Who Are The Forces Of Evil In The Cannabis Referendum Debate?

Now that the cannabis referendum question has been announced, the real battlelines have finally been drawn. Every decent person understands that the forces of evil are lined up against the Cannabis Legalisation And Control Bill, but the question remains: who are they? Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, describes the opponents to cannabis law reform in New Zealand.

The easy way to tell who is for and who is against cannabis is by looking at the correlations between various demographics and their support for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in the 2017 General Election.

This can be done by importing the demographic data from the Electoral Profiles on the Parliamentary website into a statistics program such as Statistica, and then calculating a correlation matrix. Such an approach was the basis of my analysis in Understanding New Zealand, in which I calculated the correlations between all demographics and voting preferences and every other.

The strongest correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being in any demographic is the one between voting ALCP in 2017 and being Maori. This was a gigantic 0.91, which suggests that the vast bulk of Maori people are in favour of cannabis law reform. The strength of this relationship can be seen from looking at the ALCP vote in the Maori electorates, which is around twice as high as the ALCP vote in general electorates.

Maoris are strong supporters of cannabis law reform for several reasons. The primary reason is because cannabis suits them better than alcohol, to which they have little genetic resistance. The fact that white people have thousands of years of genetic resistance to alcohol, and Maoris don’t, mean that the normalisation of alcohol culture is grossly unfair.

The other super-powerful correlation with voting ALCP in 2017 was with regular tobacco smokers. This was 0.89, suggesting that if a person is a regular tobacco smoker they are all but certain to be a supporter of cannabis law reform.

The reason for this correlation is that it’s mostly only people with mental problems who smoke tobacco, and these same people smoke cannabis for its medicinal effects. If a person has PTSD or anxiety, it’s often the case that tobacco and cannabis both have a similar medicinal effect.

One less strong, but still powerful, correlation was between supporting the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and being New Zealand born – this was 0.73. It will come as a surprise to many, but cannabis use is an implicit part of the New Zealand identity. It’s as much a part of who we are as rugby, beaches, barbeques and ethnic confusion. Therefore, people who are born and raised in New Zealand are much more likely to support cannabis law reform than those born elsewhere.

These correlations suggest that the average cannabis user is the salt-of-the-earth working-class Kiwi. This is proven by the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being employed in working-class professions, such as community or personal service worker (0.77), labourer (0.71), machinery operators and drivers (0.70) or technicians and trades workers (0.43).

The pro-cannabis forces, then, are basically the people who are at the coal face of the tough jobs in New Zealand. People who work repetitive jobs or jobs with heavy social contact are the ones who tend to have the strongest need to destress at the end of the day, and it’s for them that cannabis law reform would be the most beneficial.

This gives us a good idea of who the forces of evil are.

Many of the opponents to cannabis law reform are old people. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and median age was -0.57. It’s necessary to note, however, that the correlation between voting ALCP and being on the pension was only -0.18, i.e. not statistically significant. This means that the relation to age and support for cannabis law reform is not linear – it rebounds among pensioners.

This replicates a pattern seen overseas. People tend to be anti-cannabis the older they are, up until the point where they are so old that their life starts to revolve around medicines and doctors. At this point it’s common for people to get exposed to cannabis and to come to appreciate its medicinal effects. So the brainwashing only lasts until there’s an element of personal interest in it, at which point it’s discarded.

Christians make up another strong anti-cannabis bloc. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being Christian was -0.37. Christians have always hated cannabis users, in particular because cannabis is the natural spiritual sacrament of the Eurasian people. This is why Bob McCoskrie, funded by Church money, is taking the leading role in the anti-cannabis campaign.

Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are all significantly opposed to cannabis law reform as well. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and belonging to any of these religious groups was at least -0.30. As mentioned above, this is because cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, and therefore its use is directly against the interests of organised religion.

Predictably, then, there is a strong negative correlation between voting National and voting ALCP. Interestingly, the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and voting National in 2017 (-0.70) is more strongly negative than the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and voting Conservative in 2017 (-0.40). This underlines the degree to which National voters are not motivated by conservatism so much as actual malice.

The forces of evil, then, in the cannabis law reform debate are the same old, religious bigots who have opposed every other attempt at making society better. They’re essentially the same people who opposed homosexual, smacking and prostitution law reform, and they’ll oppose everything in the future too, because any change makes them piss their pants.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 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 2017 is also available.

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The Cannabis Legalisation And Control Bill: A Weak But Realistic Compromise

The Government released news this week about the exact form of the cannabis referendum question at next year’s General Election. The Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill, currently in draft form, will serve as the basis for next year’s referendum question. Long-time cannabis law reform campaigner Vince McLeod, author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, gives his thoughts on the proposal.

The proposed law is weak, but it’s a realistic compromise with the forces of evil.

Most importantly, it makes the possession of up to 14 grams of cannabis, a small homegrow and licensed retail cannabis sales all legal. As far as the cannabis-using community is concerned, this achieves most of the long-stated goals of cannabis legalisation. It’s broadly in line with what other states and territories in North America have introduced.

Section 18 of the Cannabis Control Bill will allow up to 14 grams of cannabis to be possessed in a public place, and for cannabis to be smoked at home. People are allowed to possess more than this if they are transporting it from one person’s home to another. There appears to be no limit on how much cannabis one is allowed to possess at home.

This will mean that it will no longer matter if a Police officer smells cannabis on you in public or while during a visit to your house. Evidence of cannabis will no longer, by itself, be a sufficient cause for the Police to attack you. Even if the case of smoking cannabis in public, which will still be illegal, the punishment is only a $200 infringement fee.

Section 15 of the Bill will allow for two plants to be grown at home per person, and up to four plants to be grown per household.

Two plants is not a lot. However, if you grew four plants in a small grow tent under a 600W light you could get ten or twelve ounces per grow. Assuming that you’re able to get hold of clones, this would mean ten or twelve ounces every eight to ten weeks. In other words, a household could meet its demands for recreational cannabis easily enough by growing it themselves.

Moreover, there is no proposed restriction on the size of the two plants, as has been the case in some North American jurisdictions. This suggests that people will be allowed to put down a couple of honking sativas in an outdoors greenhouse and get them both up to ten feet tall. Such an arrangement would make it legal to grow a year’s worth of cannabis in one season, sparing the need for the environmentally-unfriendly grow tents.

Section 19 of the Bill allows for recreational cannabis sales. Purchases will be limited to 14 grams per day, but this is at least two weeks’ worth by any reasonable measure. Aside from this, it appears the proposed model will be fairly similar to the cannabis cafe model that has existed in the Netherlands since the 1970s.

In other words, it appears that the proposed model is intended to allow for recreational cannabis sales in cafes in a similar fashion to how alcohol is already sold in pubs. Section 49 of the Bill makes reference to “consumption licences” which will allow certain premises to allow people to consume cannabis in public. Such premises will not be allowed to also sell alcohol, and will therefore follow closely to the Daktory model that Dakta Green has already established in New Zealand.

Despite these major wins, the Bill has a number of flaws from the perspective of the average member of the cannabis-using community.

Nowhere in the Bill has provision been made for running a mother plant that clones can be taken from. If one household can only have four plants, it makes having a mother plant that one can take clones off difficult. Against this criticism, however, is that it appears the Bill will allow for retail sale of feminised seeds.

It’s also a mistake to set the legal limit at 20. For one thing, it implies that cannabis is more dangerous than alcohol, which is entirely false. For another, it means two years where young Kiwis will be legally allowed to drink booze but not smoke weed, which will mean two years of exposure to the more destructive of the two drugs. Legal cannabis has been shown to lower rates of alcohol use overseas, and the sooner an alternative to alcohol was available the better.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Bill doesn’t address our right to use cannabis for spiritual purposes. Absolutely zero acknowledgement is made of the fact that cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, but this is not unexpected if one considers that New Zealand has been ruled by completely godless people since the turn of the century, and that for their sort spirituality is mental illness.

Also predictably, there is no provision for an official Government apology for conducting a war against them without their consent. The War on Drugs has been the worst human rights violation to occur in the West since World War II. The Government’s role in this war has involved decades of lying to the public about the effects of cannabis and putting people who defy them in cages. Their conduct has been obscene, and an apology should be part of legalisation – but it won’t be.

Perhaps worst of all, the Government is still committed to minimising cannabis use from the standpoint of cannabis use being inherently harmful. It’s possible that they have calculated that legalising cannabis would make it possible to strangle cannabis culture through ever-increasing taxes and red tape, as they have almost successfully done for tobacco. More likely, however, is that they have shifted thinking so that cannabis is now (rightly) grouped with alcohol and tobacco and not heroin and methamphetamine.

There are many possible criticisms of the Bill, but ultimately it is definitely worth supporting. All of the legitimate criticisms relate to aspects of cannabis law that could best be fine-tuned after the referendum has been passed.

Realistically, what the proposed Cannabis Leglisation And Control Bill means is an end to the fear. It would be taking away that dark, nauseating feeling that comes with being marked as a criminal. People smoking or growing cannabis at home will no longer have to fear saying the wrong thing or inviting the wrong person to their house, and the net result will be a reduction in the suffering of the New Zealand people.

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Hard Eugenics And Soft Eugenics

In the aftermath of World War II, certain ideas came to be blamed for the war, and so became extremely unfashionable. Anti-Semitism, supremacist nationalism and eugenics were among the foremost of these ideas. However, much like slavery after the American Civil War, some of these ideas just changed form rather than disappear.

When the Industrial Revolution swept over the Western World, it brought with it a godless kind of materialism. It taught us that the way to wealth and power was mastery of the material world and its laws, and that spirituality was merely a distraction. In the wake of this came an entirely new set of moral values that had not previously existed.

One of these new moral values was the idea of productivity. This meant that the people who did more work for their masters were prized higher than those who did less. This idea of productivity meant that the world became divided into the deserving productive and the undeserving unproductive. The idea of getting rid of people who weren’t productive enough followed in short order.

Within a few hundred years, this latter idea had evolved into what was called eugenics. This is the deliberate effort to improve the genetic stock of the nation by encouraging the breeding of those considered to have good genes, and discouraging the breeding of those considered to have bad genes. The idea is that the lazy, dumb, infirm etc. will become fewer in number if those likely to produce them are coerced into breeding less.

The breeding restrictions that come with eugenics are motivated by a variety of reasons, but what those reasons boil down to is an appeal to the greater good. Usually this means that the continued existence of the person killed would have been a detriment to the greater good because of the waste of the resources necessary to keep them alive. Sometimes it is suggested that it’s cruel to keep people alive when they appear to be suffering.

Although the idea of eugenics is most typically associated with the Rassenhygiene of Germany before and during World War II, the idea was first popularised in America just after World War I. Adolf Hitler even referenced the work of Americans such as Margaret Sanger as an example of how Germany ought to carry out eugenics programs against their own population.

In Germany, the Aktion T4 program saw the sterilisation, and then the extermination, of several hundred thousand people who were deemed to be either physically or mentally defective. This occurred in a variety of ways, from lethal injection to gas chambers (the idea of exterminating people in gas chambers was first thought up for use on schizophrenics).

This approach can be described as hard eugenics. This is when the Government kills you outright.

As mentioned above, hard eugenics became extremely unfashionable thanks to the German loss in World War II. But the desire of the ruling classes to commit eugenics on their populations did not go away. The fundamental desire to be in charge of a productive population, rather than an unproductive one, didn’t change.

It was observed, after hard eugenics became unfashionable, that the people who had been slated for extermination all had one quality in common: they were poor. Being mentally or physically infirm makes it all but impossible for one to trade one’s labour for a decent wage. In all but the most exceptional cases, it guarantees a life of impoverishment on society’s fringes.

Therefore, it was possible to institute measures that didn’t directly kill people, but which made their lives so miserable that they killed themselves. All that was necessary was to institute measures that made it hard to be poor. The modern way to do this is by applying constant stress over housing, healthcare and job security.

Soft eugenics, then, is when the Government makes your life so shit that you either kill yourself or withdraw from attempting to reproduce.

Like hard eugenics, this is also achieved in a variety of ways, although the fundamental element to it is the weaponisation of despair. Life is made to appear so hopeless, so meaningless and so pointless, that withdrawal from it seems like the only reasonable option. Despair is used as a weapon, to drive people whose survival is already marginal to suicide.

This has the same eugenic effect as hard eugenics without all the drama.

Soft eugenics has become so fashionable today that average life expectancy is now starting to decrease in America. This decrease is because of the sharp increase in what are called “deaths of despair”. Many of these deaths are suicides by gunshot, and many are quasi-suicides in the form of opiate overdoses. Their common factor is a person who gave up on life.

Making people give up on life is how soft eugenics works. This is primarily achieved by paying shitty wages, so that workers are always in a state of financial precarity. It’s also achieved by destroying communities through mass immigration, so that no-one knows their neighbours. A further tactic is a democratic political system that transparently doesn’t give a fuck about anything other than lobbyist dollars.

The tendency to give up on life is accelerated by a popular culture that only permits discussion of the lowest common denominator of thought. In our current society, anyone who thinks for themselves will be ostracised to such a degree that proper human function becomes very difficult. It’s only permissible to march in lockstep with the hordes of morons – the alternative is to get bullied towards suicide.

Political correctness plays its part in soft eugenics, especially nowadays. The more politically correct a society becomes, the greater the cognitive resources that each individual member of it must devote to self-policing. This means fewer cognitive resources left over for actually living. Therefore, the more politically correct a society is, the more heavily it practises soft eugenics.

Cannabis prohibition has been a central plank in governmental efforts to get the more vulnerable elements of their populations to kill themselves. Many people on the margins have found that cannabis is an essential tool for dealing with the depression that comes with a tough life. Making it harder to get hold of this medicine only serves to push vulnerable people towards suicide. This is the plan.

In the case of New Zealand, we do not practice hard eugenics but the practice of soft eugenics is very strong. New Zealand is a paradise for the wealthy, but a hell for the poor. Our practice of soft eugenics is taken to an extreme degree here, which is why we have the highest youth mortality rate in the entire OECD, even ahead of places like Mexico and Turkey.

We no longer kill the mentally and physically infirm – now we just make their lives so shit that they kill themselves. Because we’re not directly responsible for the suicides, we can claim that it isn’t a form of eugenics. But it is – it’s just a softer form of what the Nazis did.

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The Equalitarian Dogma – The World’s Most Damaging Lie

The most strenuously defended falsehood in the world today is not a religion (at least not a recognised one), but a pseudo-scientific dogma. It is the dogma of Equalitarianism. This is the assertion that there are no inherent differences between different human groups, or at least no psychological ones. This dogma, as this essay will show, is the world’s most harmful lie.

There is no doubt that there is large variation among and between almost all human groups in almost all measures. Over a hundred years of scientific literature establishes that this is the case. Not only is there great variation in physical traits such as height, body build and skin colour, but there is also great variation in psychological traits such as IQ and proclivities towards certain behaviours.

The question that does get debated is whether or not this variation is natural or whether it is a function of the environment. This is the great debate in psychology, and is known as the nature versus nurture debate. It’s an extremely important question, because a person’s answer to it is strongly related to their political beliefs. As has been discussed here before, people’s beliefs about human nature are closely tied to their political beliefs. One often predicts the other.

One could argue that the elementary political question is: should the differences between people be made smaller?

The response to that question is usually “It depends.” More specifically, most people usually feel that the answer depends on whether those differences between people are natural or not. Responses to the elementary political question tend to vary based along these lines.

Those who think that the differences between people are natural tend to think that it’s pointless to try and make them smaller. These people would point to the clear differences in height between different races, even when you control for environmental factors such as wealth – just compare the Japanese and Koreans with the Russians and Mongolians. Nature throws up a great amount of variation, and it’s more efficient for us to just let it be.

Those who think that the differences between people are unnatural tend to think that it’s immoral to let them continue to exist. If differences are unnatural, then they must be the result of prejudices inherent to the structure of society. Therefore, we’re morally obliged to restructure society such that those prejudices no longer exist. The favoured strategy for achieving this is mass brainwashing campaigns.

The trouble is that an elementary grounding in science is enough to know that different races will be different in all kinds of ways, it’s just a question of by what measure, in which direction, how much and how meaningfully.

By the time most people are eight years old, they have learned that no two snowflakes are the same. The reason for this is that there are no two identical things anywhere in Nature. There are no two identical people, or mountains, or even worms. All are different by virtue of the fact that there are no two identical things anywhere in the material world.

A more advanced understanding of Nature, in particular evolution, teaches us that no two subgroups of the human species will have gone through precisely the same selective pressures over the course of their biological past, and therefore no two subgroups of the human species will be the same either. This is true no matter which measure one uses. In order words, all subgroups of the human species are different, despite the presence of underlying similarities.

Therefore, we can conclude that the Equalitarian Dogma doesn’t stand up to even the most basic scientific scrutiny. It’s not just that the evidence doesn’t support it – elementary scientific principles rule it out from the beginning. However, the Equalitarian Dogma and its supporting dogmas such as the Blank Slate Theory still hold immense sway among the vast majority of people unqualified to understand the science.

The Blank Slate Theory holds that genetics have no influence on a person’s behaviour or personality – all of their behaviours can be best explained by reference to the environment in which they were raised. Humans are born into the world as if a tabula rasa – or blank slate – upon which practically anything can be inscribed.

This is the basis of the Equalitarian Dogma. If we are all the same, then the only way to explain our transparent differences is by appeal to the different environmental influences that have been present during the lives of each person.

A corollary to the Blank Slate Theory is that, as people are simply the products of their environment and nothing else, it’s possible to shape them into anything at all, simply by controlling the schedule of rewards and punishments under which they are raised. Any child could become a university professor or a gang member – it all depends on what shapes their minds when they are growing up.

It’s true that human infants are born into a state of extreme juvenility, and that they learn very quickly by mimicking their elders. It’s also true that the human brain at birth is the most plastic organ of any invertebrate creature. This means that human personalities are supremely malleable – but only up to a point.

The reality is that human behaviour can be shaped by the environment, but only with the bounds of possibility determined by genetics.

For example, the precise height of a man may be influenced by the quality of the nutrition that he received as a child, but this influence only applies to a particular range of height. A lack of nutrition might mean a man grows up stunted, skinny or even sickly, but it won’t make him a dwarf. Likewise, it’s not possible to reliably produce seven-foot tall giants simply by feeding them great quantities of food as children.

The reason why this is so important is because incorrectly understanding the reality about the human condition causes us to make terrible decisions.

The popularity of the Blank Slate Theory among political leaders in Europe caused them to open their borders to millions of Muslim and African immigrants this century, in the belief that those people could simply be conditioned into becoming the same as the native Europeans. Everyone knew they were different, but because of the Blank Slate Theory it was assumed that their children would grow up just the same as any European.

The idea was that, owing to the immense gratitude they would have from being so generously raised from the filth of their home countries, the Muslims and Africans would throw off their old cultural values like so many iron shackles, and embrace the cultural values of Europe. Having done so, they would then be identical to other Europeans.

The reality, of course, was that these Muslims and Africans behave differently to the natives for genetic reasons, and cannot simply be conditioned to suppress their sexual and violent urges the same way a European can. Consequently, all the education didn’t do much. Europe has learned this the hard way, through suffering hundreds of millions of sex crimes and crimes of violence, but they did not need to suffer in this manner.

They only suffered because they made incorrect assumptions about the nature of the human animal.

The Equalitarian Dogma has caused, and continues to cause, tremendous suffering to the people of the West by exposing them to the presence of people who aren’t the same as Westerners when it comes to civility or natural empathy. The assumption that all people are exactly the same implies the assumption that all people commit sex and violence crimes at the same rate as Westerners. It leads to a failure to correctly discriminate between relatively harmful and relatively harmless influences.

The Equalitarian Dogma is the greatest evil in the world because it causes more suffering than any other dogma.

The most evil thing about it is that, like all dogmas, it makes violence between those who submit to it and those who don’t all but inevitable. Those who submit to it truly believe that they are morally superior to those who don’t, and that their opponents are Nazis who only believe in human biodiversity out of pure hatred. This sneering superiority makes dialogue with them all but impossible, and therefore makes violence all but inevitable.

The Equalitarian Dogma has led to a situation where there are now forty million Muslims and Africans in Europe who cannot realistically be integrated, and their continued and growing presence in Europe means continued and growing misery. Eventually one of two things will happen – this population will be expelled violently, or the ruling classes will be destroyed in the native people’s desire to punish someone for what’s been done to them.

Inaccurate, dogmatic conceptions of reality must be opposed at every turn. No matter how virtuous a person may feel for holding them, they cause nothing but misery.

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