Category: the human condition

Election is Not the Same As Selection!

You’ve got the power to choose who will rule the country after September 23rd – we’re all waiting on your input! Your vote will help elect a Prime Minister and ruling party. You will have a range of choices of both electorate and party candidates – some voters will have over 25 options. That’s democracy, right? The people choose, right? Not really.

The tricky thing is that your input regarding the selection of the candidates is not asked for. The process that led to either Bill English or Andrew Little becoming one of your only two choices for Prime Minister is not under your influence, not even in the slightest.

As Richard Goode of Not A Party pointed out in a recent address, New Zealand has had either a National Party Prime Minister or a Labour Party Prime Minister for the past 80 years.

And you don’t get to select either of those. You get to vote for one list of people that you have zero input into, or another list of people that you have zero input into.

So what your vote amounts to, as an elector, is little more than a ceremonial acknowledgement of the completion of a process that started a long time before election day. Like the Queen cutting a ribbon to open a new library, it’s merely a show for the cameras.

The process that matters – where the political power is – is the process that puts a person into the position of leading their party in the first place. And the Establishment will have seen to it, as it does every other time, that both the National leader and the Labour leader are their puppets.

So it doesn’t matter if you vote for the left wing or the right wing of the shitbird – the leaders of both wings have been selected by the people who really have all the power in society, and it isn’t you.

That’s why Andrew Little and Bill English are indistinguishable when it comes to several major social issues. On the issue of cannabis law reform, Little is no less conservative than English, constantly harping on about brain damage, and the Labour Party policy webpage makes no mention of cannabis law reform whatsoever (although funding a motion-capture studio in Dunedin was important enough to mention).

In the end, we shouldn’t expect Little and English to be distinguishable. What the rulers of this country want is to frighten the markets as little as possible, and that means reducing democracy to a sham election between two candidates pre-selected for their total absence of any capacity for novel thought.

Ultimately, the people who benefit from the status quo have far too much invested in it to allow it to be upset by plebs like you!

Not even voting for a third party is possible. Watching the Green Party mortgage their soul at ever-increasing rates of interest over the past 18 years taught us one thing: a maverick third party can only win power in our system to the degree that it makes itself indistinguishable from those who already have it.

That the country will be led by someone who sees you as a unit of livestock to be milked for productivity and taxes is a given. It might appear that the only reasonable course of action was to refuse to vote and to work on building a parallel society away from the gaze of psychopaths beholden to international banking or ideological interests.

Beneficiaries Are The Only True Environmentalists

The only truly environmentally responsible way of life is to consume less than a sustainable level of the world’s resources. In the West, it’s mostly only those on welfare who manage this

Humans now need the equivalent of 1.5 planet Earths to sustain our current level of consumption, and if we all lived like Americans it would take four. In 2013 we reached “Earth Overshoot Day” – the day by which we had used an amount of the Earth’s resources equal to what it can replenish in a single year – by August 20, and every year it draws closer.

The reason why we would need four Earths to all live at the same standard as Americans is because Americans consume so much more of the planet than the average human. The average American consumes 25 tons of the world’s natural resources every year, and they operate 25% of the world’s motor vehicles, despite only being 4% of the population.

This is broadly true of Westerners in general.

We buy big cars, often with every family member having their own, we buy boats, we go on overseas holidays, we buy enormous amounts of plastic, especially in packaging, and we recycle electronic appliances well before they become obsolete.

One thing can be said for certain about all this consumption – namely, that it will end. The planet is finite whether we like it or not. Sooner or later, like sand through an hourglass, the supply will run out and activity will diminish.

Let’s be honest: we don’t work to live anymore, at least not in the West. Technological advancement has made it unnecessary. The average Westerner has so much accumulated capital increasing the value of their labour that a surplus exists easily large enough to feed us all.

We work because we want more stuff. Fuck Earth Overshoot Day! We want an even bigger car, the latest Playstation, and to upgrade to a McMansion – and we want it now!

We could collectively cut down to working half the number of hours that we do, but we won’t, because the need to accumulate stuff is its own moral imperative.

The GDP per capita in America is around USD57,000 per year, which is close to $75,000 in New Zealand dollars. If Americans use four times as much of the Earth’s resources than what the Earth can sustain, then we can put a dollar figure on the upper bound of possible consumption.

One quarter of $75,000 is $18,750 per year. This figure represents the maximum level of consumption that humans would have to limit ourselves to in order to collectively avoid ecological collapse.

Curiously, $18,750 is a level of consumption roughly equal to what New Zealand beneficiaries are already forced to live on, which raises an interesting point – in the long run, environmental laws dictate that the average person on Earth cannot be any wealthier than the average New Zealand beneficiary already is.

In other words, almost every Westerner with a job – who in almost every case will be spending far more than $18,750 a year – is consuming an amount of the world’s resources that is not sustainable in the long run.

In the long run, the average person cannot consume the world’s resources at a rate greater than that of the current average New Zealand beneficiary.

Considering that all of us will eventually have to cut down to this level of consumption, whether we like it or not, the people who are currently beneficiaries are actually giving us a glimpse of what level of wealth is realistically sustainable.

In that sense they are harbingers of the future, unlike the rest of us currently consuming an unsustainable amount of resources. Thus it could be argued that beneficiaries are the true environmentalists.

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”.