society – Page 162

The Fundamental Masculine and Feminine Moralities

People often talk about one singular, monolithic, ideal morality as is God was sitting up in the heavens waiting for us to figure it out. The belief appears to be that if we ever did figure this out, we would all behave according to it and life on Earth would be harmonious forevermore.

This childish magical thinking is, of course, false. The reality is that there are two very different moralities that represent opposite ends of an ethical spectrum upon which all actions fall.

The fundamental masculine morality is to maintain good order, and the fundamental feminine morality is to allow life to naturally express itself.

Maintaining good order and allowing life to naturally express itself might not sound like contradictions necessarily, but they are still poles on an ethical spectrum.

One can convince oneself of this by realising that all threats to good order arise from the natural expression of life, and that all bad order restricts the natural expression of life. Likewise, all good order allows for the natural expression of life, and all unnatural expressions of life lead to bad order.

This means that it is commonplace for adherents of the masculine morality to want to destroy expressions of life that threaten good order, and it is commonplace for adherents of feminine morality to want to destroy bad order that prevents natural expression of life.

For the most part, it’s entirely possible for these two moralities to work together. But sometimes they don’t.

A man might act according to masculine morality when he tends to his garden. A gardener is not at all interested in allowing life to express itself through the form of weeds. His task is to maintain good order by keeping the weeds out, by keeping the plants in correctly spaced rows, to prevent the soil from becoming too wet or too dry etc.

A woman might act according to feminine morality when she raises a child. When raising a child, women are generally not particularly concerned with the degree of order that child has. What she wants is for the child to express itself through growth, to be healthy and strong, to feel joy at being alive, and this is made more difficult by forcing order on it.

Masculine and feminine moralities therefore come into conflict when a given order is considered good by some and bad by others.

In fact, this is how most conflict starts. A king might consider his kingdom’s operation to demonstrate good order, but there may be forces in the kingdom who disagree, and who consider his rulership to be bad order.

These forces will come into conflict because the natural expression of the sentiments of those who disagree with the king’s rule will conflict with the king’s desire to maintain order, and the king will find himself forced to stamp those sentiments out else risk chaos befalling the kingdom.

In the same way that silver is a compromise between clay and iron and more valuable than either on account of its finer balance, so too does the correct course of action in any given situation appear as a balance between the masculine and feminine moralities.

Morally retarded people are those who are unable to find a balance between the masculine and feminine moral orientations, and so they either try and impose maximum order upon everything (penis-worshippers and control freaks) or maximum chaos upon everything (postmodernists and hyperfeminists).

People who go too far down the masculine track start wanting to maintain order for order’s sake. The concept of good order is forgotten.

Our cannabis laws are an excellent example of an excess of masculine moral sentiment. It’s obvious to everyone that the New Zealand cannabis laws are not fit for purpose and must be changed, but those who wish to maintain order for order’s sake are unable to countenance so much as a conversation about the subject.

People who go too far down the feminine track start wanting to introduce chaos for chaos’s sake. The concept of healthy chaos is forgotten. These people essentially “just want to watch the world burn”.

The refugee policy of Europe over the past two decades is an excellent example of an excess of feminine moral sentiment. The refusal to discriminate between the natives and non-natives, usually for what are claimed to be moral reasons, has led to a collapse in good order as all manner of chancers have flooded in to compete with the natives for resources.

The only way out of our predicament will be to find the correct balance between the masculine desire for order and the feminine desire for free expression.

Metaphysically that means choosing the right combination of clay and iron so that the overall structure can be polished into silver.

In other words, the same as it ever was.

Is The New Zealand Government About to See A Repeat of The 1990s?

The 1990s began with the chaos of a disintegrating Labour Government and ended with the chaos of a disintegrating National one

In the leadup to the 1990 General Election, the New Zealand Labour Party appeared to be falling to pieces. They had gone through three leaders in 15 months, with Mike Moore the most recent to wrest control of the jinxed idol, having convinced the hapless Labour Party caucus that he was a better bet for staving off what was looming as an electoral disaster.

The move turned a disaster into a catastrophe – the National Party won 67 seats in the election compared to Labour’s 29, as the Italy-style rapid changes in leadership gave the wider public the impression that Labour had lost the plot entirely.

This majority was enough for the National Party to force on the nation what the people called “Ruthanasia” – a Budget so callously tight-fisted that it appeared that National were trying to cull the poor through starvation.

The Budget was so unnecessarily cruel – in many cases leaving solo mothers unable to feed their own children at the end of the week – that even New Zealanders were appalled by it, and only by demoting the clearly psychopathic Ruth Richardson to the back benches did the National majority survive the 1993 General Election.

By the next election in 1996, the National Party had eroded most of the trust that Jim Bolger had earned in opposition, and they were only able to govern thanks to a rickety alliance with the New Zealand First Party.

When Jenny Shipley rolled Bolger in 1997, New Zealand had another psychopath in an influential position, and this made the alliance with Winston Peters untenable. Being neither a psychopath nor willing to submit to one, Peters was unable to work with Shipley and was duly sacked.

New Zealand First then disintegrated under the gravitational pull of the National Party as it tried to withdraw from its influence, and the New Zealand electorate responded to the wheels falling off the alliance by chucking the whole thing on the scrapyard.

The National Party was duly destroyed by Helen Clark’s Labour in 1999.

Since Helen Clark took the reins at the end of the 90s there has been nothing but orderly Government, but “History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page…”

Our current situation in the winter of 2017 is fairly precarious, with Bill English having taken the leadership at the resignation of John Key last year. Any development that brought the stability of Bill English’s leadership into question could well lead to a comprehensive National Party loss this September.

The most likely way this would happen is by some scandal being followed by a poll that hinted suggestively at a National Party loss, at which point the National Caucus panics, then Paula Bennett does a Jenny Shipley and convinces the Caucus to support her leadership instead (ironically it was English himself who replaced Shipley as leader of the National Party in 2001).

In other words, Paula Bennett may seize upon any weakness shown by the blundering incumbent PM in order to achieve her own Prime Ministerial ambitions, despite being grossly unfit for the role.

Judith Collins might also play the role of Shipley, depending on who moves first and with what support.

Either would be suicide for the National Party, because there’s nothing less orderly than an involuntary change of leader.

What the public wants, more than anything, is that the Government maintains good order, and what the public needs, more than anything, is that the Government maintains good order.

We don’t actually need it to do much else. If it can simply keep the peace, the rest of us can get on with our lives of commerce and trade. We can make ourselves rich and happy without their help – all we need is for them to not interfere.

From 1840 to the early 1900s New Zealanders developed our country from the Stone Age to first place among all the living standards of the world, and this was achieved without any of the National, Labour, Green or New Zealand First parties existing.

All we need is for the megalomaniacs at the top of the national dominance hierarchy to maintain good order, and we can do the rest.

This is why many political commentators miss the mark when they decry Andrew Little for his lack of charisma.

It’s true that Little has the charisma of a brick, but so what? He’s not going to be personally leading a company of men into battle. He’s going to be inheriting the reins of a civil machine that has been fine-tuned for almost two decades.

His job, as mentioned above, is to maintain order. To that end, being boring is a qualification. He hasn’t said a word about either of the two hot issues stirring up the left at the moment (cannabis law reform and increasing the refugee quota), and this is no doubt a carefully calculated tactic to make him appear suitable as the man to steady the ship.

After all, it’s a heavy increase to the refugee quota that is more likely than anything else to bring a massive amount of chaos to these shores, as both the Green and Opportunity Parties are gagging for it.

Some say that the National Party are the natural ruling party of New Zealand. If there’s any truth to this it’s because the National Party are the best at maintaining good order.

If Little really wants to become Prime Minister this year, all he has to do is what Helen Clark did two decades before him – simply maintain good order in his own party, and wait for the ambition and greed of the National MPs to cause them to devour each other.

The Only Reason to Still Oppose Medicinal Cannabis is Sadism

The New Zealand Parliament will soon get another chance to bring our cannabis laws into the 21st century, with Julie Anne Genter’s Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis and Other Matters) Amendment Bill drawn from the Member’s Bill Ballot this week. This ought to herald the long-awaited national conversation on the subject.

The Bill allows for any Kiwi suffering from “any debilitating condition” to use cannabis or a cannabis product if they have approval from a doctor. It also allows for such patients to cultivate cannabis themselves or to nominate someone to do it for them.

This latter point is extremely important and often underappreciated. One of Peter Dunne’s strategies to keep cannabis illegal by boondoggle has been to restrict supply to extremely expensive overseas sources, such as Sativex (which costs over $1,000 per month), instead of simply allowing people who need it to cultivate it themselves. This Bill would remove this deliberately-placed hurdle.

As Genter points out, the decision to make cannabis illegal was not based on evidence in the first place. Doctors in the 1930s were prescribing medicinal cannabis to patients in New Zealand, as they were all across the world.

The decision to stop doctors from prescribing cannabis was pushed on us by moronic do-gooders forcing their Puritan ideology on the rest of the world.

There was never any science involved, nor any common sense, foresight, empathy, compassion or concern for good order.

From the beginning, cannabis prohibition was based on nothing but a sadistic need to control the masses through causing them suffering, and on the gullibility of legions of morons willing to bleat whatever they heard from an authority figure as if it was the Word of God.

For a person to still not know that cannabis is medicinal they have to be willfully stupid.

The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party first stood in a General Election in 1996. Already in 1996 the party platform had the need for medicinal cannabis as one of its core tenets.

In 1996 it got 1.66% of the vote, so even twenty years ago it was true that one in sixty Kiwis considered cannabis law reform a major issue. After all, California legalised medicinal cannabis that year, so the medicinal properties of cannabis were already known and accepted by experts even then.

Since then, twenty-eight US states have made medicinal cannabis legal and eight have made recreational cannabis legal – and none of them have gone back to prohibition after making the change.

So to deny that cannabis law reform is inevitable is like denying that a heavyweight boxer who has won forty consecutive knockout victories is a title contender.

For a person to continue to believe that the prohibition of medicinal cannabis helps New Zealanders, they have to possess a willful ignorance that borders on malice.

They would have to continue to ignore all the stories from hundreds of medicinal cannabis users, over twenty years, in which they detailed the reduction in suffering that cannabis gave them.

They would have to think nothing of the fact that supporters of medicinal cannabis are winning a victory every month either in New Zealand or in another Western jurisdiction.

They would have to believe that it was fair that any of Martin Crowe, Paul Holmes and Helen Kelly could have been prosecuted and sent to prison for using medicinal cannabis to alleviate pain caused from dying of cancer.

And a person cannot think like that unless they purposefully deny reality for the sake of bringing cruelty into the world.

When the debate about medicinal cannabis does, finally, after over twenty years of campaigning, happen in Parliament, the MPs who oppose it will mark themselves out as particularly sadistic old dinosaurs who need getting rid of.

Understanding New Zealand: Demographics of Flag Referendum Voters

Given what is already known about the demographics of the various party voters, we can tell a lot about who supported the flag referendum just by looking at the correlations between voting for a given party and one of three other major variables.

The first major variable is the turnout rate in the first flag referendum.

The correlation between turnout rate in this first referendum and voting National was a very strong 0.86. That is enough by itself to suggest that the bulk of the people who did end up voting in it were National supporters.

The correlation between turnout rate in 2014 and voting National was, however, 0.76, so we can see that the people who voted in the first flag referendum were mostly those who are generally inclined to vote whenever they can. This was also true for Conservative Party supporters, who had a correlation of 0.70 with turnout rate in the first flag referendum.

Green, ACT and New Zealand First voters were only mildly interested. The correlation between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and voting Green was 0.07, with voting ACT it was -0.01 and with voting New Zealand First it was -0.21. None of these were significant.

Labour Party voters were almost entirely indifferent to the whole idea. The correlation between voting Labour in 2014 and turnout rate in the first flag referendum was a very strong -0.84.

This was something broadly shared by all of the Maori-heavy parties. The correlation between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and voting for both the Maori Party and Internet MANA was -0.67, and with voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party it was -0.55.

Predictably, given these statistics, it was mostly Kiwis of European descent who were interested in the first referendum. The correlation between being of European descent and turnout rate in the first flag referendum was 0.85.

The correlation between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and being either Maori or a Pacific Islander was -0.65, and with being Asian it was -0.27.

Perhaps the most striking correlation of all is that between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and turnout rate in 2014 – this was an extremely strong 0.90. Those who like to vote tend to take every opportunity they can to actually do it.

There was also a correlation of 0.89 between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and median age.

The correlations between wealth and turnout rate were significant, but only marginally so.

All of the income bands above $70K were significantly positively correlated with turnout rate in the first flag referendum, but only marginally so – the strongest of them was 0.31. None of the income bands below $70K had a significant positive correlation with turnout rate in the first flag referendum.

By contrast, all of the income bands below $10K had a correlation of -0.50 or more strongly negative, the strongest of all being for those who had a negative income. The correlation between being in this income bracket and turnout rate in the first flag referendum was -0.84.

Likewise, the correlations between education and turnout rate bordered on statistical significance.

Although there were significant positive correlations between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and having either an Honours degree (0.25) or having a doctorate (0.27), this was true for neither a Bachelor’s nor a Master’s degree (both 0.13).

Mirroring this, the correlation between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and having no academic qualifications was not especially strong, at -0.28.

One of the strongest correlations of all was between turnout rate in the first flag referendum and living on freehold land: this was 0.87.

All of this gives us a clear picture. The sort of person who turned out to vote in the first flag referendum was the same sort of person who is most heavily involved in running the country: rich, old, white and National voting with leisure time.

The second major variable is the turnout rate in the second flag referendum. Here it is only really meaningful to speak of the differences in voting pattern to the first flag referendum.

Although the second flag referendum was still mostly a vehicle for Kiwis of European descent (the correlation between the two demographics strengthened from 0.85 to 0.88), the people who turned out for it tended to be more Maori. The correlation between turnout rate in the second flag referendum and being Maori came in to -0.57 from -0.65.

Against this, turnout rate for the second flag referendum faded among Pacific Islanders and Asians. This may have been because the further the process wound on, the more likely the least established Kiwis were to drop out of it.

People who voted Green were also less likely to turn out in the second flag referendum. The correlation between the two fell to 0.02 from the 0.07 of the first flag referendum. This was probably because the correlation between being in the 20-29 age bracket and turnout rate fell from the -0.41 of the first flag referendum to the -0.50 of the second.

All of this reflected the fact that the second flag referedum saw a considerably higher turnout rate among those who did not want to change the flag. The correlation with voting to change the flag fell from 0.86 for the first flag referendum to 0.80 for the second.

The third major factor is the percentage of people who voted to change the flag.

These people were almost all National voters. The correlation between voting National in 2014 and voting to change the flag in the second flag referendum was a whopping 0.95. This is an extremely strong correlation, and it tells us that basically the only people to even vote to change the flag were died-in-the-wool National voters.

Maoris really didn’t want to change the flag – the correlation between the two was -0.77. These numbers suggest that there was a small core of Maoris who knew from the beginning of the process that they didn’t want to change the flag, but who waited until the second flag referendum to voice their disapproval.

Asians were a curiosity, because they had a negative correlation with turnout rate in either referendum, but a slightly positive correlation of 0.11 with voting to change the flag.

Some will find it very curious that the old were much more likely to vote for change than the young, which goes against the usual pattern of the old being more conservative.

The correlation between being aged 65+ and voting to change the flag was a very strong 0.62, which is amazing if one considers that one of the arguments for keeping the flag in the first place was that old people had become accustomed to it over many years of living under it.

For their part, the young preferred to keep the flag. The correlation between being in the 15-19 age bracket and voting to change the flag was -0.53.

Some might find these latter points extremely interesting, because they support anecdotal evidence from overseas suggesting that the generation to follow the Millenials – those who some have dubbed Generation Z – are more conservative than their immediate predecessors.

This question will be revisited in the second edition of this book, to be written after the 2017 General Election!

This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.