Category: politics

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”.

The Four Tenets of Anarcho-Homicidalism

Politicians who push things too far might find themselves faced with this

Anarcho-homicidalism is a radical new philosophy that is rapidly challenging people’s conceptions of what is possible within political space. Despite the tooth-and-claw simplicity of the doctrine, it is not always obvious how one transitions into it from a lifetime of statism. This essay examines four basic precepts.

1. Violence is the basis of self-defence.

In this physical, material world, life is dog-eat-dog to a major extent. Cannibalism is, after all, a fairly recent phenomenon in these very isles, and often the only way you were able to avoid this fate was with counter-violence.

It could even be argued that the very concept of violence perhaps not being fully legitimate is a particularly human invention, and even then not shared by all. As such, the concept of illegitimate violence is far from universal.

A truth frequently denied is that all property rights ultimately come down to the capacity to enforce violence. In our modern societies, there is little more to property rights than being able to bring the Police force to bear on any trespassers.

Therefore, your ability to defend yourself comes down to your ability to inflict violence upon anyone threatening you.

2. You’re allowed to kill anyone trying to enslave you.

If any other person tries to make you into a slave, you have the right to kill them in self-defence. This recognises the fact that anyone who approaches you with a will to enslave you is going to succeed unless deterred.

After all, if you are not allowed (or willing) to kill people trying to enslave you, then you don’t have any rights at all, because you will eventually find yourself unable to assert them.

If a person is not trying to make you into a slave, you don’t have any more right to kill them than you otherwise would (i.e. in the vast majority of cases, doing so would constitute murder).

Therefore, the anarcho-homicidalist only strikes upwards; only ever up the dominance hierarchy. If no-one tries to assert dominance over the anarcho-homicidalist then there is no reason for them to upset the peace.

3. Everyone must decide for themselves who they kill.

Not only does the anarcho-homicidalist never strike downwards, but they also refuse to kill on command. Anarcho-homicidalists do not kill on other people’s orders, because to do so necessarily brings into being a dominance hierarchy.

Note that this gives the anarcho-homicidalist cause to shoot any conscription officer that comes to his house. Conscription is slavery, and if someone else tells you that you have to kill another person who you’ve never met, the anarcho-homicidalist is within their rights to turn the gun on the person giving the orders.

An inescapable consequence of the total application of this tenet would be that no armies could ever be raised to attack anyone else, because anyone being pressed into one would simply kill their conscriptor.

Therefore, nothing like the invasion of Iraq could be possible, because there would be no-one willing to serve in a dominance hierarchy that killed on command.

4. Everyone is 100% responsible for the consequences of their decision to kill.

There is absolutely no guarantee that a person taking anarcho-homicidalist action will be protected from the consequences of having done so.

An anarcho-homicidalist might decide to shoot a government apparatchik who works to enforce some totalitarian horror, but nothing within the tenets of anarcho-homicidalism necessarily protects him from the consequences.

The Police and secret services will still definitely come after anyone who homicides a high-ranking political figure, no matter how fervently the homicidalist believes in their philosophy.

However, a sufficient quantity of anarcho-homicidalists would still be able to form an underground railroad for the sake of protecting any of their own who gave the dominators the full measure.

*

This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s upcoming Anarcho-Homicidalist’s Manifesto.

You Can Never Win Freedoms Back; You Can Only Trade Them

Although the accepted narrative is that we are moving into a time of greater freedom, in many ways we are in fact becoming less free – and these losses are not necessarily easy to notice

Many young Kiwis have felt a sense of relief after Julie Anne Genter and The Opportunities Party decided to champion cannabis law reform. Finally it seemed like the political class were going to grant the New Zealand people some of their rights back. But, as this essay will examine, dealing with politicians is never that simple.

Both Genter and TOP broke with the New Zealand political convention of treating cannabis law reform as a taboo subject earlier this year as the foreshadow of the General Election loomed, incentivising new policy directions that attracted media attention.

Both of them also broke with convention by bringing logic and evidence to this discussion, instead of the usual fear-mongering and hysteria. As has long been argued by this company (most notably in the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook), once the narrative on cannabis shifted from lies to truth, the days of prohibition were numbered.

Once the sheeple of New Zealand came to realise that cannabis was a medicine and not really the devil’s lettuce, it didn’t seem right to put people in cages for it anymore, and that led directly to the need for law reform being taken seriously by everyone today.

So does this mean that New Zealand is moving out of the Puritanical mindset when it comes to psychoactive substances and will now be discussing the issue sensibly?

Of course not! Morgan wants to put the drinking age back up to 20.

Even though his entire message is that prohibition of cannabis isn’t working, and even though it’s widely understood that prohibition of alcohol didn’t work, voting for cannabis law reform through TOP is also going to be a vote for some Kiwis to lose the freedom to consume alcohol.

Some people might not think too much of this, but Morgan’s actions here reveal the strategy that politicians have used to seize control of the plebs throughout all times and places.

Politicians do this by offering you some of your freedoms back at the cost of others. Their trick is to always take away more freedoms than they offer, but to present it in a way that tricks the plebs into thinking that it’s the other way around.

Another example of it also pertains to cannabis: the fact that almost every cannabis user in the country who has a driver’s licence is also a criminal, because it is a crime to drive with any amount of THC in the system, and anyone who has smoked cannabis within the last six weeks will have THC in their system – even if they are not at all impaired.

If the politicians decided to legalise cannabis tomorrow they could simply bring in more punitive consequences for driving a motor vehicle, such as regular checkpoints with saliva swabs to detect for THC in the system.

Enough checkpoints and saliva swabs and it simply wouldn’t matter that cannabis was technically fully legal – the degree of damage done to the population by the state would remain the same. It could potentially even be increased.

And then we’d end up like the states of Australia and America that have “decriminalised cannabis” but made it criminal to drive with THC in the system, impaired or otherwise.

Either that, or we’ll lose our rights to speak freely on the Internet. It’s possible that the wholesale criminalisation of the young that came about as a consequence of the cannabis laws will be replicated with criminal trials for “hate speech” and “harmful digital communication”.

In any case, we can guarantee that the freedom of politicians to lie to the nation – and to cause them great suffering as a consequence of the despair and confusion – will not be impeded by anything.