Did A Weak Cannabis Policy Cost The Democrats The Presidency?

Let’s be clear – Donald Trump will not become American President this week because he out-thought the Democratic campaign during the election (although he did). He will become President because the Democrats and Hillary Clinton threw away a winning position out of sheer arrogance and hubris. One of the prime reasons for the Democrats squandering a sure-fire win was their refusal to promote a humane cannabis policy.

Cannabis became medicinally legal in California 1996, and many supporters of cannabis freedom were frustrated by George W. Bush’s refusal to countenance so much as a discussion about the subject between 2000 and 2008. When the Bush Presidency ended in 2008 and the Democrat Barack Obama became the President, it seemed like occasion for hope.

Indeed, Obama campaigned as the hope and change candidate. Part of this campaign was to distance himself from the haughty arrogance of the Dubya years. This manifested as a website – ‘We The People’ – where the American people could have their say on the issues important to them.

The top two subjects on this new website both related to repealing cannabis prohibition.

Cannabis users finally thought they had someone who would listen. Obama, infamously part of the “Choom Gang,” was sure to legalise cannabis. He had all the right rhetoric, admitting that he “smoked pot as a kid” and that cannabis is not more dangerous than alcohol.

So it isn’t as if Obama could claim to have been unaware of the strength of the sentiment of Americans in favour of legalising cannabis when he became President. By 2008, pretty much the entirety of Generation X believed that cannabis ought to be legal.

However, it turned out that neither Obama nor the Democrats had the guts to do anything about this generation’s foremost moral issue. This blog piece from 2009 provides an eerie premonition of the argument of this essay.

Obama, like the Green Party of New Zealand and almost everyone else, sold cannabis users down the river as soon as he got into power.

In fact, in 2009 Obama was even recorded laughing at the plight of the cannabis users who had just put him into power, as if putting tens of thousands of people in cages for their choice of medicine was an absurdly trivial matter.

Come 2016, and even a country with the socioeconomic challenges of Uruguay has managed to legalise cannabis fully – and still nothing from Obama or the Democrats, apart from a sense that they expect credit and gratitude for not sending the federal police to attack cannabis users in states like Colorado that expressed a democratic will to have legal cannabis.

So when the 2016 Presidential Election came around – and Democratic voters were asked to support a candidate who was known to not support cannabis legalisation – of course they simply refused and did not vote.

Despite a growing population and many large demographic advantages, Hillary Clinton got 4,000,000 fewer votes in 2016 than Obama got in 2008, and a large number of those will have been cannabis users. After being lied to by Obama, and then being presented in 2016 with a crusty old Boomer with no appreciation of medicinal cannabis at all, why vote?

It could be argued that the Democrats’ obstinate refusal to accept what all of their constituencies know – that cannabis prohibition ought to be repealed – cost them the Presidential Election. It showed them to be a party completely out of touch with the people they claimed to represent.

The New Zealand Labour Party looks set to ignore the lesson – Andrew ‘The Ditherer’ Little believes that cannabis causes “brain damage,” which means that there is no reason for medicinal cannabis users to vote Labour either.

Medicinal cannabis users will have to wait for him to run his course as Prime Minister, and then to wait for the next National Prime Minister to sit on their arse for nine years like Key and Clark did, which means possibly waiting until the year 2036 to get what Californians have had since 1996.

With a much more sophisticated appreciation for the national sentiment than the Paedophiles of Wellington, this column stands by the following prediction: the New Zealand centre-left will not win the 2017 General Election without the humane cannabis law reform policy that young people, Maori people, and both physically and mentally ill people are now expecting by right of natural justice.

The Life Cycle of Internet Forums

As any long-term reader of this magazine can recite by heart: as below, so above. The life-cycles of men and women are well known; those of empires somewhat less so. This essay will examine how the life cycle of Internet forums follows a pattern similar to what can already be observed in Nature.

If one follows the series of 19th century Thomas Cole paintings known as The Course of Empire, one can surmise that, on a much smaller scale, Internet forums follow the same pattern.

The first stage is known as The Savage State. With regard to empires this refers to the state of nature that existed before human civilisation arose. It is therefore an especially feminine time, full of raw potential and untrammelled chaos.

Internet forums begin in a similar state before anyone starts regularly posting. Often there is nothing but forum software to start the process. At this stage the forum has the full potential to go in many directions, as the people running it are yet to make any firm decisions regarding subforums or posting etiquette.

The second stage of an empire is known as the The Arcadian State. This is functionally almost identical to a world run by philosopher-kings. In the Arcadian state, humanity lives at peace with Nature. We might have learned to alter our environment in order to not die as easily, but nothing major has happened.

An Arcadian state exists in Internet forums when the people who have the greatest personal interest in the subject matter naturally find the forum and start to populate it with quality threads. This usually occurs when the name of the forum is spread around by whoever started it and they attract a small, hard-core of highly interested experts.

The third stage of empire is known as The Consummation of Empire. This is represented by glorious buildings at noon on a summer’s day. Everywhere there are marble steps; one can observe a triumphant general crossing the bridge that spans the central river, and all of this in the shadow of the great domed temple.

This is also the best stage of an Internet forum. In this third stage, the excellence established in the second has attracted a huge number of other people. They all want to take part in the glory, and so they flood in and tell their friends. The forum expands, and develops. More rules become necessary to deal with the friction naturally caused by such heavy interaction.

However, in the same way that the seed of decadence present at the height of the glory of empire is also the seed of its destruction, so are the abundance of rules and restrictions that come with the greatest extent of traffic the downfall of Internet forums.

The fourth stage of empire is known as Destruction. In this stage, the empire is collapsing. The painting represents the fall of the Roman Empire as it was sacked by Vandals and Goths, but it could serve as metaphor for the fall of any empire into destruction and ruin. It is hinted that the cause of the destruction may have been a civil war.

Again, the pattern is replicated perfectly in the life of Internet forums. The barbarian invaders are the people who recently joined the forum at its height but who would clearly have not have belonged back in the Arcadian stage. In other words, plebs.

These plebs have the effect of dragging the forum back down, firstly by reducing how willing other posters are to be open and creative, and secondly by provoking whoever is running the forum to bring in more and more rules to crack down on the plebs and to try and restore the glory days.

In this fourth stage of forums, it becomes harder and harder to post anything unorthodox or interesting as true creativity becomes ever more likely to fall foul of censure. Consequently, many of the threads, instead of discussing current events like in the glory times, are just wistful ramblings about old posters and old arguments.

New posters, instead of finding a niche they can feel happy in, are persecuted by older ones, frequently in the manner of high school girls psychologically abusing a victim. This henpecking has the effect of making the forum into a troll’s paradise, which attracts an ever nastier grade of poster, until the stream of new blood dries up completely.

The fifth stage of empire is known as Desolation. This is similar to the first stage, with the exception that the potential of nature, instead of bursting forth with vitality, is exhausted. There are no more human beings – Nature has entirely reclaimed the space on which a glorious capital once stood; weeds and flowers grow from the cracks in the shattered marble.

This is also the natural end stage of all Internet forums. Indeed, 99.9999% of them are already at this stage. Here, there are no more truly human posters, just ghosts of people who used to be funny, back when they were younger and cooler, and before they sold out for a job or became bitter because of a family or or extended period of time without getting laid.

In this stage, there are as many banned users are there are regular ones. Here, no new posters even want to join the forum, because there is no joy in listening to middle-aged washouts droning out about how everything was cooler a decade or more ago. Especially not when these same washouts feel obliged to pack bully anyone who threatens the morgue-like atmosphere.

Because computer software does not need to eat and is therefore cheap to maintain, some forums are capable of lurching along in zombie mode for many years.

And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page…

The Fourth Satanic Principle Could Have Saved Us From the European Migrant Crisis

Perhaps no other Satanic Statement provides more illumination into the chaotic and confusing behaviour of the herd in our time than the Fourth, which is this: Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates!

It is of special importance to the people of Europe right now, who find their societies in states of social decay, perhaps even revolution. It looks as if Brexit will be followed by a wholesale shift to the right, with Geert Wilders’s PVV Party the short favourite at BetFair to win the Dutch election this year, and the French National Front and the German Alternative fuer Deutschland coming in every week.

Yes, all signs are that Europe is about to undergo one of its periodic cataclysms of violent hatred. This essay will argue that the primary cause for this is lingering brain damage caused by centuries of Christianity.

Much of the sentiment of recent years to open the borders stems from a misguided interpretation of the Christian admonition to be charitable. This explains why a picture of a drowned Syrian boy led directly to Angela Merkel (the daughter of a Lutheran minister) letting a million migrants into Germany, the reasoning being that it was cruel to deny these people a place of asylum from the horrors of war.

The responsibility for the integration of these people into their new societies was foisted almost entirely onto the European people. Merkel said Wir schaffen das!: we can do it. The migrants themselves were apparently not under any moral obligation to make an adaption to the German culture that they would soon be sharing space with, which was a very good deal for them by any historical standard.

Were they grateful?

How grateful does a woman appear if you give her sanctuary from the depredations of a cruel, male supremacist religion and then she walks around in a burka of her own free will? How grateful does a man appear if you give him sanctuary from others of his own culture and he refuses to learn how to communicate with those who gave him refuge? They certainly seem much less grateful than the majority of migrants, who do not do those things.

Because the Satanic Statements represent natural moral principles, it’s apparent that the general lack of gratitude on the part of the newcomers has naturally resulted in much of the anti-immigrant sentiment. That is to make the claim – shocking in today’s political environment – that not all of the difficulty in integrating tens of millions of foreigners in a short time can be put down to native racism.

If you love your enemy, then you love someone who wants to destroy those closest to you. This point cannot be underestimated. It is why Christians can never, ever be trusted – because if they love their enemies, and you are their friend, then they also love your enemies! So their religion will impel them to provide aid and succour to people trying to destroy you.

The truth is that hate, from a natural perspective, is adaptive. Hate keeps you safe! It is hate that prevents you from being led like a lamb to the slaughter. Hate is the emotion that keeps a people from being exploited or abused for too long, because, sooner or later, the fire of hate will burn too brightly to keep simmering and will strike out.

This is why the Abrahamic religions preach peace and love – this is the attitude they believe you, the slave, ought to take towards them, the masters! You can bet that “Don’t fight, don’t resist” is a choice phrase of paedophile priests for whispering into the ears of their victims.

The reason why the Fourth Satanic Statement is logical is because it accurately reflects reality, and therefore an attitude that is adapted to reality, in contrast to the suicidal masochism of Christianity.

Simply put, if you waste love on ingrates, you will not survive in this place. You have an intellectual obligation to determine who out of the many people you might know is genuinely worth cultivating a friendship with.

If this statement had been adhered to by the European ruling classes it may have been the better for the current migrant crisis. They might have foreseen that the mostly young adult male migrants were a poor choice of recipient for their limited resources, and perhaps would then have chosen to spend them on their own people, who, after all, built the country they live in.

Instead they chose to allow the native street cultures of their own working classes to be destroyed and replaced by foreign ones. Satanic wisdom may have saved them from the consequences of this decision.

Having Three Children or More is Tantamount to Being a Murderer

Whether you realise it or not, these are exciting times for Planet Earth. We are currently in the middle of what is known as the Sixth Extinction (in the history of Earth), or the Holocene Extinction, after the geological era. This has been caused by humans, and is reshaping the biosphere of the entire planet.

The Sixth Extinction began with human migration outside of Africa. The existing megafauna of other continents – like the Woolly Mammoth and the Moa – occupied niches that were highly sensitive to the introduction of a new apex predator, and almost all of them were wiped out by human expansion.

Today, the Sixth Extinction has wiped out significant numbers of species on every land mass and ocean. The current rate of species loss is believed to be 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than what it would have been without human presence.

And it’s not just because we’re particularly wasteful or greedy.

One inescapable fact of nature and reproduction is that, for your offspring to occupy a niche within nature, they have to drive out any possible competitors in that niche, and then to defend it against all comers. So for your offspring to so much as exist and continue to exist, they have to kill other life, because nature is permanently in a state of flux and this means conflict.

Your offspring have to eat. There’s no way around that. The cattle sector of agriculture has been responsible for 80% of the rainforest destruction since 1970. And one estimate of the world’s fish stocks suggest that the number of fish in the oceans are now 10% of their pre-industrial value.

Even if you raise them to be vegans (which is itself morally questionable), the food still has to be grown somewhere and your offspring have to live somewhere, and much of the remainder of Amazon rainforest destruction is for soybean production, housing space, or for hardwoods.

This rate of destruction is not inevitable. In fact, it is a function of another variable: our rate of population increase.

Given the increase in the human population in recent centuries (as depicted in the graph above), it is simply unavoidable that we would do the amount of ecological damage that we have done. Because people have to consume the environment around them in order to continue to live, an increasing population will always alter its environment – and therefore contribute to species extinction – in so far as it needs to eat.

The central contention of this essay is this: anyone who has more than two children does an amount of environmental damage to nature which, in terms of degree of tragedy, is equal to committing murder.

After all, there is one thing we do know for certain about our increasing population, and that is the higher it increases, the higher the demand for the limited resources of the planet become, and therefore the closer we move towards war.

If a couple has two children to replace themselves they are not increasing the amount of pressure on the environment. Only by having three or more does a couple ensure that their offspring have to expand into other niches instead of (relatively) simply just inheriting those of their parents. This expansion means aggression against the previous inhabitants of those niches – and this is unavoidable.

Perhaps, if humans were serious about avoiding the environmental collapse that would kill us all, we would pass a law so that any man who could be proven to have three or more children is to be executed. If three children was considered too restrictive, we could start with a boundary of four or even five.