Category: justice

Did A Weak Cannabis Policy Cost The Democrats The Presidency?

Let’s be clear – Donald Trump will not become American President this week because he out-thought the Democratic campaign during the election (although he did). He will become President because the Democrats and Hillary Clinton threw away a winning position out of sheer arrogance and hubris. One of the prime reasons for the Democrats squandering a sure-fire win was their refusal to promote a humane cannabis policy.

Cannabis became medicinally legal in California 1996, and many supporters of cannabis freedom were frustrated by George W. Bush’s refusal to countenance so much as a discussion about the subject between 2000 and 2008. When the Bush Presidency ended in 2008 and the Democrat Barack Obama became the President, it seemed like occasion for hope.

Indeed, Obama campaigned as the hope and change candidate. Part of this campaign was to distance himself from the haughty arrogance of the Dubya years. This manifested as a website – ‘We The People’ – where the American people could have their say on the issues important to them.

The top two subjects on this new website both related to repealing cannabis prohibition.

Cannabis users finally thought they had someone who would listen. Obama, infamously part of the “Choom Gang,” was sure to legalise cannabis. He had all the right rhetoric, admitting that he “smoked pot as a kid” and that cannabis is not more dangerous than alcohol.

So it isn’t as if Obama could claim to have been unaware of the strength of the sentiment of Americans in favour of legalising cannabis when he became President. By 2008, pretty much the entirety of Generation X believed that cannabis ought to be legal.

However, it turned out that neither Obama nor the Democrats had the guts to do anything about this generation’s foremost moral issue. This blog piece from 2009 provides an eerie premonition of the argument of this essay.

Obama, like the Green Party of New Zealand and almost everyone else, sold cannabis users down the river as soon as he got into power.

In fact, in 2009 Obama was even recorded laughing at the plight of the cannabis users who had just put him into power, as if putting tens of thousands of people in cages for their choice of medicine was an absurdly trivial matter.

Come 2016, and even a country with the socioeconomic challenges of Uruguay has managed to legalise cannabis fully – and still nothing from Obama or the Democrats, apart from a sense that they expect credit and gratitude for not sending the federal police to attack cannabis users in states like Colorado that expressed a democratic will to have legal cannabis.

So when the 2016 Presidential Election came around – and Democratic voters were asked to support a candidate who was known to not support cannabis legalisation – of course they simply refused and did not vote.

Despite a growing population and many large demographic advantages, Hillary Clinton got 4,000,000 fewer votes in 2016 than Obama got in 2008, and a large number of those will have been cannabis users. After being lied to by Obama, and then being presented in 2016 with a crusty old Boomer with no appreciation of medicinal cannabis at all, why vote?

It could be argued that the Democrats’ obstinate refusal to accept what all of their constituencies know – that cannabis prohibition ought to be repealed – cost them the Presidential Election. It showed them to be a party completely out of touch with the people they claimed to represent.

The New Zealand Labour Party looks set to ignore the lesson – Andrew ‘The Ditherer’ Little believes that cannabis causes “brain damage,” which means that there is no reason for medicinal cannabis users to vote Labour either.

Medicinal cannabis users will have to wait for him to run his course as Prime Minister, and then to wait for the next National Prime Minister to sit on their arse for nine years like Key and Clark did, which means possibly waiting until the year 2036 to get what Californians have had since 1996.

With a much more sophisticated appreciation for the national sentiment than the Paedophiles of Wellington, this column stands by the following prediction: the New Zealand centre-left will not win the 2017 General Election without the humane cannabis law reform policy that young people, Maori people, and both physically and mentally ill people are now expecting by right of natural justice.

The Curse of Abraham

Let’s look backwards in the history of the Western World, and see what we see…

Start of the 21st century to today: Islamic terrorists immigrate to other countries and terrorise the host populations.
Last half of 20th century: Jewish terrorists immigrate to another country and terrorise the host population.
15th century to first half of 20th century: Christian terrorists immigrate to other countries and terrorise the host populations.
8th century to 14th century: Islamic terrorists immigrate to other countries and terrorise the host populations.
(AD) 1st century to 7th century: Christian terrorists immigrate to other countries and terrorise the host populations.
(BC) 7th century to 1st century: Jewish terrorists immigrate to other countries and terrorise the host populations.

All of these terrorists belong to the various cults that came into the world as a consequence of what is known as the Curse of Abraham, collectively known as the Abrahamic cults or Abrahamism.

How did they get like this?

Abraham was a narcissistic Chaldean megalomaniac who hallucinated a Babylonian god known as Yahweh (so named because the name can be spoken without consonants, and thus represents the divine nature of the breath).

For some reason, the nature of these hallucinations were violent – Yahweh apparently instructed Abraham to invade the land of Canaan (to the West) and ethnically cleanse it of the natives, possibly because the burgeoning civilisation of Mesopotamia was becoming too numerous to be contained, and inevitably spilled over into the territories of neighbouring tribes as has been the human story since many tens of thousands of years before history.

After another hallucination in which Yahweh appeared, Abraham had himself and his entire household genitally mutilated (presumably it did not matter whether Abraham’s household men consented to the procedure).

This genital mutilation is believed by the Abrahamists to be their half of a deal with God – in return they were promised descendants as numerous as the stars and the Promised Land, a huge chunk of Middle Eastern real estate. The genital mutilation in exchange for being successful invaders deal was followed by the ritual slaughter of some animals.

This isn’t even the worst of it – Abraham had a later hallucination in which he was commanded by God to murder his own son Isaac. He dutifully followed this ‘order from above’, but his hand was stayed by God at the last minute, who explained that he was only testing Abraham’s faith (he passed).

All of these things may be connected.

‘Abraham’ means ‘father of many nations’, and this has traditionally been taken as an admonishment by members of the Abrahamic cults to breed as much as possible. Breeding is, after all, the most effective way for a culture to conduct war against and to conquer its neighbours.

It’s possible that this is the true purpose of the genital mutilation. By preventing the Abrahamist male from feeling the natural pleasure associated with making love, the mutilation also stops him from getting the oxytocin that would lead him to form a natural pair bond with the female. And so, he never stops looking for opportunities to reproduce beyond her.

It could be that Abraham understood that his rapacious capacity for breeding inevitably would lead to war, because – assuming his offspring inherited it – it would lead to the land of Mesopotamia rapidly becoming overpopulated which would mean more resource conflicts and thus fighting.

This would explain the numerous exhortations in the Abrahamic holy texts for the followers to slaughter and murder without guilt or hesitation. If you’re going to breed with the intent of becoming especially numerous, you might as well get used to the fact that you’re going to have to wipe out a lot of other people to make room.

It is possible that the reason why Abraham hallucinated God telling him to invade the land of Canaan is because when your tribe reproduces to the point of putting extreme pressure on the environment one is forced to fight either one’s neighbours or one’s own kin – and your genes are better served by you fighting your neighbours.

Related to this is the fact that anyone interested in invading and conquering foreign territory often finds it convenient to adopt some kind of Abrahamist culture. This is the primary reason why some of the Abrahamic cults (in particular Christianity and Judaism) are at least as strong in the New World, to where they were brought by conquerors, as they are in the Old.

Did Abraham feel a kind of guilt because he knew that his rabbit-like horniness had made it necessary for him to invade Canaan and destroy the peaceful people there to make room for his own spawn? And was it this guilt that led him to mutilate his genitals, perhaps in the belief that the pleasure from the act of procreation was too much for him to handle and was leading him astray?

All speculation aside, this is the definition of the ‘Curse of Abraham’: all followers of Abraham are cursed to spend all their short, precious years on this planet fighting because of a violently arrogant belief that they have been chosen by God to inherit the Earth at the expense of everyone else.

The Curse of Abraham is what the severely mentally ill psychopath inflicted on the rest of humanity.

‘I Like Smoking Weed’ Is a Perfectly Legitimate Argument

There is a faulty premise in the national consciousness – the premise that the pro-cannabis lobby has the responsibility to make the case for legalising cannabis before prohibition can be repealed. All kinds of politicians, from Andrew Little to Peter Dunne, have trotted out this lazy deception.

This line of rhetoric is false because it relies on a more fundamental premise, which is that the manner cannabis was made illegal was legitimate in the first place.

The usual apologia is that the politicians are our lawful representatives and so the laws they pass are done so with our consent, and so the politicians have the consent of the governed, and so all the laws they have passed are legitimate, including the ones pertaining to cannabis prohibition.

Basic logic that even a child can understand will tell you that, in the case of cannabis, the lack of a victim makes the law against it categorically different to other laws.

Punching people in the face is bad because it causes suffering.

Stealing someone’s food is bad because it will make them suffer from hunger.

Killing people is bad because it causes suffering to the remaining friends and family (not to mention the person while they’re being killed).

Murdering, shooting, stabbing, raping, kidnapping, defrauding, robbing, stealing, assaulting and battering – all of these are crimes because they have victims.

Outside of the delusional fantasy role-playing world that judges, lawyers and politicians have invented, crimes are distinguished from non-crimes on the basis that crimes cause suffering, not on the basis that a bunch of paedophiles in Wellington have decreed them thus.

This might sound really obvious to any Buddhist readers out there, but to many Kiwis, conditioned from childhood to obey authority without ever questioning its legitimacy, it appears revelatory.

It also puts the moral responsibility back on us to consider if the laws being passed by our supposed representatives actually have the effect of reducing suffering in New Zealand or not. The responsibility is not on our political representatives to make moral decisions on our behalf, because politicians are men of silver and philosophy is the preserve of everyone.

One argument is that cannabis, even if not directly harmful, may be indirectly harmful because of long-term health considerations of the user that the general taxpayer has to pay to treat. This argument contends that we ought to wait for science to prove that cannabis is relatively harmless.

The truth is this – we don’t need to prove that science says cannabis should be legal because science was never used to make it illegal. We also don’t need to prove that cannabis is harmless because harmless is not the standard things have to reach in order to be legal.

It’s legal to consume any of alcohol, caffeine, sugar, fat or tobacco to whatever extent one likes and to have the taxpayer cover any medical costs that may arise.

It’s legal to fill the tank of your car up with petrol, a vital and ever-diminishing resource, and to drive around and around in circles for no reason.

It’s legal to join a rugby team and to hit another person in a tackle with the intent of injuring them and to break a bone oneself and to go on ACC.

It’s legal to go into a forest with a rifle and shoot dead a whole bunch of large mammals.

All of these activities arguably cause more harm than smoking cannabis does, even under the broadest interpretation of health issues.

The standard to make cannabis illegal – which has never been met and which never will be met – is that there is more suffering under a regime of cannabis freedom than under a regime of cannabis prohibition.

Until this standard is met, no further reason for using cannabis need be given than ‘I like smoking weed.’