How To Get Rid Of The 5% Threshold Without Empowering Extremists

New Zealand runs elections under a Mixed Member Proportional system, meaning that parties contesting the election win a number of seats in Parliament proportional to how many votes they receive. This system has advantages and disadvantages, one of the latter being that it facilitates extremists coming to Parliament. Various methods have been adopted to counter this, such as a 5% threshold – this essay suggests a more elegant solution.

As John F Kennedy warned us, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Although it’s never admitted, the purpose of the democratic system is to pre-empt the violence that inevitably follows when people are not given a say in their own destiny. The problem with totalitarianism is that people resent it, and if they resent it enough they end up killing their rulers.

Democracy is a charade in which the ruling class pretends to take the opinion of the working classes seriously, in exchange for a dampening of revolutionary sentiments among those working classes. If the ruling class can successfully placate the workers, then they can continue to do as they please. If they cannot, then resentment will arise, and this will eventually lead to radical extremism.

Kennedy might have warned us that a 5% threshold to get into the New Zealand Parliament creates a number of problems.

It is set so high that no new party has ever crossed it. In 24 years of MMP elections, the only parties to achieve representation apart from National and Labour were parties that broke away from them (New Zealand First and United Future from National, ACT from Labour, the Greens from the Alliance that itself broke from Labour).

The ruling class considers this a win, but the people consider it a great loss. It has meant that no opinion, other than the mainstream ones, can find expression in Parliament. Only those opinions that have been so thoroughly vetted and curated by the Establishment that they pose no threat are allowed into the House of Representatives. This does little to soothe the people’s feelings of frustration.

It could be argued that having a 5% threshold leads directly to outcomes like the Christchurch mosque shootings. The mass immigration of the last half a century has caused immense resentment among the many who have lost out from it, but their voices are silenced by a system that profits heavily from the cheap labour. Sentiments like these are liable to boil over into xenophobic violence on occasion – a pattern that has been seen all around the world.

There is a possible solution to these tensions – one that has never previously been tried. This is to firstly scrap the 5% threshold, and secondly for each voter to have three votes instead of one. Two of the votes can be cast for any candidate or party, much like the current system, but one vote can only be cast against a candidate or party. This anti-vote cancels out one of someone else’s votes for that candidate or party.

Having two positive votes, one negative vote and no threshold means that (in theory) small parties who do not engender hatred can still achieve representation in Parliament, while the extremists who do engender hatred get eliminated by the negative votes.

Parties like the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, Social Credit, or The Opportunities Party, who have unfashionable ideas but who are not malevolent or extremist, ought to be able to take some seats in Parliament. The ideas that these parties represent are long overdue for serious consideration, but the 5% threshold has prevented them from ever being represented.

Other parties like the New Conservatives, who combine popular ideas like ending mass immigration with horrendous human rights abuses like increasing penalties for cannabis use, are the reason for the 5% threshold in the first place. It was precisely to keep aggressive, narcissistic, Bible-thumping morons like them away from power that it was invented.

In practice, we could expect that parties like the New Conservatives would attract a high number of negative votes. If the total number of negative votes for a given party was greater than the total number of positive votes, they would receive no seats in Parliament. Therefore, the ability to cast a negative vote would mean that human rights abusers could be kept out of Parliament, but not at the expense of other small parties who have ideas the country needs to hear.

Then again, Germany has a 5% threshold (our version of MMP was modelled on theirs) and they have six parties currently polling well over that. So it could be argued that the New Zealand political class severely lacks imagination, which is the reason why no party other than Labour, National, Greens or New Zealand First has ever presented a compelling enough case to get over the threshold.

The positive/negative vote model would allow our electoral system to not only measure and weigh the sympathy of the public for the various political platforms, but also to measure and weigh their antipathy for those platforms. The biggest advantage with this suggestion is that platforms that inspired disgust, hatred and contempt would now find themselves judged for that, instead of getting away with it.

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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Understanding The Psychology Of Police Officers

As New Zealand becomes more and more of a Police state, it has become more important than ever to understand the psychology of our oppressors. If someone’s trying to put you in a cage for offending the ruling class, it’s important to know how they operate. This essay explains.

The easy way to understand the psychology of Police officers is by analogy to dogs.

For those of you who have never observed or studied the behaviour of dogs, the key to understanding canine psychology is understanding the anxiety of hunger. A dog will do absolutely anything, no matter how immoral, to take those feelings of hunger away. It doesn’t care who or what it has to attack or rip to pieces. It’s an animal.

Humans were able to domesticate dogs because we learned that if we provided them with food, they would respond with loyalty. As long as we were able to maintain their food supply, the dogs would attack or rip to pieces anyone or anything we told them to. The dogs happily did this out of gratitude, because we permanently took away their hunger anxiety.

For a Police officer, those feelings of hunger are removed by one level of abstraction. The officers are not fed directly by their masters, but indirectly in the form of wages. Nevertheless, the same basic logic applies. On account of the fear of hunger, the Police officer will obey any order from its master, no matter how immoral, in exchange for their wage.

Many New Zealanders believe that their Police officers are significantly different in mentality to the officers of the Police forces of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. This is a grievous error that betrays a fundamental naivety regarding human nature. The Gestapo and the NKVD may have had a different organisational structure, and their leaders may have subscribed to a different ideology, but the psychology of the basic officer is almost precisely the same.

Gestapo officer, NKVD officer, modern Police officer, feudal-era sheriff, American Gilded Age strikebreaker, it doesn’t matter. There is a niche in human society for people who are willing to commit any atrocity against any other person in exchange for relief from hunger anxiety. This niche will always be exploited by the wealthy and powerful, who need sycophantic abusers in order to force their will on the world.

If you doubt any of this, try to find an example of a Police officer refusing an order on account of that following it would entail a human rights violation. You won’t be able to find a single example of this in the history of New Zealand policing. Even finding a single example in the history of the world is difficult.

For all the hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who have been given criminal convictions for the “crime” of medicinal cannabis, there wasn’t one single Police officer who publicly came out and said that it was wrong to put people in cages over a medicine. Not a single one. There isn’t one currently serving Police officer anywhere in New Zealand on record as opposing the War on Drugs, despite that this War is one of the worst human rights violations since the end of World War II.

In the same way that a dog will never turn on the person that feeds it, Police officers will never go against the people paying their wages. It doesn’t matter what the orders are; it doesn’t matter who they are told to destroy, or how they are told to do it. They will obey any order, no matter how justified it is, and no matter who has to suffer for it.

The fact is that if the New Zealand Police were given orders to put you, the VJM Publishing reader, in a cattle cart to be shipped off to a concentration camp to be gassed to death, they would happily obey those orders. They wouldn’t question them for a second. They would come to your house, politely and calmly ask for your whereabouts (not kicking doors down like in the movies), and then drag you away to be murdered.

Then they would cash in their paycheck, buy some pies for dinner, and go to sleep satisfied with a hard day’s work fighting crime.

All their masters would have to say to get them to liquidate you is “In the wake of March 15, blah blah blah…” and the nation’s Police officers would leap to readiness. The same people who refused to investigate Jimmy Savile or the child rape gangs operating in Rotherham and other places, because they were ordered to stand down, would destroy you in an instant if commanded to do so.

Their masters would simply have to give the order.

As with the Gestapo and NKVD officers, the Police that hauled you away would have the support of all of the authoritarians within the population. For every Police officer eager to smash some wrongthinker, there are a hundred bootlickers eager to rat out their enemies. This Reddit thread provides ample examples of this kind of thinking, and how readily they support their fellow citizens getting smashed (as long as it’s not them!).

So if a Police officer comes to your house to “check your thinking,” you will not be able to reason with them. You will not be able to logically convince them that the Police themselves are more dangerous than any Internet poster. They simply don’t care whether the person giving them orders is evil, or whether those orders are evil. You don’t pay their wage, so you don’t get their loyalty, that’s all it amounts to.

The way to treat them, therefore, is the same way that you would any other dangerous dog that has wandered onto your territory. Don’t show fear or anger, as either might trigger the prey instinct and provoke an attack. Stay calm, speak firmly, and ask if they have a warrant. If they don’t have a warrant, they have no right to be on your property, and you can ask them to leave directly.

Give them as little information about yourself as you can, because anything you say will be passed on to their masters, who will use it to justify more attacks against you. They will tell you that you are not a suspect – this is absolutely false. Give them as little as if you were an enemy soldier being interrogated for intelligence, because in their eyes you are (do note, however, that you are legally obliged to give the Police your name, date of birth and address if asked).

Unfortunately, there is no way to override the loyalty that the Police have towards those who pay them. As is the case with dogs, the only option is to replace the master. The ruling New Zealand Establishment must be replaced with people who have an entirely different mentality to the mindless, money-grubbing rapists who have ruled New Zealand for decades. An approach based on the Sevenfold Conception of Inherent Human Rights would be ideal.

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The Four Main Opponents Of Cannabis Law Reform

With the date for the cannabis law reform referendum now set, the battlelines have been drawn. The opposing forces have taken up their positions: the pro-cannabis forces on the side of God, and the anti-cannabis forces on the side of suffering, misery, ignorance and hate. This essay describes the four major groupings of opponents to cannabis law reform.

The first major group of opponents to cannabis law reform are simple cowards.

There’s a certain kind of person who is terrified of anything new, of any change at all – they can be called neophobic. In much the same way that a certain kind of person shit their pants at the sight of their town’s first Indian restaurant, there is a certain kind of person who shits their pants at any thought of a new psychoactive substance.

This teeming mass of sheep-like idiots comprise about half of the opponents to cannabis law reform. They also comprised a large proportion of the people who opposed homosexual and prostitution law reform, and they will comprise a large proportion of those who oppose the next change, no matter how obviously needed or overdue that change is.

The second major group of opponents are the sadists who oppose cannabis because of its healing and medicinal properties.

Hard as it may be to believe, there are many people out there who just want to create as much suffering and misery as possible, usually because it brings them a sense of gratification and power. In much the same way that sadism exists in many of Nature’s creatures, so too does it exist within the human animal. The human sadist recognises the medicinal properties of cannabis – which is why they seek to withhold it from those who would benefit.

Also in this group are the retards who will guzzle alcohol like there’s no tomorrow and belch smoke like a 19th-century factory from their cigarettes, but won’t touch cannabis on account of that it’s a “drug”. There are plenty of alcoholics out there who have boozed themselves into a state of permanent retardation, and some of these people, owing to this brain damage, support harsher sentences for cannabis users.

The third major group of opponents are the turboautists who can’t into anything as mysterious as cannabis use.

Cannabis use, like other spiritual enterprises, can be an extremely humbling experience. It can teach you that you really knew nothing about the world, and about life. The intellectually conceited sort of person, the one who has an egoic need to establish themselves as a recognised intellectual authority, has extreme difficulty with such revelations. They prefer ideological security and safety.

The intellectually arrogant are the same group of people who see all cannabis use as stupefying. They can’t get their heads around the truth of it because there are no recognised peer-reviewed journals on the subject. For these people, all talk of spirituality is mental illness, and so if smoking cannabis leads to a person talking about God, then smoking cannabis drives people crazy. They don’t want legal cannabis because it shows them up as the spoofers they are.

The final major group of opponents are the spiritual liars.

Cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, and has been used continuously for thousands of years for this purpose. Unfortunately, a great number of people in the West today are spiritually dead. Not only do they not believe in God, but they believe that death is the end on account of that the brain generates consciousness. This is not a natural state of affairs – it is because they have been lied to.

There are spiritual criminals out there who earn a living from withholding from people the truth about God and about consciousness, and then selling some watered-down, padded-out, corrupted version of it for a fee. These criminals have always tried to establish themselves as intermediaries between the people and God, and in order to make this profitable they have needed to destroy all true spiritual movements and methodologies.

These criminals recognise that cannabis makes their position untenable, on account of that it’s a spiritual sacrament that leads people to God directly. Consequently, they act to keep cannabis illegal, for the sake of holding people in a state of profitable ignorance.

These four groups cover the basic emotions that motivate people to oppose cannabis law reform: fear, cruelty and ignorance.

Some people fall into more than one of these groups. Many pretentious intellectuals are also cowards who don’t dare to step outside of well-travelled paths; many religious fundamentalists are also sadists. Someone like Bob McCoskrie might fall into all four: the pants-pissing, shit-talking, hippie-bashing religious bigot is almost the archetypal prohibitionist.

Changing the attitudes of anyone in one of these four groups is easier said than done.

There isn’t much that can be done to persuade the cruel and the evil, because the more information you give them, the more power they have to cause suffering. Those who are ignorant can be persuaded of the merits of cannabis law reform by appealing to the successful examples of reform overseas. Those who are cowards can be persuaded by showing them the rest of the herd changing their direction.

Ultimately, cannabis will continue to be used more by Maoris, by young people, by non-Christians and by freethinkers, and so anyone who hates one or more of those groups will tend towards opposing cannabis law reform out of spite. Anyone not motivated by hate, but rather by honest ignorance or naivety, can easily be persuaded to see how cannabis prohibition isn’t in their best interests.

Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for liberalising New Zealand’s cannabis laws.

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Where In The World Does New Zealand Rank On Cannabis Law Reform?

New Zealand was once looked to for moral leadership. We were the first country to give women the vote and the first to institute a universal old-age pension, but these were 19th Century issues. On 21st Century issues, such as cannabis law reform, we are no longer close to the frontrunners. This article attempts to determine how far we have fallen.

Perhaps the first major crack in the cannabis prohibition dam came with the legalisation of medicinal cannabis in California in 1996. In the near quarter-century since then, a tidal wave of cannabis law reform has rolled around the world. New Zealand has made a determined attempt to resist this wave, and has stayed loyal to the idea that cannabis users are scum who should be persecuted.

Cannabis is now recreationally legal in California, as it is in Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and the District of Colombia. That makes for 12 places in just one country that are more enlightened than New Zealand on the cannabis issue – over 100 million people.

Even if a person would say, uncharitably, that all these places are just one country, there are now several other countries that have legalised recreational cannabis. Uruguay did so in 2013 and never looked back. Canada did so in 2018. Georgia and South Africa have also legalised recreational cannabis for possession and consumption (although not yet for sale).

So that makes five countries that have legalised recreational cannabis to some extent – but they’re not the only ones ahead of New Zealand on cannabis law reform.

Many other countries have legal arrangements where cannabis is tolerated without being fully legal. The most famous example is the Netherlands, where cannabis is openly sold from licensed cafes, on the proviso that the cafe is willing to operate under a strict set of conditions. This is not de jure legal, but there is an understanding on the part of the Police that such activity is to be tolerated (provided it stays within certain limits).

Spain has a similar arrangement, where cannabis is legal if kept to private areas such as the personal home or in cannabis social clubs. In this sense, many countries have decriminalised cannabis to a greater extent than what New Zealand has done.

Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, India, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Nepal, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Slovenia, Switzerland and Trinidad and Tobago have all decriminalised cannabis to some degree.

It might come as a blow to the Kiwi ego that several Third World countries are now more advanced than us when it comes to a major moral issue such as cannabis law reform. But it gets worse – even Australia is ahead of New Zealand in this regard now. Cannabis will be legal in the ACT as of next week, and it has already been decriminalised in the Northern Territory and in South Australia.

So that makes 40 countries that have either legalised or decriminalised cannabis to some degree – but the true picture is even worse than this, because New Zealand doesn’t even have medicinal cannabis yet.

Since becoming legal in California 24 years ago, medicinal cannabis has now become legal in a further 32 American states and four territories. Even if we apply the rule from above (according to which all these states and territories only count as one country) there are still many other countries with more tolerant medicinal cannabis laws than New Zealand.

Even Zimbabwe has more enlightened medicinal cannabis laws than New Zealand does – they legalised it in 2018. It might sound incredible to some Kiwi ears that a place with the reputation for corruption and backwardsness of Zimbabwe could be ahead of New Zealand in a major area of medical knowledge. Alas, it’s the truth.

In reality, every single country already mentioned is ahead of New Zealand when it comes to cannabis law reform. We have neither legalisation nor decriminalisation of recreational cannabis, and medicinal cannabis is de facto illegal on account of that virtually no-one can afford what’s on offer.

We were first in the world to repeal the prohibition on women voting. When we eventually get around to repealing elements of cannabis prohibition, we will be no earlier than 70th in the world to have begun to do so. If you count the American states separately, New Zealand will be no earlier than 100th or so.

It might not be easy for the Kiwi ego to accept, but not only are we years behind backwards American states like Louisiana and Alabama, but we are also years behind Third World nations such as Uruguay, South Africa and Zimbabwe. If we ever had any special ability to read the winds of change, or to provide moral leadership to a world desperately in need of it, that is now gone.

By 2020 New Zealand is, morally speaking, right back in the pack. Far from being leaders, we now respond with sheep-like herd instinct to patterns that we’re not intelligent enough to understand. The only way to lift this state of disgrace is to legalise cannabis immediately and across the board.

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