justice – Page 49

The Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Harms Social Cohesion

Cannabis prohibition does a lot of harm to various groups within society, as other articles here have shown, but it also has an effect on society as a whole. Not only does society have to pay for the cost of enforcing cannabis prohibition, but it suffers at a collective level the same harm done to individuals: as below, so above. As this article will examine, cannabis prohibition harms social cohesion.

Our society relies on co-operation between different groups at all levels.

One of the most important ways is the solidarity between generations. In order for the young to be willing to care for the old when the time comes, the youth have to feel some kind of solidarity with those older ones. They have to feel like those older ones managed the country in such a way as to leave them a worthy inheritance. They have to feel like the old cared about them.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, there is a sharp distinction between young and old when it comes to support for cannabis law reform. The correlation between voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 and being in the 65+ age bracket was -0.43 – not extremely strong, but strong enough to suggest that the average person in that age bracket is decidedly against cannabis law reform.

There are several reasons why a young person might feel that the generations before them had failed in their duty of stewardship, but the unwillingness to reform the cannabis laws are one of the foremost. For a young person today, the thought that the nation’s elderly are sitting back on a fat pension drinking whisky and chomping painkillers, while at the same time putting you in prison for growing a medicinal flower, seems obscene.

Given these reasons, why would the young not come to see the elderly as evil? The indifference of the elderly towards the suffering caused to the young by cannabis prohibition certainly appears evil to those suffering it. As a result, their coming to hate those pushing it on them is inevitable. And by such means, society is divided and conquered.

Cannabis prohibition doesn’t just divide society on the basis of age.

Understanding New Zealand also showed that the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being New Zealand-born was 0.73, which is very strong. This is because cannabis use is an integral part of Kiwi culture – it brings Maoris and white people together as well as rugby and barbecues, and especially when it comes to younger demographics.

Because of the central role of cannabis in Kiwi culture, cannabis prohibition is something that pits New Zealand-born Kiwis against immigrants. This is a recipe for deep resentment, because this plays along a pre-existing fracture line in society. If the New Zealand-born would come to feel that it was only because of recent immigrants that they were not allowed to freely use cannabis, they could become very angry.

Neither is the damage done to social cohesion just a matter between different groups. Cannabis prohibition also destroys solidarity within groups.

There are occasions where people don’t get together because the illegal nature of cannabis means that some people don’t want to be associated with others. Many a party guest has been uninvited because the hosts were not sure that the guest would be comfortable with the cannabis being smoked there, or because the hosts didn’t want the guest bringing cannabis to their house.

In such ways, all manner of natural social bonds have been broken because one or the other party was a cannabis user. This isn’t just seen at parties but in romantic relationships and in the workplace too. If cannabis is illegal, then cannabis users will naturally not trust non-cannabis users and non-cannabis users will naturally not trust cannabis users. These divisions are so needless.

As mentioned in another chapter, cannabis prohibition has had a severe impact on people’s respect for the Police. But cannabis prohibition impacts other industries as well. Some people no longer trust their doctors because of their inability to speak honestly about the medicinal value of cannabis. Some people no longer trust journalists because of their past fearmongering and sensationalising over the issue. This loss of trust impacts social cohesion.

Worst of all, prohibition has caused some people to dislike their country and society, when that need not have been the case. This is especially true of those who have faced the wrath of the justice system.

How can a person respect a society that wants to put them in a cage for using a medicinal plant? How can a person respect the hypocrisy that sees hundreds of people kill themselves with alcohol every year, while at the same time targeting others for something much less harmful? Cannabis prohibition is such a poor idea that it cannot be enforced without stoking massive anger and resentment.

All this anger and resentment has had an injurious effect on social cohesion. Prohibition has caused people to dislike and mistrust each other when they otherwise wouldn’t have done so. This has had the total effect of making society worse. The only way to fix it is to legalise cannabis.

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.

Slave Morality in 2019

Some people have made the assumption that, because Christian morals have faded from the zeitgeist in recent decades, Nietzschean concepts like slave/master morality are no longer relevant. As this essay will examine, this is not only wrong but the opposite of the truth. Slave morality, in 2019, is more influential than ever before.

The slave/master morality dichotomy comes from The Genealogy of Morals. In this book, Nietzsche outlined the distinction between the master morality that arises in a state of Nature, which divides the world into good and bad, and the slave morality that arises after civilisation and which divides the world into good and evil, with the evil being the same as the good of the master.

Understanding slave morality is to understand resentment: the man with slave mentality resents the man with master morality, and seeks to bring him down. This resentment is the emotion that arises when the ego cannot get consensual reality to conform to its will, as a slave cannot. Resentment is, therefore, the natural consequence of weakness, whether that weakness be physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual.

One major problem with the modern world is that it is heavily overpopulated. We are coming up to 8,000,000,000 human inhabitants on this planet. This means that the vast bulk of us have effectively no influence over the course of the world, or even over our own lives. We can only move around in small boxes built by other people.

The result is that there are now previously unheard of levels of resentment in our society. This resentment has found a florid range of expression.

Social Justice Warrior culture is one of most apparent examples. The resentment of the weak can be clearly heard in the cries about privilege and oppression. The mantra of SJW culture is that whoever has power is automatically the bad guy in any conflict against someone with less power. The intention of SJWs is the same as that of the slave moralist: to rip down anyone strong and call them evil.

As Ted Kaczynski pointed out in Industrial Society and Its Future, these impulses on the part of the leftist can’t ever be satisfied. Their passion to change the world comes from the resentment of being stupid and ignorant, and this doesn’t go away no matter who they destroy. So every time they succeed in destroying someone, they simply move on to the next target.

Therefore, as long as resentment exists, there will be Social Justice Warrior culture. This culture will, like slave moralities everywhere, try and destroy anyone who is happy. SJW culture chooses to do this by calling them bigots, Nazis and racists, and declaring that all good in their lives is privilege that has been stolen from someone else.

Related to SJW culture is ethnomasochism. This is when a person derives a particular kind of thrill from running down their own people. In the same way that a regular masochist will tell his dominatrix that everything he does is wrong, so does the ethnomasochist declare that the history of his people is littered with acts of irredeemable evil.

This ethnomasochism is related to the Holocaust religion, in the sense that it posits a white boogeyman whose excessive in-group favouritism has brought terrible suffering and evil to the world. In the quasi-religious context of ethnomasochism, ‘sin’ is replaced with ‘racism’, which has to be beaten out of society by ripping down anyone who suggests it’s okay to be white.

The resentment of the ethnomasochist leads them to destroy their own nation through support for things like open borders and the mass immigration of Muslims and Africans. The paradoxical fact that they derive a sense of control from this can be explained by comparing the mentality to someone who cuts their own arms: if one must suffer, then at least one can learn to suffer on demand.

Trans culture is a third example. Many men who have found that they don’t come up to the mark as men, i.e. men who women are not naturally attracted to, also find that they can get more attention if they pretend to be women. This is particularly common among men who are physical weaklings. This behaviour mimics a mental illness known as gender dysphoria.

The fundamental motivation for many of these people is to destroy the legitimate enjoyment that normal people get out of natural interactions between masculine and feminine. They want to destroy the natural concept of both “man” and “woman” so that healthy people who fit into these roles cannot enjoy them. A generation ago, homosexuality filled this social niche, but today it’s no longer shocking enough to do so.

Already trans culture has had enough of an impact to make it difficult for quality women to find a man worth being devoted to. By continuing to delegitimise and denormalise healthy expressions of masculinity and femininity, those who promote trans culture find expression for their resentment by destroying the natural and the beautiful.

The inability to understand the importance of free speech or the right to self-defence is yet another example. When a person with slave mentality gets into power, as has happened in New Zealand with the ascension of Jacinda Ardern to the Prime Minister’s position, they are liable to strip these rights away from the populace.

This is made possible by the resentment of the dumb and boring conformists who have nothing interesting to say. Slaves don’t care about the erosion of free speech because they have nothing to say worth listening to, and therefore are not impacted by the loss of an ability to speak, any more than the average person would be impacted by a ban on professional boxing.

People with slave morality don’t understand the desire of master moralists to have the ability to defend themselves either. After all, the defining feature of a slave is that he will not defend himself if he is beaten. The resentment that comes from being this weak manifests as a desire to remove other people’s ability to defend themselves.

A fifth way is the bizarre alliance with Islam. As a psychologist writing in New English Review has explained, Islam is the perfect religion for the resentful who like to see themselves as victims. It takes the same persecution mania as the other Abrahamic cults and raises it to another degree. Muslims resent the current order of the world, and so they are natural allies to the slave moralists.

Many secular Westerners with slave mentality have powerful sympathies for Islam, and can relate to a person throwing their life away in a suicide bombing. After all, the more one resents life, the less value one puts on it. As Nietzsche wrote, the slave moralist is the one who has said ‘No!’ to life, and there is no more vivid expression of this rejection of life than a suicide bombing.

The depth of the resentment can be seen by the size of the cognitive dissonance that arises when the Islamophile is asked about Islam’s attitude to women and homosexuals. Despite the brutally cruel oppression of these groups by Muslim culture, the resentment of the Islamophile is so great that all of these crimes will be swept under the carpet. In this sense, the Islamic apologist is to this generation what the Communist apologist was to the previous one.

These are merely a sample of all the various ways that slave morality expresses itself in 2019. The frightening thing is that, as the world gets more impersonal and more overpopulated, slave morality looks set to become even more influential. The only solution appears to be a massive cull, and an emptying out of the cities where this cancerous mentality has its strongholds.

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.

The Case For Cannabis: It Doesn’t Matter That Substance Abusers Use Cannabis

Some people are hesitant to support cannabis law reform because they don’t want to make it easier for substance abusers to destroy themselves. Their fear is that legal cannabis will simply provide another substance for substance abusers to get wasted on. This article will explain why cannabis prohibition is not the best way to deal with those fears.

Like many of the arguments against cannabis law reform, this one is mostly based on a misconception of the psychology of cannabis users, and of substance abusers in general. It could be called the Trainspotting myth, because some people believe that the trajectory of cannabis use proceeds much like heroin use does in the film based on the eponymous Irvine Welsh book.

The fear is that legal cannabis will simply provide another way for degenerates to destroy themselves, and so why should the Government facilitate this? The fewer legal drugs available, the fewer easily-accessible avenues for self-destruction. Better to keep cannabis illegal to persuade people to go straight.

The sort of moraliser that makes arguments like this is generally not the same kind of person that hangs out with actual heavy substance users. As such, they don’t understand the psychology of them. Almost no-one goes from living a completely clean life to misusing any drug just because they “got addicted”.

The reason why people become substance addicts is usually because they have untreated mental illnesses, and this leads to a much stronger sense of enjoyment from the feeling of being drunk/stoned/wasted. The more unpleasant one’s thoughts, the more pleasant to escape from them. Therefore, it’s not so much the drug that leads to the abuse but the way the mind and brain are wired.

There are cases where people are substance abusers, and it may be that, for some of these people, legal cannabis means that they abuse more cannabis than they would have done if it was illegal. If this means that they avoid abusing worse drugs, then this is a good thing. All things being equal, it’s better for a person to use cannabis every day than to use several of the drugs listed in the image at the top of this page.

There’s no guarantee that any individual cannabis user is going to smoke cannabis until they die. Plenty of cannabis users, even heavy ones, get sick of smoking it and move on to other things. After all, although cannabis can be great fun, it can also get boring, much like alcohol and women and loud music and all the other things that people like to indulge in for a while.

So it’s better for them to get their fix on a drug that they are going to survive than on one that is going to kill them. Let them get their kicks on something that’s not going to do any long-term damage. It’s much, much better for people to use cannabis – and to perhaps need a few weeks to come back to normal – than to use something that will permanently change their brain chemistry.

An intelligent approach to cannabis law reform would put the emphasis on harm minimisation. If a person is honestly concerned about the total damage and suffering that a substance abuser might cause themselves, then a regime of regulated, legal cannabis would lead to less harm, for a variety of reasons.

Substance abusers are much more likely to get help from mental health professionals if their substance is legal. This fact has been clearly demonstrated by the willingness of patients to talk to their doctors about their alcohol or tobacco use compared to their willingness to talk about their methamphetamine use. If a substance is illegal there is a lot of fear associated with it.

Legal cannabis would make it easier for actual substance abusers – the sort who are destroying their lives – to trust their doctors or drug counsellors. This would make them more likely to take advice to either quit, or, if necessary, to go on a treatment program such as one that tapers off cannabis.

Legal cannabis would also make it possible for accurate and honest educational campaigns to exist. Right now, there’s no reason for any cannabis user to believe anything the Government says about the substance, because everyone knows they lie about it. So if the Government gave intelligent advice about protecting the lungs, it may not be heeded.

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.

What New Zealand Could Afford if We Didn’t Take in Refugees

The tendency of most social democratic governments is to tax and spend. The usual pattern is to spend ever more as extra special interests keep making new demands. This inevitably leads to the downfall of those governments, as they end up spending money on white elephants and neglecting their core voters. This article looks at how the Sixth Labour Government is neglecting its own people by importing 1,500 refugees a year.

According to this New Zealand Herald article, the costs of refugee resettlement to New Zealand is roughly $130,000,000 every year. This suggests that each of the 1,500 refugees costs an average of roughly $90,000 per year, which is similar to the costs of keeping a person in prison.

This $130 million comes out of general taxation and means that we can’t spend $130 million on other things. Despite claims to the contrary, it’s impossible to spend the same dollar twice. So spending this money on refugees who we have decided to import means that we have to tighten our belts on $130 million of spending somewhere else in the economy.

So what have we chosen to forgo? Or, more accurately, what have our rulers elected to take away from us?

According to the Ministry of Social Development, there are 286,000 New Zealanders on a main benefit at the time of March 2019. These beneficiaries are also paid out of general taxation, i.e. the same fund as pays for refugees.

If we would lower the refugee quota to zero, we would have the spare money to give every beneficiary a Christmas bonus on the order of $500 every year in the lead up to the summer holidays. This would be a much better use of the money than importing problems into the neighbourhoods that those beneficiaries live in. A $500 bonus at the time of year when things are the tightest would make a profound difference to the quality of life of New Zealand’s poorest.

It might also make a difference to New Zealand’s suicide rates, as stress over Christmas and New Year’s, particularly financial stress, is known to be a common trigger for suicide attempts.

The ongoing homelessness crisis is another issue that could do with a cool hundred million dollars. A Stuff article reports that it will cost $4.1 million to house 100 homeless people in Christchurch. At that rate, if the $130 million we currently spend yearly on refugees was used on housing our own people, it would cover the housing of close to 3,000 Kiwis.

3,000 is close to the number of people currently believed to be homeless in Auckland. Since the vast majority of those homeless are Kiwis, it seems neglectful, if not callous, to spend $130 million on refugees instead, especially when that money could simply buy the houses to put almost 1,000 homeless in (assuming a house homes four people and costs $600,000).

Many of those Kiwis will have paid into the social system themselves through taxation or through service. It’s cruel to house foreigners at their expense.

Helping our own is more cost effective than importing refugees and helping them instead, because there is no language or cultural barrier to overcome and thus no need for interpreters or cultural guides. It is also much better for social cohesion, because our own usually have families that live here, and a whole family is lifted if their weakest member is helped.

Perhaps most appallingly, the New Zealand Parliament decided in 2015 that providing free breakfasts and lunches to the poorest 20% of schoolchildren, at a cost of $10-14 million, was too expensive. It seems incredible on the face of it, but our rulers are willing to spend ten times more on importing dependent foreigners than on feeding their own hungriest children!

A society that imports dependent foreigners and takes care of them, while leaving its own children to go hungry during the day, is one that cannot long survive. The inherent contradiction means that few of the next generation will have any confidence in the system, and will withdraw or revolt, as there is no point in contributing to a nation that treats its own worse than it does outsiders. It’s better to let it die and start again.

It’s important to underline here that, although spending a nine-figure sum of money on refugees while neglecting your own people is an act of evil, it’s not the refugees themselves who ought to take the blame. At worst, they are merely the receivers of stolen goods, in that they accepted the inheritance that our ruling class had stolen from us. There’s no shame in taking advantage of people as foolish as we have been.

The blame for not being able to house our own people and feed our own kids falls squarely on our own politicians who control the spending of our tax money, and on us for letting those politicians get away with it.

They are the ones who leave the people they’re representing to die while they lavish money on foreigners instead. They are the ones who distract us with emotive rhetoric about “doing the right thing” while ignoring the needs of the people they rule over. They are the ones who promote the idea that anyone complaining about their evil is themselves evil: a racist, white nationalist, Nazi, speaker of hate or similar.

Much of the suffering that Kiwis at the back of the queue are enduring is only happening because our rulers are spending the money on importing refugees instead. Lowering the refugee quota to zero would free up $130 million to spend on amenities for those among us who are doing it hard. It’s a lot of money, and all we lose is virtue signalling opportunity.