"Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves" tells the stories of the thousands of Chinese women and girls forced into sexual slavery during World War II. Photo via WikiMedia Commons. 
The term "comfort women" masks the lived reality of the approximately 200,000 Chinese women and girls kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during WWII. (It is estimated that 400,000 women and girls from occupied countries such as Korea, China, and the Philippines, were enslaved in total.) The term evokes a much more pleasant image than that which survivors tell—harrowing stories of daily rape and torture, often ending in death or permanent injury. Many of these "women" were not women at all, but girls—pushed into the "comfort stations" as soon as they began menstruating.

The notion that men not only need access to women's bodies and sexual release, but that they are entitled, particularly during wartime, was foundational to the existence of and justification for the comfort stations. According to researcher, C. Sarah Soh, author of "The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan," the comfort women system was viewed as a way "to control the troops through regulated access to sex."

For 70 years, the Chinese "comfort women" have been erased from Japan's postwar narrative. It is only recently that the human rights violations committed against these women and girls have broken through into public conversation.

Dr. Peipei Qiu, author of "Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves," began to cry as I spoke with her over the phone. The stories are almost unbearable.

Qiu tells me that one of the survivors interviewed witnessed a woman and younger girl—just a teenager—be buried alive. She watched as a soldier showered the teenager's body with dirt, stopping mid-task to laugh at her as she died.

Another survivor Lei Guiying, was only nine when her hometown was occupied by Japanese solidiers. She witnessed the soldiers take the older girls—14 or 15 years old—away, sexually torture them, and leave them to die. Impoverished and begging on the streets, Guiying began working as a nanny and a maid in a comfort station in Tangshan. When she turned 13 and started menstruating, she was told: "Congratulations, you're a grownup now," and sent off to a room where she was violently raped by a solider. She eventually managed to escape.

The book is the first English language book that tells the stories of the Chinese women who were forced into sexual slavery during WWII. It includes the voices of 12 Chinese survivors who tell stories of being raped numerous times a day until they could no longer sit or walk. The women suffer from deep psychological trauma today, as well as headaches, memory loss, and other associated physical and medical problems. A number of the women have passed away since the book was published, still not having received compensation, acknowledgment, or justice.

Qiu points out that these accounts "expose the multiple social, political, and cultural forces that played a part in their life-long suffering." This is to say that the abuses suffered by the comfort women is connected, not just to war, but to a life of extreme poverty, colonialism and racial discrimination, and a patriarchal culture that Soh says commodifies "women's sex labour."

That the Japanese government continues to deny involvement and erase these women's past from history only contributes to their experiences of lifelong trauma.

excerpt from Chinese Comfort Women

At the end of the war, the Japanese military deliberately destroyed war evidence, and conservatives, neo-nationalist activists, and government officials in Japan continue to claim that no war crimes were committed; saying recently that the US fabricated them.

It wasn't until the 1990s that this issue and these women's stories began to receive attention. In 1992, history professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered war documents that proved the military were directly involved in forcing women into "comfort stations." This coincided with the comfort women's redress movement initiated by a number of scholars and feminist groups. Survivors began to come forward to testify about what happened to them during the war.

But opponents were not dissuaded from their efforts to bury the truth. Three hundred Japanese legislators signed a petition this year to have a statue dedicated to the comfort women in Glendale, California removed. They claimed it spread "false propaganda." Proposals for another memorial statue in Australia have also been met with fierce opposition from Japan. Just last month, Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, denied the Japanese government and military had any official involvement in the comfort stations, claiming the women were willing prostitutes, working in privately owned brothels.

Each retelling is painful and retraumatizing for the survivors and they continue to experience shame, embarrassment, and discrimination. After the war ended, many of them, Qiu tells me, were seen as immoral or as "bad women," as they had "served the other side." After escaping a comfort station, Lu Xiuzhen returned home to her village and told the interviewers: "Because I had been raped by the enemy, people in my village gossiped abut me, saying that I slept with Japanese soldiers… People in my village believed that a person defiled by Japanese soldiers would bring bad luck and could not produce anything good."

When we talk about war and the casualties of war, women are rarely discussed. Wartime stories are heroic battle tales, fought among men; or they commemorate the suffering and deaths of soldiers. Never do we hold nation-wide days of remembrance for the women and girls who were brutalized and killed during wartime. Yet the tragedy and injustice of war makes women and girls its victim daily. The comfort women are symbolic of this erasure and it is our responsibility to acknowledge and address the way in which women and girls are sacrificed by our nation's wars.

Qiu points out that that there is a racial element at play too: "The comfort women's stories were kept silent for so many years because the victims were Asian. When war crimes were prosecuted, with regard to political prisoners, for example, the focus was on white men."

Denial of these atrocities does damage not only to the victims of the comfort women system but, Qiu says, "If the historical truth is not told, the same thing could happen again." Regardless of opponents' claims, Qiu says that survivor testimonies provide a powerful counternarrative to the Japanese government's denial. One that, despite the overwhelming pain experienced by the women with every retelling, can no longer be hidden from history.

Dr. Peipei Qiu will be speaking at the Vancouver Public Library on April 27, 2014.
 

@meghanemurphy

Navy experts trying to power a tiny aircraft with a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Photo courtesy of the US Naval Research Laboratory

Last week, some people at the US Naval Research Laboratory’s Materials Science and Technology Division were able to successfully fly an aircraft fuelled by nothing but seawater. Of course, the seawater was converted into a liquid hydrocarbon "jet fuel" first, and the plane (pictured above) was a scale replica of a WWII-era fighter that even a Ken doll would find pretty cramped, but it was a pretty successful demonstration of a technology that researchers have been working on for decades now—turning the CO2 and hydrogen stored in the world’s oceans into useful fuel.

News of this achievement flew around the internet, with journalists racing to see who could misunderstand the Navy’s press release the fastest. At one extreme, the International Business Times painted the Navy as a sort of heavily armed ocean-going cleanup crew, sucking up the world’s CO2 emissions and turning them into shiny new products. But even as some waved goodbye to oil, conservative-minded folk like the American Spectator’s William Tucker rattled angrily about "perpetual motion machines" and the collective shoddiness of the liberal press.

So which is it? Let’s look at the technology:

Jet fuel is made out of hydrocarbons, which are organic molecules that contain hydrogen and carbon atoms. The biggest natural stores of hydrocarbons are the planet’s crude oil reserves, but they’re increasingly hard to reach, and have a habit of popping up in really inconvenient places, like Iraq. There is another massive store of hydrogen and carbon, though—the world’s oceans. Water molecules contain hydrogen—the H in H20—and vast quantities of carbon dioxide are dissolved in seawater (an amount that’s growing thanks to industrial CO2 emissions, and making the world’s oceans increasingly acidic in the process).

What if, instead of having to drill for oil, we could extract the carbon and hydrogen available in the oceans, and make our own hydrocarbons? We’d have to do more work converting H20 and CO2 into something useful than we do with crude oil, but on the flip side we’d be using a plentiful resource that’s available to pretty much anyone but the Swiss. If you’re a large naval warship, you’re literally swimming in the stuff.

The snag is how to actually take that raw material and process it. The Navy experiments used electricity to split hydrogen from seawater as a gas, used an electrochemical system to recover CO2 gas from the same water, and reacted the two gases together to create hydrocarbon liquid. According to the press release, the scientists can get about 97 percent of the CO2 out of the water, and convert about 60 percent of the extracted gases into hydrocarbons that can then be processed into jet fuel.

If you’re paying attention you might have noticed some problems with this plan. The most obvious is that to do all of this you need a ton of energy in the first place, not just to run the process but to pump up all this seawater initially. If your ship is generating electricity from fuel, then you’re going to end up burning more than you actually create with this process. In order for this to make sense, then, you need something more hardcore… something like the reactor on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

In fact, if you actually read some of the reports out of this project, nuclear power is exactly where they’re going with it, but that point was completely missed by the International Business Times and other publications, as the American Spectator rightly points out. That may not be such a big issue, though. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and most practical alternative energy sources available at the moment, and even if fuel spun from seawater costs more to produce, you’re saving on the cost of getting that fuel to where it’s needed and ensuring that your fleet can operate even in the event that its supply chain is disrupted. Strategically, it makes a lot of sense.

A bigger issue is the waste and inefficiency of the process. It’s true that the concentration of CO2 in seawater is a lot higher than it is in the air, but that’s still a really tiny amount. To get a significant amount of gas, you’re going to have to process a pretty huge volume of seawater, and then when you compress that gas into a liquid, it’s going to shrink considerably. A 2010 report estimated that in order to produce 100,000 gallons of jet fuel in a day—assuming the process is 100 percent efficient—“the minimum amount of seawater that must be processed in 8,900,000 cubic meters. This is equivalent to a cube of seawater that is about 200 meters on each side.”

In real life, you’d expect the cube of seawater you'd need to be twice that size, which is a lot of liquid.

And then there are the emissions. I mentioned earlier that only about 60 percent of the gas produced is successfully converted into useful fuel. About 25 percent comes out of the process as methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases around. Then, of course, there’s the problem that you’re extracting CO2 out of the ocean, putting it in aircraft, and pumping it straight back into the atmosphere.

For all the talk of renewable energy, this plan is about as old-fashioned and dirty as it gets.

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The team behind Hayden Planetarium's latest space show, Dark Universe, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, detail the developments in research and technology that have enabled the show's unprecedented views of our galaxy. Find out how they were able to simulate and visualize the cosmic mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe invisible to the naked eye.

(Collage by Marta Parszeniew)

There's a pretty thorough list of national stereotypes stashed away in the collective consciousness. French people love bread, the Swiss are born dull, Americans don't understand humor, Britain doesn't have any dentists... etc, etc, etc, until the whole globe is just a sphere of tired cliches spinning around in space.

We need a new way to make sweeping assumptions about entire populations, and what better place to start than drugs? After all, there's so much you can tell about a person from their drug of choice. Wouldn't it be great if we could apply the same logic to entire countries?

Luckily, this year's Global Drug Survey has just been released. The people who put it together gathered feedback from nearly 80,000 drug users and clubbers in their 20s and 30s, from over 40 different countries. Yes, the vast majority of them seem to be middle-class people without crippling dependency problems, but nevertheless it provides a unique insight into international drug habits.

You might have noticed the press going nuts the past few days over the revelations that people still like drugs and alcohol and that more and more of them are buying that stuff over the internet now. But what with all the hand-wringing and hysterical headlines, you might have been denied the chance to find out some of the meatier stuff. So, here are seven things that the survey told us about drug habits across the globe.

(Photo by Chris Bethell)

BELGIANS ARE THE SMUGGEST COKE USERS
Unsurprisingly, given that it's mostly stuffed with inert adulterants and a substance that can give you a chemical form of AIDS, cocaine was voted the least value-for-money (VFM) drug in the world. However, there were a few countries that didn't seem so hung up about wasting money on bags of teething powder, speed, and Levamisole—like Belgium, which was the most satisfied with their cocaine.

Already spoiled with some of the best beer, chocolate, and waffles in the world, Belgians awarded cocaine a 5.5 out of 10 value-for-money rating. Which seems shitty, but the world’s biggest gak grumblers—the Australians—gave the drug an average 2.3 out of 10. To rub their Antipodean noses in it, the cocaine in Belgium is the cheapest on the list, at an average of $72 a gram. In Australia it’s four times the price, at the equivalent of $320 a gram. Which is just fucking ridiculous.

Why the difference? Eight million containers pass through the port of Antwerp every year; it's one of the major cocaine turnstiles into Europe, with the drug regularly smuggled—sometimes in shipments of bananas—from South America. But where there’s a will, there’s a way: despite its quality and price, the survey found that Australians took just as much coke as the Belgians.

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET BEATEN UP WHILE BUYING WEED, BUY IT IN THE NETHERLANDS
Globally, around one in 20 cannabis users said they had been subjected to violent behavior while trying to pick up. The most likely places to get attacked while buying weed were Germany and France, while the most dangerous places to buy MDMA were France and Switzerland. I guess there must be something about that high altitude Alps air that makes people want to punch ravers in the face.

Of course, a regulated market is a safer one. In the Netherlands, where buying a draw is as easy and as legal as buying a cup of coffee, less than 2 percent said they had experienced violent behavior while trying to buy bud. If you're stoned and in Amsterdam, I'd imagine this is around the same level of risk you're at of getting run over by a tram.

In fact, dealers generally appear to be more peaceful across the board in the Netherlands, as it also boasts the lowest rates of violence experienced by people trying to buy MDMA.

(Photo via)

THE COUNTRY MOST LIKELY TO KICK UP A FUSS ABOUT A TOBACCO SPLIFF IS AMERICA
We already knew this, of course, but now it's official: Americans are offended, disgusted, and confused by spliffs that contain tobacco.

The survey found that only 7 percent of Americans mix cannabis and tobacco in their spliffs. Throughout the rest of the world, an average of 75 percent view a joint as something that's made out of tobacco and cannabis. In Switzerland, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Hungary, more than 90 percent saw tobacco as a necessary part of using cannabis; in the UK it was 80 percent. In Europe, it's joints elongated and mellowed by tobacco, passed around leisurely; in the US, it's all quick-fire hits on a crumply, potent roach.

America’s closest cannabis cousins are stoners in New Zealand, where only 24 percent of people use tobacco in their joints. This gives us a clue as to why tokers in these two countries smoke the healthier, tobacco-free joints: they both have a historical abundance in domestically grown weed, which doesn't need tobacco to burn—unlike hashish, which, until the mid-2000s, was the most common type of cannabis in Europe. 

IF YOU WANT TO BE CAUGHT WITH WEED ON YOU, GO TO SPAIN
Nearly a quarter of Spanish drug users have been caught with cannabis on them. That number may be connected to a recent drive by the current Madrid-based government to step up its war on drugs in an effort to head off cannabis regulation plans by the regional parliaments in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The second most likely country to get caught with cannabis, with one in five users getting rumbled, is Switzerland. Despite its relatively relaxed laws when it comes to punishment, it's thought that new laws that replace prosecution with an on-the-spot fine may have led to a money-led drive to pick up more users.

Of all the countries where the survey was carried out, America and Hungary have the worst implications were you to be caught with a bag of weed. Around a quarter of people arrested for cannabis possession in these two countries had their ability to travel freely affected, as well as the arrest impacting their job and studies. 

(Photo via)

BESIDES IRELAND, THE WORLD DOESN'T DRINK THAT MUCH DURING THE WEEK
A surprisingly low 35 percent of interviewees said they'd been hungover at work during the last year, while only 64 percent said they had ever been hungover at work. These results might be understandable if the survey was carried out among pilots and heart surgeons, but it wasn't—it was mainly answered by drug-using professionals in their 20s and 30s. I'm afraid I don't have an explanation as to why nobody's drinking during the week, but maybe it's because they're too busy taking drugs.

Flying the flag for hungover workers are the drinkers of Ireland, but even there only 50 percent say they'd gone to work hungover in the last year. Among the least likely to be hungover at work were the Spanish. Maybe because no Spanish people actually have jobs?

In terms of dealing with comedowns at work, the Dutch—probably because they're the biggest users of MDMA and amphetamines—found themselves stuck in the grasp of crippling, drug-induced depression more often than anyone else. It's probably not a coincidence that the Dutch were also the biggest consumers of caffeinated soft drinks.

Those least likely to turn up to work with comedowns (i.e: the biggest squares polled for the survey) were New Zealanders and Americans.

MEXICANS SMOKE A BUNCH OF WEED
The survey found that 77.5 percent of Mexicans questioned had used cannabis in the last year, compared to a global average of 48.2 percent. America (69.9 percent) and Brazil (69.5 percent) take the runner up spots, with the UK trailing behind at 53.6 percent.

Weed has been used in Mexico since pre-colonial times and has a deep traditional-medicinal use. Thanks to that, the public perception of cannabis there is that it isn't a "hard drug," which could have a direct link to higher use. Of course, another potential reason is that truckloads of the stuff—around 20,000 tons annually, according to the government—is grown there.

IF YOU LIKE MDMA AND LIVE IN NEW ZEALAND, MOVE TO THE NETHERLANDS
The Dutch gave MDMA pills the highest VFM score—eight out of 10—in the world. Mind you, they do have the cheapest pills in the world, at $6.75 a pop. MDMA powder in the Netherlands also has a high VFM rating, at 7.5 out of 10 (joint top with Denmark) and is, again, the cheapest in the world, at just $33 a gram.

Unfortunately for MDMA fans living in New Zealand, the country has the lowest global VFM rating for MDMA pills (four out of 10) and powder (five out of 10), and the pills cost $38 while a gram of powder comes in at $243—the most expensive in the universe.

It’s the perfect example of how drugs become more expensive and adulterated the further you get from the main distribution networks. It's also the reason New Zealand had the world’s first booming legal high market in the 2000s—in the form of the ecstasy mimicking "party pills," BZP—and explains why DIY drugs, such as crystal meth, took off over there and in places like rural America.

If people are unable to buy decent drugs, they will just make them themselves. 

Based on the experience of almost 80,000 people who took part in the Global Drug Survey 2014, the High-way Code is the first guide to safer drug use, voted for by people who take drugs.

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Bat Mitzvah. Sweet 16. Quinceañera. Three different names, three different cultures, one interchangeable concept: an introduction to womanhood—and more importantly, an opportunity to throw a needlessly lavish party. After all, why even become a woman if you can't do so with a chocolate fountain buzzing in the background? What's the point of maturing if it doesn't put your family further into debt?

On a recent Sunday afternoon, hundreds of excitable young things flocked to the Expo 15 & Sweet 16, located in the bowels of a charmless concrete convention center. There, they learned (via an endless ream of brochures) about the heights of party and ball gown technology. They watched an inoffensively wholesome teen pop star poorly, shamelessly, lip-sync. They roamed in packs. They brought their moms.

At an expo like this, girls take photos of the things they want their parents to buy them with the phones their parents bought them. They smack their gum and—with a critic's eye—judge countless gowns as they're trotted down the runway. They are courted by exhibitors, who sell them the idea of an adulthood filled with taffeta and rhinestones and cake pops. They can purchase "on call access" to their very own event planner for the low, low rate of $750 ("A $200 SAVINGS!!!"). They shouldn't get used to it.

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Anyone who is a fan of shoving deliciousness into their face already knows about Momofuku. Over the years, owner and chef David Chang has garnered respect for his empire of flavour not only in New York City—where his impeccable string of restaurants began—but the world over. In Canada, the peachy peach brand is still stretching its wings, which is why we felt like it was a good idea to showcase Toronto's Noodle Bar, Daisho, Nikai, and Shoto—the four arms of Momofuku Toronto—to show how one of the planet's most tantalizing food brands has Canadianized itself in an impressive way.

Not only did we hang out with the crew of this massive culinary endeavour on their home turf, we took them to Edulis for a pressed duck dinner, and to Parts and Labour where Chef Matty Matheson stuffed the Momofuku Toronto crew with lobster grilled cheese sandwiches, fried quail, pig's head, and whiskey shots. After all that, we circled back to Momofuku for a gigantic rib eye, more drinks, and fried chicken. This episode is not to be missed. So, enjoy it. We sure did.

Illustration by Sam Taylor

Declaring independence is all the rage in international politics. Recently, Venice voted overwhelmingly in favor of becoming an independent city-state, while over in the UK, the Scots are debating whether to consign the Union Jack to the dust bin of history. And ever since the whole Crimea incident, rumors have been flying around that Taiwan will formally attempt to declare independence from China, and that Misrata will attempt to do the same in Libya.

What if the next big independence movement happened closer to, say, Britain's capital? With a booming population and established trading links with the rest of the world, could London's people go to it alone?

It’s an idea that’s been mooted a few times, not least by former Mayor Ken Livingstone. When asked what he wanted for London during the 2012 elections, he claimed he wanted a "Republic of London," and that the city could be improved if other areas of the UK weren’t so busy sucking all the blood out of it. According to Ken, London generates £10–£20 billion (about $15–$30 billion) more in tax for the UK than it receives in public expenditure, making it the cashcow of the UK’s feckless regions.

How feasible would London’s independence claim be? After convincing him this wasn’t a joke, I spoke to Dr. James Ker-Lindsay, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics who specializes in secession movements.

VICE: Hi, James. What would London have to do to prepare a claim to independence?
James Ker-Lindsay:  First of all, if it were to have any hope of success—by which I mean it would receive widespread international support—a formal process would have to be agreed. With Scotland, for example, there's an agreed process by which it must prepare its independence claim, which will have been negotiated through democratic and legal processes. With London, the same would have to happen.

What are those processes?
It would have to start with a referendum. The wish for independence would have to be expressed. To do this, the central government is usually expected to agree to such a vote; it could take place without permission, but it would have no real effect and would probably just be ignored. In the case of London, this seems a very unlikely prospect. Unlike Scotland or Wales, which have their own historical character, London’s always been an integral part of England. Moreover, considering how interwoven London is with the rest of England, and its wealth, it just seems difficult to see how any government would ever agree to such a vote.

But what if we suspend our disbelief for a sec and pretend that a referendum was agreed?
If the result indicated support for independence, the terms of separation would then have to be agreed. Again, this would be an incredibly difficult process. In fact, it could be a much more difficult separation to negotiate than Scottish independence. For example, the seat of the British government is in London. A new capital city for what would remain of the UK would have to be decided. The cost of moving the government would also be prohibitive. This is before you even get to the range of other issues, such as pension, joint property—such as embassies abroad—etc.

OK. What's next?
The final stage is the declaration of independence and recognition. Assuming that the split takes place with agreement, this would be a relatively straightforward process. Going by other recent examples of states that have seceded peacefully and with the permission of the parent or partner state, such Montenegro, it wouldn't be difficult to secure wider recognition. It could even join the UN within a matter of weeks. However, if the talks broke down and London decided to break away without permission, it seems highly unlikely that it would be widely recognized. One or two mischief-makers might choose to recognize it, but that would be it. It would certainly not be able to join the UN, as this requires Security Council approval, which would be withheld by veto-wielding Britain.

Are there examples of any places more like London than South Sudan that have successfully gone independent?
Perhaps the most obvious example would be Singapore, which broke away from Malaysia in 1965. However, it's an island. London would be in the very unusual situation of being surrounded by another state. Of course, this isn't unknown. Other examples of this are San Marino, which is surrounded by Italy, or Lesotho, which is surrounded by South Africa. 

The Vatican would be another obvious example, although this isn't really a good comparison for all sorts of reasons. Tied to this is the question of borders. Someone would have to identify the boundaries of an independent London. Perhaps it could work off the boundaries of Greater London that are already widely accepted. Alternatively, how about aligning it with the M25?

That could work. What other things would London have to consider if it were to secede from the UK?
There are many different factors that one would have to consider in creating a London state. Some of these are symbolic, like a flag and a national anthem. Then there are all the other things that go along with being an independent state, such as embassies abroad, an international telephone dialling code, an internet country code and even a national football team.

What about defence?
Yeah, one of the most obvious symbols of statehood is an army. But it’s not essential for a state to have one. After all, Iceland and Costa Rica don’t have standing armies. Moreover, London probably wouldn't need one – because would the rest of the UK really be an existential threat? I suppose part of the Met Police could take on certain civil defence capabilities. However, [having an army] is usually seen as one of the signifiers of sovereignty, and so there may be pressure from some quarters to have at least a token military force.

Would London have a relationship with the EU?
This is, in many ways, the key question. To my mind, there would be no point in London becoming independent unless it remained in the EU. But as we've seen in the debate over Scottish independence, this is a very contentious issue. My personal view is that states seeking independence from existing EU members could negotiate their way into the EU at the same time as they work out the details of their split from the parent state. In other words, there would be a seamless transition.

OK. That doesn't sound too bad.
Having said this, it's certainly possible that the EU could put in place some conditions on an independent London. For example, it could force it to sign up to the Schengen Agreement [the treaty that negates checks between signatories' borders]. Although extremely unlikely, this would mean that London would have to establish a formal border with the rest of the UK—unless the rest of the country finally decided to join up as well. This would create a rather bizarre situation—to put it mildly—of having border checkpoints and guards around London. This would create chaos for the millions of commuters coming into the city every day.

What about currency? Would anything change there?
Another, perhaps more realistic, demand could be for an independent London to adopt the euro. However, this could also be very troublesome in view of London's strong reputation as an international financial center. Indeed, this could lead to a very strange situation. Just imagine that the City of London decided that it did not want to be a part of the Kingdom (or Republic) of London, and thus accept the euro, but instead decided it wanted to remain in the UK or even become an independent state within a state but outside the EU. The mind starts to boggle.

Londoners staging a pro-independence protest

Yeah, it's pretty confusing.
On a more general note, and as we have seen with Scotland, the prospect of EU membership actually makes independence more enticing for sub-state territories. It allows smaller countries to flourish within the confines of a group that has real influence on the world stage. In the case of London, while it would be a medium-sized EU member in terms of population, assuming it retains its financial clout, it could be a fairly significant member of the Union.

So much of British government is in London. What would happen to that?
As already noted, this would be a real issue of concern. At present so much of the British machinery of state is focused on London: Parliament, Whitehall, Number 10. This would all have to be relocated. Obviously, this need not happen overnight. Also, it could be done in such a way as to spread government around the rest of the UK. Nevertheless, the expectation is that a new capital would need to be established and one would imagine that this would be an incredibly costly undertaking. Who would foot the bill for this? The rest of the UK could well ask London, given its economic strength, to cover the costs as part of a settlement package. Meanwhile, London would have to develop its own administrative capabilities. That’s a lot of money to be spending, and I’m sure if someone worked it out, it might be way more than the city can afford.

And the Monarchy?
I wouldn’t see any major issue arising over this if London voted to go it alone, but decided to keep the Queen. Scotland is proposing to do this. And there are many Commonwealth countries where she remains the head of state. She would just take on an additional new title: Queen of London. She could certainly stay in Buckingham Palace. However, if London decided to become a republic, then it might very well be the case that the Queen would have to move to a residence outside the city.

Do you think Londoners would want to go independent?
As fascinating as the idea is, I just cannot see people taking such an idea seriously. If any part of England were to break away, I’d say that there is more mileage in the idea of an independent Yorkshire or Cornwall. The idea of independence has gained ground in Scotland because it was previously an independent country and has retained, or regained, many elements of statehood since then. This is not the case with London.

But could it survive?
If it were to happen, I think it could survive perfectly well. The UK isn’t self-sufficient. Few, if any countries, are these days. Self-sufficiency certainly isn’t seen as a prerequisite for statehood. Assuming good relations with the rest of the UK, I don’t see it as a major issue.

What about the rest of the UK? When would it feel the difference?
This is a crucial question. In large part, the attitude of the rest of the UK to the idea of an independent London, and the way it would approach the negotiations, would be largely shaped by how it feels it could cope with the loss of London. The impact would undoubtedly be huge. This would make the price London would have to pay for its independence all the greater. I would imagine that some very large concessions would have to be made. As already suggested, the burden of transition costs would probably fall largely on London. Then there are other issues. For example, it would be certain that the rest of the country would demand that it retains Britain’s permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

All right, so lastly, do you think that life in London would be different if it were independent?
It all depends on how independence is negotiated. It’s likely that any claim to sovereignty wouldn’t be violently fought for, so it’s pretty unlikely that anything dramatic would happen as a result. Assuming London stays in the EU, and that the split is agreed on very favorable terms, such as allowing dual citizenship and no borders, I suspect you could even wake up in an Independent London and not feel any different.

Thanks, James.

Have you recently heard, or made, the argument: “The need for feminism is gone. There are more women in universities than men, and more and more female CEOs all the time!”

Yeah. This week, that theory was disproven. Spurts of deeply engrained Canadian media misogyny oozed out like the tart fillings of packaged fruit snacks popular in the mid-90s. Truly, an ugly scene: a couple of dudes said in the Globe and Mail that marginalized people really need to be quiet—privileged dudes want to talk still! And a radio station in Edmonton posted a poll on Twitter asking if people who are sexually assaulted are partially to blame.


Screencap via.

But Let Me Mansplain!

Remember when you were a kid, and there was always that bossy asshole in your class who forced the teacher to implement the talking stick rule at least once a week, because some kids were never able to get a word in? It seems those assholes never learn, doesn’t it?

Two men are sad this week about terms like “mansplaining” and “whitesplaining.” They feel those terms are limiting. Recent med school grad Tom McLaughlin and law grad Joshua Sealy-Harrington took to the pages of The Globe and Mail to explain to everyone just how tired they were of being discriminated and silenced by people just for being themselves! For being men!

The two felt like their opinions were diminished after Tom was accused, by a female colleague, of not fully understanding women’s health because he is a man, and after Joshua, who is Black, was accused of both mansplaining and white privilege in a Facebook thread discussing the definition of racism.

“Both Tom and Joshua’s stories exemplify a worrisome trend in our society,” the piece reads. “Discrediting opinions (or even fact-based research!) because the individuals expressing them come from a privileged background, such as being male or white. Representing diverse backgrounds in a discussion is important, but dismissing opinions solely because of their origin does more to stifle progress than to hasten it.”

Sorry guys, but you just don’t get it. The irony of a male doctor and lawyer whining about being silenced in The Globe and Mail is just too much to bear. You just graduated from medical school and law school, respectively, and your platform is one of the most respected, widely-read media organizations in the country. You speak from a place of utmost authority, and you and others like you have been, and will continue to be, heard. In fact, you’ll spend your lives dictating to others, and they will have no choice but to listen. I hardly think you are disenfranchised. (Take the How Privileged Are You quiz, maybe).

“The use of terms such as “mansplaining” (and its racial counterpart, “whitesplaining”) can cause disengagement. These labels are sometimes used to dismiss arguments when men and white people simply disagree,” they say.

So basically, two men are mansplaining and whitesplaining why they should be permitted to mansplain and whitesplain. The irony is doubly cruel.

The terms “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining” are used to refer to the insufferable habit these groups have of speaking over everyone else, and from overly-broadcast points of view.

Sometimes women, people of colour and queer people (and those with intersectional identities, obviously) don’t want to hear from men or white people, and that is okay. Sometimes we don’t want to have to offer up yet another fruitless explanation, as McLaughlin and Sealy-Harrington suggest.

Women and people of colour and queer folk are forever having to justify and define elements of our everyday lives and identities. Make explanations. And we often say, privately amongst ourselves, that though we’re trying to affect change, we’re so goddamn sick of explaining. That’s why we need to be able to speak freely, and sometimes that means privately, within our communities. We can choose to exclude men or white people as required, and to varying extents, if that’s what we need to feel heard, and to avoid being interrupted by male or white voices demanding to take precedence.

“Discussing issues such as white privilege and masculinity without white people or men limits dialogue and disengages privileged communities...The unspoken message of excluding an entire group from a discussion is that not a single person in that group has anything worth hearing – an astounding proposition,” the Globe piece continues.

Because heaven forbid a privileged community be disengaged, and that a dialogue be “limited” to only voices of colour, or women’s voices. You’re only preaching the harmful paternalistic tropes you’re claiming to fight against. You don’t get to have unlimited access to our conversations simply because you are used to being granted unlimited access to any space you desire.

If you want to learn more about the importance of safe community spaces, check out the site and philosophy of Black Girl Dangerous. Editor Mia McKenzie, as a queer person of colour who edits a site showcasing the work of queer people of colour, is strict about who gets to speak on her site. She does not publish work by straight white people, because the world is already oversaturated with privileged white voices. She is correcting that imbalance, and that’s what “excluding” white or male voices is about.

McKenzie also offers a primer on how to check your privilege, should you be so inclined. From the section on knowing when to shut up:

“1) no one asked you, 2) the subject matter is outside your realm of experience (why do you even think you get to have an opinion about the lives of black women??), 3) anything you say is just going to cause more harm because your voice, in and of itself, is a reminder that you always get to have a voice and that voice usually drowns out the voices of others.”

Similarly, I attended the Feminist Porn Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and the strongest statement of the weekend came from performer and activist Arabelle Raphael:

“If you want to be a good ally, learn to shut the fuck up,” she said. Yup, that.

Voices like McLaughlin’s and Sealy-Harrington’s already carry a disproportionate amount of weight in our social, political and economic dialogues. It is time to pass the stick. 

Screencap via Twitter.
Radio Station 630 CHED Wonders, Are People Who Are Sexually Assaulted…To Blame?

This week, an Edmonton radio station asked in an online poll: do you think victims of sexual assaults share any blame for what happens? There was much in the way of backlash, happily, but the station reacted in a bumbling fashion which only served to illustrate its ignorance.

It revised the poll before finally taking it down, arguing that it hadn’t been properly contextualized.

The poll reportedly gave two options for a response, yes and no. According to the Calgary Herald, the “no” option said: “women should be able to dress, drink and walk as they choose without fear of being blamed.” And the “yes” option said “if women drink too much, dress too little or walk in harms way, they put themselves at risk.”

This is a radio station (remember those?) with a staff of four humans handling “new media.” The fact that one or all of these humans failed to recognize the hateful and egregious nature of their poll is a signifier of how deeply rooted we are in rape culture in Canada.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: rape is a men’s issue. Men can stop rape. And we need to, collectively, do a better job of educating boys about sex and rape in order to fix the problem.


@sarratch

On Sunday morning, a Dutch teenager named Sarah made one of the most disastrous attempts to be funny on Twitter in history. The 14-year-old girl, whose now-suspended handle was @QueenDemetriax_, decided it would be a good idea to tweet “hello my name’s Ibrahim and I’m from Afghanistan. I’m part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I’m gonna do something really big bye [sic]” at the official account of American Airlines, which responded with an ominous “Sarah, we take these threats very seriously. Your IP address and details will be forwarded to security and the FBI.”

Naturally, she freaked like the kid in trouble she was, tweeting panicked messages to @AmericanAir that she was “kidding,” “joking,” “scared,” “not from Afghanistan,” and “just a girl” who “never did anything wrong” in her life. She briefly paused to take stock of her fame (“Over 2,000 RTs what”) before she was identified by Dutch police, turned herself in for making a false report, and was brought to a court hearing before being released.

It’s not clear that she’ll face criminal charges, but in the wake of her jokey “threat” came a storm of copycats tweeting warnings to American Airlines (and Southwest Airlines, for whatever reason); it was sort of like that scene in Spartacus except much, much stupider. Articles about this hot new teen trend generally took pains to castigate young twitterers like @twerkcunt for their poor choice of prank. Writing for the Washington Post’s style blog, Caitlin Dewey made sure everyone knew that this kind of trolling was NOT COOL, KIDS:

We hardly need reiterate the problems with this kind of thing: Airlines need to take threats seriously, no matter how silly they seem, which means a lot of airline employees (and presumably, police and security and FBI) are spending a lot of time tracking down nuisance threats, as well.

Leaving aside, for a minute, the vast waste of taxpayer money and manpower that represents, there’s another more ground-level problem here: This trolling completely destroys whatever incentives airlines have to engage with their customers on Twitter.

I would argue that if federal agents spent any time whatsoever tracking down Twitter user @comedybatman or the kids making “I think you guys are THE BOMB”–related puns, the resulting waste of taxpayer money is on them, not the trolling teens. But more importantly, the knee-jerk reaction here—tut-tutting at some kids for having some fun making incredibly distasteful jokes—distracts from the actual problem of teens getting arrested, or suspended or expelled from school, for things they've posted to social media.

Three weeks before the American Airlines incident, a pair of teens in Louisiana were arrested for making online threats against a school. A 16-year-old made a comment about putting an explosive in the cafeteria on Twitter, which resulted in East Ascension High School getting shut down while a bomb squad combed through the building; hours later a 15-year-old copycat tweeted similar things and got in similar trouble. Though no explosive devices were found, both kids were charged with terrorizing and cyberstalking.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Techdirt has done a particularly good job covering incidents in which social media chatter has gotten people (mostly teens) in trouble—the blog has written about young people getting thrown in jail for making jokes on Facebook or engaging in some hyperbolic trash talk or rapping about killing people or putting up threats just to see what would happen. Kids have been expelled for what were obviously jokes and suspended over completely innocuous posts, and adults aren’t immune to getting in trouble for this kind of thing—in 2010, a UK man was arrested for tweeting a joke about blowing up an airport and New York cops showed up at an American comedian’s door after he made a Fight Club reference on Facebook.

The “threats” the authorities responded to in these incidents are of varying levels of seriousness. Sometimes, as in the case of the Dutch girl, it’s fairly obvious that it’s just a kid making a stupid joke or trying to prank someone. Other times, the statement may seem legitimately disturbing—the 16-year-old who tweeted about blowing up the Louisiana high school had been expelled before he made his threats (though the local news account I read didn’t say what for), and there could very well have been some evil shit in his head.

Obviously, when writing about this subject, I should make a disclaimer: Don’t make threats against anyone online, even jokingly, or you might find yourself trying to explain your brand of humor to cops who have never heard of Twitter and barely understand what the internet is. But just as obviously, law enforcement, school officials, and other authority figures often do a piss-poor job distinguishing between actual threats and the hyperbolic language teenagers so often speak and write in.

“I don’t want to say that school officials overreact across the board, although I think that can and does happen on occasion,” Gavin Rose, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana who specializes in education issues, told me when I asked him about how schools responded to students making threatening statements on social media. “I imagine that they are rightly putting the safety of their schools, their students, and their employees first. But in so doing, I think there have certainly been occasions where administrators have not recognized sarcasm, hyperbole, or other common forms of communication for what they are.”

Some teens using phones. Hopefully these girls haven't just committed a felony by tweeting about shooting up a school. Photo via Flickr user Tammy McGary

When administrators or cops decide to punish kids for what they say on social media, the “I was joking, OMG!” defense employed by @QueenDemetriax_ isn’t likely to be much help, especially when it’s their word against the word of an adult with a serious-sounding title. 

The line between jokes—which, in America, are protected speech under the First Amendment—and bona fide threats that can land someone in prison is blurrier than you might think. The US legal standard for evaluating statements like those that got the Dutch teenager in hot water is called the true threat doctrine. “In essence,” Rose said, “speech is protected unless an average, reasonable person would interpret it as a threat of imminent harm.”

But what's a "reasonable person"? According to Robert Richards, co-director of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment, the standards by which courts judge threats to be threatening are often vague and sometimes contradict each other. The Third Circuit of Appeals has ruled that the objective standard—the “reasonable person” test—is the best one to apply to ominous statements, while the Ninth Circuit favors the subjective test—which requires the prosecution to prove that the speaker (or tweeter or facebooker) intended to make a threat.

Richards favors the subjective standard, which is the most protective of free speech. “People write things on social media that aren’t directly threatening,” said Richards, “but the language might seem threatening.”

If courts across America adopted the subjective standard, prosecutors would have a more difficult time going after kids who have made eerie statements, whether those statements were serious or in jest or just in a moment of anger—which might not be the worst thing.

“It does put the onus on the government to prove criminal intent,” Richards admitted, “but that onus is on the government in other parts of criminal law.”

In any case, some clarification on the subject is needed from the Supreme Court, Richards said. He recently joined other First Amendment expoerts in urging the nation’s highest court to take up United States v. Elonis, a case centered around Anthony Elonis, a Philadelphia man who posted bizarre stuff on Facebook about murdering his wife, some schoolkids, and an FBI agent. He claimed that his “rap lyrics” were just a form of venting, but a jury (and most of the federal courts that he appealed to) ruled that a “reasonable person” would have been threatened by the rants. Elonis is appealing because he thinks that the prosecution never proved he intended to threaten anyone—in other words, he wants his Facebook ramblings to be judged by the subjective standard.  

The Supreme Court has heard true threat cases a few times before. In 2003 the justices decided, in Virginia v. Black, that cross burning was OK as far as the Constitution was concerned, provided you aren’t trying to intimidate anyone. And back in 1969 the court heard Watts v. United States, which was about Robert Watts, an 18-year-old who in 1966 got up in front of a rally against police brutality in Washington, DC, and told the crowd, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is [president] LBJ.” Watts was convicted of threatening the life of the president, but the Supreme Court overturned the conviction because, duh, the kid was obviously using political hyperbole to make a point and because “he language of the political arena… is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.”

Hey, kids, if you are writing blog posts about how Obama should be shot, you better hope that they fall under the category of political hyperbole! Photo via Flickr user Michael Surran

You could say the same thing of the language of the social media arena or the high school arena. And thanks to technology that allows teenagers—and others—to vent their fleeting anxieties and rages into empty text boxes and have those thoughts transmitted to thousands of people in an instant, it’s easier than ever for someone to make something that legally counts as a threat. That can result in serious consequences for unserious statements.

“The conversations that we used to have with our friends at recess or after school (or in the back row of social studies) are now being had in front of thousands of people,” Rose told me in an email. “Sophomores may not always act sophomoric without fear of repercussions.”

Unfortunately for teens, while it’s become easier for them to blast out hateful messages than ever before, the school system and law enforcement have become less forgiving. Thanks to zero-tolerance policies, it’s routine for high school students to be slapped with serious charges for what are fundamentally harmless youthful mistakes. While these policies are now being slowly reconsidered, young people are still being punished far too harshly for off-the-cuff remarks they’ve floated out for all the internet to see.

“Sometimes zero-tolerance policies can be zero common sense,” said Clay Calvert, the director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. “But after Columbine, judges are going to be hugely deferential to school officials.”

The fact that some of these kids wind up before a judge in the first place raises all kinds of questions. Airlines are prone to hyper-vigilance after 9/11, but does that justify the overreaction to @QueenDemetriax_’s tweet? How can we expect teens to understand what is and isn’t illegal speech online when the true threat doctrine is as muddled as it is?

Rose, the ACLU attorney, told me that he didn’t see the law changing any time soon, and the Supreme Court doesn’t hear many cases, so in all likelihood it won’t take up Elonis in order to clarify what a true threat is. That means individual social media users and authority figures must try to navigate the path between letting people speak their minds and sniffing out legitimate threats—something that’s going to become more important as social media becomes even more ubiquitous.

“We're going to see more and more of this type of behavior,” said Richards. “People say things on Facebook and Twitter because it's sort of cathartic for them to write them, but there can be legal consequences for that.”

People shouldn’t make fake threats—that sort of joke is hardly ever funny anyway—but school administrators and cops should be aware that teens say dumb shit on Twitter and Facebook all the time, and they should try to avoid handing down serious, potentially life-changing punishments unless the behavior warrants it.

In any case, the raft of articles expressing shock about kids tweeting “threats” to airlines for the lulz has not helped the situation, nor have crackdowns on kids who say crazy things on Facebook. Teenagers are going act like teenagers, even on the internet. That means adults need to act like adults.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

The other night some friends and I went to a midnight screening of Trainspotting at Nighthawk cinema in Brooklyn. I first saw the movie as a freshman at UCLA, back in 1996. I had read the book over the summer while attending a program for young artists at Cal Arts called California Summer School for the Arts, so I was disappointed when I realized the scene with the pregnant woman was cut and events were changed. I was especially queasy when I watched two of the famous scenes in the movie: when Ewan McGregor’s character Renton climbs in to the toilet to fish out his suppositories, and when the dead baby climbs across the ceiling.

What I didn’t understand back then is how movies differ from books. Danny Boyle adapted the book into something more cinematic while remaining very loyal to the spirit of the book; in truth, he couldn’t have done it better than the author, Irvine Welsh, himself. I was like a Twilight fan who criticized the film because—I don’t know—Edward Cullen’s bangs weren’t cut the right way.

When, in fact, translating a narrative into a new medium generally means using the most interesting aspects of that new medium. To have a completely loyal adaptation without doing anything new would be bizarre. Boyle—young Danny Boyle—added a layer of humor and editorial pizzazz that redefined a genre 20 years ago, when he made drug use subjective. How he depicted heroin use in the film was, in many ways, unprecedented.

Weed had been used as an anchor for humor in the past: the campfire scene with Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Cheech and Chong, the Spicoli scenes in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It wasn’t until Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (which is next on the late-night slate over at Nighthawk, if you’re in the Brooklyn area) that heroin use was depicted with comic undertones. Matt Dillon’s character is so hilarious yet so confident with his dope wisdom and superstitions: “Diane was my wife. I loved her, and she loved dope. So we made a good couple,” or “Hats. OK? Hats. If I ever see a hat on a bed in this house, man, like you'll never see me again. I'm gone.”

Drugstore Cowboy made it so movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Pulp Fiction, and Requiem for a Dream could depict heavy drug use without having to explicitly punish the characters for their indiscretions. If the characters did fall into some ill fate of poverty or death, it wouldn’t necessarily be because of the moralistic narrative that “drugs are bad.” Drug use is mainstream; it’s familiar and comfortable. Denis Johnson's book Jesus’ Son survives solely on its brilliant writing rather than its unflinching depiction of the muzzy drug life of its protagonist, Fuckhead. We’ve seen stoners become heroes in Pineapple Express; and even though the implied moral of the film is that weed is bad and leads to trouble, the characters are so lovable that they were a billboard for a weed-filled lifestyle.

Sexual content and sexual addiction are the latest to undergo this transformation in movies, and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac is proof that the subject is becoming less taboo in mainstream commercial venues. Steve McQueen’s Shame opened the subject to new depths. The title of the film shows McQueen’s efforts to be earnest and somewhat moralistic, which is sometimes necessary to forge new ground on explicit subjects. It’s like a disclaimer at the beginning of an old gangster movie saying, "Hey, we don’t condone this violence," so they could actually relish the violence. The film at least made the open discussion of sexual excesses more acceptable—even if the conversation revolved around Fassbender’s dick flopping against his thighs as he walked past the camera in a completely unnecessary shot. (I should say a shot unnecessary to the plot, but one that explicitly points to sex and sex addiction.) The famous dick shot warned the audience: Hey, listen, this movie is going to get down; get ready for raw material. I would argue that it’s the equivalent of a close-up of a needle entering a vein in the pre-Godfather Al Pacino venture, Panic in Needle Park: This shit is real, and we’re going there. The dick shot also left the audience wondering, Will we see Fassbender naked?  It was a good move, but in the end, the size of Fassbender turned it into something completely useless, the equivalent of a nude selfie showing of the Dirk Diggler–size member.

It’s for all these reasons that I could laugh at Nymphomaniac, because the genre shifted from moral depictions to freedom to satire. The fact that it could be funny while engaging such a subject shows that we are stepping into a new age of sex in film. I also just wanted to say how funny it was.

A Barakat ("Enough") movement protest in the city of Batna, Algeria. Photo courtesy of Barakat

Algerians are voting for their president today, but everybody already knows the results. Abdelaziz Bouteflika is expected to win a fourth term as head of state, thanks to the powerful backing of the regime and despite his contested track record and the frail condition he's been in since suffering a stroke in 2013.

The 77-year-old, who has been clinging on to power since 1999, has been able to count on the support of his political party, the National Liberation Front (FLN)—a former guerrilla group that fought off France during the war of independence in the 1950s. He is one of six presidential candidates, and the campaign has been marked by his absence. When he made a rare TV appearance in March, Bouteflika’s movements seemed impaired and his voice was barely audible.

Algerian elections are pretty obviously not fair. The last time around, in 2009, Bouteflika was re-elected with a suspiciously high 90 percent share of the vote. Officially, 74 percent of registered voters cast ballots, but according to a cable from the American embassy that was later released by WikiLeaks, participation was more likely around 25 percent.

Nevertheless, Bouteflika and his party still enjoy a fairly wide support base. On Sunday, thousands of people gathered in a stadium in the capital of Algiers to cheer for an absent Bouteflika on the last stop of his lackluster campaign tour. The president is seen by some as having restored stability following the "Black Decade" in the 1990s, a bloody civil war that was triggered by the cancellation of an election set to be won by the Islamic Salvation Front. Ten years of violence followed, with fighting between the national army and Islamist guerrilla groups claiming around 150,000 lives.

Every Algerian above the age of 15 has experienced living in a war-torn country, which may help explain why people haven't risen up against the dictatorship—maybe they can't bear the thought of yet more chaos.

Barakat protesters in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria. Photo courtesy of Barakat

Nevertheless, opposition is growing. During the 21-day campaign, opposition groups called for a boycott of the election, with small sit-ins and actions taking place across the country and in the capital of Algiers, where a blanket ban on protests remains in place. The newly-formed group Barakat ("Enough") has been particularly active in opposing the regime.

"We need to go toward a transition phase so that institutions are real institutions, not support committees for the system and the presidency," Nerouane Bounezoud, a member of Barakat, told me. "We want more democracy, more civil rights, more political and social freedoms, and real social justice."

Barakat’s first gatherings in early March were violently dispersed by security forces, and dozens of demonstrators were arrested. In a report issued on Monday, Amnesty International condemned the crackdown on peaceful opposition protests. That report wasn't much help, however: Bounezoud told me that during Barakat’s final pre-election gathering yesterday, he and fellow protesters had been "beaten up" by police.

Amine Mouffok, an Algerian expat who's lived in London for 13 years, is part of the Algerian Solidarity Campaign, which organized a small protest outside the Algerian embassy in London on Saturday, calling on fellow Algerians all over the world to boycott the vote. He thinks that these elections are pointless.

"They will not solve the fundamental political deadlock that the country has been facing for a long time now, nor will they solve the Algerian people's problems," he explained. "The regime is trying to force through a president who is not capable of governing anymore, given his serious illness. He shouldn’t even be in office, let alone run for president again."

Bouteflika amended the constitution in 2008 in order to be able to run for a third consecutive term in 2009. In fact, Abdelmalek SellalBouteflika’s former prime minister and campaign director—hinted last month that the president wants to die "as a martyr" in office.

"The Algerian community is somewhat divided. Some think Bouteflika got us out of a civil war and relaunched our economy. For [Barakat], that’s a fallacy," Mouffok said. "But it’s also true that Algerians don’t want to go back to a civil war… so they’re being cautious. Some other factors have contributed to this lack of appetite for change of sorts, notably the regime’s use of the oil rent to buy peace and quell social unrest."

Protesters outside the Algerian Embassy in London on Saturday. Photo courtesy of the Algerian Solidarity Campaign

In contrast to Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, Algeria stayed relatively calm during the Arab Spring, despite experiencing many localized riots and protests against high unemployment, job insecurity, and the rising cost of living. According to Mouffok, there were around 10,000 or 11,000 of these protests in 2010 and 2011.

In an attempt to placate the protesters, Bouteflika lifted of the state of emergency that had been in place for 19 years and passed new laws allowing more freedom of expression. Despite this, Amna Guellali, the Tunisia office director of Human Rights Watch, told me that "in 2013 and 2014, authorities continued to restrict freedom of assembly and association, prohibiting meetings and protests." Corruption also remains rife: Transparency International this year ranked Algeria 94th out of 177 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index.

"Algerian youth, in particular, generally express themselves outside of the institutional and political framework, basically in the street," said Mouffok. "But the core of the problem is political. The youth in particular is increasingly realizing that supporting a regime that is illegitimate and corrupt has a damaging effect on the socio-economical situation of the country and on theirs directly."

This past week’s protests have brought on both new hope and new fear for Algeria’s future. "The people still have a bit of fear," Nerouane of Barakat said, "but I think we will catalyze the drive for the change that we need in order to get a real democracy and a parliament that represents the people."

Whether opposition groups can gather enough momentum to oust Bouteflika and reform his outdated regime now depends on whether Algerians want to turn widespread disaffection into action, or if they’re still petrified from the memories of past conflicts.

Follow Rebecca Suner on Twitter.

At the end of 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to fully legalize marijuana. VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu headed over to Uruguay to check out how the country is adjusting to a legally regulated marijuana market.

Along the way, he meets up with Uruguay's president, José Mujica, to burn one down and talk about the president's goal of a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and six cannabis plants per household.

An Occupy Wall Street protester doing her bit to fight the oligarchy. Photo by Harry Cheadle

A new report from researchers at Princeton and Northwestern universities reveals a deeply unsettling truth: Money rules American politics. Of course, it's likely you already knew that, but the good thing about the report is that you now have 20 years of research to prove that the US government is in the grip of the rich and powerful.

The report, titled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens," analyzed data gathered between 1981 and 2002 to understand whether ordinary Americans are best served by lobbyists, interest groups, or the government. Depressingly, it concluded that they're rarely served very well by any of them.

I called up one of the report's authors, Princeton's Professor Martin Gilens, to find out a little more.

Professor Martin Gilens. Photo by Sameer Khan

VICE: Your report's conclusion is that America is more an oligarchy than a democracy. How so?
Martin Gilens: America has many features of a democracy: a free press, free elections, and so on, but when it comes to the ability of changing government policy, ordinary citizens have very little influence. The power rests almost wholly on affluent individuals and interest groups, especially those representing business.

How does this skew the way the government behaves?
It skews it tremendously when the preferences of these different groups diverge. There are policies and issues where middle-income and high-income Americans and interest groups might overlap, but there are important issues when the preferences of these interest groups do diverge. Tax policy, for example, or support for the unemployed, government regulation or trade policy—these are all areas where the views of ordinary citizens and those held by "elites" diverge. In these situations we see government policy responding almost overwhelmingly to the preferences of elites and virtually ignoring the views of ordinary citizens.

What policy is the best example of this?
The Bush and Obama administrations’ response to the great recession is a perfect example. We’ve seen minimal accountability of the financial sector and minimal effort to impose meaningful regulation. We’ve seen policies that have been helpful in allowing businesses and affluent Americans to recover quite nicely by this point from the recession, but the middle class and the least well off are still suffering.

And, of course, average Americans presumably want to see new regulation and accountability imposed on these elites.
Based on surveys, there is some support for imposing taxes on the wealthy. There's a widespread assumption that the tax system is unfair, that the economic system in general is "rigged," if you will, in favor of the powerful. So while I don’t think Americans are gathering at the barricades, there is dissatisfaction at the idea that the government purposefully creates an unfair playing field. There is a lack of support in government for popular policies because there’s a lack of power with the general masses.

Do interest groups put pressure on political parties so that beneficial policies for the general public never reach electoral manifestos?
That’s exactly it. It’s just groups and wealthy individuals playing such dominant roles in the political system that both parties have no choice but to curry their favor. Even when there are individuals, particularly in the Democratic Party, who are advocates for the interests of the middle class and the poor they don’t get far.

Do you think the American public would be surprised by your findings?
I’ve surveyed people and asked, "Do you think the government cares about what people like me think?" Those surveys show that the majority of middle class Americans doesn’t think it does. And the majority of people at the top of income distribution say in general that the government does.

Do the general public know what’s best for their own interests?
Average Americans don’t know a lot about the specifics of social conditions or political policies, and that’s partly true for affluent Americans also. People generally play only a modest amount of attention to what’s going on. People do have misconceptions too. The question, though, is whether people, despite general low levels of knowledge, are able to form policy preferences that are worthy of guiding democratic policy making? And the answer is yes.

In what way?
Perhaps the most compelling evidence is from studies where hundreds of ordinary citizens are brought together for a weekend, listen to experts, and study the issues and policy options. They’re then surveyed to see how their thoughts have changed. What we see is that, though some views may change, the collective view changes very little. People are reasonably good at taking views from their environment and their views are the same even when up to date with the relevant information.

How can average Americans organize themselves to play a bigger part in government?
The most important thing is the role of money. It's very hard to see how to empower middle-class Americans without reforming the part money plays in politics. We need meaningful campaign finance reform.

Do you see a stage where ordinary Americans will have absolutely no influence over government policy?
I think we’re pretty much at that point, but that doesn’t mean there's no potential to have influence. Before the crisis of 2007/2008 and the brief Occupy Wall Street campaign, I would have said an economic crisis of that nature would galvanize the public and policy makers to take the preferences of ordinary Americans seriously. But the crisis didn’t, and everything carried on as usual.

How optimistic are you for American democracy?
Well, not particularly. Realistically, looking at the situation and given the increase in economic inequality, it’s really hard to see where improvement would come from.

Jon Daniel, the creator of the parody Twitter account that caused all the commotion

Jon Daniel woke up on Thursday morning to a news crew in his living room, which was a welcome change from the company he had on Tuesday night, when the Peoria, Illinois, police came crashing through the door. The officers tore the 28-year-old’s home apart, seizing electronics and taking several of his roommates in for questioning; one woman who lived there spent three hours in an interrogation room. All for a parody Twitter account.

Yes, the cops raided Daniel’s home because they wanted to find out who was behind @peoriamayor, an account that had been shut down weeks ago by Twitter. When it was active, Daniel used it to portray Jim Ardis, the mayor of Peoria, as a weed-smoking, stripper-loving, Midwestern answer to Rob Ford. The account never had more than 50 followers, and Twitter had killed it because it wasn't clearly marked as a parody. It was a joke, a lark—but it brought the police to Daniel's door. The cops even took Daniel and one of his housemates in for in-depth questioning—they showed up at their jobs, cuffed them, and confiscated their phones—because of a bunch of Twitter jokes.

Now Daniel’s panicking.

“I’m going to fucking jail,” he told me yesterday when he was on a break from his job as a line cook. “They’re going to haul me away for this shit.”

They might. No one was arrested for Twitter-related charges on Tuesday (though one roommate was pinched for having a few ounces of weed), and no charges have been officially filed yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be. The media have raised the profile of this incident more than the mayor and police would probably like—there was the news crew at Daniel's house, and a story about the raid appeared in the Los Angeles Times—but who knows if that will shame Ardis into apologizing?

Authorities seem to believe that Daniel was “impersonating a public official,” to use a bit of legalese, a misdemeanor that's punishable by up to a year behind bars. Steve Settingsgaard, the chief of police, has been quoted as saying that “it appears someone went to great lengths to make it appear it was actually from the mayor.” This dastardly impersonation of a 50-something public official included such tweets as:

Peoria is a town of 116,000 people. It has some problems with crime and also some problems with the police, which you can get a sense of if you follow my work or the work of Matt Buedel, the Journal Star crime reporter who broke a several stories last year detailing misconduct within the police department, including an attempt to catch a city councilman in a prostitution sting. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office ruled that an internal report regarding some of those acts of alleged misconduct should be released, but the city and the police department refused. (That report was apparently “lost” by Settingsgaard, and somehow ended up in the hands of a panhandler whom, coincidentally, I used to work at a gas station with and know to be a pretty serious drug addict.)

So the police raid on Daniel’s house wasn’t an isolated incident; it was just another case of the cops acting shady—and naturally, many in this town are raising serious questions and concerns over the use of taxpayer resources and manpower to find out who ran @peoriamayor.

Daniel didn’t confess to the crime when questioned by police. When he told me about the event, his description, like almost everything that comes out of his mouth, was hilarious and delivered in an only-in-Peoria ghetto twang.

“They acted like they were gonna be on some First 48 shit,” he said of the night of the raid while he put back some Busch cans with friends and roommates. “I said, ‘Well, at least let me puff a yig [cigarette] if y’all are gonna sit here and try to break me down.’”

They didn’t. After reading Daniel his rights he chose to lawyer up, and the cops let him go. They took his phone, though, which contains all the evidence they’ll need to tie him to the account, and another he started in a fit of bravado the night after @peoriamayor was shut down. Daniel is also behind @peoriapolice, but that account has been largely inactive. It’s not clear if the real Peoria police know that account exists, but Buedel let its existence be known to his followers last night.

Meanwhile, a host of copycat parody accounts have cropped up, possibly as an act of protest, possibly just to fuck with the Peoria power structure further. I’m not sure who’s behind them or if they’re coordinated, but it’s clear that if Ardis sent the cops to Daniel’s home to clamp down on people making fun of him online, that effort failed spectacularly.

Full disclosure: Part of the blame for this situation rests on my shoulders. I loudly promoted @peoriamayor when I first noticed it, having no idea someone I knew was responsible for tweets that mostly had the fake mayor using drugs and partying. It was pretty damn funny. One of Daniel’s roommates told me that the first question police asked him was, “How do you know Justin Glawe?”

As it happens, less than an hour before that query was posed I was at police headquarters, reading reports like I do several times a week. Daniel found that fact funny Tuesday night, but he isn’t laughing anymore. Neither are his roommates, one of whom hasn’t been able to be reached because he’s out of town without a single electronic device. Another is so shaken by the experience of having his room trashed by the cops he wanted nothing to do with this story.

Daniel said fuck it.

“Tell them my name. Tell them I did it,” he said, acknowledging the cops have him cornered. “But when they lock me up, tell them to tweet using the hashtag #freesleezyd.”

Justin Glawe is from Peoria. It's a weird place. He chronicles crime and violence there.

Hamid from Iran has been in Greece for two and a half years. He has a knife tattooed on his chest and two flames on his arms. The flames are symbols of Zoroastrianism.

The appointment had been arranged several days ago, but Mohsen still harbored doubts. He borrowed a calling card to phone his mother, intending to tell her the truth about where he was and what he planned to do. In the end, he just muttered that he missed her and hung up. Six hours later, in cell number 67, Mohsen had his first tattoo—a picture of a boy with his face between his hands and his feet in shackles. Underneath, a Persian poem: “A smart bird will not be caught in the trap. If caught, however, it must endure it.”

Mohsen endured seven years in Greek prison and two years in detention, getting a new tattoo each year: the picture of a woman—his first love, whom he left behind in his native Iran; the word omerta (the code of silence); and, on his right arm, the word mother.

“In prison, it’s either them or you," he said. "You have to stay strong and struggle to survive on a daily basis. Some fight with their fists, others with their minds. I struggled daily to remain human. For this reason I carved two stars on my chest—a reminder that I wouldn’t put my hands up, that I wouldn’t surrender even if it meant my life would be in danger. Deep in my soul there are some thoughts and images, some secrets, that words cannot express. I turned these secrets into poems and drawings and had them engraved on my body.”

Mohsen

Mohsen, like most Muslims, believes that permanent tattoos are haram, or forbidden. According to Islamic law, the human body is sacred and perfect exactly as God made it, so any intervention is seen as a form of mutilation. Today, in most Muslim countries, tattoos are considered makrouh—that is, they aren’t illegal per se, but it’s generally best to avoid them. In Iran, the government dubs anyone with a tattoo a criminal, and the punishment for getting one can be up to six months in prison and a hundred lashings.

Phaim

Phaim remembers the day he left prison well. The first thing he did once outside was head to the nearest gas station. His only thought that day was to wipe out the marks on his body. He had heard that he could do this by mixing gasoline and battery acid, which he tried several times in vain.

“It was August of 2007 when I was transferred to the prison in [the Greek coastal town] Nafplio," he said. "I tried for several days to get through to my family in Afghanistan, when I was told that they had all been killed. I didn’t have time to learn how and why. I returned to my cell, found a sharp object and began to carve my hands. Five cuts on each hand. One for each member of my family. The next day I gave someone six packs of cigarettes to get my first tattoo—a lion and a scorpion.

"A while later, in exchange for two packs of cigarettes, I had my mother’s name inscribed on my left hand. This is the only tattoo I don’t regret. Before coming to Greece and being imprisoned, I didn’t even know what a tattoo was. I feel ashamed, but now it's too late. It is a sin. I was born with an unsoiled body, and I will die dirty—marked by tattoos and stab-wounds."

Morandi

Morandi feels just as “dirty,” but not for the same reasons. It has now been almost two years since he left prison, but the sound of the iron door closing behind him, the filthy cells and the fear of being deported will haunt him for a long time to come. In a badly lit room, he hesitantly shows me his tattoo. A tiger is drawn across his entire right leg, above a poem is written in Arabic: “I had everything in life, but I was not content. I wanted more, I wanted to do better. When I came here, I saw that there was only worse.” On his left leg is a spider web and the line, "This is it; this is as far as it goes."

“Do you see this web?" he asked me. "Every ring of the web represents a year I spent in jail. I had every one of my tattoos done while I was inside, and it was there that I first tried drugs. My mother is begging me to go back to Algeria, but after everything I’ve done how could I ever face her?"

Hamza

All you need to make an impromptu tattoo gun is an electric motor, a toothbrush, a pen, two or three needles, and a switch.

“You can get this stuff easily in prison," said Hamza. "Everybody knows who makes the best tattoos and they'll direct you to him. All you need is a little money or a few packs of cigarettes."

Hamza came to Greece in the spring of 2009 and has been in and out of prisons and detention centers ever since. “How can I pray or fast now? I got all of my tattoos in prison," he said. One tattoo reads: "M.A.T." ("Mama Avant Tout" in French, which translates to "Mother Before All"). Another is the letters LTPS (Tout Passé).

"This means that everything passes, even the most difficult things," Hamza explained. "Only evil remains— the evil that I have done to myself and the others who are trapped in Greece.”

Amin

Amin, from Iraqi Kurdistan, has been in Greece since 2002. He’s spent three and a half years in and out of detention because his status as a political refugee isn't recognized. “That’s the reason you can only make out the back of the dragon I have tattooed on my shoulder – it only seems fierce in the front," he said. "I am calm and composed, like this dragon. I will only go crazy if someone provokes or hurts me. Most people will stab you in the back. I had all those tattoos done in Greece so I would never forget what I saw here.”

“Today’s culture is integrationist and requires a certain kind of behavior,” said Zissis Papadimitriou, emeritus professor of law at the Aristotle University of Thessalonica, an expert on racism and social exclusion.

“Muslims from countries like Iran are fleeing oppressive regimes—all this is new for them," he explains. "Their host country offers an unprecedented kind of freedom they’ve never experienced before. People have a strong desire to express and mimic a fashion that may have been forbidden in the past. In this case, tattoos. The need becomes even greater when it comes to individuals who are oppressed and have no hope of escaping this oppression, as with those who are in rehabilitation centers and prisons.”

Nasser

In the back of a building in the middle of Athens, Hamza suddenly stopped talking, looked upwards,and silently raised his hands in the air in a gesture of prayer. Hamza's praying hands reminded me of those engraved on his friend Nasser's left shoulder.

And then I found myself thinking of Nasser's second tattoo: It's a drawing of the fence he looked out on from his window in prison. Once night began to fall and the sun sank into the horizon, Nasser would be able to make out the lights of an amusement park flickering in the distance behind the fence. “I watched their colors and in a way it felt like I was there too—as if I had stepped out of my cell for a brief moment. It felt like my life was normal again. I would tell myself that everything I was going through was a dream, and that one day I would get myself to that amusement park and on that roller coaster. But maybe I won't.”