How A Coronavirus Pandemic Could Win Jacinda Ardern The Election

This September’s election promises to be very close. Opinion polls suggest that either of a National-ACT or Labour-New Zealand First-Greens coalition could easily take power in the aftermath. The actual winner will be determined by a number of factors. One of those factors, as this essay will discuss, is the effect of COVID-19 on the demographic makeup of the nation.

One striking feature of this particular form of coronavirus is its death rate among old people. The death rate for people aged 80 and over who contract it is believed to be over 14%. For people aged between 70 and 79 it appears to be 8.0%, and 3.6% for people aged between 60 and 69. Corona-Chan is the Scourge of the Aged.

The death rate among young people, by contrast, is extremely low. No-one aged under 10 is known to have died of COVID-19 yet, and the death rate for those under 40 appears to be no more than 0.2%, i.e. barely different to regular bouts of influenza. Corona-Chan is merciful upon the young.

This great differential in danger across age brackets may have electoral consequences.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, there are very strong correlations between being old and voting Conservative or National. In 2017, the correlation between being aged 65+ and voting Conservative was 0.39, and between being aged 65+ and voting National it was 0.62. At the other end of the scale, the correlation between being aged 20-29 and voting Labour in 2017 was 0.34, and with voting Greens it was 0.60.

0.62 is a strong enough correlation to suggest that the vast majority of people over 65 will vote National, and much of the remainder will vote Conservative. Meanwhile, the correlation of -0.35 between being aged 20-29 and voting National in 2017 tells us that few young people will vote for them in September.

Put these two things together, and it becomes apparent that COVID-19 is likely to kill off a significant proportion of National and Conservative voters.

There were over 711,000 people in New Zealand aged 65 or over at the end of 2016. It might be closer to 800,000 by now. If COVID-19 kills off 10% of people over 65 before September 19, that will approach 80,000 deaths, and if 75% of those people were National or Conservative voters, that suggests that they could well lose 60,000 voters – 20,000 more than Labour, Greens or New Zealand First would lose.

At the 2017 General Election, National, ACT and Conservatives got 1,171,403 votes between them out of a total of 2,591,896, a proportion of 45.2%. If they would lose 60,000 voters from coronavirus deaths, as per the scenario outlined in the above paragraph, they would end up with 1,111,403 votes out of a total of 2,511,896 – a proportion of 44.2%.

A loss of one percent might not sound like much, but the effect of COVID-19 in suppressing right-wing voters is not limited to deaths.

If there are 60,000 deaths among National and Conservative voters, there will be at least this many incapacitated by the illness. The overseas experience has shows that COVID-19 often means a few weeks confined to an artificial respirator. If the pandemic is at or near its peak in New Zealand at the time of the election, there could be a large number of old people unable to vote because coronavirus has left them physically incapable of doing so.

A further factor is that some old people might decide to stay away from polling booths on Election Day out of the fear of contracting coronavirus. As COVID-19’s greater threat to the elderly is widely known by now, a significant number of those elderly might be persuaded to stay away from the polling booths altogether. A majority of the population will pass through the nation’s polling booths on September 19, so standing in line at one for half an hour is asking for trouble.

Adding together deaths, incapacitations and discouragements, the right wing appears likely to lose several tens of thousands of voters before September 19.

All of this is moot if Jacinda Ardern suspends the election. There is presently no hard indication that she is prepared to do this, but mayoral elections due for May have already been suspended for 12 months in London, and Ardern must have felt the temptation. New Zealand has already been in chimpout mode for the past year and this coronavirus pandemic has made it three times worse.

Assuming the election goes ahead as planned though, there is a small but realistic chance that what would have been a National-ACT victory is transformed into a loss by the effects of COVID-19. The balance is so fine that a nudge the size of a coronavirus pandemic could tip it over.

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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Let It Die – We’ll Build A New One On The Ashes Of The Old

As stockmarkets plummet across the globe, many fear that the end of the world is upon us. It may well be – but this is no reason to be afraid. Much better to embrace this new destiny. It’s time to let the old order die; it’s time for good people to step into the light of the new century. Let the old order die so that we can build a new one!

Panic spreads as the stockmarkets collapse. Emergency measures have been taken to halt trading. Let the stockmarkets collapse! They measure nothing but how much wealth can be wrung out of the sweat of the nation’s workers. Let them collapse, then demolish the buildings they were run out of, break the rubble into gravel and turn the empty lots into gardens.

Will globalism survive the coronavirus? Who cares – let it die! Globalism sees the common man worked to breakdown and then chucked on the garbage heap, his productivity siphoned away to fund the importation of his replacements. Good riddance to the global economy! Good riddance to globalism!

Let the world die – its current order is worth less than nothing anyway. In its stead, let’s build a system where productivity is rewarded more than dumb ownership, and where the objective is to spread the wealth, not to extract it. Let’s build a system where the fundamental basis of solidarity is being raised on the same soil, drinking the same water, breathing the same air, under the same Sun.

Today’s system is rotten to the very core. The only way to advance is to lie and cheat, or to fasten one’s fangs into the back of some working-class man target and to suck wealth from them. Rent-seekers are lionised; truth-tellers are shunned. Lottery winners and inheritors of fortunes are prized as highly as great entrepreneurs and inventors.

Let it die!

Instead of hailing the financial swindlers, the planet rapers, the producers of stupefying drugs and those most adept at slithering up the greasy pole of politics, in the New Century we will hail those whose effort brings a reduction to the suffering of other sentient beings. Those who meet other people’s needs for food, for medicine, for shelter, for companionship, for knowledge and for entertainment will be our heroes!

Some argue that the Internet needs to be regulated on account of that “the proliferation of fake news” has led to people losing faith in the mainstream media. Let the public lose faith in the mass media and in the political institutions! Since forever the mass media have been paid propagandists for the Establishment, surpassed only in wretchedness by politicians. Let this be known by all!

Since forever the political institutions have pushed honest people away and promoted liars, grifters, horse-traders, palm-greasers and teleprompter-readers of all stripes. The political institutions are happy to promote people of any race, creed, sex or sexual orientation, so long as they maintain strict adherence to the one moral truth: money is God.

Corona-Chan can take the whole wretched system! Let a new one arise – one in which the truth is valued, and where statesmen are hired to do a job for the people, not to them. Let a culture arise in which tellers of truth are no longer ridiculed but admired. Let the liars be shunned!

Most ridiculous of all are the lamentations of the impotent old fools and superstitious cowards who think that appeasing the God of Abraham in this world will grant them an absence of suffering in the worlds to come, and that our loss of faith in this miserable slave doctrine is the reason for our current woes. These execrable weaklings have it that all suffering in the world comes from a failure to grovel obsequiously enough before the priests of this slave ideology.

Let the public lose faith in religion!

Our “Judeo-Christian” heritage is worth less than nothing; at best a safety blanket for resentful egomaniacs, at worst an intoxicating set of delusions that rot the soul. There’s no reason for Westerners today to follow a book that tells them to kill non-believers and homosexuals in the hope of spending eternity with the rabbi in the sky.

Let it get flushed down the S-bend of history.

In the New Century, women stand alongside men as interdependent forces that work together to reduce the suffering of everyone. No longer shall any filthy book of hate cause violence and discord between natural allies. No-one is to be killed unless they unrepentantly cause suffering to other sentient beings.

We will build a new world, one based upon an honest and real connection to God. Let the Abrahamist piss his pants at the thought of spiritual sacraments like cannabis, psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine – we will consume them all, at the same time! In our new world, knowledge of the divine and the sacraments that reconnect us to it will be common.

There is no fear that the collapse of the rotten old order means that we will rush blindly into the unknown. Those who have long hated that order have thought for many years about a better one.

It’s time for an order that puts the elimination of human suffering first. Not profit, not equality, not adherence to the twisted moral tenets of an inhuman desert cult but the elimination of actual human suffering – directly, not in the abstract.

Let us have a system that feeds rather than starves, which heals rather than sickens, which enlightens people instead of making them more ignorant. Let the coronavirus destroy the stockmarkets so that the whole filthy charade finally ends. Let the old world die, so that we can get to work building a new!

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How The Lack Of A Universal Basic Income Leaves Us Vulnerable To Pandemics

With the COVID-19 pandemic taking hold around the world, many people now realise that the economic foundations of our society are much more fragile than they had seemed. The disruption to global supply chains from the Wuhan coronavirus is just beginning to have an effect. As this essay will show, much of the pain that we will suffer this year could have been avoided if we had had a universal basic income.

Nothing gives a person more power over another group of people than that group’s desperation. The more desperate people are, the less money they will be willing to work for, and the shittier the workplace conditions they will be willing to accept. The ruling class doesn’t want to give up the power that widespread desperation and poverty give them. so they promote more of it.

The major argument against a UBI is that people need a certain level of coercion before they are willing to work. Without the threat of starvation or being kicked out of their house for not making their rent payments, people won’t do the amount of work that their rulers consider acceptable. Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen is the logic.

Modern events like the COVID-19 pandemic show that this way of thinking has made our society much weaker than it needed to be.

A forestry exporter in Gisborne recently complained that the pandemic had halved the income of his business. Because Chinese workers are being kept at home to prevent further spread of the virus, there is no-one to unload the boats in the docks. This means that forestry exporters can’t send any product to China, and so have to shut down a large part of their operation.

Without income, this forestry exporter has found themselves needing to lay off staff. Getting laid off is a highly stressful event at the best of times – when it comes at the same time as your entire industry is shutting down because of a coronavirus pandemic, then one also has to deal with the fear of not being able to find new work. Those who fail at that will be forced to go into WINZ and run the usual gauntlet of getting accused of being a bludging, malingering piece of shit. It promises to be a tough time for many.

A great amount of stress is needlessly created as the result of the way our economic system is structured, and this is amplified beyond breaking point when a pandemic like our current one strikes. If we are intelligent, we will take this opportunity to restructure this system so as to make ourselves more resilient to the next mass medical shock.

A recent Stuff article reported that Jacinda Ardern and other high-ranking Labour ministers had generously agreed “in principle” to remove the one week standdown period for anyone losing their jobs as a result of the coronavirus. No-one really knows why beneficiaries are made to starve for a week before being granted money, but the fact that they are creates much unnecessary misery, sometimes leading to suicide.

Removing this standdown week is a good move, but it’s a tiny measure compared to the introduction of a UBI. That would remove an enormous amount of stress from the people whose jobs were vulnerable to pandemics that impacted China – a group that will always be sizable in New Zealand. Greatly reduced stress means, in cases of sudden employment shocks, a greatly reduced number of deaths from despair.

Some are expecting that COVID-19 will be particularly virulent in America, for reasons relating to their economy. The best way to combat the pandemic is to quarantine entire areas, as China has done. America is unwilling to do this, which means that they have relied on asking people who think that they might be infected to get themselves tested and then to self-isolate – a process that might take up to three weeks.

The problem is that most American workers can’t simply leave work for three weeks. For them, three weeks with no income means getting kicked out of their houses for not making rent payments. It means getting the car repossessed, it means going hungry, it means needing to beg for an overdraft extension or miss out on healthcare. It means an immense level of stress.

A UBI would take the majority of this stress away. The knowledge that losing one’s job would not result in starvation and destitution, but merely a temporary reduction to a Spartan lifestyle, would make the necessary adaptations much easier to make. Losing one’s job would no longer mean crisis time but merely scaling back operations for a while.

A UBI would also incentivise people to not spread diseases like coronavirus to others.

Workers who are in precarious financial situations will feel compelled to go to work even when they suspect themselves to have coronavirus, on account of that they need the money. This will inevitably lead to them infecting far more people than if they had self-isolated. So not only does the lack of a UBI mean an increase in stress, it makes epidemics like COVID-19 more likely to develop into pandemics.

If New Zealand had a UBI, people who suspected themselves to be infected in a pandemic could easily arrange with their employers to be off work for a few weeks, without getting fucked by cashflow problems. These cashflow problems currently make it all but impossible to follow medical advice to self-quarantine, which exposes the entire economy to a systemic danger.

COVID-19 might not be the world-ending pandemic that many had feared. But even if it isn’t, we are still vulnerable to such a thing in the future. The introduction of a universal basic income would, above its numerous other benefits, make the national economy much more resilient to a pandemic. As it is, the ability to self-isolate is almost a luxury – perfect conditions for disaster.

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Why I Don’t Believe In Climate Change Alarmism

I don’t have a qualification in Climatology, and am therefore not an expert on the subject. I do, however, have a couple of Psychology degrees, and so have a claim to expertise there. When it comes to understanding issues like climate change, I can’t use Climatology knowledge; I have to use Psychology knowledge. This is how I do it.

Like anyone else who understands general science, I can try to understand the basics of climate change. I can go to Google Scholar, type in “climate change predictions” and then limit the search to papers from 2019 onwards, as I did here. This would give me a general overview of the current state of the science. There’s one minor problem – such a search query returns over 20,000 hits.

Realistically, becoming an expert on climate change would require reading at least a hundred of these papers, as well as at least a hundred published before 2019. This would total several years of study – a time investment that I’m neither able nor willing to make. Therefore, like any other layman, I’m reduced to making a judgment based on whether I believe the people taking about climate change are credible.

If the people talking about it seem trustworthy, then I will be inclined to believe what they say. If they seem untrustworthy, then I will be disinclined to believe what they say. This is how it works with every other political issue, from cannabis law reform to immigration to abortion to euthanasia to taxes. Once the subject of discussion moves out of Psychology, I’m operating on trust and not my own expertise.

As it turns out, the people pushing climate change strike me as grossly untrustworthy, for three major reasons: they seem insincere, irrational and dishonest.

If the politicians pushing climate change alarmism were sincere, they would not also be buying beachfront properties. Yet Barack Obama, one of the world’s foremost harbingers of climate doom, recently bought 29 acres of it. Why would Obama, privy to the world’s most advanced scientific research when American President, buy beachfront property, unless he expects the sea level to remain the same?

The market shows that seaside property is still highly valued. Waterfront property in Sydney, extremely vulnerable to rising oceans, still sells for eight-figure sums. How could a property doomed to be wiped out by rising sea levels sell for over ten million dollars? The only answer is that no-one cares about rising sea levels. The claims of those like Obama cannot be sincere.

On top of this, the people pushing climate alarmism seem irrational. On the one hand, they claim that CO2 emissions are making a major contribution to global warming, such that every one of us has the moral imperative to minimise our CO2 emissions insofar as we are able. But then these same people turn around and argue for an increase in the refugee quota, in some cases tripling it or even more.

New Zealanders consume resources at many times the rate of the average Third World resident. Where is the sense in taking 5,000 people every year (as the Greens propose) from low-emissions parts of the world, and flying them at great expense to a high-emissions part of the world, where they and their numerous descendants will consume future resources at many times the rate they would have done otherwise?

The only logical explanation for the Greens’ refugee policy is that the entire concept of CO2 emissions being bad is horseshit. Either the Greens are lying about the imperative to minimise CO2 emissions, or they don’t understand the relevant science (a closer look shows that not a single one of New Zealand’s current Green MPs has a tertiary science qualification – the closest is James Shaw with an M.Sc from a business school).

If the Greens would say that CO2 emissions were bad and, therefore, we will close the borders to immigration from low-emission areas, then the threat of climate change would appear to make rational sense. But they do the exact opposite of that. Therefore, I can conclude that those promoting climate change are irrational, and so the truth value of their pronouncements can be discounted.

The real showstopper for me though, as a psychologist, is that one of the people fronting the climate charge alarmist movement in New Zealand is a convicted fraudster. This is no less a dignitary than the Maori Climate Commissioner herself, Donna Awatere Huata.

In 2005, Huata was found guilty of fraud and of attempting to pervert the course of justice. The money that she defrauded from a foundation set up to help underprivileged kids learn to read was used on a stomach stapling operation. What sort of malignant narcissist would steal money from children to fund cosmetic surgery for herself? A Climate Commissioner, that’s who.

In the same way that I wouldn’t buy a used car off convicted ponzi schemer David Ross, I wouldn’t buy one off Donna Awatere Huata either. So why on Earth would I listen to her pronouncements about climate change? The smart thing to do would be to believe the exact opposite of whatever Huata says.

In summary, I don’t believe in climate change alarmism because the people pushing it are crooked, insane and unqualified to make scientific pronouncements. These people seem every bit the shameless grifters that have pushed every other kind of alarmism to make a quick buck out of the ensuing hysteria.

I’m willing to be corrected, but do note that you will have to have a qualification in a relevant science from a proper university, and you will have to cite peer-reviewed journal articles in relevant disciplines, for me to take you seriously on this matter.

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