In which this is very interesting.
I’ve tried the patch and the gum. They suck. My own anecdotal experience tells me that it’s not nicotine I’ve been addicted to.
In which I re-post something I wrote on Facebook somewhere.
It’s been a very long time since the American populace could protect itself from any sort of Federal armed forces takeover.
Even if we all had automatic weapons, they would crush us in hours due to military technological advances. We’ve been pumping massive amounts of money into our military for hundreds of years. There’s no way we, as citizens, could ever stop them if they came for us. None. Zero.
Therefore, the right to bear arms for the purpose of protecting ourselves from our own government, or even enemies from without, has long passed. The issue now is plainly that there is no rational reason for civilians to have automatic weapons. None. Such weapons would be ineffective against invading enemies, they would be ineffective against our own government should it choose to move against us, and such weapons are clearly and demonstrably a threat and danger to the public.
I’ve begun to think that only persons belonging to certain exempt classes should be able to keep weapons: farmers, ranchers, active and retired military, active and retired police, persons who can demonstrate a need to own a gun, and persons whose guns are antique heirlooms received via bequest from ancestors. Anybody else should have to apply for permission, and that permission should be contingent upon rigorous and frequently-updated training and the passing of proficiency tests.
So if you can’t shoot accurately, strip, clean, and assemble your weapon/s, as well as pass a written safety test, well then, you can’t have them. Basically the gun version of getting a driver license.
I live in a big city, and I follow the police and first response feeds. There is a shooting here every couple of days, and of course the majority are fatal. These shooters aren’t protecting their homes, they’re out shooting each other in the streets. They’re inner city gang bangers who have zero need for guns (in what we consider the traditional sense of preservation of life and home), let alone assault weapons, and are allowed them only due to an antiquated amendment that desperately needs to be revisited.
I’m pro-second amendment, but it was written so long ago that it doesn’t encompass modern weapons, modern warfare, modern humanity. We’re not a culture that values the necessary self-discipline to practice shooting, cleaning, assembling, locking up our trophy weapons without being forced to. We’ve already had dozens of toddler shootings this year because our current “adult” population is too fucking stupid to lock up their “toys.”
And they do think guns are toys. They weren’t raised on farms, shooting animals for the table. They have no real sense of or respect for what guns are and do. What they know about guns they learned from movies, rap videos, and video games. They buy guns because they think they’re cool.
Yes, I understand that criminals by definition don’t follow laws, and that black markets always rise up to fill any void. Criminals will always have things they’re not supposed to. Which is why cops have SWAT gear.
But it should not be so easy for people to buy an assault weapon and open fire on movie theatres and churches and clubs. And simply reducing the number of weapons lying around would immediately reduce deaths. Countries who have collected their citizens’ guns all show lowered gun-based crime rates afterward, so we do have evidence that lives would be saved, and, in the end, if we’re loving persons, that’s the goal. To save human lives.
The second amendment probably needs a major overhaul. Sadly, the government would probably gridlock if it tried to do such a thing, being as fucked up, infantile, and partisan as it has become.
In which I’m ranting about “rape culture” yet again.
Rape culture doesn’t exist.
No matter how many articles you see about it, it still doesn’t exist. There was a national hysteria in the 80’s about an underground ring of satanic day care centers, where American children were being sodomized by the thousands. That didn’t exist either.
Back then the battle cry was, “We believe the children!” because only an asshole wouldn’t protect children. Now we “believe” the women, but the boogey man is equally unreal.
If you go look up the study that the 1-in-5 allegation was based on, you’ll find that even THE STUDY’S AUTHORS THEMSELVES say that it was never meant to be used this way. Not to mention that the methodology was ridiculous and biased, and basically all of the sexual contact reported was counted as rape or assault whether the respondant thought so herself or not.
Do you really think that all sexual contact is rape or assault? Really?
Seriously, gentlemen, just stop and THINK ABOUT IT for a minute. If 20% of women were getting raped, you wouldn’t be online right now. You’d be out with a baseball bat fighting men off of your mothers and sisters and daughters in the very streets. After all, it takes a long time to rape 31,400,000 women.
Rape culture was manufactured. Probably by college feminists for their own grant-generating agenda. Who knows. I don’t know, but I do know it’s a massive goddamned waste of time and attention.
The snake analogy is utterly ridiculous and lacks intellectual rigor on every conceivable level. Snakes are animals, and they behave instinctively. Men are humans and have brains that are orders of magnitude more complicated than snakes’ brains. The snake analogy is straight-up sexism because if I can judge all men by their dicks, I can judge all blacks by their melanin, and all idiots by their IQs.
Men have become so soft now that they just accept brutal sexism — from one of their own! — without even a whimper. (There are few things more incorrect-seeming than the self-loathing modern male feminist.)
Feminism is now making men hate themselves for their masculinity. HOW IS THIS A BEAUTIFUL, RIGHTEOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENT?! It’s fucking not. It’s a disaster. It’s hateful, it’s ugly, it’s whiny, and it’s childish. There’s no academic rigor; it’s just a bunch of complaining about being rich and Western and how awful it is when you’re and public and men look at you. These women honestly believe that the world owes them perfect comfort and perfect safety, and that their feelings of discomfort are exactly like what Malala went through.
And the duh moment: the idea that men should police their own sex, particularly in the protection of women, has existed as long as men have existed! (See: nearly everything men have ever done, ever.)
Why are we letting idiots write articles? (Yeah, yeah, it’s HuffPo. They’ll let anybody post anything.)
As a woman, I think mens’ desire to help and protect women would be better served if it were based on facts and evidence rather than hysterical press. I also wish that they’d hold both themselves and women to a higher standard of truth.
This ‘rape culture’ hysteria distracts from real issues, like the fact that ISIL just burned a bunch of sex slaves to death in public. Let me say that again: they took a group of women and lit them on motherfucking fire and burned them until they were dead. THAT is a women’s issue. THAT is where our attention should be. THAT is what feminism should be working on, not making boys ashamed of their sex.
White chicks “feeling uncomfortable” when men look at them, or walk past them, or speak? IS FUCKING NONSENSE. White chicks are the safest, most educated, freest, and most privileged class IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. They — we — are not victims, and letting us tell you we are is a disservice to us all.
Rape culture is a lie. Kill it with fire.
In which I talk about the news.
Was told by WaPo via popup that I’d already viewed my allotment of free stories for the month, and was invited to give them a hundred bucks per year. Instead, I switched to another device and read the story anyway, and they got no money. (I sometimes subscribe for a month or two to a paper I read frequently, out of guilt, but there are so many I visit that it’s a hassle to subscribe and remember to unsubscribe and keep them all straight.)
Same with the NYT. And the local paper from the last town I lived in. It’s only the 10th of the month, so clearly I click on a lot of news links as I scroll down my Twitter and Facebook feeds. But ultimately, there’s no paper I want more than twenty articles, maximum, per month from.
Problem is, I feel bad about it. I want to support journalism. We need newspapers more than ever before, because they do things that nobody else does: they do long, involved, expensive research; they send reporters to sit through meetings at every level of government; they centralize and curate conversations.
And most of them, unlike entities that were never papers but have only ever existed online, still feel the ghosts of journalistic ethics. They went to school for this shit, and they took ethics classes. They care about impartiality, facts, and justice. We may not agree with their various slants, but they’re all we’ve got. And they’re dying. (See: tronc.) Imagine a world with no journalistic exposées: just imagine it. You think it’s bad now?
When real papers, with real traditions and real experience and real journalistic ethics die, what will fill the void?
And not just big papers. In most small towns, once the paper fails there will be nobody to sit in on the budget meetings and report the results to the citizenry. (And, as we know, unobserved people do things they’d never do otherwise. Enter the new age of rampant fucking fraud and embezzlement at the city and county level!) Nobody to cover the town hall meetings, or the police reports, or the local obits.
This stuff is important, and without it we’re at the mercy of… God knows what. No information, bad information, information made up by politicians, corporations, and whackjobs; important information that never sees the light of day because there’s nobody whose job it is to report on it.
I want to pay for the work of journalists and journalistic institutions because I believe it’s valuable.
However, I have no interest in annual subscriptions to a dozen different news entities, because there’s no paper I want to read thoroughly enough to justify the expense. (The last time I subscribed to the NYT, it guilted me that I wasn’t reading enough of the content to make sense of the subscription. Who has time to read the whole paper each day, let alone the Magazine every week?) This is no longer the age where we all subscribe to our local paper, expecting it to cover local events and to buy important national and international news off the wire. That day is done. Nobody wants a full subscription to a non-local paper, or even a local one. We get our news from everywhere.
What I want instead — and I’ve been thinking about this really hard — is the following:
- A widget I can sign up for once, that follows me from paper to paper and lets me pay a dollar with a single click to view a story behind a paywall. (Or two dollars. Maybe five if it’s a massive research-based exposé.)
- A way to buy an annual subscription that is allocated across all the news sites I visit. (For $99 you can access X number of articles across all member news entities for 12 months; if you go over, you can upgrade incrementally or revert to the per-story fee.)
AND/OR
Is it so much to ask? A little button that pops up and says, “You’ve read your free stories. This article is $1,” and which hits my card immediately and grants me access when I click on it, and which is secure and fair and works across all devices and platforms once I login? Why has no one invented this, when papers are starving for money? Maybe a bank could do it, or a credit card company. Bitcoin. Google. I don’t care, just make it happen.
I don’t want to subscribe to WaPo; I read the big stories but I’ll never read the whole paper every day because I don’t live there. Same for the NYT and the Star-Tribune and the L.A. Times and the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (as well as magazines: Slate and Mother Jones and Wired and The New Yorker and The Rolling Stone).
Since most U.S. papers have shut down their international bureaus, I go to international papers for international news. I’d like to pay them, too. But I want it to be convenient and I want it to be fair.
I don’t buy print newspapers or magazines, and I don’t want online subscriptions, but I do want to pay for my news.
So, make it easy for me to do so. I beg you. I love you. We need you.
In which I go off on stuff that has nothing to do with me and about which I know nothing! Because it’s the internet!
A guy from Tor has recently been accused of rape. He had to resign. (I don’t know him, I’ve never chatted with him, but people who do and have say he’s a twat. So there’s that.) A woman who, ten years ago, had multiple sexual encounters with him over the span of a year, has now accused him of rape.
By her own admission, she slept with him repeatedly, in group settings, and while drunk. Apparently he violated her “safe word” in front of another man, who was allegedly appalled but failed to stop the alleged rape.
~+~+~
One thing the sexual revolution told women was that they need sex as much as men do. This is not true. (I suspect this is why gay males will hang out in bathrooms and parks and malls and bars and concerts trying to get laid by strangers, but there really isn’t much, if any, of a lesbian corollary of the same behavior.)
Another thing the sexual revolution told women was that dangerous sexual activities are safe, and that women have an expectation of safety in unsafe situations. Which is obviously not true, if women are routinely upset for entire decades after engaging in such activities.
~+~+~
Women prefer less sex than men and they often prefer sex with committed partners.
Much if not most of the sex women have with non-committed partners is performed in an effort to convert the non-committed partner into a committed partner, rather than a male-like desire for the sex itself.
Women with truly high libidos are the exception, not the rule. There were always places in society for such women before the sexual revolution. The lower classes became dancers, hookers, escorts; the upper classes made secret assignations via servants, sometimes with servants (and often to the servants’ detriment). Men knew their expectations of such women could be different than the expectations they had for the rest of women.
For these types of women, the sexual revolution was awesome. For the majority of women, though, it’s been confusing. And damaging.
Before the sexual revolution, society kept females out of situations in which they could be emotionally damaged by the fundamental sexual differences between most males and most females.
It wasn’t oppression, it was protection. Withholding the vote was bullshit, of course, but telling us we need chaperones probably wasn’t. (“Boys will be boys” actually means something like, “you’re probably not going to like what he’d like to like, so let’s save you from that.”)
~+~+~
The sounds of a woman being happily fucked are virtually indistinguishable from the sounds of a woman being unhappily fucked. If you don’t move, turn, sit up and demand in clear language that the activities cease, well, there’s a lot of grey area. Especially if you’re not objecting to sex in general, but to a specific act.
Is it really that hard to understand that a muffled “um, no, stop” can sound — especially in a kinky setting — just like continued consent? Especially if you’ve already said the same thing earlier as part of the play?
Is it really hard to understand that an avoidant wiggle looks very much like a playful, fake-avoidant wiggle?
Is it really hard to understand when you’re in a hotel room with two or more men with whom you’ve agreed to have sex and with whom you’ve already discussed your safe word, that they might believe you’re up for pretty much anything sexual within a probably-not-completely-pre-discussed reasonable range?
Is it really hard to understand that when you’re in a hotel room with two or more men with whom you’ve agreed to have sex and something’s happening that he really enjoys and you suddenly safe word that he’s maybe going to have trouble getting on board with that?
Is your refusal to honor part of an implied social contract really rape? I mean, you agreed to be there, you agreed to sex, you agreed to take part. You agreed.
~+~+~
In before accusations of accusing the accuser!
I’m not accusing you. I’m telling you that your choices and behaviors have consequences. You’re not on a nice date with a nice boy; you’re drunk in a hotel room at a convention with a safe word and a couple of horny guys.
You have put yourself in what is clearly and plainly a dangerous situation: a purely sexual encounter with multiple partners, sexual play and/or role playing that requires a safe word, and intoxicants.
It is a situation in which someone is very likely to do something to you that, while not clinically harmful or physically dangerous, you don’t want or like.
And ten years later, this is rape? I’d say rather that it’s remorse, and that you need to take responsibility for not protecting your body or fine feelings adequately.
I’m not judging you. I’ve made equally bad decisions myself. I’m just saying it’s not legally actionable. (Destroying a man’s livelihood through public accusations is legally actionable. Again, I don’t know anybody involved, but still.)
~+~+~
If you’re super horny and a woman and on contraception, sex with random people is great and fun. Yay sexual revolution!
But if you’re a regular female with a typical libido, you’re doing it because everybody else does and because you’re human and enjoy human contact. But you’re not doing it like males do it, because you rarely want it like males do. (That you believe otherwise is part of the great feminist whitewashing, which has denied you many kinds of happiness and exposed you to many kinds of emptiness.)
When you get older and look back over your sexual career, you may find that most of your sexual encounters were not sexual as much as societal. If sexual intercourse weren’t now so normalized, if you’d had to go out and seek it rather than having it more or less just happen, you’d probably have had a lot less sex. And if you hadn’t had access to media that taught you about kink, if you’d had to invent it yourself, you probably wouldn’t have. You probably wouldn’t identify as submissive or sadistic or whatever you identify as; you probably wouldn’t have invented the safe word.
It probably never would have occurred to you, if it weren’t societally normalized, that you’d feel powerful getting drunk and naked in a hotel room with one or more men, being the willing object of a specific and certain kind of male regard. A kind of regard that is entirely physical and sexual, and which does not, in fact, encompass the whole of who you are.
If you weren’t both promiscuous and naive, you’d know that getting drunk and naked in a hotel room with one or more men is very, very likely to get you fucked up the ass, or spanked, or gagged, or pissed on, or used in some manner that, while not technically dangerous, you would prefer not to be used.
Because while this particular type of power over men can feel good, you can’t help but note that: you’re not a beloved female, known and cherished and cared for, you’re an imaginary sexual archetype. You’re a fantasy. You’re a dirty girl.
You’re a whore.
Because you’re drunk. And naked. In a hotel room. With one or more men. Who believe they have your permission, because you’re there. Freely, and of your own volition. They think you’re one of those women who like sex the way they do. But mostly what you want is attention and contact and to feel valued and powerful.
This is generally not the ideal way to experience those feelings.
~+~+~
And the other guy in the room, the one with whom you say you did have a closer relationship? Why didn’t he protect you? If he did, you weren’t raped. If he didn’t, why aren’t you accusing him, too, as an accomplice?
And why did you have sex with your so-called rapist again, afterward, at a later date? How does his charisma relieve you of responsibility for your own actions, your own choices, your own decisions? I mean, c’mon. He’s a fucking nerd. Literally.
While wanting to feel powerful and desired is quite normal, it doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility of the results of your decisions. Because you’re an autonomous grown adult, not a child.
~+~+~
Accusations of rape can ruin men’s lives. And society listens to women who accuse men of rape, because women are — in spite of all our efforts to prove the contrary — still considered valuable and precious, simply because we’re women.
~+~+~
“The crime of rape generally refers to non-consensual sexual intercourse that is committed by physical force, threat of injury, or other duress. Common law defined rape as unlawful intercourse by a man against a woman who is not his wife by force or threat and against her will.”
If you’ve already consented and are in flagrante delicto, and [one of] your partner[s] tries to do something you don’t like, where’s the duress? Men are generally bigger and stronger, of course, but if you weren’t already tied up and spanked and drunk or whatever, you’d be able to let your caring partner[s] know you’re not into that and that he should stop. And he would.
Could it possibly be that your decision to make yourself available in such a way to men who are not deeply invested in you emotionally was a dumb idea?
And simply not preferring one act to another, is that rape? Is an expectation that you should like and enjoy every single aspect of a sexual encounter truly realistic? Do you like and enjoy every aspect of your job, of your family holiday get-togethers, of your Tuesday night bowling league? Why do you believe you have the right to like and enjoy every single aspect of a sexual encounter, that only your own pleasure should be considered? Is that at all mature?
These men, after all, are not your husbands or committed partners. They have not made any formal commitment to protecting you or providing you with happiness, have they?
No. You’re just a fuck. You are owed only what fucks are owed, which is fucking. You cannot possibly argue that long-term partners and fucks get the same considerations.
~+~+~
I could safely consent to being spanked and tied up and gagged by my current committed long-term partner. Because he’s my committed long-term partner, he’s invested in me emotionally, and we have history and we have context. My pleasure and happiness are his concern.
I doubt he’d be equally as invested in some random convention chick in a hotel room, even if he’d known her a few years, through work. Context.
Context is a real consideration, and one that must be considered both morally and legally. And your having repeatedly consented to this sort of play with this man is willing and repeated consent, without force or duress.
The person who owes you an apology is you. The person who endangered you and let you down is you. The person who treated you like an unpaid whore… is you. The men you did this to yourself with were merely set dressing.
~+~+~
I might also posit that a post-birth control feminist society, which has repeatedly told you that you want and enjoy and deserve sex as much as men, might also be at fault. It repeatedly tells you that you can and should have a realistic expectation of safety in unsafe conditions. It tells you that nothing that ever happens to you is your own fault.
It tells you that you cannot and should not be held responsible for your own choices and actions.
It tells you that you can be drunk and naked with a safe word in a hotel with two men and not suffer any discomfort. Which is total bullshit.
Yeah, that might be at fault.
~+~+~
I know, I know.
People will say I’m not “sex positive,” like it’s some sort of an insult.
Telling women they’re frigid is an insult these days, too, because women are as horny as men. Right? It’s not like we exit these situations with experiences that bother us for years or anything, while the males very seldom do.
I won’t even bother to trot out my own sex life, because it’s lovely and it’s nobody’s business.
Instead, I’ll say that the majority of the hurts and fears of my past were due to the idea that I wanted and needed and enjoyed sex for its own sake just like men do. Furthermore, I would say that the majority of the hurts and fears of most women, their pain and rage and anger, their conviction that there are “no good men,” are due to the same myth. (See: all episodes of Sex and the City, ever.)
Women are not men. Left to our own devices, we don’t act like men, especially not sexually. Our society has told us that we like meaningless sex, but what we really like is attention and power and to be desired. And because of this, we put ourselves into situations that are quite plainly not safe.
The idea that you can go anywhere and do anything is false. We cannot. There are neighborhoods it’s best not to drive through, but if we must, we lock our doors and roll up our windows, don’t we? This expectation we have, that we can go anywhere and do anything, is both privileged and false. If we willingly go unsafe places and do unsafe things, the results of those choices are our own. We are credited with discrimination and, ladies, we must strive to deserve it.
If a male hangs out with drug dealers, uses drugs, engages in unsafe behavior, and ends up in jail or shot, whose fault is it? Well, we can, like I’m doing here, partially blame society, but ultimately his decisions — and their results — are his own. Is that blaming the victim?
When a person gets shot, it’s the shooter’s fault. When a person gets raped, it’s the rapist’s fault. Of course. But we have a definition of rape, and it does not include not liking a particular sex act while engaged in otherwise consensual sex.
Recognizing our own agency in our hurts is not blaming the victim. It’s responsibility.
Until women stop playing the blame game and start owning their choices, we’ll continue to be mocked and made fun of. Which is why I think it’s ridiculous that this entire thing, and all the other things like it, is playing out online.
—
This is what his detractors are doing:
‘The site was made by a small group of people of different genders, who are tired of Jake victimizing and harassing our friends in the infosec and internet freedom communities. Some of us have personal stories of being abused by Jake and some don’t. We have heard lots of complaints about his behavior over the years, and have experienced it first hand. We want it to stop.’
Maybe he’s a rapist. Maybe it’s a bunch of hearsay. I read the site, and he does sound like a manipulative, aggressive jerk!
In which I comment.
I’d be more into the whole ‘we may be about to witness the first woman’ etc etc etc if she was a better example of the qualities typically associated with my sex.
There’s nothing particularly womanly about her as she runs for president, so talking about her sex is, to me, irrelevant.
If she seemed to embody, for instance, qualities of motherhood, or leadership through service, or anything, you know, specifically womanly rather than human, the chatter would make more sense.
In which I bitch about things I see on Twitter! (You kids get off my lawn!)
A snowflake narrative is being claimed by nearly everybody these days, from African Americans to feminists to white males to the parents of autistic children, and they’re all saying the same thing: our suffering is so unique that no person or group can ever possibly understand it or us. Ever.
Here’s a prime example:
Complex! Contextual! Nobody can speak to it!
Bullshit. What are you, twelve? Have you not yet learned that other human beings can model your experiences if you explain them?
Listen, you’re human. So are the rest of us. We can and do understand you. You’re not that unique. Or rather, you’re just as unique as everybody else.
The article itself well-written and interesting and is worth a read, even though the author gets himself turned around and eventually says that blackness is cultural, thereby negating his own point about racism and the so-called “black experience.” (He actually means the black American experience, which doesn’t apply to blacks in Europe, for example, or Somalian refugees, who can walk around being black all day long without getting shot by police.)
I’ve basically had it with this complaint. The concept that there are human experiences that nobody can understand unless they belong to a certain group is untrue and contributes directly to racism. Nay, it actually is racism, because it claims that human beings of various different skin tones are fundamentally unknowable to one another.
Which is stupid. Race is a social construct. We’re far more alike than we are different. Race is cultural, and cultures can be understood because everybody belongs to one or more.
Fear is universal. Fatigue is universal. Anger is universal. These are all human experiences, not black experiences, not female experiences, not disabled experiences. Blacks as a group and females as a group may feel fear in response to different triggers (cops for one, and strange men for the other), but fear is fear. We can model each other’s experiences, and we must if we wish to actually achieve the goals of these various social movements. If you’re a white member of Black Lives Matter and you parrot the idea that you are incapable of understanding the black experience, you’re perpetuating racism.
The article is really about finding out you’re not what they said you were, which is not a black experience, nor an American experience. It’s a human experience, and cloaking it as “racism” is disingenuous.
If you want to be understood, tell your story. But every time you claim nobody can possibly understand you but your own group, you’re basically claiming victimhood as your identity. Which isn’t exactly a healthy psychological state.
In which I’m feeling annoyed and paranoid about big tobacco and pharma lobbies.
So the doctor-medical nerds in the U.K. were recently all, like, “So vaping, in our opinion, is less dangerous than smoking, and we see no evidence that the candy flavors are causing teens to try vaping or that vaping is a gateway behavior to smoking.”
So I read up, decided that vaping had to be less harmful than smoking cigarettes, and, because I had to quit smoking, I switched.
My subjective opinion is that they are a wonderful alternative to smoking cigarettes. My lungs feel fantastic, comparatively; quitting was effortless; and it’s not all about the nicotine: I use very low-percentage juices. It’s about the activity of “smoking,” which these devices mimic very, very well.
Which is what you need after 30 years of smoking: something to replace the habit.
Since that British news, though, my Twitter feed is stuffed with items like this:
Over and over. Every day. Once upon a time there was nothing in my feed about ecigs, now it’s shit like this daily. Claims from news services that there’s worry about ecig use, that there’s a spike in teen uptake (?), that people are worried about the health effects. And, most tellingly:
That because of these fears, people are going back to combustible cigarettes.
One has to ask herself: who benefits from people going back to cigarettes?
And she has to answer: Big Tobacco itself, of course, and, more worryingly, the tax funds filled with luxury taxes levied on the sales of tobacco products.
~+~+~
Now, I take European findings with a grain of salt, because they do shit like encourage homeopathy and ban GMOs, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
If ecigs were very dangerous, we’d know because people have been using them for a full decade now.
So we can conclude that if they are dangerous, they’re not immediately so but rather they’re dangerous over time, and any danger discovered is probably going to be related to the e-juice ingredients, and it’s probably still going to be less dangerous than smoking tobacco.
E-juices use food grade ingredients, and the bulk of them are the substances used in asthma inhalers and nebulizers. The only real unknown is the flavorants, which exist in such small percentages it seems unlikely they’d be truly dangerous. Only time and testing will tell.
But, while no, we don’t know that vaping is safe quite yet, we do have evidence it’s less harmful than tobacco, and all this fear-mongering for the love of money? IS PISSING ME OFF. Let’s let the fucking evidence decide. Gawd.
—
Ecigs have been banned by a number of countries:
– Electronic Cigarette History
In which this is the scene at 27:24 of The Brief (season 1, episode 1, ‘The Road to Hell’) typed from memory. Since it’s a Brit show, he probably said “fiver” rather than “five bucks,” but whatever.
A man and a woman are looking out a window. Outside, it’s raining.
The man points at two raindrops and says, “Five bucks says mine wins.” He touches one when he says “mine” to indicate which is which.
The woman shrugs. They talk for a few minutes. The raindrop designated as hers reaches the bottom of the glass first.
The man hands the woman a five dollar bill.
She says, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
He says, “Fair’s fair,” and insists that she take the bill.
~+~+~
Most women absolutely do not understand the exchange: For one, betting? On raindrops? In the middle of an otherwise important conversation? What the hell?
Two, maybe at a party or in Vegas, but during a private conversation? How much more irrelevant could he be?
Three, insisting on paying out? Over something so clearly throw-away and irrelevant to anything? It’s five dollars! I don’t want it! I didn’t even make the bet!
~+~+~
This is the difference between men and women, in a nutshell:
Her excitement about or disinterest in the bet is irrelevant, the value of the bill is irrelevant, the silliness of the wager is irrelevant.
A man keeping his word, even under the most trivial of circumstances, is what’s relevant. To him, at least.
~+~+~
If there had been only two women in the room, the wager would probably never have been offered in the first place, because wagers are the sort of endless, needless competition men engage in.
If the wager had somehow been made anyway, the women probably wouldn’t have exchanged money, because, c’mon, it’s a freakin’ raindrop for heaven’s sake, obviously it was just a joke, and because with only women in the room, no honor is at stake, since women don’t have honor.
We can play at honor, of course, and often do when we enter male environments, but we’re free to opt out at any time with no repercussions. This means we don’t take it very seriously, since it can’t get us killed. (If you’re a woman and this statement infuriates you, you don’t yet understand what honor is, nor why you’re glad you don’t have to uphold it when you can’t or don’t want to.)
~+~+~
Basically, for all the things we care about that are baffling to men, there are just as many of their words and behaviors we just gloss over because they’re so irrelevant to us we basically don’t even hear or see them.
If a man makes a silly little bet with you, like in the scene above, you probably don’t even really register it beyond amused condescension when he hands you money, and you certainly don’t realize that he has to give you the $5 or lose his honor.
In which I’ve quit smoking!
I started smoking at 16. I’m 47 now. That’s 31 years.
I was down to smoking less than a pack a day, usually less than half a pack, but my lungs felt dry and tight. I was having difficulty breathing.
Every morning, I decided not to smoke. Every evening I smoked anyway, because the power of habit is massive. I’ve tried keeping my regular behaviors and just ditching the smoking part, but it’s hard. I’ve gotten up, put on my coat, grabbed my ebook, stepped outside and not smoked, just to keep up my normal routine, but it doesn’t really work. Before you know it, you’ve bought yourself a pack of cigarettes.
You need a substitute. And no, not for the nicotine. The gum and the patches are worthless; I’ve tried both. For the smoking.
Luckily, here in the future, we have such a thing! It’s called vaping.
A well-controlled trial has recently been carried out by Dr Grant O’Connell and colleagues working for the vaping manufacturer Fontem Ventures. They asked 15 smokers to give up altogether for five days, 15 to vape only for five days, and another 15 to mix vaping and smoking for five days. They measured the harmful and potentially harmful constituents in the urine, blood and breath of each group, and the results were striking. After five days, the vapers’ carboxyhaemoglobin levels—an indication of how much carbon monoxide they had in their systems—had dropped by 83%, which was an even bigger drop than in the cold-turkey cessation group, whose levels dropped by 75%. Even the dual users had seen a drop of 23%. The amount of carbon monoxide they exhaled had halved in both the vapers and the cessation group. Much the same was true for all the other biomarkers except, of course, for nicotine.
So I bought a Vuse at the corner gas station. It was a piece of shit and just as sketchy as the first ecig I bought a decade ago and it was so awful it basically drove me back to cigarettes. (The Vuse is by RJ Reynolds. There is speculation that they were specifically designed to drive smokers back to cigarettes. They taste bad and they’re incredibly inconsistent, delivering either burnt-tasting air or a massive hit of lung-scorching, scaldingly hot vapor. Each replacement cartridge costs at least as much as a pack of cigarettes, if not more.) The Vuse would be an acceptable experience only if you were a hard-core smoker locked in an airport or hospital for days with no other way to deal with your discomfort.
Then I bought this sciencey-looking little Pro Tank II for only $20 at the ecig store over on Lake Street, and I haven’t had a cigarette since.
It screws together. The whole bottom section is a rechargable battery, with a button you push to send power to the coil; the tank is Pyrex and holds e-juice, which is vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol with flavorings and nicotine, and contains a coil, which is what actually heats up and turns the juice into vapor; and then the tip is the part you inhale through. There’s an utterly bewildering variety of these things, but all of them are basically made up of these three components.
An old Fairfield friend saw my interest in ecigs on Facebook, and kindly sent me his unwanted stuff (he’s discovered a favorite brand of tank, and no longer uses any of this):
That’s hundreds of dollars of equipment and ten flavors of juices! That he was just going to throw out! A Vaporfi kit, a Nautilus tank, an Aerotank Mega, a Halo Tracer kit, a second Vaporfi tank, and coils!
Now I have tons of everything. Batteries and chargers, tanks, tips. Most of the parts are interchangeable, too, so you can mix and match and make devices that look cool and draw, due to adjustable air flow rings on the nicer tanks, exactly the way you want them to. These are the two I’m into right now:
I’m into the 6% blueberry and 3% cocoa flavors right now. (I hate even typing that because it sounds so douchey, but it is what it is! Blueberry! Cocoa! I’m a twat!)
I started with 18% juice, but I don’t think I need it. They tell you that nicotine is incredibly addictive, but I’m perfectly comfortable with 6% and 3% juices. I do have a tank loaded with the 18%, but haven’t used it much in the past two days.
I haven’t gone five days without a single cigarette in years. I’ve gone one, two days without a cigarette, sure; I’ve gone days only smoking one or two. But zero cigarettes? For five days? In a row? No, not in years.
With low-nicotine juice and a device that works well, one can enjoy the activity of ‘smoking’ almost to excess, and yet wake up in the morning feeling better than she has in years. It’s fucking wonderful.
While I doubt vaping is a zero-harm activity (after all, what is), it’s definitely lower harm than smoking cigarettes. It’s almost therapeutic-feeling; inhaling mist into dry, damaged lungs actually feels good. (Turns out that juice uses the same base used in asthma inhalers and nebulizers.) And apparently my carboxyhemoglobin levels have dropped by 83%.
Eighty-three percent.
The devices themselves probably last for quite a long time, being made of Pyrex and stainless steel. You have to replace the coil, the part that heats up, and the juice, but from what I can tell that’s much less expensive than 3.5 packs of cigarettes every week.
There’s a bunch of negative hysteria around e-cigarettes, but it appears to have been deliberately manufactured by pharmaceutical companies involved in nicotine replacement therapies and cigarette companies. The recent FDA regulation binge was brought on by these lobbies, apparently. Of course. Since so much money is generated by the luxury taxes on cigarettes, anything that threatens the market is worrisome… even if it’s a technology that is reducing harm and by extension probably saving lives.
The bulk of the evidence so far leans heavily toward vaping being much safer than cigarettes, and much more effective than NRT in helping people quit smoking.
– E-cigarette studies, research and reports
– E-cigarettes save lives
– UK doctors urge wide promotion of e-cigs to help smokers quit
– Smokers Urged to Switch to E-Cigarettes by British Medical Group
– Vapers Helping Smokers to Quit
So, the take-away here is that we’re seeing research showing that vaping is much less harmful than smoking, and that if you wish to vape, you need to buy a decent piece of equipment and avoid shitty disposables made by cigarette companies. The vapor, even from low-nicotine juices, is so satisfying that you don’t even want cigarettes. Vaping is credited with helping tens of thousands of smokers quit.
“In the case of addictions, where people find it genuinely very hard to resist temptation, harm reduction surely makes sense,” said Viscount Ridley. And I agree. Being against vaping because it’s not zero-harm is ridiculous. If we expected driving to be zero-harm, we’d never build another car again. But as far as risk management goes, vaping is safer than smoking by orders of magnitude.
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4 random books from my Library!
