Ten Reasons Why The Sixth Labour Government Should Legalise Cannabis Despite The Referendum Result

New Zealand cannabis users were gutted yesterday by news that the cannabis referendum had failed. New Zealand’s reputation as a place for intelligent, compassionate decision-making was shattered by the result, which revealed the presence of a virulent strain of religious bigotry. Despite the outcome, there are at least ten good reasons why the Sixth Labour Government should legalise cannabis anyway.

The first reason is that the referendum result showed that the sentiments of the New Zealand people are moving rapidly in favour of cannabis law reform.

It was not long ago that an overwhelming majority of New Zealanders opposed cannabis law reform. When I began campaigning for it in 2007, I often got spoken to like I was the enemy of society. If 46.1% of voters support it now, this means that the trend is moving rapidly in favour of reform, as it is elsewhere in the world. Legalising cannabis now would simply recognise this trend.

The second reason is that the true will of the New Zealand people was confounded by Jacinda Ardern’s cowardice.

National Party Leader Judith Collins was forthright with her position against cannabis law reform. Ardern, who was perhaps worried about losing support from brown religious voters, didn’t state her affirmative position on the referendum until afterwards. If Ardern had not been so gutless, and had stated her position like Collins did, that may have been worth 4-5% (given Ardern’s current level of popularity).

The third reason is that a majority of Labour’s constituents voted in favour of the bill.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, most of Labour’s voters are young people and Maoris. This is also true of supporters of the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party. Although the final statistics are not in yet, it’s already clear that the young and Maori voters who gave Labour their majority also voted in favour of cannabis law reform. Legalising cannabis would accord with Labour’s duty to do right by their supporters.

The fourth reason is that a majority of actual Kiwis voted in favour of the bill.

For whatever reason, you don’t have to be an actual Kiwi to vote in a New Zealand election. Being little more than a fishing village of cheap whores, we’re happy to let permanent residents vote. The problem here is that these newcomers don’t understand New Zealand culture or values. So a majority of them voted in favour of more prohibition.

As with the above point, precise statistics are not available until the final results are in. But McGlashan has predicted, from the strong correlation between voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 and being born in New Zealand (0.73), that an absolute majority of New Zealand-born voters will have voted in favour of cannabis law reform.

The fifth reason is that most No voters are old, and will die soon, and it isn’t fair for them to have so much power over a world they won’t even be living in.

Many of the people who voted are 65 years old or over. Understanding New Zealand found a correlation of -0.43 between voting for the ALCP in 2017 and being aged 65+. People this old are incapable of changing their minds to accommodate new information. They will simply reject any new knowledge on the grounds that, if it was true, they would already know it.

As such, their votes should be discounted. If such a discounting is made, and the votes of the people who will have to live with the consequences weighed more heavily, the balance shifts in favour of cannabis law reform.

The sixth reason is that the National Party has already set the precedent, with the asset sales referendum, that it can do what it likes despite the will of the people.

The Asset Sales referendum of 2013 saw John Key’s Fifth National Government soundly defeated, with 67% against. Key sold our assets anyway, on the basis that National’s General Election win in 2014 gave them a mandate to do so. If winning an election gives a party a mandate to override 67% of the people, then the Sixth Labour Government definitely have a mandate to override 53% of the people.

The seventh reason is that a considerable proportion of No voters were dissatisfied with the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill itself, and not with the idea of legal cannabis.

The Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill had a number of major flaws. Most obviously, there was no good reason to restrict cannabis to 15% THC, nor to a miserable two plants per person (which makes cloning from your own mother plant impossible). Some people who wanted legal cannabis did not support the bill on account of these flaws. Some other cannabis supporters didn’t want to pay taxes on cannabis, fearing that this would make their current supply more expensive.

Others just thought the Legalisation and Control Bill was poorly written. So there are many groups of people who are all cannabis law reform supporters but were not supporters of the Legalisation and Control Bill. Therefore, their No votes cannot be taken as votes in favour of cannabis prohibition.

The eighth reason is that a large number of voters were misled by a well-funded campaign of lies.

Democratic referendums assume that the population is correctly informed about the issue under discussion. This assumes that both sides of it are somewhat honest. In the case of the New Zealand referendum, the likes of Bob McCoskrie and Aaron Ironside lied without shame about every aspect of legalisation, claiming falsely that experiences with cannabis legalisation overseas had led to more teen use, more violent crime and more injuries from traffic crashes.

It was never a level playing ground. The campaign of lies from Say Nope to Dope needed to be countered by an official response that made reference to the facts, and it never was. Accounting for the effect of this bombardment of falsehoods would be to credit the Yes side with a large number of extra votes.

The ninth reason is that the No side had a great deal of foreign funding.

The American Church of Scientology funded the No campaign to the tune of at least six figures. Another American outfit known as Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which helped to defeat cannabis law reform measures in several American states, also worked closely with the Say Nope to Dope campaign. The Family First charity mysteriously doubled its income in a few short years, and this resulted in letterbox drops and large advertisements in major newspapers and television.

Many New Zealanders are appalled by the fact that cannabis prohibitionists in this country would team up with foreigners against their own people. In any case, most New Zealanders agree that we shouldn’t allow foreigners to influence New Zealand elections. Cannabis should be made legal to defy the foreigners who sought to interfere in our election.

The tenth, and major reason, is that cannabis prohibition has still failed. Just because 53% of the population support it, doesn’t mean that it has succeeded.

All of the arguments for cannabis law reform, such as the ones laid out in The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, are still valid. Prohibition has still failed to keep vulnerable people safe, it still funnels millions of dollars to gangs, it still causes people to hate the Police and it’s still an affront to human decency.

The ten reasons outlined in this essay are enough that the Sixth Labour Government ought to legalise cannabis despite the referendum result. The arguments that saw support for prohibition fall from 80% to 53% over the past decade are still valid, and those who support prohibition will soon be a minority.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: Race Relations In Clown World

Race relations have always been tricky, because they’ve always involved a degree of coercion. But for most of the recent history of the West, we’ve managed to muddle through. This was until Clown World dawned, and brought acrimony and hatred into every aspect of life, and few more so than race relations.

Ideally, race relations would be a matter of mutual appreciation in the same way that the yang appreciates the yin. In practice, the differences between all the races create a number of challenges. Varying biology leads to varying cultural values, and this makes it hard to find a middle ground that everyone can agree on.

In Clown World, race relations are maximally antagonistic. Things are so bad that it’s now possible to speak openly about resegregation (along the lines of e.g. the New Afrika model) or repatriation. This grim state of affairs is the case all over the Western World.

In the New World, there are natural tensions arising from the fact that all countries are colonies. This means there is an inherent conflict between the settler government and the political organisation of the natives. These tensions are especially bad in places like America, Brazil and South Africa, which all had some form of slavery.

In the Old World, there are similar tensions, only from different causes. The race problems in the Old World have been imported over the course of the last 70 years. Germany, France and Britain imported cheap labour from Turkey, North Africa and the West Indies (respectively), and now the offspring of those imports are clashing with the natives.

Race relations in the West probably peaked when Martin Luther King declared that people ought to be judged on their character and not on the colour of their skin. People tried doing that, and it led to a degree of race unity that posed a direct threat to the interests of the ruling class, particularly in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The ruling class quickly realised that, in order to secure their position, the various races had to be set at each other’s throats. The story of race relations in Clown World is the story of how this was achieved.

In Singapore, most racial tension was solved by the brilliant Lee Kwan Yew, who intuited early the problems that would arise from pretending all races are the same. Lee Kwan Yew understood that if we say all races are the same, then any economic disparity must have arisen from oppression. Therefore, equalitarianism is a recipe for resentment and discord.

The West, unfortunately, adopted a different approach, and it was partly the decision to do so that led to Clown World.

In Clown World, your skin is your uniform.

If you have white skin, you’re automatically to blame for all the greed of other people with white skin, both in the present and in the past. Wearing white skin marks you as a member of the oppressor class, a beneficiary of slavery and of warmongering. It means that you have “privilege”, and that abuse of you is “punching up” and therefore justified.

If you have dark skin, you’re automatically a victim. Poor, sweet, innocent, native, innocent of all misdoing. Any crime you commit is the fault of the white man whose economic oppression forced you into desperate circumstances. Even if you rape and murder someone, the white man made you do it.

This state of affairs, quite naturally, appalls two major groups of people: the working-class whites and the non-criminal browns and blacks, neither of who are given due respect. These two groups, who have a great deal in common, are thereby pitted against two other major groups of people: the middle-class whites and the criminal browns and blacks, both of who benefit enormously from racial conflict and strife.

In short, the ruling classes of Clown World understood that racial tensions had to be stoked in order to distract from their misrule. However, it’s not just a simple matter of stoking tensions. It’s mostly about the psychological control that can be seized as a consequence of those tensions.

Although your skin is your uniform in Clown World, this can never be admitted. Not only is racial consciousness higher than ever, but the imperative to deny it is stronger than ever. The slightest error will bring accusations of racism crashing upon you like an ocean wave. The race neurosis amplified by the mass media has brought about a renaissance in race-based thinking – mostly through constantly highlighting any and all race issues, and magnifying them into global dramas.

This has created a situation that is ripe for racial tension. Now, even though most people know it’s a bad idea, it’s normal to identify with one’s race instead of the wider community (such as the nation). People can’t help doing so because it’s become normalised thanks to McDiversity. Clown World is when society becomes ever more like a Californian prison, where social bonds are made on the basis of skin colour before any other quality.

These racial tensions have all but destroyed the west, and by design. As far back as Aristotle it has been observed that tyrants tend to rule over multicultural societies, because the racial tensions inherent to them created the kind of animosity that made people happy to put evil men in power. The citizens of Clown World have, thus far, shown no real desire to change the path of diversification. As such, it continues.

Race relations in Clown World, then, are about as poor as one might expect, given the enormous lack of social coherency and the aggressiveness of the propaganda campaign dividing us all. They promise to get worse, putting an ever worse type of person in power.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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Clown World Chronicles: Politics In Clown World

In The Republic, Plato laid down the facts about the political cycle. The political cycle begins with the introduction of an aristocracy by a class of educated philosopher-kings, then degrades into timocracy, then degrades into oligarchy, then degrades into democracy, which finally degrades into tyranny. It is at the junction between democracy and tyranny that we find ourselves in Clown World.

By 2020, the enlightened aristocracy is long gone. The timocracy ended with the World Wars. Oligarchy reigned for some decades, perhaps up until the 1990s, and since then we’ve been firmly in democracy. With the intensification of Clown World after the Global Financial Crisis, we’re arguably now in a state of tyranny.

Tyranny is when the rulers work to enrich themselves instead of working to enhance the common good. This state is characterised by an absence of reason among the ruling class. Not being reasonable, the rulers make decisions based on crude lusts and impulses. Usually these relate to gratifying their egos in some way, often at the expense of others.

When the ruling class gratifies their egos at the expense of the common man, the common man comes to feel as if he lives in a Clown World. He can’t find a job that pays enough to buy a house and raise a family, but political discussions in the mainstream media ignore such issues, focusing instead of trivialities. It all seems so callously absurd.

Callous absurdity is the hallmark of tyrannies throughout history, and that’s exactly what Clown World is – a kind of tyranny.

As Plato anticipated in his famous Analogy of the Cave, people who figure out that it’s Clown World are treated with violent contempt by those who think that it’s Normal World. Anyone who has a problem with the current order of things is marginalised. Although the numbers of the marginalised are growing, the Normies are still in control.

The general rule of Clown World politics is that everything is either the opposite of how it should be or a grossly corrupted form of it. Politics may have always been corrupt, but only in Clown World has it reached such a shameless, venal and shallow intensity.

In Clown World, we’re led by the worst of us. The American Presidential Election of 2020 will be contested by two very old men, both of who are very much past it. The challenger, Joe Biden, was the Vice President during the Barack Obama era, and so helped to oversee the destruction of Libya. This unprovoked war led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the deaths of 100,000 Libyans and the reintroduction of slave markets to the Libyan capital – and Biden is painted as the good guy in this election.

In Clown World, politicians no longer have to know what they’re talking about. Obama constantly read from a teleprompter, relying on it so much that if it broke down he didn’t know what to say. Clown World politicians in general are barely better informed than the population they’re ruling over – and are frequently worse informed. They are no longer orators, performing feats of wit and memory. Instead they speak in soundbites aimed at the lizard brain.

Because Clown World politicians don’t work towards the greater good, they have no philosophical grounding, and therefore no principles. As such, they are whores who will jump into bed with whoever’s paying. This has led to some exceptionally strange alliances.

One such strange alliance is the one between fundamentalist religious Muslims and left-wing social justice warriors. The social justice warriors are strong supporters of homosexual rights, but the Muslims are strong supporters of homosexuals being thrown off rooftops. They appear to have allied on the basis of having a common grudge against middle-class white men.

Another strange alliance is between Antifa and the corporate elite. Antifa’s great enemies are the Nazis that supposedly lurk around every corner, and their strongest ideological point of difference relates to immigration. Antifa believe that the working class is international and should not be restricted by borders – but the corporate elite have exactly the same opinion. They love to be able to import cheap labour without restriction.

Yet another strange alliance is between feminists and the so-called transphobic. In Clown World, it’s possible to have your cock and balls chopped off and then play for a woman’s sports team. Many right-wingers are disgusted by trans culture, and in getting accused of transphobia they find themselves on the same side as the devotedly left-wing feminists, who want to keep trans people out of women’s spaces.

Perhaps the weirdest of all is the alliance between the fundamentalist religious who want to ban cannabis and the criminal gangs who currently supply the black market with it in the places where it is illegal. Fundamentalist Abrahamists, in particular, are against cannabis because it is a spiritual sacrament, and here they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the criminal gangs who need it to be illegal to profit from it.

It can be observed, as Plato did so many centuries ago, that democracy leads to widespread bickering and resentment. Eventually this gets so bad that people come to support a tyrant in the hope that unlimited power will make it possible to clean away all the filth. Clown World is at the stage where people might support a charismatic dictator, should one arise. Our political situation is a tinderbox.

Unfortunately there’s no easy solution. A revolution of philosopher-kings seems unlikely owing to the fact that there’s no widespread agreement as to who the philosopher-kings would be. Although Plato described the philosopher-king as being motivated primarily by the love of wisdom, people don’t agree on what constitutes wisdom.

In Clown World, life has become so deeply politicised that every philosophical or scientific question is now divided by political camps. If a person identifies with the left, it can be confidently predicted that they agree with the climate change science but deny the human biodiversity science. If a person identifies with the right, the exact opposite is true. So every question of philosophical wisdom or the nature of reality is corrupted by political influence.

The only solution to the political problems of Clown World might be waiting for it all to collapse.

Politics is now total war, permeating every level of society. No-one can escape the new social justice Inquisition, which scours everyone’s mind for any sign of wrongthinking. Everyone must maintain a state of high alertness and watch over their every word, lest they inadvertently give their political enemies a boost. This anxiety can’t last forever – and it won’t – but it will last as long as Clown World does.

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VJMP Reads: Free Speech Under Attack V

This reading carries on from here.

The 13th chapter in Free Speech Under Attack is ‘Speaking Controversially’ by Robert Stanmore. This essay begins by looking at the controversy over Israel Folau when he quoted a Bible verse promising eternal punishment to sinners. Stanmore cites Mark Latham as stating that corporate elites are intruding upon workers’ rights by punishing them for what they say on social media outside of work hours.

This also happens in New Zealand, as shown by the example of Ray White Real Estate, who sacked two of their agents for social media posts critical of Islam. Given that a large proportion of the population is critical of Islam, and for very good reason, this seems like an excessive and callous response. Stanmore concludes by claiming that the possibility of offence being taken is a fair price to pay for free speech.

Chapter 14 is ‘Free Speech and Universities’ by David Round. Here, Round recounts how the Education Act guarantees academic freedom. The primary concern of universities is to develop intellectual independence. But the general societal trend is towards intolerance of free speech and free expression. Round wisely points out that today’s generation is both tolerant in some ways and intolerant in others when compared to their grandparents.

Round details the social media attacks against himself and his reputation for supposed racism, and the efforts made by cancel culture to shut down the Canterbury University Law Revue and Don Brash’s scheduled speaking appointment at Massey University. He also discusses the attempts made by Muslim and Chinese interests to buy influence in Western universities through making donations.

Chapter 15 is ‘Silencing the Public on Immigration’ by Robert Stanmore. This is another short essay, at only five pages. Stanmore begins by noting the unprecedented increase in Third Worlders moving to the West, and by pointing out that these moves are happening without the consent of the local populations.

Stanmore states, correctly, that the United Nations is inescapably opposed to the interests of individual Western nations. Free speech is, unfortunately, far from a universal human value. He also discusses the evil of the United Nations Compact on Migration, and how our Government kept it secret from us. He ends with an appeal to learn from the experience of Europe and only allow immigrants who are compatible with our way of life.

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