philosophy – Page 91

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.

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: 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.

The Conceit of Silver

Alchemically speaking, there are two great conceits – one lesser and one greater. The lesser one is known as the Conceit of Iron, and relates to the arrogance that comes with physical dominance. The greater one, generally speaking, comes with intellectual dominance, and is closely related to the concept of hubris. This essay will examine what is known as the Conceit of Silver.

Silver is the first of the two precious metals, and one arrives in the realm of silver once iron is sufficiently brightened. As one progresses up the alchemical scale, thought moves from the simple bipartite distinction of strong/weak to the new distinction of smart/dumb. As such, there are now two distinct kinds of weak: the dumb-strong, and the dumb-weak.

The Conceit of Silver is not the same thing as simply thinking one is smarter than everyone else, although it is related. If one is intelligent enough to dominate both attractive women and muscular men, it’s very easy to become arrogant. Possessing unusual intelligence can feel like a superpower, because it makes it much easier to create change in accordance with one’s will.

The problem is that silver, by itself, cannot make moral decisions. Intelligence is a great thing, but without wisdom it can only ever be directed towards fulfilling egoic desires. Without the capacity to feel empathy for other sentient beings, an individual cannot act to end the suffering of them. Such a person is unenlightened.

Without at least some of the element of gold, a person acting in the realm of silver will act to accumulate resources or to raise their social standing, not to reduce the suffering of other sentient beings. Much of the moral grandstanding that people of silver engage in claims to achieve the latter, while really achieving the former. It isn’t always clear how much of this is conscious and how much is unconscious.

The Conceit of Silver is, in short, the belief that higher intelligence, education or social standing makes one a moral authority.

This happens in two major ways: by thinking one is gold when one is silver, or by denying the existence of gold altogether. This is a very easy mistake to make if one is of the silver, because if one is aware of such, then it follows as a general rule that most of the rest of the world is baser. Generally speaking, others are dumber, and their desires short-sighted. But this rule does not always hold.

The classic example of the Conceit of Silver is when a person achieves a high position through scheming, inheritance or politics, and then assumes that they must possess a commensurate moral superiority. At its worst, this conceit can lead a person into thinking that their individual egoic desires are the same as the Will of God. Such a person can be extremely dangerous if in power.

The Conceit of Silver is that it assumes itself to be divine. Individuals prone to this conceit are apt to say things like “Intelligence makes humans unique from the rest of the animal kingdom,” inspired by their failure to appreciate the perspectives of others. This will usually reinforce a belief that intelligence confers moral authority, or, even worse, a belief that education or birth station confers moral authority.

In fact, there’s an argument that the only reason why intelligence evolved so prodigiously in the human animal is because our social structure allowed for an unprecedented degree of scheming, lying, backstabbing, cheating and all kinds of general skullduggery. From this perspective, intelligence could even be seen as a moral negative, a sign that one clings to material power.

Finding an example of the Conceit of Silver is easy. All it takes is to go to a university and to find a person who believes that they might be smarter than everyone else there. At any university, there will be plenty of them. In the absence of a university it’s only necessary to find a place where intellectuals gather, or even a professional association.

Almost invariably, when a person becomes intelligent enough, they start to assume that they are a moral authority of some kind. They start to conflate their understanding of how systems are with how systems should be. People who do this are not always wrong – understanding a system often does lead to an understanding of how that system could be optimised to minimise the suffering it causes. But that isn’t necessarily so.

It isn’t easy for an intelligent person to agree that their brainpower is not particularly valuable in comparison to wisdom. The majority of intelligent people make a living out of their brainpower by way of learning a valuable profession. It’s therefore very hard for them to set all of this silver aside, and to admit that possession of it doesn’t make someone a morally superior person.

It takes a mercurial sort of personality to admit that one’s intelligence, however vast, is not sufficient to conclude that one is fundamentally more valuable. That, despite being smarter, one might be of less value than a person of iron or clay if the right circumstances arose, or if one had the wrong moral direction. This element of mercury is necessary for the alchemist to successfully transition from silver to gold.

The truth is that gold is the most malleable of all metals, and that gives it one paradoxical quality: it doesn’t resist when claims to leadership are made by men of silver. Because silver is harder than gold, it’s usually possible for those of silver to force those of gold out of leadership positions by way of intimidation or verbal and social aggression.In today’s degraded age, this has taken place all over the world.

The universities, the religious and spiritual movements and the political movements have all been taken over by materialists pushing some irrational political ideology or other. The element of gold has been pushed to the peripheries, making it possible to ask whether we live in the Kali Yuga. The Conceit of Silver is everywhere.

The Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Is Cruel

There are a lot of differing political philosophies in the world, and they disagree on a great many matters. The closest we’ve been able to get to a universally agreed-upon value is that the Government ought to act to minimise human suffering. This article will make the argument that prohibition ought to be relaxed because it is cruel.

Cruelty is a malicious disregard for the suffering of other sentient beings. It was cruel to perform electroshock therapy on people without their consent. It is cruel not to summon medical help when one encounters a person in distress. It was cruel to not allow homosexuals to express their genuine regard for each other. Cannabis prohibition falls into the same category.

Some people will argue that not being allowed to use cannabis doesn’t constitute cruelty because it’s not really a big deal. There are many other things that we’re not allowed to do, so what does it matter if cannabis is another one of those things?

But that’s looking at it around the wrong way. People naturally live, and part of life is to explore what comes your way. People will naturally use cannabis, because others will offer it to them. Some of those people will find they really like it, perhaps even enough to use it daily. Punishing people for an act that they do naturally – especially when that act harms no-one – is an act of cruelty.

It’s cruel to cage a bird, or keep a cat inside, because it’s a violation of their natural instincts to be free. The natural instincts of a human being is to explore consciousness. Isn’t it, then, an act of cruelty to prevent them? Preventing a human from exploring their consciousness is as unnecessarily restrictive as keeping a cat or dog in a small cage for their whole life.

Forcing people to follow arbitrary laws and dictates is cruel, because it makes those people feel like they are of less value than those imposing the rules. Putting someone in a cage where they suffer intensely from being in close physical contact with extremely dangerous people, just because they don’t follow those arbitrary decrees, is beyond cruel. Yet, that is what our system does in the pursuit of enforcing cannabis prohibition.

Perhaps the worst cruelty is that done to the family members of those who are incarcerated for cannabis offences. For a family member who is relying on certain other members of their family for income or support, it seems almost egregious for the state to incarcerate those others on account of a cannabis offence.

It’s unlikely that many cannabis prohibitionists would like to explain to a small child how the supposed dangers of cannabis are so great that it necessitates putting their parent in jail. They would much rather prefer that social workers and Police officers explained that to the children of parents imprisoned for cannabis offences. This cowardice exposes that cannabis prohibition is underpinned by an absence of compassion.

Some people ought to think about what sort of world they want to live in, because the compassion or cruelty of the laws under which we live have an impact on whether people act to ameliorate each other’s suffering or not. The legal system, whether we like it or not, sets the standard for whether we are compassionate or harsh towards those who really crash out.

Passing a law that says a person has to go in a cage if they grow a medicinal plant sets a precedent for what the appropriate level of compassion in our society is. And it’s a low one. Locking people up for using medicinal flowers shows that we are a brutal people. It shows that even if a person can provide a fair reason for using a medicinal substance, the Government can just bulldoze through and imprison them anyway.

Some of the older prohibitionists might like to consider that they themselves will soon be in need of compassion, because their bodies will continue to decline towards death. In a person’s final few years, they are just as dependent on the goodwill of others as they are in their first few years. If one is old, therefore, it’s to one’s own benefit to normalise compassion and empathy.

Even if the argument is made that the point of the cannabis laws is to prevent suffering (by way of preventing addiction and mental illness), the reality is that there are hundreds of millions of cannabis users who are happy to tell you that their use of cannabis prevents suffering. It’s cruel not to listen to these people, to tell them that their claims of being helped by cannabis are delusions and that they should be in a cage for their own good.

Ultimately, this argument asserts that there’s enough cruelty in the world, and that we don’t need any more. Cannabis should be legalised because it’s cruel to punish people for using a medicinal flower that doesn’t harm anyone. This would contribute to a world with less suffering in it – something that we all benefit from.

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.