Can an old troll change his spots ? Gohde returns to sci.med.nutrition
We must admit, after his latest humiliating banishment (his second in six months), we thought John H Gohde would lie low for a little while before continuing his trolling. If nothing else, all that hating must be exhausting.
But no - we got an email from someone at sci.med.nutrition, the scene of many of Gohde’s most bitter, racist and angry posts. He’s back, under his old posting identity of “Mr Natural-Health”
But the question is: has he learnt, and has he changed ?
Look at his first five posts there, and you be the judge:
Post #1: A poster asks whether the behaviour of olive oil when chilled can be indicative to its purity. Gohde has nothing to contribute to the thread, but that never stops him from butting in: “Please STOP abusing the English language. And, say what you mean next time.”
Post #2: A poster asks: “From chemistry lessons I know that fatty acid aldehydes and peroxides have strong smell and taste of rancidity. How could this be that the industry manages to mask these properties? What are the additives which mask the smell?” Gohde doesn’t have a clue, but can’t pass up the opportunity to insult another poster: “If anything is defective, I would say that it is your half-baked notion that all rancid or otherwise unhealthy oil must smell bad.” A third post in the thread suggests that Gohde is just plain wrong.
Post #3: In answer to the question: “Has anyone ever heard of 1200mg per day of lecithin causing muscle achiness and/or pain?” Gohde doesn’t have a clue: they didn’t cover that in his 70’s accountancy course. Go for an insult instead: “Trust your intuition, because your logic is not much better.”
Post #4: In response to a poster who posts an extract of the paper “Vascular events in healthy older women receiving calcium supplementation: randomised controlled trial” which appeared in the British Medical Journal, which concludes: “Calcium supplementation in healthy postmenopausal women is associated with upward trends in cardiovascular event rates.” Gohde thinks different, but hasn’t undertaken any BMJ-published peer reviewed studies himself to refute this, so he blusters his way through unconvincingly: “Generally, if you were to spend the time to actually read these totally bogus research studies they are extremely likely to be doing something totally stupid, such as you have suggested above. These people are bigoted, plain and simple. Totally devoid of any research ethics, they will stoop to any low-level to prove that taking supplements is dangerous. “
Post #5: Classic John Gohde: now he’s got into the swing of things, the hate can really flow: “Tom operationally proves that mental illness is both real and persistent! Tom thumb used to live in a shoe, that did not have an Internet connection. Hello! Anybody home? Everybody on the planet has gotten your message ten years ago. Now, can you kindly get a life?”. He signs the message: “John who hates ironjuctice (sic)”, in case anyone is in any doubt.
So what can we learn from this ?
Well, firstly, John Gohde is never going to change. He is a deeply angry, racist, misogynistic, embittered and dumb old man, stuck in his ways, refusing to learn from his mistakes and so doomed to repeat them.
Secondly, he needs an audience, he hates to be ignored, and trolling gives him all the attention he needs.
Thirdly, on the internet, Gohde can pretend to be an expert who is surrounded by petty imbeciles, whereas in his day to day life, Gohde is a lonely failure, surrounded by people who consider him to be a petty imbecile, whose own health is poor, and whose teeth rotted away in his forties, and who is an embarrassment to his family. Newsgroups and Wikipedia give him the opportunity to reinvent himself as a healthy nutrition expert, and so pretend that his 57 years on this planet have not been in vain.
(Want a primer on Gohde ? Read this)
Igor Berger (right), aka Igor the Troll