Category: society

Should Kiwis With Historical Cannabis Convictions Be Compensated?

Now that the New Zealand Parliament has officially apologised to Kiwis convicted of historic homosexuality offences, the day when they apologise to medicinal cannabis users draws ever closer. So in much the same way that there are calls for gay men convicted for homosexuality offences to be compensated, there will also be calls for people convicted of medicinal cannabis offences to be compensated.

This isn’t necessarily a brand new idea – Article D of the twenty-six point plan in the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook calls for compensation on the grounds that a criminal record for a medicinal cannabis offence severely impacts the sufferer’s social and financial standing.

It’s easy for most to agree that a person’s rights to cultivate a herbal medicine are in the same category as their rights to have sex with another man. There is no good reason to sic the Police on people who do either, because neither action causes harm to anyone else.

And so it’s straightforward to accept that there is a genuine case for compensation for harm done to the victims of the Police and Justice systems. After all, putting someone in a cage for an action that harms no-one is itself a crime.

There are life-long consequences to getting a criminal conviction, such as extreme difficulty in finding a job, getting a loan or being accepted to an academic course. The financial losses to these three consequences alone might add up to half a million dollars or more over the course of a lifetime.

So most of us can accept that it’s fair that the Government pays money to put right the damage that it caused to its own people by effectively conducting a war on them without their consent.

If a person wants to make the argument that compensation should be denied because the offences were technically crimes at the time they were committed, they ought to ask themselves if they would be happy with a criminal conviction for reading this VJM Publishing article in a dystopic future where websites without state approval were considered pirate media.

Because it’s very easy to dismiss the psychological damage caused by arbitrary misapplications of judicial power when it doesn’t happen to oneself.

What ought to happen is, first, that it be written into the New Zealand Bill of Rights that actions that do not have victims cannot be crimes. This will not only entrench the legality of both homosexual activity and medicinal cannabis use, but it will also make it impossible for any future offence in this category (i.e. victimless ones) to be pushed into law.

What needs to happen, second, is that a commission is put together to calculate – using the same evidence-based methodology that is being pushed by some with regards to cannabis law reform – an accurate dollar figure corresponding to the amount of suffering caused by being persecuted by this law.

Possibly the fairest way would be to declare a set sum of compensation per conviction and per day in jail if there was a custodial sentence.

For example, we might say that the amount of personal damage inflicted on a person by giving them a criminal conviction was equal to $25,000, with a further $250 for each day spent in prison.

And third we need to decide if we’re actually going to pay this compensation or if we’re going to just say “Fuck ’em”.

An Anarcho-Homicidalist Primer

Homicidalism is a new branch of anarchist thought. The essential belief is this: authoritarianism will always arise unless dominance hierarchies are actively resisted by killing the people at the top of them. The impetus behind this line of reasoning comes from a passage from the great author Aleksnder Solzhenitsyn.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

In essence, homicidalism recognises that individuals have the ability to kill each other by exercising their free will, and that homicide (and fear of homicide) is the basic social tool keeping authoritarianism in check.

Consider this thought experiment. Try to think of a law that would not change that day if the people who were to be arrested all behaved in the manner that Solzhenitsyn described above.

A practical example of homicidalism in action was given in the case of the cannabis laws by Jan Molenaar, who was responsible for a Police siege that led to the death of one Police officer. Considering that there were 10,487 total cannabis offences in New Zealand in 2014, and that the total number of Police officers is fewer than this, it’s clear that cannabis prohibition could not continue for more than a few days if every victim of it resisted “Molenaar-style”.

Of course, Molenaar did not survive long after taking guns to the Police. This is both obvious and a crucial point.

The first law of homicidalism is this. All tyranny exists because the people oppressed are unable or unwilling to kill their oppressors. This is because it is in the nature of oppressors to tighten the screws further and further until the population begins to resist, and then to release them a little so that the population is oppressed but not enough to revolt.

Thus, homicidalism recognises the psychological reality that tyrants tyrannise to the degree that they can get away with it.

Therefore, all oppression exists because the people oppressed have set the point at which they will revolt and kill their oppressors too low. Had they “loved freedom enough”, as Solzhenitsyn put it, they would have revolted earlier, would have killed their oppressors before the oppressors could have established a stranglehold.

Anarcho-homicidalism is explicitly anti-Christian. The very message of Christianity is, as Friedrich Nietzsche taught us, a slave morality, in which people submit to authoritarians out of fear and then try to drag all others down by way of resentment.

To the homicidalist, the admonishment to “turn the other cheek” is to encourage tyranny by lessening the consequences of trying to oppress a population. “Render unto Ceasar” is the same as accepting the rule of tyranny in the world.

The real difficulty with homicidalism is that it is something of a taboo subject, for the obvious reason that anyone with an intention to commit tyranny instinctively fears anarcho-homicidalists. It is unlikely that homicidalism will ever be taught at a Government-funded school, for example. It is also very likely that anyone publicly promoting homicidalism will get a visit from the Police.

Homicidalism is explicitly anarchistic because it is considered immoral to kill anyone weaker than yourself. This inverts the usual pattern of things, and provides a clear distinction between homicidalism and serial killing. It is also a bridge between anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism, as both of these sides implicitly concede that the means of production always belong to those most willing to kill to control them.

It also has an immune system built in. One of the great problems with most anarchist solutions is that, when the power structure is abolished, there are no mechanisms in place preventing it from arising again.

Homicidalism gets around this by simply continuing to kill anyone who tries to take charge. The ruling class are killed until they stop ruling, and then anyone who tries to disrupt the ensuing anarchy by creating another dominance hierarchy is summarily executed by the nearest homicidalist.

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This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s upcoming Anarcho-Homicidalist’s Manifesto.

Apologising For Anti-Gay Oppression Means Nothing If The Government Still Oppresses

Thirty years after the New Zealand Government stopped violating the rights of Kiwi homosexuals, New Zealand politicians have finally worked up the courage to crawl out of their holes and apologise – but are they sincere?

The House of Representatives today took the extraordinary measure of apologising to Kiwis with historical criminal convictions for engaging in homosexual activity. The move was broadly welcomed, the general attitude suggesting that putting someone in a cage for an act that harmed no-one was, in hindsight, wrong.

Let’s be honest. What the New Zealand Government did to gay people wasn’t just wrong – it was a human rights abuse.

The reason why it qualifies as a human rights abuse is that humans have the inherent, inviolable right to do whatever they like as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.

Engaging in consensual homosexual activity did not harm anyone else, therefore it wasn’t a crime. Therefore, putting gay people in cages for doing it was a human rights abuse.

After some decades of pressure from reasonable people, the New Zealand Parliament appears to have finally accepted this logic and apologised.

But the truly obscene thing about this whole affair isn’t men sticking their cocks up each other’s arses.

The truly obscene thing is how our current crop of gutless politicians, safely separated by thirty years of history, happily stick the boot into their forebears of a previous generation, while paying no mind to the fact that they are still oppressing cannabis users with the same total absence of justification as they once oppressed homosexuals.

So how can we take the Government’s apology for violating the human rights of homosexuals seriously when it continues to do exactly the same thing to cannabis users?

Marama Davidson, who never misses an opportunity to shamelessly grandstand, spoke in Parliament today about the deaths caused by the anti-homosexual prejudice engendered by the law criminalising homosexual activity.

But regarding the fact that prejudice and discrimination against medicinal cannabis users is still taking lives today, she (like everyone in Parliament apart from Julie Anne Genter) remains completely silent.

The cowards in Parliament won’t be making apologetic speeches about the damage caused by cannabis prohibition for another thirty years, not until most of the current lot are dead.

Grant Robertson stood up in Parliament today and said, on the subject of homosexuality being illegal, that “the arrests, the imprisonments and the fear of that happening did not just ruin lives and destroy potential – it killed people. Hundreds, possibly thousands of lives have been lost because men could not bear the shame, the stigma, and the hurt caused by this Parliament.”

Exactly the same words could be said about cannabis prohibition – but our politicians lack the courage to say them.

Justice Minister Amy Adams said “this apology is a symbolic but important act that we hope will help address the harm and right this historic wrong.”

If the New Zealand House of Representatives is serious about being apologetic for violating the human rights of Kiwi homosexuals, why are they continuing to violate the human rights of Kiwi medicinal cannabis users?

The prejudice against cannabis users – one that is enforced by the New Zealand Parliament to this very day – has taken ten times as many lives as the law against homosexuality and continues to take them.

Until the current Parliament takes the general issue of human rights seriously – not just rights for favoured, fashionable minorities – this apology can be dismissed as an exhibition of crocodile tears.

New Swear Words For A New Digital Age

“I got in trouble for saying the F-word,” goes the common lament of schoolboys across the Anglosphere. Just about everyone understands the quoted sentence – but few realise that it has two different meanings.

For most of the modern history of the English-speaking people “the F-word” meant ‘fuck’. Swear words are usually taboo because of their association with a sacred subject, so it’s not surprising that a culture subjected to the sexual repression of Abrahamism would make a swear word out of the sexual act.

However, we’re no longer in a sexually repressed age. Far from it – arguably no other cultural tradition has ever found within itself the range of sexual expression and alternative identities as the modern West.

In fact, if anything we have swung the other way (no pun intended). Now it’s seen as deeply immoral and aggressive to criticise anyone for any sexual expression, even those undertaken in front of children in broad daylight.

And so, the F-word isn’t ‘fuck’ any more. The F-word is now ‘faggot’.

If you don’t believe this, just try using either word on social media and see what sort of response you get.

People use ‘fuck’ all the time on FaceBook and nothing bad ever happens to them. No-one reports it, no-one cares, and no-one appears to be seriously suggesting that it breaches what community standards FaceBook has.

However, people calling each other ‘faggots’ is strictly discouraged by means of bans – even though the word was barely considered a profanity 15 years ago.

Even better, observe a young person when something undesired happens to them, like stubbing a toe: chances are that they will cry out ‘faggot!’ rather than any variant of ‘fuck’.

They are also much more likely to tease their friends by calling them faggots than by calling them fuckwits or fuckheads. This is now also true of ‘nigger’ and various epithets for Jews, such as ‘kike’ etc.

So any young person trying to be edgy isn’t going to bother saying the old F-word. That’s so passe that even our grandmothers use it without blushing.

The swear words of this century will reflect this century’s social mores – casual sex is in, setting boundaries is out.