new zealand – Page 57

The Black Caps Can Win The World Cup If They Summon The Spirit of The Crusaders Team of 1999

Some say that you need to lose a final before you can win one, and therefore the Black Caps should win Sunday’s Cricket World Cup decider since they lost the final in 2015. Others point out that their opponents, England, have already lost three finals and are playing at home. The 2019 Black Caps, as Dan McGlashan writes, need to take their inspiration from the champion Crusaders team – of 1999.

The 1999 Super Rugby season followed a similar format to this year’s Cricket World Cup. The twelve teams all played each other in a round robin league, and then the top four played in semifinals, with the top team playing the fourth-ranked one and second playing third. The final would be played at the home ground of the highest-ranked finalist.

The Crusaders started the season with wins, but the wheels fell off the campaign in later rounds and they limped into the semifinals in fourth position. Their semifinal was away against the Queensland Reds, a team that had beaten them by 13 points during the round robin stage. To the surprise of many, the Crusaders won the game 28-22.

The lesser-favoured team also won the other semifinal, with the Otago Highlanders taking down the Stormers in South Africa. This meant that the Highlanders were the highest-ranked finalist, having been third at the end of the pool stage to the Crusaders’ fourth. The final would therefore be at Carisbrook, Dunedin.

Despite having qualified fourth, and despite having to win away, the Crusaders were able to overcome. They won the final 24-19 despite the hostile Otago crowd and the gallant efforts of the Highlanders.

The Black Caps have had a similar campaign this year. Their World Cup started with a number of wins against the easy teams, and then some very tight games, and then some losses. Consequently, they limped into the semifinals in fourth place.

India was heavily favoured to win the semifinal, having only lost one game during the round robin. However, vulnerabilities had been exposed in the Indian win against Afghanistan, and the Black Caps took advantage to win the fixture by 18 runs.

That the Black Caps have not been favoured to win is an understatement. Smarter media pundits, such as VJM Publishing, have been reporting for years that this Black Caps unit is an excellent side: their players stack up statistically to the world’s best, they’re better man-for-man than the 2015 side and we believed years ago that they could be the No. 1 ODI side in the world.

The mainstream media, by contrast, has been spewing out pessimistic garbage. They don’t simply remember the sporting landscape of 1999 – they’re stuck in it. Hence, they write as if the Black Caps were still as unfavoured as the team of 1999.

This garbage, however, could be used as fuel to spark a fire, the kind of fire that inspired Andrew Mehrtens to give a one-fingered salute to a raucous Bulls crowd on his way to leading the Crusaders to the 1999 title.

It’s true that the English team is probably the favourites. Not only are they the No. 1 ranked ODI team in the world, but they also beat the Black Caps in their pool stage encounter. This isn’t a bad thing from the Black Caps’ perspective – it just means that they have to do two things.

The first is to go to the final with an attitude of defiance. It’s probably fair to say that the 2015 Black Caps side were a little overawed by the occasion of a Cricket World Cup final. They were playing in the 90,000-seat home stadium of the five-time world champions. The Black Caps looked, and played, nervously that day. Those nerves may have led to incorrect decisions being made.

The 2019 side shows no sign of this. Kane Williamson has been a colossus of silk and steel who plays with the self-belief of a prophet of God, and his lieutenants all have experience from playing in the last final. Martin Guptill, Ross Taylor, Trent Boult and Matt Henry have all played multiple World Cup knockout games by now, with Guptill and Henry even winning Man of the Match in two of them.

They need to take this newly-won confidence into the final, then double down on it. Let them rage coldly against their doubters, against the sheep-like mockers. Let them take the field with the belief that they’re not there to do well or evenly merely to win, but to write their names into history.

For a second thing, they have to do something new that England isn’t expecting.

That something unexpected might be swapping Guptill and Tom Latham in the batting order. If Latham opened the batting with Henry Nicholls, the Black Caps would have their two best leavers of the ball to see out the first six overs. So far this World Cup, the ball has not swung much past the six over mark, and so surviving this period becomes crucial (as India found out to their dismay).

Opening with Guptill makes sense if the bat dominates the ball, as it has done for most of the past four years. If the ball dominates the bat, however, as has been the case for much of this World Cup, Guptill tends to nick off or miss a moving one early and get out. Better to have Latham and Nicholls deal with this, then to have Guptill come in at 5 once Williamson and Taylor have seen off the main danger.

Nothing needs to change in the bowling department. The Black Caps produced one of their greatest ever bowling performances in the semifinal, with lethal accuracy up front and then a dogged refusal to give away bad balls as the innings progressed. If they can bowl that well again, or even close to it, England will have to play extremely well to score 270 or more.

The Black Caps need to summon the iron-willed spirit of the 1999 Crusaders team. Then they can go into an away final against a favoured opponent with the attitude of sticking it up all of them, their crowd and their media. This need not mean they go against their established culture of goodwill and fair play – it just means they have to play with a bit more steel in the spine.

Summon the spirit of the Crusaders side of 20 years ago, and the Black Caps could be world champions on Monday morning.

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).

Should We Sell New Zealand to China on A 99-Year Lease?

Many Kiwis are concerned about the amount of New Zealand land being sold into overseas hands. This concern has been heightened by last week’s sale of Westland Milk to China for $588 milllion. This essay asks an extremely controversial and unpalatable question: should we sell the country to the Chinese on a 99-year lease?

Thomas Porter of the Colonial Defence Force was a famously close ally of Ngati Porou war chief Ropata Wahawaha. When a captain, he served with the Ngati Porou contingent under Wahawaha that hunted down mass murderer Te Kooti in the Uruwera ranges. From the 1870s onwards, he was involved with work as a land purchase officer, a job made easier by his fluent command of Maori and his marriage to the daughter of a chief who had once paid for Wahawaha’s release from slavery.

Porter knew that the settler thirst for land was insatiable. The British Empire was possibly the most rapacious enterprise ever created by humans, and it had its eyes set on New Zealand. The Maoris would have to give up most of their land or be annihilated, as the Aborigines had been in Australia and the Native Americans before that on the other side of the Pacific.

However, Porter had a trick up his sleeve.

He was aware of the Highland Clearances, where the relentless desire for maximum profit had led to the evictions of tens of thousands of people from communal land in Northern Scotland from the middle of the 18th century. Some of the original landholders had survived the clearances by giving up their land on 99-year leases rather than selling it. By the time 99 years were up, the original pressure to sell had gone.

A great friend of the Ngati Porou, Porter did them a great favour. Instead of arranging for the land to be sold outright, he arranged for much of it to be sold on 99-year leases. This meant that the land was returned to Ngati Porou control in the years after World War II. Hindsight would prove this to be a stroke of genius.

A 99-year lease, Porter reasoned, would give the leaseholder all the security they wanted, as well as all the freedom they needed to use the land for whatever purpose. Consequently, there would no longer be any pressure on the Ngati Porou to sell it forever. So at the end of the 99 years, much of the original Ngati Porou holdings were still in their hands – and worth a packet.

This decision is part of the reason why the Ngati Porou are doing so well today compared to many other Maori tribes. Rather than accept a windfall that was inevitably squandered, the land was effectively put into a 99-year investment account. When that account matured, the whole tribe shared in the profits.

The Chinese demand for food products to feed their population of 1,400,000,000 is as difficult to meet as the Western demand for land once was. The Chinese population might not be growing any more, as birthrates have declined sharply since 1980, but Chinese wealth has been growing strongly since then, and their demand for food products has increased commensurately. The pressure to sell our land in the coming few decades will be immense.

This was a similar situation to what the Ngati Porou faced in 1870, and the factors that apply to us were considered by Captain Porter in his decision to arrange 99-year leases. We ought to ask ourselves if we should do the same. Would it not be better, instead of selling it for good bit-by-bit, to lease the whole country to the Chinese on a 99-year contract?

We wouldn’t be the first to have the idea. The Northern Territory Government has leased Darwin Port to the Chinese on a 99-year lease. This move has been criticised severely on account of its strategic implications, but the fact remains that Australia will get the port back after 99 years, the same way that the Chinese got Hong Kong back. So there is precedent, among other places faced with Chinese expansionism, to consider this option.

Some might not like the idea of selling the country into Chinese leaseholdership. They might reason that China is a human rights abuser, a corrupt, totalitarian dictatorship that strangles honest aspirations and which is incompatible with the Western desire for personal freedom.

However, these sentiments have to be balanced with the fact that the whole country is being sold into Chinese ownership anyway. Chinese nationals purchased $1,500,000,000 of New Zealand residential real estate in 2017 alone. Eight-figure sums are not uncommon for land purchases made by Chinese interests, many of which are owned in part by the Chinese Government.

Moreover, the old Western traditions of freedom are gone. Zimbabwe has legal medicinal cannabis, and Malaysia has announced that it will decriminalise it. New Zealanders are, therefore, less free than citizens of either Zimbabwe or Malaysia in important ways. Uruguay, South Africa, Chile, Mexico and even North Korea are further examples of countries with greater cannabis freedom than New Zealand. Our time as a human rights leader is long over.

Perhaps worst of all, New Zealanders are now going to prison for years for sharing videos, or getting harassed by the Police because they might like Donald Trump. There is ample evidence that we are no longer a free people, so there’s nothing to lose on that front.

Maybe it’s time to concede that it’s better to lease the whole country to China on a 99-year term today, get them to build some proper houses and infrastructure, and then to get it back in 2118, than to have it sold piece-by-piece into Chinese hands permanently. We would probably not suffer more under Chinese leadership than we already do under our own.

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

Hate Speech Laws Will Lead New Zealand to Misery and Servitude

The Sixth Labour Government is in no hurry to change the cannabis laws, which has seen New Zealand fall behind Zimbabwe and South Africa in terms of personal freedom. This reluctant approach to liberty helps explain why Andrew Little is so enthused about bringing in hate speech laws. As this essay will show, hate speech laws will only increase the suffering of the New Zealand people – but that may be by design.

Last week, Danish politician Rasmus Paludan was sentenced to two weeks in prison for breaking the Danish hate speech laws. He received this conviction after speaking in a video where he said that the average IQ of South Africans was 70, and that this intelligence level was too low to properly run the country. The conviction was upheld on appeal.

The video of him saying this was available on the homepage of Paludan’s party, Stram Kurs, and someone who viewed it reported it to the Police (some readers will have already sensed a red flag here – yes, in Denmark you can rat other people out for racism, and they’ll go to prison if they’re found guilty of it).

What Paludan said about the IQ of South Africans is accurate, as shown in the table below, taken from Professor Richard Lynn’s latest book, The Intelligence of Nations. Accuracy and truth, however, will be no defence against a hate speech accusation. The case of Paludan shows that New Zealand risks losing basic freedoms to speak if we introduce hate speech laws.

*The scientific facts suggest some unpalatable truths – now stating these truths is illegal in Denmark*

If hate speech laws were introduced in New Zealand, we could expect to see headlines like “Don Brash/Brian Tamaki/David Seymour Convicted of Racism” as certain political statements became illegal. It might sound ridiculous, and the Government will deny it, but literal facts will become grounds to put people in prison. This is the inevitable consequence of bringing in hate speech laws.

As shown by Paludan’s example, it won’t matter if you can back up what you say with science. A bunch of politicians and their assorted arse-lickers, none of who have any background in the science of intelligence testing, will decide what you’re allowed to say and what you are not. The definition of hate will be entirely up to them, and they will choose the definition that best suits their interests.

In the judgment against Paludan, the judges decided that it was not illegal to say “neger” (c.f. ‘Negro’), as he does several times in the video. The fact that they considered the possibility, however, is telling. It exposes that such a prohibition is under consideration: there are many who would like to make it illegal to say certain words, or to state certain things.

Imagine a world where it’s a crime to say a word that your Government has forbidden you to say, or a crime to draw logical conclusions that your Government has forbidden you to draw. If you dare do either of these things, you have to go in a cage.

It sounds like the kind of law that might have been parodied by Monty Python or Comic Strip Presents as an example of cruel and unreasonable punishment. But it’s the world that we are heading towards if we let Andrew “The Ditherer” Little and his fellow short-sighted control freaks override our right to free speech.

Hate speech laws mark the death of free speech. Once they are introduced, eventually anything that goes against the Government’s agenda will be classified as “hate speech”. Saying things that are scientific facts, backed up by decades of research and by the experts in the field, will be classed as hate speech if they alert people to the failures of the Government.

The reason why the Government wants to make it a crime to point out facts – like the low IQ of Africans – is because they want to import cheap labour. They are in bed with the globalist corporations. They know that if we’re allowed to openly speak the truth about the effects of globalist immigration policy on the well-being of our nation, more and more people will come to resist that globalist policy.

Every globalist knows that a nation will sooner-or-later go down the toilet if it imports large numbers of people with an IQ of 70. But they don’t care about that. All they want is cheap labour so that they can extract a quick profit from New Zealand. Then they move on, and leave us to clean up the mess. This is parasite capitalism, and it’s the pre-eminent paradigm of our age.

Hate speech laws will lead to people getting sent to prison for pointing out scientific facts that the Government doesn’t want attention given to. They will also lead to a culture of snitching as the Government employs people to handle the complaints. The end result is an East Germany-style hell society plagued by snitches and secret police. We should resist the introduction of hate speech laws at any cost, on the grounds that they are a violation of our inherent human rights.

The Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Does Not Serve The Good of Society

Cannabis prohibitionists have a fallback position when none of the usual rhetoric succeeds. It’s a vague appeal to some kind of “good of society”. This argument encompasses a variety of different sentiments, most of them fear-based. As this article will examine, this argument is no more true than any of the others.

At the time this article was being composed, it was in the news that a Dunedin man named Harley Brown had just been sentenced to two years and three months in prison for growing over a hundred cannabis plants. Meanwhile, another man named John-Boy Rakete had been sentenced, two weeks previously, to two years and two months in prison for bashing a man into a coma from which he is expected to never recover.

Imagine going to prison for growing a medicinal flower at the same time as a gang member who beat someone into a vegetable state, and seeing that gang member get out of prison before you. It sounds like something out of a Kafka novel, but it’s the reality of our current legal approach to cannabis. Can it fairly be argued that this arrangement serves the good of society?

It’s hard to see where the benefit to society is in this arrangement. Brown will be incarcerated at the cost of $100,000 per year, which is greater than the total value of the cannabis plants he had, even if this value is calculated using Police maths. As a result of his incarceration, a number of people will be made to suffer without the medicine they would otherwise have had.

How does this serve the good of society?

Rather than serving the good of society, prohibition puts us at each other’s throats. The friends and family of Harley Brown will probably have contempt for the system for the rest of their lives. Most people who compare the two cases above and their respective sentences will conclude that something is fundamentally rotten with our justice system, which appears to dish out punishments with no consideration given to how much suffering the perpetrator may have caused.

The good of society is served by alleviating the suffering of the people in that society. Education is a public good because ignorance causes suffering. Healthcare is a public good because disease causes suffering. Infrastructure is a public good because mobility restrictions cause suffering. Anything that is genuinely a public good alleviates suffering somewhere.

Prohibition serves no such good. As has been demonstrated in the previous chapters of this book, it doesn’t prevent suffering, but, to the contrary, it causes suffering. There is no social good served by arresting people who aren’t harming any one. Neither is any good served by imprisoning these people. Least of all is any good served by lying about how cannabis causes harm to the community.

The ultimate reason why cannabis prohibition does not serve the good of society is that the people will never accept not being allowed to use cannabis. The people will always intuitively feel that they have the right to use cannabis, because it alleviates suffering, because it’s a social tonic and because it can connect people to God. Because of this, prohibition can only ever cause conflict between the people and those tasked with enforcing it.

The idea that people will eventually “come to their senses”, realise that cannabis is a dangerous drug, and stop using it, is nonsense. Cannabis prohibitionists have gone all-in on this puritanical delusion, and they have lost. It’s time to admit that reality does not reflect the idea that cannabis is dangerous, or that the harms of cannabis are in any way ameliorated by making it illegal.

The good of society is best served by honesty. Honesty is one of the most fundamental virtues, because it’s only through honest discussion that we can come to see the world accurately. Without being able to see the world accurately, we will make mistakes that lead to conflict.

This honesty would cause us to have a look at Colorado, where they legalised cannabis in 2012. In Colorado, none of the terrible things that the prohibitionists predicted came to pass. There wasn’t an outbreak of violence or other crimes, there wasn’t an epidemic of cannabis addiction and it didn’t become easier for young people to get. Everything continued the same as normal, only there was much more money on account of it no longer being wasted on enforcing prohibition.

Legalisation would serve the good of society much better than prohibition. A system of legal cannabis would not only increase social cohesion by removing one of the major wedges that drives us apart, but it would also increase the respect that the average person has for the Police, the Justice System and the Government. Not least of all, it would save us a ton of money.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.