Is David Seymour the Biggest Coward in the New Zealand Parliament?

On the face of it, it seems self-evident that a New Zealand libertarian party would be a staunch supporter of cannabis law reform. There’s nothing less libertarian than the government putting people in cages for using a medicine they don’t approve of, and there’s nowhere in the world with a greater appetite for a repeal of cannabis prohibition.

The New Zealand ACT Party claims to be a libertarian party. They have wrapped themselves in the libertarian yellow and their website boldly states “We believe the current role of government is far too large and should be limited on a principled basis.”

Sounds good, as probably 75% of New Zealand agrees that the New Zealand Government’s decades-long war on medicinal cannabis users has been a governmental overreach and should be limited.

The ACT Party Crime and Justice page even goes as far as to state, at the top: “We’re striving for a progressive, vibrant New Zealand that encourages individual choice, responsibility and excellence.”

From all this rhetoric you’d think a repeal of cannabis prohibition would be front and centre, but it’s not even mentioned. Instead the entire Crime and Justice section is just a lengthy diatribe about how burglary is the greatest evil facing our nation and ought to be punished severely.

David Seymour shares more than a gormless possum-in-the-headlights look with Andrew Little – he’s also a coward when it comes to our cannabis laws

The inability of the ACT Party to make good on their rhetoric about compassion and freedom by supporting a repeal of New Zealand’s cannabis laws – despite their unprecedented degree of leverage on the current Government – marks that party, and David Seymour, as a pack of weaklings.

What takes the ACT Party’s behaviour from disappointing to pathetic is the fact that it has already been well established that a repeal of our cannabis laws would save the taxpayer $400,000,000 per year.

So changing our cannabis laws, and making good on all the lofty rhetoric about compassion and freedom and fulfilling New Zealand’s destiny as a forward-thinking nation, would be a simple matter of negotiating with the current National Government $400,000,000 worth of tax cuts that would be paid for with the savings from cannabis prohibition.

It isn’t clear why Seymour has yet to kick the ball into this wide open goal.

Probably because he is a coward, but it’s unlikely that a man could possibly be so craven. Imagine being so gutless, so lily-livered, so chickenshit, that a 76-year old former leader of your party was saying what needed to be said six years ago, and you still can’t find the stomach to walk the same trail blazed by this geriatric.

A more charitable explanation though, going by his wittering about the need to do work on evaluating what’s happening overseas, is that Seymour is just in the same twenty-year time warp as most of the rest of the country.

It was pointed out in a previous Dan McGlashan column that supporting the ACT Party has a very strong negative correlation with being born in New Zealand (-0.74). Has the ACT Party sold its soul to corporate globalist interests so that Seymour could be a National party puppet?

Considering that there are significant correlations between voting ACT and both having a professional occupation, or with working in financial and insurance services, it’s unlikely that ACT voters or supporters have much in common with cannabis users at all, much less using cannabis themselves.

If those are the circles Seymour moves in, perhaps this is why Seymour has failed to observe the immense appetite for a change to our ridiculous laws.

So maybe he needs to climb down out of the ivory tower and get a clue.

Coming out in support of cannabis law reform would lend credence to the idea that ACT might really be a libertarian party, instead of what most Kiwis suspect them to be – paid whores of big corporate interests.

The question is whether Seymour has the courage to stand up to a Catholic prohibitionist National Party leader, or whether he’d rather scurry away and prepare himself for the aftermath of the likely National loss later this year.

The most sure thing of all is that if ACT does not make an appeal to libertarian New Zealanders by updating their cannabis policy, they have little hope of winning more than one seat in this year’s election.

The Four Realms of Human Awareness

Dividing the Great Fractal along two particular masculine-feminine axes gives us four realms of human awareness. These axes arise in response to two fundamental questions about any new piece of knowledge that are natural for a conscious entity to ask themselves as reality becomes more apparent after the birth of a physical body.

The first question is “Is this knowledge actual knowledge or is it a lie masquerading as knowledge?” The second question is “To what area of existence does this knowledge pertain?”

The first question gives us a basic division into truth and falsehood. The second question gives us a basic division into physical and metaphysical.

In the quadrant corresponding to both truth and physical, we have the realm of knowledge we call science. Human awareness probably entered this realm in conjunction with the mastery of fire, because it was not until then that the scientific method became necessary.

It was necessary for the mastery of fire because we had to learn, by trial and error for the most part, that dryness of the air was a factor that determined the possibility of starting a fire, as was the degree of contrast in terms of hardness of the two woods that were rubbed together, as was the temperature of the embers created by the friction.

This primitive scientific methodology led to the invention of the bow drill – a technological leap as ingenious as anything humanity has taken since, and one that increased our chances of survival in nature by more than any other. All scientists are the spiritual descendants of those early shamans who had the courage to master fire.

In the quadrant of truth crossed with metaphysical, we have philosophy. This arguably preceded the mastery of fire. More likely, though, it arose as a consequence of the leisure time that itself was created as a consequence of the massively increased efficiency of food consumption afforded by the ability to cook food in fire and therefore pre-digest it.

In other words, because eating cooked food was hyper-efficient it gave early man an opportunity to relax, and this brought with it consideration of basic existential questions like “What the fuck is going on here?”

The advent of philosophy massively increased human survival prospects because it allowed us to think ahead in a rational manner. This naturally led to an appreciation of the cycles of nature such as the seasons and the tides, and the migration patterns of the game animals upon which nomadic tribes depended.

These two realms of human awareness increased human survival chances so much that our population began to swell to a degree that could not be sustained by the hunting and gathering practices of the time. This overpopulation naturally led to increased competition for the now relatively scarcer resources.

It would have soon been apparent that this increased population led to increased violence. There was one way around it, though: there is one way to compete with one’s fellows without using violence, and that is by telling lies.

Science and philosophy come naturally to men. To get them to behave in an unnatural manner, one needs politics and religion.

This mixture of the physical world and falsehood is the realm of human knowledge that we know as politics.

The earlier developmental stages of politics can be observed in the ever-shifting alliances of chimpanzee troops. Essentially the objective of politics is to position oneself or one’s group so that one is in an optimal position to compete for scarce resources without violence.

For example, it can be seen that in our modern civilisation that the men of silver generally have an easier time attracting fertile women than the men of iron. This is because being of silver – a part of which having the capacity to derive advantage by telling lies – is more closely associated with having a capacity for resource acquisition.

The politics of today have arranged the minds of the rest of us so that if the man of iron tries to take what he wants by force, as he did in prehistoric times without anyone being able to stop him, he will be outgunned by the Police.

The simplest way, however, to arrange a group of people so that they will do whatever you tell them is with religion. This is why the intersection of the metaphysical and falsehood is the quadrant of religion.

That philosophy and religion are the opposing poles of one axis can be understood by knowing that the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten and the purpose of religion is to confuse.

Make no mistake – the purpose of religion is to confuse its victims into passivity, from where they can be herded wherever their shepherd desires. This is why religious scriptures are absolutely riddled with contradictions.

These contradictions, such as the Biblical admonitions to both love thy neighbour and to destroy all enemies of God, have not arisen because the authors of these texts were philosophically unsophisticated.

Quite the opposite. It has been known since Babylon that if you can rot the minds of the populace with moral confusion they will become compliant with any decree from a ruler, as long as that decree promises to impose the order that all confused people desperately crave.

Telling lies, therefore, is an end in itself to both political and religious rulers. This point cannot be overemphasised if one wishes to make sense of the world.

The Fallacy of Pre-Emptive Violence

At a march in Washington D.C. this week, accused neo-Nazi Richard Spencer was kinghit from the blindside by a mystery black-hoodie-clad protester. Footage of the incident was the most viral meme of the entire Inauguration period, trumping even anything the U.S. President said. The reaction of the Internet, predictably, was divided.

One part of the viewership was appalled by the purposeless attack on the sacred value of free speech; another part was excited to an almost sexual state of arousal by the sight of a Nazi getting what they thought he deserved.

Justification for the latter reaction began almost immediately, and was earnest, although convoluted. The basic premise, however, was eerily familiar: Spencer was a Nazi, Nazis want to violently take over the world, therefore they can essentially be attacked at any time in pre-emptive self-defence.

On the face of it, it’s hard to argue with that line of reasoning. The excuse that “I just got the bear before the bear got me” was after all, the excuse George W. Bush used to invade Iraq and kill a million people – and he completely got away with it.

There’s one glaring problem with the Bush Doctrine though, especially when it is applied to blindsiding people in the street for their political opinions: the potential excuses that a person might make to conduct ‘pre-emptive’ violence against another is limited only by human ingenuity.

In the same way that conservatives delude themselves into believing they are compassionate, liberals delude themselves into believing they are tolerant.

For a start, the logic that any violence against Nazis is justified because Nazism is a supremacist political movement also justifies violence against any of the Abrahamic cults, as they are also supremacist ideologies.

It would then be legitimate to beat the shit out of any Christian or Jew one met on the grounds that their holy book contains a command from God to kill homosexuals. One could also conduct pre-emptive violence for a number of reasons against any Muslim you met.

Any American could be dealt to under the logic that American imperialism is one of the prime threats to the stability of the world order, and any European could be shown some fist on the grounds that prior imperialism suggests a high likelihood of future imperialism. Any Chinese or Indian could be bashed because their massive populations threaten the viability of the biosphere.

If someone calls you a Nazi, whether you are one or not, that could be an excuse for pre-emptive violence on the grounds that the epithet is generally only levelled at people who are murderous totalitarians and therefore should be killed with extreme prejudice. And people are being called ‘Nazi’ at ever-increasing rates – it’s almost become synonymous with ‘to the right of the speaker.’

If someone calls you a Commie, whether you are one or not, that could be an excuse for pre-emptive violence on the grounds that the epithet is generally only levelled at people who are murderous totalitarians and therefore should be killed with extreme prejudice. And people are being called ‘Commie’ at ever-increasing rates – it’s almost become synonymous with ‘to the left of the speaker.’

This means that anyone can find a reason to attack anyone else pre-emptively. It’s just a simple matter of knowing if you are doing it because your target is a Nazi or because they are a Commie.

As anyone who walked the streets of Weimar Germany could tell you, National Socialists and Communists are just ready made for fighting, like the yang and yin of violence. Their natural instinct is to go each other like two stags in rutting season.

Perhaps the best course of action for reasonable people is the Churchill Doctrine that served Britain so well in World War II: just stand back and let them kill each other.

P.S. Our anarcho-homicidalist readers usually enjoy seeing any kind of political extremist get punched in the head, so here’s the funniest dubstep remix of the incident we could find.

Why So Many Kiwis Hate The Police

“If you were to come and ask me for a tinnie of marijuana and I give you a tinnie of lawn clippings, you’ve still committed an offence, even though you haven’t got drugs in your possession.” Sound reasonable? Perfectly reasonable according to Senior Sergeant Rupert Friend of the Hamilton Police.

In the odd case of Betty Tamihana, who tried to purchase some cannabis on Facebook to treat an anxiety disorder, she found that if you try to buy some medicine and get ripped off, the New Zealand Police will not help you if that medicine was cannabis. In fact, they will attack you.

Such an attitude is especially galling for the tens of thousands of Kiwis who use medicinal cannabis. Imagine being told that not only is your medicine illegal but if you so much as get ripped off by someone falsely claiming to sell you it then you are a criminal.

It would be more honest just to make it a criminal offence to suffer from a medical condition that could be treated by cannabis. Perhaps specially equipped Police units could raid the houses of cancer sufferers and if it was found that cannabis would be an effective medicine for the terminal pain then the sufferer could be charged with the crime of ‘Having a Reason To Want To Try To Purchase Cannabis.’

If your light is on at night because you can’t sleep, perhaps that could be taken as sufficient evidence that you might end up wanting to buy some cannabis to cure the insomnia, and so the Police should have the right to pre-emptively break into your house and put you in a cage (for your own safety of course).

Joking aside, that shows how ridiculous cannabis prohibition is. Should we accept that, in New Zealand, after all the time and effort we’ve put into building a decent justice system, a Police officer might sell the sufferer of a mental illness some grass clippings in the guise of an anxiety medicine just to arrest them under a law that was supposedly enacted to protect the public?

None of this is to blame the Police. The Police are men of iron, and the key to understanding them is to understand dogs, who are also of iron.

The thing about dogs is that they have absolutely no concept of right or wrong – they just obey dominant males in their group. Anyone who feeds them, or pays them in the case of Police officers, is their total and complete master, and they will rip to pieces anyone who fails to pay this master due respect.

The real bad guys of this story are, as usual, the Paedophiles of Wellington, who are the ones responsible for maintaining the law against cannabis freedom that is mindlessly enforced by the Blue Dogs.

The refusal of the New Zealand political class to accede to the public will to repeal cannabis prohibition has driven a wedge between the Police and the public, as it has induced the Police to spend forty years attacking the citizenry in the War on Drugs, instead of acting as peace officers, which is their warrant.

This has meant that there are now several large demographic groups – the under 40s, Maori, the mentally infirm – who distrust the Police to the point of seeing them as no less oppressive than an enemy army.

Of course, the biggest irony of this story is that the only person to behave in a rational manner was the drug user who called the Police to report a fraud. The Police officer did not act rationally, because to have a total lack of sympathy for the sufferer of a mental condition is the kind of hatred that ends up getting reciprocated, even if indirectly.