My First Homophobe Attack

On the weekend of my ex's birthday we went out cruising Oxford St, Sydney while pilling off our dials. 

We ended up at Cue Bar which is a mixed gay/straight club. The DJ was awesome, I was really relaxed and the dancing just moved me without me trying..I felt great. 

This really good looking, muscled guy smiled at me while I was dancing. I smiled back and he did a beckoning gesture with his finger. I walked over and talked to him for a while, even grabbed his waste and told him he was cute. Then I asked if he was gay. He got funny and said "no". He asked me if I was gay. I said "yes". He pushed me away and said "get away". I asked him what his problem was; I wasn't cracking on to him. He said "just go back and dance, go away" and pushed me again. I told him it was Oxford St so what did he expect and that he had a problem. 

I was in Ecstasy heaven and quickly threw the vibe off, went back and danced. I told all my posse about what happened and we were all staring at him and whispering. He didn't look at us and got on the phone, presumably to gather some mates for a dance off! Like in "Beat It". Then half an hour later I was in my own world dancing when he came and confronted me again. He had one skinny tall disgustingly ugly drunk friend he'd mustered up. I told him I wasn't interested in him sexually and wasn't interested in fucking up my night with a fight with someone random who had a gay/homophobe complex. He said I'd been whispering to all my friends about him and we needed to go outside and have words. My friends got between us and pushed me and him back. Hot Russian chick with us, AV, was really good at calming me down, she was a real sweetie. 

He threw a glass of water on my friends and some bouncers came and threw the guy out.

The other friend stayed and tried to rile up my mates. He got his cock out which was apparently speed dick size and stuck his finger up. 

For some reason the whole experience didn't really disturb me as much as it seemed to upset my mates. Probably because I was Eing off my skull. But it was my first true homophobic attack and I'll cherish it for the rest of my life!

Triple A Credit Ratings; Government Debt; Keynesian Economics; Infrastructure in NSW

Triple A ratings are a farce. Self-appointed ratings agencies such as Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch are unreliable; they were giving some of the recently collapsed and nationalised financial institutions AAA ratings before they self-destructed. In any case a drop in credit rating equates to not that much of an increase in interest rates paid on borrowings.

The current economic orthodoxy and popular view of government finances dictates that governments maintain surpluses at all costs - and in a low-taxing environment. In Keynesian economics, which rescued the world from the Great Depression, it is correct for governments to go into debt when there is a recession. They pump money into the economy, create jobs and build infrastructure that will create economic growth in the long term. Debt is not a dirty word.

The NSW Government should abandon its paranoia of the ratings agencies, recognise that Sydney is on the verge of recession and use the opportunity to invest funds in infrastructure. It should spend billons of dollars creating a proper public transport system for Sydney, including a full heavy rail line to the North West and a rail line from Glenfield to Leppington. For decades to come Sydney will reap economic and social benefits. Future generations will thank us, just as we thank the then braver bunch of people in charge of NSW when things like the current rail system, Sydney Harbour Bridge, etc were built.

Also, the Federal Government should immediately do things like increase the pension for all pensioners, injecting billions of dollars of its surplus into a segment of society that needs it and will spend it on things that will boost the economy more than well-off people would. Higher government spending will result in the Reserve Bank of Australia raising interest rates. Part of the current credit crisis has to do with the fact that interest rates worldwide have been too low for too long, making it easier for people to take on mortgages and lines of credit that they can’t afford. Moderately high interest rates are sometimes desirable.

Finally, if the NSW ALP Government wants to win the next election, Carmel Tebbutt needs to installed as leader. Nathan Rees is a poor performer.

Sex Work Stories On My Blog; Defamation; Professional Privacy Standards

I’ve been out of sex work for over a year now. I’ve held a job down the whole time. I’m pretty sure I’ll never have to go back.

Now that it’s all behind me I wouldn’t mind telling some sex work stories on my blog. I have to be careful (or maybe I won’t!) about defamation laws. Then - it sounds strange - but I was very professional in many ways in my sex work and one of them was a strict rule of non-disclosure and discretion. I don’t know why. And I guess there’s also the issue of maintaining my anonymity; there are only two agencies for male sex workers in Sydney (Delivery Boys and Knightcall). I think I might throw a few stories out from time to time though. Fuck it.

Some Simple Maths for Moron Journalists; Percentages

When something is analysed in terms of percentages and changes/differences in percentage terms, a distinction needs to be made between absolute change and relative change.

For instance, if something goes from being 10% to 20%, this means a 100% increase, not a 10% increase. 20% is twice the size of 10%, not 10% plus a 10% increase, which would mean 11%.

Second, the way percentages of percentages work seems to elude journalists. If 50% of the population have a certain opinion, and in this group 80% also hold a second opinion, it means 40% of the entire population hold both opinions. Then if, in the other 50%, 40% of them hold the second opinion, this means a further 20% of the population holds the second opinion. This means that 60% of the entire population hold the second opinion. Conversely if 80% of the population have a certain opinion and 40% of them hold a second opinion, it means that 32% hold both opinions.

I’m sick of moron journalists that report political polls, medical statistics etc with bad analysis of percentages.

Julie Pasco, Tobacco Smoking, Depression and Causation in Science

Julie Pasco of the University of Melbourne has done a bogus study on the role of cigarette smoking in depression.

She started out with a group of smokers and a group of non-smokers. No one had depression. Then after ten years she found that 14.9% of smokers developed depression while 6.5% of non-smokers developed depression. The problem is one common in modern science: a refusal to tease out causation. Just because they didn’t have depression at the start of the study doesn’t mean that the smokers didn’t have neurochemical or environmental issues that cause depression already pre-existent. Does tobacco cause depression, does depression cause tobacco consumption or do they both exacerbate each other? Or does tobacco even guard against depression? Cigarettes with their dopaminergic quality, social utility in some work places and role in occupying the hands and punctuating time could have an anti-depressant effect. It could be that the smokers were self-medicating and would have had even higher rates of depression after the ten year interval without tobacco.

The only way an answer to the question of tobacco being a unidirectional cause of depression can be obtained is to have a study in which a group of non-smoking people is divided into a control group and a group that is forced to smoke and see the rates of depression after a long interval. Ethics committees would reject it, rightly of course.

Pseudohedonism

Pseudohedonism means faking pleasure. It can mean false display of pleasure to others or convincing oneself of one’s own pleasure.

In prosperous Western countries pseudohedonism is rife and is a detrimental phenomenon. There is a fine line between trying to put yourself in a good mood and moving into a state of denial of boredom and anhedonism. There are a lot of reasons for people in rich countries to experience anhedonism and depression. They won’t be listed here but prominent among them is being freed from continual manual labour, not having to strive for survival and being dissociated from your body.

Examples of pseudohedonism include faking orgasms, rich people self-consciously forcing laughter at plays and people listening to music that society deems worthy without really feeling it.

People need to get back in touch with the immediacy of phenomena. They need to have visceral reactions to art and activity. If music for example doesn’t provoke a reaction in the body or unmediated emotional reactions without intellectualising , or if there is too much consciousness of associations such as certain music scenes, then any enjoyment derived is fake.

Too much intellectualisation of phenomena mediates the reaction. Fashion is a major interruptive intellectualisation. For instance people get confused about what they’re sexually attracted to by societal definitions of what is attractive. In the present era this means women are making themselves too thin, men strive to be more muscled than they should be and both genders engage in too much hair removal and fake tanning. Too much intellectualisation results in trained musicians becoming divorced from an immediate reaction to music and people who study English being bad writers.

Consciousness seated in biological entities creates many problems that humans have to tackle. Pseudohedonism takes humans away from the truth. People need to quiet their intellect often, trust their own judgment without worrying about other people’s opinions and get back in touch with their own visceral reactions and intuition.