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If hypocrisy was an Olympic event then I would come in at a solid fourth.

Gold would go to the US State Department for hounding an Australian who runs a website in Sweden, and all because he let slip that Uncle Sam's Ambassador to Russia thinks that one time KGB officer and never ending Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin is a bit of a shady character. Quelle surprise; his name's Vlad for fuck's sake. The focus on Wikileaks and Mr. Assenge has certainly taken the heat off whichever colossal fuckwit in the US government allowed more than a decade's worth of private communiques from all over the world to wind up on a single USB stick for the cleaner to wander off with. Thank God that nasty Assenge man has been accused of - and now arrested for - a totally unrelated crime that the media can prattle on about. Otherwise the whole world would be asking who at the White House let the work experience gibbon draw up the data security plans.

The surprise Silver medallist in the hypocrisy race is nappy manufacturer Pampers, for their "One Pack = 1 Vaccine" program. I'm all for charity, but this campaign isn't charity. What it is is pretty blatant emotional blackmail. The Clear English translation for the campaign is as follows: "Make your baby shit in our product because if it shits in someone else's product then another baby somewhere else won't be shitting in anyone's product because it'll be DEAD you selfish bastard so buy our product and make your baby shit more." A quick bit of research shows that a tetanus shot costs about £1.20 if bought in a pack of ten, so orders of magnitude less if you're buying by the thousand. The average price of a pack of Pampers is upwards of £10. The nappies themselves probably cost pennies to make, so instead of indulging in this cynical scheme why not buy the sprog some own-brand nappies and post a cheque to UNICEF? In fact, post the cheque to UNICEF and post your kid's fresh turds to Pampers.

Bronze goes to the unbidden love-child of Anneka Rice and Skeletor, a.k.a "Dr" Gillian McKeith, the self styled nutritionist* and 'health guru' who appeared on "I'm A Celebrity" looking so gaunt that the Vegan Society sent her a veal and black pudding food parcel out of sympathy. Normally I wouldn't watch "reality" TV shows, but the idea of watching McKieth get tortured on a regular basis was too good to pass up. In fact that particular (not very) guilty pleasure was probably what set me on the road to the much larger hypocrisy I am guilty of now...

Which brings us to my fourth place effort, the plucky Brit falling just short of the top spots but giving it his best: Recently I have started using Facebook again, a technical and social phenomenon that I have spent literally days of my life decrying. Thanks to some questionable life choices, the internal combustion engine and the M5 / M6 corridor I have developed a group of friends at both ends of the country. A few years ago this would have been absolutely fine; there were things like telephones, text messaging and email: All forms of communication that require a certain level of personal interaction. Now there's fucking Facebook.

Signing up to Facetwat is the digital equivalent of volunteering for a smack habit: it's fun at first but quickly you realise that it's starting to screw with your whole life. It forces you to make decisions you normally wouldn't have to make, like publicly declaring who your friends are. It changes your brain chemistry via prolonged periods of anxiety over whether or not any of your 'friends' actually care about whatever benign activity it is you're doing, whilst subtly reminding you that whatever it is you are doing is uninteresting enough for you to decide to stop doing it and take the time to tell all your 'friends' that you're doing it. At this point I can already hear people pointing out that not everyone gets so personally invested in their Faceturd status. My response is simply: "Why not?" When you change your status on Faceminge you are imparting information to dozens or even hundreds of people about how your life is going at that moment. If you don't care if those people have any interest in your status then for whose benefit are you posting it?

'Friends'. It seems to me that Facedick is ruining the concept of friendship forever: I get 'Friend' requests from a lot of people that, whilst wishing no ill will to any of them, I would not class as 'Friends'. A friend is someone you would trust to have your back; someone that you know relatively well and, in turn, knows you. I do not consider someone that I've said a total of nine words to in my entire life as a 'friend', with all the social etiquettes and mutual expectations of trust that such a relationship demands. If I did I would be a sociopath, or at least suffer from some other condition with a name ending in 'path'.

I guess it's this black and white approach to friendship that annoys me most about Facefuck. There is no middle ground: You are either friends with someone or you are not. Facejizz doesn't cater for people who, for example, you would invite to your wedding but would never consider to be godparent material, even if it was your fifth child. I want to be able to say that 'I've met this person a couple of times and didn't immediately want to hit them' without having to commit to being 'friends' with them. That way I can impart real, personal information that really matters to my close friends without planting it in front of almost total strangers. I want to get to know people, and I want people to be able to get to know me. You just can't do that with throw away comments and drunken photos on a website. The important bit is being there to make the drunken photos in the first place; everything else is just protracted escapism.

And yet... I am using it. I am on fucking Facebook, because not being on it makes me feel strange and alienated from those people who are. Like smack, once you've started it's hard to stop. I want to know what my friends are doing every day, especially as many of them are now a long way away. A few years ago craving that kind of information would have been considered stalking, but now it's the closest thing a lot of people come to social concern.

But if the day comes when I realise that I have been using Facebook as a surrogate for spending real time with the people I am close to, I'll close my Facebook account in a heartbeat and without regret. And then I'll find out who my real friends are.

Rant over.

*Note: The protected term is "dietitian". Dietitians have to go to medical school and do proper exams and can be held accountable for their actions. Nutritionists don't have to have any qualifications at all and can feasibly gain all of their knowledge from the backs of cereal packets.