Category: politics

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.

National and the Greens Could Form A Globalist Alliance Post-Election

A recent leaked poll suggests that the Green Party might find themselves snookered after the election on September 23rd. Although they are polling fairly well, Labour is not, and so the Green-Labour alliance might find themselves dependent on New Zealand First, who the Greens have intimated they cannot work with.

The Greens have also suggested that they would not like to support a Labour-New Zealand First minority Government on the grounds that New Zealand First is “racist”.

This raises the disaster scenario of New Zealand First choosing to go into coalition with National, which would form a comfortable majority, with the Greens left out in the cold again.

Sounds like an everyday drama at a girls’ high school – and the participants are every bit as catty – but for us plebs out there in New Zealand it’s what decides whether we eat at the end of the week or not.

One scenario, however, has been relatively ignored – the Greens can always come around from the other side and form a globalist alliance with the National Party.

National wants to remove capital controls; the Greens want to remove border controls. This makes the two of them natural bedfellows.

After all, the only reason why the Greens are making noises about how “racist” New Zealand First is is because New Zealand First represents the nativist axis on the great globalist-nativist spectrum (that may define the politics of this century).

In other words, New Zealand First represents the people who are born in New Zealand – principally the Maoris and the majority of the white people.

But as Understanding New Zealand demonstrates in the section about Maori voting patterns, the Greens are themselves clearly more of an established power structure party than New Zealand First.

The correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2014 and being Maori was 0.66, whereas between voting Greens in 2014 and being Maori it wasn’t even positive, being -0.09.

So why would the Greens make a big song and dance about how not wanting tens of thousands of “refugees” is racism when the racism in question is an expression of the will of the indigenous Maori people?

Globalism.

The commitment of the Green Party to the globalist dream of destroying any connection between land and ethnicity is so great that they’re willing to further water down the Maori presence in Aotearoa by bringing in 5,000 “refugees” a year.

This may be so strong that, by itself, it tips the true home of the Greens away from the Maori they claim to be taking care of (and subsequently from New Zealand First and Labour) and towards the wealthy white people in the National Party, for whom any connection between land and ethnicity is merely an impediment to business.

Furthermore, as is also discussed in the Understanding New Zealand section about Green voters – “…the correlation between voting Green in 2014 and median personal income is 0.31, which is not as strong as National’s 0.53 but is much closer to that than to Labour’s -0.51…”

The Greens are, simply put, a much wealthier and whiter group of people than either Labour or New Zealand First.

The Greens essentially represent the urban wealthy, and as such it’s arguable that they could more naturally form an alliance post-September with the rural wealthy in the National Party, rather than the urban poor in the Labour Party.

Of course, an alliance with the rural poor – the diametric opposite of the Greens – in New Zealand First would be the most difficult of all.

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Dan McGlashan is the author of Understanding New Zealand, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

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”.