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New Conspiracy Theories That The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Generated

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the responses to it, have been the biggest thing to happen to the world since World War II. Like all major happenings, new conspiracy theories have abounded in its wake – some plausible, others absurd. This article provides an overview.

The first wave of conspiracy theories to achieve widespread acceptance suggested COVID-19 was a bioweapon.

When the initial outbreak happened in China three months ago, it was traced back to one particular wet market in Wuhan. This market happened to be close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory that studied extremely contagious and deadly viruses. That sparked rumours that the COVID-19 strain was a Chinese bioweapon that had escaped the lab.

Some people claimed to have proof that workers at the Institute had sold lab animals to local markets for meat, and that some of this meat had carried the virus that infected people. This assertion was demolished once it became understood that the virus had leaped to humans from eating undercooked bats, and not lab animals.

The next theory was that the strain was an American bioweapon, deliberately engineered to target Chinese people. Apparently the coronavirus targeted something in the lungs called ACE receptors, and apparently Far East Asians had seven times more of these receptors than other races. This theory was very popular when the pandemic was mostly affecting China, Japan and South Korea.

After the pandemic exploded in other countries, that theory became unpopular. It was replaced by a theory that claimed the strain really was a Chinese bioweapon after all, and that they deliberately infected themselves with it, knowing two things. One – the virus would spread to America and to the West anyway, and two – the Chinese model of government would allow them, unlike the West, to take the necessary measures to prevent it becoming a pandemic.

A second wave of conspiracy theories broke out when the world’s governments started to institute various lockdown and social control measures, ostensibly to stop the spread of the virus. One of the first of these held that the strain really was an American bioweapon after all, but it was not launched for military reasons. Rather, it was launched to stop climate change.

It has been observed that many climate experts had predicted an apocalyptic future for the human species, on account of that we appear to have cooked the planet. Some of them were saying that the world’s industrial output was such that, if we didn’t change course, our carbon emissions would raise the Earth’s temperature by five degrees Celcius by the end of the century, making human life impossible.

The first conspiracy theory of this second wave suggested that COVID-19 had been deliberately engineered to kill a large number of old people who would not be missed. This would caused world governments to shut their countries down to contain the spread, which would cause the world economy to collapse, which was the only thing that could have saved the world climate.

The next conspiracy theory claimed that COVID-19 was neither deliberately engineered nor even a truly big deal, but world governments had seized the pretext of a catastrophic pandemic as an excuse to carry out drastic social change. This theory developed out of the previous one, but suggested that the government was acting opportunistically rather than with forethought.

This theory stated that the world’s governments knew that a coronavirus pandemic was coming and that it would be reasonably bad, but that they co-operated in secret to overplay the severity of the threat, creating the impression that shutting down half of the economy was justified.

This conspiracy theory made extensive mention of something called UN Agenda 21, which apparently calls for much of the world’s urban and suburban area to be reclaimed by wilderness. This is given as one of the explanations for why the world’s governments want to cripple the global economy with lockdown measures. Forcing a shift to a cashless society is often a part of it.

A more sinister theory has it that the governments of the West will use these lockdowns to persecute critics.

In many places around the world, the ruling powers have given the police the power of warrantless entry to private property on the grounds that they need to look for gatherings of people indoors. It can be predicted, even without conspiracy theory, that the police will use this power to intimidate and harass dissidents.

With conspiracy theory, it’s easy to believe that it could go as far as kidnappings and extrajudicial murders. Right now, no-one could protest about police brutality as protests are banned while the lockdowns are in place. So the police could get away with disappearing a great number of government critics before any civil unrest could occur.

No doubt there will be more conspiracy theories as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens. The next wave of them may relate to which demographic categories are being left to die once the health system gets overwhelmed, or whether the police are able to see the entire population’s whereabouts in real time by using cellphone tracking. If a vaccine gets released, that will surely lead to another wave.

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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They Want To Cause Suffering To People They Hate

The latest cannabis referendum poll suggests that 54% of New Zealanders will vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum on September 19. According to the poll, there are significant differences in levels of support for the referendum between supporters of the various parties. Some people have found this hard to explain. For their benefit, this essay elucidates.

Paul Manning, Chief Executive of Helius Therapeutics, asked the question “What do they want?” in response to the news that many elderly and conservative voters plan to vote against the cannabis referendum. He points out that these people understand that cannabis is widely available and that cannabis prohibition is not working. So why do they support it?

The reason why most elderly and conservative voters intend to vote ‘No’ is because they hate the sort of person who uses cannabis and they want to cause them suffering. This might sound uncharitable, or even cynical, but it has to be understood that most elderly and conservative Kiwis are twisted creatures of hate.

For their entire lives, this generation of New Zealanders has been exposed to propaganda inducing them to hate cannabis users. Ever since the 1930s, when Reefer Madness came out, popular culture has normalised the idea that cannabis users are depraved, anti-social maniacs. This propaganda has had the intended effect on the elderly of the West, who mostly swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

This anti-cannabis propaganda stems from two main sources, both of which hate cannabis for its ability to induce free thinking.

The first is the Church, who have always hated freethinkers because freethinkers question religious dogma. For centuries, the Church has relied on the acquiescence of its subjects in order to brainwash them. Freethinkers were the enemy because they threatened this acquiescence, and thereby Church control – this is why the Church has always persecuted them, going back to the murder of Hypatia and beyond.

The second is the Government, which wants a compliant population of submissive worker drones. Their ideal citizen is one with an IQ of 90, who goes to work everyday and produces widgets or basic services without ever complaining. As far as the Government is concerned, they are running a tax farm, and their chief concern is to milk the livestock as profitably as possible. The last thing that want is someone rocking the boat with free thought.

The elderly have internalised almost a century of this propaganda. As such, they genuinely believe that cannabis users are dangerous radicals who threaten to destroy the foundations of society itself, and who therefore deserve all the abuse they get. This hatred, in their minds, justifies cannabis prohibition.

In America, it was admitted that the purpose of the War on Drugs was to smash people they hated. John Ehrlichman, aide to Richard Nixon during the latter’s presidency, admitted that the purpose of the War on Drugs was to target anti-war hippies and black people. In an interview with Harper Magazine, Ehrlichman is quoted as saying:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Although it hasn’t been admitted, the same calculus applies in New Zealand.

There are almost no blacks in New Zealand, but elderly and conservative New Zealanders hate Maoris just as much as their American counterparts hate blacks. Elderly and conservative New Zealanders also hate hippies, who they associate with Communism and with the free and honest sex lives they wish they had had.

It’s well known that Maoris are strong supporters of cannabis law reform – the correlation between being Maori and voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 was a whopping 0.91. The reason for this immensely strong support is because Maoris are adversely affected by cannabis prohibition to a much greater degree than other New Zealanders.

However, this disproportionate harm is considered a good thing by many elderly and conservative New Zealanders. They see Maoris as the enemy anyway – a thieving, bludging, ungrateful, violent enemy – so if cannabis prohibition harms them, that’s a good thing.

These elderly and conservative New Zealanders also hate other cannabis using demographics, such as young people, artists, hippies and freethinkers. Elderly and conservative New Zealanders do plenty of drugs, but their drugs are sedatives, alcohol and opiates. Cannabis prohibition doesn’t target them.

This hate is why arguments appealing to the suffering caused by cannabis prohibition often have no effect. Most elderly or conservative voters think “Cannabis users are suffering? Good! Smash them, crush them, destroy them. Ruin their lives with a criminal conviction. Imprison them so their kids can’t see them. They are the enemy and should be obliterated!”

The psychiatric damage caused to cannabis users by arresting and imprisoning them is considered a bonus by these people. Appealing to the cruelty of it makes as much sense, to elderly and conservative voters, as appealing to the cruelty of shooting the enemy soldiers on the other side of the battlefield. Of course it’s cruel, that’s the point.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to the presence of this malicious streak in New Zealand’s elderly and conservative voters. Hatred is a deep emotion – usually too deep to be influenced by reason. The sight of intelligent young people like Chloe Swarbrick speaking eloquently merely aggravates the elderly and conservative, and further entrenches their prejudice.

At the end of the day, young Kiwis and Maoris can take solace in the fact that the old bastards who hate them are dying off. No amount of hate can stop the aging process, and the old bigots will lose their ability to influence the law once Time puts them in the ground. Absent measures such as forcing the elderly to surrender their voting rights in exchange for a pension, that will have to do.

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

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An Introduction To Great Fractal Theory

Works such as The Verity Key (published 2012) make reference to something called the Great Fractal, a concept expounded upon in an essay published here in 2017. Great Fractal Theory is a subset of a wider philosophy known as Elementalism. This essay provides a basic introduction.

Great Fractal Theory starts with a simple premise: that consciousness is the prima materia. Consciousness was the first thing to exist, and everything else comes after and is dependent upon it. Consciousness is more fundamental than both time and space, and therefore does not need to have a beginning, an end, a cause, or a final destiny. It simply is.

Everything else that exists falls into the category of ‘the contents of consciousness’. Here we find the metaphysical world (that which Plato referred to as the ‘World of Forms’), and the physical or material world (that which we’re used to calling ‘Earth’).

The material world is not truly real, despite the fact that it appears very real. In fact, it has been dreamed up by consciousness, in the Great Act of Creation. Consciousness is therefore the creator of the material world, in the same way that it creates the worlds we navigate in our dreams. It is the stage upon which the play on life takes place.

The material world is most accurately understood as not being a place, then, but rather a matrix-like series of self-similar sets of perceptions that manifest in conscious awareness. Consciousness perceives a field of impressions that collectively create the illusion that we are bodies living in a material world, as opposed to consciousness dreaming it up. As such, we appear to be ‘living’ rather than simply experiencing.

The essence of Great Fractal Theory is that all of the possible fields of impressions that consciousness could ever perceive are related to each other by way of a fractal matrix. This matrix, known as the Great Fractal, contains every emotion, every thought, every desire and every sensory impression that could ever possibly manifest in conscious awareness.

Our lives do not involve being bipedal fleshsuits moving around on a rock in space, but rather being fragments of consciousness navigating through an eternal and ever-changing Great Fractal of self-similar fields of sensory impressions.

The easiest way to conceptualise the Great Fractal is to think of one’s own life.

Consciousness is, right now, experiencing not only your current life but also all the possible gaps in between your birth and your death. Your own personal fragment of consciousness may be living right now, in 2020 A.D., but other fragments of consciousness are living out every possible moment of your life, simultaneously.

By “every possible moment”, imagine that your life was divided into a billion or so chunks, each corresponding to a second or two of awareness. Think that all billion of these fragments of consciousness are living their own lives, unaware of the presence of the others. Then think that each of these billion fragments could themselves be divided into a billion fragments.

Now imagine these quintillion or so lives, each separated by one or two nanoseconds, rolling from birth to death like freight carriages on a railway. One ends and one begins every few nanoseconds, and follows the exact path of the life that you are experiencing right now, past and future. This is what Nietzsche meant by eternal recurrence: your life is lived again, by another fragment of consciousness, forever.

Now imagine a parallel streak made up of lives of people who are of the other gender to you. Their lives are otherwise exactly the same, only they came into the world female instead of male (or vice-versa). These lives would have followed an entirely different path on account of that they would have had different instincts and would have been treated differently, but a life they would have had.

This parallel streak of lives can also be divided into a quintillion separate existences. Now takes this dual streak of lives, and change another facet from masculine to feminine or vice-versa. If you are rich, imagine another dual streak of lives that is poor. If you are short, imagine another streak of lives that is tall. If you are white, imagine black etc.

Every possible way that a human life can differ from another is another dimension of the Great Fractal. This number of dimensions is close to infinite – there are as many different dimensions of this Great Fractal as there are ways to distinguish one human life from another. So not only does every moment of every human life exist in the Great Fractal, but so does every moment of every possible human life.

If we say, for simplicity’s sake, that there are a hundred different dimensions along which human lives could differ, that would mean that the Great Fractal contained at least one quintillion to the power of a hundred different human lives in it – a number that defies comprehension.

All of these lives are being lived right now.

On top of this has to be added not only the lives that are possible according to the specific world that has manifested to us (i.e. Earth), but all the possible lives in all possible worlds. These possible worlds might also differ from each other over a hundred different dimensions.

This would mean that the number of human lives being lived right now is (at least) one quintillion to the power of a hundred to the power of a hundred. This number would cover all the fragments of consciousness that are right now experiencing a human-like life in an Earth-like world, somewhere in the Great Fractal.

Trying to understand this is enough to understand that the Great Fractal is humming with consciousness.

On top of this, we could add all of the non-human lives being experienced by consciousness right now. There’s no reason, other than anthropomorphic conceit, to believe that only human beings are conscious. Once it’s realised that consciousness is the prima materia and not a phenomenon of the brain, it becomes entirely possible that all other animals, indeed even insects and trees, are conscious like we are.

If we assume, for simplicity’s sake, that the number of dimensions along which life can vary is a hundred, then the number of different lives being experienced by consciousness right now is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 ^ 100 ^ 100 ^ 100. This is a nonsense number as there’s no way that a human mind can comprehend it. However, our failure to comprehend it is the glory of God.

In sum, anything that can possibly be perceived by consciousness lies somewhere in the Great Fractal. All moments of all lives of all possible creatures in all possible worlds are contained within the Great Fractal, to be experienced by consciousness eternally. Your life is simply an infinitely small fragment of this incomprehensibly vast whole.

Getting what you want out of life is not, as most think, a matter of manipulating and dominating the material world until it accords with your will. Making your dreams come true is simply a matter of navigating your consciousness to the part of the Great Fractal in which those dreams are experienced. This is, however, a topic for another essay.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Weimarisation’?

Every history student knows that the Weimar Republic preceded the Nazi Era in Germany. Fewer understand that the process of historical decline goes through certain predictable stages, one of which is characterised by the Weimar Republic and its infamous successor. This article explains.

The process of political decline is so well established and so predictable that Plato, over 2,300 years ago, was already able to describe it at length in The Republic. A healthy political system begins with an aristocracy of philosopher-kings, and then degrades into a timocracy, then an oligarchy, then a democracy, and finally into a tyranny.

Plato’s description of democracy corresponds closely to how it is practiced today. He criticised it for being a stage in which every man was out for himself, and no-one thought of long-term considerations when making decisions. This leads to a lack of order and discipline, which leads to it becoming impossible to tell the truth. Eventually all kinds of crooked liars fill the vacuum and come to office.

The problem with democracy is that it makes men weak, as it panders to their crudest and most primitive desires, and does not encourage them to cultivate their higher moral senses. Being weak, they are then unable or unwilling to resist cruel men who come to oppress them. When the cruel are in charge, we are in a state of tyranny.

The most widely known example of this latter process occurred a century ago in Germany.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated at the end of World War I and the German Government collapsed, it was replaced by a republic whose first national assembly took place in Weimar. This short-lived experiment was a highlights reel of all of the worst things about democracy, and it caused so much distrust that it made Adolf Hitler start to look reasonable.

Few would argue that the worst thing about the Weimar Republic was that it led to the rise of the Nazis. This process occurred exactly as Plato had described over two millennia previously. It is this final stage of democracy, and the related phenomena that lead to the rise of tyranny, that could be described as Weimarisation.

Weimarisation involves the process of making the polity ever weaker and ever more decadent and degenerate until no-one is willing to stand up for anything. Most bonds of solidarity are broken by this increasing selfishness, because no-one cares about anything other than the next buzz. This ongoing disintegration of the social fabric leads to the most characteristic feature of Weimarisation: it precedes a tyrant coming to power.

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Weimar Republic itself were the child prostitutes. History recalls a relatively clean child prostitution trade in 1920s Berlin, but parts of it were much grottier than what is described in the linked article. At the most desperate, during the heights of the hyperinflation in 1923, it was possible to see children being pimped out on the streets.

The extreme levels of disgust induced in German men by the awareness that their children were being rented for sex was the emotional fuel for the rise of Hitler and everything that followed. Exposure to depravity on that scale tends to cause people to lose their moral compasses. If renting children for sex is permitted, then what could possibly be forbidden? Certainly not killing the people to blame – or so many millions of Germans reasoned.

From our current position in Clown World, there are two paths. The path recommended by Plato is a revolution of philosopher-kings who institute an aristocracy that justly governs. The other path is to decline into tyranny, wherein the average man becomes so pathetic and weak that he is unable to resist any injustice, whether physical, intellectual or spiritual.

If Clown World is to decline into tyranny, it will be the final result of the Weimarisation process. There’s an eerie parallel between the Weimar child prostitutes and the 19,000 young girls raped by grooming gang members in Britain alone last year. This ongoing mass sexual exploitation of Britain’s young children is the kind of dystopic horror show that makes people lose their humanity entirely, as it did in Germany.

In Rotherham, where one of the most prolific of these grooming gangs was based, the Police actively worked to cover up the rapes. Investigation of the rape gangs was made more difficult by the investigators’ fears of seeming racist (this is an outstanding example of what another chapter in this book calls race neurosis). There’s no way to understand such phenomena other than as the last gasps of a dying culture.

One of the reasons why Hitler was able to summon so much rage against Jews was because of the widespread belief in Germany that Jewish men had played a disproportionate role in the buying and selling of these child prostitutes. Those same grounds for murderous rage are also present in the case of Muslim men in Europe this century.

It’s entirely plausible that if a man would stand up in Britain or elsewhere in Europe and threaten to get revenge on the forces that had humiliated his nation, he would get widespread support. The neo-Nazi Sverigedemokraterna are already polling at close to 25% in Sweden, which is evidence of the deep anger that exists elsewhere in Europe over such issues.

The big problem with Weimarisation, of course, is that the original form of it ended with a war that left 60 million dead.

There’s little doubt that the existing tensions in Europe are sufficient to trigger a civil war that could kill similar numbers. One of the reasons why Western political authorities are so concerned about “Islamophobia” is that they are fully aware of the rage that their failures have caused. They are aware that great numbers of men feel deeply humiliated by the rape gangs and would very much like someone to give them the opportunity to get revenge.

The cure for Weimarisation can also be found in the philosophy of Plato. A new cultural movement of philosopher-kings must arise, and attract so many followers that it destroys the old order and replaces it with a just one. The alternative, as history has shown, is almost too terrible to contemplate.

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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