Paula Bennett's Cannabis Stance Emblematic Of National's Failure

Paula Bennett’s Cannabis Stance Emblematic Of National’s Failure

Yesterday’s Reid Research poll suggested complete and utter failure for the National Party in this September’s election. Most media commentators rushed to congratulate Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party, and suggested that their steady hand during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic was the reason for the good polling. The alternative explanation, as this essay will explore, is that National are shit.

The poll suggested that Labour is currently favoured to win 56% of the vote at the next general election. This would only be a fraction lower than what the African National Congress won in last year’s general election in South Africa, a country often criticised for being a one-party state. It’s a triumphant poll for Labour supporters; their opposition lies scattered and disorganised.

Predictably, most National supporters reacted by bleating about how Reid Research was in Ardern’s back pocket and how everything will be different once the economic effects of the lockdowns are more widely understood. But it won’t be. The fact is that the country has fundamentally lost confidence in the current National leadership.

This magazine reminded everyone last year, in response to increased complaining about the human rights abuses committed by the Sixth Labour Government, that Labour were only in power because National were shit. The Fifth National Government had unmistakably demonstrated its indifference to the suffering of New Zealand’s working class and younger generations, and, subsequently, Winston Peters went with Labour after the 2017 General Election.

Nothing has changed on National’s part.

Deputy Leader Paula Bennett has announced that she’ll be voting to keep putting cannabis users in cages this September. She isn’t bothered that cannabis prohibition costs the taxpayer $400,000,000 a year to enforce, or that it causes great suffering to many of her fellow citizens for no justifiable reason. She wants to charge on with cannabis prohibition as if we’ve learned nothing at all from the past 45 years of failure.

This position is a microcosm of National’s failings.

We tried the politics of cruelty for nine years – the term of the Fifth National Government. We saw John Key and then Bill English sit on their arses as medicinal cannabis was legalised across the world, leaving desperate Kiwis to suffer needlessly. They wasted some $3,600,000,000 on enforcing cannabis prohibition during their term, with nothing to show for it at the end.

During those nine years, we saw the suicide rate climb as the mental health system was pared down to the bare bones. Banking and finance interests grew fat and wealthy, while working New Zealanders were driven first into debt and then to the wall. The National Party rejected all pleas for relief with the same contemptuous indifference that the previous National Government had shown.

By 2017, New Zealanders decided that they’d had enough cruelty. National lost so much support that they lost their grip on power, and Winston Peters dealt the killing blow. It seems that National didn’t learn much from this, however. They have continued to campaign for a kick in the guts to all the usual victims.

Bennett’s position on cannabis shows that National still don’t give a fuck at all. They don’t give a fuck about science, or evidence, or what’s happening with cannabis law reform overseas. They’re just drifting along, in their own little bubble, as if it were still the 1990s.

Things were different in the 1990s. The Fourth National Government passed a Budget in 1991 that left the children of poor families to go hungry, and were rewarded. Kiwis didn’t care about hungry kids then, so we voted National back into power – twice. In the 1990s, we didn’t give a fuck either. But we do now (at least generally speaking).

New Zealand, and the world, have moved on from beggar thy neighbour politics, but the current National leadership has been slow to see it.

Today’s National Party are so out of touch with the average New Zealander that they might as well have a Deputy Leader who wants to put homosexuals in cages. Bennett’s position on cannabis is ludicrous in the light of existing evidence. The electorate inevitably punishes someone holding antiquated positions, and cannabis prohibition is an antiquated method of dealing with cannabis misuse.

To be in favour of cannabis prohibition today is to deny reality. A person is insane if they think that, by using the criminal justice system to put cannabis users in cages, the Government decreases the sum total of human suffering. Kiwi voters can sense this, and so they have overwhelmingly chosen to support the opposition.

The National Party needs to move away from the politics of hate that have characterised it in recent decades, and accept that policies like cannabis prohibition belong in history’s garbage can. This might necessitate a clearout of their current leadership. Nikki Kaye has previously demonstrated a 21st Century approach to cannabis law reform, and the electorate might reward this good sense over what Bridges and Bennett are offering.

Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for ending cannabis prohibition.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 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 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Why Stuff Is Worth Less Than VJM Publishing

Many New Zealanders were surprised last week by reports that the Stuff news portal at www.stuff.co.nz was worth less than one dollar. How could it be possible that our foremost media portal, which employs hundreds of people, has a lower net value than a ramshackle outfit like VJM Publishing? This essay explains.

Stuff has a world Alexa rank in the top 4,000, and was ranked 7th in New Zealand at time of writing. They get hundreds of times more traffic than VJM Publishing does. They have been legitimised in most people’s minds as the “mainstream media” and, despite being shit, are considered to be “proper” journalism.

So how can they make less money? The simple answer comes down to who owns Stuff and what they have bought ownership for.

The VJM Publishing strategy is not to churn out vast numbers of shitty articles, with clickbait headlines, about vapid celebrities, in the hope of tricking some pleb into clicking on some more clickbait in the form of an advertisement.

No wonder advertising revenue is plummeting, if that is the business model.

VJM Publishing doesn’t make money from spamming Google ads through every page or by having banks of them at the bottom of every article like Stuff does. In fact, we don’t make any money from advertising revenue – we make it from selling books. Every page on this website has a set of links to our book sale pages on Amazon and TradeMe.

Making a living selling books is tough, but it’s possible. The trick is to produce material of a high enough quality that it promotes and advertises itself. This is the secret to ranking well in the Google algorithm, because that algorithm can estimate a page’s quality by measuring the responses of its readers. If the readers tend to click away quickly, it’s probably a low-quality page, and vice-versa.

This is a different business plan to that of Stuff, but we are in fact a publishing company, not an advertising seller (or reseller). As such, we compete on quality and not on volume.

This company operates under the logic that if we can provide quality articles about esoteric subjects and alternative psychology, as well as intelligent political commentary from an alt-centrist perspective, that this will give us an edge. As long as this edge leads people to become aware of our books, some people will buy them, and we make profits.

All of this sounds so obvious, that the question has to be asked: why doesn’t Stuff do similar?

The first thing is to look at who owns the New Zealand media: essentially it’s owned by international banking and finance interests. This was demonstrated by us here at VJM Publishing, in an example of the kind of journalism that the mainstream media will never give you.

These international banking and finance interests don’t care if they lose money from Stuff. They gain something of far, far greater value: control of the narrative. Thanks to having control of the narrative, they can normalise all kinds of things that are in their benefit. In principle, every article on Stuff has been calculated to suit the agenda of its owners.

By directing Stuff to constantly cry and scream about racism, those owners achieve several objectives.

The international banking and finance interests make enormous profits from mass immigration. Not only does every new immigrant push the price of housing up and generate one new mortgage account, but their cheaper labour also pushes the cost of running a business down. On top of all that, their presence destroys the solidarity of the host nation, making it easier to rule over. Win-win-win.

The major opponents to the mass importation of cheap labour are the native working class. They lose the most heavily as they don’t tend to own houses, and they tend to sell rather than hire labour. As such, the mainstream media makes a great effort to paint these people as ignorant bigots who oppose mass immigration out of nothing but pure hatred.

It has to be understood that the mainstream media stokes up hysteria about racism for money. Not only does it generate clicks and traffic, but it also normalises the idea that mass immigration is normal and that anyone objecting to it is evil. Multiculturalism destroys the ability of the host nation to resist the predations of the international banking and finance classes – and the latter know this intuitively.

By directing Stuff to fill space with crap about Meghan Markle, they also achieve several objectives.

Foremost of these are wasting people’s time and conscious awareness on shit. If the mainstream media informed people about issues that directly impacted their well-being, it would agitate them. This might lead to chaos, which is bad for business. Much better to have a passive population who can be milked for profits without protest.

The best thing for business is for the populace to be induced into maximum docility. Perfection would be a herd of consumers that only get excited when the next product is released. So the mainstream media is directed to fill their pages with fluff pieces about irrelevant people. Meghan Markle, who has no connection to New Zealand at all, is the ideal subject.

All of these objectives serve one greater meta-objective: to gain control over our minds. Whoever controls the mainstream media – otherwise known as the apparatus of propaganda – controls the minds of the people. They control what the people hear, what the people think, what the people consider normal. Effectively they control how the people react to every stimulus that is put before them.

It’s an enormous power, perhaps the archetypal modern expression of what Elementalists call silver magic.

In summary: the international banking and finance interests who own the mainstream media are happy to lose money from it as long as they gain control of the narrative, because this confers a great deal of power. The elites run Stuff as a loss-leader to capture the attention of the masses in the same way that supermarkets run chocolate specials as loss-leaders. The losses from it are written off against greater profits elsewhere.

VJM Publishing, by contrast, is run as an actual business, whose mission is to provide quality information, forecasting and analysis in exchange for money. As such, we have to maintain a net worth above zero.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Gutmensch’?

For Clown World to be possible, the people building it have to have popular support. It has plenty of support, of course, among the ruling elites and the great capital interests that profit from the alienation, despair and fragmentation of the people. But how does it get support from the common person, who doesn’t benefit from Clown World? This essay explains.

‘Gutmensch’ is a German term that literally means ‘good human’. It’s a pejorative term that means something akin to “do-gooder” or “goody two-shoes”.

The gutmensch is someone who tries very hard to be seen to be doing the right thing, but who lacks the intellect to actually discern what the right thing is. They are not intelligent enough for philosophy, and they are not intelligent enough to understand the material world and to extrapolate from that, and they do not have a natural moral sense. So they have to take cues from the social world.

The process of determining right from wrong by way of observing the social world is an error-strewn one that takes decades to become any good – and is inaccurate at the best of times. As such, the gutmensch learns right from wrong from learning what the authorities say it is. Their parents, the government, their church, the boss, doesn’t matter – the authorities are always right.

The great weakness of this approach, of course, is that the social world can easily be manipulated by malicious actors. Most people older than children understand that there are many malicious people out there, and that it’s common for these malicious people to seek power in institutions that give them authority over others.

By the time intelligent people are 15 years old, they have figured out that hierarchies of power attract evil people and therefore it’s unwise to ever trust police officers, politicians, psychiatrists or priests. These intelligent people naturally distrust anyone who appears motivated to exult themselves or to assert control over other people.

The gutmensch never figures this out. He will go on blindly parroting what these authority figures say as if it were the word of God. For him, social dominance hierarchies can only be climbed by competence, and people can only become authorities if they were better than others. This child-like naivety makes it possible for all kinds of malicious actors to get support from gutmenschen.

These malicious actors prey on the sheep-like nature of the gutmensch to induce him to support policies which are in the interests of those malicious actors, but not in the interests of the gutmensch. Mass immigration is the foremost example. As such, the gutmensch can be herded to his doom, like a deer driven over a cliff.

The big problem with that is that the gutmenschen take the rest of us down with them. Their overwhelming mass support for the status quo and for the established rulers of society means that, in order to effect positive change, one has to fight against society itself. The gutmensch serves as a mindless drone guarding the elites, something that has to be overcome if Clown World is to be overcome.

Another way that the gutmensch weakens society is from his fear of taboos. There are so many things that the gutmensch forbids themselves from speaking about that, sometimes, talking to them feels like talking to a religious fundamentalist. Topics of race, religion, sex and gender differences cannot be discussed, and if they can be, only the most blue-pilled, Government-approved opinions can be offered.

All these taboos have the final effect of destroying conversation and making communication more difficult. In the final analysis, the gutmensch is, despite his intentions, a destroyer.

Although the gutmensch thinks himself an upstanding citizen who wouldn’t harm anyone, he was on the front lines of the Nazi and Communist battles against their own people, comprising a large proportion of those who ratted out their neighbours. The gutmensch is capable of committing any atrocity while thinking that, because the Government approved of them, they were doing a good thing.

Fundamental to gutmensch psychology is a terror of being judged, especially of being found unworthy. This is because the gutmensch has no real self esteem, and must find it elsewhere. Because his social equals are also pathetic, the gutmensch must seek approval from authority figures. This is why he is so eager to please them.

Underneath it all, gutmenschen are massively egotistical losers, so incredibly precious that they’ll happily go along with any mob, no matter how destructive, rather than risk disapproval. In their hearts, they know they are pathetic, which is why they resent those who are not. Fundamentally, then, gutmensch mentality is a slave morality.

In most cases, gutmenschen turn out the way they do because they have lived extremely sheltered lives. The typical gutmensch will never have travelled outside of their comfort zone, much less backpacked through the third world or lived in countries where they speak another language. They have never been challenged, and as such remain men of clay.

These gutmenschen evoke plenty of hate on account of that their self-righteous moralising makes people want to punch them. These sentiments are well warranted, because it is the gutmensch who normalises every government abuse, from those of the Nazis and Communists to the War and Drugs and alcohol prohibition.

The difference between a gutmensch and a baizuo is subtle, and mostly a matter of age and education. Perhaps the best way to explain the difference is by analogy to the animal kingdom. The baizuo is like a peacock: it preens, it appears vain, and its elaborate virtue signalling does more harm than good. The gutmensch, by contrast, is a simple herd animal. It doesn’t care about anything other than fitting in.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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Everything’s Legal If You Have Superior Firepower

The majority of New Zealanders wander the streets in a child-like stupor, thoughts of flickering television and cellphone screens like a safety blanket around their minds. So when reality intrudes, it can have a powerfully disturbing effect. Sometimes people realise that life is much different to what the screens say it is. This essay explains one recent example.

Much discussion has filled conscious space recently on the subject of whether the Level 4 coronavirus lockdowns were legal in New Zealand. Many people, including Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges, have questioned whether New Zealand law actually affords the Government the ability to shutdown the entire country and to force people to stay in their homes.

Even more discussion was created by the release of the Sixth Labour Government’s COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill recently. Section 20 gives the right to any “enforcement officer” (notably not “Police officer”) to enter private property without a warrant if they have “reasonable grounds to believe” that Section 11 of the bill is not being complied with.

This section of the bill has upset many people, because it seems to be doing away with a number of fundamental human rights. It seems like we New Zealanders have suddenly lost the right to free assembly and the right to unreasonable search and seizure. How, these people are asking, can such a thing be possible?

Many of the people commentating on these issues haven’t thought hard enough about how the world actually works.

There are five million of us stuck down here in the South Pacific, closer to the middle of nowhere than any other nation. The British Empire that created the order of New Zealand society is long, long, long gone, the rump state (the United Kingdom) now being a sad parody of its former glory. We have not been independent for long enough to have created a philosophical or spiritual tradition that we can fall back on for wisdom.

Our situation is very much like that of William Golding’s boys in Lord of the Flies. There is no higher power to which we can appeal. There is no wise and benevolent authority looking out for the goodwill of all people. There is no God here, just the Sixth Labour Government. We’re all alone – and this loneliness risks turning us feral.

In the situation we’re in, the ten thousand or so Police officers in the country are the law. If you doubt this assertion, ask yourself this – what happens when a Police officer breaks the law? The answer is: nothing. If you doubt that assertion, wait for something to come from today’s revelation that the Police trialled facial recognition technology on the populace without their knowledge, and without permission to do so.

Or wait for anything to come from the Operation Whakahumanu harassment campaign, where hundreds of Police officers were sent to the houses of various Internet commentators in an effort to intimidate them into silence. Using the Police to intimidate one’s political critics is illegal – but there is no-one to hold the perpetrators to account.

The reality is this: the Government of our country is a pack of pirates, who have arrogated to themselves the right to enslave the rest of us with laws that are enforced by arse-licking sycophants, who are themselves happy to destroy their fellow man in exchange for a full belly. This is true whether the Prime Minister is from Labour or National, because in either case they represent the piratical ruling class and not the New Zealand people.

The arse-licking sycophants don’t care what the Government tells them to do, as long as they get paid and get pats on the head for being good boys. As this column has previously discussed, the Police will kill to enforce any law, no matter how trivial. This follows inevitably from the fact, as this column as also previously discussed, that the psychology of Police officers and their relationship to the Government is analogous to that of dogs and their masters.

However, if you don’t like it, what can you do about it? They have all the guns, therefore there’s nothing you can do, in practice, to resist their will. As Mao Tse Tung realised, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. One man with a firearm can easily keep several dozen under control out of a fear of getting shot. Ten thousand men with firearms, like our current Police force, confers legitimacy.

New Zealanders mistakenly think that our votes confer legitimacy to the Government, who in turn delegate some legitimacy to the Police. The reality is that whoever has the guns, the organisation and the will to use them has the power, and in our current situation that’s the Police and the Army. Therefore, it is the loyalty of the Police and the Army that confers power – and they take orders from the ruling class, both the visible government and the invisible government.

If you disagree, ask yourself by what process New Zealand law came to be the law in the first place, or ask yourself what the law would be if New Zealand was invaded by a hostile foreign power and an occupation government installed. The fact is that all life on Earth operates under the law of the gun: everything is legal if you have the firepower to get away with making it so.

There is only one simple way out of this grim situation.

The first step is to rally around this sevenfold conception of inherent human rights. The Sevenfold Conception is an elementalist exposition of inherent, God-given human rights that are not to be violated by any government law or action. If all New Zealanders would rally around this conception, we would no longer allow the Government to divide and conquer us by playing off factions that support one right against factions that support another.

The second step is to normalise the recognition of this sevenfold conception of human rights until it becomes commonly accepted, in all instances, that it applies. This will involve the raising of a parallel Police force – one that is loyal to the soil, the water, the wind and the Sun of these isles, and to the people from them above all.

A Police force that has been made to swear to the Sevenfold Conception before becoming officers will not slavishly obey orders to violate the human rights of New Zealanders. Not before the Sevenfold Conception is widely understood, and is widely insisted upon, can we can expect that our rights to free assembly, to self-defence, to free speech, to unreasonable search and seizure and to access spiritual sacraments will go unviolated.

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