Nice article.
The reader comments which follow are as predictable as gravity, however. :evil:
The HiveMind now believes that ANYTHING concerning tobacco in ANY WAY is categorically evil, and 100% deadly to anyone and everyone who comes within a hundred yards of it.
Here's how that absurd, extreme conclusion came to be: Humans are slow moving, physically weak, have small teeth, and no claws. Since their inception the only way they survived was in groups. As a result, their social/tribal/grouping instinct evolved into a behavioral imperative right up there with food, shelter, and sex. For several million years to NOT be part of a tribe or group was a death sentence.
Then along came mass media, and soon after that so-called "social media". Technology that was not around during the first 99.99999999% of human evolution. The human brain doesn't care about how recently a given environmental factor came to be, though, it is hardwired to respond to certain things in a certain way, and it damn well WILL come hell or high water. And when one of those invoked imperatives is "going along to get along"---i.e. the tribal dynamic---and a given notion/idea takes hold among a critical mass OF the group, rationality and logic go out the window. No one wants to be shunned by the tribe.
It was not only a handy mechanism, it was an essential one. h. Sapiens literally owes its existence to it.
It sure is a pain in the ass of the MODERN world, though. Pipe smoking being a tiny---but highly illustrative---example. "The Tribe says tobacco is categorically evil, and I want to be accepted by the tribe.... Therefore, I will join the movement!"
A woman who used to live across the street from me approached one day when I was smoking a cigar on my porch, to inform me that I was setting a BAD VISUAL EXAMPLE for any child who might happen by and see it.
Think about how she got to such a place in her mind, and how powerful the virtue signaling urge must have become for her to confront a man sitting outdoors on his own property about something she IMAGINED MIGHT BE a POTENTIAL risk involving a child's POSSIBLE future, and you will understand what our hobby is up against.