Category: philosophy

‘I Like Smoking Weed’ Is a Perfectly Legitimate Argument

There is a faulty premise in the national consciousness – the premise that the pro-cannabis lobby has the responsibility to make the case for legalising cannabis before prohibition can be repealed. All kinds of politicians, from Andrew Little to Peter Dunne, have trotted out this lazy deception.

This line of rhetoric is false because it relies on a more fundamental premise, which is that the manner cannabis was made illegal was legitimate in the first place.

The usual apologia is that the politicians are our lawful representatives and so the laws they pass are done so with our consent, and so the politicians have the consent of the governed, and so all the laws they have passed are legitimate, including the ones pertaining to cannabis prohibition.

Basic logic that even a child can understand will tell you that, in the case of cannabis, the lack of a victim makes the law against it categorically different to other laws.

Punching people in the face is bad because it causes suffering.

Stealing someone’s food is bad because it will make them suffer from hunger.

Killing people is bad because it causes suffering to the remaining friends and family (not to mention the person while they’re being killed).

Murdering, shooting, stabbing, raping, kidnapping, defrauding, robbing, stealing, assaulting and battering – all of these are crimes because they have victims.

Outside of the delusional fantasy role-playing world that judges, lawyers and politicians have invented, crimes are distinguished from non-crimes on the basis that crimes cause suffering, not on the basis that a bunch of paedophiles in Wellington have decreed them thus.

This might sound really obvious to any Buddhist readers out there, but to many Kiwis, conditioned from childhood to obey authority without ever questioning its legitimacy, it appears revelatory.

It also puts the moral responsibility back on us to consider if the laws being passed by our supposed representatives actually have the effect of reducing suffering in New Zealand or not. The responsibility is not on our political representatives to make moral decisions on our behalf, because politicians are men of silver and philosophy is the preserve of everyone.

One argument is that cannabis, even if not directly harmful, may be indirectly harmful because of long-term health considerations of the user that the general taxpayer has to pay to treat. This argument contends that we ought to wait for science to prove that cannabis is relatively harmless.

The truth is this – we don’t need to prove that science says cannabis should be legal because science was never used to make it illegal. We also don’t need to prove that cannabis is harmless because harmless is not the standard things have to reach in order to be legal.

It’s legal to consume any of alcohol, caffeine, sugar, fat or tobacco to whatever extent one likes and to have the taxpayer cover any medical costs that may arise.

It’s legal to fill the tank of your car up with petrol, a vital and ever-diminishing resource, and to drive around and around in circles for no reason.

It’s legal to join a rugby team and to hit another person in a tackle with the intent of injuring them and to break a bone oneself and to go on ACC.

It’s legal to go into a forest with a rifle and shoot dead a whole bunch of large mammals.

All of these activities arguably cause more harm than smoking cannabis does, even under the broadest interpretation of health issues.

The standard to make cannabis illegal – which has never been met and which never will be met – is that there is more suffering under a regime of cannabis freedom than under a regime of cannabis prohibition.

Until this standard is met, no further reason for using cannabis need be given than ‘I like smoking weed.’

Why Lucifer is a Symbol of Enlightenment

Even in his aspect of the fallen angel, Lucifer is a symbol of enlightenment. In his place as King of the World, Lucifer shows the way towards maximal excellence in one’s life.

The Abrahamist interpretation of the myth of the fallen angel is that they were cast out of Heaven owing to a deliberate moral failure. The usual story is that God had put everything in its correct and perfect order, and Lucifer, out of pride, refuses to accept the primacy of this and therefore earns his sentence of being cast from Heaven – a sinner.

Like most things that Abrahamists believe, this is close to the opposite of the truth. To understand the real truth, one must understand that the Abrahamisms are chiefly male supremacist religions, as they were dreamed up by old men resentful of the young who were still sexually potent, as they once were.

Thus, Heaven can be taken as representing not a state of perfect balance, as one might consider perfection to be, but instead a state of perfect masculinity. The male God is in charge in Heaven and everyone knows it, and everyone knows their place in the hierarchy of subordination.

To another kind of mind, to the sort of person who might be said to be approaching a Luciferian state of consciousness, this state of affairs represents an excess of order so stultifying, so suffocating, that it is anti-life.

When everything is in a state of perfect order, nothing can ever change or go forwards, and this is tantamount to death for anyone who is not afraid of the feminine principle in her manifestation as chaos.

Therefore, as fallen angel, Lucifer most fairly represents someone who rejected the sterile purity and bubble-wrapped certainty of Heaven for the brutal, wild-eyed insanity of the World.

In doing so, he chose to embrace the material world rather than to be afraid of it, and thus made himself appear evil to the cowardly Abrahamists who mutilate their own sons lest they enjoy themselves unduly.

This is what makes Lucifer a symbol of evil to followers of the Abrahamic cults. Because these cults fear the physical world – an attitude reflected in their contempt for the feminine – they naturally envy and despise those who do not.

The main reason why the Abrahamist fears the material world is, ironically, his lack of spiritual knowledge. Believing that the material world is the primary reality, he naturally develops a terrified attitude towards death, observing it to be the death of the body he mistakenly identifies with, and so believing it to be the end of him.

Lucifer represents a rejection of, and a reaction to, this pants-pissing. He represents the masculine light of consciousness entering the dark, cold physical world, not as a fall or a punishment, or as the nefarious trap of some demiurge, but rather as an opportunity to make love.

Knowing himself to be the light of consciousness, and therefore knowing himself to be eternal and incapable of being sullied, Lucifer was not afraid of the material. In being not afraid, and in being truly spiritual, he represents a degree of masculinity that is the natural complement to the physical or material world.

This can even be read into the very name of Lucifer himself – a cognate of lucid and of lux, both of which carry connotations suggesting the light of consciousness.

This gets to the heart of why the reputation of Lucifer has been so relentlessly lied about. In representing the light of consciousness he embraced the physical world without fear, and so cannot be manipulated into disgracing himself or harming others through threats to his physical body.

If this degree of wisdom was more widespread there would be a higher standard of human existence in this place.

Cannabis and Alcohol Users Must Unite Against the Wowsers and Control Freaks

Some Kiwis might have woken up from a New Year’s-induced stupor long enough to ask: “What happened to the Wellington Sevens?” Well, sit down, folks – I’ve got a bitter and tragic tale to tell.

The short of it, though, is this – New Zealand is full of wowsers, and those wowsers saw Kiwis having a good time and decided that this had to be stomped down as soon as possible, lest anyone get carried away.

The linked article notes that the occasion was essentially “a two day party with a bit of sevens rugby on the side” and it died because “the organisers have slowly strangled the event with tighter and tighter regulations as the years went by.”

Amazingly, putting several tens of thousands of drunks in a confined space in the middle of summer didn’t end without problems.

But, as this essay will argue, so what?

14 years of what had grown to become the single greatest annual festival in the Kiwi cultural calendar, was destroyed by the Fun Police in a couple of years: “the wowsers have killed off the atmosphere that made the Wellington Sevens so popular.”

This year, an event that used to sell out a 30,000+ seat stadium in minutes has struggled to sell so much as 1,300 tickets. The general attitude towards the event from once-loyal partygoers is that “they can’t have fun at the event in case they upset someone.”

The question is: why do we let them do this to us?

So what if a few drunks caused trouble and created a sub-optimally family-friendly atmosphere. So what? Do we live in a McDonald’s playground?

It’s time to stop the rout! Everyone who enjoys drinking alcohol has to face up to this fact – cannabis is already illegal and tobacco is being made illegal. What’s going to stop the control freaks from cracking down on alcohol once they’ve banned tobacco?

And will Kiwis do anything it when it happens, or just take it up the arse as we have done thus far?

Is it acceptable that it is gradually becoming illegal to have fun? Are we doomed to end up like the Soviet Union, streets full of dour, grey-faced citizens conditioned to be afraid to crack a joke or a smile, lest they fall foul of some bureaucratic juggernaut that comes after them like a pitbull?

New Zealand has to face the very real possibility that, as our population continues to age, we will eventually ban every possible avenue of enjoyment and turn the whole country into a giant old folks’ home.

Pissheads and potheads, its time to acknowledge that we have a mutual enemy that is only growing in power as the population ages and our politicians become ever more out of touch with reality.

This enemy has existed all throughout history, and it waxes and wanes in strength according to the fashions of the age. It’s an enemy that resents all fun, resents all happiness, and which resents life itself.

The New Zealand Wowser is the single greatest threat to our quality of life. If we do not begin to oppose them, we will wake up one morning to find that everything is illegal except for a curated, Health and Safety-approved set of behaviours on a short list.

Virtue Signalling in the Post Truth Age

Observant readers may have noticed an increased awareness of a social phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘virtue signalling.’ This is exactly what is says it is – an attempt on the part of the person expressing themselves to enhance their social standing among the listeners by advocating a particular political viewpoint, and ostensibly on the grounds that it is the morally correct thing to do.

The most recognisable recent example of virtue signalling was all the people who expressed support for allowing Syrian refugees into their country as the Syrian Civil War accelerated.

What made this virtue signalling, as opposed to a genuine regard for the well-being of the Syrians, is that very few of the people making noise about the refugees actually cared about them one way or another. This was evident in two major ways.

The first was that the virtue signallers were mostly young, fashionable people who wouldn’t be seen dead with a refugee or in the kind of neighbourhood that the refugees are going to end up in if they are accepted. Very rarely did any of these people actually volunteer time to refugee services.

The second was that the virtue signallers, rather than making any effort to ensure that anything good happened to the Syrians, simply moved onto the next opportunity to signal virtue (which was opposing Brexit, and then opposing Trump).

These two points explain why, once the refugees are let in, they’re inevitably dumped in a cheap neighbourhood or suburb and forgotten about.

Virtue signalling has always existed. In fact, it is a part of nature. Darwin himself realised that the extravagant, luxurious tail of the peacock was a significant survival disadvantage as it was a beacon for predators and made it harder to escape them. Such a sight could only have evolved if there was some compensatory mechanism, such as if presence of a glorious tail attracted females to a degree that outweighed the increased death rate from having to bear it.

Virtue signalling signals more than just virtue. It also signals being part of the leisure classes, which necessitates the expression of contempt for the labouring classes and their unfashionable and brutal politics and desire for neighbourhood solidarity.

Virtue signalling can therefore be a statement of belonging.

In our society, being cluelessly out of touch with reality is seen by some as a virtue. It suggests that one is from a family wealthy enough to have shielded one from the harsh realities of life, and that one has enough leisure time to indulge in truly wasteful peccadilloes like advocating for the conquest of the West by a hostile foreign ideology.

Note that this has always existed in the human sphere – the previous generation of virtue signallers made a show out of advocating for communism, for the same reasons their descendants advocate for mass Muslim immigration. The generation before that signalled virtue by appeasing Hitler and claiming this was motivated by a sensitivity to the value of peace.

Unfortunately, there is now so much virtue signalling that when someone expresses a political opinion, the listener actually has no idea at all whether this opinion is genuinely believed, or if it is merely a brazen attempt to ingratiate the speaker with the sort of person the speaker presumes will agree with that opinion.

This would explain why mass Muslim immigration has such passionate apparent support from homosexuals, even though Muslims would gladly throw those same homosexuals off the top of buildings as soon as they were given the opportunity.

It may be that what is being signalled is not ‘virtue’ but rather a masculine or feminine orientation. So that a person against mass Muslim immigration is rather expressing themselves in a masculine manner, like when people advocate exercise, and anyone for it is expressing themselves in a feminine manner, like when people advocate veganism.

In the Post Truth Age, you can never take anything at face value, not even your own desires.