justice – Page 43

Why Beneficiaries Are Morally Superior to Workers

It’s a nearly universal assumption nowadays that people who work are morally superior to people on welfare. People on welfare, we are told, are essentially parasites that do nothing but suck wealth out of the system, and we’d all be better off without them. As this essay will explain, this is almost the exact opposite of reality. People on welfare are, in fact, morally superior to those who work.

The vast majority of human history has been one of deprivation and toil. Having evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, the primary survival challenge facing our species for almost the entirety of its existence was finding enough food to meet the metabolic needs of our bodies. For the most part, this was a brutal and bloody struggle against the world – and each other.

This had a powerful effect on the evolution of human behaviour – and our morality.

Because resources are scarce, and the metabolic clock is ticking, humans have always needed to be active. We have always needed to work, whether that be hunting, gathering, fishing or working the land in the form of agriculture. This was how we gathered enough resources to survive. The alternative to activity was death.

Because working was necessary for survival, we have always praised those who did it, and always excoriated those who did not. It was probably necessary to do this, because, had we not done so, the lazy would have dragged all of society down with them. Our culture, especially Northern European culture, came to consider work something almost holy, as if the meaning of life.

Working more and harder is how wealth is built, but as can be seen in the graph at the top of this essay, the planet cannot support the level of consumption that humans are currently subjecting it to. There simply aren’t enough of the necessary resources. The resources that do exist are being depleted at such a pace that we can see hard physical limits approaching, and there’s no escaping it.

The fact is that a profound paradigm shift has taken place over the past few hundred years, and we’ve barely even noticed it, let alone adapted to it.

American agricultural productivity increased 1200% between 1950 and 2000. This was thanks to something called the Green Revolution, which increased agricultural productivity severalfold all across the world. What this means is that it requires far, far fewer people to feed society today than what it took in the past. Therefore, most people are now surplus labour.

We have adapted to this by setting the now-redundant agricultural workers to work in other industries. First was manufacturing, then service industries. This worked out great for a long time, because all of these non-essential workers were able to produce things that raised the human standard of living, even if those things weren’t necessary.

This was pretty awesome for a few decades, and arguably continues to be. However, we are now aware of some things that we once didn’t know. In particular, we are now aware of the pressure we’re putting on the natural environment through shifting those surplus workers into manufacturing all sorts of things. We now know that we can’t keep doing this.

The world doesn’t need hard work and production any more. Those days are over. What the world now needs are people who can restrict their consumption to a level that the world can sustain. As seen on the graph above, that level is about half that of the average Chinese level of consumption, some $15,000 of resources every year.

In other words, a First World standard of living will, necessarily, become a thing of the past sooner or later.

For the average Westerner, restricting one’s consumption to about $15,000 worth of goods and services a year will not be easy. This will demand an extremely sharp curtailment of material desire. It will mean that far fewer international trips can be taken, and far fewer new cars or big screen televisions can be bought. It may require vegetarianism or something like it. It will require great sacrifice.

Without such a great sacrifice, our planet cannot survive, or at least not in a form that can sustain human life. Therefore, doing so is a moral imperative.

The average Western beneficiary has already achieved this. Considering that the average Western beneficiary already survives without the excessive consumption displayed by almost everyone in a job, they are in fact showing the way forward for the rest of the Western World. They are the pioneers of the future, demonstrating the correct way for the rest of us to behave. They are the Men of Gold.

Like the holy ascetic men of the great Eastern religions, the Western beneficiary class has liberated themselves from materialism. They are therefore showing the way forward for the rest of humanity, and ought to be praised as spiritual masters. The rest of us need to follow the path of the beneficiary, and stop following the path of the worker/consumer. The first step is recognising the moral superiority of the welfare recipient.

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.

How and Why to Use the TOR Browser

Censorship in New Zealand is reaching levels that would be unbelievable to Kiwis a few years ago. The latest involves the New Zealand Chief Censor pressuring local Internet Service Providers to block access to sites that the Censor deems not to be in the public interest, such as 8chan. This article discusses how to circumvent censorship of online free expression.

New Zealand is not the first country whose Government has suppressed our natural right to free speech. Power trippers and control freaks all around the world have given in to the temptation to do so, reasoning that free speech is a potential risk to their authority. As Joseph Stalin once said: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We do not let our enemies have guns, so why would we let them have ideas?”

Unfortunately for us Kiwis, the Sixth Labour Government has chosen to exploit the atmosphere of terror created by recent mass shootings both here and overseas. They have used this as an excuse to strip away our rights, in particular our firearms rights and our right to free expression. As this column has mentioned elsewhere, they simply don’t care about such things.

It’s not clear that the Labour Government directed the Chief Censor to pressure ISPs into banning 8chan, but they have shown no indication that they disapproved. In any case, the censorship fits neatly into the wider Labour Party goal of cracking down on free expression. It’s all but certain that the Chief Censor knew that his actions had the approval of the War Criminal’s Apprentice and her Cabinet.

Even though 8chan hosts orders of magnitude less violence and hate than any of FaceBook, Twitter or mainstream television news, and even though Section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act establishes that all New Zealanders have the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form, 8chan has been targeted. They will not be the only ones. The day may come when VJM Publishing, despite being alt-centrist, gets banned.

Luckily for those who value free speech, there are technological ways around these governmental abuses. One of the foremost of these is the TOR browser.

TOR stands for The Onion Router. This isn’t the place for a technical description, but it’s enough to say that TOR confuses surveillance attempts so thoroughly that the user can surf the Internet anonymously. The purpose of it is to conceal the user’s identity and online activities from surveillance and data tracking. If someone is trying to spy on what websites you are visiting, all they will be able to see is that you are using TOR.

Another advantage of using TOR is that it’s possible to access sites that are censored. Although this currently applies to little other than 8chan, you could bet money on the fact that the Sixth Labour Government are going to censor everything they can, and anyone who disagrees will be labelled a white supremacist collaborator alongside Brenton Tarrant, Anders Breivik and Adolf Hitler.

Getting hold of the TOR browser is a simple matter of going to the TOR Project website at www.torproject.org and downloading the 54MB file. This is an install file, so double-click it once downloaded and follow the instructions like you would any other program. The installation isn’t difficult, it’s just a matter of running it and letting it do its thing.

Once installed, the purple TOR icon will be available. If you click on that, it will open the TOR browser, which is very similar to the Mozilla browser on which it is based. From there, it’s a simple matter of typing what you want to look for in the search bar, as you would any other browser. TOR is a bit slower than other browsers, owing to the methodology it uses to anonymise the traffic.

That’s about all there is to it – TOR is otherwise like a normal browser. While on the TOR network, it’s possible to find access to all kinds of illicit goods and services, not merely information. It’s not a good thing from the Government’s perspective that people become exposed to material of that nature, but that’s the risk they run when they violate our human right to free expression.

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.

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.