politics – Page 102

The Advertising Standards Authority is Becoming the Ministry of Truth

In George Orwell’s 1984, one of the major departments of the Big Brother government is the Ministry of Truth. Ostensibly, the purpose of this division is to determine truth from falsehood, and to discourage the latter from being spoken or written. The reality, of course, is much more sinister. New Zealand is seeing the emergence of its own Ministry of Truth, in the form of the Advertising Standards Authority.

New Zealand doesn’t have a constitution, but we do have a Bill of Rights Act. Modelled on the American constitutional version, our Bill of Rights Act is meant to clearly delineate the areas in which the Government may not act to restrict our freedoms. Section 14 of this Act describes the right of every New Zealander to “freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.”

The right to freedom of expression includes the right to say things that aren’t true. I’m allowed to say that the world is flat. I’m allowed to say that cannabis has no medicinal value. I’m allowed to say that the Germans started World War Two. I’m allowed to say that a warlord who raped a nine-year old was the perfect man, that consciousness is extinguished when the physical body dies or that anyone who doesn’t worship Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef is going to burn in eternal hellfire.

I’m even allowed to write an entirely fictional novel about a two Anzac machine cultists and a machine that can control minds by satellite (as I did here), and present it as if were true for the sake of taking the reader for a ride.

Not only am I allowed to express any number of false ideas, but I’m allowed to express them in any form.

The first sign that alerted New Zealanders to the monster that the Advertising Standards Authority was becoming was the actions it took over the One Treaty One Nation flyers, published by the 1law4all movement. In an incredible act of arrogance, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that these flyers were not allowed to be distributed.

Incredibly, they ruled that speaking of the benefits of colonisation to the various Maori tribes “was likely to cause offence”, and was therefore verboten. Maori alt-media figure Tim Wikiriwhi wrote about how he did not find the flyer offensive, calling the Advertising Standards Authority’s move “yet another example of patent hypocrisy and pretentious arrogance against a legitimate political perspective that is calling for the abolition of treaty separatism.”

New Zealanders have the right to freedom of expression. Therefore, there is no Governmental agency that can arrogate to itself the right to decide when we’re not free to express ourselves. Unfortunately, evil individuals and groups have the free will to defy and deny these rights if we can’t stop them.

The Advertising Standards Authority shows no sign of wanting to end their power trip any time soon. Their latest effort involves forcing themselves into the political arena, by claiming the right to decide which political statements are permissible and which are not. Ominously, the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that an advertisement made by the National Party “will be investigated for being potentially misleading.”

This move is in line with the wider agenda of the Sixth Labour Government to crack down on free speech by censoring everything that doesn’t suit their narrative. Megalomaniacal “Justice” Minister Andrew Little has already suggested as much. He weighed in on the issue to promote his pet project of criminalising hate speech by saying that the flyer “peddled myths” and calling its author an “ignorant fool”.

Given that it’s a fairly extreme move for a Government Minister to take to the mainstream media to insult and threaten a private citizen who is acting within his rights, many will be astonished to find out what the flyer actually claims. It’s actually a very tame document that merely asserts obvious and well-known truths, such as the fact that Maoris benefitted from colonisation.

The grim fact is that New Zealand is rapidly moving towards the point where we will only be allowed to express opinions that are on a pre-approved Government list. We are aided towards this miserable goal by entities such as the Advertising Standards Authority, who are acting exactly like 1984‘s Ministry of Truth.

The solution is to organise around the Sevenfold Conception of Inherent Human Rights. This would involve all true Kiwis agreeing that we have the God-given right to free expression, and that this right cannot be abrogated by arrogant shitheads in Parliament, no matter how narcissistic they are.

This would necessitate that all Kiwis agree to what is known as the Right of Silver, which is that all of us have the right to free expression, and that no Kiwi shall act to abrogate the right of any other Kiwi’s free expression. This means we agree that anyone acting to abrogate this right is an enemy of the New Zealand people on account of that they cause us suffering.

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.

Slave Morality and Modern Conceptions of Human Nature

The main reason why there is so much political disagreement in the world is because there are many different conceptions of human nature. As this column has discussed previously, a person’s politics follow directly from their conception of human nature. This essay will look specifically at how slave morality conceives of human nature, and the effect this has on public discourse.

To understand how slave morality conceives of human nature, it’s first necessary to understand the difference between the Hobbesian and the Rousseauean conceptions of it.

Hobbes’s conception, as discussed in Leviathan, is that human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The state of nature, for humans, is the same as the state of nature for other animals – a zero-sum game characterised by violence and cruelty. Because life is naturally miserable, enlightened elites are justified in defying nature in various ways, such as building a giant state apparatus to watch over people.

Rousseau’s conception is best described as that of the “noble savage”. The essential idea here is that humanity was better before it was corrupted by civilisation. In a state of nature, Rousseau contends, humans are gregarious, wealthy, kind etc. – the opposite of Hobbes’s conception. Rousseau’s idea belongs to a school of thought broadly described as Romanticism.

The idea that humans are intrinsically good is far from a new one. Confucian philosopher Mencius made the argument, some 2,400 years ago, that humans were inherently good because all humans would instinctively act if they saw a baby crawling towards a well. Confucius himself, however, argued that men had to be bound by laws imposed upon them from above by their betters.

The reality is better understood today, thanks to advances in biological science and ethology. Observational fieldwork of other primate species has shown us that Hobbes and Rousseau were both right and wrong. Humans are more than capable of being either good or evil, both at an individual and at a collective level, and are really more opportunistic than they are moral.

Slave morality blends these two conceptions together and combines them in a single idea girded by unalloyed resentment. Slave morality expresses itself as a belief that the weaker party is automatically the morally superior party. Therefore, whenever there is a conflict, picking a side is as simple as determining who is the weaker party.

What this has led to is a conception of human nature that claims strong people are nasty and Hobbesian, and weak people kind and Rousseauean.

Anyone with high social status is assumed to have achieved it by viciousness, aggression, skulduggery and violence. Nastiness is, to the slave mindset, the only way that one can distinguish oneself from the masses – there is no such thing as excellence. Even the desire to distinguish oneself is evil.

Anyone with low social status, by contrast, is assumed to have received it because they were too kind and loving. Either they got exploited by a nasty Hobbesian, or they gave so much of their wealth away that they were left with nothing themselves. Kindness is, to the slave mindset, the highest moral value, because it avoids confrontation.

Another way that slave morality expresses itself is a refusal to concede that any one person or group of people are superior to any other, in any way. This mentality will deny that the great variety of different environments on this planet resulted in a commensurate variety of different adaptations. To admit this would be to concede that some were better adapted to others. Slave mentality is too resentful to admit this.

At its most dogmatic, slave morality denies any inherent difference between population groups full stop. All differences in outcome are therefore considered to be cultural in nature. This mentality was satirised by StoneToss when he pointed out the contrast between how willing people are to concede that genes explain physical differences on the one hand, with how willing people are to concede that genes explain mental or behavioural differences on the other.

This reaches its greatest absurdity when slave moralists insist that the difference in physical strength between men and women is due to environmental causes. This comically naive logic would be laughable if it was held by a child. When held by a fully serious adult it’s monstrous, and the shadows of the gulags become apparent.

Anyone who has travelled and observed the world (and many people who haven’t) will, of course, have noticed that there are many people who have laboured their entire lives without building up much strength (such as Indians), whereas others don’t need to exercise at all to become strong (such as Polynesians). The other population groups are all somewhere in between.

Moreover, anyone who has travelled will have observed that there are a vast range of different environments on Planet Earth, and therefore a vast range of different survival pressures. This range of survival pressures has necessarily led to a multiplicity of genetic variation.

The genetic basis for the differences in physical strength between populations is obvious. Therefore, it stands to reason that there will be a large variation in mental, intellectual and behavioural tendencies because of genetics.

To disagree is to deny reality, but this is the real horror of slave morality – it rejects life and even reality itself.

Unfortunately, slave morality has started to become normalised on account of the fact that populations are so large now that the vast majority of people have no chance of ever achieving a leadership position. This means that resentment-based narratives will become ever more popular, and accurate scientific information will become ever harder to find.

Day of The Pillow

The Western World has a severe structural problem, and it’s getting worse. We have a great millstone around our necks in the form of the Baby Boomers. This economic burden has grown much heavier in recent years, and it promises to keep growing heavier, perhaps until the rest of us are crushed. This essay discusses how we can solve the Boomer problem.

In New Zealand alone, it is believed that pensions will cost the taxpayer over $16,000,000,000 this year. It’s impossible to say how much they cost “every year” because the cost keeps sharply rising. By 2023, a mere four years away, Government pension spending is expected to rise by another $4,800,000,000. This total figure would represent almost a quarter of total Government spending.

The Supported Living Payment, by contrast, which is the welfare given to all the disabled people in the entire country, was a little over $1,500,000,000 in 2016. In fact, all of the other benefits put together are less than a third of what the Government pension costs. Many people find this fact astonishing, as we are constantly being fed stories about lazy bludgers on the unemployment benefit. The truth is that the vast majority of lazy bludgers are on the pension.

The younger generations are being sucked dry by the Boomers. Many Boomers are retiring at age 65 in full health and with 20-30 years left to live, and usually with a freehold house to their name, but are still claiming their $370 per week. It’s an obscene theft of resources.

Boomers claim that they’re merely getting what they’re due, that they were promised a pension and by Christ they’re going to get one, even if it means the impoverishment of every generation to follow. But there was never, ever any agreement on the part of the young that they would get sucked dry to provide an extravagant retirement for Boomers.

Moreover, this fifteen-billion dollar redistribution of wealth in favour of the Boomers doesn’t take into account how much extra health spending they absorb. In Britain, the over-65s take up two-fifths of all health spending. Crown spending on health in New Zealand is currently running at about $16,000,000,000 per year, and two-fifths of that would represent about another $6,500,000,000. What’s more, this figure, like overall pension expenses, is also rising sharply.

This means that the over-65s already impose a twenty billion-dollar burden on the rest of us Kiwis. The yearly cost for the entire West runs to multiple trillions. For the average taxpayer, this represents an individual burden on the order of $8,000 yearly. That every working adult gets taxed several thousands of dollars yearly to pay for pensions is one of the reasons why birthrates are so low among Westerners in their 20s.

It isn’t just that Boomers are old. They’re also morally defective. Never in the history of the West has there been a generation that was happy to sacrifice the wellbeing of their children for their own comfort. Never before has there been a generation that willingly left their offspring worse off. The self-centred and egotistic nature of the Boomers is simply unparalleled. They are not anything like the generations that won World War II.

However, there is historical precedent for dealing with situations like this.

Sometimes, when an old person is hanging on to life well beyond the point where life can be meaningfully lived, they become subject to a “mercy killing”. In American Indian culture, people who got to this point were left for the wolves. In Old Norse culture, people who got to this point were put on an ice floe and pushed into the sea. In Anglo culture, people who get to this point are often smothered in their sleep by pillows.

This essay suggests that the time may be approaching when we need to do this on a generational level. It’s time for the Day of the Pillow.

Involuntary euthanasia might sound harsh. However, the Boomers brought this upon themselves. You can’t enslave an entire population and expect them to work themselves to death to finance an extended, luxury retirement for you. If you do, you have to hope that you can keep getting away from it, because if that population ever manages to throw the shackles off they will come looking for revenge.

This is not to suggest that Boomers need to be euthanised en masse. There could be a law that says, for example, that once you accept an old-age pension, you have 5 or 10 years before you get euthanised. This would discourage intergenerational theft by ensuring that only the people who had genuinely come to the end of their working lives would claim the pension.

A more civil way of ending the stranglehold that Boomers have on the West would be stripping the right to vote from anyone who took a Government pension (this newspaper has argued this point at length elsewhere). Retirement should mean retirement. If a person is too infirm to work, then they’re too infirm to be making decisions about the future of the nation.

Yet another solution is to introduce a universal basic income for all at a rate similar to the unemployment benefit, and to lower the pension to this new figure. This would ensure that the younger generations were no longer subjected to indignities for the benefit of the old. Everyone would then be on an even playing field.

The Day of the Pillow is not something that needs to happen. There are much less brutal ways to free the young from the unreasonable burden that the Boomers have placed on them. However, if the Boomer generation continues to exploit the rest of us unnecessarily, we will need to take measures to defend ourselves and our ability to pay for our own needs.

Why Alt-Centrism is Necessarily A Spiritual Movement

Central to alt-centrist philosophy is that, although it’s possible to understand why people support the other political positions, all those positions are fundamentally misguided by ignorance of the true nature of reality. Because the Establishment positions, the alt-left and the alt-right are all materialist, alt-centrism must distinguish itself from materialism. As this essay will explain, alt-centrism is necessarily a spiritual movement.

Keeping in accordance with the Five Rejections, the alt-centrist believes both that: 1) the current political system has failed and is causing misery, and 2) that the most popular of the proposed solutions to the current system will also fail and will cause more misery.

The ultimate underlying reason for all of this is the process of spiritual degeneration that has taken place over many centuries. Since the destruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries by Christian zealots in the 4th century A.D., the Western World lost touch with the methodologies they once used to connect to God.

Over the past 1,600 years, we’ve gradually come to believe, more and more, that materialist solutions are the only possible ways to alleviate suffering. This morphine-over-meditation reasoning has made us creatures of sensory pleasure. We have abandoned the old ways that led to acceptance of the world and the truth that life is transitory suffering on the way to reunion with God, and replaced them with a child’s narrative that we will never suffer again if we have enough stuff.

This has led to great innovations for making war on our enemies, but has done little to alleviate the suffering of sentient beings. The hyperfocus on knowledge that would allow up to build better weapons or to manufacture greater volumes of widgets has allowed for great physical wealth and power, but it came at the price of a commensurate lack of focus on spiritual knowledge.

We no longer know the spiritual truths of existence. We no longer know that the material world is an illusion borne of God’s will to play, and we no longer know that consciousness survives the death of the physical body and comes thereafter to associate with other consciousnesses on a similar frequency. Because we now believe that this world is all there is, no concern is given to one’s situation after death. It’s simply assumed that, upon the death of one’s physical body, one simply stops existing.

Therefore, much like an 80-minute game of rugby, one must score as much as possible as quickly as possible before one’s time is up.

This leads to a scramble for material wealth and power. Because spiritual knowledge and wealth is considered to have no value, the order of the day is to accumulate as many resources as possible. In New Zealand, and many other places, this has taken its most obscene form in the obsession with rent-seeking. The praised man is not one who has found peace and set his heart to order; the praised man is the billionaire.

The ultimate materialist dream is to own a large amount of property, because then rent can be charged. With enough property, it’s possible to charge enough rent to maintain a lifestyle without doing any work. It might sound incredible, but the popular model of success in our society is someone who has become the largest parasite they could manage to be.

In our severely degraded culture, the man who absorbs wealth from the wider system without working for it is lauded and envied.

The problem exacerbates when crude displays of success at resource accumulation is the only way to attract women. In a degraded age, women are not able to perceive or value higher qualities in men, so they become attracted to superficial ones. This leads to immense resentment, both from men and women, as they come to feel that their chances for a happy marriage were robbed from them.

The alt-centrist rejects this materialist obsession with resource acquisition. It’s obvious that the crude obsession with wealth has locked the vast majority of us into a zero-sum contest for the best-looking women, the trendiest places of residence and the highest positions in the social dominance hierarchy. This is zero-sum at best when the population is small; with a population as large as that of the current world, it’s a recipe for widespread misery.

As mentioned above, however, it isn’t just the Establishment and our inherited culture that is materialist.

The alt-left are atheist and Marxist, and therefore utterly materialist as well. The alt-left, like the original left, considers spirituality a means by which the poor are tricked out of their real wealth. In accordance with the Five Acceptances, alt-centrism accepts that there is some merit in this concern, and that many people claiming to possess spiritual truths were really crooks. The alt-left, however, has gone too far.

In any case, we insist that no number of religious criminals can invalidate the value of genuine spirituality.

The alt-right recognises that the left is materialist, and that this leads to death camps and gulags, but their error is to demand a return to Abrahamism. Alt-centrism rejects this nostalgic attempt to return to the past. Abrahamism has always been a millstone around the neck of the world, and currently it serves only to further entrench pre-existing hatreds. The world needs a new spiritual methodology that unites people across divisions.

The alt-centre, therefore, must be spiritual by way of contrast to the materialist ideologies that have caused so much suffering.

This is another way in which alt-centrism is entirely different to centrism. A regular centrist is likely to also be a materialist, on account of that they are trying to find a balanced compromise between other materialist positions. They note that the left and the right are both materialist, so agreeing on that point seems like a good start. The regular centrist merely follows along with social convention.

The alt-centrist says “Fuck that!” and declares that the fact the paradigm is materialist is evidence to support the case the paradigm needs to be overthrown. If all of the corrupt actors responsible for a failing system tell us that materialism is correct, then it is more likely to be false.

Alt-centrism then, is about a return to spirituality – but not a return to religion.

A return to spirituality would allow for the genuine moral and spiritual self-improvement that materialism denies is possible. If people would focus on this, instead of on acquiring more physical possessions, achieving liberation from suffering would be more realistic. A spiritually improved population would succeed regardless of the political system they laboured under.