some funding for the psychological rehabilitation of adults who were mutilated by their parents, because we can anticipate that this particular redpill might not be easy to swallow.

The Police Will Kill to Enforce Any Law, No Matter How Trivial

There are many power-worshippers in the world today who think it would be just great if their area politicians passed a law banning this or that – some minor irritation that probably does not affect the quality of their life in any meaningful way but which they believe ought to be stamped out for the sake of maintaining good order at the very least.

These people are as dangerous as any fanatic that put a dictator into power.

The reason for this is that the Police, who are tasked by politicians with enforcing laws, will go as far as killing any citizen to enforce any law that they have broken, no matter how trivial.

A lot of people balk at this assertion, usually because they have neither encountered Police officers in operation nor thought the whole process through as a thought experiment.

But if you think it through as a thought experiment, the meathook clarity of it cannot be denied.

Take the case of a medicinal cannabis user. If you have a psychological condition such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or if you have pain related to terminal cancer and do not want to take opiates, you might end up as another of New Zealand’s hundreds of thousands of cannabis users.

Now let’s say that the Police come to your house with a search warrant, on the grounds that they have reason to believe that you have cannabis in your possession or a cannabis operation in your house. They are going to arrest you, and you know that you face up to seven years in prison for the offence.

You might well protest that you are fully within your rights to use cannabis as it is a medicine which legitimately alleviates human suffering, whether physical or psychological. And so the search warrant is not valid, because it was granted on the grounds that a crime had been committed, and none has.

This is perfectly reasonable – after all, you have harmed no-one. But what will happen at that stage is violence. The Police will escalate to violence at this point, probably by forcing their way into your home.

Let’s say that they are unsuccessful at doing so, either because you manage to lock the door in time or because you brandish a weapon in an effort to show them that you are willing to respond to their violence with violence of your own in order to defend yourself and your home.

In that case, you can probably assume that the Police officers will withdraw – and come back with the Armed Offenders Squad. They will call the AOS on the grounds that you threatened a Police officer with a weapon – the fact that you were only doing so to defend yourself against an immoral attack will not help you at all.

The AOS will then lay siege to your house, as they did to Jan Molenaar. This may even involve, as it did in Molenaar’s case, the Special Tactics Group – formerly known as the Anti-Terrorist Squad.

Jan Molenaar ended up shot dead at his own hand, probably in full awareness that escape was impossible.

Note here that this pattern of escalation of violence all the way to your death will happen if you don’t submit to the Police for any reason, no matter what it is.

It doesn’t matter what the crime is. It could be a hundred counts of serial murder, or it could be a parking fine. The inescapable rule is that you must submit to any state-allocated legal punishment for any offence you have been deemed to have committed, no matter how vindictive and cruel the punishment or how petty and victimless the offence, or the Police will kill you in the enforcement of it.

This is why there is cause to think very deeply before deciding that something should be illegal. Constable Len Snee would not have been shot dead if cannabis had not been legally prohibited, as Jan Molenaar would have been left in peace to treat his mental condition in the way that he knew best.

Anyone who supports a law also supports the consequences of enforcing that law. Those consequences might involve the Police shooting up a house with no-one in it, as happened in Napier last year.

In the case of cannabis prohibition, this means also supporting the expense of $400,000,000 per year and the occasional death of a Police officer – is it worth it?

Peter Dunne Just Made it Legal to Violate the Bill of Rights Act

The Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill received Royal Assent this week, now making it legal for any New Zealander to violate Section 11 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, as long as the victim uses a psychoactive substance.

This column has already reported on human rights abuses of psychiatric patients in New Zealand, and it seems Peter Dunne, in his decades-long, multibillion war on the poor and vulnerable, has laid the legal foundations for more.

Like the Psychoactive Substances Act – another invention of the psychopathic Dunne – the Substance Addiction Act is worded so vaguely as to almost be meaningless. Almost anyone can be involuntarily interred for almost anything, raising the possibility that the barbaric New Zealand mental health system is about to get even worse.

Section 7 of the Act lays out the criteria for compulsory treatment. These are vague enough that use of almost any psychoactive substance, legal or otherwise, is enough to force compulsory treatment on someone.

Section 8 lays out the criteria for severe substance addiction. They are broad enough that most of the New Zealand population would have qualified at one point in their lives. For example, anyone who has tried to give up cigarettes but has found it hard could have “treatment” forced on them.

Why is the New Zealand mainstream media so obsessed with whether or not Donald Trump is a fascist, when our own Government is passing laws giving itself the right to force mental health treatment on any Kiwi expressing their right to cognitive liberty?

Having a “very serious addiction” that “seriously diminishes the person’s ability to care for himself or herself” is one thing – but the problem is that the people defining what a serious drug addiction is don’t have an accurate idea of what the drugs they are legalising compulsory treatment for actually do.

New Zealand has, after all, fallen behind Arkansas, Uruguay and South Africa in social progress on the medical cannabis issue. Many New Zealand mental health patients have had the experience of trying to explain their medicinal cannabis use to a doctor who, by some crude calculus, simply decides that the regular use is a sign of addiction.

Section 9 states “A person’s capacity to make informed decisions about treatment for a severe substance addiction is severely impaired if the person is unable to…(a) understand the information relevant to the decisions.”

Potentially this means that if you disagree with a doctor that your medicinal cannabis use causes reefer madness, creates holes in your brain or makes you psychotic/schizophrenic/depressed/anxious/insomniac/narcoleptic (or whatever stupid shit the Govt. says that cannabis does), then you can be said to not understand the relevant information.

Given the rubbish our authority figures already believe about drugs, how can we trust them for one moment to make accurate decisions about who is so addicted that they need to be forced into treatment?

It’s already clearly not in the interest of medicinal cannabis users to be forced into prison, yet they are, at the cost of $400,000,000 per year – so how can we trust that the same Govt. doing that won’t also use this new law to aggress against medicinal cannabis users?

Section 12 of the Act states “the interests of patients should remain at the centre of any decision making.” But the Government is already supposed to be making decisions on the basis that the interests of the governed are at the centre – and they have utterly failed, because they have made it a law that medicinal cannabis users are to be brutalised by the Police and by the Health and Justice Systems.

In the Hansard record of the third reading of the Bill, Ruth Dyson said “We are putting a significant number of new patients into the system under this compulsory treatment regime.”

So we can expect that these new powers to detain the mentally ill will be used against them, and especially against those who have found relief for their mental illness in medicines that they do not have Parliamentary approval for.

It’s worth noting that the New Zealand Police can and will go as far as killing any Kiwi who resists treatment under this law.

If a patient will not go voluntarily, even if they have a good reason – like being one of the five New Zealanders who had electroshock therapy forced on them after they had explicitly withdrawn their consent last year – the Police will use force to get them to comply.

And if the patient resists that, the Police will kill them. We know this because the Police will go to that extent to enforce any law, no matter how trivial.

For the Catholic Dunne, this latest persecution of the mentally ill is a continuation of the brutal religious tradition he embodies; a tradition of abuse stretching even further back than the Inquisition.

The Psychoactive Substances Act made it illegal for anyone to have anything to do with any psychoactive substances that were not on a Government-approved list, and this Substances Addiction Act makes it possible for the Govt. to go as far as violating the Bill of Rights Act in enforcing compliance with that.

The mainstream media, of course, is too busy copy-and-pasting the latest social media gossip about Donald Trump to report on any of this. Other channels will keep you informed.