Bits and Pieces

I wish to begin this blogpost by talking about the blog itself. A little while ago, I read a horoscope in the Auckland Herald that talked about a 'private journal' – I can't remember the Leo horoscope that day exactly but it made me wonder if people in the world think this blog is a diary, that I don't want others reading it. The opposite is true. I want people to read it, lots of people, particularly people in the media. I would love it if Steve Braunias himself were to read it regularly. (If he does, I wish to express to him my appreciation of his recent article in the Herald about Benjamin Swann, an article that could have presented Swann as a monster but instead depicted him as a somewhat silly man who had made serious mistakes in his life.) The truth is that this blog is my route to recovery. I have been quite well for a long time now, indeed seem to get better every day. The reason for my recovery is my decision to talk about my life, to talk about schizophrenia and homosexuality, neither of which condition I suffer from. People may think my decision to talk about all this is a symptom of illness, that the mentally ill should bottle everything up until at last they kill themselves. The psychiatrists may not want the people they diagnose as mentally ill to talk about their lives and treatment because to do so is to illuminate the insane evil that is psychiatry itself. So long as the 'mentally ill' are voiceless, the psychiatrists retain their power to dehumanise and torture the people who, largely through no fault of their own, end up in their consultation rooms. I am fighting against a system that manifestly fails almost everyone who ends up in it as a patient.

Although I am quite well and can judge my wellness according to some rubrics such as improved ability to sit still and watch TV, to read books without becoming restless, to take better care of myself, and so on and so forth, (I no longer talk about homosexuality with my mother at all), I may not always present myself as well when I have an appointment with the psychiatrist. My last appointment was immediately before Auckland went into lockdown. I mentioned to the psychiatrist that I had got into an online altercation with a former friend of mine and I wish I hadn't told him this. This argument, which began when my friend sent me a ridiculous, asinine essay about schizophrenia, ended with him saying unforgivable things to me and me replying in kind. It is impossible for me to describe this argument without traducing my friend and so I won't. It was a mistake, however, to tell the psychiatrist that I had got into a verbal stoush with my friend. I see my psychiatrist infrequently, as you would gather, and for a long time now I have been trying to present myself as well, so I can get out of the Mental Health Act that I have been under since early 2014. At this last appointment, I brought my brother along, a lawyer. I was given a choice – either agree to take the same dosage of medication voluntarily or remain under the Act and have the medication gradually reduced. I opted for the second course of action. So far no dosage reduction has occurred – my brother told me immediately after that appointment that I should get it in writing. I wish to make two points about all this. First, the symptoms I described at the beginning of this paragraph, the restlessness, I believe to be a side-effect of the medication rather than an indication of an 'underlying condition' – because I no longer have that underlying condition. The restlessness became markedly worse after my dosage was doubled in 2018 and the only reason I feel better now is because, I believe, my brain has adjusted to the medication. Second, the psychiatric profession probably would prefer me to agree to take medication voluntarily because then, if I go off the medication secretly and get into trouble somehow, they can blame it on me and have me hospitalised and immediately put back under a Compulsory Treatment Order. Alternatively, if I go off the medication secretly, remain quite well and don't do anything problematic, they are not accountable or liable for anything – they can wash their hands of me in the same way as I can wash my hands of them. I have considered this option, agreeing to take medication voluntarily and then secretly discontinuing it, but have rejected it because this would involve lying to those treating me and perhaps also to my family. I am too honest to elect for this course of action – certainly more honest than the corrupt and lazy doctors who have been treating me.

I have titled this post "Bits and Pieces" because I want to touch on a number of different topics. I want to begin by discussing the Youtube vlogger Veritasium and then move onto talking about some moments in my own life. This post is a bit ramshackle – there is a part of me that feels that I have said all I need to say in this blog and that there is no reason to keep on writing it. Even this post has taken me a couple of weeks to get this far. I hope to accelerate the writing of it as I go along.

Veritasium is a science education channel on Youtube run by Derek Muller that began in January 2011. Muller covers a wide variety of topics, not least mathematics, chemistry, and physics. I believe the first clip I saw by him was "These Pools Support Half The People Who Live on Earth", a clip about potassium. Not long after I watched a clip about a wind-driven craft that can move faster than the wind propelling it. Muller specialises in videos that appear to be grounded in science but assert highly counterintuitive claims, a marketing strategy that has made his channel very successful. Initially I enjoyed his videos because I decided to trust in Muller's credentials as a intelligent authority on science and found his videos interesting and engaging. And then I saw his clip about General Relativity, titled "Why Gravity is NOT a Force". In this video, Muller argues that a charged object that appears to be motionless to us, which is in the same gravity well as we are, is actually accelerating and should therefore emit electromagnetic radiation according to Maxwell's laws. But this is patent nonsense. Muller doesn't address the gaping hole in his argument, that if an object that appears motionless to us because it is also on the surface of the earth is emitting radiation, that this energy has to come from somewhere. If Muller's claim is true, that an object that appears motionless to us is in fact emitting electromagnetic radiation, this violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law that energy is always conserved. To take Muller's argument to its final absurd limit, we could utilise this perverse 'fact' by putting a charged object in a room with walls capable of transforming electromagnetic radiation into electrical energy and, voila, we have something like a Perpetual Motion Machine, a simple source of infinite power. Needless to say, if General Relativity leads to such a conclusion, a conclusion that not only is counterintuitive but transgresses against one of the foundational laws in modern physics, either General Relativity is wrong or Muller's description of it is wrong. My money is on the latter.

The video on General Relativity made me wonder if Veritasium is really legit and a clip I saw recently only reinforced my doubts. The video I wish to discuss is "The Big Misconception About Electricity" – if you haven't seen this video already (which is likely) I suggest you watch it now before coming back to this blog. In "The Big Misconception About Electricity", Muller asks us to imagine a circuit consisting of a battery, a switch, a lightbulb, and a length of (resistance free) wire that stretches half a light-second in either direction. Although the circuit is enormous, although there is a full light-second of wire stretched between the battery and lightbulb in both directions, the lightbulb is physically only 1 meter away from the battery. Muller asks us, at the beginning of the clip, to make a guess as to how long it would take for the lightbulb to light up after the switch, which is near the battery, is closed. Would it take O.5 seconds, 1 second, 2 seconds, 1m/c seconds, or none of the above? Muller goes on to argue that it would take 1m/c seconds, his counterintuitive assault on the commonplace idea that energy flows through wires. But I think Muller is wrong, that although there may be some dim illumination immediately after the switch is thrown, it would take at least 1s for the lightbulb to fully light up.

Muller is arguing, in effect, that the energy that causes the lightbulb to light up passes directly from the battery to the lightbulb across the one meter gap between them in the form of electromagnetic radiation. But, again, this is patent nonsense. If we take this argument to its final absurd limit, we would have to suppose that if a lightbulb is in the general vicinity of a battery, and the switch is thrown, the lightbulb would light up even if there is no circuit connecting the lightbulb to the battery. In fact, because there is no wire connecting the battery to the lightbulb, it is difficult to even know what the expression 'the switch is thrown' means in this situation. It seems we could make a lightbulb light up simply by waving a battery near it. Muller's argument rests I believe on two mistakes. The first is that he argues that energy flow in this situation is best described by the Poynting vector. But the Poynting vector only applies to electromagnetic waves and energy can flow from one place to another in other ways. Consider a line of dominos. If we push the first domino over, each successive domino falls until the final one falls – energy has passed from the first domino to the last but obviously the Poynting vector is irrelevant in this situation. The second error Muller makes is that he argues that in the circuit electrons accumulate on the surface of the wire between the battery's negative terminal and the lightbulb and are depleted on the surface of the wire between the lightbulb and the battery's positive terminal. Although I suspect this is possible in the very small interval of time after the switch is thrown, when the current is established I believe the distribution of electrons across the surface of the wire reaches a neutral equilibrium. The reason Muller proposes that positive and negative charges accumulate on the surfaces of parts of the circuit is that, for the sake of his Poynting vector argument, he needs the electrical fields around the wire to be perpendicular to the energy flow. And although there may be a minuscule shred of truth to his argument, I think he is wrong.

So what actually happens in Muller's thought experiment when the switch is thrown? Electrons are produced by the battery's negative terminal which move along the wire pushing those in front of them which push those in front of them, and so on. Similarly, the positive charge at the battery's positive terminal pulls electrons towards it which pull those immediately behind them towards it, and so on. The electrons themselves do not move very quickly but the push and pull, the electrical field inside the conductor, moves along the wire at something approaching the speed of light. The domino analogy is useful again – although each domino only moves a little, the effect propagates much faster. When the switch is closed, a current is established, if only in the part of wire close to the battery, although the current does not instantaneously reach its full value. This current produces a magnetic field and because it is a time varying magnetic field (increasing as the current increases), it will induce an electric field in the wire immediately attached to the lightbulb, an electric field that causes current to flow in that part of the wire and the lightbulb to almost immediately light up. However, and this is important, the lightbulb will be very dim because the induced emf across the lightbulb is much less than the emf produced by the battery. Only when the current is constant across the whole circuit will the power dissipated by the lightbulb equal the power provided by the battery. This would take at least one second, the time it takes for the push from the negative terminal and the pull from the positive terminal to reach the lightbulb along the wire – in fact, if we consider self-inductance it may take much longer. Self-inductance is too complex to explain fully here but it can be briefly summarised as a characteristic of circuits that prevents them from reaching their maximum current instantaneously as energy is invested in producing the magnetic field surrounding the wire. Although Muller specifies that the wire is resistance free, he doesn't mention self-inductance at all. Yet I suspect that the self-inductance of the circuit he describes would be very substantial indeed. This is indicative of the whole video, a hash of ill-founded speculation that doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny at all.

The reaction I felt watching these two Veritasium clips was deep disappointment. We live in an age of lies and although Derek Muller is not Q, he is also trafficking in bullshit. The difference is that Muller is disseminating bullshit for smart people rather than easily debunked conspiracy theories about 5G towers and microchip-carrying vaccines. In my more conspiratorial moments, in the past, I have wondered if the bullshit that we often find on the Internet is a way of protecting the universities and other elites – in order to maintain their monopoly on the truth in an era where information about anything is only a mouse click away, I have wondered if they deliberately allow the propagation of falsehoods. Perhaps, I thought, this was their way of maintaining their power and ascendency, the established hierarchy that is founded on knowledge. Today, though, I think that the blatant mistakes Muller and others make can be blamed on the profit motive and the craving for an audience. The more provocative the content of a clip, the larger the number of hits. This is why I have gone off Bret Weinstein and Heather Haying – they have gone all the way down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole and can't come back. I presume that they are pandering to this fringe, often right-wing demographic because they have decided that the bulk of their audience is made up of vaccine skeptics – their income depends on the size of their audience and so compromise, some degree of selling-out, is inevitable. It seems to me that the Dark Horse Podcast  has jumped the shark and have largely stopped watching it. However, although Weinstein and Haying also traffic in ridiculous speculation, it is hard to argue that they are part of a conspiracy to conceal the truth by hiding it behind a cloud of bullshit. They are too paranoid about conspiracies to deliberately participate in a conspiracy themselves.

Earlier in this post, I signalled that I intended to talk about my life again. I also intimated that I feel that I have said all I need to say in this blog about my life and so my decision to talk about it again is perhaps unnecessary. In one post or another, I have said everything that needs to be said, I think. My main worry is that I have not reached enough people for my life-story to have registered in the popular consciousness, and so I hope that my readers sometimes go back to earlier posts, and the right posts, to gain a complete picture of my life and 'illness'. I have noticed that a popular post is one with the clunky title "The Limits of Discourse, or The Truth About Cats and Dogs". In this post I argued that the cat/dog delusion, which I think is or has been fairly common, has no semantic content, that "the truth about cats and dogs is that there is no truth about cats and dogs". In that post I said that, if I had to choose, I would identify as a 'cat'. I wish now to resile from this profession as I have in other posts. Since I wrote "The Limits of Discourse", other examples of people experiencing the cat/dog delusion have come to my attention, but nevertheless I think that because the cat/dog delusion is meaningless, it was wrong for me to decide to identify as a cat. Simply put, in the world there are gay people and straight people and I count myself among the latter.

I wish to start by adding something to the previous post. In "Anatomy of a Delusion" I described how I had formed the delusion in 2007, a delusion that lasted perhaps eight months, that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. I wish now to briefly mention a logical consequence of this delusion that I entertained briefly perhaps in 2007 or perhaps in 2009. In New Zealand, at this time, there were two types of men's magazines, the magazines like FHM and Zoo that put sexy bikini-clad women on their front covers, and the genteel magazines like GQ and Esquire that put men like George Clooney or Brad Pitt on their covers. I thought that the latter magazines were directed toward the vast demographic of men who harboured secret homosexual desires. Why else would a man want to buy a magazine with Brad Pitt on the cover? Many years ago I was listening to the radio and heard the DJ talk about his brother who at school had got into ballet and endured teasing because he wasn't involved in a more masculine extra-curricula pursuit like rugby. The DJ pointed out that surely it is preferable to be hanging around a bunch of near naked women than to be on a rugby field "with your head stuck up another man's arse". The point, here, is that in 2007 and 2009 I thought that men who tried too hard to be macho were all latent homosexuals, were compensating for their sexual confusion by presenting a false face to the world. I thought entirely heterosexual men didn't worry about appearing manly to the world because they had nothing to prove. A related and very important point that my magazine example draws attention to is that sexuality is defined in terms of 'attractions'. As I discussed in the post "Straight Conversion Therapy", heterosexuals are only sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex, homosexuals are sexually attracted to people of the same sex, and bisexuals are attracted to both. I knew this quite clearly even back then in 2007. I have always been strongly attracted only to women but the thing about 'attractions' is that they are by nature private, unless a person wants to appear crass and vulgar by, for instance, wolf-whistling at hot young women on the street – and I try very hard not to make the women I find sexy uncomfortable. Accordingly the fact that I am only sexually attracted to women is not something that is easily ascertained.

Because it is difficult to determine whether or not a man or women harbours attractions towards people of the same sex, a person's sexuality is often, in fact usually, deduced from circumstantial evidence, from a person's body language, accent, sartorial choices, from the parts of the city where he chooses to spend his time. At the beginning of this post I mentioned an article by Steve Braunias about Benjamin Swann. It has been some time since I read this article but, as I recall it, Steve was focussed on the way Swann went on about his life attempting to break into the media or showbiz even though charges of sexually molesting boys were hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles. It seems that everyone who had any contact with Swann thought he was gay but, if asked, Swann would say he wasn't. Steve makes a lot of the fact that Swann often wore teeny-tiny shorts and that he was often seen perambulating along Karangahape Road. (Swann lived in Eden Terrace very near K Road, as I know well because I live in Eden Terrace myself.) Presumably the reason people just assumed he was gay was because of the way he presented himself and this has made me wonder about the way I myself present to others.

Let's start with body language. I don't have any gay mannerisms like limp wristedness although, when I was very ill in 2009, there were times when I exhibited these mannerisms a little against my will. I felt then as though because others around me, specifically those treating me, thought I was gay when I'm not, that a malign force was somehow acting upon me forcing me to conform to the idea they had of me. Generally, however, I don't believe I have any gay mannerisms at all. But then there is the matter of my voice. When I was about fourteen, I had an operation on my nose and I believe this permanently affected my voice; I suspect that this operation might have altered its tonality or timbre by changing the shape of the sinus cavity. I remember when I was seventeen I applied to be in the choir for the school musical; the music teacher I auditioned for wrote in my report that my voice had "an odd quality" and put me in the bass section, the section reserved for those who can't really sing. Like everyone, I can't really hear myself, but over the years I have become aware that my voice can be a little strange, a cause for some anxiety. However, although my voice is sometimes high pitched, I don't believe that I have the gay accent. (In using the word 'accent' to describe the gay voice, I am implying that the distinctive characteristics of the way gay men speak is learned rather than innate in the same way that an ethnically Caribbean person who grows up in Glasgow picks up a Glaswegian accent.) I can adduce a story from 2009 to prove this, that I don't ordinarily have the gay accent, a story I have told before. From 2005 until 2013 I worked for the TAB part-time taking horse racing bets over the phone. In 2009, there was a period during which, whenever I received a call, I would make a snap decision about whether the punter was gay or not and, if I thought he was gay, I would put on the gay accent. Otherwise I would use my own voice. This was not a premeditated decision, rather it arose from some place deep in my subconscious mind. After a couple of weeks, I realised I was doing this and attempted to snap out of it; on the next call I put on an Australian accent – after this call, I stopped doing it altogether. When I put on the Australian accent, the chap sitting next to me said to his neighbour on the other side, in some alarm, "He's talking like an Australian now!" From this I conclude that, ordinarily, I don't employ the gay voice at all.

Let's turn now to the issue of dress. Gay men are popularly supposed to be flamboyant, to be exhibitionist in their choice of clothes. In the same way that Swann set off alarm bells with the shorts he often wore, gay men often display their homosexuality through their sartorial decisions. Do I dress like a gay man? The short answer is 'no' but there is an important exception. In 2006, my step-mother and sisters went on a trip to South America and returned with a pair of Peruvian trousers as a gift for me, pants that resembled pajama bottoms. I wore them around the Big House sometimes and was wearing them when I rocked up to bFM with the idea of resuscitating an old friendship with Jose Barbossa and possibly helping out at at the radio station. As I described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode", Jose brought me into the studio and introduced me to Noelle McCarthy; she looked me up and down and then took me on board at once as a part-time news writer. First impressions count and I believe that, principally because of the pants I was wearing, she had probably immediately decided I was a gay man. I didn't wear those pants again while I was working at bFM but I sometimes wore a blue t-shirt with the slogan "Live Like A Dissident", a t-shirt that had also been given to me by my step-mother. I sensed at the time that this t-shirt might make people, such as Mikey Havoc, think I was gay, a source of distress, but, at the time, I was dealing with an anxiogenic confusion – I couldn't be sure which behaviours, displays, were 'cool' and which were 'gay'. (After I became deeply psychotic, I briefly decided that these two words, 'cool' and 'gay', were effectively synonyms, that gay men used the word 'cool' as code to describe gay people and displays.) This t-shirt ended up causing me great anguish. Although I have not talked about it much in this blog, for most of 2006 I had been studying to become a secondary school teacher, a choice of vocation that had been effectively decided for me, forced on me, by my father and step-mother. (My father had told me that if I went into secondary school teaching, he would pay for me to go to Europe for three months, a proposal I had declined.) At the first class at AUT on the shore early in 2006, when I formally introduced myself to my fellow trainee teachers through a short speech, I was wearing this t-shirt. I often felt that year that my fellow students thought I was gay because of the bad impression I made right at the beginning. I had never wanted to become a teacher and dropped out in around September or October 2006, about a month before rocking up to bFM.

After I became deeply psychotic, a fortnight or three weeks after leaving bFM, I tried to get rid of that t-shirt. For some reason, one or more of my flatmates decided to hang it on an interior wall of the Big House. This was just something else that compounded my paranoia. That t-shirt haunted me in my sickness, as did a certain confusion about which attire is gay and which is cool. I recall in 2011 telling the girl I call Jess, as proof of how just how ill I was when I was ill, that in 2007 I had nearly bought myself some skinny jeans. I was making fun of myself, of course, being self-deprecating to try to make her laugh, but it gets at the fundamental cause of my illness, an anxiety about how I present myself to others.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the signs adduced by Steve Braunias as possible evidence for Swann's homosexuality was the fact that he was seen sometimes walking along Karangahape Road. For my foreign readers, it might be helpful to describe K Road a little. K Road, particularly the section between Queen Street and Ponsonby Road, is a hub for Auckland's counterculture – it has a couple of strip clubs and gay bars and, when prostitution was illegal, was a popular haunt for street walkers. (New Zealand legalised prostitution in 2003, becoming the first country in the world to do so.) K Road, with its bars and clubs, is a favoured destination for Auckland's young party people, regardless of their sexual orientations. However, in the popular imagination, there is something suspicious about spending time in K Road, particular at night, by oneself. I don't understand this myself – I have lived in Eden Terrace, very near K Road, since early 2016, and quite often walk around around the block in the evening, a trip that takes me along K Road from Ponsonby Road to Symonds Street. I have never felt unsafe and have only ever come close to being propositioned by a man once. I was in Myers park during the daytime several years ago. As best as I can recall, I asked a stranger who was drinking a beer on a park bench for a cigarette and entered into a conversation with him. He told me that after a period of mental illness or psychosis, he had lost interest in women. The turn the conversation had taken made me uncomfortable and I took my leave of him. Quite recently, in fact, it occurred to me that this young chap might have been fishing, trying delicately to ferret out from me if I was interested in casual male intimacy (which of course I'm not). The reason I didn't realise this at the time was that this young man didn't seem camp or crazy in the slightest.

I don't know what form my current psychiatrist imagines my lifestyle to take but I suspect that my previous psychiatrist thought I would often cruise for gay men. At my most recent Independent Review, in 2018, she wrote in my report that I would go for walks at night for hours by myself, presumably intending to prove this way that I have treatment-resistant schizophrenia by insinuating that I am secretly having gay sex with casual acquaintances. I wish my life was that exciting. The truth is that the allegation of homosexuality has hung over me since early 2014, that my life has effectively been in a holding pattern for most of the last seven years. Every day for the last three years I do exactly the same thing. I wake up late, have a shower, and go to my mother's house where I complete the cryptic crossword and watch CNN and Comedy Central. I have a very good relationship with my mother (she is a wonderful woman) and occasionally we will go for a drive somewhere. In the evening, I listen to Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Stephen Colbert, and others on Youtube. Every Tuesday I attend a Pub Quiz with some friends, a tradition I have been observing since 2010 that was curtailed for many months by the Covid lockdown. Occasionally I watch a film with my father and his girlfriend or see my brother. My life effectively stopped many years ago. I am currently endeavouring to apply to do a Masters in Philosophy through Auckland University although I am having issues enrolling – I hope that next year my life will start again.

I wish to say something about my previous psychiatrist, Jennifer Murphy. At my appointments with her I went through a phase in 2017, I think, of trying to explain to her why I had become psychotic in the first place, as I have done in this blog. I remember bringing it up on one occasion and my mother, who was present, said, "He formed delusions about some of the staff at bFM". I said, "I thought a couple of them were gay. I was right about one of them. I was wrong about Mikey – I feel very bad about that now." Murphy grimaced. In the report she wrote in 2018, she made no mention of the fact that I had been wrong in thinking Mikey Havoc was gay. I suspect that Murphy believes that a simple allegation of homosexuality is proof sufficient, that it is impossible to be wrong in thinking someone gay. This insane paranoid bigotry, this idea that the world is full of secretly homosexual men and women, a delusion shared I believe by many psychiatrists who think that you can't be wrong in thinking someone is gay, is why she never believed that I am totally heterosexual, that, like Janet Frame, I am repelled by homosexuality.  But, as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have shown, experts can be fallible. On another occasion, when my mother wasn't present, she asked me, "How is your sexual functioning?" This question came at me from left field and I simply answered, "It's alright." I wish I'd answered with the full truth, that I only watch lesbian porn because I don't like pornography with men in it.

I'll finish this post by going right back to the beginning of my treatment. At my first contact with the Taylor Centre in 2007, in the consultation room with the psychiatrist Trish van der Krellen and the woman who was to become my key worker, Kate Whelan, I said, "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay and I want to come out as straight!" I was wrong about my father but the important thing I said was the bit about wanting to come out as straight. In the same way that when a gay man comes out as gay, he is saying, "I have always been gay and I want people to know it!" I was saying, "I have always been straight and I want people to know it!" I recall Kate sitting there smiling and immediately getting a vibe, perhaps a premonition, that she was going to destroy my life. Of course, my statement then was open to misinterpretation but I didn't realise it at the time, and in fact didn't realise this until many, many years later. Milos Yiannopolous has recently announced that he wants to "come out as straight" – if I could speak directly to Milos I would say, "You can't come out as straight. You've had too much anal sex with men to ever be able to describe yourself as straight." I have to assume that the people treating me decided I was like Milos. In the end, the reason why the people treating me decided I was gay had nothing to do with my body language, voice, clothing, or nocturnal walks. They decided I was gay because I had said I was straight.

This post is quite long. I hope it is in the main free from typographic errors and that it does not seem too digressive. It may be the last I need to write about my life. The next post will, perhaps, be about something entirely different. Au revoir, my friends.