justice – Page 43

Why The Left Doesn’t Give A Shit About Drug Law Reform, Gun Rights or Free Speech

For many of us in Generation X, it was easy enough to associate the right with authoritarianism. The association was so obvious that it was near enough to a universally held belief for those born between the mid 60s and early 80s. As this essay will describe, the sands have shifted under us, and the left is now the authoritarian side.

In the 1990s, Christian fundamentalism still had a powerful grip on the moral consciousness of the West, especially the Anglo part of it. Age restrictions on television and movie content were standard. Music was made to carry labels that warned of explicit lyrics. Purchasing restrictions on alcohol were commonplace.

All of these restrictions were driven by a religious fundamentalist sentiment that not only believed that pleasure was sinful, but that those same religious fundamentalists had the right to force laws restricting those pleasures on the population at large. This self-righteous indifference to the will of others engendered a great deal of hatred for the right among those who grew up at the end of the 20th century.

Generation X hit adulthood, therefore, with the near-universal belief that the right wing, and anything associated with the right wing, was the authoritarian side, and the path to liberty and freedom lay in opposing them.

This worked out pretty good for about a decade. It inspired Generation X to resist the Iraq War, in part by organising history’s largest ever protests. It also inspired them to resist the PATRIOT Act, the West’s first example of true mass surveillance. By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, many had a sense that a golden age awaited the world once the Baby Boomers ceded power to the Gen Xers.

It wasn’t until Barack Obama was elected, ironically, that things really started to go to shit.

Obama was the first Generation X American President (more or less). He had taken office with a lot of fanfare about a new age of democratic politics, where Presidents listened to the people instead of mysterious, unelected advisers. Exemplifying this new era was a website where the American people could submit their concerns directly to the political class by way of Internet petition.

The most popular petitions on this site generally related to cannabis law reform, for the reason that cannabis prohibition is arguably the most egregious modern example of Western governments abusing the human rights of their people. To the surprise of many, Obama just completely ignored all of these pleas, and went about instituting the agenda that he had had long before running for the Presidency.

A recent mainstream media piece made an appeal to Helen Clark to intercede on the side of cannabis law reform. This appeal is misplaced, because the left hasn’t cared about freedoms for a long time. They didn’t have to, mostly because the right so conspicuously didn’t care for so long that the left won the libertarian vote by default.

The New Zealand Labour Party’s total refusal to campaign for the repeal of prohibition has astonished some and disappointed others. Many of us expected Clark to make a move on medicinal cannabis 20 years ago, when she was in power and had the chance. After all, California made medicinal cannabis legal in 1996 and the Fifth Labour Government came to power in 1999.

Their flat refusal to do is, however, just part of a wider pattern of leftist indifference to human rights. The left has now completely sold out to corporate interests, as evidenced by their support for the mass importation of cheap labour, by their working hand-in-glove with the corporate media and by their refusal to accept the result of the Brexit referendum.

When the Sixth Labour Government came to power, many had similar hopes for them to the ones they had for Obama. But like Obama, the Sixth Labour Government has done less than nothing to bring freedom to the people they represented. One can write ‘less than nothing’ because they have taken freedoms away.

Gun rights have been stripped, and the right to express political opinions without interference has been thrown out the window. Kiwis are now facing a protracted campaign of Police harassment for anti-Government posts on social media, so much so that one can now seriously ask if New Zealand is a police state.

The reason for all this is that the left, now being authoritarian, demands ideological purity with the same kind of bone-headed ruthlessness that the Nazis once demanded racial purity. Therefore, any and all measures that increase ideological diversity must be opposed. Anything that increases a person’s propensity to generate novel thoughts or ideas is right out.

They don’t want people using cannabis because then people come to think freely, and they want to be the ones dictating what people think (for the greater good, of course).

When the left champions diversity, they mean the sort of superficial diversity that makes a people easier to control. They mean the diversity that allows them to divide the population into numerous teams and to set those teams against each other through their control of the apparatus of propaganda, in particular the mainstream media.

They don’t mean ideological or intellectual diversity. This constitutes a threat, such that all ideological and intellectual diversity must be suppressed. This has reached its worst expression in countries such as Britain and New Zealand, where regular citizens face increasing Police harassment for the content of their social media posts.

In summary, the reason why the left doesn’t care about human rights any more is because they are now the authoritarians. One entire generation has passed since the right were the authoritarians, and now the political landscape is very different.

The right, for their part, have been extremely slow to capitalise on this by moving towards libertarianism. If the right would set its flag on the libertarian side of the fence, as a few politicians have done (David Seymour of the ACT Party being the most prominent), they could benefit heavily from it. If Donald Trump would call for legal cannabis, the right would achieve a masterstroke of propaganda.

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.

Is New Zealand Now A Police State?

The Great New Zealand Chimpout appears to now be a permanent state of affairs, as the Sixth Labour Government has doubled down on its suppression of free speech. Far from once having been the world’s leader in human rights, things are now worse than anyone could have thought possible. This essay asks – is New Zealand now a Police state?

The term “Police state” is used to describe a political regime that employs the Police to intimidate or destroy their political enemies. This is widely considered a moral obscenity for the reason that the Police are supposed to be there to keep the peace in a morally neutral fashion.

One defining characteristic of a Police state is “The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions […] on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement.”

The home of VJM Publishing Vice President Vince McLeod was visited by two Police officers on Friday. Although they were asked to leave the property immediately on the grounds that they didn’t have a warrant, one of the officers had the time to mention something about “concerning posts made on the VJM Publishing FaceBook page”.

VJM Publishing is far from only one to have been targeted in this manner. Many Kiwis are aware of the current ongoing campaign of Police harassment targeting the alternative media and outspoken freethinkers. Alt-media mogul Vinny Eastwood has been targeted five times already, and a video of one particular harassment attempt has been viewed over 100,000 times on YouTube.

The purpose of these visits is, and can only be, to intimidate certain sections of the citizenry into silence.

Ideally, the targeted citizen will feel such an unpleasant sense of fear at armed Police coming to their house that they will begin to censor themselves, and no longer express views critical of the Government. The knowledge that they are being monitored is supposed to cause the citizen to think twice about which opinions they express, lest the Police come back.

This logic has underpinned all Police states and dictatorships throughout time. It’s the basic abuser logic of punishing any and all displeasing behaviour. Dissenters must be punished so that dissent is quelled.

New Zealanders are generally happy to glibly declare themselves a free people. After all we have such a thing as a Bill of Rights, and in that Bill of Rights it says in Section 14 that “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.”

However, if New Zealand Police officers are visiting members of the media for the purposes of intimidation, then New Zealand qualifies as a Police state. There’s no other way to describe a country in which the Government sends Police officers to intimidate people for expressing their opinions, when their right to express those opinions is enshrined in law.

Perhaps even more concerning is the willingness of the mainstream media to go along with this repression. Not only are the mainstream media happy to distract the people from this mass human rights violation, but they work hand-in-hand with the Government to manufacture public consent for the Police harassment campaign.

Indeed, Stuff admits that the Police have shared the secret watchlist with them, which is tantamount to an admission that the Government, the Police and the mainstream media are all working together. If that’s not a sign that the New Zealand Establishment is rotten with corruption, then no such sign is possible.

Some will be asking: where to from here?

New Zealand is likely to proceed along the lines of the East German Stasi model. This version of a Police state emphasises building a massive network of informants who are motivated to rat out wrongthinkers. Thanks to FaceBook, such a thing is trivial to achieve – it’s only necessary to appeal to the public to dob people in.

Much like New Zealand, the East German censorship system was applied despite the freedom of expression being enshrined in law. East German censorship was applied so that “Content which was considered harmful to the regime, or to communist ideologies in general, was strictly forbidden.”

The content that is and will be suppressed under the Ardern regime is content that criticises left-wing globalism.

It can be predicted that in coming years the Government will try to censor reports about the state of homelessness in New Zealand, because they want to import as many refugees as they can, and awareness of the housing crisis reduces the people’s will to do this. They will also want the media to not report on crimes such as Muslim grooming gangs or gang rapes, because this also affects public sentiment towards globalism.

New Zealand now effectively has the same thing as the Stasi, because Kiwis who share content considered harmful to the Ardern regime are getting Police visits. New Zealand doesn’t have a gulag system yet, but it could be argued that we have political prisoners. There are individuals sitting in prison for sharing a video of the mosque shooting, even though the video was shared before it was declared objectionable (and therefore the sentence is retrospective and not legal).

Philip Arps is not a very nice person, according to a number of accounts, but that’s specifically why the Government targets people like him first. They want to create the idea that everyone else they target belongs in a similar category. If they can manufacture the impression that independent media outlets like VJM Publishing belong in the same category of person as Arps, half the job of suppressing dissent is done.

There are also reports that Police have visited schools to intimidate pupils who have joked about the shooting or about sharing footage. This intimidation campaign amounts to an attempt to socially engineer the population into a more submissive and compliant state.

It can be seen that the Sixth Labour Government has introduced a Police state along the lines of Socialist East Germany. Expression of political opinions that the Ardern regime wants suppressed may well result in an intimidatory visit from the Police. The only way out is to ensure the coming to power of a force that respects the inherent rights of every New Zealander.

Hate Speech Laws Will Lead New Zealand to Misery and Servitude

The Sixth Labour Government is in no hurry to change the cannabis laws, which has seen New Zealand fall behind Zimbabwe and South Africa in terms of personal freedom. This reluctant approach to liberty helps explain why Andrew Little is so enthused about bringing in hate speech laws. As this essay will show, hate speech laws will only increase the suffering of the New Zealand people – but that may be by design.

Last week, Danish politician Rasmus Paludan was sentenced to two weeks in prison for breaking the Danish hate speech laws. He received this conviction after speaking in a video where he said that the average IQ of South Africans was 70, and that this intelligence level was too low to properly run the country. The conviction was upheld on appeal.

The video of him saying this was available on the homepage of Paludan’s party, Stram Kurs, and someone who viewed it reported it to the Police (some readers will have already sensed a red flag here – yes, in Denmark you can rat other people out for racism, and they’ll go to prison if they’re found guilty of it).

What Paludan said about the IQ of South Africans is accurate, as shown in the table below, taken from Professor Richard Lynn’s latest book, The Intelligence of Nations. Accuracy and truth, however, will be no defence against a hate speech accusation. The case of Paludan shows that New Zealand risks losing basic freedoms to speak if we introduce hate speech laws.

*The scientific facts suggest some unpalatable truths – now stating these truths is illegal in Denmark*

If hate speech laws were introduced in New Zealand, we could expect to see headlines like “Don Brash/Brian Tamaki/David Seymour Convicted of Racism” as certain political statements became illegal. It might sound ridiculous, and the Government will deny it, but literal facts will become grounds to put people in prison. This is the inevitable consequence of bringing in hate speech laws.

As shown by Paludan’s example, it won’t matter if you can back up what you say with science. A bunch of politicians and their assorted arse-lickers, none of who have any background in the science of intelligence testing, will decide what you’re allowed to say and what you are not. The definition of hate will be entirely up to them, and they will choose the definition that best suits their interests.

In the judgment against Paludan, the judges decided that it was not illegal to say “neger” (c.f. ‘Negro’), as he does several times in the video. The fact that they considered the possibility, however, is telling. It exposes that such a prohibition is under consideration: there are many who would like to make it illegal to say certain words, or to state certain things.

Imagine a world where it’s a crime to say a word that your Government has forbidden you to say, or a crime to draw logical conclusions that your Government has forbidden you to draw. If you dare do either of these things, you have to go in a cage.

It sounds like the kind of law that might have been parodied by Monty Python or Comic Strip Presents as an example of cruel and unreasonable punishment. But it’s the world that we are heading towards if we let Andrew “The Ditherer” Little and his fellow short-sighted control freaks override our right to free speech.

Hate speech laws mark the death of free speech. Once they are introduced, eventually anything that goes against the Government’s agenda will be classified as “hate speech”. Saying things that are scientific facts, backed up by decades of research and by the experts in the field, will be classed as hate speech if they alert people to the failures of the Government.

The reason why the Government wants to make it a crime to point out facts – like the low IQ of Africans – is because they want to import cheap labour. They are in bed with the globalist corporations. They know that if we’re allowed to openly speak the truth about the effects of globalist immigration policy on the well-being of our nation, more and more people will come to resist that globalist policy.

Every globalist knows that a nation will sooner-or-later go down the toilet if it imports large numbers of people with an IQ of 70. But they don’t care about that. All they want is cheap labour so that they can extract a quick profit from New Zealand. Then they move on, and leave us to clean up the mess. This is parasite capitalism, and it’s the pre-eminent paradigm of our age.

Hate speech laws will lead to people getting sent to prison for pointing out scientific facts that the Government doesn’t want attention given to. They will also lead to a culture of snitching as the Government employs people to handle the complaints. The end result is an East Germany-style hell society plagued by snitches and secret police. We should resist the introduction of hate speech laws at any cost, on the grounds that they are a violation of our inherent human rights.

The Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Does Not Serve The Good of Society

Cannabis prohibitionists have a fallback position when none of the usual rhetoric succeeds. It’s a vague appeal to some kind of “good of society”. This argument encompasses a variety of different sentiments, most of them fear-based. As this article will examine, this argument is no more true than any of the others.

At the time this article was being composed, it was in the news that a Dunedin man named Harley Brown had just been sentenced to two years and three months in prison for growing over a hundred cannabis plants. Meanwhile, another man named John-Boy Rakete had been sentenced, two weeks previously, to two years and two months in prison for bashing a man into a coma from which he is expected to never recover.

Imagine going to prison for growing a medicinal flower at the same time as a gang member who beat someone into a vegetable state, and seeing that gang member get out of prison before you. It sounds like something out of a Kafka novel, but it’s the reality of our current legal approach to cannabis. Can it fairly be argued that this arrangement serves the good of society?

It’s hard to see where the benefit to society is in this arrangement. Brown will be incarcerated at the cost of $100,000 per year, which is greater than the total value of the cannabis plants he had, even if this value is calculated using Police maths. As a result of his incarceration, a number of people will be made to suffer without the medicine they would otherwise have had.

How does this serve the good of society?

Rather than serving the good of society, prohibition puts us at each other’s throats. The friends and family of Harley Brown will probably have contempt for the system for the rest of their lives. Most people who compare the two cases above and their respective sentences will conclude that something is fundamentally rotten with our justice system, which appears to dish out punishments with no consideration given to how much suffering the perpetrator may have caused.

The good of society is served by alleviating the suffering of the people in that society. Education is a public good because ignorance causes suffering. Healthcare is a public good because disease causes suffering. Infrastructure is a public good because mobility restrictions cause suffering. Anything that is genuinely a public good alleviates suffering somewhere.

Prohibition serves no such good. As has been demonstrated in the previous chapters of this book, it doesn’t prevent suffering, but, to the contrary, it causes suffering. There is no social good served by arresting people who aren’t harming any one. Neither is any good served by imprisoning these people. Least of all is any good served by lying about how cannabis causes harm to the community.

The ultimate reason why cannabis prohibition does not serve the good of society is that the people will never accept not being allowed to use cannabis. The people will always intuitively feel that they have the right to use cannabis, because it alleviates suffering, because it’s a social tonic and because it can connect people to God. Because of this, prohibition can only ever cause conflict between the people and those tasked with enforcing it.

The idea that people will eventually “come to their senses”, realise that cannabis is a dangerous drug, and stop using it, is nonsense. Cannabis prohibitionists have gone all-in on this puritanical delusion, and they have lost. It’s time to admit that reality does not reflect the idea that cannabis is dangerous, or that the harms of cannabis are in any way ameliorated by making it illegal.

The good of society is best served by honesty. Honesty is one of the most fundamental virtues, because it’s only through honest discussion that we can come to see the world accurately. Without being able to see the world accurately, we will make mistakes that lead to conflict.

This honesty would cause us to have a look at Colorado, where they legalised cannabis in 2012. In Colorado, none of the terrible things that the prohibitionists predicted came to pass. There wasn’t an outbreak of violence or other crimes, there wasn’t an epidemic of cannabis addiction and it didn’t become easier for young people to get. Everything continued the same as normal, only there was much more money on account of it no longer being wasted on enforcing prohibition.

Legalisation would serve the good of society much better than prohibition. A system of legal cannabis would not only increase social cohesion by removing one of the major wedges that drives us apart, but it would also increase the respect that the average person has for the Police, the Justice System and the Government. Not least of all, it would save us a ton of money.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.