anarkiwi – Page 40

Demographer Dan McGlashan Explains This Week’s Horizon Research Cannabis Poll

My name is Dan McGlashan, and I am the author of Understanding New Zealand, a demographic study of the Kiwi people. In this article, I will explain the results of the recent cannabis law reform poll by Horizon Research, which broke down support for the upcoming cannabis referendum by party affiliation and age.

60% of New Zealand adults would vote to legalise the recreational use of cannabis on the upcoming referendum, according to the poll, with only 24% against. 16% had no opinion. Broken down by party support, 84% of Green voters would vote yes, with 63% of Labour, 56% of New Zealand First, 49% of ACT and 33% of National voters doing likewise.

The Green, Labour and National votes don’t need much explaining. The Greens have always been the strongest supporters of cannabis, apart from the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party. Likewise, National has always opposed any effort to reform the laws. Many readers were surprised, however, to learn that support among New Zealand First voters is stronger than support among ACT voters.

In Understanding New Zealand, I showed which demographics were the strongest supporters of cannabis law reform, by correlating those demographics with support for the ALCP.

The average cannabis law reform supporter is – on average – young, poor, Maori, uneducated and with an especially high chance of suffering from a debilitating physical or mental illness. These demographics are all disenfranchised ones, which is why there is a strong association between being a cannabis user and having a difficult life. They are also the ones most heavily impacted by cannabis prohibition.

Some were surprised to see that support for cannabis law reform is very high among New Zealand First voters. 56% of New Zealand First voters would vote yes in the referendum, almost as many as Labour voters. New Zealand First voters are often stereotyped as old, bitter, out of touch racists, which makes it hard to explain their heavy support for cannabis law reform.

In reality, there is a moderately strong correlation between being a New Zealand First supporter and being Maori: one of 0.38. This also helps to explain why there was a moderately strong correlation of 0.40 between voting for New Zealand First in 2017 and voting ALCP in 2017. Many will also be surprised to read that there is no significant correlation between median age and voting for New Zealand First.

In other words, the New Zealand First demographic is much younger and browner than the lazy stereotype would have it. This can be established simply from observing the extremely high levels of support gained by New Zealand First in the Maori electorates. These young, brown and poor people are reliably fans of cannabis use, despite the general social conservatism of the New Zealand First movement.

Many others were surprised to see that only 49% of ACT supporters expected to vote yes in the referendum. ACT markets itself as the party of liberty from government overreach, and one might think that this would be reflected in support for cannabis law reform, but they have traditionally been very weak on the issue, perhaps even cowardly.

The simple truth is that ACT voters are not from the demographics that care about cannabis law reform. The correlation between voting ACT in 2017 and being Asian was 0.46, but the correlation between voting ACT in 2017 and being Maori was -0.51, which suggests that very few actual cannabis smokers are ACT supporters.

Moreover, ACT voters are wealthy: the correlation between voting ACT in 2017 and personal wealth was 0.61, making their supporters their wealthiest of all. ACT voters tend to come from two major groups: rich, old, white people with all the money, and young professional Asians who don’t want to pay taxes. Neither group has any major interest in recreational cannabis.

The cannabis referendum is very likely to end up with a yes vote, because most of the opponents of cannabis law reform are old and dying off. Conservative National voters are being replaced by less conservative ACT voters, and young people mostly support it anyway. It’s enough to compare Chloe Swarbrick with the decrepit Bob McCoskrie to guess that the repeal of cannabis prohibition is inevitable.

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).

The Two Fundamental Political Questions

There are a myriad of political questions under discussion, and every day that goes by there are more. All of these questions have contributed to a state of confusion. This essay seeks to cut through it, by arguing that all of those questions fundamentally boil down to two interdependent ones: Who and How Much?

Politics exists in other mammals, in particular primates, and could be said to be a cultural method of minimising violence in the distribution of resources. It’s a way of deciding who gets what, and who goes without. The first fundamental question of politics, then, is: “Who is part of the ingroup?”

All political arrangements are a way of reaching the most satisfying arrangement for the group. In cases where it’s clear who is in the group and who isn’t, such arrangements are simple. The practical reality, however, is that it’s very difficult to draw clear and distinct lines between who belongs and who does not.

It’s an easy question to answer when the subject is a family. This group derives from the strongest bond of solidarity that exists: that between mother and child. The members of the group are therefore the mother and children, plus the father, plus the parents (especially the maternal grandmother).

When it’s an extended family, or a village, it’s also easy to answer. It’s when the group size starts to exceed Dunbar’s Number that problems start to arise. Dunbar’s Number is an ethological rule of thumb that posits the breakdown of social structure once the size of the group exceeds about 150. This number is an estimation of the number of meaningful social connections a person can maintain.

Once you have a group that exceeds this, like a town, city-state or kingdom, then it becomes impossible for individuals to remember enough social connections for them to recognise every person they meet. This means that individuals start to encounter strangers. This is an everyday concept for us, but only because we are civilised – in the biological past, encounters between strangers frequently resulted in violence.

To circumvent this violence, lines were drawn to clearly delineate who was part of the ingroup and who was not. Another way to ask the first of the two fundamental political questions is, therefore: “Who counts as ‘us’, and who counts as ‘them’?”. As will be shown, this question is interdependent with the second.

The second fundamental political question is: “What does it mean to be ‘us’ and ‘them’?” Once you have a group, it then becomes a matter of what the members of the group are willing to do for each other. Are they willing to die for each other, or do they merely extend a slight favouritism sometimes?

Viewed another way, the second fundamental political question is one of solidarity. How much solidarity do members of this group have for one another? If they have high levels of solidarity, the group could be a fearsome political or military force in their region, or upon the world stage. If they have low levels of solidarity, then the name of the group might be something of a joke.

From looking at the consequences of the various ways of answering these two questions, two laws of group psychology become evident.

The first is: the larger the ingroup, the weaker the bonds of solidarity. As mentioned above, the strongest bonds are between mother and child, followed by the wider family bonds. Tribal bonds are also very strong, but once the group becomes larger than 150, bonds begin to weaken appreciably. When the group becomes too big, ingroup members start being treated as strangers. Then, new ingroups form.

The second law is: the more diversity within the ingroup, the weaker the bonds of solidarity. At one extreme is the example of a family. Such a group will co-operate so closely that individuals are happy to make extreme sacrifices for each other. At the other extreme would be a group that was comprised of one half Nazis and the other half Communists. Such a group will tear itself apart in short order.

The inverse relationship between diversity and wealth within a nation is established: the more diverse a nation, the poorer it tends to be. The reason why is clear if one considers that the most important factor in national wealth is the human capital of the workers. It costs money to make an investment in the human capital of the young, and people are less willing to pay to make that investment the less they have in common with those young people.

A loss of solidarity with increasing diversity can also be observed by comparing the nature of society in Scandinavia or Japan with society in America or Brazil. In the former countries, people are generally happy to pay taxes because they believe those taxes will help people like them. Their answer to the second fundamental political question is that there ought to be strong bonds of solidarity within a nation, like an extended family, and their answer to the first is that who constitutes ‘us’ needs to be tightly controlled.

The two fundamental political questions are therefore interrelated. The first question determines the answers to the second question, and vice-versa. It is impossible to decide how much solidarity one should have for other group members until you know who is in the group, and it’s impossible to decide who should be in the group until you decide how much solidarity is expected of each member.

But until those questions are answered, it’s impossible to decide any other question. A person’s position on issues such as how much tax to pay, what social services should be covered, immigration, defence and more, are all functions of their positions on these two fundamental political questions. Until you know who counts as ‘us’ and what that entails, it’s impossible to decide anything else.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

Reverse McCarthyism

A terrible and pathetic social phenomenon occurred in the United States of the 1950s. In the shadow of the Cold War, a large number of people lost their jobs and faced social persecution after being accused of Communist ties or sympathies, a phenomenon known as McCarthyism. Our society today is wracked with a similar, but different phenomenon – this essay calls it “Reverse McCarthyism”.

Senator Joe McCarthy was the man who gave the name to the phenomenon, otherwise known as the “Red Scare“. He started it by making the claim to a Republican Women’s Club that he had “a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The implication was that Communist traitors had infiltrated the US Government.

The ensuing mania to root out suspected Communist sympathisers led to a large number of innocent people getting harassed, interrogated and fired or rendered unemployable. This had the effect of chilling all discussion about left-wing topics, for fear of being accused of being Communist. People would openly declare their contempt for “Pinks” and for labour movements in general, leading to the normalisation of extremely conservative attitudes.

Our culture nowadays has a very similar phenomenon occurring. Now that the Great Pendulum has swung back in the other direction, as it does every 50-60 years, today’s form of McCarthyism takes aim at the bogeymen of the left. We can call this phenomenon ‘Reverse McCarthyism’.

Reverse McCarthyism is a witchhunt against suspected supporters of Nazism.

Original McCarthyism was marked by a fear of saying anything that sounded even vaguely Communist. Reverse McCarthyism is identical, except about Nazism. In the same way that Original McCarthyism scared people into silence about left-wing ideas, Reverse McCarthyism scares people into silence over nationalist ideas.

It’s fair to say that open declarations of racial supremacy do not contribute towards the common peace – but the truth is above all, and without the freedom to express the truth we have nothing.

The idea that a Western country could realistically be improved by importing millions of Muslims and Africans is insane. Reverse McCarthyists, however, make out that to oppose it means that you must hate non-white people and desire to see them expelled for the sake of racial purity. Opposition to Third World immigration is genocide. Much like other moral panics, Reverse McCarthyism is leading to people making terrible decisions out of a fear of being persecuted for wrongthink.

The most boneheaded example of Reverse McCarthyism has been the FaceBook witchhunts of recent years. It’s now possible to get ratted out to the FaceBook admins, and banned, for even the vaguest allusion to something that the Nazis might have supported. You don’t have to support genocide or even ethnic purity – the mere suggestion that a nation ought to have the choice to decide what sort of person comes through its borders is enough. Even laugh reacting the wrong post can be taken as support for Nazism.

Hitler jokes are right out. The famous meme of Hitler strumming a banjo is completely verboten, as is the Hitler dancing with glowsticks gif and the Hitler-fighting-the-Satanic-banking-cartel meme. Posting any of these will get you blocked and banned. No mercy can be had because, under the rules of Reverse McCarthyism, any lenience shown towards Nazi jokes makes a person morally complicit in all the crimes of World War II (as well as European imperialism).

The most pathetic example of all – which showed that Reverse McCarthyism has gone just as far as the original did – was when Scottish comedian Count Dankula was convicted of a hate crime and fined £800 for teaching his girlfriend’s dog to do a Nazi salute as a joke. In this case the moral hysteria had reached such a degree of intensity that a mere shitpost was judged worthy of being branded a criminal.

There is an overlap between Reverse McCarthyism and the Holocaust religion. Both of these ideologies benefit from pushing the myth that the Nazis were a uniquely monstrous evil, somehow categorically greater than any that has gone before. In the case of the Holocaust religion, this sentiment is used to justify the conquest of the Palestinians; in the case of Reverse McCarthyism it is used to justify more globalism.

Reverse McCarthyism is pushed by a different sort of person. Although many Reverse McCarthyists are Jews seeking revenge for the original Red Scare, the majority are just the same bog-standard capitalist parasite that used the original as an excuse to bust unions (ironically, simply pointing out the fact that many Reverse McCarthyists are Jews is enough to get Nazism accusations from other Reverse McCarthyists). These people oppose nationalism because they want to import cheap labour to make money today.

The phenomenon has led to some strange bedfellows, notably Israeli Jews and actual Nazis, who both oppose globalisation on account of that it weakens the borders of their particular desired ethnic enclave. This has led to the common but bizarre sight of Western leftists calling Israeli Jews ‘Nazis’ on account of their desire for a strong border wall and immigration policies that favour a particular race.

Thoughts of a Luciferian Occultist Upon the Tenth Anniversary of His Apotheosis

On Boxing Day, 2008, I took a heavy dose of psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. It wasn’t a reckless decision. I had been a heavy cannabis user for some years already, and as a schizophrenic I was well accustomed to strange and sometimes terrifying thought patterns. It was about six o’clock in the evening.

Perhaps forty minutes later, I started to feel unusually good. The come-up had already become more pleasant than was possible with cannabis alone (much less alcohol). I felt so good that I decided to go over to my neighbour’s house to split the rest of the mushrooms.

Standing on the road outside my house, on my way to my neighbour’s, I started to feel unusually good. I was certain that this was the best I had ever felt in my life. It was a sense of exhilarating peace, in that all of my suffering had been abolished, replaced with an overwhelmingly confident sense that everything was going to be alright.

My neighbour and I divided up the rest of the mushrooms. After a while, he suggested that we smoke some weed to “kick it on a bit”. So we did. At about 8 p.m. the experience started to become unusual – I started to enter psychedelic space for real.

My ordinary vision started to be replaced by a shimmering field of reds, yellows, greens and blues. These colours took on more and more of my view, but when someone spoke, or if I moved my head suddenly, the room I was in would become apparent again. These colours were not simply placed on top of my ordinary vision, but were a higher-order interpretation of it, as if I was seeing elemental fire, air, earth and water.

Soon this vision collapsed from four colours into two: an electric neon blue, and black darkness. The neon blue was alive, and it seemed to reach out into the darkness as if by sexual impulse. It reached out with tendrils that curved into every available space, but not merely three-dimensionally – the electricity reached into every available space in a countless number of higher dimensions.

What I was seeing was the material world represented as masculine and feminine. This was an ancient Taoist secret: that the world is yang and yin, interdependent and meshed together so tightly that it is impossible to ever see pure masculine or pure feminine in a state of Nature. That I was able to see it was because my mind was rising through the dimensions, into metaphysical space.

Soon this vision also faded, and I was left with no sensations at all, just pure awareness. My mind no longer contained words, until I was asked how much of it I wanted to see. In my mind, I responded: “The full measure.” This is the Luciferian in me – I had waited my entire life, perhaps even several lifetimes, for this exact moment, and I knew what to do.

As if by lightningbolt, the Veils of Isis were lifted, and I looked directly into the face of God. What was seen cannot be described, for reasons that will shortly be explained. It is sufficient to say that the ancient Vedics were correct when they claimed that there is no such thing as space or time, and that behind Maya is absolution.

Looking into the face of God, I realised that everything I knew was wrong. It wasn’t that everything I knew was factually wrong, it was that reality was so fundamentally different to what I thought it was that every assumption had to be revisited. I was open to all possibilities – and in that state of maximum receptivity, and in the presence of God, some things were revealed to me.

There is no such thing as time and space. In the same way that twenty-five still frames a second gives the impression of a moving image, what we think of as time is closer to multiple universes flashing in and out of awareness. This happens so quickly that we think we’re actually moving around, but we’re really just jumping through the multiverse.

The multiverse is not merely a large number of universes. It is, in fact, a practically infinite number of universes, that are related to each other by way of a fractal pattern. This was called the Great Fractal, for the simple reason that it contained all possible perceptions. Maya, or the material world, is a fractal that contains every single possible universe, in every single configuration. Every universe that can exist, exists somewhere in the Great Fractal.

Now aware of this, I felt so profoundly different that I knew I had opened a door that would not be closed again on this side of the death of my physical body. I was now a master of the physical world, in that I could explain it from first principles of yin and yang. But there was more. Eventually I realised that it was necessary to spend some time with God – perhaps years.

As if on cue, knowledge came, about God. I had more-or-less been a materialist atheist up until then, despite considerable dabbling in Eastern traditions, so what came was shocking.

Consciousness is God. This is why it can fairly be said that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-wise. God is all knowing because everything that is known is perceived by consciousness, and God is consciousness. God is all-powerful because everything that exists has been created by consciousness, and God is consciousness. God is all-wise on account of the combination of the previous two.

It is true that consciousness cannot be described empirically. It cannot be sensed, and therefore cannot be described in terms of appearance, sound, taste or touch. Neither can it be measured. There is no instrument that can detect its presence or absence. Therefore, it cannot be a material phenomenon.

In understanding this, I understood the first line of the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Eternal Tao.” God, as consciousness, is the prima materia of reality. Therefore, God is more fundamental than any human conceptions that may be dreamed up, such as words and language. God is even more fundamental than yin and yang, and therefore there is nothing about God that can be said. Therefore, all the claims of organised religion as to the nature of God are false.

Consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world because consciousness is the prima materia. God is the prima materia. The first thing ever to exist was consciousness, and it is more fundamental than time, and therefore does not need a cause. Therefore, it is not necessary to suppose some kind of “creator” that “willed” consciousness into being.

The only thing that really exists is consciousness, and this is eternal and without blemish. Everything else is merely something that consciousness is aware of, and, because no two consciousnesses are the same, that which is apparent to one is not necessarily apparent to any other. Therefore, nothing material can meaningfully be said to definitely exist.

Because there is no material world, there is also no death. The realisation of this brought me immense elation; I realised that I had suffered awfully under the delusion that the death of my physical body meant the cessation of my consciousness. In reality, it is the consciousness that creates the material body, and therefore the death of that body – like the death of all bodies – does not impact consciousness.

The persuasiveness of the illusion of the material world is the reason for the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”. The hard problem only makes sense if you already assume the presence of a solid material world, inside of which consciousness arose. Explaining how consciousness arose within a material world is, indeed, a hard problem, because it’s impossible. The reality is that consciousness exists, and has dreamed up a world that is as close to plausible as possible, when viewed from the perspective of the conscious present moment.

All that exists is consciousness and the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is more fundamental than the contents of consciousness; the latter is dreamed up by the former. The contents of consciousness, for every individual, is a slice of the Great Fractal. Therefore, it is possible for any individual consciousness to experience anything whatsoever that is possible – it’s just a matter of navigating to that part of the Great Fractal, which may take several lifetimes.

Every possible arrangement of the contents of consciousness is being experienced by God right now, because God is split into an infinite number of consciousnesses. These are not inferior in any way to the original, or to each other. God is experiencing your life ten seconds ago, and ten days ago, and whatever decisions you will make ten days or ten years in the future are already being experienced by God, and forever will be.

Therefore, all of the other people in life are also God, in exactly the same way that you are. They all are consciousness, an extrusion of God into the material world, so that God might experience something. It is true that All is One. We may be separate – and even competitors – in the material world, but behind it all, everything that exists is on the same team, God playing at the experience of being God.

Becoming God is not a question of growing in power as if life were some kind of game of Dungeons and Dragons. There is no spiritual progress to be made, and there are no spiritual points to be earned. You are already God, perfect and complete; you just forgot. Apotheosis is nothing more than anamnesia, remembering something that has been forgotten.

The reason why you forgot – why we all forgot – is clear, if you consider what it means to never forget. Being God is a state of perfect bliss. It is the absence of all suffering and longing. Looking into the face of God, I also felt this complete absence of desire – and realised its drawbacks.

Sitting for eternity in a state of perfect bliss is extremely limited from an experiential point of view. It is boring. It is so painfully boring that it makes sense to dream up the material world, for the sake of having something novel to experience. Thus, you chose to forget that you were God because it’s more interesting that way.

The problem is that, because God is perfect and complete, any change to this must necessarily be a desecration. Because God is a state of perfect knowledge and bliss, the process of individuation into a human consciousness necessary implies the introduction of ignorance and misery. Awareness of this is why so many religious traditions have a conception of a “Fall of Man”.

This is also true of the Great Fractal. There is an ideal life, and there are a practically infinite number of fractally similar lives. All of the fractally similar lives involves imperfections in comparison to the ideal one. Each one of us has a unique pattern of suffering, much like how the fractal forms of other things within Nature are variations of one ideal.

The real mind-bender is that it’s better this way, with all the suffering, than without. Existence as God is so painfully boring that all the misery in the entire Great Fractal is preferable (at least temporarily, and for a change). This means that there is a higher order of morality than mere pleasure and suffering. God seeks relief from boredom, and therefore the suffering of individuals is a good thing, as long as that suffering entertains God.

Therefore, it makes sense for individual consciousness to get slung into the material world (or, at least, to appear to have been) and to fully adopt the illusion of being a particular creature, separate from the wider whole and with desires that work against that whole.

All of this knowledge was downloaded into my mind in an infinitely small passage of time, because God is more fundamental than time and therefore not subject to its laws. Had I not already been a Luciferian, and therefore somewhat prepared, this downloading of knowledge probably would have fried my brains completely.

As it was, it took four years for me to make any sense of it all, six years before I could think about it calmly, eight years before I could be happy about it and ten years before I could write it down. The distillation of the wisdom of those ten years with God is the essay that you have just read.