politics – Page 216

The Left Needs to go Back to Its Working Class Roots

The sentiment expressed here – that if you do a working class job you must be a piece of shit – is depressingly common among people who claim to be leftists

A common sentiment among many leftists today is that the working class is fundamentally deplorable, as if everyone who works with their hands or rides the bus is something out of Romper Stomper, just waiting for the chance to bash some poor transsexual or Muslim and get away with it.

These regressive leftists even use codewords like “fascist” to disguise their contempt for the working class. That this has been allowed to happen is the reason why left-wing politics are in such a state of complete disarray in the modern West.

In many ways this is deliberate. The children of the political elite know that the more effectively they can destroy working-class movements, the more power they will inherit when they inevitably do inherit it, and so they have gone to some effort to cause them to rot from within.

This is why social justice movements are so often full of middle-class people who aren’t really serious about the issue. It’s also why so much mainstream media attention is given to leftists who are fighting for issues that only, or primarily, affect the middle class.

Essentially, the middle and upper classes have infiltrated the political and media structures that used to give a voice to working-class people, and have twisted them to middle-class interests, or simply destroyed them where this was not possible.

This is how we have ended up with a situation where the white working class votes for a Republican like Trump, and those claiming to be in favour of the disadvantaged force those same disadvantaged to compete with refugees for housing, jobs and public space.

No-one in the working class could give a damn about gay adoption, or Syrian refugees, or transsexual toilet rights, or global warming.

If you’re hungry, the only thing you care about is food.

If you’re sick, the only thing you care about is medicine.

If you’re cold, the only thing you care about is shelter.

If you’re broke, the only thing you care about is money.

If you’ve had a hard day, the only thing you care about is chilling out for a bit.

Watching Jacinda Ardern on television passionately arguing the need for homosexuals to be allowed to adopt kids, while her party has gone silent on meaningful questions like cannabis law reform and the TPPA, is a disgusting sight to the working-class people who used to be represented by the Labour Party.

As mentioned above, much of this is deliberate. The Labour Party are, despite their rhetoric, ultimately as conservative as National, because ultimately they are part of the same establishment. Just look at the ease with which Shane Jones shifts from one wing to the other if you doubt that the ruling class is on the side of the ruling class and the rest of us are on our fucking own.

Ardern’s objective, as it was for the multimillionaire David Cunliffe, is to waste the energy of the people who wish for social change, and to misdirect it to where it can do no damage to the establishment.

This is why the Labour Party promotes gay adoption, which affects perhaps a hundred Kiwis, and ignores cannabis law reform, which affects four hundred thousand.

After all, fucking another man in the arse does not generally bring about patterns of thought that are dangerous to the control systems of the establishment, whereas taking psychoactive chemicals regularly does.

A far higher proportion of cannabis users than prospective gay adoptive parents are societal outcasts, which is hardly surprising when you can be put in prison for being one.

Until such a time as the left goes back to its roots – which is giving a voice to the truly disadvantaged, not merely to whoever’s cause is the most fashionable this moment – it will continue to lose influence.

Medicinal Cannabis Users in New Zealand are Treated Worse Than Animals

The above image is from the testimonials page of VetCBD, a medicinal cannabis product formulated specifically by veterinarians for conditions that might cause suffering to pets. All of the animals in the above image have been (according to their owners, at least) successfully treated with VetCBD.

Some Kiwis will be amazed, but this simple Californian website offering therapeutic treatment for pets actually offers more advanced and accurate cannabis science than you will get from a New Zealand doctor.

Namely, it will tell you that that CBD oil, an extract of one of the cannabinoids in the cannabis plant, is known to have considerable medicinal value.

No Kiwi doctor will tell you such a thing – if you ask them about CBD oil they will reflexively groan, zombie-like, “Cannabis causes braaaaaaain damage!”

Some pet owners in places with legal medicinal cannabis treat their pets with more compassion than Kiwis treat each other with

The website also lists a number of conditions that their product is believed to reduce the suffering associated with, in particular pain, anxiety, nausea and loss of appetite – in other words, the same things that human medicinal cannabis users use cannabis for.

Another way of putting this is: people in California treat their dogs with more compassion than New Zealand politicians and doctors treat their patients.

Yet another way of looking at is that medicinal cannabis users in New Zealand have cause to be envious of animals in more enlightened parts of the world.

Cannabis ought to work on pets if they have an endocannabinoid system, which all mammals do.

But whereas animals in over twenty American states can access CBD oil out of compassion for their misery, adult human New Zealanders cannot legally access it, as we have been commanded to go without this medicine for the sake of higher profits.

Next time you think you are living in a free country, Kiwis, just remember that there are places in the world where they don’t even allow animals to suffer to the degree that your own politicians and doctors will allow you to suffer if you have a condition that can be alleviated by medicinal cannabis.

The Tragedy of New Zealand

Chains of Clay and a Universal Basic Income

A universal basic income could be expected to drastically reduce the number of women forced into prostitution by poverty

Some forward-thinking people are starting to discuss the idea of a universal basic income. This is the idea that the Government would make a small but weekly payment to each adult resident citizen, just enough to keep them alive but not enough for any luxuries or even any decencies.

Predictably, the idea that the Government might help the poor in some new fashion has resulted in cries of communism from those who expect to inherit large amounts of property.

But there are reasons to believe that bringing in a universal basic income, even if it was as little as the current unemployment benefit, would significantly raise the standard of living of the average New Zealander.

For instance, a universal basic income would, at a stroke, remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of desperate poverty.

One might object here that they would not remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of greed – and that’s true in some cases – but consider this.

Every great dictator or tyrant who convinced a mass of people to go against their better nature, and to later regret that they had done so, convinced those people by offering them money.

How?

They just looked for desperately poor people. Poverty is control. That’s the way it has to be understood for the psychological reactions of people to the question of a universal basic income to be understood.

Hitler could not have achieved what he did without the Great Depression and the economic restrictions imposed on Germany as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty.

People like to make a big deal about Hitler’s rhetoric and oratory skills, but the naked fact is that the NSDAP paid men to serve in the military, and they could pay a lot of men for not much money because those men were all as poor as shit.

This is why getting the rich to give up some of the money they have extorted out of the poor through their control of the Police and of private property is not a simple matter of appealing to the simple fact that it would reduce the sum total of human suffering.

One must also take into account the loss of power this entails.

Think of all the women in history who were forced to accept the sexual advances of a man they didn’t like because they needed the money.

Think of all the men in history who have wound up doing violence to strangers because they were forced to be obedient to someone violent for the sake of money.

Think of all the kings and queens who were able to raise an army to invade some other peaceful place because the peasants of their kingdom had no access to the commons on account of enclosure, and therefore were forced to take the monarch’s silver or starve.

Think of all the times a parent who, on account of stress from worry about where the next meal was coming from, took a short-sighted decision in the heat of the moment and came to regret it.

Go back as far in history as you like. How many robberies, how many burglaries, how many thefts, how many assaults and murders could have been prevented had we merely seen to it that people didn’t need to go hungry, and did so with a similar effort to what we already put into punishing and protecting ourselves from robbers, burglars, thieves and murderers?

We’re not talking about an equal distribution of luxuries, or even decencies. A person living merely on a universal basic income will be too poor to afford much beyond food and shelter – but at least they will not be so poor that they will take violent actions out of desperation.

One might raise an objection to this on the grounds that, if people were willing to look after each other enough to introduce a universal basic income, they would have done so already and would not need coercion through Government taxation.

This objection is only reasonable up to a certain historical point. When the productivity of the average citizen has advanced to such a degree that simply by pressing a button they can cause machines and computers to produce a million dollars worth of goods, there’s no reason barring a sadistic need for control to cut non-machine-owners out of this cornucopia.

Of course, much of this discussion is academic in the case of New Zealand, which is 20 years behind the rest of the world in progress on questions like this and getting worse. Medicinal cannabis was legalised in California in 1996 and we are yet to even have a proper discussion about it, so we will likely be several decades behind the rest of the world on the basic income question too.