Twitter has long been a playground for miscreants, liars, anonymous cowards and trolls which is why so many people find its block and mute functions a godsend. But when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes a pile-on thread of such galactic stupidity that your thesaurus just can’t do it justice.

First, a little background. Last year, I had the interesting experience of being publicly accused on Twitter of lying under oath to a parliamentary committee by this self-described “social commentator and public speaker”. There was not a syllable in what she wrote below which was true.

She avoided legal action by pinning the notice below to the top of her feed for 12 months.

She follows me on Twitter and on 26 June 2021, was at it again, posting that I “had not denied owning or being party to the troll account known as @350zeee”. Senator Joe McCarthy (“Are you or have you ever been a communist?”) would have approved of this form of outing.

Vaping advocate Alex Wodak excitedly grabbed hold of this with both hands, tagging five of his echo chamber, with one, fellow ATHRA director Joe Kosterich, dutifully retweeting (ie republishing) it.

Wodak kept it rolling, addressing @350zeee as Simon and prescribing some corrective reading for “my” simplistic understanding.

As you might expect, I mute Pippa. I’ve found her take on vaping to be often very silly as I wrote in this earlier blog. And strange as it is I know, I prefer to avoid the incontinent deluge of vaping theology that almost invariably gushes into my feed whenever I engage with a vaping missionary.  So I missed any question she may have put to me about whether I owned or was a “party” to the account @350zeee.

On being shown these tweets, I looked through her feed. The tweet below may have been the one that she just knew I had seen.

“Chiming Slapman’, geddit? Here’s someone who finds this grown-up stuff very amusing.

When she defamed me last year, she got everything wrong in her tweet before hitting ”send”.  So let’s see how likely it is that I indeed am @350zeee

First and most obviously, why on earth would I open a fake Twitter account when I already have one and have hardly been inhibited in tweeting material about vaping? Perhaps this thought sprang to Pippa’s and Alex’s minds  because they are probably well aware that this is a tactic with which their pals in vaping are well practised?

All these accounts are run by the same aggressive, often bad spelling person, right Hamish?

And here’s a day’s work from totally different authors at accounts all run from the same shop that runs the Legalise Vaping microphone

Then there’s this. @350zeee opened their Twitter account in December 2008 (see below). I joined Twitter in November 2009. So I guess this now all makes perfect sense: I open my first Twitter account in a fake name and then nearly a year later, opened one in my own name! And 10 years down the track, I write a blog about joining Twitter where I cunningly throw a false trail about being totally disinterested in Twitter before I joined it, needing to be coaxed into it by a journalist friend. I did this of course, because I was prescient or telepathic enough to know that Pippa and Alex were planning to break my cover a full 19 months later, as they’ve just now done. Sadly, there’s no escaping such exquisite detective prowess.

Nicotine only addictive in cigarettes, not in vapes

In the global movement among vapers to rehabilitate nicotine as a quasi-vitamin, I’ve noticed a bizarre meme emerge about nicotine not being addictive when being vaped. You see, it’s only addictive when being smoked in those terrible cigarettes.

This seems to rather fly in the face of what we see in plain sight when watching vapers chugging away all day like old steam engines. A recent study monitoring vaping found  exclusive vapers pulled the vapourised nicotine/flavourings/propylene glycol/metal particle cocktail deep into their lungs on average 173 times a day — a mere 63,188 times a year. Those who were dual users (ie who smoked and vaped) inhaled only 72 lung-basters on their e-cigarettes. The average 12 a day cigarette smoker takes about 96 puffs.

No. Vaped nicotine isn’t addictive. It’s just that exclusive vapers just can’t get enough of the stuff. And not forgetting too that these new hedonists are just very busy pleasuring themselves all day long.

And then there’s all the evidence we have of rodents have been shown to bar press to get pure nicotine. And comparisons of vaping with smoking on standard measures of dependence. The 1988 639 page door-stopper report of the US Surgeon General on nicotine addiction apparently got it all wrong.

Politicians have told me often about the rabid abuse they get often get from vapers and the “your correspondence has been received” replies they send in return. For many years, I posted a stock reply to fruitcakes who sent me unsolicited abusive email. “Dear …. I have just received the email below from some deranged person using your email address. It looks like you may have been hacked. I suggest you contact your IP provider as soon as possible.”  Another failsafe response was “Thank you for your recent email. Please be assured that any future correspondence from you will get all the attention it deserves.”

I’m thinking it’s time to resurrect these.

Other blogs in this series:

Vaping theology: 1 The Cancer Council Australia takes huge donations from
cigarette retailers. WordPress  30 Jul, 2020

Vaping theology: 2 Tobacco control advocates help Big Tobacco. WordPress 12 Aug, 2020

Vaping theology: 3 Australia’s prescribed vaping model “privileges” Big Tobacco WordPress Feb 15, 2020

Vaping theology: 4 Many in tobacco control do not support open access to vapes because they are just protecting their jobs. WordPress 27 Feb 2021

Vaping theology: 5 I take money from China and Bloomberg to conduct bogus studies. WordPress 6 Mar, 2021

Vaping theology: 6 There’s nicotine in potatoes and tomatoes so should we restrict or ban them too? WordPress 9 Mar, 2021

Vaping theology: 7 Vaping prohibitionists have been punished, hurt, suffered and damaged by Big Tobacco WordPress 2 Jun, 2021

Vaping theology: 8 I hide behind troll account. WordPress 29 Jun, 2021

Vaping theology: 9 “Won’t somebody please think of the children”. WordPress 6 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 10: Almost all young people who vape regularly are already smokers before they tried vaping. WordPress 10 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 11 The sky is about to fall in as nicotine vaping starts to require a prescription in Australia. WordPress 28 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 12 Nicotine is not very addictive WordPress 3 Jan 2022

Vaping theology 13: Kids who try vaping and then start smoking,would have started smoking regardless. WordPress 20 Jan, 2023

Vaping theology 14: Policies that strictly regulate vaping will drive huge
numbers of vapers back to smoking, causing many deaths. WordPress 13 Feb, 2023

Vaping theology 15: The government’s prescription vape access scheme has failed, so let’s regulate and reward illegal sellers for what they’ve been doing. WordPress 27 Mar 2023

Vaping theology 16: “Humans are not rats, so everybody calm down about nicotine being harmful to teenage brains”. WordPress 13 Jul, 2023

Vaping theology 17: “Vaping advocates need to be civil, polite and respectful” … oh wait. WordPress 3 Oct, 2023

Vaping theology 18: Vaping is a fatally disruptive “Kodak moment” for smoking. WordPress Oct 30, 2023