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The Liberals Are Sending Former Police Chief Bill Blair on a National Weed Tour

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Liberal MP Bill Blair—formerly known as Toronto's chief of police—has reportedly started a cross-country tour to meet and talk with Canadians about the upcoming legalization of marijuana.

The announcement, which came via the Department of Justice yesterday, says that Blair—along with Attorney General of Canada Jody Wilson-Raybould—will be meeting with Canadians and "various stakeholders" in the cannabis economy to help better understand and formulate the execution of the Trudeau government's long-awaited legalization process.

The statement also notes that one of the main focuses of the government's legalization effort is to keep cannabis "out of the hands of children and the profits out of the hands of criminals"—a fitting statement considering that was pretty much the MO of Blair before he became a politician.

"I look forward to meeting with Canadians from across the country to hear their perspectives on regulating access to legal cannabis. We know that the current system of prohibition through the criminal justice system is not protecting the health and safety of Canadians, especially our young people," a statement on behalf of Blair reads.

"These meetings, along with the work of the Task Force on Cannabis Legalization and Regulation and the online consultations, will help inform the development of legislation to be introduced in Parliament this spring."

Blair, who has been at the helm of the government's legalization task force since 2016, has fielded criticism from activists like Marc and Jodie Emery—owners of the dispensary chain Cannabis Culture. Jodie Emery took to Twitter Thursday morning to decry Blair as disingenuous.

"Really @BillBlair? Will you finally talk to me like YOU said you wanted to in Ottawa last year? I've been on front lines for years," Emery wrote, before going on to criticize the government for not decriminalizing cannabis in the lead up to legalization.

"What a warped, twisted message. Ending prohibition means ending criminalization, not waging war on cannabis - that's prohibition!"

Dates and locations for the tour have not been announced yet.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

Lead image via Flickr user Bruce Reeve.


Suspect in Kim Jong-nam Assassination Says She Thought It Was a TV Prank

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A 25-year-old Indonesian woman suspected of helping assassinate Kim Jong-un's half-brother in Malaysia on Monday says she thought the whole thing was a TV prank, the Guardian reports.

Indonesia's national police chief, Tito Karnavian, says the woman—Siti Aisyah—claims that she's taken part in stunts where she sprays men in the face with water and allegedly figured this was another similar prank aimed at Kim Jong-nam. In reality, the spray was a fast-acting toxin that led to Jong-nam's death.

"Such an action was done three or four times and they were given a few dollars for it, and with the last target, Kim Jong-nam, allegedly there were dangerous materials in the sprayer," Karnavian said, according to the Guardian. "She was not aware that it was an assassination attempt by alleged foreign agents."

Siti was taken into custody on Thursday with a man suspected to be her boyfriend after police reviewed CCTV footage of the attack, which took place in the shopping section of Kuala Lumpur's airport. The footage reportedly shows two women—one of whom is suspected to be Siti—approach Jong-nam, hold him in a chokehold, and spray him with the toxin.

South Korean officials say that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un ordered the assassination on his half-brother following a previous failed attempt in 2011, though there is no proof yet that the leader was behind this week's supposed TV prank turned murder.

How Dangerous Is It to Take Expired Drugs?

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We don't need to tell you that prescription medications are getting exorbitantly expensive. In 2015, spending on prescription drugs in the US rose to $457 billion, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, an 8 percent jump from the previous year. How much you paid out of pocket probably depends your issues and insurance, but consumers are feeling the increase.

A recent Consumer Reports survey found that a third of patients reported an increase in prescription drug costs, with most of them absorbing an average of $39 more per refill. Much of this problem is due to spikes in the prices of generic drugs. Among those for whom the price of pills shot up, 40 percent spent less on dining and entertainment, and 32 scrimped on groceries.

So given that people are bracing themselves at the CVS checkout, some might be tempted to swallow an expired antibiotic or pull an old pill jar from the back of the medicine cabinet. But is that really such a good idea?

"Long story short, if it is a tablet or capsule and is being used for a non-serious disease, where the results of sub-potency aren't devastating, it's likely okay to take it up to a year or two after the expiration date," says C. Michael White, head of the department of pharmacy practice at the University of Connecticut's School of Pharmacy.

Read more on Tonic

What We Know About the Alleged Dylann Roof Wannabe

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A man with ties to white supremacist prison groups was arrested in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, this week after allegedly trying to buy a handgun from an undercover federal agent so he could commit a racially motivated attack "in the spirit of Dylann Roof."

Prior to his arrest on Wednesday, 29-year-old Benjamin McDowell reportedly started posting about Charleston shooter Dylann Roof on Facebook, expressing frustration that fellow "tattoos wearing" members didn't have "the heart to fight for Yahweh like dylann roof did."

In December, McDowell wrote a somewhat cryptic post on Facebook that linked to the website of a local conservative Jewish synagogue, saying, "I love love to act what u think." Then in January, McDowell allegedly used Facebook Messenger in an attempt to find a gun, or an "iron." He linked up with an undercover FBI agent, who he thought "handled problems for the Aryan Nations." The two met at a Myrtle Beach hotel where McDowell is said to have expressed his desire to get his hands on a firearm and commit an attack against non-whites without getting caught.

"I seen what Dylann Roof did and in my heart I reckon I got a little bit of hatred and I want to do that shit," he reportedly told the agent, adding, "If I could do something on a fucking big scale and write on the fucking building or whatever, 'In the spirit of Dylann Roof.'"

On Wednesday, McDowell met with the agent again to purchase a .40-caliber Glock and hollow point ammunition for $109, the New York Times reports. Shortly after the purchase, he was searched and arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm. He's currently being held at the Florence County Detention Center awaiting his detention hearing scheduled for next Tuesday. His previous arrests centered on allegations of malicious injury to animals, third-degree assault, and marijuana possession, among other offenses, according to a local NBC affiliate.

McDowell's apparent inspiration, white supremacist Dylann Roof, was sentenced to death last month for gunning down nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church in June 2015. This month, President Trump's White House reportedly began drawing up plans to revamp the nation's Counter Terrorism Program to focus solely on "radical Islamic terrorism."

Gun Control Shouldn't Mean Stigmatizing the Mentally Ill

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I do not like guns. In fact, I absolutely despise them. I see no reason for civilians to have guns and would be very content if we considerably increased gun control in the United States. But gun control must be approached in the right way—limiting access to guns must be an across-the-board effort that applies to all segments of Americans. Put differently, we cannot—and should not—restrict access to guns (or any right) for certain groups based on bias and speculation.

On December 19, 2016, the Social Security Administration (SSA) issued final rules to implement provisions of the NCIS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 (NIAA), which require federal agencies to provide certain individuals' records to the attorney general for inclusion in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NCIS). This rule, which was part of Barack Obama's late-term efforts to strengthen gun control, prohibited people with mental disabilities who receive Social Security benefits and have a selected representative to manage their finances from purchasing firearms.

This month, both the House and Senate have voted to repeal this rule, a move that most Republicans supported and most Democrats opposed. It is now headed to President Donald Trump for his signature, which he will presumably provide. Many supporters of gun control were outraged; the Brady campaign and center issued a strong statement challenging the reversal, asserting that Congress had voted to "Make American Dangerous Again."

Notably, however, the response has not been entirely along usual ideology lines. Indeed, some traditionally liberal and conservative groups have found themselves on the same side of the issue, making for unusual alliances.

The ACLU, for example, urged Congress to disapprove the SSA regulation, stating, "We oppose this rule because it advances and reinforces the harmful stereotype that people with mental disabilities, a vast and diverse group of citizens, are violent."

Disability advocates and organizations have similarly found themselves on the same side as pro-gun groups. As Ari Ne'eman, CEO of MySupport.com, wrote for Vox, "While congressional Democrats have been admirable allies to the disability community on the vast majority of issues, when it comes to gun violence, both parties use people with mental illness as props—in ways that don't help public safety, and that put vulnerable people at risk. In this case, it was the Democrats that got the issue wrong."

As a disabled woman, I too have found myself in a very bizarre and unfamiliar place. I am liberal and typically an unwavering proponent of measures to restrict firearms purchases. I am also an advocate for disability rights. While I truly believe the United States desperately needs much stronger gun control laws, I also believe restrictions must be evidence-based rather than a result of bias. For instance, rules against domestic abusers buying firearms are based on well-established links between domestic violence and gun deaths. The Obama administration's rule barring certain people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities from buying guns implies that, like abusers, they cannot be trusted with guns—an assumption that is false and perpetuates stigma toward a vulnerable group.

To understand the problems with this rule, we need to get into granular specifics. If fully implemented (compliance was not required until December 2017), this rule would have forbidden firearms purchases from people with mental disabilities who receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and who have been appointed a representative payee. Specifically, the rule mandated that SSA send to NCIS the names of all SSDI and SSI beneficiaries who have a mental impairment and utilize a designated individual to assist with managing financial affairs.

First, while proponents of the rule assert that the rule applies to a very small and discrete group of people, it actually applies to people with a wide-range of disabilities. Indeed, SSA includes 11 categories under the umbrella of mental impairments: "neurocognitive disorders, schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, depressive, bipolar and related disorders, intellectual disorder, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, somatic symptom and related disorders, personality and impulse-control disorders, autism spectrum disorder, neurodevelopmental disorders, eating disorders, and trauma- and stressor-related disorders." Thus, people with vastly different diagnoses and symptoms would be affected.

Second, this rule only applies to individuals who have been designated a representative payee—someone who helps the beneficiary manage his or her finances. A representative payee is a person (usually a family member or friend) or an organization chosen by SSA to receive benefits on behalf of a beneficiary. SSA appoints a representative payee if the agency determines the beneficiary has difficulties managing his or her own finances. Notably, SSA regulations explicitly state that representative payees may be appointed even if the individual with a disability is considered legally competent.

The rules restricting firearm purchases state the intent is to apply to those who lack mental capacity to manage their own affairs. This is inconsistent: Representative payees are appointed for individuals who may need additional assistance with managing their financial affairs, not all of their affairs. Many people with representative payees do not have guardians and are therefore legally able to manage their own lives. They can sign contracts, get married, consent to medical treatment, possess a driver's license, make end-of-life decisions, vote in elections, and determine where they live.

It should also be emphasized that just as being mentally or intellectually disabled does not make one incompetent; it also does not mean one is more likely to be dangerous. A large and growing body of research has found that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disabilities are not violent or suicidal. In fact, research has consistently revealed that people with psychiatric disabilities are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Moreover, no evidence exists that indicates that people with representative payees are more likely to engage in gun violence.

Equating psychiatric disabilities with gun violence is unjust and stigmatizing. For far too long the media has portrayed those with mental illness as dangerous, based on a few high-profile shootings rather than the realities of mental illness. These misconceptions result in isolation and discrimination.

As a someone who is very anti-gun, I understand the desire to limit access of firearm purchases. The tragedies that happened in Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and Orlando should never have happened. Nor should the countless deaths from gun violence that we don't hear about. The truth is, we do need gun control, and Americans know this. Eighty-five percent of gun owners support universal background checks. Republican-led efforts to loosen gun regulations are based on the dangerous idea that everyone should be able to buy any gun they want at any time, a notion that can only lead to more tragedies. Gun control advocates are generally right to oppose this—but they should make sure they do not embrace bad policies based on stereotypes.

We cannot give up. We owe it to the countless number of people affected by gun violence to finally end this phenomenon. It's time we enact effective—and unbiased—gun control.

Robyn Powell is a proud disabled woman, attorney, researcher, and freelance writer.

A Mississauga Teacher Taught His Class How To Make and Inject Crystal Meth

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A Mississauga middle school teacher who thought it was a good idea to give his students instructions on how to cook and inject crystal meth has been suspended.

According to the CBC, the teacher at Erin Mills Middle School printed off the instructions as part of a "skit" for his Grade 8 class.

The mother of one of the students, Delight Greenidge, told the CBC she was shocked when her son brought home the print out instructions, which also advised the kids to act "scared" when cooking the meth and "happy" when injecting it. Points for authenticity, I guess.

"To think that all of what I've tried so hard to teach him — good principles, good values, moral character — the things that make you a man, a strong black man, and this is what an educator is giving to my child," she said.

Greenridge said the meth "skit" was plan B and that originally the kids were going to do an exercise about an old TV show. (To be fair, it sounds like they pretty much still ended up doing that.)

Peel school board said the teacher has been suspended with pay pending an investigation. He reportedly got the instructions off the internet.

"I can't speak to his rationale," Carla Pereira, communications manager at the school board, told the CBC, noting the board shares parents' concerns over the assignment.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Subreddit of the Week: Emu War Flashbacks

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Have you ever thought about how truly terrifying emus are?

The motherfuckers are like six feet tall, ugly as sin, and have goddamn razors on their feet. These friggin' birds are dinosaurs and, if you look into their cold, dead eyes, it's easy to see they want blood—human blood, your blood, my blood.

Now, with that fear-mongering in mind, would you go to war with these creatures?

No? That's what I thought—I wouldn't either (we can hang out in my emu proof bomb shelter and like listen to emo tunes or something else cowards do)—but, there is one group that will go to war with these feathered barbarians. May I introduce you to the fun folks of subreddit Emu War Flashback?

They're something else.

To start, perhaps I should explain to you what the Great Emu War was (yes, it's a real thing). It took place in Australia in the 1930s when, and I'm paraphrasing here, a bunch of crazy Aussie bastards, mostly soldiers, mowed down emus with machine guns because they were a nuisance. The emus turned out to be wily little bastards and at first kind of outsmarted the soldiers, one general even compared the birds to the famous Zula Warriors.

"They can face machine-guns with the invulnerability of tanks," one commander said at the time. "They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum [hollow point] bullets could not stop."

After being outsmarted by the flightless birds the army started utilizing guerrilla tactics and wiped out over 50,000 of them, still, the operation was a considered a failure because, to this day, emus rule Western Australia with the heartless abandon that only a soulless, flightless bird can muster.

A image posted by user HadesNightOut with the caption "A Lasting Image."

The subreddit takes this narrative and expands on it, creating lore, characters, and an active story as if the war was ongoing. It's creative, charming, and down-and-dirty pure internet weirdness cultivated by some rather amazing storytellers and content creators.

Adam W., a 18-year-old high school senior, who goes by Fumblerful on Reddit, created the subreddit last year as, more or less, a joke in response to the 'Nam flashback meme. The Emu war was already a meme on Reddit but since the forum's humble beginnings though the group has grown into something else entirely.

"The lore they created is a struggle for survival. In the first emu war, human forces fought against an emu coalition," Adam told me in an interview. "The emu had the help of many other birds like Cassowaries and magpies. Human forces from around the world joined the Australians in beating back the emu menace. Humans were successful but took heavy losses."

Goddamn bro, can you write a movie?

A image posted by user rowdiness with the caption "The popular myth that emus are 'flightless' is incorrect."

The subreddit has an official canon of the war, one that is moved forwards by some of the major storytellers and group consensus. A comprehensive history (maybe?) can be found here. There are three main types of content that populate the subreddit, images, stories and emus in the news. The group maintains a Google doc that keeps the events in chronological order.

When the subreddit first started, the content was rather sporadic and hard to follow, according to Adam. To remedy this, a while back the subreddit had a vote and made some of the more prolific and creative posters the generals of the war.

"These generals post a lot of stories and also help maintain an official canon and timeline," Adam said. "If someone wants to completely change the tide of the war or remove a city they consult the generals to see if it fits the narrative."

"A single user should not decide Darwin is officially nuked but if many decide Darwin is nuked, it is," he added.

Adam admits though that even know the content can be hard to follow for a first-time user, thanks to the may splintering story lines and injokes. One of the most spectacular in-jokes, in my opinion, is the appearance of the "fallen great war hero" Steve Irwin—solely because of the video of him running down and catching an emu with his bare hands.

Adam said that some in the group have become close over their mutual appreciation of storytelling, creativity and, well weirdness. When his pet passed away suddenly he came forward with his grief and the group supported him.

"I was in shock and awful grieving. I decided to reach out to emuwarflashbacks to see if they had some sympathy. I remember another subreddit owner doing that and how it may have helped them," said Adam.

"Being on Reddit, one of the things I learned was the importance of a stranger's sympathy. It isn't expected of them to feel your pain so when they do, it means a lot."

Since starting the subreddit, it has grown from 100 or so followers and contributors to close to over 18,000. Adam said that he is "gratified and thrilled" to be a part of it and is honoured to give a platform to such creative people.

"It still feels a little unreal," Adam said. "I have seen a few articles written about the emu war recently and I can chuckle knowing I might have had something to do with that."

I think we can all agree that keeping the memory of the Great Emu War alive is a noble pursuit—so, Emu War veterans, keep fighting the good fight.

Give those flightless bastards hell for us.

Lead image: A post by Hobbes1945 with the caption: "Emus Preparing for War."

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

This Raccoon Riding on a Garbage Truck Is the Only Thing in DC That Makes Sense

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Things in DC are pretty shitty right now. Our political system has become a hacky Tom Clancy novel, congressmen are trying to make appeals for sanity by forcing Stranger Things references into their speeches, and Trump made Chris Christie force down a plate of meatloaf like he's a grown-up Bruce Bogtrotter from Matilda.

But, lo, not all is so bad. Just feast your eyes on this one intrepid raccoon who hitched a ride on the back of a garbage truck in our nation's capital Friday morning. His photo was captured by Politico writer Helena Evich, who tweeted it out for all to see. The world may make little sense right now, but this raccoon's motivations are clear.

Can you see the mixture of wonder and terror in his tiny raccoon eyes? Those are eyes that know that this dangerous ride on the back of the garbage truck will lead him—if his luck holds—to the mecca of trash that is the dump. There, he will feast and feast on all the food scraps society has thrown away, gorging himself on the world's waste.

Godspeed, young beast. May you dip your paws in a pool of cool, clear water before devouring your weight in old meat. Your journey gives us all hope. You are the only ray of light inside the Beltway today.


How Often Do You Think Beyoncé Regrets Being in 'Goldmember'?

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There is a fairly common belief held in our society. A belief which posits that Beyoncé is #flawless to the point of being an advanced humanoid from the future who does not have the capacity to do anything misguided or embarrassing. As far as theories go, it makes a lot of sense. Apart from the journalist responsible for that Huffington Post article claiming Bey has yet to "earn" her Album of the Year Grammy, most people concur that Lemonade is an audio-visual masterpiece, with her 2013 self-titled being the only other recent release that comes close.

On stage, she is a force beyond approach—like a natural disaster, but a good one. She announced her first pregnancy by bursting open a sequin dinner jacket and sensually rubbing her tummy after blasting through all of the 5,000 key changes of "Love On Top." Her thighs work harder than the UN. Beyoncé is un-fucking-real. Except, guys, we are all forgetting something. Something terrible, something important. No, not her starring role in a hip-hop adaptation of Bizet's Carmen, which sounds like Destiny's Child doing "Trapped In The Closet". We are forgetting the 2002 motion picture Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Read more on Noisey

Climate Change Skeptic Scott Pruitt Is Now Going to Run the EPA

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The Senate voted to put Scott Pruitt—a fossil fuel-loving, climate change-doubting former Oklahoma attorney general—in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, despite fierce opposition from hundreds of the agency's current and former employees, Politico reports.

The 52-46 vote was divided down party lines, except for Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine who voted against Pruitt, and Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota who voted for his confirmation.

As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt fought against President Obama's climate change regulations and sued the agency he's now going to run 14 times. Now as head of the EPA, Pruitt will have to regulate the very companies he's sought to protect, like Continental Resources and Devon Energy. He was confirmed before having to disclose thousands of emails he exchanged with fossil fuel companies he's fought for in the past.

Pruitt will likely aid Trump in his vision to "get rid of" the EPA "in almost every form." The Trump administration has already placed a press gag order on the agency's staff, told them not to believe what they see in the news, and planned to vet all scientific studies before they can be released to the public. Now that Pruitt is running the show, Trump is reportedly planning a trip to EPA headquarters where he will likely sign a string of executive orders to revamp the agency as a whole.

We Spoke With the MP Behind Motion M103 About Threats, Conspiracies, and Islamophobia

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It's been tumultuous and tense few weeks in Canada, to say the least.

Earlier this month, six Muslim men praying in a mosque were murdered in cold blood by a young man who has been described as being radicalized by far-right nationalist leaders. Now, counterintuitively, an anti anti-Islamophobia movement is gaining strength in Canada.  

At the centre of the most current controversy stands Iqra Khalid, the Liberal member of parliament for Mississauga-Erin Mills. In December, Khalid tabled motion M103 which is entitled "Systemic racism and religious discrimination." Over the last few weeks, the motion was seized upon by the far and alt-right who spread conspiracy theories about it in rapid fashion—some of which accused Khalid of attempting to make Canada a Sharia compliant state.

In reality, the motion asks the government to "condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination" and asks for the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage to conduct a study for a "whole-of-government approach" for the problem of systematic racism and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia.

In response to the motion, the Rebel, Canada's B-rate Breitbart, held an "Emergency Rally for Free Speech" which, unsurprisingly, was full of dumb, rambling incoherent statements, self-victimization and more racist dog whistles than David Duke's local dog park. According to Khalid, herself has received hate and death threats by the thousands. Four federal Conservative leadership candidates decided that it would be a good use of their time to speak at this event.

M103 was debated upon in parliament, but the vote will be put off until early April. During the debate Khalid read some of the death threats and messages she's received.

VICE reached out to Khalid to talk about the goal of M103, conspiracy theories, creeping Sharia, and dealing with death threats.

You can see the full interview in it's entirety below.

VICE: Why did you bring forward M103 and what is its purpose?
Khalid: Being the person that I am and look like, I realized that Canada is a diverse country and our diversity is really our strength and we need to keep building on that so, you know, I saw the e-petition through MP Frank Baylis that received 70,000 signatures almost calling on the government to act on issues like Islamophobia. So I brought forward a motion that was broader in scope that called on our government to study all issues revolving around systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia here in Canada.

I tabled it in December and never in my wildest imagination did I think that Quebec would happen which just makes it all that much more relevant. So, I'm really looking forward to this study being initiated.

There was a very similar motion passed in October with unanimous consent . Why do you think there has been such a turn around for some politicians and their supporters on this notion?
I really don't know. I mean the definition of Islamophobia, in the house at least, there has been nothing added to it, nothing taken away since the motion was passed unanimously condemning Islamophobia.

I understand that the party in opposition is having divisiveness within their own leadership race at this point but I think that we really need shift and to keep out focus on the very, very important issue of systemic racism and religious discrimination here in Canada.

The thing about the whole discussion is that, agree or disagree, there are cognizant criticisms to be made about free speech in Canada but instead of making those arguments the majority of dissenters are focusing upon what can easily be described as conspiracy theories. Did the way the criticisms of the motion take shape surprise you? I was surprised, I thought that especially in respect to the opposition I would think that everyone would know the difference between a bill and a motion. I mean a motion is not legislation, it's not law. [It's] merely asking, very nicely, for the government to ask the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage to study this issue.

A major part of the criticism has been the notion that, in the end, the study will bring about stringent hate speech laws outlawing any form of Islamophobia. Is there any chance, in the end, that this could wind up curtailing freedom of speech?
Definitely not!

Like I said this is a motion, not legislation, not law at all and I would be the first person to oppose anything that goes against our charter of rights and freedoms. This motion is really about bringing marginalized communities to the table and hearing what they have to say, this is really about initiating dialogue, initiating conversation—a very important conversation about race and discrimination in Canada.

People are using M103 to kind of push anti anti-Islamophobia, to an extent, today there was an anti-M103 rally outside of a mosque in Toronto where people shouted "ban Islam."

As the person who brought M103 forward, what does it feel like to see that happen based around this motion?
I think that it, again, really highlights the fact that there is Islamophobia in Canada and that the almost 70,000 people that signed that e-petition, to begin with, which brought all of this upon us were right that this is an issue that we need to tackle head on to be proactive.

I've felt it to. I felt it through the hate messages I've received and the threats. It just strengthens my resolve, I really want to make sure that we're making sure we're building bridges among Canadian communities instead of dividing them.

So, for the last week, you've kind of lived as enemy number one of the far and alt-right in Canada. For you personally, how bad has the backlash gotten?
I was looking at our inbox this morning so we have about 65,000 emails that we haven't gone through. I mean, I appreciate that this has highlighted the extent of the problem and I was very, very glad that we had all of yesterday to debate this issue in the house and to really shed light on a very, very important problem that about a million of us Canadians are facing.

This is not just about the Muslim community, right? Racism is really interconnected and we all face it in some ways.

The backlash that you have received, you've received death threats which you read some out yesterday. People are calling you names that I'm not going to repeat, there has been personal attacks, attacks on you as a politician.

How on a personal level are you dealing with that? 
I have a great caucus, I have a great staff, an amazing family and we've been dealing with all of this together. Nothing is in a vacuum, everything affects everybody here in Canada. The support that I've received from the Prime Minister personally, from Minster Melanie Jolie and all of caucus, it's kind of overwhelming.

I can definitely say it overshadows the hate.

Can you describe the hate? 
It was just appalling, being called a draper head, being told that people are going to burn down mosques, people calling me a terrorist Muslim, that they would watch somebody shoot me and would film me lying on the ground and laugh.

It really shed light on the issue, it really shed light on the extent of systemic racism and religious discrimination in Canada, including Islamophobia here in Canada. But the messages of support were overwhelming and they really made me understand how many people are actually facing it. I had fourth generation Canadians emailing me and saying "this is the right thing to do, thank you for doing it." Those messages met a lot more to me than the outright hate and threats we've received.

Any chance of you backing down?
No. Hell no! Whoops, sorry.

Nah, it's all good, this is VICE.

So, I suppose I have to ask, is this all part of a secret Islamic plot to bring Sharia law to Canada? I would like you to tell the truth to me!
No sir. I would be the first person to oppose such a thing. I am very much in love with our multicultural, secular society here in Canada and I will do everything I can to protect it.

Lead photo via Facebook.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

Canada's Largest 'Urban Reservation' Fights Back

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On an all new episode of RISE, we travel to the capital city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, where Canada's largest "Urban Rez" takes back the streets, battling the intergenerational effect of residential schools, poverty, high crime, and violence directed at girls and women.

RISE airs Fridays at 9 PM on VICELAND

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

The Real Scandal of the Trump Administration Is How Little It's Accomplished

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In the lead-up to Donald Trump's inauguration, political observers braced for a flurry of substantive executive and legislative activity. Trump had promised to make radical changes to everything from foreign policy to healthcare to immigration, and had the backing of a Congress controlled by a particularly right-wing version of the GOP. And Trump has been a busy boy these past four weeks, as he has been eager to point out—most recently in his bizarre press conference on Thursday. Yet while Trump has kept America preoccupied with a never-ending stream of executive actions, bold proclamations, and scandals, as I've previously written, most of his actions have been more showmanship than substance.

Sure, some of his moves have had real and dire consequences. For instance, Trump's broadening the definition of who Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents should target has led to hundreds of undocumented immigrants being detained who would not typically have been scooped up in raids. The ham-handed rollout of the travel and refugee ban resulted in widespread confusion and fear. And Trump's nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court will likely have far-reaching consequences. Congress has made some notable moves too, using an obscure procedure to rescind three late Obama-era federal agency rules and indefinitely block the introduction of similar new rules—a tactic experts say we're likely to see more of in the near future—and passing a few minor bills.

But Trump has not actually done as much as quickly as many of his supporters had hoped and the Republican Congress, despite continued promises it will be making moves, has come under fire from conservative pundits for its apparent lethargy. The Affordable Care Act is still in place, the Iran nuclear deal is intact, not even a brick of the wall has been laid. So what exactly is holding up the promised great Trumpian deluge of governmental action, and when might we start to see more motion?

According to Molly Reynolds, a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, Trump is outwardly ready and willing to roll ahead with his agenda. However, she says, "He will need Congress's cooperation to take things further" than just making statements of intent via executive actions. And Congress is blocked up by a host of internal and external factors.

Ever since Trump's inauguration, a contentious confirmation process for Trump's cabinet picks and other appointees has eaten up a significant amount of the Senate's time and energy. You can blame some of this, David Lewis, an expert on presidential nominations at Vanderbilt, tells me, on the fact that the confirmation process has gotten longer over time as nominations have become more politicized and polarizing. But they're moving slower than one might have expected under recent Senate rules changes and GOP control of Congress.

Some of this comes down to Democratic obstructionism, which seems to have hit harder and faster than Tea Party obstructionism hit the Democrats in 2009 (the Democrats had a larger Senate majority back then than the GOP does now). But Lewis notes that this goes further than just Democrats eating up time and making noise. Trump's people, he would argue, are partially to blame for snafus like Andy Puzder's doomed appointment as labor secretary.

"Naming a nominee is not the same as carefully vetting that nominee and doing the groundwork on the Hill to make sure that nomination is acceptable," he says. "The administration has done a poor job… They didn't do their work in advance and we're seeing the results of that now."

Watch White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer try to defend some Trump tweets:

Congress's remaining bandwidth at the moment is likely also being squandered by the flurry of scandals swirling around the White House, coupled with confusing directives from Trump. "So much is getting dumped on Congress at once," says Lewis, "that there is sand in the gears. [The White House] is effectively saying, 'Here's a thousand things to deal with—now do something with them.' And Congress is just not set up to do that well."

There's real reason to suspect that the Senate will confirm most of the cabinet (aside from that pesky labor secretary spot) by the end of February. The Senate will still have to approve dozens of other appointees, whom Trump has been slow to name, says Reynolds; Lewis has his doubts that the Trump team will fill its full roster before people start leaving and needing to be replaced by new appointees. Still, both Lewis and Reynolds suspect once the cabinet is done, confirmations will stop consuming huge gobs of time.

"Democrats could choose to continue to obstruct some or all of the [lower-rank] appointees," says Reynolds, "but they might not get the same rewards from their base for doing so… [and Republicans] might just let many of the positions languish" unfilled rather than get bogged down over posts few people will notice or care about.

But whether post-confirmation hearing energies can be effectively utilized largely depends on Trump himself. The campaign showed just how suited he is to conflict and chaos, but that's not a recipe for DC, a town that moves slowly and cautiously. If he tamps down on his impulses, quiets the din coming from the White House, and learns how to better prioritize issues in Congress, he could make some real headway. That feels pretty unlikely for now, though.

Republicans have clear priorities with or without Trump: repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act and passing tax cuts. But they have to overcome Democratic opposition and intra-party disagreements on how to construct and advance those policies.

"If Republicans are unable to overcome their internal divisions on major issues, there's not much they can do," says Reynolds. "The White House could be a powerful force in working to mediate some of the internal divisions within the GOP, but the president would have to decide on which approach among the several advocated by various Hill factions."

Another issue is that there's a lot of stuff Congress needs to do, which will rob time from the things House and Senate leaders want to do. "Legislative activity in Congress has a bit of a predetermined life cycle in terms of when you have to start working on appropriations bills and those things," says Lewis.

None of this means this Congress will get nothing done. Republicans have already managed to pass a handful of laws even amid the cabinet confirmation furor, and will likely continue to roll back some regulations and push forward a right-wing agenda. On Thursday, Republican leaders gave the House rank and file more details on an Affordable Care Act replacement, and that long-awaited project will continue even as protests against the repeal mount.

But a combination of Democratic obstructionism, strife within the GOP on how to move on their core priorities, a slate of predetermined and energy-sapping issues, and a lack of leadership from the Trump administration is currently making life tough for Republicans on Capitol Hill. It's never easy to deliver on big campaign promises, much less promises to deliver on them with speed, but incompetence and infighting make it infinitely tougher.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Why Getting Spanked and Tied Up Makes You Feel High

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There's no denying that understanding how the human body works can lead to some intense sex. After all, as clichéd as it is, the brain is the biggest erogenous zone—and BDSM is no different.

It may conjure up images of bondage, discipline, sadomasochism, dominance, and submission, but many BDSM practictioners attribute the pleasurable pain of their fetish to the endorphin rush that accompanies the acting out of their fantasies. There's even a word for the state of a submissive's mind and body during and after consensual kinky play: subspace, often described as a "floaty" or "flying" feeling.

"For all of us, endorphins bind to opiate receptors to naturally relieve pain," explains Maitresse Madeline Marlowe, a professional dominatrix who also works as a performer and director for Kink.com, a leading BDSM content producer. "Since BDSM play can include power exchange and masochistic acts, endorphins are one of the most common neurotransmitters [produced]."

As far back as 1987, leather activist and author Dr. Geoff Mains hypothesized that BDSM activity stimulated the release of endorphins, but scientists have yet to tease out the exact relationship between neurochemicals and S&M. But subspace does exist: Dr. Brad Sagarin, founder of the Science of BDSM research team and a professor of social and evolutionary psychology at Northern Illinois University, has compared it to runner's high, the sense of euphoria and increased tolerance for pain that some joggers feel after a long run. Except, obviously, one is caused by the asphalt flashing beneath your feet, the other by a whip swishing through the air.

Read more on Broadly

Inside Wikipedia’s Attempt to Use Artificial Intelligence to Combat Harassment

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Despite its noble goals, Wikipedia is notorious for harassment among its editors. Now, research from tech incubator Jigsaw and the Wikimedia Foundation is looking at how artificial intelligence can help stop the trolls.

The research project, called Detox, began last year and used machine learning methods to flag comments that contain personal attacks. The researchers looked at 14 years of Wikipedia comments for patterns in abusive behaviour. Detox is part of Jigsaw's Conversation AI project, which aims to build open-source AI tools for web forums and social media platforms to use in the fight against online harassment.

A paper published last week on the arXiv preprint server by the Detox team offers the first look at how Wikimedia is using AI to study harassment on the platform. It suggests that abusive comments aren't the domain of any specific group of trolls, and that diverse tactics are going to be needed to combat them on Wikipedia.

"This is not ground-breaking machine learning research," said Ellery Wulczyn, a Wikimedia data scientist and Detox researcher, in a telephone interview. "It's about building something that's fairly well known but allows us to generate this data scale to be able to better understand the issue."

Read more on Motherboard


What Do Rappers Know About Tofu That We Don't?

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Out of all the foods rappers have formed relationships with—Rick Ross's lobster bisque breakfast, Kanye's fish fillet snobbery, Drake's tuna sandwich heartbreak—it's tofu that has a generation of rappers' noggins truly twisted. When it comes to the humble coagulated bean curd, your favorite spitters are never shy about airing out their personal philosophies on the issue—and for a food as bland as tofu, a surprisingly motley range of opinions have been expressed through rhyme.

Some rappers have pledged a firm allegiance to the pro-soy camp, whereas others sound like they'd experience a panic attack if someone replaced their beloved steak with a piece of grilled, marinated tofu. Some artists are all about bigging up the food's health benefits, while others stick solely to their taste buds when it comes to weighing the dish. Beyond actually eating tofu, it's also been invoked in creative ways: it's been characterized as a paler form of beef, used to threaten rival MCs, and held up as an unlikely status symbol (not to mention at least one case of an artist blaming its placement in their local Whole Foods for scuppering a romantic tryst.)

Read more on Noisey

Culture and Crisis Centers Share Their Reactions to Post-Election Spikes in Hate Crimes

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In the first ten days after Donald Trump's unprecedented Presidential win, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that nearly 900 hate crimes were reported around the country. Immigrants, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people, and others minority groups were targeted by individuals riding a vile wave of euphoria, ostensibly emboldened by a man who unabashedly trades in bigoted rhetoric winning the Oval Office.

Unfortunately, it seems as if this spike was more than just a post-election flare-up and these hateful herpes sores are planning to stick around for a while. Anti-Muslim hate groups have been multiplying around the nation, and the disease is also affecting other areas.

I reached out to a variety of community centers that cater to marginalized or vulnerable groups to see how they're reacting to, preparing for, and countering the recent surge in hate-based attacks. Though each person I spoke with had concerns about the coming years based on the strife they and their people had experienced, the majority seemed hopeful about the future of the country based on the outpouring of support they'd received from the silent and tolerant majority.

Before the election, those from the LGBTQ community were the likeliest targets of hate crimes. They were so used to this grim reality, in fact, that it took a string of post-election vandalisms for Gerald Coon, President of Diverse & Resilient, a Milwaukee LGBTQ center, to realize something new was at play.

"In the middle of December, we had the glass front of our building smashed in, and about a week after that another one of our windows was broken," says Coon. "We weren't sure if it they were related or not as there was no note or message. Then, last Thursday we came in and there was spray paint over the entire building and "fag" was there on the bricks. At that point we were like, OK, this is about us."

Nonetheless, Coon sees spray painters as small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. "I'm far more afraid of people who hide behind their politics or religion and seek to really cause harm to the LGBT community. Things like this vandalism, though, don't have any real power over us."

Kelly Taylor, the Assistant Director of Raleigh, North Carolina's LGBT Center, echoes Coon's concerns, pointing to the passing of an anti-Transgender law that shook the state in 2016.

"Part of our challenge," says Taylor, "has been getting it out there that it's not just the LGBT community that's affected. [Such laws] affect every single person in North Carolina, unless you are a straight, cis, white man."

Of course, changing hearts and minds can only be done after more immediate safety concerns are addressed. Amidst the spike in hate-crimes, the Raleigh center has beefed up its security for this new normal.

"We're installing additional cameras at our back door, some more at the front door, and we're now regularly changing the key codes," says Taylor. "We also have a resource officer, a member of the Raleigh Police Department who we can call at any time. If something happens we can run the incident by them and that's an added measure of security for us."

Karen Palmer, the Executive Director for CASA Women's Shelter in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, says her shelter has seen an uptick in abused LGBTQ guests, though she can't be certain "whether that is directly related to the election, or if people are just becoming more aware of the resources" available to them. Whatever the source of this boost, Palmer has committed resources to the assistance effort and hired a full-time advocate attorney "specifically for that category" as she plans on seeing more LGBTQ victims coming into the center.

America's Jewish communities are also experiencing a new wave of discrimination in conjunction with the rise of the alt-right.

A rash of bomb threats has plagued temples, synagogues, and Jewish community centers around the country since the election, enough so that a Jewish reporter brought them up to the President in Thursday's press conference. While his particular location hasn't been targeted, Executive Director of LA's Valley Jewish Community Center, Jerry Wayne, says the looming threat is adding a "new layer of urgency" to their usual emergency preparedness drills.

"We do regularly schedule fire, earthquake, and bomb drills, so we make sure we know what we're doing in those scenarios. It hasn't changed the details of these routines, but it's certainly encouraged us to stay on top of them."

Wayne expressed personal feelings that the uptick in anti-semitism was part of a larger issue in the breakdown of civility between Americans and that the road to recovery must include a return to spirited philosophical debate over arguments. "There used to be a dialogue about these things," Wayne laments "but now it's just pitchforks. It all seems so different now from what this country's supposed to be about."

No group of individuals has received more hateful rhetoric from Trump and his supporters than the Muslim community, which should make it unsurprising that Muslims have been on the receiving end of a sizable share of the post-election attacks.

President Imam Muhammed Musri, who runs the Islamic community center, Center For Peace in Orlando, Florida, told me that his center had been "preparing for the worst" throughout 2016 because, "regardless of whether he was to become President or not, Trump opened Pandora's Box."

Musri told me that beyond fortifying their center with sturdier gates and additional security teams, the community has taken a "see something, say something" approach to potential trouble, both internally and externally. Suspicious figures skulking about the property are reported to local police, and the center is taking that department's safety best practices to heart, implementing whatever suggestions the PD deems best. Conversely, the center has taken a proactive approach to radicalization amongst their members, immediately reporting hints of seditious activity to the FBI before the ideology has an opportunity to take root.

Despite the vitriol Musri and his community have recently received, he remains steadfast in his sense of belonging, explaining that what Islamophobes "don't understand is that American Muslims are Americans. We're not going anywhere."

Dr. Saleh M. Sbenaty, Program Coordinator for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee told me that, while his community has also been forced into a hyper-vigilant state, also willfully cooperating with local and federal law enforcement agencies and rigging up more cameras, he's found a silver lining to the spike in hate.

"We've made coalitions with churches, synagogues, community centers, and we're all cooperating together," says Sbenaty. "There was a bomb threat against a local temple recently and we made it public that we stand with the Jewish community against these sorts of racially-motivated incidents." It's not just the religious communities stepping up to show their support. Sbenaty choked up while recounting that on the first Friday after the November election, the main day of prayer in Islam, "people showed up at the center and gave flowers to everyone inside as a sign of support. We still periodically find flowers and cards around the center."

This, to Sbenaty, outweighs the negativity and leaves him optimistic that the Trump years can be regarded an opportunity to educate those who may just have never met a Muslim before. And despite all the trials he now faces, he still feels that "this country is so great and the majority of the people in it are honest and good and that's what we need to cherish."

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

'The Drum Tech Meets the Press,' Today's Comic by Jeff Mahannah

Talking to New Yorkers Who Went on Strike to Protest Trump

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Ever since Donald Trump's inauguration, protests have been cropping up in America's large cities, as one vulnerable population after another voices opposition to the new president's discriminatory policies and rhetoric. In late January, when Trump issued his executive order barring citizens from seven Muslim majority countries from entering the US, demonstrators swarmed the nation's airports to show solidarity with those caught up in the ban. Two weekends ago, New York's Yemeni and LGBTQ communities held separate rallies. Thursday marked a "Day Without Immigrants," as Latinos and immigrants stayed home from work to demonstrate how much the country relied upon them and their labor. And on Friday, a nationwide general strike brought anti-Trumpers out of the offices and workplaces to the streets.

The action, known as #F17 for the date, was organized by a number of groups, including one called Strike4Democracy, and included more than 100 events in towns and cities across the country. The idea was simple: Go on strike and participate in a day of action from 1 to 8 PM. Those who couldn't take the whole day off to protest were encouraged to spend their lunch breaks at a rally.

The National Lawyers Guild organized the first rally I attended in New York. These are the lawyers who help protesters navigate the law if they are detained by police—I know the group's work and have stayed connected with the NLG since 2015, when I was arrested while covering a Freddie Gray march in Baltimore for VICE.

From 1 to 3 PM, about 200 people rallied in front of the Manhattan Supreme Court. Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, spoke to the crowd: "We're not accustomed to being the law and order guys. But that son of a bitch is turning us into the law and order guys. And we're telling him that nobody, especially him, is above the law. So we're going to hold him accountable, we're going to stand with the people."

Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, the president of the NLG, took the megaphone said, "We live in, and are from, these communities—it is our communities that are also under attack and we are willing to lend out titles, our positions, and our skills in defense of who we are and where we come from."

I took Bannan's portrait in front of the courthouse and asked her how people looking to become active in advocacy can participate. "Anyone can be a legal observer," she told me. "On NLG.org you can sign up for training, which means that you can observe and document the interaction between law enforcement and the people at rallies and protests, spaces that are likely to become increasingly criminalized."

(From left) Helena Sarber, Stephanie Olszewski, and Stephanie Johanssen

I also met three Global Justice Center Employees. Stephanie Johanssen told me, "I'm a human rights lawyer from Germany and I feel quite passionate about the rule of law being upheld. No matter who the government is, no one, even the president, is above the law."

Micheleen C. Karnacewicz is a corporate finance lawyer who had to close her practice due to health reasons. She came to the rally to offer her knowledge and experience. "This is about human dignity, human rights, human potential—we all have that," she told me. "But if we don't have representation and support, none of us can survive."

Adan Soltren (right) is a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society, where he is a part of the Attorneys of Color Caucus. "We need all hands on deck to fight for our clients, for our communities, for justice, for the principles our democracy were founded on," he said.

Jane Sampeur (left), also with the Attorneys of Color Caucus, told me, "Today we are organizing a lawyers' resistance. We want to make sure that lawyers are participating in the struggle and the resistance to oppose these racist Trump policies. We want to make sure that we're not leaving our communities hanging. I want to make sure I'm in a position to help protect my community."

Around 3 PM I headed to Washington Square Park, where strike participants and dissenters of all kinds were partaking in a rally.

Some students linked arms and chanted anti-Trump slogans.

"This is a very integral part of the First Amendment," said Richard L. Entrup. "When totalitarianism encroaches on us I have the humanistic instinct to rise up."

"I came out to show my outrage and my disappointment that somebody who is so un-American was elected president," said Erica Zurer, a retired Brooklynite. "I'm just really sad for the country and I want to register my dissent wherever possible too."

An easel was set up with free paints to allow demonstrators a different way to express their feelings.

"I try to take part in every way that I possibly can at every occasion. Like all of my colleagues, friends, and family I'm horrified by what has happened and in shock. I think we all need to express ourselves to overturn the tragedy that is happening in our country," said Amy Yoes, an artist. "We'll keep going, even though we all have busy lives. I think this is the most important moment of my political life and I think it's crucial for us to all stand together and defeat this travesty."

I Was a Virgin Anti-Prostitution Fanatic

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The first tit I ever saw in real life, besides my own mother's, belonged to a 50-some-year-old sex worker in a back alley of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

It wasn't a sexualized reveal. The woman just all of a sudden pulled up her shirt to point out a birthmark or scar to help augment a specific story she was telling about her life (which on the whole was a fairly tragic narrative that included becoming a classically trained pianist, her husband dying and an eventual spiral into vicious drug addiction).

But for an 18-year-old extremely virgin and sexually anxious evangelical Christian like myself, the act was just fucking traumatizing.

Look, I hadn't come to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics to be unceremoniously exposed to an older lady's boob in a back alley littered with used needles! No, I was there to use my mediocre photography and writing skills to expose the allegedly Olympics-inspired rise of "sex trafficking."

It might sound peculiar. But evangelical Christians are simply obsessed with the spectre of "sex trafficking." It's a top justice issue for young hip believers, with recent efforts elevating the issue to the status of serious moral panic and spawning hundreds of NGOs and books and documentaries.

Unfortunately, this religious infatuation has arguably caused far more damage than a teenage evangelical getting flashed.

Let's be clear just so I don't get doxxed by some rabid evangelical teens: trafficking for all sorts of labour — sex, agriculture, construction, service — obviously happens and should absolutely be stopped. Just last week, a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines reportedly identified a teenage girl who was being trafficked on a plane to San Francisco. Nine traffickers were arrested at the Super Bowl in a single sting operation.

Assault and kidnapping and manipulation is bad.

The problem is that anti-trafficking activists like my younger dweeb self don't stop there. Instead, they conduct some absolutely mind-bending logical leapfrogging and conclude that all sex work is a form of exploitation and violence and non-consensual and should thus be banned. And that's not like a reasonable Marxist critique of alienation, but a specific War on Drugs-style moral condemnation of the act of selling sex: all brothels should be raided by SWAT teams, johns incarcerated and every form of solicitation prohibited (including ads in alt-weeklies and Backpage).

Such proposals might sound a tad over-the-top. But the spectre of prostitute-as-slave has now permeated much of the public discourse on the subject, which has historically made it extremely difficult to talk about decriminalization, or harm reduction, or anything that doesn't result in sex work being driven underground and made more dangerous for workers (and far harder to identify actual exploitation and violence when it happens).

There's an argument to be made that the needle is slowly shifting on the issue. But sex work is still illegal in Canada and most of the U.S., and sex workers are regularly excluded from events like the Women's March on Washington, which quietly changed the wording of its support for sex workers to standing "in solidarity with all those exploited for sex and labor" before being pressured to change it back.

Generally, it's still considered pretty A-OK to neglect, insult and craft dangerous policies for sex workers.

You can thank me for helping with that.

While in Vancouver for that strange, strange week back in 2010, I participated in a silent protest outside a strip club alongside dozens of other people wearing shirts with the slogan "Buying Sex Is Not A Sport" emblazoned on them. Workers yelled at us from the windows above because we were deterring clients and just being overall assholes. But we stood silent, utterly convinced of their false consciousness and exploitation.

Of course, we had no proof that they were there against their will (insofar as "will" can be determined in a society marked by low minimum wages, lack of affordable housing, zero access to health or dental care, the overall awfulness of many retail and service jobs, and systemic racism, colonialism, homophobia and misogyny).

But that didn't matter to us, standing there in our blue and green shirts with a tiny stick figure riding skis down the side of the text.

Clients were evil. "Prostituted women" were being exploited who had to be "rescued." That was the end of the story for us.

In the months and years following, I wrote many articles — thankfully, all now deleted — about the inherent evils of "prostitution." I rehearsed for and performed an hour-long contemporary dance about sex trafficking. With a friend, I drove from Alberta to Colorado to go on a hiking trip that was fundraising for an anti-prostitution organization in Thailand (to help pay for gas I sold off my massive collection of Star Wars toys that I'd collected as kid, which was idiotic as hell given how much I could snag for them now).

I also presented to a few community groups on the subject, including one with a cop in the audience who enthusiastically backed me up when I was challenged on my sweeping generalizations about sex workers. It felt exhilarating to be on the cutting edge of activism for this hot-button issue, presenting to and being asked questions by people two or three times by age.

At one point, I even took a deeply bizarre self-portrait for a university class which featured me standing in my parents' basement with the phrase "One of 27 Million" — referencing the unsubstantiated estimation of the number of "modern-day slaves" around the world — that I somehow scrawled on my own chest in red marker, with a bandana wrapped around my face and plastic handcuffs from Dollarama on my wrists.

I recall being annoyed after the fact that I hadn't thought to put duct tape over my mouth.

It was all meant to somehow symbolize the plight of the victim of sex trafficking but in retrospect just coming off as an intensely BDSM-inspired shoot combined with a bit of implied gender bending since most anti-prostitution activists are exclusively concerned with cis women and girls despite the fact many men and trans people engage in sex work.

Photo via Flickr user Yvette

I don't think that narrow obsession with women and girls is a coincidence. In my experience, the entire vortex of anti-prostitution activism revolves around the ol' bullshit "virgin-whore" binary in which women are either pure or impure. Especially if there's money involved.

There's also the presence of sexual anxiety and inexperience that I'm fairly convinced drives much of the evangelical interest in the subject matter, combining the sense of Doing Something Good while exploring the subject of sex in a way nearly impossible within the evangelical lifestyle. For me, years into that bizarre game, I'd still never had sex.

But that fact sure didn't stop me from constantly debating the ethics of sex work with people including one coworker at a cafe who couldn't wrap his mind around my absurd logic over the course of an hour-long argument and eventually walked away when I started citing Scripture as evidence for why sex was sacred and just shouldn't be commodified.

Yvonne Zimmerman, associate professor of Christian Ethics at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio and author of Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex and Human Trafficking, notes in an interview with VICE Canada: "There's this sense for many Christians that sexual sins really get at and damage the core of a person in ways that other sins might be a little bit more external and on the surface."

She adds: "It feels good for people to condemn sex trafficking. It feels intuitively and viscerally moral and right and good."

It does indeed.

"There's no ambiguity. It's good versus evil, pure versus tainted, saved versus shackled."

Living your life as an anti-trafficking activist means constantly feeling like you're in a Tom Clancy film, filled with global political intrigue and international crime syndicates, with white people as saviours and a dangerously high dose of "orientalism."

It also allows for seemingly clear delineations between "good" and "evil" (which has a bunch of historical racist baggage associated with it, but no time to get into that now). There's an obvious goal in sight: incarcerate all pimps and johns, and liberate all sex slaves. Well, and also police people's sexual behaviours, but that's just evangelical culture at large.

"Since so few of us are engaged in anything even remotely connected to sex trafficking, it means that it's an easy social issue for everybody to get behind," says Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, author of What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize What They Do, in an interview.

"For evangelicals, it means you don't have to engage in a much deeper and complicated conversation about historic slavery, about race and ethnicity, about globalization and inequality, about class. You can dodge an entire Bernie Sanders sounding kind of conversation. And that's important for evangelicals."

You're always on the look-out for victims. I was once wandering around a low-income area of the city I grew up in with a group on a "prayer walk" against trafficking when I spotted two girls who I was immediately convinced were sex slaves for no reason other than the fact they were hanging out by themselves and were not white.

This shit seriously wrecks your brain.

Of course, there are many sex workers' rights organizations — including the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, Maggie's and the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee — that push for recognition of their members' agency and desire for their profession to be improved via decriminalization, labour rights, access to medical care and cops taking their safety seriously.

Yet anti-prostitution activists simply don't acknowledge the existence of such people and organizations. They can't. It would destroy their case. Back in the day, I'd effectively disregard any citation from such organizations as corrupt due to being funded and controlled by pimps or drug lords, or something.

It was only when I took a women's studies class on the subject of sex work and trafficking in one of my last years of university — and I was forced to, you know, read stuff by people who had performed sex work and didn't view it as more exploitative than any other form of labour under capitalism — that my mind started to change.

For instance, a key factor was that I'd relied on was evidence that had focused on the relationship between street-level sex work, childhood trauma and PTSD. And it wasn't like I came to the conclusion that there wasn't a link between the three, but rather that survival sex work is often tied up with a whole bunch of other issues like poverty, addictions and unsafe working conditions that aren't intrinsically related to sex work itself.

It was a matter of learning to deal in nuance. Which I guess is the whole point of university!

That being said, the realization wasn't an easy one. Much of my personal identity was wrapped up in anti-prostitution activism. At one point, I'd contemplated ditching university to staff an evangelical photography school in Las Vegas that focused specifically on the subject of "sex trafficking." I wanted to be a full-time Abolitionist, travelling around the world and taking down brothels and pimps and trafficking rings with my undercover photographs of red light districts and hotel rooms.

Ditching that ambition was in many ways similar to leaving a religion, which I did shortly after. There are plenty of other social issues out there with equal urgency as trafficking, but none quite had the same sense of coherence to them in the religious sense of absolute belief in what was right and wrong, and what were corresponding solutions to the moral problems.

It's not like I now believe that everyone performing sex work is a "happy free hooker."

Work fucking sucks for most people, especially when it's labour that the legal system punishes, cops view as dangerous, landlords deem as undesirable and the public largely thinks is deplorable. Some people have terrible times in sex work, others great. As with every job out there, it tends to be far worse for black, Indigenous and people of colour.

Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, suggested to me in an interview: "One of the worst things about anti-prostitution crusading is its reductionism, the over-simplification of human diversity. This is fundamentalism."

That's the crux of it. It's why evangelical culture and anti-prostitution activism meshes so well. There's no ambiguity. It's good versus evil, pure versus tainted, saved versus shackled. Unfortunately, the hard questions about liberation and freedom and all the rest of that nice-sounding shit tends to be a hell of a lot more complicated than that, involving issues of labour rights and affordable housing access and tuition rates and dental fees and undoing colonialism.

Trafficking is real. It should be stopped. But from what I've seen and experienced, evangelicals aren't remotely in the right headspace to come up with solutions outside of punishing all sex workers and calling it a day.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

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