Photo via Pixabay user photovision

Ermanno Borra thinks that aliens just may be winking at us from across the void—that they're trying to make contact using a method that even we primitive earthlings might grasp, and that they come (or perhaps will come, eventually) in peace.

YouTuber "Sargon of Akkad" (Screen shot via)

Back in August, something quite strange happened. A man called Rudy Pantoja was being interviewed by a local news organisation in Seattle about the opening of a new police station he was in support of. Anti-police activists were also present. One of them was Zarna Joshi, a somewhat notable climate and social activist in the area. She approached Pantoja and asked what his name was. Pantoja, with the titter of a schoolboy, replied: "Hugh Mungus".

Joshi takes extreme umbrage to this comment, interpreting it as a reference to Pantoja's penis (he later said it was a self-deprecating nod to his weight) and proceeds to scream bloody murder about being sexually harassed by the comment. As Pantoja walks away, Joshi complains to the security inside the building about being sexually harassed and asks why they're not doing anything about it.

This was all caught on film and, naturally, as it goes with these kind of things – and as it will continue to go until the end of time, until the world implodes into a silent black hole and the internet ceases to exist – people were upset.

Look deep into YouTube's darkened hallways and you'll find a video uploaded by a user called Miss Misa, who appears to be a young English woman. She sometimes has guests on her channel, one of which is a man who calls himself The Irate Bear. Unlike Misa, The Irate Bear doesn't show his face, and rather embodies an avatar of a cartoon bear dressed as a Limp Bizkit fan.

The Irate Bear (Screen shot via)

He created a reaction video to a reaction video about the Hugh Mungus incident, made by a woman arguing Joshi's side. This is something that happens a lot on YouTube: a seemingly endless double helix of constantly criss-crossing videos reacting to events which no history book would ever document – which are insignificant in the extreme. In his video, the Irate Bear castigates feminists, SJWs, all of the usual suspects for an angry, faceless man ranting on YouTube.

He also, though being English, uses a great deal of American terminology.

The Angry Bear falls into a distinctive new category of YouTuber, and indeed of society at large. There's a certain type of British man who has become enamoured with America, its social politics and its machinations, and wishes to become an intellectual authority on it. And to a lot of these guys, intellectual authority means reducing any and all subject matter to a kind of hyper-rationality.

One of the biggest proponents of this style is Sargon of Akkad, real name Carl Benjamin – also known as the man who tweeted Labour MP Jess Phillips after she wrote that "people talking about raping me isn't fun, but has become somewhat par for the course", in which he said he "wouldn't even rape ". The real Sargon of Akkad was an emperor who ruled over Mesopotamia in the 24th century BC, so the links between him and a man with a YouTube account who sounds like he's from Swindon are of course easy to make.

Carl of Akkad, much like the rest of them, seems to pride himself on a sense of purist thinking and a logic-before-all attitude. Problem is, when you're speaking on issues of a social nature that cannot be boiled down to textbook definitions of words, it's not really an approach that works particularly well.

Still, that hasn't stopped men like Carl and "Infowars editor-at-large" Paul Joseph Watson from becoming the right-wing commentators of the digital age. Gone are the days when your Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys screeching about the desecration of the American flag and the war on drugs was enough to rile up conservatives. Now, something more nuanced is needed, and arrives, strangely, in the form of young-ish British men.

Where Fox News prided itself only on the extremities of playing devil's advocate and brow-beating guests, the new wave are staring dead-eyed into the camera and explaining to you via their massively superior intellect why the SJWs are wrong.

Intellectualism and "logic" is the greatest currency among these types, though they often wilfully choose to ignore the nuances of many of their subjects. This happens especially when it comes to matters of race, racial biases, discrimination, etc. Issues that have hundreds of different permutations and considerations that must be taken into account are often just reduced to their dictionary definitions.

The definition of racism, for instance, will be used to discredit people insinuating that maybe – just maybe – a great deal of white people have been conditioned into being racist. Because to make that – or any – assumption about white people and the way they think would itself be racist, or so the thinking goes. It's a kind of blustering myopia, expressed with an unwarranted air of cerebral authority that appeals to (mostly) men who feel ostracised for just being too damned smart for the world.

READ: We Asked an Expert About that Data on Right-Wing People Having Happier Sex Lives

In a general sense, this is nothing new; the internet has been a home for these guys for many, many years. But what is it about this new breed of British men and their obsession with whatever's outraging America?

Is it just because the cultural hegemony is so great that it blots out all other light? Maybe it's because American issues, typically overblown, serve as convenient vessels for their prejudices – ones they can't quite find here? And why do Americans seem to lap it up? Could it be that the old trope of the intelligent, nuanced Brit has taken a right-wing turn in a time of exponential growth of anglophilia? Is Doctor Who to blame for snide, digital age right-wing nerds becoming some of the biggest voices among the fringe commentariat?

Either way, if you have an annoyingly precocious teen in your charge and you catch them watching Sargon of Akkad or Paul Joseph Watson or The Irate Bear, put your arm around them and tell them that it's OK to be empathetic sometimes. That you don't have to be right all the time, or use big words and sarcasm to make people feel small.

@joe_bish

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Csanad Szegedi and Rabbi Boruch Oberlander (Photos courtesy of the UKIJFF)

Before finding out his grandmother was Jewish, Csanád Szegedi was a poster boy of the Hungarian far-right. Aged just 24, in 2006 he became vice president of the country's virulently anti-semitic, nationalist Jobbik Party, the third largest political party in Hungary's parliament. A year later, he helped create the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard), a now outlawed paramilitary group that spent its time marching through Roma villages in black boots and protesting against the World Jewish Congress.

It wasn't until a former convict with a personal grudge against Szegedi mysteriously stumbled upon his grandmother's birth certificate that his life in one of Europe's most successful far-right parties suddenly came crashing down. His grandmother, it transpired, had survived Auschwitz, and his grandfather was subject to various Nazi labour camps. Though initially unrepentant, after the news was finally leaked to the public in June of 2012, Szegedi was forced to resign and rethink his life.

In a new documentary, Keep Quiet, directors Sam Blair and Joseph Martin explore what happened next, as Szegedi begins to carve out a new identity as an Orthodox Jew. A fascinating portrait of a man in crisis, Keep Quiet is also a story about identity, trust and forgiveness. Can a life-long fascist really call himself a Jew, and should Jewish communities feel compelled to accept him? Ahead of a screening at this year's Jewish Film Festival in London , I had a chat with Sam.

VICE: Hi Sam. How did the team first hear about Csanád's story? And how did you come to make the documentary?
Sam Blair: Our producer Alex was in Hungary, looking to make a film about the rise of anti-semitism there. While he was researching, the story about Csanád emerged in the news. It was such a powerful story and it allowed us to look at this issue of anti-semitism and the rise of the right in Hungary through a fascinating, troubling, complex central character with such amazing twists and turns.

You began working on the film shortly after the story became public. Why do you think Csanád wanted to be in a documentary at such a vulnerable point in his life?
Csanád was so publicly ridiculed when this scandal hit that, in some ways, he didn't have anything left to hide. He's also someone who certainly likes the stage. He's very happy on camera and wants to be heard, even if it is criticism. I also think he wanted the chance to maybe tell his story. He saw the appeal of a film that would treat the subject in a more considered, thoughtful way than is allowed when you're making a two-minute news segment.

What was the reaction to Csanád in the Orthodox community he became a part of?
It was mixed. As you see in the film, he does become accepted by certain elements of the Jewish community. But many people, if not more, were offended by him and wanted nothing to do with him. One of the most compelling scenes is when Csanád is travelling to Auschwitz with a holocaust survivor.

He's still very clearly grappling with far-right views and borderline holocaust denial. Is it fair to say this is a documentary about a character very much in transition?
The film shows Csanád in this kind of grey area where he definitely has remnants of the belief system he's had throughout his life. It's not an easy transition and it's uncomfortable to see these moments where he is saying stuff that feels like it's from his former self. It really makes you wonder about him and his intentions and the veracity of his claims to be repenting. But I think it also shows that the transition can't happen overnight.

One of the things which makes Csanád's turnaround so hard to believe is that he seems more concerned with appropriating a quick, easy, new costume for himself as an Orthodox Jew, rather than actually facing up to his past.
I think Csanád's personality and ego means that he needs to reinforce a strong identity. Obviously the story that he believed about his identity proved false, but I think he is someone that needs to go to extremes. He could have gone for a more moderate take on his Jewish identity, but chooses otherwise. And he does have that tendency to wear it as a badge. That is what makes him interesting and troubling as a character. But from the position of a filmmaker it's fascinating and it creates conflict.

Right at the end he's asked if he will continue to be a Jew, and he kind of shrugs his shoulders and says, "I don't know." It's a strange, ambivalent ending that seems not in keeping with the rest of the film. What's your take on that?
I think if you turned it around and the film came to a conclusive answer about Csanád it would feel wrong. He is on a journey of change. It's important to accept that someone can be both one thing and another. Csanád as a character is someone you certainly puzzle over. It's an inconclusive film and I think it had to be.

So do you feel like he changed at all over the course of the time you knew him?
When we finished the film and were showing it publicly there was a humility to Csanád, which I think is a sign of change. This was a man who was incredibly bombastic, full of self-belief and happy to stand on stage and be utterly confident about who he was and what he believed. That was completely challenged.

Thanks, Sam.

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have sex with an alien? Would it include lots of butt stuff? What exactly would an intergalactic dick look like? And, most importantly, how would it feel to lay an extraterrestrial egg?

These—and other strange sex questions—were the focus of Wednesday's episode of Desus & Mero, when the hosts invited adult film star Janice Griffith to talk about sex positivity, porn, sex toys, and, yes, alien fetishes.

Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11:30 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Kris Kobach in his office in 2015. Photo by Christopher Smith/for the Washington Post via Getty

In the days since Donald Trump secured his seat in the Oval Office, America has witnessed what feels like a bizzaro Republican beauty pageant. Sarah Palin as secretary of the interior? Rudy Giuliani as secretary of state? Rumors about who would fill which cabinet posts have abounded, but few people seem to know what's actually happening inside the White House transition team. As Trump himself tweeted on Tuesday, "Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!"

But one of the leading contenders gunning for a top spot in the White House is a far-right darling whose potential appointment as attorney general is keeping liberals up at night: Kris Kobach.

Kobach is the Kansas secretary of state, a post that belies how involved he has been in some of the most controversial policies of the conservative movement. Perhaps his most famous résumé item is his work as the leading architect of Arizona's notorious SB-1070, which is considered to be, by far, the strictest anti-illegal immigration law in America. Passed in 2010, it allowed police officers to pull over undocumented immigrants—or anyone they had a "reasonable suspicion" of being undocumented—to check if they had their papers, and detain, or even deport, them if they didn't.

This soon landed on the desk of the Supreme Court, which, in a 5–3 ruling in 2012, said that while federal law preempted Arizona doling out such harsh punishments, officers could still ask about someone's immigration status when pulling them over. But in the meantime, the law created an environment of paranoia in the Hispanic community, with businesses dependent on migrants closing up shops as their customers fled the state.

That sort of outcome may be exactly what Kobach wants. In the last week, he said on FOX News that a Trump administration would make sure that "no person living here illegally gets a free pass, like they did under the Obama administration... The jobs are going to dry up, the welfare benefits are going to dry up, and a lot of people who may not be criminal illegal aliens may decide, hey, it's getting hard to disobey federal law, and may leave on their own."

This is the idea of "self-deportation," where federal and state governments make it so hard for immigrants to live in America that they simply just leave on their own. This was advocated for by Mitt Romney (Kobach was an adviser on his 2012 campaign), but the Trump administration may take things much further.

According to Reuters, Kobach and his team have discussed drafting an arsenal of executive orders for the president-elect, "so that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security hit the ground running." This would mean starting construction on Trump's much-ballyhooed border wall even without congressional approval. Kobach told Reuters that the transition team is also "mulling" over the idea of a national registry for Muslims entering America from countries deemed "higher risk" by the Trump administration.

The registry—known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS)—is a byproduct of the Bush years, and was shut down in 2011 after national security officials said it was redundant; one critic called it "a proxy to target Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities." Per ThinkProgress, when still in existence, NSEERS "registered 93,000 people, of whom 13,740 immigrants were placed in deportation proceedings." And the number of people who were prosecuted on terrorism charges under the program? Zero.

Last October, Kobach reportedly spoke at an event put on by the Social Contract Press, a known racially tinged publishing house whose editor is a member of Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that inspired Dylann Roof, the Charleston massacre shooter. According to the Southern Law Poverty Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups and crimes, the publishing house's creator, the anti–illegal immigration activist John Tanton, has said, "I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that."

Kobach's connection to Tanton runs deeper than a single appearance at one of his group's events. Kobach currently serves as a lawyer for the legal arm of one of Tanton's organizations, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the SPLC has listed as a hate group since 2007. That organization's president, Dan Stein, has said things like, "Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing... Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for." Stein also thinks that the Immigration Act of 1965, which helped do away with decades of xenophobic measures, "was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris."

"Kris Kobach has showed that he is an extremist," Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC, told me. "An extreme nativist, and a fear monger."

He has done that, Potok explained, by suing his own state (twice) for granting in-state college tuition for children of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the state for three years and graduated high school. Kobach also accused the Human Rights Campaign of promoting "homosexual pedophilia" during an unsuccessful run for Congress in 2004.

Potok then pointed to a 2002 legal memo Kobach wrote while working at the Justice Department that stated cops should be able to arrest any undocumented immigrant they pull over for civil rights violations. The George W. Bush White House quickly distanced itself from the memo, but it served as a blueprint for the Arizona bill that would come years later, as well as similar ordinances in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and Farmers Branch, Texas—both of which Kobach and his associates at FAIR authored. (Since then, those ordinances have been struck down, but not before costing the towns millions of dollars in legal fees.)

Kobach is not singularly focused on immigration. He has also been at the forefront of a Republican battle to restrict access to the ballot box that has been underway ever since the Supreme Court gutted an integral part of the Voting Rights Act, in 2013.

According to the Washington Post, Kobach's former colleague, Brian Newby, is the head of the federal Election Assistance Commission, a small agency charged with helping out with election logistics. The agency was sued by civil rights groups because Newby changed the rules without consulting commissioners, making it harder to vote in Alabama, Georgia, and Kansas through requiring voters to show documents proving citizenship in order to register to vote. Kobach supported Newby, and helped pass a law in Kansas in 2013 that had the same effects—before this election, 37,000 people found themselves frozen out of the voting rolls until they provided proof of citizenship. (A Reuters analysis later showed that the list was disproportionately populated by younger Democratic and unaffiliated voters.)

"Kris Kobach has been actively involved in trying to stop immigration," Potok told me. "He has hurt kids of immigrants. He has suppressed voters, even though there's been no evidence of fraud."

And his reward: He could soon hold one of the most powerful offices in America.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by Kyodo News via Getty Images

US News

Trump to Meet Japanese Prime Minister in New York
Donald Trump will hold his first meeting with a foreign head of state as president-elect Thursday when he meets Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in New York. Abe said he was "honored" to be "ahead of other world leaders." An aide to Abe said that members of Trump's team explained that any statements made about Japan by the Republican during the election campaign should not be taken literally.—CNN

Clinton Urges Followers to 'Never, Ever Give Up'
In her first speech since the one conceding the election, Hillary Clinton told her supporters to "never, ever give up" and to "stay engaged." Clinton admitted to the crowd at a Children's Defense Fund gala in Washington, DC, that there had been moments in the past week when she wanted "to curl up... and never leave the house again."—NBC News

US Companies Urge Trump to Stay in Climate Pact
More than 300 companies and major investors signed a joint letter urging President-elect Donald Trump not to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the international deal to reduce global warming. Gap, Intel, Mondelez International, Kellogg Company, and Mars Inc. all signed the letter.—VICE News

Cop Charged with Manslaughter in Philando Castile Shooting
Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who shot and killed 32-year-old Philando Castile back in July, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and dangerous discharge of a weapon.—VICE

International News

Children's Hospital Hit in Blitz on Aleppo
A children's hospital and medical blood bank have been struck during the renewed Syrian government offensive on rebel-held eastern Aleppo. According to information from activist groups inside the city, at least 84 people were killed and dozens more wounded over the past 48 hours or so of airstrikes and general bombardment.—Al Jazeera

Philippines' Duterte Considers Withdrawing from ICC
Rodrigo Duterte might join Vladimir Putin by pulling his country out of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The president of the Philippines called the global institution "useless" on Thursday, a day after the Russian president signed an order to remove that country from the ICC's founding treaty.—Reuters

Protestors Occupy Brazilian Congress in Call for Military Coup
Dozens of protestors who want a return to military rule in Brazil occupied the nation's lower chamber of Congress for several hours on Wednesday. At least 40 demonstrators smashed a glass door and tussled with guards to make their point in front of the assembled press. Brazil was run by the military between 1964 and 1985.—BBC News

Australian State Rejects Voluntary Euthanasia
A bill designed to legalize voluntary euthanasia in South Australia lost by a single vote, 24 to 23, in the state parliament on Thursday. Regional Premier Jay Weatherill, who supported the bill to allow those with terminal illness the option of assisted suicide, said he was "gutted" by the defeat.—AP

Everything Else

Robert DeNiro Among Medal of Freedom Winners
Robert DeNiro, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jordan, and Bill and Melinda Gates are among President Obama's final 21 honorees for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They will all receive the award at a White House ceremony on Tuesday.—AP

Slavery Novel Wins the National Book Award
Colson Whitehead has won the National Book Award for fiction for The Underground Railroad, a novel about a female slave who uses a literal underground locomotive to obtain freedom. Referring to "Trumpland" in his acceptance speech, Whitehead said: "Be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power."—The New York Times

Secret 'Doll' Pyramid Found Inside Mexico's Kukulkan
Archeology experts have found a third pyramid hidden inside the two existing structures that make up the Mayan-built Kukulkan pyramid in Mexico. Project chief Rene Chavez Seguro said it resembled "a Russian nesting doll."—AFP

Metallica Reveal Videos for Comeback Album Tracks
Metal legends Metallica have shared a series of stunning videos ahead of the release of its first album in eight years this Friday. The gory video for "ManUNkind," directed by Jonas Åkerlund, features actor Rory Culkin.—Noisey

Pluto Likely Holds an Ocean of Water, Scientists Say
According to a new paper published in Nature, there is likely a viscous ocean of water beneath the surface of Pluto's red, heart-shaped region. The water layer "might be 100 km thick," according to MIT professor Richard Binzel.—Motherboard

Canadian Weed Companies Break Nation's Stock Market
Six marijuana-related companies had their trading on the Canadian stock market TSX halted after they tripped a circuit breaker during a massive spike in stock prices. Some of the legal weed firms experienced up to a 44 percent price surge.—VICE

When NBC's Superstore premiered last fall, it did so to little fanfare. Most critics wrote it off as a generic workplace comedy. Considering it featured character archetypes such as "lovable slacker," "hardass boss," and "obvious will they/won't they," it was hard to disagree with the critical consensus. And yet, despite a so-so pilot and a seemingly unoriginal premise, there was something about Superstore that charmed me from the start.

Superstore, created by Office writers room veteran Justin Spitzer, had solid joke writing and a fairly impressive cast, ranging from TV veterans like America Ferrera and Mark McKinney to promising up-and-comers like Lauren Ash and Colton Dunn. However, what really kept me interested in the show was that it was the first sitcom in ages that actually showed people working a job that didn't feel like a far-fetched fantasy to me, someone who was working as a grocery-store cashier with little indication of a way out.

The characters of 30 Rock may have worked for a comically bad sketch show, but they were still network television employees who could afford to live in fancy Manhattan apartments. Maybe the characters of Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Parks and Recreation aren't particularly wealthy, but their jobs are still treated as noble, important, and capable of changing lives. Superstore's Cloud 9, on the other hand, felt more like the kind of place that both myself—and much of the population—are more accustomed to working at. It's the kind of place where you clock in and out every day, more concerned about on holding on and keeping your head above water than the actual tasks of the job.

When it comes to depicting Cloud 9 as a workplace, Superstore holds no punches—from its bumpers that showcase shoppers' horrifying behaviors to the way it makes it clear how little corporate thinks of in-store employees, it's obvious that this is not a place you'd want to work at. But it is the kind of place that many people have to work at.

Superstore gradually grew more comfortable discussing its characters' class and personal struggles over the course of its first season, and it all came to a head in the season finale. After pushover store manager Glenn is fired for giving new mother Cheyenne two weeks of maternity leave (a benefit not offered to Cloud 9 employees), the employees rise up and organize a walk-out in protest, despite the store's relentless anti-union propaganda. It was a genuinely uplifting scene that served as a surprising defense of workers' rights, showcasing the kind of neglect that Cloud 9's employees are expected to deal with while also seeing them triumphantly refuse to put up with it any longer.

Unfortunately, it was also a scene that was almost immediately overturned when the show returned for a second season. After all, in both real-life retail work and the world of Superstore, positive change isn't built to last. The strike ends almost before it begins, when corporate receives word of the walk-out, completely belittles strike leaders Amy and Jonah ("You're in way over your heads," their regional manager says with a smirk during a negotiation), and easily manipulates the store's employees into returning to work. Unlike, say Leslie Knope or the detectives of the 99th precinct, passion and dedication don't get the Cloud 9 employees very far. But before giving up the strike and returning to work, Jonah says to Amy, "You know, just because we go back inside doesn't mean it's over. The fight will go on. This was just the first punch."

And by and large, the second season of Superstore has delivered on this promise. The show has doubled down on its mission to showcase working-class struggles that don't always have a place on television. In "Halloween Theft," Amy struggles to get out of work in time to go trick-or-treating with her daughter; in "Election Day," she teams up with Jonah to convince Cloud 9 employees not to vote for the anti-workers' rights candidate that corporate is pushing for. In that same episode, in one of the show's most powerful character revelations, employee Mateo reveals he's an undocumented immigrant and struggles to keep the secret from the Cloud 9 higher-ups.

Even with this increased focus on its characters' struggles, though, Superstore hasn't lost sight of its quirky workplace sitcom roots. There are still plenty of fun and entertaining hijinks to be had, whether it's the employees struggling to keep corporate from finding an employee's severed finger, or Mateo searching the store for an "I Voted" sticker, or Jonah and Garrett placing bets on which of the seasonal employees will quit first. But underneath those hijinks is an understanding that these situations, while humorous, have real consequences for the characters. If corporate does find the severed finger, Amy will lose her job and be unable to provide for her family; if Mateo doesn't find an "I Voted" sticker, he could face questions about his citizenship status from management; and the bet on seasonal employees' jobs is undercut when Jonah and Garrett find out that most of them are recovering addicts trying to get their lives back on track.

These stories may not be as glamorous or inspiring as the ones from shows centered on political figures or high-powered lawyers, but they are the kind of stories that most of us are living. So kudos to Superstore, the first show on television in quite some time that's interested in telling our stories.

Follow Vincent Crincoli on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Michael Casim

According to search data from Google, there's been a massive surge in searches relating to the Ku Klux Klan since Trump won the election, the Washington Post reports.

Apparently, more Americans scoured the internet for the infamous hooded racists this November than ever before. Google doesn't publish its numbers, but the mass of people searching for the KKK is right up there with the number of searches for the internet's longtime traffic barometer, Kim Kardashian.

The KKK has made a mainstream resurgence this year alongside Donald Trump's presidential run. Former Klan leader David Duke endorsed Trump back in February before launching his own bid for Senate. The group's official newspaper, the Crusader, aligned itself with Trump's views, and the KKK in North Carolina announced that it would be holding a victory parade in honor of the new president-elect in December.

Obviously it's not clear if the searches are born out of fear for the domestic hate group or out of interest in joining. Searches for "how to impeach a president" increased by 4,850 percent after Trump won, too, so that's something.

Watch: The Movement That's Fueling Donald Trump's White Nationalist Supporters

The author, on his way through Aquarium, a night club with a pool (Photos: Theo McInnes)

London's nightlife has a disease. One that has seen clubs and bars crumble away, replaced with expensive new flats, built exclusively for people who already own expensive new flats. And despite mass public protests, hearings and the election of a new, night-friendly mayor, the city has powered on, closing more than half of its clubs over the past eight years and making it clear the disease is terminal.

But hey, is it all that bad? London still has more clubs than Stevenage, or Ipswich, or Blackburn, and some of them – XOYO, Corsica Studios, the Bussey Building – are actually good. Then, of course, there are also loads of slightly more maligned places to spend £6 on bottles of beer, but in times of desperation perhaps we should be giving them a chance? Looking past their reputations as disgusting shit holes and making the most of what's available to us?

There's only one way to find out if this is worth it: down two cans of extra strength Polish lager and tour the worst clubs London has to offer (according to the experts on TripAdvisor). The best place to start? Clapham, a 220-acre absence of culture in the south-west of the city, filled exclusively with Australians, young people who watch rugby and Instagram clean-eating gurus.

INFERNOS, CLAPHAM – #932* of the 1,278-strong "Nightlife in London" list (via TripAdvisor)

First, let's see what people who take the time out of their day to write online reviews of nightclubs think of the place:

"Probably the smelliest club in London."

"Overpriced, Disgusting, Tacky. Full of disgusting perverts."

"Quite possibly was the worst nightclub I've ever been to, unless you were looking to hook up with a 40-year-old while listening to the Macarena."

A solid start.

I've got a lot to get through tonight, so I arrive at Infernos for 11PM. It's hard to capture a smell in a photograph, but the above is the best I can do. The legend is right: the first thing you notice upon entering the place is that distinctive locker room stench – years of spilt vodka-Cokes, lager farts and BO coalescing to form a scent you can almost taste.

People begin to dribble in over the next hour or so, and from what I can see they're not really disgusting perverts, per se, but more estate agents with nothing to say to each other. People sit around the edges, like at a school dance, giggling and grimacing into fluorescent pitchers of mostly Monster energy drink. It's like something from The Inbetweeners, a show I'm told was partially filmed here. It's so bereft and empty, I would take anything at this point. So to tilt the odds in my favour, I head over to the DJ for a request.

"Macarena" time – the oldest trick in the book: the place goes off. Threes of people polish off their drinks and surge towards the dance floor. How wrong I'd been! These people know how to party!

I can't see myself topping this, so I finish my drink, head out and stop in the shop next door for a couple of bus tinnies. Asking the guy behind the counter for the card limit, I hear a loud voice from behind me: "What's the limit on card? Yam! Yam! Yam!" it says. Turns out it belongs to a man in a blue shirt. "Sorry, mate, it's just I'm Welsh and I'm always having the piss taken out of me for my accent. When I hear a Brummie voice, I've got to get my fill!"

Clocking the stamp on my hand, he shrieks: "You're leaving already?!" I nod. "Why, mate? My sister is here for the weekend and I've brought her specially to Infernos. You've got to come in! It's tragic!" I shake my head and walk off to the bus stop, wondering 'If everybody can equally see and smell the tragedy, who is the Infernos joke even on?' The Brummies, evidently.

Next up:

TIGER TIGER, OXFORD CIRCUS - #68* (!) of the 1,278-strong Nightlife in London List (via TripAdvisor)

And some more indications of what I've got to look forward to:

"Had the worst night of my life in this club, ruined by the rudeness of Australian manager Sam. Being in VIP was a complete waste of money. Never ever again."

"Cheap night club feel, the toilets were dirty, urine on the floor up the seats, spiders and cob webs in the corners, toilet paper all over the floor, stunk of urine, and cocaine traces all over the toilet roll dispensers!! Disgusted!! If that's how they keep their toilets, I dread to think what the kitchen is like! When I approached one of the staff, he rudely dismissed what I said so I didn't make too much of a scene in front of other diners."

"Did not see anyone dance all evening"

Straight off the bat, the VIP point appears to check out.

It's strange place, this: doesn't really seem to have a demographic. It's just a paddock of disparate people, some dancing, some trying to eat their halloumi skewers in the inexplicable restaurant portion of the club, some just nursing a solitary pint.

I make my way to the dance floor, where a giant grabs my shoulder and I hear, in a thick Irish accent, "Go on then!"

Dermot and I hit it off. We chug through drink after drink, until he knowingly leans into me. "This place is fucking shit, isn't it?" I say. "Yeah, of course it is, but that's the game," he smiles. "London used to be decent!" I reply. "Yeah, well, it's decent still; it's just decent at being really shit to go out in." We agree it's time to move on.

I'm looking for a promising pocket of Carnaby Street – the Cirque Le Soir, where I've read stories of clowns groping punters. Dermot likes the sound of this too, takes the address and hails a rickshaw.

After a rickety ride, we pull up. This doesn't look anything like the Cirque Le Soir and, hopping in the queue, I realise it isn't. Dermot has brought us to SophistiCats, which, as I'm sure you can guess, is a strip club. "For fuck's sake – classic Dermot!"

Theo, the photographer, and I leave our new friend behind and finally make it to Cirque Le Soir. Alas, it is a members' club. It is at capacity. It is a pre-book only job: we can't possibly get in. No biggie. Twenty minutes up the road, the next on the list is Bonbonniere, number 965 of the 1,278-strong London nightlife list, and the one thing the city has always been missing: a sweet-shop-meets-nightclub.

Though there's a light on, nobody's home. I thump the door until someone pulls up alongside me and warns I stop, as this place just "opens when it fancies it." Best avoided, then. So I find myself on another fucking schlep away, to number 928, Heaven.

Well, holy hell. I ask the guy on the door how long a wait we're talking. "Two hours, pal." I shoot back: "Fine. Will I get in?" He looks me up and down. "If I'm honest, it's unlikely." Jesus: it's hardly Berghain, is it? Why is every post-midnight pint here such a fucking war? Desperate, I jump on a Santander bike and listen to my ears. The stream of trotting heels lead me to the edge of the Thames: bingo.

OPAL BAR, EMBANKMENT - #946* of the 1,278-strong Nightlife in London list (via TripAdvisor)

"Worst place I ever been in London."

"It's a rather tatty affair. Sticky worn cream leather sofas give it the feel of a minicab's waiting room."

"We were told to 'sit on the kerb for 10mins' before coming in even though we had only had 2 drinks each and it was raining. I was appalled by the bouncers' attitude and even now, considering the venue was absolutely empty, we were asked for ID and searched, it was ridiculous. We were not made to feel welcome at all."

I toss an empty can in the bin and tuck my Santander Cycle away. The doorman watches me doing the whole thing. He's shaking his head as I approach, saying, "We're at capacity," but I'm not having any of it: "I don't care what you're charging, just please let me in – give me your VIP experience if you have to." He starts nodding, then speaks into a Bluetooth headset. Miraculously, there's room all of a sudden and the rope is unclipped for me to make my way through.

You know what? They sure do know how to treat a guy here. Tepid fizz from a plastic goblet! A large leather sofa and some goth-coloured balloons all for me! The magic this night so desperately needs.

Turns out Opal Bar's not so bad. In fact, after those previous dives, this is paradise. I order three drinks in the space of ten minutes; I live for this shit! Bounding back to my leather seat for round number four, I drop a lighter and scurry down to grab it. It's then that I see it.

A birthday cake, on the floor. A birthday cake, on the fucking floor. Staring deep into the half-footprint taken from its side, I snap out of my trance. I'd been suffering from full-on Stockholm Syndrome. Shaking hands with security guards, winking at the bar staff and giggling as they accepted £14 for two singles with mixers; I was so desperate just for somewhere to actually let me in that I'd put up with anything.

I have to get out of here before I thank somebody for putting a dishwasher tablet in my buck's fizz.

It's 4:30AM and you can count the amount of open places on one hand. People shovel kebabs into their mouths, stumbling men push each other into the street and mini-cabs abruptly pull up so passengers can empty their guts. It's no great surprise that London looks so ugly at this time of night: it's a city that has to condense all of its partying into a two-hour time slot, and this is the product of that. But there's one place left; one final frontier that could satisfy the depth of my needs. And it is but a night tube away.

CLUB AQUARIUM, OLD STREET – #925* of the 1,278-strong Nightlife in London list (via TripAdvisor)

"The water in the pool was cold and the beers etc exspenssive"

"The swimming pool was right at the end of the club, by the 'gents' toilets - It felt like a private room where a bunch of 'very' wasted individuals in their boxers/thongs were trying to get it on with each other!"

"Worst experience of clubbing."

Club Aquarium, a club with a swimming pool. By this point in the night it's an oasis on an otherwise bleak horizon; a place I can get a drink at 5AM without having to gamble or routinely put a pound coin in a pint glass. Walking up its stairs I pass dancers and muscular, bare-chested men. I've been told by a friend that if you dip a toe in Aquarium's waters you're destined to tip-toe away with a skin condition. I must be careful.

People peer in and angle their heads from the porthole in the men's toilet as I approach the edge of the pool.

The water is absolutely fucking freezing, which explains why the only other swimmers are two men stood in wet boxers, jaws flapping about, having a heart-to-heart. Then, on the other side of the room, a girl on her own in the hot tub. Weird, weird vibes inside.

I hear the distant thump of a Roland TR-808, think of the rising sun and feel the chlorine burn my eyes: this is exactly what I was looking for – a place that seems to actively revel in its shitness. So it's a shame, when the lights come up at 5:30AM, that I'm forced to leave.

As I'm walking out a guy wraps his arm around me. "It's turned my birthday, bruv!" he screams. He's a ball of uncontainable excitement: "I'm DJ Sharp. Let's grab some drinks! We still got an hour or two before they kick us out, bro. Let's go, let's go, let's go!"

We launch into a final flurry; a seppuku you're offered at the end of a dreadful night out. The part where you see reality ahead and you turn around, leaping off a cliff to avoid it. As 7AM approaches, I ask DJ Sharp why he decided to come here for his 30th Birthday; what would possess him to choose this as his birthday destination?

"I didn't choose this place, bro – this place is long," he says. "But what am I gonna do, sit in my mum's living room or a strip club? Nah, fuck that shit. This place is it at this time; I'm telling you – there was no other choice."

And he's right. Central London's club culture has been strangled, neutered and held down by the powers of the city, to the point where there is nowhere decent left open putting pressure on these places to be better. It's like British politics: the Tories have no credible opposition, so they're free to continue being as bastardly as they like. And with the way things are going, it's only going to get worse.

But you can't let this get you down; what we need to do is embrace what London still has to offer. Put nights on at Aquarium with your mates; enjoy Infernos for its awfulness; suck it up and pay more than you ever should for a drink from Tiger Tiger.

Let's go all in for the shitness – we're really, really good at it.

*All TripAdvisor rankings are accurate at the time of publishing.

@oobahs / theomcinnes.com

More on VICE:

Photos of People Who Got Rejected from London Clubs This Weekend

Explaining the Bizarre World of British Nightlife to Americans

Dalston and the Dangers of a Thriving Nightlife Scene

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

One of the ways I've found some relief in life is through a morning meditation practice. I don't practice meditation to become more enlightened, holy, or "pure" than other people. I do it to massage certain qualities within myself that make it difficult for me to live on Earth—qualities that include a discomfort with living in a body, a terror of both death and existence, and the desire to self-soothe using things that will actually destroy me.

Often I've felt like my morning meditation practice is just me meditating on how much I hate myself. Usually it takes me the full ten minutes of sitting for all of that gunk to finally come out of my head, so I may experience a bit of peace. In the past, I would stay in the meditation for a while longer and enjoy the newly-carved quiet place in my mind. But for the past year, when my buzzer rings after ten minutes, I'm kind of just like "Bitches, I'm out." It's as though the practice has turned into a duty: something that I am just checking off a list of things I need to do to be okay.

This is not to say that the goal of meditation practice is necessarily to have an enjoyable experience, or that there even is a goal. In the style of meditation I practice (which is really no style, just sitting on my ass with my eyes closed and breathing) there isn't a goal. But I do miss the serenity it often gave me in the past.

Every positive statement I am asked to make only makes me feel the deficits in my own self-esteem more fully.

Recently, in an effort to re-invigorate my practice, I've been doing some guided meditations, complete with positive affirmations, like a real fucking hippie. In some ways these guided meditations are easier, because they offer a distraction for my mind. In other ways they are much more difficult, because every positive statement I am asked to make only makes me feel the deficits in my own self-esteem more fully.

In the interest of self-inquiry, I decided to actually record some of the thoughts that go through my mind in response to these positive affirmations. It is my hope that this might help me to clear out the bad stuff in there more thoroughly and get back to that peaceful place.

Affirmation: I am grateful for every lesson I've learned and for those I still need to learn.

Response: Eh, not really. I feel like I've already learned a lot of lessons and the thought of having to learn any more lessons seems terrifying. I'm tired. Please don't make me grow any more. I'd be totally fine with not learning any new lessons.

Affirmation: I treat myself with love and kindness, because I am a wonderful being who deserves only the best and deserves to be happy.

Response: Who says I deserve to be happy? Really I'm just another consumerist American (and one who is often a little lazy about recycling). I could rant about political issues on Facebook, call myself an activist, but my tax money still goes to drones, bombs, and missiles. If I really got what I deserved, it probably wouldn't be happiness.

P.S. Didn't the Buddha decide that life was suffering? When did it become happiness?

Affirmation: I feel pure.

Response: No.

Affirmation: I trust the process of life and I am safe.

Response: The thing about life is that we are powerless over everything: especially death. So how the hell can you trust it? Seems to me that I'd have to be pretty egomaniacal to think that life is safe and is going to work out for me. Why would it work out for me but not for other people? The truth is that I can die at any moment. Any moment! So who is to say I'm not about to die right now?

Affirmation: I am beautiful.

Response: Any time I've thought this I ended up fucking someone with whom I had to fake an orgasm and/or accidentally walking into a wall.

Affirmation: I am perfect just as I am.

Response: Sorry, I just don't feel safe thinking this. What if I accept myself too much, totally let myself go to a point where I can never get back ("back" to the insanity of the beauty industry) and then regret having loved myself?

Affirmation: My body always knows what is best for me so I always listen to my body.

Response: If I listened to what my body thought was best for me, I'd be on heroin at Panda Express right now.

Affirmation: I am very grateful for the wonderful things and events that have manifested in my life.

Response: Is it me who has actually manifested these things? Or is it mostly just the luck of the time, place, and body that my soul decided to surface in? It seems kind of mean to people who don't have wonderful things and events in their lives to say that shit sucks because they haven't done enough manifesting. I mean, aren't we all trying to manifest wonderful things? Also, I feel like some of the wonderful things in my life probably piss people off. If someone else was having a lot of wonderful things and events happening in their life, and I wasn't having any wonderful things or events happening in my life, I would hate them.

Affirmation: I feel good.

Response: No.

Affirmation: I am attracted to food and drinks with high vibrational levels.

Response: Actually I'm attracted to packaged foods that tell you how many calories they contain. Also foods like diet ice cream and Splenda, wherein you can eat a shitload of them, not gain weight, and then die of cancer.

Affirmation: I exercise my body often to keep it in perfect shape.

Response: I exercise my body often, because I have body dysmorphia and an obsessive and compulsive personality that tells me if I don't exercise a crazy amount of minutes per week I'm going to blow up into a size that is unacceptable to me.

I know that the purpose of affirmations is not to create an immediate self-love fest like MDMA might provide, but to see exactly where these deficits in my self-esteem lie. Yet I'm not sure how one overcomes so many deficits. Perhaps through doing the repeated affirmations enough I will finally give in and just be like "OK, fuck it, I'm not that bad." Or maybe I will feel better about myself based on the sheer fact that I'm not some asshole telling people that their lives would be amazing, and that they would be healthy and rich, if only they believed more.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

Buy So Sad Today: Personal Essays on Amazon, and follow her on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user steven high

According to a new report from US surgeon general, nearly 21 million Americans are struggling with substance abuse and only one out of ten are receiving treatment, ABC reports. That's more people than are currently diagnosed with any type of cancer.

The report is the first of its kind to dive into the country's addiction epidemic and is on par with the one released to the public during the AIDS/HIV crisis. It found that in 2014, approximately 50,000 Americans died from an opioid, alcohol, or other drug overdose, whereas only 32,744 died from car accidents. Of the 50,000 overdoses that year, nearly 30,000 of them were caused by heroin or prescription opioids.

"The nurses had one parting request for me," US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in the study of his former colleagues. "If you can only do one thing as surgeon general, they said, please do something about the addiction crisis in America. I have not forgotten their words."

Murthy recommends the US tackle the problem with more funding and research for potential treatment options, better screening at medical facilities, and more early intervention programs. The study also supports a shift in how people think about drug addiction in general.

"I recognize there is no single solution," Murthy writes. "For far too long, too many in our country have viewed addiction as a moral failing."

Watch: Welcome to Tonic, a New Health Channel from VICE

Photo via Pixabay user cheifyc

A doctor in Regina has been charged with professional misconduct after allegedly trading his ex weed in an effort to reclaim his Bose speakers, the CBC reports.

A Muslim woman walks in Queens on August 29, 2016, in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

You don't look Muslim. You hardly even look Arab. You pass for nearly everything and anything else. People ask if you're Italian or Spanish or Greek. Israeli. Sometimes Mexican, occasionally Argentine.

For four years, you taught a class in the Midwest, in a swing state. You loved and respected your students, and they loved and respected you—they worked hard for you and for one another, they valued your feedback, they hugged you before Thanksgiving and Christmas, they came to you after breakups and family deaths and roommate quarrels. On the third to last class each semester—far enough in so they couldn't drop, but still two classes away from course evaluations—you'd tell them that you're Muslim. Many of them were surprised. You don't look Muslim. What does a Muslim look like? you'd ask. They weren't exactly sure, they'd say, but not like you. They'd admit that when they first saw your name in the course directory, they weren't sure what to expect. They thought you'd have an indecipherable accent (they imply that they're happy you don't). They thought you'd be wearing a headscarf. You'd smile, you'd laugh a little. You wouldn't mention that while you may not look like a Muslim, you are one. You carry your Qur'an from city to city, for years you fasted during Ramadan, you love your religion, you're heartbroken over the way its been hijacked by extremists. You travel to predominately Muslim countries once or twice a year to see your family. You wouldn't mention these things. Instead you'd ask if they had ever met another Muslim. We had one in our town, an earnest, young, male student offered.

You think about that earnest, young, male student, in the days after the election. Could he both respect you and vote for him, for a man who called for measures that would blanketedly and blindly ban all Muslims from coming here, a man who's now considering forcing Muslims to register as such? Did your student choose him? Does your student know that the man's stance threatens that part of your identity, even though you are the good kind of Muslim, you are a friendly Muslim, you are different than the Muslims on TV? You wonder if you should've spent more time on your lecture against stereotypes.

You are a woman, and you look like one. You've watched men hire and promote less qualified men over you and your female friends, you've watched them maintain all male staffs. You've heard your boss say that he thought a former female co-worker was physically unattractive. He's spoken to you about his wife's reproductive issues, as though that information wasn't fiercely private to her. You think about how, interestingly, these men voted for her, claim to be #wither and against him, these men live in New York, where you now live, these men are so dissociated from their own biases, so ingrained and endemic is the misogyny. You wonder if that's the worst part of all this. You know that it isn't.

You think about your students again, you keep coming back to them. How could they simultaneously respect you, and choose him? You recall another young male student, one who laughed and pointed at the screen when you showed a news clip featuring a female commentator, called her a dyke. It was your first year teaching, you were still a rookie then, you yelled at him in front of the class. Don't use that word in here again, you said, and you watched him momentarily shrink. You wonder if you should've done it differently, if you should've taken him aside and asked him to explain why he thought the way he did instead of shutting him down, maybe you should've tried to understand, to teach him something different. Would that have helped us now?

You watch the candidate brag about sexual assault. You watch the first lady shake as she speaks about his words. "It hurts," she says, and yes, it does. You watch him laugh it off as locker room talk, you watch woman after woman come forward against him.

You hear him insult a Muslim family that lost a son in combat, a son they sacrificed to protect this country. You hear him promise to preserve "traditional family values," to overturn Supreme Court decisions. You panic. You watch him win the election, in spite of all this.

You feel more alone than ever. You feel defeated. You've been negated.

How could they simultaneously respect you, and choose him?

Again you think about those students. You think about the Iraq war vet, who said drones are not controversial; they may kill civilians, but they're the right kind of civilians. You were a more experienced teacher that time, you took him aside after class and asked him why he thought that, why he said that. You watched him color, and you came to understand that's what he'd been taught. But you have a different lesson for him. When he emails you one Friday night a few weeks later, asking you to come to the Saturday football game and watch him carry the flag across the field, you feel moved. You feel that he's including you, it's your flag too, you belong here, too. You wonder if that moment stuck with him as it stuck with you.

You think about a writing prompt you used to give in class. "I am both..." You were excited to teach about cultural duality, about overlapping identities. You designed a whole class around it, your syllabus was admirably diverse, and yet at the time you didn't know how high the stakes were. "I am both American and Muslim," you wrote to yourself, as you participated alongside them. "I am an American and a woman. I am Muslim and I am a woman and I am American. I am all of these things."

You realize now that the prompt should not have been internally driven, it should have been outwardly focused. It should not have been "I am," it should've been "you are." You should have had them look at one another, look at you, "Don't look away, don't disassociate," you should've said. "Look at me and say: You are Muslim and you are a woman and you are American."

Maybe you should've taken the prompt even further. Maybe you should've had them qualify what they saw, what they felt. "You are Muslim, and we love and respect you. You are a woman, and we love and respect you. You are Muslim and you are a woman and you are American, and we love and respect you."

You realize now you should've had them hold it all in their heads at once. You should've had them say it out loud. You realize it's not too late to say.

Zaina Arafat is a Brooklyn-based writer and is currently working on a book. Follow her on Twitter.

Former Daily Show host and pro wrestling heel Jon Stewart spoke to CBS's Charlie Rose on Thursday morning about Trump, the current state of the country, and why liberals should stop assuming all Trump voters are racists.

Stewart, who has been relatively quiet over the course of the 2016 election season—save for a few surprise cameos on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—was on CBS This Morning to promote a new oral history of The Daily Show, but the conversation inevitably focused less on the book and more on the political climate.

While Stewart was "surprised" by the election results, he makes it clear that America is still the same as it was before November 8.

"I don't believe we are a fundamentally different country today than we were two weeks ago," he told Rose. "The same country with all its grace and flaws, and volatility, and insecurity, and strength, and resilience exists today as it existed two weeks ago. The same country that elected Donald Trump elected Barack Obama. I feel badly for the people for whom this election will mean more uncertainty and insecurity. But I also feel like this fight has never been easy."

Stewart cautioned against liberals who made blanket assumptions that all Trump supporters were xenophobic racists. "There are guys in my neighborhood that I love, that I respect, that I think have incredible qualities who are not afraid of Mexicans, and not afraid of Muslims, and not afraid of blacks," he continued. "They're afraid of their insurance premiums."

Watch the full interview above.

All images are screenshots of 'The Sims'

Launched in 2000, The Sims franchise is known as one of the best-selling PC games of all time. If you were one of the seemingly few who didn't play it, it was a life simulation game where you controlled your Sims characters' fates – whether they became a lazy slob working as a bit actor, or a business mogul with a seven-bedroom mansion.

But for a lot of us, hours were spent finding new and ever more extravagant ways in which we could make our Sims die.

Since the emergence of video games, worried parents and pundits have used them as their scapegoat for whatever is ailing society. If your kids require anger management classes at ten years old, blame video games, not the merciless bullies at school. The Sims isn't often brought into this conversation, but thinking about it, maybe it should have been? Few other games needed as much pre-meditation to murder a pixellated character.

And thinking about all the virtual slaughter we committed as tiny adults now is slightly uncomfortable: Why did we want to knock them all off?

My first assumption before looking into this further was that everyone just thought it was fun to kill their Sims. From deliberately sparking a fire while whipping up a casserole to causing a minor electrical mishap in the bath, death in The Sims is comedic, which is probably why we enjoyed experimenting with the many ways in which they can perish – right?

Apparently, this is not the case – something I discovered when I first sought out former Sims players.

I made a vague Facebook post asking if any of my Facebook "friends" had been avid players of The Sims. To my surprise, the responses were plentiful. "Rosebud;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!" one friend responded, referring to the infamous cheat code where you gain a thousand "Simoleons" (the currency of The Sims universe), the semi-colons and exclamation points indicating a shortcut to multiplying the 1,000 Simoleons. Another friend wrote, "I AM READY TO OPEN UP ABOUT THIS." I felt like I had opened up a Pandora's Box of recovering Sims addicts, so I gathered my findings and brought them to Adam Lobel – game designer and a specialist in social psychology, currently based at the University of Geneva and a member of the GEMH (Games for Emotional and Mental Health) Lab in the Netherlands – who examined my respondents' testimonials.

I told Adam that, to my surprise, former players said they didn't like killing their Sims and that, instead, they wanted to take care of them and watch them grow. I also had my own mega-successful Sims who I cared for immensely, and I'd always be very sad if they died, but at the same time I wanted to experiment and see what would happen if I removed a ladder, or kept a Sim locked in a room for too long.

Adam pointed out that we have to look at player motives, especially within the context of an open-ended "sandbox game" like The Sims. "Some people will play The Sims because they love the idea of being a nurturer," he explained. "Other people might play The Sims because they just like to experiment with things and break boundaries."

I told Adam that my passion for killing Sims conflicted with my highly sensitive nature, where I tend to become depressed after seeing a sad movie. Adam explained that The Sims was likely a way for me to experiment with a side of myself that was foreign to my core personality traits. In other words, breaking my own personal boundaries – which chimed when I talked to my Facebook respondents, like my friend Will from Melbourne, who said he didn't necessarily enjoy offing his Sims, but wanted to see what would happen within the confines of the game.

"I always became overly attached to my little folks," he told me. "I definitely did the whole deleting-the-pool-stairs-while-they're-swimming-so-they-drown thing, though. I guess my motivation was to see how long they could endure constantly swimming around before they finally succumbed. And to watch the reactions of their loved ones as they stumble unwittingly upon the deceased. I also would kill Sims in order to get the Grim Reaper to show up so that one of my living Sims could seduce him."

Based on my conversations about The Sims for this article, there seem to be plenty of links between seduction and murder in the game play. For instance, Lizzi, a student from London, told me that her games "always went one way or the other".

"I had this really wholesome redheaded family and I loved them because they all matched each other and that was definitely this idealistic tendency," she said. "Then the other side of the spectrum was just total anarchy and I think it's kind of cathartic to fuck everything up."

I checked in with Adam to see if all of this – including my own experiences – were normal. He said it's all illustrative of how gameplay in general is an exploratory realm for our psyche. "That's the essence of the philosophy that we try to bring to studying the benefits of gaming," he said. "We try to look at it as this safe space for emotional development and self-discovery."

So ultimately, if you were one of the many players who killed your creations during the Great Sims Boom of the early 2000s, chances are you're not a closeted murderer. And who knows who'd you be without it.

@kristencochrane

More on gaming:

How Doom 2 Helped Me Understand Technology

Why It's So Hard to Make a Video Game

The Curious Appeal of Crunch

All photos by Alice Aedy

We've all heard of the Calais "jungle." We've read news stories of families uprooted from their homes, of shaky security at night, of the fires that burned as the French government cleared the camp in October.

But tucked into marshland by a Dunkirk forest, near the northern French town of Grande-Synthe are the remains of a refugee tent city we've heard very little about. Its conditions were described by the director of emergency medical aid charity MSF UK as "some of the worst that I have seen in 20 years of humanitarian work." In March, it was cleared. Documentary photographer Alice Aedy, working for humanitarian organization Help Refugees, saw it for herself.

"The most striking thing about the camp in Grande-Synthe was its location—a forest, with a residential road and huge, beautiful houses just opposite," she says. "The juxtaposition of these two worlds was truly shocking." Aedy would wonder how people who lived just down the road could turn a blind eye. "The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about 'the danger of a single story,'" she says. "I think the negative media narrative about refugees allows people to convince themselves that they are different. And when you believe that, it is easier to ignore their suffering."

Aedy says she's returned to both Calais and Dunkirk for the past eight months. In the time since the camp was cleared of its 2,000 or so inhabitants, she has been back to Grande-Synthe to document what has been left behind—the items set aside, discarded in the rush to leave, or put down when there wasn't room to cram anything else in. "The objects, set into the ground or submerged in overgrown plants, are like scars in the ground," she says. "They are a memory of the suffering that has happened here."

When you stand that close to a humanitarian crisis that has become tabloid fodder, a site of anxieties about migration, and a tool for political manipulation, you see its complexities and conflicts in 3D. How does it feel to look at both the media representation of refugee camps and the reality on the ground? "The media has created a dichotomy, that we have all heard: one between the 'economic migrant' and the 'refugee.' This creates a hierarchy based on nationality or ethnicity, between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' movers. On Wednesday, we heard that only Sudanese and Syrian unaccompanied minors would have the right to come to the UK—meanwhile children from Afghanistan, who grew up in a country at war, won't be given that same right...The media presents refugees as criminals, even though they are victims of war and poverty," she says.

The area has been locked and fenced, "with a ditch dug around it to avoid the forest reemerging as a refugee camp," and inhabitants moved to a new camp nearby. Remembering what once stood, waterlogged in and around the forest, feels like the least Aedy can do to remind people that Calais wasn't the only pressure point in a crisis we still haven't solved.

Follow Alice Aedy on Twitter.

Donald Trump at a rally in Virginia in September. (L. Todd Spencer/The Virginian-Pilot via AP)

President-elect Donald Trump is hiring! According to a Washington Post summary of the process, the new president, who has never worked for a government before, needs to figure out who should fill about 3,800 temporary government jobs, many of them obscure, in order to keep the executive branch humming along. It's been a bumpy ride. Not only has Trump not nominated any cabinet members, reports have emerged of the transition team fighting amongst themselves, and as of Wednesday Trump's people hadn't yet contacted many federal agencies, including the State Department and the Pentagon, to go over the nuts and bolts of the handover—a tricky operation even in the best of times.

Part of the problem seems to be that Trump didn't expect to win and therefore may not have given a lot of thought to the nuts and bolts of being president—Trump reportedly didn't know he even had to hire all his own people to work in the West Wing until he visited Barack Obama last week.

To find out how bad is this early confusion at the top of the incoming executive branch is, and what might happen if Trump delays making these hires, I called up Berkeley political science professor Sean Gailmard, who specializes in bureaucratic politics and executive branch structure. Gailmard said even if you aren't a fan of Trump, you probably shouldn't be cheering for lots of human resources fuck-ups inside his government.

VICE: What happens when there are staffing problems in the executive branch of the federal government?
Sean Gailmard: One of the things you see is an erosion of executive capacity and expertise ," and that's where the short-term political appointments starting really took off under Nixon, and especially under Reagan.

But even if staff turnover has been a problem in recent decades, what are some specific new problems we might see if the executive branch is short-staffed?
First of all, will definitely be able to fill all of the secretary spots, and all of the assistant secretary spots, and things like that. Where they're gonna have trouble is when they get to the undersecretary level and they get to something called Schedule C appointments, which are people that are even below that, but are presidential appointees.

What will we see in the coming months if they can't get those slots filled?
In the short run you could have career staff from the agencies kind of step in on an ad-hoc interim basis and manage programs if they really need to be managed.

OK. And in the long term?
There'll just be offices that don't get staffed, programs that don't get run. To some extent, you could say, "It's just memos that don't get written!" but you have someone like the undersecretary of state for analysis of cyberterrorism in Southeast Asia—they have a person who works on that—and if they don't find a person who's qualified to do it, then we just don't have the government doing systematic analysis of that area.

To what extent are these staff members going to be ideological tools Trump will use to execute his political agenda?
It depends a lot on the agency. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), roughly zero. These are people who study weather patterns and climate patterns, and the National Weather Service. They're just collecting data, disseminating information, and providing information to the FAA, airports, and things like that—just garden variety program implementation. The Social Security Administration? They get requests for money, check the eligibility, and cut checks. That's all they do.

And what if these more apolitical administrations have hundreds of empty desks?
Some of those programs are designed to target a specialized group of recipients, like the Railroad Retirement Board. Most people aren't gonna feel that, but people who worked on railroads, and didn't participate in Social Security, if those people don't get their retirement, they're certainly gonna feel it, because they're not gonna have their retirement payments. People in their communities would notice in a secondary sense, because these are people who are without government support that they were promised.

How big can you see the impact of understaffing being?
In cases like that, it's a matter of honoring commitments, and many people won't see it. A few thousand or tens of thousands would see something like that. But if you started sprinkling those across the entire government, people would start to see it.

And what would you say to a small-government advocate who wants to tear these systems down?
It's a matter of, does the executive branch live up to the commitments expressed in law, and passed by Congress over the years?

What if there were gaps in the more overtly political departments like the Department of State? Should Trump's opponents want to see him fail to hire enough people there?
A lot of what these people do in the Department of State is implementing stuff. They write memos, analysis, and provide information about conditions going on in various parts in the world that could affect the interests of the United States. If you don't have these offices staffed, you just don't have coordination, or information about threats to the interests of the United States in those areas. If there's a corner of the world where a threat begins to materialize, or something that effects the interests of the United States begins to materialize, and that office isn't staffed, then the federal government is not equipped to detect it, and not equipped to format a response to it and deal with it.

In general, what goes through your head when you imagine Donald Trump in charge of all this staffing?
Does he have people who have federal level executive experience? A New York City mayor and a New Jersey governor of questionable ethical standing—although he's now disfavored—these are not the prime time, A-list, varsity team of American government. Are these people really equipped to take over the federal government? That's really not clear. It would make people more comfortable if there were somebody who knew how to make the trains run on time at the federal level.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Ugh. Photo via Facebook.

My uncle, a rabid Donald Trump supporter, has spent the last week gleefully posting racist memes on Facebook.

He lives in Australia and immigrated there from Fiji decades ago. Most of our family, including my parents, left Fiji for Western countries, including Australia, the US, and Canada.

Suffice to say, I couldn't help but point out to my uncle the irony of his view that "Muslims remain in a Muslim country where their way of life is the norm."

The conversation got heated, and ended with him calling me "delusional" like the rest of "the media" while I advised him that most of the articles he posts (he doesn't believe in climate change) are based on conspiracy theories and that as a bearded brown guy, I wouldn't be surprised if he was labelled a terrorist by the same soon-to-be-administration he admires so much. In short: we got nowhere, and I started to wonder if our exchange was actually a microcosm for my job.

I didn't become a journalist to write about race. But in the last year or so, I've found myself focusing on it a lot. It feels like Canada has been having a race moment. While some are content to pretend we live in a colourblind utopia (looking at you, #meanwhileinCanada), damning reports like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and viral videos of assholes spewing hate make it hard to deny that both systemic and individual racism are the reality for many Canadians.

Conversations about race can be uncomfortable but I've believed them to be necessary if anything is ever going to change.

Now I'm not so sure.

Read more: Canada's Not Immune From a Trump-Style 'Whitelash'

Despite being repeatedly put on blast for his racism and xenophobia, Trump won the presidency, suggesting that his followers, the vast majority of them white, either weren't listening or didn't care.

The most hate mail or Twitter harassment I receive is when I publish a story about racism. In addition to being called disgusting slurs, like "sand n---er," I'm frequently labelled as anti-white. Or a race baiter. Often, it seems like the people who are so vehemently rejecting what I'm saying haven't read past the headline before making up their minds. Their demands that I be fired, kill myself, or go back from whence I came (which is Vancouver, FTR) only serve to prove my point.

On the flip side, it feels like those who are inclined to share my work are already on side. So is there really a point? (And yes, that goes for this column too.)

A recent Vox article suggested that calling a racist "racist" doesn't help. It cites a Stanford/Berkeley study on transphobia that found having brief conversations that appeal to the empathy of people with prejudice views is more effective than calling them a bigot.

We've been hearing a lot of this in the aftermath of the election. How we need to take seriously the concerns of disenfranchised rural white voters, instead of calling them out on their racial biases. I don't think those things are mutually exclusive though. It is absolutely true that politicians need to consider the struggles of that demographic. But putting the work on non-racists or people of colour to appeal to someone's empathy is unfair. It's 2016. If you haven't figured out what constitutes as racism, go read a fucking book. It shouldn't be up to the most marginalized groups to educate or placate the racists around them.

I don't have any real prescriptions for this conundrum. What I know for sure is that in the days since Trump was elected, racists on both sides of the border have been emboldened. We've seen high school students dropping the n-bomb; women having hijabs ripped off their heads; swastikas being graffitied onto synagogues.

The hate is real and it's not going anywhere. It feels like the least we can do is continue to call it what it is and bear witness.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.