Paula Bennett's Cannabis Stance Emblematic Of National's Failure

Paula Bennett’s Cannabis Stance Emblematic Of National’s Failure

Yesterday’s Reid Research poll suggested complete and utter failure for the National Party in this September’s election. Most media commentators rushed to congratulate Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party, and suggested that their steady hand during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic was the reason for the good polling. The alternative explanation, as this essay will explore, is that National are shit.

The poll suggested that Labour is currently favoured to win 56% of the vote at the next general election. This would only be a fraction lower than what the African National Congress won in last year’s general election in South Africa, a country often criticised for being a one-party state. It’s a triumphant poll for Labour supporters; their opposition lies scattered and disorganised.

Predictably, most National supporters reacted by bleating about how Reid Research was in Ardern’s back pocket and how everything will be different once the economic effects of the lockdowns are more widely understood. But it won’t be. The fact is that the country has fundamentally lost confidence in the current National leadership.

This magazine reminded everyone last year, in response to increased complaining about the human rights abuses committed by the Sixth Labour Government, that Labour were only in power because National were shit. The Fifth National Government had unmistakably demonstrated its indifference to the suffering of New Zealand’s working class and younger generations, and, subsequently, Winston Peters went with Labour after the 2017 General Election.

Nothing has changed on National’s part.

Deputy Leader Paula Bennett has announced that she’ll be voting to keep putting cannabis users in cages this September. She isn’t bothered that cannabis prohibition costs the taxpayer $400,000,000 a year to enforce, or that it causes great suffering to many of her fellow citizens for no justifiable reason. She wants to charge on with cannabis prohibition as if we’ve learned nothing at all from the past 45 years of failure.

This position is a microcosm of National’s failings.

We tried the politics of cruelty for nine years – the term of the Fifth National Government. We saw John Key and then Bill English sit on their arses as medicinal cannabis was legalised across the world, leaving desperate Kiwis to suffer needlessly. They wasted some $3,600,000,000 on enforcing cannabis prohibition during their term, with nothing to show for it at the end.

During those nine years, we saw the suicide rate climb as the mental health system was pared down to the bare bones. Banking and finance interests grew fat and wealthy, while working New Zealanders were driven first into debt and then to the wall. The National Party rejected all pleas for relief with the same contemptuous indifference that the previous National Government had shown.

By 2017, New Zealanders decided that they’d had enough cruelty. National lost so much support that they lost their grip on power, and Winston Peters dealt the killing blow. It seems that National didn’t learn much from this, however. They have continued to campaign for a kick in the guts to all the usual victims.

Bennett’s position on cannabis shows that National still don’t give a fuck at all. They don’t give a fuck about science, or evidence, or what’s happening with cannabis law reform overseas. They’re just drifting along, in their own little bubble, as if it were still the 1990s.

Things were different in the 1990s. The Fourth National Government passed a Budget in 1991 that left the children of poor families to go hungry, and were rewarded. Kiwis didn’t care about hungry kids then, so we voted National back into power – twice. In the 1990s, we didn’t give a fuck either. But we do now (at least generally speaking).

New Zealand, and the world, have moved on from beggar thy neighbour politics, but the current National leadership has been slow to see it.

Today’s National Party are so out of touch with the average New Zealander that they might as well have a Deputy Leader who wants to put homosexuals in cages. Bennett’s position on cannabis is ludicrous in the light of existing evidence. The electorate inevitably punishes someone holding antiquated positions, and cannabis prohibition is an antiquated method of dealing with cannabis misuse.

To be in favour of cannabis prohibition today is to deny reality. A person is insane if they think that, by using the criminal justice system to put cannabis users in cages, the Government decreases the sum total of human suffering. Kiwi voters can sense this, and so they have overwhelmingly chosen to support the opposition.

The National Party needs to move away from the politics of hate that have characterised it in recent decades, and accept that policies like cannabis prohibition belong in history’s garbage can. This might necessitate a clearout of their current leadership. Nikki Kaye has previously demonstrated a 21st Century approach to cannabis law reform, and the electorate might reward this good sense over what Bridges and Bennett are offering.

Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for ending cannabis prohibition.

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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Everything’s Legal If You Have Superior Firepower

The majority of New Zealanders wander the streets in a child-like stupor, thoughts of flickering television and cellphone screens like a safety blanket around their minds. So when reality intrudes, it can have a powerfully disturbing effect. Sometimes people realise that life is much different to what the screens say it is. This essay explains one recent example.

Much discussion has filled conscious space recently on the subject of whether the Level 4 coronavirus lockdowns were legal in New Zealand. Many people, including Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges, have questioned whether New Zealand law actually affords the Government the ability to shutdown the entire country and to force people to stay in their homes.

Even more discussion was created by the release of the Sixth Labour Government’s COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill recently. Section 20 gives the right to any “enforcement officer” (notably not “Police officer”) to enter private property without a warrant if they have “reasonable grounds to believe” that Section 11 of the bill is not being complied with.

This section of the bill has upset many people, because it seems to be doing away with a number of fundamental human rights. It seems like we New Zealanders have suddenly lost the right to free assembly and the right to unreasonable search and seizure. How, these people are asking, can such a thing be possible?

Many of the people commentating on these issues haven’t thought hard enough about how the world actually works.

There are five million of us stuck down here in the South Pacific, closer to the middle of nowhere than any other nation. The British Empire that created the order of New Zealand society is long, long, long gone, the rump state (the United Kingdom) now being a sad parody of its former glory. We have not been independent for long enough to have created a philosophical or spiritual tradition that we can fall back on for wisdom.

Our situation is very much like that of William Golding’s boys in Lord of the Flies. There is no higher power to which we can appeal. There is no wise and benevolent authority looking out for the goodwill of all people. There is no God here, just the Sixth Labour Government. We’re all alone – and this loneliness risks turning us feral.

In the situation we’re in, the ten thousand or so Police officers in the country are the law. If you doubt this assertion, ask yourself this – what happens when a Police officer breaks the law? The answer is: nothing. If you doubt that assertion, wait for something to come from today’s revelation that the Police trialled facial recognition technology on the populace without their knowledge, and without permission to do so.

Or wait for anything to come from the Operation Whakahumanu harassment campaign, where hundreds of Police officers were sent to the houses of various Internet commentators in an effort to intimidate them into silence. Using the Police to intimidate one’s political critics is illegal – but there is no-one to hold the perpetrators to account.

The reality is this: the Government of our country is a pack of pirates, who have arrogated to themselves the right to enslave the rest of us with laws that are enforced by arse-licking sycophants, who are themselves happy to destroy their fellow man in exchange for a full belly. This is true whether the Prime Minister is from Labour or National, because in either case they represent the piratical ruling class and not the New Zealand people.

The arse-licking sycophants don’t care what the Government tells them to do, as long as they get paid and get pats on the head for being good boys. As this column has previously discussed, the Police will kill to enforce any law, no matter how trivial. This follows inevitably from the fact, as this column as also previously discussed, that the psychology of Police officers and their relationship to the Government is analogous to that of dogs and their masters.

However, if you don’t like it, what can you do about it? They have all the guns, therefore there’s nothing you can do, in practice, to resist their will. As Mao Tse Tung realised, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. One man with a firearm can easily keep several dozen under control out of a fear of getting shot. Ten thousand men with firearms, like our current Police force, confers legitimacy.

New Zealanders mistakenly think that our votes confer legitimacy to the Government, who in turn delegate some legitimacy to the Police. The reality is that whoever has the guns, the organisation and the will to use them has the power, and in our current situation that’s the Police and the Army. Therefore, it is the loyalty of the Police and the Army that confers power – and they take orders from the ruling class, both the visible government and the invisible government.

If you disagree, ask yourself by what process New Zealand law came to be the law in the first place, or ask yourself what the law would be if New Zealand was invaded by a hostile foreign power and an occupation government installed. The fact is that all life on Earth operates under the law of the gun: everything is legal if you have the firepower to get away with making it so.

There is only one simple way out of this grim situation.

The first step is to rally around this sevenfold conception of inherent human rights. The Sevenfold Conception is an elementalist exposition of inherent, God-given human rights that are not to be violated by any government law or action. If all New Zealanders would rally around this conception, we would no longer allow the Government to divide and conquer us by playing off factions that support one right against factions that support another.

The second step is to normalise the recognition of this sevenfold conception of human rights until it becomes commonly accepted, in all instances, that it applies. This will involve the raising of a parallel Police force – one that is loyal to the soil, the water, the wind and the Sun of these isles, and to the people from them above all.

A Police force that has been made to swear to the Sevenfold Conception before becoming officers will not slavishly obey orders to violate the human rights of New Zealanders. Not before the Sevenfold Conception is widely understood, and is widely insisted upon, can we can expect that our rights to free assembly, to self-defence, to free speech, to unreasonable search and seizure and to access spiritual sacraments will go unviolated.

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The Elementalist Exhortation Against Suicide

Camus wrote that humanity is constantly challenged by the ever-present prospect of suicide. To many people, it isn’t obvious why one should keep going in a world with as much suffering in it as this one. Elementalism exhorts people not to kill themselves, a position that is outlined in this essay.

The approach of many other ideologies is to say that committing suicide will cause you to go to Hell. There’s some truth to this, but it’s a crude and superstitious explanation, and as such is not convincing to most adults. Elementalism offers a much more persuasive admonition: to commit suicide is to cause oneself to be reincarnated in a world where people commit suicide.

At this point, a distinction needs to be drawn between tragic suicides and understandable suicides.

A tragic suicide is usually one where the suicide leaves behind people that cared for them. That is to say, the suicide increases the net amount of suffering in the world. The vast majority of suicides of young people are tragic ones, on account of that young people usually have a number of family and friends who care for them and who would be upset by their death.

An understandable suicide is one that does not increase the net amount of suffering in the world. An example might be when a person is so old that their remaining life is no longer worth living, but to continue is to suck up resources that could be used on someone else. If a person has outlived all their friends, their brothers and sisters, and their wife or husband, they might not be causing more suffering by ending their life.

Elementalists believe in the Law of Assortative Reincarnation. This is the belief that the consciousness of individuals and the consciousness of worlds are matched by a process of metaphysical assortment that occurs after the death of the physical body. A corollary of this is the belief that people incarnated into this world because they deserved to.

Fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter if a suicide is tragic or understandable, because one is not assorted into the next world based on categorical variables (such as suicide or natural death, believer or non-believer) but based on a continuous variable, namely one’s frequency of consciousness. Therefore, the assortment is much more precise than what most people think it is.

As stated above, a person reincarnates into the next world because the frequency of that person’s consciousness matches the frequency of that world. Thus, it can be stated that the actions of the beings in the next world will be reflective of your actions here in this one. If your actions here are violent, reckless and indifferent to human suffering, then the actions of the beings in the next world will reflect that.

So a suicide might well find that they reincarnate in the next world, and start to live a life in the hope and expectation that they can wring some joy out of it, only to have (for example) a child of theirs kill themselves at a vulnerable moment. Or perhaps they reincarnate in the next world and are left orphaned by a parent’s suicide. The extremely callous and violent nature of a tragic suicide means that being confronted with such things in the next life is all but inevitable.

Note that the above examples are only examples. It is not possible to say that simply because you do something in this world that it will get done to you in the next, therefore it’s not as simple as saying that suicide leads to suicide. But if you live a life on a frequency of murderous self-hatred that leads to suicide, you will manifest in the company of similar beings, and you might not like it.

More to the point, perhaps, someone who struggles with depression or despair and overcomes it will also find that their frequency of consciousness comes to reflect that. Therefore, the sort of people they will attract, both in this life and the next, will be the sort of person who suffers and then overcomes it. In other words, men and women of gold.

Gold is made by transmutation of energies. If a person can suffer and yet transmute that energy into something positive – so that the initial suffering eventually led to a net reduction of suffering – then they have successfully practised gold magic. The ability to transmute suffering into its opposite is the highest of all arts, and commensurately, the transmutation of suicidal suffering into its opposite is among the greatest of all achievements.

An Elementalist who properly understands these doctrines will be extremely disinclined to kill themselves, for these reasons. It would be much better to not kill oneself, and instead to take the opportunity presented by life in this place to raise one’s frequency of consciousness by transmuting suffering into joy. This is the true path of liberation.

Understanding the Law of Assortative Reincarnation is to understand that, in the next world, we will be enveloped in the very same energy that we expressed in this life. Therefore, the greatest imperative is to act to transmute suffering into its opposite, and the least imperative is to act to bring further suffering into the world.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is The ‘Day Of The Rope/Pillow/Rake’?

Of all the bizarre threats that get thrown around the Internet, one of the strangest is the repeated references to something called “The Day of the Rope.” Similar to the idea of the Boogaloo, those populating Clown World make reference to this event as if it was a much-anticipated glorious occasion. This article has the details.

The most meaningful characteristic of Clown World is that a great number of people are suffering, and for non-physical reasons. There are immense amounts of loneliness, fear, anomie and despair in the world today, even in the wealthy and developed countries. This suffering can be crudely measured by the rising suicide rates.

People are in pain and want revenge. The nature of the beast is that it doesn’t really matter who the targets of that revenge are, as long as someone gets it good and hard.

The Day of the Rope can be described as an eschatological belief that predicts a secular Day of Judgment. When this day comes, all of the bad guys in the world will finally get their comeuppance. The ‘Rope’ is a reference to execution by hanging. Some even believe that we will see the corpses of politicians lining Western streets, suspended from streetlights by ropes around their necks.

This has led to the common expression “It’s time for the Day of the Rope,” which is usually made in response to some new report of massive corruption or governmental ineptitude. On these occasions, when the government shows how fundamentally rotten and evil it is, there will inevitably be someone calling for its overthrow. That overthrow would see much of the existing political establishment swinging from streetlights.

Related expressions refer to a “Day of the Pillow” in which the world’s geriatrics are dealt with, or a “Day of the Rake” that gets rid of all the Canadians. In general, the expression “Day of the X” refers to an apocalyptic settling of the scores reminiscent of the Rwandan massacres of the mid-90s.

The ongoing Q psychodrama is an example of these beliefs in sudden, total justice. Supposedly Q has arranged many tens of thousands of sealed indictments, each one charging someone with a treasonable offence, all to be unleashed on the corrupt political Establishment in one volley. One day we will wake up to find enormous swathes of this corrupt Establishment arrested.

That the Q drama has become so popular is proof of the powerful sentiments that wish for a Day of the Rope. The vast majority of Q followers believe in some nebulous cabal of evildoers (called “the Swamp”), with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as central network nodes. The common belief is that Trump will “drain the swamp”, end institutionalised corruption and usher in a new age of prosperity.

Sometimes it is said that, when the Day of the Rope comes, there will be no more liberals/globalists/Marxists/Jews/Trump supporters. In such statements one can hear an echo of the sentiments that inspired the Drang nach Osten. This is the great, unspoken danger inherent in Clown World: that the suffering caused to people by the ineptitude of their ruling classes could find expression in mass murder.

The Day of the Rope is a similar idea to the Boogaloo. Both share the idea that the current arc of history will be egregiously terminated by an event that upends the entire world order. The main difference is that the Boogaloo is a descent into terrifying chaos, whereas the Day of the Rope is a descent into terrifying order. The Day of the Rope will see a new order imposed with extreme prejudice.

The logic of the Day of the Rope is much like the logic of the other things in Clown World. The idea is that society is too rotten, too corrupt to keep standing. Therefore, it must collapse. In doing so, it will create a vacuum for a new order, hopefully a more just one.

Of course, the Western World has a gigantic intelligence and security apparatus devoted to stopping things like Days of the Rope. Internet chatter is constantly screened for any sign of violent insurrection, and the amount of chatter needed to organise any such violence inevitably gives the game away.

Any realistic chance for a Day of the Rope scenario relies then, on the intelligence and security apparatus itself. This fact is tied in with the culture that has arisen among Q followers, many of who believe that Q himself is an intelligence officer with close ties to Donald Trump, or perhaps a group of them.

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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