Category: politics

VJMP Reads: The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand VII

This reading carries on from here.

The seventh essay in The Interregnum is ‘Contributing to Public Life From Afar’, by Lamia Imam. If the essays so far had mostly managed to be worryingly Marxist without being alarmingly so, this essay leaps right into the deep end with no restraints at all.

In an effort that stretches credibility beyond breaking point, Imam complains about the difficulty she has found being accepted by New Zealanders as one of our own, despite literally being an anchor baby who spent almost all of her formative years overseas.

Echoing the complaints of Golriz Ghahraman, who also spent most of her formative years overseas being raised by non-Kiwis, Imam describes being born in New Zealand only to move away with her parents while still a toddler, only to wonder why she isn’t welcomed with open arms when she decides that she is a New Zealander many years later when she briefly returns to study (before shifting off again).

The question she does not confront is: why should Kiwis form close social bonds with people who are liable to up and leave the country forever, rendering that social investment worthless? If a person has all of their family overseas, and are themselves getting educated overseas, the likelihood of them still being here in 25 years is very low, at least in comparison to anyone else.

Really this essay should be seen for what it is, which is an effort to destroy the social bonds between New Zealanders for the sake of making us more easily exploitable by the international globalist class of which Imam is a member. To this end, it uses a number of globalist rhetorical devices that have previously been successfully employed towards the destruction of the Western working class.

One of the most obvious of these is crying about the “racism” she has faced on account of being Muslim (which is, of course, not a race). Another is the astonishing claim that people who don’t consider her to sound like a Kiwi on account of her admitted lack of a Kiwi accent are “ignorant”.

Claiming to be “hyper-aware of her privilege”, Imam appears to make no effort whatsoever to understand the thinking of the New Zealanders she claims to be her countryfolk. Relating an incident where a highly distressed man at a Community Law Centre “started screaming at me about immigrants, and specifically Muslims… ruining his job prospects,” absolutely zero effort is made to commiserate with one of the many Kiwis who have lost out from globalism.

Instead she complains that “acceptance was hard to come by,” as if the rest of us ought to have been grateful for the presence of a Muslim immigrant – a sight that has heralded the impending destruction of communities and nations all around the world for 1,300 years.

It seems that, according to Imam, Kiwis no longer have the right to decide for themselves what a Kiwi is. That can apparently now be decided by people who have lived three years of their life in New Zealand and who do not have Kiwi ancestors. Now you can just step off a plane and say you’re a Kiwi and that’s as good as anyone else can do.

As a reader I wondered how welcoming Imam would be if I turned up at the funeral of a wealthy family member, declared myself to be one of their tribe and demanded a share of the family fortune? Would I also find that “acceptance was hard to come by”?

In the end, I gave up when I read “Ordinary Kiwis supposedly do not care about identity politics, which suggests to me that they don’t have an identity.” No-one who, while claiming to be a Kiwi, writes something that stupid is worth reading.

In summary, this poorly-written effort rambles, does not employ logic and frequently contradicts itself, but the essay does raise many questions that are yet to be meaningfully discussed in the West, such as: who are we allowed to exclude?

Answering those question is not for The Interregnum. This book that preaches inclusivity as the highest of virtues has expressly excluded right-wing and working-class voices.

Fair enough on excluding the right-wing, if one wants to restrict the dialogue to the voices of the young, but why provide a platform for a jetsetting middle-class professional woman while denying a platform to working-class white people? It seems very strange that a book can claim to be speaking for the underdog but deny that underdog the right to speak about the issues that are causing them to suffer.

Generation X’s Most Bitter Realisation

Instead of seeing the next generations as inheritors of a world that they were duty-bound to steward, The Baby Boomers see the young as resources to be exploited

Some things have been part of life for so long that we’ve taken them for granted. We take for granted that parents pass wealth onto their children in the form of knowledge and silver; we take for granted that technological and social improvements mean that the quality of life increases for every generation that passes; we take for granted that each generation has an obligation to the leave the world in order for the one that comes after it. Generation X has come to bitterly realise that some of these assumptions are no longer true.

The most bitter realisation of Generation X is that we will be the first generation in history to inherit a lower standard of living than the previous generation enjoyed. The Baby Boomers ticked up so much debt on the intergenerational credit card that they can never pay it back themselves, even if they intended to. We will pay it back through the sweat of our own labour so that our parents can enjoy a lengthy retirement, the vast majority of them still fit to work.

What is currently taking place is the greatest theft in history: the Baby Boomer’s theft of the production of the Generation Xs and Millennials, who will lose a large proportion of their wages to pay back the debts their parents accumulated, and for rents on houses that they can never own, merely so that those parents could experience an unprecedented level of comfort.

They did this by giving themselves tax cuts without cutting spending, so that our nations had to borrow to pay for basic social services, many of which the Baby Boomers themselves used more frequently on account of being elderly. All over the world this was done, not just New Zealand; everywhere an excuse was found for the increase in borrowing.

At the same time, the wages of the next generation were squeezed between having to pay back massive student loans that the Baby Boomers were not themselves subjected to, competing with foreign labour to a degree that the Baby Boomers were not themselves subjected to, and forking out for ever-scarcer affordable housing to a degree that the Baby Boomers were not themselves subjected to.

So not only did the Baby Boomers ensure that they enjoyed the highest standard of living ever recorded by one generation in human history, they did so explicitly at the expense of the generations who would follow, saddling them with a debt so heavy that even war reparations would be less burdensome.

They ticked up this unique standard of living for themselves on the national credit card, and simply left us to pay the debt off, which will take half a century. For most Western nations, cleaning up this mess will involve trying to integrate millions of individuals from very strange and often barbaric cultures, people that the Baby Boomers let into our countries because they didn’t want to pay us proper wages like they themselves had been paid.

The question that will define the soul of Generation X is whether we do the same thing to the generations after us out of bitterness and resentment for what our parents put us through, or if we treat the generation after us fairly out of a belief that we learned something from the greed of our parents.

VJMP Reads: The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand VI

This reading carries on from here.

The sixth essay in The Interregnum is ‘Radical Kaupapa Maori Politics’ by Carrie Stoddart-Smith. Turning to maoridictionary.co.nz I discover that kaupapa means, in this context, something like ‘agenda’ (indeed, within the first page it has been defined as “something like first principles”), but the essay itself explores the various definitions of ‘Kaupapa Maori’.

At the core of this essay is the question that Maori have been asking themselves for 200 years. To what extent to we cling to the old ways, and to what extent to we abandon them for the sake of adaptation to a world that is different to what it was when the old days arose?

Many mainstream readers, conditioned to mainstream journalism, will find the tone of this essay jarring, as it is heavy on the kind of guilt-based sermon-style rhetoric that so many have learned to manipulate otherwise well-meaning audiences with.

It’s also full of the unnecessary race-baiting and shit-stirring that has become associated with the American style of race rhetoric, such as when Stoddart-Smith justifies the exclusion of non-Maori with “empowering Maori voices that continue to be silenced by the noise of history, and by the protestations of white New Zealand that insist on shouting us down and shutting us out.”

Unfortunately this dishonest, deliberately aggravating style of rhetoric is a throwback to the Cultural Marxism espoused in the introductory essay. Only “white New Zealand” is the enemy; the fact that Asian and Pacific Islander New Zealanders think much less of Maoris than white people do, not having had two centuries of living together, is ignored on account of not fitting the narrative (the fact that Asians and Pacific Islanders are harder to guilt trip may also be a factor).

It’s a shame that a confrontational and antagonistic stylistic approach was taken, because there’s plenty of philosophical value in this essay. In particular, Stoddart-Smith draws multiple parallels between kaupapa Maori and the anarchist philosophy of mutualism.

After all, pre-European contact Maori did not have a central government, and as a consequence they adapted to learn patterns of mutual support that helped them and their neighbours to survive. In some cases the agreements over which tribe had the rights to access what were very sophisticated and complicated, but the important thing was that they were mutually consensual, in contrast to today’s arrangement where representatives of the Queen enforce the law whether people like it or not.

If this side of things had been emphasised, this could have been a good essay. Unfortunately it’s full of common separatist canards like “colonialism embedded patriarchy in tikanga Maori” and the revisionist attempt to ignore He iwi tahi tatou, as if the historical nature of interactions between Maori and British settlers had been entirely involuntary on the part of the Maori, rather than mutually beneficial.

One feels that a sophisticated approach to redressing the historical wrongs done to the Maori people, and this essay falls a long way short of that. It is, however, a good example of Marxist agitprop.

If Politicians Don’t Like Binge Drinking, They Need To Legalise The Cannabis Alternative

Smoking cannabis is safer than drinking a crate, but if we’re not allowed cannabis then we’ll drink the crate

Another Crate Day, another opportunity for self-righteous old wowsers to stand up and condemn partying and having a good time. Unfortunately, New Zealand is full of these useless old bastards, and they’re as stupid as they are pompous. If our political class had any clue, they would legalise cannabis immediately so that there was a recreational alternative to alcohol.

Jonathan Coleman, the former National Health Minister who presided over the gutting of the New Zealand mental health system and the subsequent highest teen suicide rate in the world, is currently one of the most prominent. Coleman slashed funding to rape crisis centres and community crisis teams for the sake of tax cuts for the wealthy, driving many poor families into a desperation that was frequently fatal, and this week he was in the news criticising Crate Day.

Coleman said that Kiwi patterns of heavy alcohol use are “part of a past New Zealand should be leaving behind”. Binge drinking is, indeed, a remnant of the sleazy and vulgar New Zealand that many of us want to leave behind, but the political class gets the Police to put us in cages if we use any alternative to alcohol.

The vast majority of us know that cannabis is a safer alternative to alcohol, and we have been trying to tell the ruling class this ever since it was made medicinally legal in California in 1996. So why didn’t the National Party legalise it when they were in power?

There is plenty of evidence that shows that rates of binge drinking decrease when cannabis is legalised. The reasons why are obvious to anyone who thinks about it honestly: people have recreational needs that must be met otherwise mental illness will result, and getting fucked up can be one of those needs (of course the old wowsers and control freaks will never admit this).

Given a choice of different ways to get fucked up, most people will choose the healthiest way, unless they have a death wish, and this is why rates of cannabis use continue to increase in the West. When alcohol is the only option, it will have to do.

Robin Room, an Australian professor, has himself claimed that legalising cannabis is the right thing to do because there are fewer social harms associated with it than with alcohol. Pointing out something that has been long known to knowledgeable people, Professor Room has stated that the association between alcohol and violence makes it more dangerous than using cannabis ever realistically could be.

There is already ample evidence that legalising cannabis is the right thing to do from the perspective of decreasing human suffering, and if our political class had any sense they would get onto it immediately.

Coleman said “Crate Day is something, in modern New Zealand, we can do without.” What New Zealand could really do without is ignorant, arrogant, stubborn old pricks like Jonathan Coleman, who refuse to do the decent thing and admit that cannabis prohibition is an offence against the New Zealand people.