Background Info

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, when aspiring authors attempt to write a 50,000+ word novel within 30 days. This means averaging 1,667 words per day.

My 360 odd blog posts to date have averaged 1,246 words per day, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for me to write a bit more each day and achieve the goal. Plus, I have the support & encouragement of all the other authors who are taking part in this challenge.

Since leaving school, I have done very little creative writing, so a whole novel may be rather more difficult than I anticipate.

Hijacking my blog for the next 30 days seems unusual, but the general advice to authors is "write about what you know" so you may find that my novel is a natural extension of my blog, in actual fact.

Anyhoo, the working title of my novel is "Poste Restante" and without further ado, I shall begin #writing.

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

1. The Caravan

Neil's consciousness sparked back into existence. This was not like waking up, as if he had been dreaming. This was not like coming round after an operation in hospital, under general anaesthetic. It was much more akin to a sudden re-ignition of his brain activity, after head trauma, perhaps after being knocked out cold by a punch or a blow to the head with some other blunt object.

At first, Neil's mind was confused; everything was jumbled up. He could make no sense of what was going on. His thinking was cloudy; cognition impaired. Then, the blurry mess and unfamiliar shapes that had previously filled his field of vision now came into sharper focus. He started to see things in his surroundings that he could identify, even though he still didn't know where he was or why he was there.

Neil lay on a bed at one end of a caravan. The bed filled the width of the caravan and extended all the way to the bedroom door, which was wide open. At the opposite end of the caravan was a dining table, surrounded by a U-shaped bench of seating, with windows behind. The bench was upholstered with a pink floral pattern. The table had a wood veneer, although it was clearly made of chipboard, exposed around the edge. A small kitchenette was on one side and a toilet and shower cubicle on the other.

The interior of the caravan was not in good condition. Mildew stained everything. The ceiling had dark black patterns where the permanent dampness had allowed everything that was water permeable to fester in the moist atmosphere. The carpet, which seemed to have been some sort of dark maroon colour originally, was soggy and stained. Mud was trodden into the pile of the carpet around the entrance to the caravan. The carpet had started to rot and there were patches of blue furry mould growing in places. A lightly coloured textured wallpaper peeled away from the walls in places, revealing a layer of polystyrene insulation, as well as the glue behind, which had now turned an orangey-brown colour as it had aged and dried.

The bedroom windows were covered by navy blue curtains. These had been neatly stapled to the wall below and at the sides, so that little light could penetrate through each of the three windows at the bedroom end of the caravan. Where the curtains hung on the curtain rail, a small amount of light crept in and it was clear that it was daytime.

The other windows had been covered with self-adhesive opaque plastic, which allowed light into the caravan, but you could neither see in nor out. The plastic had been applied with little attention to detail: there were air bubbles and the edge had been cut rather raggedly, exposing some of the clear glass near the white plastic window frames. Paper masking tape had been applied around the edges of the windows, to cover the gaps between the plastic and the frame. The large window at the opposite end of the caravan from Neil had newspaper stapled above the curtain-less windows, draped down so that it covered two thirds of the window. On the left hand side, a bedsheet had been stapled above and at the side of the window. The staples were haphazardly placed and the sheet had folds and creases in it, hanging hopelessly from the wall, and no use as any kind of curtain. The staple-gun lay on the dining room table, abandoned.

In places, there had been small craters scraped crudely in the polystyrene insulation of the walls, so that the thin aluminium exterior skin of the caravan was exposed. In each of these craters in the wall, a hole had been punched through the aluminium. Beams of sunlight shone into the dingy interior of the caravan through the holes. These beams illuminated swirling mists of moisture within the caravan, almost like the silken threads of a spider's web, heavy with morning dew and shining in the sun.

Clothes were scattered throughout the caravan. Some were torn, others stretched or unusually knotted; all seemed ruined in some way. There was the debris of habitation: discarded food wrappers, dirty plates and cutlery on the floor. There were many other objects made of bits of broken plastic, rubber and string that seemed to be the twisted, mangled and knotted remains of other things that had been dismantled, torn, bent and otherwise manhandled to the point that they were no longer clearly identifiable as anything in particular. Things were strewn all over the floor, with no discernable pattern.

There were many containers distributed around the caravan: plastic bottles were filled with fluid in various hues of yellow and orange. Then there were mugs, saucepans, bowls and glasses that were filled with orangey-brown liquid. A glass on a shelf near Neil's bed had a layer of red at the bottom, then an opaque layer that was milky pale yellow and the topmost liquid - which filled the majority of the glass - was clear and brownish in colour.

After his sight, the second of Neil's senses that returned was his sense of smell. His nostrils were assaulted by a strongly pungent but not putrid smell. The smell was extremely unpleasant, but not so much so that it was causing Neil any feeling of nausea. The smell had a kind of nasty allure, like a strong ripe cheese. There was the smell of mould, damp and decay of soft furnishings, mingled with the smell of bodily odour, and distinctly a smell of urine. Sweat intermingled with the general dampness in the caravan and ran down the walls in droplets. The windows were completely misted up with condensed moisture. The cheap sponge of the upholstery and bed had soaked up a lot of this foulness. Clothing and bedding had also absorbed some of the humidity from the air.

Neil's memory of how he found himself in this position now slowly returned to him. Things made little sense to him. They had found him; they had surrounded him; they had been readying themselves to storm his little stronghold and they would tear him from the private surroundings which he had attempted to create for himself. They had antagonised him; they had spent an incredible amount of time making noises and assembling themselves for the onslaught; the invasion of Neil's privacy, now that they had found him. They had hidden in the shadows and attempted to remail unseen, but Neil had seen them: fleeting glimpses, as he looked out of the peepholes. Counter-espionage: they were spying on him, so he would spy back at them.

Neil had no idea what their motivation was. Why was he so relentlessly pursued? Why were they so voyeuristic, wanting to intrude on his private world? Why were they so childishly antagonising? Why did they tirelessly toy with him, so close, but waiting and waiting before they made their move? He was angry with them. Quite rightly too. He had gone to such incredible effort to create a bubble of privacy, far away from anybody he could possibly disturb, or who might happen upon him by accident. He was in such a remote hidden location. How could anybody have possibly taken offence at his presence?

His final memories before he blacked out were of a night filled with terror and blind panic as the people he had tried so hard to avoid and evade were now making their final advances. All the dim shapes he could make out in the surrounding gloom of the trees were of figures, coming towards the caravan. He could see the movement of people in the shadows that danced on the ceiling and walls of the caravan. He could hear twigs snapping underfoot as they were stepped on. He could hear the sound of bushes being brushed past and branches being bent to make way for the advancing horde.

He passed out. When he came round they were gone.

Tentatively, he started to try and sit up and make his way to one of his peep holes so he could look out, but he realised he had blacked out with his leg jammed awkwardly underneath himself. His foot had gone to sleep. Incredible pain swept through his leg as the blood started to flow again and the feeling came back into his numbed limb.

There was momentary relief as the pain in his leg subsided, but then he was flooded with pain from multiple parts of his body. His hips ached, many parts of his legs seemed bruised and swollen, his back and neck were very stiff and painful; his body was covered with cuts and grazes, especially his knees and elbows.

In agony, Neil managed to prop himself up by the nearest of the peep holes and pushed his face up against the wall so he could look out. He saw nothing. Just trees. Where had they gone?

How long had he been unconscious for? It had been night time when he had blacked out and now it was daytime, but there was no way of telling whether it was the next day, or the one after that. He had lost all sense of time: days and nights had blurred into one.

Neil had spent a long time, afraid to leave the caravan. How long, he couldn't be sure, but he knew that they had laid seige to him and now his situation was desperate. He was dying in that caravan. He was so thirsty. He was in a great deal of pain. It was clear that there was a lot of blood in his urine. He felt so weak. He really didn't want to confront his persecutors and he had hoped that they would act first so that he didn't have to make the decision. Now he was confronted with the dawning realisation that they had won. Surrender was his only option if he wanted to live.

He collapsed back onto the bed to contemplate his next move, not at all able or willing to fully comprehend the staggering unpleasantness of the situation he was in.

Next chapter...

This is a story about a fictitious bear and an imaginary bull...

To explain how a speculative bubble bursts is very easy indeed. Investors are like a herd of cattle. They are not rational actors. When a critical mass of investors become spooked and start selling off their investments, this creates a market with more sellers than buyers, which means the asking price for financial instruments has to be lower to attract more buyers. Pretty soon, there is a stampede, as all the investors try to 'cash in' their investments and take their profits or minimise their losses. The asking price drops lower and lower, and buyers simply wait, knowing that the ever growing crowd of panicked sellers will underbid each other in a desperate attempt to offload their devaluing assets.

Anyway, that's so simple and obvious that it doesn't warrant further discussion. What I want to write about is what causes a speculative bubble in the first place.

We could look at historical examples, like the tulip mania during the Dutch Golden Age, with tulip bulb prices peaking in 1637, before crashing spectacularly. The Madness of Crowds explains the crash, but not the initial price bubble, in any satisfactory way for the modern financial markets.

To understand your average investor in publicly listed companies on the major stock exchanges, you only need to understand two human characteristics: greed and laziness.

The greed part is simple. Any of your friends who have reached a point of economic prosperity where they have disposable income are likely to have 'invested' some of their wealth. It's highly unlikely that they made angel investments in small startup companies where they knew the founders, the business model and understood the domain in which the embryonic enterprise operated. Instead, they thought they could make a quick buck by buying shares in a major corporation.

The laziness part is slightly more complex. The lazy divide into two groups. The speculative private investor looking to make a quick buck isn't interested in doing any actual work in order to earn their extra wealth. One phonecall to your stockbroker, having read a stock tip in your preferred newspaper does not count as an investment of labour, and so it is clear that these investors are lazy.

The second group are institutional investment managers: the people who look after pension funds. Now, you can ignore profit:equity (PE) ratios, yields, earnings per share (EPS), turnover and EBITDAs (Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation). You can ignore the philosophy of Warren Buffet, who is an active shareholder. The pension fund manager is passive and invests for one reason and one reason alone: the market capitalisation of the public company has reached a certain threshold. That is to say, the market values a public company above a certain amount of money.

To understand market cap, let's take Apple Inc. as an example. We take the number of Apple shares that are issued (5.4 billion at time of writing) and multiply that by the share price ($118 at time of writing) and we arrive at a market capitalisation of $637 billion. That is to say, if you had a spare $637 billion in your bank account, you could buy Apple outright^*: every single share. You would be the sole shareholder of Apple, which is the biggest company in the world, by market capitalisation.

Now, Apple might have absolutely dog shit products lined up for the next 10 years. The CEO, Tim Cook could be an absolute moron who's going to run the company into the ground. The institutional investment manager doesn't give two hoots. They're going to buy Apple stock simply because it's highly valued. In fact, they're going to buy ALL the highly valued companies, above a certain market capitalisation.

In the UK, we have a kind of football league, with the premier league being the FTSE100 and then the league below being the FTSE250. As the market caps change, companies drop in and out of these 'leagues'. Consequently, investment managers will buy the new entrants and sell the ones that drop out. Easy as pie, right?

The laziness that drives all this is retirement. People saving for retirement are too lazy to make their own investments that ensure the value of their pension is not eroded by inflation, so they get an investment manager to 'track' the value of an index like the FTSE100, which generally outperforms inflation, over a long period of time. That makes sense, right? Money invested in the 'best' companies, should outperform money that's just sitting in the bank earning interest.

Furthermore, when people come to retire, they want their pension pot to be managed for income not for growth, but they're still too lazy to shop around to make sure that the yield or dividends that they are receiving on their pot of money give them the best possible income, while also protecting their capital.

In essence, the biggest part of our economy is driven by greedy lazy people. Instead of the industrious and ingenious entrepreneurs finding it easy to borrow money or sell a share of their company in order to raise the capital they need to grow, the sad reality is that almost all of the wealth in the developed world is ploughed into corporate behemoths that have already extracted all their value from the public, in order to keep people who have nearly reached the end of their lives in the manner to which they have become accustomed to.

Yes, that's right. By the time a company comes to the point where it floats on a stock exchange, it has peaked. It's time for the original founders, angel investors, venture capitalists, private equity and other shareholders to now cash in and fleece the public by offering their shares in an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Because the company has reached a certain 'valuation' (as decided by market sentiment and the bullshit written by the underwriting investment bank in the prospectus) then it has to be bought by the institutional investors, because it is highly likely to have a market cap that will put it straight into the FTSE100 or FTSE250. The companies with the smallest market cap in the FTSE250 are around £400m; for comparison Twitter floated with a market cap of $30,000m, which is 75 times more.

Let's take a hypothetical example. If I was to build a company with a turnover of approximately £20m per month, or £240m per year, then one might say that it could be valued using a rough multiplier of 2x turnover at £500m. That would easily be enough to make for an attractive IPO, because the market cap is going to attract all the institutional investors who have to buy FTSE250 companies. In effect, the IPO is underwritten by the pension tracker funds.

Therefore, greedy lazy people buy dog shit stock, it appreciates in value because of market sentiment - "ooh the price is going up, let's buy more" - and the fact that public companies can use their shares to acquire other companies (growth through acquisition) until they have a dominant market position (some may say monopoly, ahem!).

Growth through acquisition is not really growth. If I have 100% of the shares in company A, and 0% of the shares in company B, and then I use 49% of my shares and a bit of cash to acquire company B, such that I now own 51% of company A and 51% of company B, no new value has been created. There may be cost savings, there may be benefits from anticompetitive practices, but really all I'm doing is increasing the market cap of the parent company, hoping to move from the FTSE250 to the FTSE100, where a whole load more pension funds will have to buy shares for their index trackers.

The same deal goes on in the US, where companies are trying to IPO at a certain valuation in order to get into the Dow Jones or the NASDAQ, such that the US tracker funds will have to invest. The public - mostly pensioners - get fleeced.

So, in conclusion, the cause of a speculative bubble is actually institutional. Because the pension funds are so massive and they are passive investors, using index tracker funds, there is an immense amount of fake value created by mergers and acquisitions, as growth by acquisition carries such huge rewards. This starves the companies - who are truly growing and innovating - of much needed investment capital, stifling the economy and instead creating corporate giants who are too big to fail.

Eventually, the central banks and the rest of the money multiplying machine reaches the limit of how much the value of dinosaur institutions can be artificially inflated. These dinosaurs move at glacial pace and stifle change and competition. The lack of efficiency of markets to deliver capital to those companies who have true growth potential, undermines the economy for years, until finally things reach breaking point.

Overvalued companies, market disruption by venture-capital backed challengers, the faltering of capital gain and the end of effortless profits, are the things that spook the lazy, greedy investors. So, then begins the market crash.

The dying behemoths are dangerous animals. For example, the 'too big to fail' banks were able to hold the world's largest economies to ransom, with the threat of unimaginable disruption to our systems of payment and borrowing that underpin so many mortgages, overdrafts, credit cards, car loans and how we get and spend our wages each month.

For now, the status quo persists, because the idea of smoothly transitioning to truly free and competitive markets is beyond comprehension, such is the web of complexity that has been created by supranational organisations that have swallowed so many competitors around the globe.

Until we move to active investment rather than passive investment, we will always have the cycles of boom & bust.

Tags: #economics #capitalism

* - You couldn't actually buy all Apple's shares for $118 each, because the very process of buying up all the available stock for sale would drive up the price. I merely offer a simplified example.

This is a story about a pill for every ill...

There was a young man who swallowed a lie, about how hard work and loyalty to his company would make him successful. It left him exhausted and with depression, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. I don't know why he swallowed the lie. Perhaps he'll die.

There was a young man who swallowed 150mg of Bupropion - a fast acting antidepressant - to cancel out the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he'll die.

There was a young man who swallowed 5mg of Olanzapine - a mood stabiliser - to cancel out the hypomanic highs that were created by the Bupropion, that was supposed to fix the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he'll die.

There was a young man who swallowed 15mg of Mirtazapine - another antidepressant - because the Bupropion wasn't working so well any more on its own, to fix the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he'll die.

There was a young man who swallowed 25mg of Lamotrigine, to raise his seizure threshold so he could take more Bupropion, stabilise his mood more and as a third antidepressant, to fix the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he'll die.

There was a young man who swallowed 10mg of Diazepam - an anti-anxiety drug - because by now he was pretty jittery from all the damn drugs, that were supposed to fix his depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he'll die.

There was a young man who was going to swallow 2,000mg of potassium cyanide, to end the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Of course he would die.

Top picture, from left to right: Mirtazepine, Olanzapine, Bupropion, Diazepam, Lamotrigine.

Tags: #depression #bipolar #medication #suicide #career

This is a story about gallows humour...

Here's something for your amusement:

Q: What's worse than an abandoned blog?

A: A dead blogger

Not feeling particularly suicidal today, in case you were wondering. I think my mood will worsen before it improves though.

I've got a nice little project to play around with regarding Zero Knowledge Proofs - also known as zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) systems - for Blockchain sidechain tech. Hopefully I can busy myself hacking something fun I want to build, rather than just lying around feeling miserable.

Otherwise, I could always get a job I suppose, although the prospect filled me with enough dread to trigger the downward spiral anyway.

I had another more fun/creative project planned, but the hard numbers just don't make the payoff worth the effort.

Sleepless manic nights spent reading cryptography papers might pay off in the end.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about the undead...

I got sick. I stopped blogging. I'm sad I broke my daily writing routine. I would have hit 365 blog posts by now, if I had kept going just a little longer.

When people say "keep going, you're doing really well" the sentiment is lovely. Keep going where though? Have I been there before? Is it a good place to keep going to? Also, what does it mean to be doing really well? Does it mean superficially? Is the most important thing to look like you're doing really well, on the outside? Are you doing really well even if it's all an act?

I'm no faker; no actor.

I do however have to do something that I can keep going with, while genuinely doing really well. My last contract could not keep going. I was not doing very well.

Perhaps getting sick wasn't an inevitable consequence, but it takes more than letting off steam through personal writing to harmlessly neutralise the 'toxic' build-up, due to months of stress, boredom, lack of stimulation, lack of social interaction, no new challenges, no creative outlet etc. etc.

Equally, my solo hack-a-thons have been challenging and creative, perhaps a little over-stimulating, and have made me sick through social isolation and stress.

There must be a cool project with a team here in London that ticks the other boxes.

Anyway, I need to get well again first.

Tags: #career

This is a story about projection...

Do you want to predict the future? Would you like to be in the right place at the right time? Ever wonder how ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky gets to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been? How does a torpedo fired from a submarine intersect with its target, while following a relatively straight trajectory? Welcome to the world of dead reckoning.

Imagine I have a single data point - a latitude and a longitude - which tells me the location of a target at one point in time. I don't know how fast it's going, and I don't know what direction it's going. Fairly useless information. In the parlance of physics, I know location, but I don't know momentum. All we can say is that the probability of its next location spreads out from the point of origin: the thing being tracked is very unlikely to be a long way away, and it's more likely to be somewhere near where it was last seen. This is a probability cloud.

Next, we've measured two data points. We're sure it's the same thing that we're tracking, because we have identified some unique characteristic about it. In the submarine example, the sonar operator will be listening to the sound of the propeller, so they will know if it's the same ship, because it's got the same number of propellors generating the same kind of sound, underwater.

If we have two data points, we can draw a straight line between them, and assuming the same course and speed, we can predict where the object we are tracking is going to be next. We measure the distance between the two points, and divide by the time it took to travel between them, and we have the speed. Then, we simply extrapolate the line between the two points, and we can guess where the target will be on that line, at a future time.

But, the simple extrapolation model is flawed. Perhaps currents are pulling the ship in a different direction from the direction steered. Perhaps the captain of the ship is steering an arc-shaped course, to go around an obstacle, or to change direction.

With three data points, we can now fit an elliptic curve to fit those measurements. The elliptic curve shows us whether the captain is steering or drifting right or left. Additionally, we know whether the ship is speeding up or slowing down. If the ship is accelerating, but steering a constant course, it will be further along the line we plot than we think it will be. Equally, if the ship is decelerating, it won't get as far along its course as we anticipate.

Finally, with four data points, we can come up with a mathematical function that fits the data. To give a very simplified example, if the captain of the ship is zig-zagging to avoid submarines, we could fit a sine wave to the data, and predict when the ship is going to make its next turn... assuming that the captain tacks with regular frequency, of course.

As we gather more and more data points, plotting the course history of the ship we're tracking, we can come up with ever more sophisticated mathematical models to predict where we're going to see the ship next.

The arc of a ball travelling through the air is fairly easy to model. We just need to model momentum, gravity and air resistance. Momentum would be constant in a vacuum, so if you whack a tennis ball with a racquet while floating in the outer reaches of the galaxy - where there is little gravity - then the tennis ball will continue on a straight trajectory, at the same speed, more or less forever. Back here on Earth, the tennis ball will be pulled down to the ground by gravity, and it will also slow down, due to air resistance.

Given that air density and gravity are more or less constant at ground level, where you expect to find tennis courts, we probably only need 3 data points, and we should be able to make an accurate guess as to where the tennis ball's going to land. Even with gusts of wind, the flight of the tennis ball is relatively short, so the wind speed is unlikely to change dramatically during the flight of the ball. It should be a case of simply fitting an elliptic curve to the 3-dimensional co-ordinates of the 3 points of measurement, and then working out where that curve intersects with the plane of the ground, to predict where the ball's going to land.

"But what about spin?" I hear you ask. Yes, good point.

Spin is angular momentum. For our tennis ball example: the fluffy exterior of the ball will exert a 'grip' - friction - on the air. Therefore, the spin of the ball makes a reasonable difference, as more air gets pushed towards one side of the ball, by the rotating face. Just like a wing, the ball will experience a small amount of lift: the ball is 'pulled' towards the side that is spinning in the same direction as the air flow. That's the Magnus effect.

If we had hit our tennis ball with spin out in the vacuum of space, it would not create a curved trajectory, because the fluffy tennis ball has no air to grip on - a vacuum is frictionless. However, the centripetal force of the spinning ball will cause it to stretch to be slightly bigger than it would be if it wasn't spinning, because the outside is being thrown away from the centre, like a centrifuge. The elasticity of the ball will be trying to pull it back inwards, and in so doing, energy will be released in the form of heat. Eventually, all the energy of the spin will be radiated away, and the ball will slowly stop spinning. This effect is far too minuscule to even bother calculating, for our tennis court example here on Earth.

Of course, all this maths is just to model a dumb tennis ball, which can't make decisions and alter its own course, once it has left the racquet. To predict the behaviour of even a single individual is hard - this is the work of top poker players - and when we try to model complex systems made up of vast numbers of individuals - such as financial markets - the systems become chaotic and unpredictable. Thus, past performance is not a predictor of future results, unless you're a tennis ball.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about liberal arrogance...

Ah, caps lock, my old friend. Also, exclamation marks: you can never use too many. Do you think if there was more caps lock typing and sentences ended with multiple exclamation marks, we could wake the sheeple from their coma? The sheeple are clearly sleepwalking [or is it shleepwalking?] towards disaster.

While this is self-deprecating humour, it's also mockery of the same old liberal lines that are trotted out instead of any kind of nuanced counter-argument.

During Brexit, I noticed that people on both sides would say "I can see you're far too intellectually inferior to be able to have a debate, therefore this argument is over and I won". I lament the loss of anybody who can actually be bothered to have a proper debate, without being so childish.

Your white-trash, redneck, poorly educated person is now incredibly bored with the tried and trusted liberal short-cuts that supposedly immediately discredit an opponent in a debate. "Bigot" is a particularly charged word, and guarantees instant disengagement by the disenfranchised members of the public, being browbeaten by a group of elites who consider themselves morally superior.

I'm as guilty of it as anybody.

But, I've also noticed a kind of pathetic infighting amongst the intelligentsia.

Firstly, one must overcome the snobbery of the grammar Nazis. For your argument to even be considered it must be deemed to have attained certain standards. The most innocent spelling mistake will become the focus of commentary, rather than the points raised by the original author, no matter how eloquently the central argument is presented.

Having established oneself as 'a cut above the rest' there is one kind of ad hominem attack that succeeds where all others might fail. All one has to do to win the argument is write "WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!" in mockery of your opponent's attempt to make a reasoned argument and reach a sensible conclusion. Essentially, you're accusing somebody of being a nutjob; a raving madman. Case closed. End of debate.

Our asylums are stuffed full of 'visionary' people, and those seized by absolute conviction that the end of the world is nigh. However, do we not also laud that tiny handful of individuals who successfully predict recessions, stock market crashes, credit crunches, housing crises and other cataclysmic man-made events?

Why is it that a stock market trader or hedge fund manager, who might make a good living from short selling - betting against the market - is considered a highly intelligent person - cloaked in the mystery of mathematical models - while others who also forecast negative events, are dismissed as lunatics?

Humans always err on the positive side. There is a psychological test where participants bet money and win precisely as much as they lose. In this randomised gambling experiment, most test subjects will report that they think they're making a profit, even though they're breaking even. Even when the experiment is adjusted so that the participants are losing money, most will still think that the course of events is in their favour.

It's undeniable that we do see a herd mentality amongst groups of humans. The accusation of sheep-like behaviour is entirely valid and well supported by evidence. Stock market crashes are created by market sentiment not by external events. When investors collectively lose confidence, there's a rush for the door. The sheep line up for slaughter, even though by selling their stock, they're going to lose money.

Bank runs are another great example. The FCA underwrites deposits - your savings are safe - but we still saw long lines of people queuing up to withdraw cash from Northern Rock, during the credit crunch. That's a bank run, and it's driven by sheeplike behaviour. The panic is not rational. It's animalistic behaviour, not calculated and logical.

The well-educated middle classes have turned on one another, in this zero-growth second Great Depression. Research grants are at stake. Well paid middle-management jobs are at stake. The baby boomers are trying to collect excessively generous pensions. For God's sake don't even breathe, for the whole house of cards may come tumbling down at any moment. We are so highly leveraged - indebted - that one hiccup and we're all screwed. 

We should remember that the working-class are more numerous than the middle-class. While the working-class wail inarticulately about their poverty and lack of opportunities, the middle-class lock themselves into an echo-chamber of Facebragging and snobbery. Whenever somebody is critical of the status quo, we quickly shut them down by typing "WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!" to bully them into submission.

Personally, having safely circumnavigated the City of London - and profited - during the dot com crash, 9/11, the commodity price boom (and bust), the credit crunch and Bitcoin's ups & downs, I feel rather like Cassandra.

Dismiss and ignore me at your peril.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #economy

This is a story about slavery...

Do you have to run just to stand still? Does it seem like no matter how hard you try, you just can't get ahead? Why is it that the only time you're going to get to enjoy any leisure time, is when you're sick and old?

Even if I owned my own home outright, I would still need to pay council tax, gas, water, electric and sewerage. Even if I grew all the vegetables I needed and never left my plot of land, I would still need to raise a significant sum of money every single month.

Let's assume that I had solar panels, wind turbines and I heated my own water using firewood from my own trees. Let's assume I got water from my own well, and I operated my own miniature sewerage plant, so I could release my processed effluent back into the water table, without breaking environmental protection laws. I would still have to pay council tax.

I don't object to council tax. Council tax pays for the police, who will protect my self-sustaining home from being burgled. Council tax pays for the fire service, who will come and douse my house with water, in the event that it should catch alight.

If I never leave the house, I grow everything I eat and compost everything I waste, then I have no use for dustbin collection, and I have no use for street lighting or roads. I have no use for car parks. I have no use for regular parks and recreation grounds.

Furthermore, I have no use for schools or libraries. I certainly have no use for councillors, council officers and other civil servants.

Let's assume I surround my land with a 15-foot electrified fence, topped with razor wire. Let's assume that I install a sprinkler system, and have my own high-pressure hoses and firefighting training. I would still have no exemption from paying council tax. Paying council tax is my civic duty, because of the air that I breathe in a particular county.

This isn't a rant about how "taxation is theft". I'm just pointing out that there's no such thing as a free man in the United Kingdom. Somebody will always want something from you, even if you're minding your own business, being totally self-sufficient and working in harmony with nature and the land.

Very few people would be able to buy a sufficiently large plot of land to be able to grow enough trees to give them a lifetime's supply of firewood. Also, you're going to need somewhere to grow all those vegetables you're going to eat. You're probably going to need greenhouses and polytunnels to grow more frost-sensitive fruit & veg.

There's capital expenditure necessary to buy a wind turbine and a lifetime of spares for any repairs. Solar panels don't come cheap, and they have a finite lifespan. You're going to need a shittonne of batteries, so that you can store energy for when it's not windy or sunny.

You're going to need a well insulated house with a wood-fired boiler to heat hot water as well as to keep you warm in winter. Your home is going to have to be super energy efficient, because you don't have much electricity, so you'll use LED lighting and cook on a wood-fired stove. You won't be able to use a washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer, electric oven, microwave, electric hob, hairdryer, electric heater or other electricity consuming units.

Then, to keep your smallholding running, you're going to need tons of tools and machinery. Doing it all on your own means you'll want a petrol-powered rotivator, strimmer, lawnmower and a bunch of chainsaws to chop up all that firewood. You'll need lots of gardening equipment to make sure you're growing enough food to keep yourself nourished the whole time. You'll need lots of building equipment, to make sure you keep your house repaired and maintained.

If you don't have a well on your plot of land, you're going to have to dig a borehole and install a pump. Building a sewerage processing plant is no small investment of time, labour and materials, and probably not something you would do yourself, although you would be responsible for ongoing maintenance: a lovely job.

Remember, you're also going to need a lifetime's supply of petrol, engine oil and other consumables such as soap, toothpaste, spare lightbulbs etc.

So, after all this, your miniature self-sustaining estate has probably set you back the best part of £1 million, and you still have to work full-time to tend to your fruit and vegetables, and maintain all the equipment that generates power, pumps water, pumps sewage etc. etc.

Worst of all, you're going to have to sell some of the fruit & veg that you produce to pay your council tax, so really, you're not very free at all.

You may end up busting your balls in all weather, just so some council bureaucrat can take paid sick days and generally not work very hard at all.

Through economies of scale, farmers can harvest the crop in huge fields in a single day, when previously it would have taken men and women all summer to do it with sickles and scythes. Something as basic as a masonry nail is incredibly hard for a blacksmith to make, but in factories, vast quantities of goods like nails can be produced much more cheaply, in terms of labour effort.

"The good life" and nostalgia for a time of peasantry is nothing more than stupidity. Only a tiny handful of people blessed with inherited wealth can be idle in the countryside, doing the occasional spot of gardening, and otherwise spending their trust fund income in Waitrose and charging around the countryside in a gas-guzzling Range Rover.

Thus, I don't believe in communism, with its emblem of the sickle and hammer. Growing your own vegetables, or making ornate ironwork is a nice hobby, but we don't want to return to the era of blacksmithing and working in the fields. The combine harvester is a thing of great progress, as is the ability to mass-produce metal goods in factories.

The communes that sprang up in California in the 1960s and 1970s all failed, because they were set up by lazy bums who just wanted to sit around smoking dope. When they ran out of money, they found that they had been subsidising their stupid middle-class fantasies all along. Eventually power struggles tore the little hippy communities apart, but they were doomed to failure from the start.

In climates where the need for heating is less pronounced and the crop yields can be much higher, there are already population problems. For sure, you can go and buy a plantation in the developing world relatively cheaply, but aren't you then headed down the colonial path? When you employ local labour to till the fields, because it's too hot to do it yourself, you've then economically enslaved your workforce.

The division of labour is a hard problem to solve, but there is also dignity in labour, if you're doing something that you feel is productive and useful. Perhaps the high sickness rates in local government are due to the fact that their staff know that all they're doing is pushing paper around their desks and looking busy. It doesn't feel morally right, to tithe the estates of the hard-working men and women who are working the land, only to spend it on fancy offices, coffee machines and watercoolers.

Eventually, I decide that we must move to a model of state-owned enterprise for everything that's in the public interest: transport, education, healthcare. But where do you stop? What about housing, food and clothing?

Clearly the technocrats of the Soviet Union completely failed in their attempts at central planning, but can we be sure that there's less wasteful use of resources in private enterprise? My experiences certainly don't bear this out. Every company I've ever worked for has been full of idle incompetent fucktards. That's not supposed to happen in capitalism. Capitalism is supposed to lead to efficiency.

If we look at the vast amounts of food and energy that are wasted by the United States and Britain, we can be certain that capitalism is a failed model for the efficient use of labour and scarce resources, and the fair distribution of wealth. Capitalism has failed every single test, including its ability to weed out the 'bad apples'. One only has to look at the 2008 financial crisis to see that the idea of market efficiency has been replaced by monstrous monopolies: enterprises that are too big to fail, but are bleeding our economy dry.

The banks need to be nationalised. The railways need to be re-nationalised. No more council houses can be sold off. Any private parts of the National Health Service need to be re-nationalised, and a huge cull of middle-management dead wood needs to happen. Executive pay needs to be capped, and those who wish to work in public services should be proud to be performing their civic duty for their fellow citizens.

Of course, wealth will flee offshore. Investors will panic. Let them.

The assets are here. The workforce is here. We don't need the paper money created by the plutocrats. We can rebase our currency back to a sensible gold standard, forgive all loans and start over. Clean slate.

One only has to study the German economic miracle to see that these reforms can work, do work, and will transform a country into one of happiness and productivity.

The strategy of trying to print money to get out of economic trouble, and enforce bad policy with a police state and martial law, is always doomed to failure. We are at the tipping point. Things could boil over at any moment.

So, the Western world finds itself at a crossroads: to continue with the folly, down a path that has always led to ruin for past civilisations, or to learn from the lessons of history, and take the alternative route.

Tags: #politics #economics #capitalism

This is a story about being objective...

If you want to compare two measurements you have to use the same yardstick. If you are comparing two subjective things then how can you possibly draw any concrete conclusions?

At times, I have kept a mood diary. I rate my mood from 1 for worst to 10 for best. Who's to say that if I rate myself as "1" during prolonged depression that's comparable to "1" on a bad day when otherwise I've been feeling mostly normal?

During a lengthy period of depression, where nothing seems to hold any pleasure or enjoyment: subjectively, life is terrible. I also have periods when I'm generally in a much better mood, but something really shitty will happen. The shitty thing might feel like the end of the world at the time, but I'm not going to kill myself over it: I'll quickly get over it and move on with my life... so can it really be a "1" even if it feels like it at the time?

If your mood slowly improves or declines, over the course of several weeks or months, can you spot the trend? If you're suffering a lengthy depression, does your yardstick change? You might have a day where you just feel normal, but now you rate that 10, because it's the best you've felt in as long as you can remember.

Do you even remember how you used to feel, before you got depressed?

This might be why I have a tendency to invite hypomania, because at least it's clearly some kind of polar opposite from depression, even if I don't exactly feel "happy".

Defining "happy" has started to get really hard.

Going in search of happiness has been a disappointing experience. Anhedonia means the loss of pleasure and enjoyment of things that you used to get a kick out of. Finding that you no longer love the things you've always loved to do, is terrifying, because it's further confirmation of the way that you feel: "everything is shit".

I ended up completely rebasing my whole idea about what made a happy day:

• "Got to work only an hour late"
• "Didn't quit my job"
• "Only drank one bottle of wine instead of two"
• "Survived another week without being sacked"
• "Got out of bed at the weekend before it went dark"
• "Went to the shops"

I know that I must be unwell, because I used to have happy days that were more like this:

• "Cooked a healthy dinner"
• "Went for a walk or a bike ride"
• "Took some cool photographs"
• "Went to an event"
• "Made a new friend"
• "Did some work I'm proud of"

Now, I could do those things, but I don't feel like it. Often when I try to force myself to do things, I get very stressed about it and I find it really exhausting. When I get home I feel wiped out and that I shouldn't have bothered. I find myself out taking a walk and nothing takes my interest enough to photograph it. That's weird. I used to live behind the lens.

So, I started to bring in more objective measurements: movement data, alcohol consumption, number of social engagements, number of words written.

When I analyse the data, I think the most reliable predictors of my subjective feelings of depression, are movement and alcohol. Looking at last year, I was averaging 12,000 steps a day, and although I had alcohol binges, my average consumption was reasonably low. This year, I'm averaging 7,000 steps a day and drinking excessively nearly every day.

Now, you might think "walk more, drink less" would be the solution, but this assumes a causal relationship. Perhaps I was more in the mood to walk more and drink less, last year. Perhaps the relationship is the other way around and my poor lifestyle 'choices' are actually due to depression.

We often tell people to eat healthier and exercise more, to improve their mood, but perhaps it's the people who have a happier mood who are the ones more likely to eat right and be active. In actual fact, healthy eating and being more energetic could be a good predictor of happier people.

The cause-effect relationship is not always clear. Psychologists had published a paper that appeared to show that smiling made you feel happier. However, when the experiments were repeated, the results could not be reproduced. If you can't reproduce the results of your experiment, it's not good science.

A friend made the following amusing observation:

"People who are dying of dehydration can't just mime drinking water to quench their thirst"

I think this hits the nail on the head perfectly. While depressed people can eat healthier and go to the gym, they're just going through the motions. They're not getting the benefits that their happy counterparts are getting, and in fact it could be pure torture for them.

There's an experiment where a pigeon is fed at a computer-controlled random interval. What the researchers found was that whatever the pigeons were doing the first time they got fed, they then decided they needed to do again, in order to get fed. Let's say the pigeon was cocking its head to the side when the food was released, the pigeon will then start repeatedly cocking its head, and believe that it is causing the food to be released, when in fact it's completely random. Essentially, the pigeons had become superstitious.

It seems relatively random - unpredictable - when a depression is going to lift. Let's say you were trying acupuncture or homeopathy at the time when your mood started to improve: you might assume a causal relationship between the alternative treatment and the lifting of your depression.

Even a double-blind placebo trial is not exactly fair. Psychiatric medications do make you feel noticeably different. I would be able to tell whether I was taking an inert placebo pill, or something psychoactive. I would know whether I was in the control group or not. Placebos don't work if you know you're taking a placebo, so this could explain some of the mood improvements seen with antidepressants. The antidepressant might look effective, when compared with the control group, but it's the placebo effect.

Antidepressant clinical trials generally only take place over 6 to 12 weeks. Many common antidepressants take 6 weeks before their effects can even be felt. There is no focus on long-term outcomes in these trials, only that the medication should perform better than placebo.

Many trials of longer duration have shown that being unmedicated might be more effective in the long-term, than taking antidepressants. Pharmaceutical companies are not concerned with long-term outcomes. In order for a medication to be sold to the public, it merely has to be safe and proven to be marginally better than placebo.

You would have thought that taking antidepressants would be a lot better than not taking them, right? In actual fact, there might only be a 15% chance of you feeling better, but there's a 15% chance of unpleasant side effects. The very process of going to your doctor, being listened to by somebody nonjudgemental, and then feeling something even if it's not actually better, might convince you that you're improving, when actually your depression could be lifting quite naturally anyway.

Culturally, we have developed a strong superstitious belief in the power of medicine. We believe there's a pill for every ill. We believe that a man in a white coat can wave a magic wand and we'll be cured of any ailment; discomfort.

You only have to go into any pharmacy during the winter, to see signs that say "we have no medication to treat your common cold". The fact that doctors and pharmacists have to tell people not to waste their time with an incurable virus that has unpleasant but non-life-threatening symptoms, shows how strongly we believe in the power of medical science to save us from even a runny nose.

There is a clear difference between "feeling a bit sad" and depression. Depression is life-threatening. Depression has a massive impact on people's quality of life. However, we are often medicalising a non-medical problem.

If somebody who's feeling down visits their doctor and receives some medication that's basically a placebo that makes them feel a bit different - drugged - then their pseudo-depression will lift, because it was going to anyway. The non-judgemental medical consultation will also have marginally assisted.

However, those who have prolonged severe depression - to the point of suicidal thoughts - may find that their quality of life is actually reduced by medication, because it gives no real mood improvement, but it does have unpleasant side effects. The longer-term studies seem to back this up.

Through extensive research, I found a number of medications that are very rarely prescribed, but have been used for treatment-resistent depression. These medications are dopaminergic not serotonergic.

There are a whole raft of medications used to treat Parkinson's disease, that have been shown to exhibit antidepressant effects and can successfully treat patients who had previously been treatment-resistent.

In the most severe cases of depression, deep-brain stimulation has been employed with remarkable efficacy. Deep-brain stimulation had previously only been used on patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, to stop their tremors.

The idea of having electrodes implanted into my brain does not sound immensely appealing. Rats who have had electrodes implanted in their lateral hypothalamus will starve themselves to death, in order to press a lever thousands of times an hour, to stimulate their brains. Do humans who have had the same procedure, just stay at home hitting the button as often as they can? We have wandered into the territory of the neurological basis for addiction.

This is how I arrived at my decision to use a medication that helps people to quit smoking.

My very first addiction was to nicotine. I had no choice in the matter. My parents forced me to breathe their second-hand smoke. Because I was a tiny child, the concentration of nicotine in my bloodstream would have been very high. Second-hand smoke was responsible for inflicting an addiction onto me in my infancy.

In the UK, nightclubs, bars and pubs used to be filled with smoke, until July 2007. My addiction was therefore maintained through passive smoking. The timing of the ban seems to correspond with my first episodes of depression.

The stop-smoking drug called Zyban is actually France's most popular antidepressant. The French have found that Bupropion - the active ingredient in Zyban - is also effective for treating alcoholism. The link between addiction and depression seems clear.

I have a theory that my brain is in mourning. I was subjected to second-hand smoke throughout my childhood, and I spent a lot of time in smoky clubs and pubs. Nicotine withdrawal was something I was used to experiencing again and again, but what I'd never been through was a prolonged period of withdrawal, because I would regularly get a hit of second-hand smoke. It wasn't until the age of 27 that I was finally able to escape nicotine, because of the smoking ban, even though I have never smoked in my life. You would expect that such a prolonged addiction would produce a profound psychological effect, when my brain realised it was never getting any nicotine ever again.

I then experienced a later period of addiction. Although there were periods of abstinence, these never exceeded 3 or 4 months, and the total amount of time that I struggled with addiction is close to 5 years. The addiction was extreme. The drugs I was using have a much more profound effect than cigarettes. Still today, after 6 months of total abstinence, I get shaky sweaty hands and feel sick with anticipation at even the merest thought that I might be able to obtain some drugs.

Although Bupropion is a poor substitute for the addiction I once had, it does at least slightly soothe the aching sense of loss... the mourning.

Thinking about this more now, it seems obvious that I should mourn the loss of the love of my life. My addiction was so obsessive, overwhelming, all-consuming. How on earth can you let something like that go, with just a 28-day detox, or a 13-week rehab, if it's been a huge part of your life for years?

It should be noted that my mental health problems, which predated my addiction, compound the problems. To give an official name to my ailment: it's called dual-diagnosis. That is to say, Bipolar II & substance abuse. Yes, substance abuse is a kind of mental illness. Take a look at the kind of self-harm that addicts are inflicting and tell me that's normal behaviour. That is why substance abuse is classified as a disease.

Bipolar II is a motherfucker, because it comprises both clinical depression and hypomania, which are both destructive. Therefore, I'm actually suffering with triple-diagnosis and trying to fix 3 illnesses... although the hypomania is something that most people with Bipolar II wouldn't give up, and substance abuse is hard to stop because of addiction.

I haven't had a hypomanic episode in almost a year, and I've been abstinent from drugs of abuse for 6 months, therefore the final nut to crack is this damn depression, which might turn out to simply be the fact that - subconsciously - I'm depressed that I can't take drugs anymore. It feels like the love of my life has died, hence why I'm describing it as mourning.

How long it will last, I have no idea, and I've lost patience... hence resorting to a mild form of substitute prescribing. I successfully beat addiction once before using Bupropion. I beat it using progressively weaker drugs, until I was weaned from my addiction.

You wouldn't ask a smoker to quit without nicotine patches. Why would you expect somebody with an addiction to harder drugs could quit with willpower alone? The only slightly unusual thing is that the stop-smoking drug seems to be just as effective for addictions to things other than nicotine.

Perhaps we will one day treat all addictions as compassionately as we treat nicotine addictions. Certainly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of appliance of science, when it comes to treating addiction to anything other than smoking.

Subjectively, cold-turkey & willpower is a fucking awful approach to beating addiction. We have the scientific data to show that smokers are 4 times as likely to successfully quit, with nicotine replacement therapy and smoking cessation medications like Zyban.

Of course, a relapse would be disastrous, but haven't I already relapsed back into depression?

I've been on medication for 5 days now, and Bupropion should start to be effective within a week, so perhaps I will feel an improvement in my mood any day now. Certainly, my suicidal thoughts seem to have stopped, but that could be psychosomatic and also because my horrible contract ended.

You see what I mean about how hard it is to control the variables? Human lives are messy and complex. It takes vast quantities of data to be gathered over many years, not a 6 to 12 week trial with 30 people.

Also, there's an argument to say that your subjective yardstick is altered by your experiences. Your perfect 10 can become unattainable, except through the use of powerful narcotics. Does that also mean that the best you can ever hope to feel is mildly depressed, now that the bar has been set so high? My only hope is that my brain "resets" itself over time. The brain can downregulate parts that are overactive, in order to maintain equilibrium, so it can also upregulate... eventually. The big concern is neurotoxicity: have I irreversibly "burnt out" the reward centres of my brain?

6 months isn't long though. I'm going to see what happens if I can make it to a year. Presumably, there might be marginal improvements that have happened already, but are too subtle for me to perceive. The data actually bodes well: instead of spiking back up into hypomania, things have plateaued during the last couple of months.

This unethical self-experimentation doesn't yield any results worth publishing but it does give clues as to what could be worth researching. A sample size of one is not statistically significant, but it's important to me, because my life depends on it.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth #addiction

This is a story about reality checks...

When you're amplifying a signal - for example, a microphone connected to a public address loudspeaker - then you have to be careful that you don't get the microphone too close to the speakers, or else you will get horrible feedback.

My blog is read by friends who've known me for years & years, but I very rarely meet up with them. Sometimes I get an email or a Facebook message, and it's jaw-dropping that they understand me and what I've been going through so well. The usual trite platitudes (e.g. "why don't you try getting more exercise?") are certainly applicable to anybody and it does show that you care, but it's a wonderful experience when I communicate with friends and they've got all this background info on me.

Regarding my blog, only very rarely will anybody ever present an alternative opinion, or challenge me. I think I have a fairly persuasive manner of putting a point across, and I write with a great deal of certainty; forcefulness. It must be somewhat intimidating: the idea of potentially entering into debate with me.

A strange thing starts to happen when you think about things in isolation too much. Because I work with boolean algebra for a living, I start to think of everything as binary: there's a right answer and a wrong answer. I can use a lot of deductive reasoning to arrive at a set of beliefs that evolved purely from logic - a priori - as opposed to being shaped by experiences, discussions and human relationships. I labour the same points, over and over again, becoming ever more certain in my convictions and better and better at defending my position; entrenched in my stance.

It's quite satisfying to present your thesis quod erat demonstrandum.

Weirdly, if nobody calls you out on anything, then you assume that you must have made a valid unassailable point. When somebody does call you out on something, then things get a bit more fun, because you have to decide whether to dig into your trenches and defend, or whether to concede the validity of an alternative viewpoint that had not been considered.

I used to have a certain attitude that could be surmised as follows:

"Fuck you. You're wrong"

Once you have constructed a fairly infallible piece of logical reasoning, being told "no, I disagree" is the most frustrating thing in the world. You can't just disagree with something. It's point/counterpoint. You need to make your own reasoned counterargument. Contradiction is just stupidity. It's very frustrating to deal with people who don't even realise that they're complete idiots.

I deal with idiots for a job: they're called computers. If I tell a computer to jump off a cliff, it will do it. Computers just follow my instructions to the letter. Computers follow my logic with 100% precision. Being a computer programmer quickly teaches you how to logically reason things, leaving few loopholes. If you leave loopholes, these are called 'bugs'. Bugs will cause rockets to explode, trains to derail or aeroplanes to crash.

And so, a computer programmer arrives in the real world, and they're experts at spotting cognitive dissonance. "Fucking immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs"... but, but, but you're an immigrant, stutters the programmer, incredulous that somebody could be so stupid as to not see the flaw in what they're saying.

Anyway, I'm not even part of the debate. I'm watching from the sidelines, writing my manifesto; proselytising my theology; broadcasting my dogma. Nobody is questioning the validity of anything I'm saying. Nobody is challenging my assumptions. Nobody has yet said "you're wrong, and this is why...".

Even to say the word manifesto sends a shiver down my spine. I fear that I might have gone mad. There are so many vilified people and policies, linked to a manifesto. In Britain we are not particularly terrified of communism. Being called "red", "Marxist" or "Trot" is not even pejorative, to me. However, if you were to point out that Anders Breivik also wrote a manifesto, and so did Hitler, then I start to feel a little defensive.

But, how the hell are you supposed to develop a political ideology, if you don't write it down? If you can't express a set of values and ideals for the betterment of humanity, then what? Am I only allowed to select from a menu of just a few mainstream choices? Of course, this is what party politics wants. The idea is that we should vote for party, not policy. If we voted for policies that we wanted as citizens, we'd be getting dangerously close to having a democracy.

If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.

I worry like crazy about how isolated and weird I'm getting, honing my ideas and developing my system of values, without very often discussing what I'm thinking over a pint of beer, with a good friend in the pub. Obviously, one must be mindful that Mein Kampf was conceived while Hitler was in hospital, and started when he was incarcerated. It's mad to speak this aloud, but I'm always asking myself: "am I more like Hitler or Jesus".

Christian values are actually pretty cool. Forget the ten commandments, because, I mean, rape isn't even on there. Graven images: no frigging way! Rape: no problem.

Jesus Christ was an awesome dude. He basically founded the Occupy Wall Street movement when he turned over the tables of the money lenders in Herod's Temple. Does that make him an anti-semite though? Could that have been a hate crime, given that it was an attack on Jewish businessmen, in a holy Jewish temple. Certainly a controversy worth pondering.

Then you get to thinking that Jesus Christ, The Prophet Mohammed and Adolf Hitler, all thought that earning interest should be abolished. Hitler was a socialist, as was Stalin, but then so was Tony Blair and he started an illegal war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It's all so damn confusing.

To my mind, if you have a political system that's successful for the vast majority of people, the educated bourgeois can go to hell. To hell with your freedom of speech. To hell with your attempts to pervert government to better serve your own needs, at the expense of the majority. Go buy yourself a desert island if you want to run things in your own selfish interests.

Eventually, I arrive at the decision that it might be better to just write a utopian novel that merely disguises my manifesto. It should be no surprise that I've extensively read Orwell and Huxley. However, the dystopian novels seem to have become instruction manuals for our governments. Perhaps novels are powerfully influential, in all the wrong ways.

I love the Roman idea of the forum. The Internet discussion forum is a wonderful invention. The online communities are a lovely place to inhabit.

My writing and debating skils - or lack thereof - were honed in the arena of the online discussion forum. In a way, I did a lot of growing up, by reading, writing, trolling, debating and very often being shot down in flames.

Now, I have brought those writing skills, and the skill of making a reasoned argument expressed in a succinct and persuasive manner, to bear in the world of blogging.

I deliberately chose a non-Wordpress platform, because I wasn't looking for yet another blog and to connect with yet more bloggers. All the bloody comments sections are filled with other bloggers, link building back to their own blogs. It's such a ridiculous echo-chamber of people all clamouring for readers. How can you compose your thoughts and reach conclusions, when embryonic ideas are critiquéd so immediately?

I could have started to write on Medium, and I'm thrilled that my friend whose startup powers this blog, is now working for them. It might sound like intellectual snobbery, but there is a higher standard of writing and comments on Medium, than anywhere else on the 'Net right now.

But really, the biggest win for my blog has been to inform a bunch of my old friends from my discussion forum days, what the hell happened to me when I "went off the rails". It's been an opportunity to defend myself against malicious rumours. It's been an opportunity for me to ward off the shame and sense of failure, for things that happened.

Finally, the nicest thing happened the other day: I met up with a friend at the pub, and he reassured me that I'm still the same person who he knew, all those years ago, before the whole horrid mess in the middle. It's an immense relief to know your personality hasn't changed, your brain hasn't been damaged and the person that friends once knew, still lives and breathes and hasn't been replaced by some demonic creature.

Life is pretty hard without feedback, but equally, it's been useful to write at length without the debate that so ground me down and made me unwell before. It's a horrible thing, to be so misunderstood, and to feel like the people who are supposed to care about you are working against you. It's so hard to argue with multiple people at once. It's so hard to defend yourself against a mob.

Publishing is super powerful. Publishing is like a megaphone, to shout down the bullies.

However, the occasional reality check has very high value.

Tags: #writing #politics #friends