Mario Beaulieu, image via Facebook.
There’s no denying the Bloc Québécois has seen better days. If you’re not familiar with the party, the Bloc officially came into existence in 1991, when former Brian Mulroney pal and cabinet minister Lucien Bouchard quit the Progressive Conservatives over constitutional issues. Along with a handful of MPs they built the Bloc up quickly, and were so successful they formed the official opposition after the 1993 elections. After the 1995 referendum, Bouchard jumped to the provincial independence-minded Parti Quebecois and was replaced as head of the BQ by Gilles Duceppe—an egghead-y but generally respected politician who, some say, focused too much on getting as much out of Ottawa as possible at the expense of pushing tirelessly, constantly, and relentlessly for independence.

Duceppe stepped down when the BQ was annihilated in the 2011 elections, following the then-Jack Layton-led NDP sweep of Quebec in the so-called Orange Wave. The party had two interim leaders since, but has not made any significant headlines since. In both Ottawa and Quebec, it's largely a forgotten force, its membership dwindling and its influence fading.

Enter Mario Beaulieu. The former head of the hardcore nationalist—and provincially funded—organization Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste has promised to talk about independence all the time—"before, during and after an election." His plan includes an aggressive membership drive and to once again stir up support for Quebec independence, especially, he says, in the province's colleges and universities.

So if you thought the country had enough to deal with given its current government, think again. With a federal election coming next year, Quebec's place in Canada may yet again become an issue. Excited yet?

So what’s his plan? How do you breathe new life into a party, much less a movement, that’s reeling from electoral catastrophe? The sovereignty movement may or may not be dead, especially given its crushing defeat in April’s provincial election, but Beaulieu and a hefty chunk of Quebec’s nationalist-leaning population are far from giving up hope.

I’ve known Beaulieu for years, and this is the first time I’ve interviewed him in English.

VICE: How was your St-Jean-Baptiste Day [Quebec’s national holiday, celebrated June 24]?
Mario Beaulieu: Oh, it was very fine.

Did you do anything for Canada Day?
It was very fine! I went to some events about Moving Day [Quebec doesn’t celebrate Canada Day, instead there’s an odd arrangement involving the majority of residential leases terminating July 1]. But I do want to wish all Canadians and federalists a very happy Canada Day. We are not against Canada or Canadians.

How are you enjoying your new job?
It’s going very well, I love the job. I’m meeting lots of people, a lot of our members, explaining our project to make Quebec a country, and the response has been very encouraging.

Why did you want it?
I became the party’s head because after the last referendum [in 1995], we put sovereignty aside. The Bloc focused on good government and being good in opposition, and not enough on its main project of Quebec independence.

And the results of the April provincial elections were a shock. It brought decline—electoral decline and decline for the support of sovereignty—even though polls showed that between 35 and 40 percent of the electorate supported it, depending on the phrasing of the question. So we have to make a systematic campaign to explain it. Why we are sending $45 billion to Ottawa every year that doesn’t benefit Quebec, money that can be better spent in Quebec? We would be much better off, and Canada would be much better off.

Look at the Champlain Bridge. [The federal government is spending over $4 billion to build a replacement bridge from Montreal’s south shore to the island, scheduled to open in 2018.] Ottawa decided there won’t be a light-rail train over it, there will be tolls, it will bring traffic to other bridges. It’s another example of Quebec being better off deciding these questions.

And look at Lac Mégantic [the rail disaster marked its first anniversary this past weekend]. The federal government decided on the regulations that caused this catastrophe.

What does the French language mean to you, personally?
The French language supports our culture, our unique culture. It’s part of the self-determination to secure the future of our language and culture and way of life.

More and more non-francophones are becoming bilingual. Bill 101 is generally considered a success…
French is in decline in the work place, it’s not the common language. Fifty percent of allophones switch to English at home. [Bill 101’s education mandate, that immigrant children have to be educated in French, among other rules] has been a success at the elementary and high school levels but not at CEGEP [Quebec’s two-year junior college system]. English colleges are better financed and are better attended than francophone ones.

Bill 101 is not against individual bilingualism. The problem is institutional bilingualism.

What does the Bloc want from the rest of Canada?
The Bloc Québécois wants a relation of equals with the rest of Canada. An independent Quebec would take control over our own decisions on issues such as international trade and the economy. We want a respectful relationship.

How do you think the rest of Canada sees the BQ? Or for that matter Quebec in general?
Some people in Canada critique the Bloc and question its right to exist, but we say that Quebec independentists pay their federal taxes and have a right to be represented in Ottawa.

There is a very negative view in parts of English Canada. We’re accused of being tribal, of being closed in on ourselves. We’ve seen articles in the media, especially the National Post, that accuse us of being prejudicial and intimidating. But why is Canadian nationalism a good thing in their eyes, but considered tribal and bigoted in Quebec?

Others are more respectful and are interested in hearing our point of view. They want a dialogue, which would be good for the future of both Quebec and Canada.

Independent-minded parties suffered crushing losses in the last two elections, at the federal level in 2011 and at the provincial level last April. You just said that you—like many other people in the province—were shocked by them. What do you think accounts for those results?
For me, the results are the result of an approach the independence movement has had since 1995, when we talked about good governance at the expense of independence. So people were not ready for a discussion about independence.

Well there are serious issues other than sovereignty to discuss. Crime and corruption, health, education, a languishing economy…
All of those questions are interrelated. In order to reinforce our economy we need to control all of our tools. Each and every year we send $45 billion to Ottawa. That money is managed by Canada in the best interests of Canadians. We want to use that money our way, to build an economy based on sustainability, renewable energy and knowledge-based industries. Canada spends it on the oil and auto parts industries.

The last two results have led to a lot of people saying the sovereignty movement is dead, that it’s a one-generation movement.
It’s been very often said that the movement is dead, but every time it has emerged stronger. This is the first time in the history of Quebec where all generations have supported the idea. About a third of young people are for independence, and more and more people feel Québécois rather than Canadian. There is still a lot of hope there.

But are young Quebecers especially able to be part of an increasingly globalized, internationalized world if they lack English?
Well, international has the word “national” in it. If we want equitable globalization and equity between nations it has to start at home. Just like the Catalans want their self-determination, just like the Scots, the Welsh and just like other minority movements elsewhere in the world.

So you support independence for Catalonia, Scotland and Wales?
I support the principle of self-determination. It’s a fundamental right as recognized by the United Nations.

Getting back to local politics, you seem to have some pretty strong differences with former long-time Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe and other members of the Bloc. What happened there?
In my acceptance speech, I said that after 20 years, we have to change our strategy. There have been many good actions in the past, but there has never been a large campaign with our partners in civil society to explain independence other than to our own members. We are planning a major campaign with over 30 organizations within civil society in Quebec, a door-to-door campaign, meeting with people in colleges and universities.

And for the next year, we will try to recruit new members because membership is on the decline. We have less than 20,000 members now, down from around 100,000 in 1994-95. We’ll try to have 50,000 by next year.

What’s your personal relationship with Gilles Duceppe like now?
My relations with many older members is good. I will talk to Duceppe and we’ll be united in this campaign. We will talk about sovereignty before, during, and after the campaign. We had a serious defeat in 2011. So we have to look to the future and work for this noble and just cause. 
 

I love this world and it freaks me out every day. More and more, I experience the sensation that nothing is real—like it's all a dream. That’s when I’m drawn to take pictures. It can happen at any time, whether I'm in the wilderness or in the city—whenever I feel I’m not in a place, or faced with a scene that I can imagine to exist in reality. I shoot so others can see how I look at my world.

Everyone in this life is batshit crazy, which I find endearing; I like to look for people's quirks, and the quirk can often simply be someone's face—they can actually look insane. But then there are the times, when someone is so beautiful it makes me feel crazy and confused—like, how can this person actually exist on planet Earth?

See more of Sam's work here and here
 

The first iteration of the e-joint (Photo via)

For whatever reason, stoners seem to enjoy spending vast amounts of money on smoking paraphernalia that they don't really need. Owning more than one percolator ice bong, for example, is fucking pointless, but that doesn't stop anyone from filling their cupboards with various expensive, yellowing glass sculptures.

The latest hot product is the e-joint, which is just like an e-cigarette, only it's shaped like a cone and features a weed leaf that lights up every time you take a puff. And just like an e-cig, it doesn't get you high whatsoever, as all you're inhaling is a blend of "safe components," like natural Propylene Glycol and Vegetable Glycerin. So what's the use? Who's going to bother buying a weed-themed product that doesn't do any of the stuff you want it to do?

We had a think about the different kinds of smokers who might slouch out of the woodwork once e-joints become the new norm. 

GUYS WHO WORK AT NON-PROFITS
Michael is in his late thirties. For his 24th birthday his then-girlfriend bought him a ticket to a Carlos Santana concert. More of an Incubus kind of guy at the time, he initially wasn't too over the moon. But two or three songs in, Mr Smooth's chill vibe and groovy, far-out look began to draw him in. Soon enough he'd started to wear patterned silk shirts and even bought a giant "Legalize!" poster for his room. 

Since then he's been mostly spending his free time learning how to play a 12-string bass and rock climbing at his local activity center. When he gets back from a long afternoon of bouldering he likes to relax with a couple of joints and a Bill Hicks DVD. His friend suggested they go and buy an e-joint this weekend. Although Michael didn't say "yes," he also didn't say "no".

Photo via

YOUR ANTI-CAPITALIST UNCLE
Your uncle never recovered from Reaganism. He hates chain stores and thinks McDonalds were directly complicit in the global economic disaster. To escape all that he lives in a little house in the woods. It's kind of a protest, only nobody knows about it and wouldn't care if they did.

His kids are worried about his dwindling supply of funds, so they buy him an e-joint to try and trick him into cancelling his weekly hash delivery. Sadly, all it achieves is reminding him of the technological gap between him and the rest of the world, and just how isolated he's become.

Photo via

STONERS WHO WANT TO STOP SMOKING WEED
The e-cig is ostensibly to help people cut down their tobacco intake in the vague hope it will help them give it up for good. Of course, it's now just become a device that enables people to inhale a bunch of nicotine on the subway, getting their lungs nice and ready for a real cigarette once they're back up on the street. In other words—and according to 84 different studies—they don't help you give up smoking at all.

The point here is that all those stoners who've spent the past three years telling themselves they should stop smoking weed will buy this to help them quit once and for all. It won't work.

Photo via

PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE INTERACTING WITH DRUG DEALERS
Drug dealers can be a bit of an ordeal. Ten minutes inevitably means two hours, and wrapping up a Madden marathon is always far more important to them than decent customer service. This ordeal becomes even more troublesome when you're one of those people who thinks of every single dealer as an unstable sociopath with a machete and a pack of attack dogs.

That's why Freddie and his friends are thrilled by the concept of e-joints—so much so, in fact, that they've already commissioned a web developer to build the "on tap app," which automatically orders refill cartridges when you're close to running out. Because there's nothing better than getting back to your skyscraper loft and puffing on a load of innocuous chemicals while blasting some Jack Johnson on the surround sound.

TWEENS
Ever since he started following Badgirlriri on Instagram, your little cousin has been dreaming of only two things: finishing eighth grade, and sparking a blunt for the very first time.

He doesn't know where to buy drugs, thinks drinking the bong water will get you high and had to sit through hours of pest control videos before he realized what a roach was. He also has absolutely no idea how to roll. For him, the electronic joint is a window into a post-pubescent society that would otherwise swallow him whole.

Photo via

ISIS parades captured Iraqi Army vehicles in its Syrian capital of Raqqa

Six months ago, as it swept into the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq, ISIS was looking a lot less triumphant in Syria. Faced with a coordinated attack by a coalition of Syrian rebel groups, it was fighting for its survival on that front. Since then, ISIS has rampaged even further into Iraq. This is going to enable them to turn their attention back to Syria, but this time armed with a load of new pillaged weapons, making them a scarier prospect for their enemies.

According to Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute and specialist on ISF and the insurgency, roughly a quarter of the Iraqi Security Forces' (ISF) combat units collapsed within the first few days of fighting. ISIS has captured hundreds of US supplied upgraded Humvees, pickup trucks, tanks and armored vehicles, artillery pieces, and even reportedly a number of helicopters, not to mention huge stocks of ammunition and artillery shells. From the sheer quantity of captured equipment, Knights noted "ISIS has probably three sets of captured M16 rifles and body armor for every one of its fighters."

An ISIS convoy with captured Humvees enters Bayji 

Although much of the captured hardware was in poor quality, and it is still unclear whether ISIS has the capability to use it, pictures of captured US supplied Humvees roaring down the streets of northern Iraq flying the group's distinctive black banner were obviously a bit of a propaganda coup. In a jab at their hated American enemies, ISIS's huge and vocal online fan base advertized the group's capture of US-supplied vehicles by mocking Michelle Obama's role in the #bringbackourgirls Twitter campaign, launching the hashtag #bringbackourhumvee.

Charles Lister, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, told me that, "ISIS's newly acquire fleets of Humvees, transport vehicles, and other APCs should prove valuable for the group, at least in the medium term. Of course, as time goes by, ISIS will need to maintain and repair the vehicles, which may raise some issues. But in terms of live capacity and coordination, ISIS can certainly make use of such an expanded vehicle fleet and potentially even exploit the more sophisticated radio equipment installed in Humvees.”

An ISIS social media image shows its fighters with a captured Humvee

While everyone’s been gawping at ISIS’s Iraqi rampage, the knock on effects in Syria may be equally significant. A few hours after controlling Mosul, ISIS overran several places on the border between Syria and Iraq. At two of them, Rabiyah, they bulldozed the earth mound dividing the two countries and started transferring captured vehicles and equipment to Syria. ISIS even released a slick video entitled "The Breaking of Borders" featuring ISIS' firebrand spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani and top military commander Omar al-Shishani symbolically driving a bulldozer over the Iraq-Syria border and proclaiming the “end of Sykes-Picot”—an agreement made by the UK and France in 1916 about their spheres of influence in the region.

An ISIS bulldozer drives over the barrier separating Iraq and Syria

The vehicles and equipment seized in Iraq are already playing a role in the Syrian battlefield. Several days ago, the al-Nusra faction in the border town of Abu Kamal pledged allegiance to ISIS, which then moved in with its superior firepower and seized control of the town. ISIS' victory in Abu Kamal led to a complete collapse of the rebels across the province. As groups recognized the new reality, they either pledged allegiance to the new Islamic State, or quit the fight and ran away.

Within a week, ISIS has gained control of another entire province—Dayr az-Zawr—with the exception of the remaining rebels and the besieged Syrian army in the provincial capital. After taking Dayr az-Zawr, according to Charles Lister, "ISIS will seek to consolidate as many of its recent gains in Iraq and possible and to further bolster its control of territory and resources in northern and eastern Syria, so as to present itself as much as possible, as a cohesive ‘state.’ Only then will ISIS be in a position to attempt to push back further into western Syria—Idlib, western Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama. This will almost certainly be attempted, the question is simply when it will come."

ISIS propaganda video "The end of Sykes-Picot"

The ISIS proto state is at its most established in Raqqa city, the group's main Syrian stronghold. This has earned the town the moniker of "Syria's Kandahar"—Kandahar being the birthplace of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The presence of ISIS there is all-pervasive. "They hold an iron grip over all life's aspects,” a local told me. “Wherever you walk on any of the city's streets you'd encounter at least two ISIS fighters walking, driving, sitting, or passing by... ISIS fighters have a strong presence in the city. They control everything. They run most of the former regime service departments, from granaries and bakers, power and transformation stations, water pump stations... They formed an 'Islamic court,' 'Muslim's services office,' an 'Islamic' traffic police department and other posts."

Raqqa is also likely to be the operations in Syria. As my Raqqa contact told me, "The organization depends on a rotation system where a fighter might be sent to several provinces in a relatively short time. Also Raqqa is the safe haven for wounded fighters where many come from different ‘Wilayas’ [ISIS' term for its zones of combat] to settle temporarily in new recovery HQs."

ISIS now operates with complete freedom on both sides of the old Syria-Iraq border, and can transfer its forces between theaters at will. The future for the new jihadist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East has never looked brighter. 

Follow Memlik Pasha on Twitter.

An aerial photo of the NSA's data centre in Utah, released by the EFF. via WikiCommons.

On Monday, the Washington Post provided a glimpse into the “raw traffic” (content) that the NSA collects from such a recklessly vast amount of individuals, that the regular ol’ non-terrorists whose personal privacy is invaded far outnumber the actual bad guys (or “targets”) that the NSA is trying to squash with their all-knowing spy powers.

In a stunning report, Barton Gellman details how the NSA collects nudie pics, chatlogs, voice chats, and emails from: “Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike.” These ordinary individuals represent a much larger slice of the pie than the terrorists, kidnappers, rapists, and other evil doers that the NSA is legally allowed to spy on—after they receive a warrant.

This news should read as highly disturbing for Canadians, who may presume they are immune to NSA spying because of their non-Americanness or non-evilness, but in reality could very well be swept up by the NSA’s Bond villain-esque data-vacuum.

In their report from earlier this week, the Washington Post published a spiffy infographic that breaks down the information they observed through analyzing 22,000 surveillance reports that were produced by the NSA between 2009-2012, and leaked to the paper by Edward Snowden. The graph shows that Canadian IPs and corporations were part of the “identifiers” collected during that time, but the information was “minimized” so that the NSA was allegedly unable to view that private, allied data.

When the NSA talks about the minimization of identifiers belonging to friendly states (like Canada!), it’s to describe a process of automatically preserving the privacy of America’s BFF. So, if a bad guy sent a message to another bad guy that read, “I’m gonna buy a pay-as-you-go phone from Bell Canada so I can prank call Stephen Harper,” it would read as “I’m gonna buy a pay-as-you-go phone from MIN. CA CORP so I can prank call MIN. CA PRIME MINISTER” to an NSA agent on the other end.

This does not mean that the NSA hasn’t recorded the full text of the message which outlines the bad guy’s plan to patronize Bell Canada, then prank call Stephen Harper, but the “distribution of unminimized intercepts is limited by law,” so access to that full text would be somewhat limited. If the NSA thought that prank call was going to be a major threat, they might be able to easily reveal the full text.

The criteria for revealing masked content, however, might be even looser than that. According to Edward Snowden, he had “unusually broad, unescorted access to raw SIGINT [signals intelligence],” which would indicate that the raw data isn’t as locked down as the NSA may want you to think.

While Canadians are allegedly protected from NSA spying as a result of our membership in the Five Eyes spy club (a partnership of surveillance agencies in the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) there appear to be all sorts of ways Canadian data can get swept up, plus, it seems as if the US has had schemes worked out to spy on Five Eyes partners before.

All of this does not even address the very common usage of proxies and other VPNs to mask the true geolocation of an internet user, which would mean that a Canadian using a proxy would not appear to be a Canadian to the NSA. So if you, as a Canadian, use Tor (a popular tool for people who want to avoid internet surveillance) to mask your location while browsing online—you are basically throwing away your “privilege” as a protected user from the NSA’s spy vaccum.

In fact, recent news tells us the NSA basically targets any users of privacy software by default. According to the source code of one of the NSA’s more infamous spy tools, XKeyScore—an absurdly powerful tool that is said to be able to track basically anything a human being does online—the program is designed in such a way that “simply searching the web for privacy tools online is enough to get the NSA to label you an ‘extremist’ and target your IP address for inclusion in its database.”

This is not to mention an even more innocuous method of masking one’s location online—watching TV. As mentioned in the Post article, many North Americans have used IP blockers recently to access certain World Cup streams. Canadians are constantly being blocked out of American, British, and other global web content because of our status as an igloo-loving nation with restricted access to great television.

It seems that once you start playing with your geo-location, the NSA stops caring you’re Canadian.

Even if you don’t use privacy software to keep prying eyes away, or geo-location proxies to watch the soccer game bro! You can still manage to get caught in the web of spies if you are simply in a chat room where an NSA target is present.

Again, from Gellman’s story:

“If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply ‘lurked,’ reading passively what other people wrote.”

While you may think that the odds of finding yourself in a targeted chat room are fairly low, we know now that the NSA has Muslim thinkers on their watch lists, simply because they are Muslim thinkers. In an article published on The Intercept earlier this week, Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain reported on five Muslims (a former George W. Bush staffer, two professors, an attorney, and a civil rights leader) who made their way onto FBI and NSA watchlists—harkening back to the McCarthy era. With growing jihadist activity coming from Canada, one might imagine that there will be closer attention paid to the Muslims of the great Canadian north.

To further contextualize this trap of being surveilled as a Canadian online, I reached out to Christopher Parsons of the Citizen Lab, who discussed the latest NSA revelations:

“It's apparent that the National Security Agency is collecting significant amounts of information about persons believed to be residing in Canada. And, even when 'minimizing' data about Canadians, that information isn't scrubbed from NSA databases but merely masked.

Intelligence agencies are very good at retaining data for long periods of time and, since they aren't deleting information about Canadians, that means some future law or policy might expand the number of persons or number of uses for 'minimized' Canadian personal information. As long as it resides in a US government database there is the potential that innocent people's data will be used either against them, or against others they know, despite the fact that the data collection and retention was inappropriate in the first place. Moreover, the fact that this data is even retained raises question about whether the American government could, or will, authorize the sharing of Canadians' personal information with additional intelligence agencies or governments elsewhere in the world, thus expanding who has access Canadians' information that is collected by NSA.”

So, even though you may not be concerned about your data being incidentally swept into the NSA’s massive spy network, what happens if you join a politically controversial group like Idle No More and join in on a pipeline protest? Or if you convert to Islam and start attending critical lectures? Would you still be comfortable with the government having a retroactive database of communications from your personal life?

I asked Chris Parsons about the dangers of incidental collection, as it pertains to Canadians, from both the NSA and Canada’s surveillance agency, CSEC. If you’re not familiar with CSEC, very little is known about their activities and practices. But its former chief, John Adams, has said Canadians are “stupid” for posting too much on Facebook. So you can definitely trust them.

“The Canadian government routinely insists that Canadians are not targeted by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) though some 'incidental' collection does occur. Where incidental collection demonstrably happens there should be requirements to purge such raw data from signals intelligence databases but, seemingly, the NSA has decided to not do this because analysts never know when data could be important or useful to another of their colleagues. Such 'hold it all, because it might be useful one day' philosophies have been sufficient to incite European courts to strike down European laws that mandate data retention as a violation of basic rights. Moreover, such broad retention schedules mean that so much data is retained as to hinder analysts' abilities to find relevant information amongst a sea of irrelevant information. And finally, the possibility of a 'permanent record' has chilling effects on speech and association and, as a result, damages the abilities and willingness of citizens to exercise their democratic rights.”

In short, if a government collects information about you “incidentally” then shouldn’t they delete it? There don’t appear to be very strict rules against retention of incidentally captured data, and that’s a big problem, for the reasons described above, non-criminals shouldn’t have a “permanent record” simply for using the internet.

Ultimately, just as I have seen with every other online surveillance revelation, there will be an inevitable reaction of: “So what? I have nothing to hide.” But with so much of our communications out there in the cloud, between family members, friends, and lovers, it’s simply unacceptable that all of that can be “incidentally” logged onto a government hard drive for absolutely no reason.

So, hopefully, imagining your sexts being stored in Ottawa or Utah will give you the heebie jeebies feeling that should tell you the system is out of control.

@patrickmcguire

Kara Crabb: One sophisticated ass lady. Photo via the author.
After my two year-old butt sex article went recently viral for some weird, perverted reason, I decided to look it over again. Upon review, I was absolutely horrified. Not because of what I had written, but what I’d forgotten to mention. There are so many better, more obvious reasons why girls should literally only have anal sex and nothing else, at all, and I’m sorry for being so neglectful. It was truly an irresponsible disposal on my account, focusing solely on sensory delight and passivity, when in reality there are far more relevant reasons why every female ought to be prohibited from all sexual acts excluding anal intercourse.

They are as follows:

NO PREGNANCY

Never mind the purely selfish reasons you wouldn’t want a human larvae ruining your life, let’s look at this from an socio-environmental standpoint: the human population is expected to reach eight billion by the year 2025. We have no way to feed all of these people, plus, what would we do with the sewage if we could? Even now, with seven billion people on Earth, more than 200 million tons of human waste goes untreated every year, so think about that before you freak out over a little poop on your boyfriend’s peener. It’s a small price to pay for not living a literally shitty existence. Overpopulation is a colossal nightmare that we, as a species, can no longer physically withstand and that is exactly why anal sex is so important.

You can’t grow a baby in your ass, but you can have an orgasm if you try a little.

If girls were only to engage in anal intercourse, there would be fewer humans on Earth, and therefore less resource depletion, and perhaps a better quality of life for the rest of civilization. Only through these swollen pulsating lips, may we still find our planet hospitable. So forget those stupid solar roadways, anal sex can single-handedly lead us to a future of sustainability and hope.

I am the bearer of objective truth.

LIMITED DISEASE TRANSMISSION

One might prefer the “stinky” to the “pinky” for their non-propogational preclusions, but blowing loads into rectal tissue is practical for many legitimate reasons that further help control our steadily expanding population!

Diseases were predetermined to regulate human population densities on Earth because humans are gods and the universe clearly revolves around our existence, right? Now think about this: it’s easy to poison yourself with shit: cholera, hepatitis, clostridium difficile (Hawt! New!) These are all cool, fun things you can get from digging around in people’s assholes and what a positive influence on our demography! Girls should really only be having the dirtiest, most-unprotected, anal sex ORGY PARTIES because infectious disease is a material privilege in this short sweet life. I ought to be canonized.

PHANTOM PHALLUS

I must especially apologize for failing to recognize the obvious possibility that receptive males ought to engage in anal intercourse with penetrative females.

While the act is commonly rejected in most het-cis relationships, I can personally attest to its reality. One time I met a guy off Craigslist (that story is not really relevant). He was comfortable with his sexuality (there’s no need to divulge my personal life right now); he was interested in prostate orgasms (I don’t want to encourage unwanted attention by sharing this story).

I still believe that sexual dominance and pain are extremely fun and gratifying, under the right circumstances, but thrusting an inorganic penile into another autonomous human being can be pretty alright too.

PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE

Since antiquity men, women, and children were all players in the anal-receiving game. In fact, it is debated whether academia itself grew from the edges of a child’s sphincter.

Pederasty was a socially accepted form of education wherein young male students developed erotic relationships with their teachers in exchange for private mentorship. Cultural views on actual penetration, however, are confused.

While depictions of anal sex in Greek and Roman art suggest that penetration was reserved only for slaves and whores, there ARE accounts of celebrated anal intercourse among companions throughout a variety of ancient civilizations.

Regardless of whether males were actually INSERTING their penises into their friends' buttholes or not, posterior stimulation bears definite cross-cultural synchronicity. It makes me wonder: without anal sex would there have ever existed democracy? Would there have ever been linguistics? Or spectator sports? Or militaries?

In this vein we should all open ourselves to the fact that every race, creed, age, and sex are unified under ANAL SYNERGIC TRANSCENDENCE!!!

On that note, males, I would like to address the fact that many of you are messaging me, telling me about how you’d like to convince your girlfriends to have anal sex with you. Why? Why? Why would you do this? Why would you email someone you don’t know and tell them these things? Why would anyone care about this? Why? Why?
 

@kara_crabb

Photo via Flickr user ronniegrob

In April 2010, ex-cocaine smuggler Douglas Spink briefly dominated headlines when police raided his property in Whatcom County, Washington. Inside, they found a Welsh tourist making use of what the press has since described as an animal brothel, replete with tail-less mice covered in Vaseline. Overnight, Spink became the poster boy for the bizarre, brutal world of bestiality.

But according to Spink and journalist Carreen Maloney—whose upcoming book, Uniquely Dangerous, deals with his case—that’s not quite how things went down. Maloney believes, based on court records, that the Vaseline mice, for instance, were a fabrication created by the local Humane Society, and Spink says the ordeal is a manifestation of a bigoted assault on him for being an outspoken defender of heterospecies relationships, sometimes known as zoophilia.

Spink doesn’t consider himself just another animal fucker. He describes himself as a counter-surveillance researcher (at Baneki Privacy Labs), a heterospecies writer and thinker, and species equality activist who cut his teeth in frontline direct action in the 1990s with Earth First. 

VICE recently spoke to Spink, in the final stretch of his current sentence, about his views on heterospecies identity, zoophobic bigotry, and our revilement of inter-species intimacy as a natural result of human solipsism and aggressively ecocidal policies.

VICE: First off, are you OK with being called a zoophile, or do you use a different term?
Douglas Spink: I tend to use "heterospecies" rather than "zoophile." I see it as the difference between calling someone a faggot and calling them gay.

I do not think that I'm terribly good as a categorical representative of heterospeciesists or any particular class. I'm a bit of an outlier, even in the communities where I feel most at home. A BASE-jumping, Chicago MBA-carrying, counter-surveillance tech-developing Asperger's-diagnosed oddball. Proudly so.

I have chosen a path of dissent from the default zoophobic stance in our current social sphere, and as a result I've been targeted and imprisoned. It's a thought crime issue, not an action-based issue. My words are considered criminal, and enormous effort has been expended to censor me.

Can you tell me how you first got engaged in heterospecies identities and issues?
I was raised in a horse-centric environment, having learned to ride at age two. I was (and am) able to empathetically understand things from the horse's perspective. In biology class, I was presented with some counter-intuitive claims of "facts that were decidedly incongruent with what I knew from my firsthand immersion alongside equine companions, like "Animals were devoid of any interest in sex or sexuality, and bred purely based on instinct."

As a young teenager, I was able to learn about the (then new) horrors of factory farming from nonprofits like PETA. I became a lifelong (if imperfect) vegetarian, and my interest in activist work in support of non-human wellbeing kicked into high gear. Bring those threads together, and you get the question of heterospecies relations between humans and nonhumans.

OK, so you questioned the treatment of animals early on, and animal sexuality—but how did you move past the initial taboos and start engaging with heterospecies intimacy?
Anyone who can really generate some sort of putative revulsion over the idea of two social mammals engaging in intimate relations is displaying a deeply problematic misunderstanding of what it is to be a social mammal. It's a manufactured taboo.

I hear, in private discussions, a dropping of the entirely manufactured taboo positioning and a curiosity about the topic itself. And yet, when our public faces are put back on—Shocking! Disgusting! Revolting! Shameful!

That's different from folks who are genuinely made uncomfortable by discussions of homosexual (human) relationships. Our culture has a closet obsession with non-human sexuality. We deny it, but can't get enough of it.

Zoophobic persecution in any systematic sense is very much a modern phenomenon. I know we tend to assume that people like me have always been persecuted. But that default assumption doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Can you give a few historical examples where heterospecies relations were considered normal? Or the moment you think anti-heterospecies sentiment originated in modern culture?
The most compelling evidence is the vastly common theme of human/non-human couplings within the genesis stories of so many different cultures and religions. Clearly, this is not a concept that was beyond imagination in the vast majority of human cultures. If anything, the evidence suggests that it would be unimaginable for such things not to have taken place as part of routine social activities!

I do note that the rise of modern torture-farmed production of meat (and milk and eggs) for human consumption takes place step-by-step alongside the sudden (putative) freak-out over nonhuman sexuality and heterospecies relationships. Whether there's a causative link between those two variables is an open question within the research literature.

We are cutting ourselves off from the rest of the living world. What few pets we see on the street are almost certainly surgically mutilated—spayed or neutered—in order to make them de-sexed and socially crippled versions of themselves. We never see real non-humans, and thus can distance ourselves from the concept of non-humans as people.

Illustration by Julia Gfrörer

Historical precedent or not, critics of heterospecies relationships say it’s impossible for animals to give consent for a sexual relationship, so human-animal intimacy is at least coercive, but more often abusive. What do you say to that?
While it's not too difficult to see that pulling the skin from a still-living cow is harmful to her—something that happens hundreds of times a day in torture farms, 100 percent legal in the USA. It's not at all clear that equating sexual intimacy with abuse has any scientific or empirical basis.

People say any sexual interaction between a human and a non-human is "always abusive" because non-humans are unable to consent to being passive participants in a sexual act. But the zoophobic hate-law passed in Washington State in 2006 came about as a direct result of an interaction in which the humans were passive. People say non-humans cannot make their own choices about their own sexual activities. But a mare who prefers not to mate with a given stallion does just fine telling him "no" with her hooves. That's called "female mate preference" and it's an essential part of mammalian life.

If animals cannot consent to sexual intimacy with humans, then they cannot consent to such activity with anyone else, which means we live in a world of unrelenting, unpunished, unacknowledged rape. Which is obviously silly. It's profoundly insulting to the integrity and autonomy of sentient, self-aware, adult non-humans.

No means no, and that translates just fine. There's a deep tradition of awareness within the genuine animal rights world that specious mislabeling of heterospecies relationships as abusive does a profound disservice both to the humans and the non-humans involved in such relationships.

Humans can be cruel—horrifically so—when it comes to their treatment of nonhumans. From bulls who are forcibly “electro-ejaculated” by having an electric probe rammed into their rectum to mares put in stocks and inseminated by veterinary technicians as they kick and fight, these kinds of overtly non-consensual activities happen all the time. They're perfectly legal, too.

To me, that's a crime. That such rapes take place far more often in industrial torture-farming than in reciprocal, heterospecies relationships is impossible to deny.

So who are the people who get into heterospecies relationships? You’ve said you’re a bit of an outlier, but is there any commonality within the heterospecies community? For that matter, is there actually a community that views it as a primary part of their identity? Or is it just hidden and idiosyncratic?
The community, as fragmented and occasionally (perhaps often) dysfunctional as it is, exists. Sometimes there are heated political divisions between the “dog zoos” and “horse zoos” in the heterospecies community. And the rotten apples tend to smell strongest and be most easily picked out. But that doesn't mean they represent the wide body of apples in the barrel, eh?

It mirrors what one finds in, for example, the gay community. I mean, is there really such a thing as the “gay community” in the first place? Are twinks and leather bears really part of some cohesive social identity, simply because of their gender preferences? Also as bizarre as it is to imagine that someone could be cured of homosexuality by having some mouth-foaming preacher scream at them that an imaginary Jee-zus hates fags, it's even more ridiculous to think that someone whose internal social nexus revolves around non-humans is going to be able to selectively exclude this essential component of their identity from the way in which they approach the most fundamental elements of both their self-construction and their place within larger society.

I'd say that heterospecies folks are generally and noticeably empathetic in essential nature. One of the key flags that will trip what we colloquially refer to as “zoodar” is that highly empathetic feeling they give off. They tend to quite visibly have “the gift” when it comes to working with non-human colleagues. They're often somewhat shy about that gift. They tend to be somewhat bookish and perhaps a bit more likely to be highly verbal and/or strong in math. I suspect this has to do with a wide overlap between heterospecies folks and the proverbial autism spectrum. Sadly, they tend to be scarred.

The scarring can be somewhat shallow or it can manifest in spectacularly destructive, self-hatred driven exhibitions such as found in the case of Randy Pepe, a.k.a. Zoobuster. He was an admitted zoophile who turned on his community in the late 1990s, outing people who had trusted him and keeping a kill list on his website where he bragged about those who had committed suicide, or whose non-human partners had been abducted and murdered, as a result of his sick campaign.

These scars all mirror what we'd expect from any dual-identity situation, i.e. closeted psychology.

You talk about persecution. How does that usually play out? Do you think the bigotry you feel you’ve experienced is similar to, say, that involved in the gay rights movement?
The tragic reality is that bigotry toward heterospecies individuals primarily manifests itself in attacks on the non-human partner in the relationship. There are examples documented in this country of police abducting mares from (presumed) zoophiles and burning off their genitals with a blowtorch while forcing the human partner to watch the torture. What's been done to me, as a person, pales in comparison to the horror of knowing my loved ones—family members I would gladly put my life down to protect—were murdered while I was held in a solitary confinement isolation cell in federal prison, unable to save them. It's quite difficult to pretend this is all motivated by a concern for non-human wellbeing when the first targets are always the non-humans involved.

Stigmatized or targeted minorities are subjected to a barrage of bizarre, counter-factual, essentially mythological assertions by the majority social groups. Look at how many “respectable” newspapers published the bullshit Vaseline-slathered mice myth relating to my case in 2010. There's not a single actual recorded instance of Vaseline-slathered mice actually existing. I've also seen it in the almost-humorous lengths to which mainstream journalists will go in writing stories about me without ever contacting me.

Because the lies that are routinely told about us are so patently ridiculous, effort focuses in silencing anyone who can and will directly confront the bigoted bullshit. I've been threatened with assassination (by a US Marshal), threatened with years in prison, been targeted by several (failed) efforts to frame me for new (nonexistent) crimes. But, in the end, it was worth it. A core precedent was set: No longer can zoophobes in this country batter and coerce people like me into silence with threats of violence.

It's essentially impossible not to see the obvious overlap between the excuses offered in justification of zoophobic bigotry when compared to those which were, until quite recently, offered in service of homophobic bigotry: Justification based on citations from the Old Testament, and in particular Leviticus? Check. I've developed a theory that, for some bigots in search of a bigotry, the fact that they're no longer (socially) empowered to hate gay folks has caused them to switch over to zoophobic bigotry as a handy substitute.

This comparison is not popular with many self-styled activists against “discrimination based on sexual orientation.” To them, the only legitimate sexual orientation dimension is straight/gay. Witness the ugly battles over whether trans folks are allowed to share the momentum of the successful gay-rights campaigns.

You seem to couch some of your arguments in the notion that you’re targeted for your sexual orientation. But as far as I’m aware, heterospecies is not recognized as a legitimate, legal sexual orientation. How do you contend with the fact that society and the legal system don’t acknowledge the validity of your self-described sexual orientation?
There is an “evolving consensus” amongst researchers who actually bother to study such things that a heterospecies orientation is indeed a legitimate sexual orientation, whatever “legitimate” means in this context. Turn it around: Where's the research suggesting that a heterospecies orientation is not a legitimate sexual orientation? There's no such research.

Whether the legal system, or society, acknowledges the validity of an empirically validated fact or not is not actually my concern. My own experience is that the legal system will bend itself into comical pretzels in order to avoid confronting the issue altogether.

Let the bigots justify their position. The transitive statement holds true:

1. Bigotry based on sexual orientation is wrong.

2. Heterospecies is a sexual orientation.

3. Therefore, bigotry targeting heterospecies individuals is wrong.

You talk about your vocal and open role as a heterospeciesist in terms of political dissidence, academic research, and activism. What are your goals?
My work is entirely in support of full, reciprocal, respectful interconnections between humans and non-humans. Period. Zoophobic persecution is the other side of the coin of hatred of, disrespect for, and rejection of full personhood on behalf of non-human people.

In the political space, I see zoophobic bigotry more as a manifestation of the breakdown of the rule of law in modern America: "The law doesn't exist to protect people like you." That transcends the heterospecies community, and includes extra-legal attacks on people of color, trans folks, immigrants, those without lots of financial resources.

It's a betrayal of all the good things on which our country was originally founded (if imperfectly so: see treatment of Native Americans, slaves, women, and others): Equality, equal protection under law, and due process.

Today, Jon Lomberg, the design director of the Voyager Golden Record project, wants to rethink the almost forty-year-old project for current times. Over 10,000 signatures from 140 different countries have been culled in support of a crowdsourced digital message to be beamed up to the computers on the New Horizons probe—the first spacecraft to reach Pluto, come 2015.

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: The Gregory family

Screencap via ABC

The incident: A cat freaked out. 

The appropriate response: Putting on some long sleeves and oven mits and moving the cat to another room. Maybe calling animal control if it's really bad. IDK I've never owned a cat.

The actual response: The owners of the cat called 911. 

Earlier this week, police in DeLand, Florida released audio from a 911 call they'd received about an angry cat.

In the recording, the son of a woman named Teresa Gregory tells the operator that his mom's cat "has gone crazy and has attacked her multiple times."

He also said that the cat, which is named Kush, had attacked his stepfather "multiple times." 

Teresa also made a call to 911. She told the operator that she thought the cat might be freaking out because she'd accidentally stepped on it earlier in the day. 

"We just need her out of our house. We don't know what to do," she told the operator. "She's in the living room and I can't get out. She's got us trapped in the bedroom."

According to the Orlando Sentinel, officers were dispatched to the couple's home around 7:15pm. 

While speaking to the 911 operator, Teresa expressed some concern that the responding officers might also be attacked by the cat. "They might have to shoot her, I don't know," she said.

The officers didn't shoot the cat (which, for this column, is a surprise.) They decided instead to call in animal control, who took the cat and put it into quarantine, where it will be kept for at least 10 days. It's unclear what will happen to the animal at the end of that period.  

Neither Teresa, her son, her husband, or the responding officers required hospital treatment.

Cry-Baby #2: Kanye West

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The incident: Kanye West became annoyed that photographers were taking photos of him wherever he goes. 

The appropriate response: Stop making music, stop being on TV, divorce Kim Kardashian, move to a cabin in the woods, shut up. 

The actual response: He compared his experience with being raped. 

On Saturday, while performing at the Wireless Festival in London, occasional rapper and full-time troll Kanye West stopped singing to go on a 20 minute rant.

As is standard protocol for a Kanye West mid-set rant, it was reportedly rambling, made little sense, and involved Kanye switching between first and third person.

A lot of the rant, which was done in full view of tens of thousands of people, is said to have involved issues of privacy.

Kanye began by complaining about his arrest for assulting a paparazzi in 2013. Saying that his reaction was similar to that of "a porcupine or a blowfish when they're angry”.

Kanye, who makes millions and millions and millions of dollars a year by being a famous person, then went on to say, “I don’t care what you do in life, everybody needs a day off, everybody has the right to say, ‘You know what, I need a minute to breathe’."

Though I definitely agree that it must be super fucking annoying to be followed everywhere by paparazzi, it's not like Kanye is the parents of a murder victim or some other type of human that is followed around by photographers through no fault of their own. He's a very highly compensated musician who is married to a reality TV star.

Kanye isn't the first famous idiot to compare photography to rape, Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron have both previously received criticism for saying that paparazzi are like, totally raping them. 

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A woman who set fire to her house because she saw a spider vs. a restaurant that fired a guy for giving away a free muffin

Winner: The restaurant!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter

Constable Adam Kelly behind the wheel. All photos via the author.
The calls keep coming in. Some idiot gets caught trying to steal a car, and now the owner is beating the shit out of him. Another guy pulls a knife on a bouncer when he’s told that that he can’t take his three beers to go (he takes them). There’s talk of an overdose, updates from the World Cup, notices about impaired drivers, a woman on a bike being followed by a car, and someone who’s just bought a length of hose after losing his will to live. There’s a bar fight. Another bar fight. And another. And another. A 40-year-old male takes a spill down a flight of stairs.

“Alcohol and gravity don’t mix,” one of the cops says.

And—of course—someone’s always causing a ruckus at McDonald’s.

I’m with Constables Adam Kelly and Dean Bassett, covering their downtown beat on a Calgary Stampede Saturday night. Over a million people party in Cowtown every year for the event, which is billed as “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.” Think: midway rides, greasy eats, rodeos, western wear, twangy music, and a hell of a lot of beer. It’s essentially a ten-day city-wide country and western party. Women get pregnant, marriages end, and boots get broken in while cowboys compete for $2 million in prize money. The cops say that a Stampede night is like any other—times four. And they’ve seen it all: guys drunkenly riding horses down the street, escaped cattle, cowboy knife fights. The only thing that’s changed in recent years, they say, is the prostitutes: thanks to internet marketing, only fourth-tier sex workers walk the Stampede streets.

We’re hopping in and out of their police van on this 4 PM to 4 AM shift, answering calls, and patrolling priority areas. When we’re on the road, I sit between the cops and the van’s cage, with their big death-black 12-gauge shotgun and a clip of lead slugs directly in front of me. “It’s the best stopping tool we have,” says Bassett.

This is what it’s like: radio calls, running commentary, cruising to classic rock, then hitting the pavement and popping into bars—and a kid’s (unlicensed) lemonade stand. Kelly is cheery, affable, and a reader. He often keeps a copy of the Economist tucked into his ballistic vest, and he likes being able to explain his police world. Bassett has more of an edge and a penchant for biting sarcasm. He chides Kelly for liking Game of Thrones—he calls it “nerdy dragon shit”—and spent seven years as a journalist in Cranbrook, BC before joining the Calgary Police.  “For me,” he says, “it was the difference between covering a game and being in it.”



This kid didn't have a business license, but the cops didn't care.
With pale eyes and complexion, buzzed light hair, stocky builds, and matching cowboy hats, the partners could be brothers—and they are, in a way. They don’t play good cop/bad cop as much as they take on the roles of decent cops, giving breaks where they’re due and treating assholes as they deserve to be treated.

“The beat is old school police work at its best,” Kelly says. “Our job is to walk and talk —we’re the face of the force.” Discretion, he adds, is the name of the game. If a guy has an open beer or a joint and he cooperates, they’ll let it slide. If the dude is belligerent, they’ll come down on him hard.

“We know our areas and we know the people in them,” Kelly says. “There’s no other kind of police work that I’d rather be doing.”

*

We’re strolling down 17^th Ave—one of Calgary’s hipper drags. The bars are packed. Nearly everyone is in western wear—denim, boots, plaid, and cowboy hats—and guzzling pints of draft beer while shimmying to twangy country or pounding rock. It’s like the whole city is out, drunk, and on a bender. But the vibe is good—there’s a lot of laughter. And I laugh too: anyone with dreadlocks or some kind of counterculture look (not so common here in Calgary) gets this nervous flush on their faces whenever Kelly and Bassett walk by. I know that flush because I’ve felt it too: that expectant oh, shit, the cops are gonna hassle me paranoia anyone who holds vague anti-authority sentiments (or a small bag of weed) feels when the boys in blue strut by. But Kelly and Bassett just grin at those pale, frozen faces and keep walking, thumbs tucked into heavy tactile belts laden with their .40 calibre Glock pistols, twin clips, Tasers, pepper spray, radios, extendable batons, Maglites, and dual sets of handcuffs.

"Howdy, poe-leeeese!" someone shouts. "I'm from Montreal!" a kid slurs. "I'm just here to party. Stampede is ze best I ever saw! As we continue walking, we come across a gaggle of typical Stampeders. "I'm behaving officer!" a woman in a miniskirt drunkenly giglges. Another woman tries to kiss Bassett. "We call them 'badge bunnies,'" he tells me. 



Some British tourists wanted a picture while we waited for Downtown Outreach Addictions Program. Constable Kelly happily obliged.
Two dudes—sans western wear—come right at us, beers in hand. They see the cops and freeze.

“Oh shit,” one says.

“Officer, I’m—”

“Pour ‘em out,” Kelly says.

The first pauses. “Do we have to?”

“Pour ‘em out.”

“Come on, officer—it’s Stampede!”

“Pour ‘em out.”

“Can I take one last sip?”

“No.”

“Just one sip?”

Kelly sighs. “One sip.”

They chug.

“Now pour ‘em out.”

“One more?”

Kelly gets angry. “Pour ‘em out!”

They pour. Beer seeps into the roots of a stunted sidewalk tree. “Leave the cans,” Kelly says. The dudes eye him suspiciously. “But we don’t want to litter,” one of them says.

“Leave them.”

“But littering is against the law, officer.”

“Just leave them.” Kelly’s losing his patience. “Someone will pick them up.”

“Fine, fine.”

They drop the cans, eye the cops, and start walking away.

“Happy Stampede,” Kelly says.

“Fuckers,” one of them mutters under his breath. Someone grabs the cans within seconds.

We come upon a dude sleeping on the cement in a frayed straw cowboy hat next to a greasy McDonald’s bag. Kelly wakes him. “Ahh,” the guy moans. “Ahh.”



Down and out on a Stampede night.
He’s stinking drunk, so the cops call DOAP—the Downtown Outreach Addictions Program. DOAP works with the police and EMS, running a shuttle service to the city’s Alpha House shelter. “The folks at DOAP are worth their weight in gold,” Bassett says. “As soon as we find a guy like this, they’re our responsibility. They’re vulnerable, right? They could get robbed or assaulted, or they could choke on their own vomit. And it’s better for these guys to go to a shelter than spend the night in jail. Less paper work for us too. And they like the DOAP folks a hell of a lot more than they like us.”

The dude eventually sits up. “I’m fucking starving,” he says in a frog croak. He starts picking at his soggy fries. He tries to jab them into a little cup of ketchup, but misses most of the time. I’m standing there, camera around my neck. The guy registers my presence. “Who the fuck is he?” he says.

“He’s with us,” Kelly says.

“What the fuck is the camera for?”

“Don’t worry about the camera.”

“Is he fucking taking pictures of me?”

“He’s not taking pictures.”

I had taken a few pictures.

He gets up, swaying, shouting.

“What the fuck are you doing taking pictures of me, man?!”

Kelly turns from Mr. Nice Guy to hard-as-fucking-nails. He grabs the dude’s wrist, twists it, and pushes him up against the wall. They have a little talk and the guy drops to the ground, subdued, nursing his wrist. He lies back down, eyeing me, angry, while picking fries out of his crumpled bag and grumbling about his wrist and me. “You didn’t have to do that,” he moans. “Fuck.”



Constable Kelly turns hard-as-nails.
DOAP shows up. Two women in a minivan. They help the guy in. He seems relieved to see them. “Crazy night, eh?” Kelly asks one of the women. “Oh, It’s fun!” she says. She gives the cops hand sanitizer and rubber gloves before getting back in the van and speeding away.

We walk five paces—no more—and there’s another dude drunk and out and sleeping on the cement: a guy with a ratty goatee and a faded Mötley Crüe t-shirt. Dean calls DOAP and we wait. People pass by. Some laugh. Others try to take pictures. “What a loser,” one says. “Oh fuck,” says another. The chorus continues. “Check out this idiot.” “Poor dude.”

“Nothing to see here,” Kelly says. “He’s just Stampeded out.”

A group of British tourists ask Kelly to pose for a photo. He obliges while the dude lays dead to the world and snoring on his back. It takes DOAP half an hour to come this time, and there’s already another guy in the back of the minivan. The cops hook Mötley Crüe under the arms and drag his sleeping self to the sliding side door.

*

Last call at the bars comes just before 2 AM, then the streets are packed. People hail the police van, thinking it’s a cab. A drunk girl in cut-off shorts and a push-up bra approaches us at a red light and asks for a ride. “Sorry,” Bassett lies, “we’re going the other way.”

We get dozens of "Yeeeeeee-haws." A dude flips us a middle finger, and Kelly and Bassett stop the van to give him shit. People puke, stub out joints, and chug beers on the sidewalk. “Pour ‘em out!” Kelly shouts out the window.

We drive by a guy contemplating climbing an electrified fence. “Darwin’s law,” Bassett laughs. “You can’t fix stupid.” We try to follow up on a 911 hang-up call (no caller in sight), then go to McDonald’s to take a statement from a belligerent little shit who says he got sucker-punched in line.

Back in the van, Basset raps about the beauty of the coming pre-dawn quiet. I ask the cops about Stampede fears and Kelly talks about getting clocked in the back of the head in a busy bar. Bassett is more blasé.

“Let me put it this way,” he says. “I’d rather take a gun call than deal with my ex-wife.”


@dsotis

Photo via Flickr user Francis Storr

In the modern world, it’s impossible to live ethically without going off the grid or killing yourself. If you did live off the grid­ (or didn’t live, period), you wouldn’t be reading this right now. But you are. Which means you—yes, you, in spite of your Prius with the “Coexist” sticker and your love of same-sex marriage and free-range poultry—live unethically.  

Indeed, every single thing you do is unethical. Where'd you buy the clothes you're wearing? Somewhere unethical. What’d you eat for breakfast? Something unethical. Did you take a shower this morning? How long did you take? If you didn't just dab yourself with a wet, Dr. Bronner's covered rag, you fucked up. You continued to be part of the problem.  

It’s a nice gesture for you to drive the Prius with the “Coexist” sticker. After all, you could be driving a Hummer with a “Fuck Differences” sticker. The Prius makes you feel better about yourself; like you’re raping Mother Gaia a little less than the other guy. Naturally, this fills you with a fair amount of self-righteousness. Your self-righteousness, however, is unfounded. In spite of your best efforts, you’re still ruining the world.  

No matter what you do, and how you do it, you’re tangentially supporting Koch Industries. The second largest privately held company and the fourteenth worst air polluter in the US, Koch "started in the heartland, and has expanded to nearly every state." A fair amount of their $115 billion in annual revenue is spent on lobbyists, who in turn ensure a fucked future for us all by paying politicians to look the other way while Koch contaminates waterways and blackens the air.  

To know Koch Industries is to hate it. "You may not always see [their] name on the products you use,” their promotional video reminds you, “but [they’re] working every day to make better food, clothing, shelter, transportation, hygiene supplies, technologies, and other necessities." The video’s imagery—a diapered infant waddling, an old man on a horse—reminds you that, from the cradle to the fucking grave, by virtue of simply existing, you're contributing to their bottom line.  

Koch-provided or not, well-intended or not, the staples of your life—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, hygiene supplies, technologies, and other necessities—are all inherently immoral. Let’s discuss.  

Photo via Flickr user John Morgan

Food 

Organic produce, while more environmentally friendly than traditional produce, is still produce. Which means it’s still picked by farm workers who, while not having to suffer the health hazard of being exposed to pesticides, nevertheless suffer long hours, oppressive working conditions and low wages. The USDA’s list of organic standards includes no rules about labor, which means organic farms have carte blanche to treat their employees as poorly as traditional ones. You may feel better, eating that organic arugula, but the back of the woman who picked it doesn’t. 

The artisanal-ification of restaurants—muddling cocktails, over-complicating ingredients—is making the act of eating out more and more cost-prohibitive to people who don’t have tech jobs or take money from their parents. Every boozy brunch you attend distances you further and further from the lower classes and, by proxy, reality. Every family-run restaurant that gets priced out of its lease and turned into a shticky bistro further fragments us. Every hip Korean-Mexican fusion food truck with a punny name puts a taco truck out of business.  

Photo via Flickr user Gaudencio Garcinuño

Clothing 

You dress like a bohemian. But your faux rags, your artful affectation, were assembled by someone in real rags, working Christ knows how many hours a week for Christ knows how little pay. You wonder how those stores in the mall can sell things so cheaply. It’s easy: low overhead. 

Even if you don’t shop at the mall, even if you buy your clothing secondhand at a thrift store, you’re depriving people poorer than you from purchasing it. You got a great deal on that skirt. But did you need to get a great deal? You could have afforded to pay more—much more.  

Shelter 

Gentrification works thusly: You show up. You displace. You repeat. Wherein your parents once fled from the city, you now flock to it. Because, like, the suburbs fucking suck. In doing so, you’re essentially committing reverse white flight. The people forced to stay in the cities, the people abandoned by their former neighbors who got the hell out of Dodge as soon as they made enough money to buy a Dodge, have been keeping Echo Park, the U Street Corridor, and Beacon Hill warm for you. Now you want those areas back. So you take them. Where do they go once you, and people like you, kick them out and fill their neighborhoods with vinyl-only record stores? That question does not cross your mind.  

Photo via Flickr user Marshall Astor

Transportation 

Sure, you can go to the desert and do mushrooms and connect with your Earth mother, but how'd you get there, numbnuts? You drove a fucking car. You filled the tank with dinosaur bones, threw a Chinese-made tent in the trunk, and bought some shrooms from your dealer, who also sells harder shit smuggled across the border by murderous cartels.  

Hygiene Supplies 

I was in a co-op the other day, the sort of place in which one would witness a man burn honest-to-Goddess sage without comment, after smoking DMT, again, without comment. Despite the overwhelmingly hippy ethos of my environment, the hand soap in the shared bathroom was made by Procter and Gamble. A package of disposable razors I noticed in a woman’s bedroom were made by the same. Procter and Gamble is a major donor to the Republican National Committee. The Republican National Committee hates hippies, and hippies hate the Republican National Committee. Yet there I was, in that co-op, using their hippy-hating soap.  

Photo via Flickr user Robert Scoble

Technologies 

Sure, your iPhone was “Designed by Apple in California,” but it sure as shit wasn’t constructed there. It would cost a mere $4 per unit to manufacture in America, but cost isn’t the reason why the labor has been outsourced to China, Taiwan, and Korea. It’s because there’s something about borderline slave labor that makes manufacturing things so darned fast! The folks over there can crank these babies out like crazy!  

Which reminds me of a delightful story: Steve Jobs decided he wanted the iPhone’s screen to be made out of glass very shortly before its launch; in America, the time constraints involved would have made it an impossibility. Not so, however, in China! A factory made its own dorms to facilitate employees working 12-hour shifts, making 10,000 iPhones a day. Steve got his wish! He could die happy!  

If you don’t have an iPhone, but you have ethics, you're probably upset about Google raping and pillaging San Francisco. You write tweets about it on your Droid. Which is filled with conflict minerals.

Photo via Flickr user Marisa McClellan

Other Necessities 

While it may seem as though that $6 cold-brewed coffee you just bought is a necessity, I assure you it is not. It’s liquid privilege.  

You’re slightly different than that theoretical Hummer driver. But only slightly. So the next time you pat yourself on the back for being such a good person, a caring citizen of the Earth, do me a favor: don’t.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Dorothy Hunter is on a mission. Hunter, the owner of Paw’s Natural Pet Emporium in Richland, Washington, really wants you to feed your dog healthy food. It matters to her so much that she's eating nothing but dog food for a month. She’s chronicled the experience on her YouTube channel, where you can watch her scarf down dog treats, canned tuna pate, and kibble. Before speaking to her about her project, I binge watched her taste-testing videos, which accomplished the impossible feat of making dog food look delicious.

VICE: So you decided to only eat dog food for 30 days. What inspired that?
Dorothy Hunter: There are lots of times that we’ll meet companies that sell really good products that are using USDA or Grade-A ingredients—but they aren’t allowed to put that on the package. I knew that, and I had a lot of confidence in these foods because we carry them in our store. Anyway, we had a car show coming up—we own a couple of hot rods—and I was just trying to get a bunch put out before the show that night, and on my way out of the house I grabbed a bag of snacks, and they turned out to be Pure Bites. But I was like, “Hey. This is better than human food.”

Really? What do they taste like?
They taste like goldfish, minus the salt. The ingredients are 100 percent cheddar cheese. So from there, I decided to do the Scout and Zoe’s chicken jerky, and she’s one of the ones who can’t put it on her package, but she uses the same USDA, Grade-A chicken that we send to our restaurants. She doesn’t put anything else in it. It’s that simple. I have pride in what we’re selling—so much that I said, “I’ll put my mouth where my money is and eat my food.” 

Right, and now you’re exclusively eating dog and cat food for a month. How has that made you feel?
I know that the health professionals out there are like, “Don’t do this!” And I agree with them. But I’ve only got 11 days left and I feel great. Although, when I was doing all the different kinds of canned foods, I was experiencing what would be known as “dog gas.”

Dog gas?
Yeah, I had the dog farts. Bad. But now my main diet is the dehydrated food—Honest Kitchen and Grandma Lucy’s dehydrated dog food—and other stuff just to keep it interesting.

What’s the best thing you’ve eaten so far?
On the meat side, it would probably be the Scout and Zoe's dehydrated chicken. My favorite dried kibble is the N&D “nutritious and delicious” dog food. And the worst? Yesterday we tried some 96 percent tuna pate. As soon as I cracked the can open, I knew I was in trouble, because I hate pate. My husband did the video with me too, and it’s pretty funny. I really wanted to spit it out but I had no place to spit it. So yeah, that was nasty. But you know what? These ingredients are so good for your pets. My advice to everybody is ingredient awareness. Flip the bag over and read the ingredients. Go and ask questions at the pet store you go to, or go to an independent pet store.

Have you gotten any of your family and friends to join in?
Oh yeah. My husband samples some of the food with me on the YouTube channel. And my brother joined in. We had an ingredient intervention with him—he just moved here from Nebraska, and wasn’t feeding his pets the best food—so I had an intervention. I went to his house, brought a whole bunch of treats out and we tried them, and he was like, “Huh, that’s not bad.” So we converted his pets, and his pets liked the treats. Then we left the bag out on the counter, and that night, when he and his wife were unpacking into their new house, she ate like, half the bag.

She ate half a bag of dog treats?!
She actually liked them better than their other snacks at the house.

Wow. So if it’s good enough for your pets, it should be good enough for you. 
Everybody still has that stigma that dog food is nasty, nasty, bad stuff. Back in 2008, when they had the major recalls on, like, every pet food out there except for the good brands, that’s when the natural foods started taking off.

And what are you eating today?
I had the canine granola blueberry cookies for breakfast. And I think I’m going to go find a new snack or new can or something and try it a long with my Grandma Lucy’s for lunch, and the Honest Kitchen for dinner. And for my grand finale, I’m going to taste—but not eat—the Green Cow Green Beef Tripe. I’m sure I’m going to be nasty, because I’ve opened the cans before and they stink. But I’m going to taste it. And before I actually taste it, I want people to know how good that is for digestion and other health benefits for your pets.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). Coney Island, New York, ca. 1952. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

In order to enter the Garry Winogrand retrospective that opened last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you exit the main auditorium into the south wing, where you are greeted by a long corridor of Greek Art from the 6th-4th centuries B.C. It mostly consists of statues in various poses—some at war, some lost in thought, some proclaiming, some brooding. By the time you reach the Winogrand show on the second floor and begin to survey the work, it may occur to you that the Greek gallery provided something of an anachronistic prologue. Known for his routine of tirelessly walking the streets candidly photographing city life, Winogrand was a photographer of people, from rodeo performers in Texas to socialites in Manhattan to the regulars at Venice Beach. Humanity—or perhaps American humanity—in all its iterations and range of expression, was his subject matter.

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). New York, 1950. Gelatin silver print. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The Met is the third stop of the exhibition’s tour, originating at San Francisco MoMA. The project began when gallerist Jeffrey Fraenkel asked photographer Leo Rubinfien to help compile a large retrospective book of Winogrand’s work. Rubinfien agreed, but in his own words, “it was immediately clear you needed a museum.” So Rubinfien approached San Francisco MoMA Curator of Photography Sandy Phillips, who jumped at the idea of doing an exhibition, in which Rubinfien, who is not a curator by trade, would act as such. This iteration at the Met was reduced from the original SF MoMA show by Jeff Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at the Met. It is the first Winogrand retrospective in twenty-five years, a virtual eternity for an artist of Winogrand’s renown, let alone an artist no longer living.

Although Winogrand’s work was published and exhibited in fairly tight, topical categories during his life (The Animals, Women are Beautiful, Public Relations) Rubinfien decided to group Winogrand’s work by time and to an extent place, irrespective of theme, for the retrospective:

“The best presentations I ever saw of Winogrand’s work during his life were the slideshows he gave at universities and museums. When he did it this way it produced a result that was totally unlike what you got from those books and the result, closer to anything else, was like Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” where Whitman gives you these lists, and as the lists unfold, you get the whole of America. Here’s the businessman, and here’s the sailor, and here’s the sexy model, and here’s the lost child, and here’s the ape in the zoo, and here’s the fireman, and you’d feel like the whole country was unfolding in front of you in this American epic.”

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). El Morocco, New York, 1955. Gelatin silver print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, 1992 (1992.5107). © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The show is broken down into three sections. The first, “Down from the Bronx (1950-71)” covers the early and middle phases of Winogrand’s career, specifically the photographs taken in New York, and literally refers to Winogrand’s short but symbolic voyage from his hometown of the Bronx to photograph in Manhattan, his main working location. The first picture on the left as one enters this first section depicts a young sailor, bag in hand, walking completely alone yet purposefully down a long stretch of road, the hazy night punctuated by bright streetlights; the photograph has an ominous, dramatic quality to it that Winogrand would become famous for. It’s hard not to imagine, in context of the show, that the sailor is meant to symbolize Winogrand beginning his own voyage, travelling alone into Manhattan to shoot, armed with only his camera bag. However, this photograph stands as an exception to the bustling New York City scenes that comprise this first section—airports, zoos, Coney Island, and gatherings of all kinds. What’s immediately clear is that Winogrand was not simply interested in photographing people, but really people in places where things were happening.

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1957. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

This idea is reinforced as you move into the second section, “A Student of America (1950-1971),” covering Winogrand’s work during the same time period in other American cities, mainly in California and the Southwest. The title comes from a quote directly from Winogrand, who provided many notable lines over the course of his life: “You could say I’m a student of photography, and I am, but really I’m a student of America.” Indeed, Winogrand’s subjects reflect a range of characters and scenes that are strikingly American—a man welcoming a younger woman home with a homemade sign in an airport; a toddler emerging from a darkened garage, tricycle strewn about the driveway; an older man sitting on a lawn chair under a sun umbrella looking directly into the camera as sprinklers go off behind him. But the work has an undeniably socio-political tilt to it as well. In one photograph, three stylish women walk down the street in Los Angeles, lit so miraculously that they appear in something of a late afternoon spotlight. It might take the casual viewer a few moments to notice that there is a beggar slumping forward in a wheelchair to the ladies’ right, and a small child who strains his neck to look across at him on a bench opposite. They’re all in the picture, it’s just a matter of where you look, and certainly what you look at first. According to the picture’s accompanying placard, when asked about the photograph’s meaning, Winogrand responded, “It’s the light. Look at the light!” This sort of response was vintage Winogrand. While photographers a half generation older—Robert Frank, Eugene Smith, et al.—used photography as a means of demonstrating the redemptive qualities of humanity post-World War II, Winogrand photographed for the sake of photographing—neither he, nor his pictures, needed any larger justification for themselves. In another quote, displayed on the wall of the exhibition, Winogrand claimed, “I photograph to find out what things will look like photographed.”

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). Los Angeles, California, 1969. Gelatin silver print. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

But, given pictures like the one of the ladies and the beggar in Los Angeles, this explanation simply doesn’t seem good enough, especially when trying to make sense of Winogrand’s oeuvre. It wasn’t satisfying for Rubinfien either:

“It seemed to me one had no business doing this project if one did not as part of it seek to address the issue of meaning, maybe you’d address it badly, maybe you’d address it well, but you could no longer use the kind of evasive expressions Winogrand and [Lee] Friedlander and [Diane] Arbus used. The justifications don’t work in the present day.”

When I met with Rubinfien, a close friend of Winogrand’s, in his office on the top floor of his triplex, amidst the buildings of the New York City skyline, he spoke about Winogrand with the same mix of reverence, affection, and wistfulness that many of the photographers who knew and were deeply influenced by Winogrand display. At one point, he warmly recounted a story in which he sat in on one of Winogrand’s classes when he was teaching in Texas in 1974. Analyzing a Kertesz photograph, Winogrand declared, “This is a picture of a man looking at his own death.” Clearly, that sort of meaning is not literally in the picture—it must be read into the picture. To Rubinfien, this moment proved that, despite his non-committal, riddle-like answers to questions about the raison d’être of photography, Winogrand understood the profound meaning that could be communicated in a photograph:

“There is a point at which the literal world we see becomes transformed into a symbolic world. They are not objects in the world, but things with meanings beyond themselves. You’ve gone from describing the physical to the metaphysical. And that’s what the meaning in it is. Things in photographs are pregnant with meaning. It’s not enough to say, ‘He [Winogrand] showed what the world looked like in 1967 or 1968.’ His work is much greater than that because of all its resonances.”

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). Fort Worth, 1974. Gelatin silver print. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Doris and Donald Fisher, and Marion E. Greene. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The third and final section of the exhibition, “Boom and Bust (1971-1984),” covers the period of Winogrand’s career when he left New York for teaching positions in Chicago and Austin. This, according to Rubinfien, is when Winogrand’s work drastically changed. The ecstasy of human interaction in his earlier photographs gives way to a bleakness—in terms of both tone and light—that implies a disillusionment. Of course, this sentiment mirrors the general cultural malaise the nation fell into after the social and political turmoil of the 1960s, which generated much of the energy evident in Winogrand’s earlier work. But a deeper look at the photographer’s life and career yields a more complex explanation of this period.

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). Central Park Zoo, New York, 1967. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Randi and Bob Fisher. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Winogrand died suddenly in 1984 leaving behind a host of unseen film—contact sheets he made but didn’t edit thoroughly, film he processed but never made into contact sheets, and film he never processed at all, most of it produced in the later stages of his career. And since he had devoted his time to photographing rather than processing and developing, there was an enormous number of these pictures. More than half of his life’s work, in fact. The first Winogrand retrospective, organized by legendary MoMA curator John Szarkowski, had written off most of this undiscovered work as inferior, but Rubinfien wanted to reinvestigate the late work, searching for meaning. To do so, he reviewed some 22,000 contact sheets and commissioned the printing of selected photographs, which notably appear for the first time in the show. Although Rubinfien contends that strong photographs are fewer and farther between during this period, he believes the work is no less significant, and provides some sort of closure to the career of an artist whose life ended before he had a chance to bring his work to a conclusion. Up until “Boom and Bust,” the narrative of the exhibition is, like its subject matter, distinctly and familiarly American—a young, brash man from humble beginnings goes it alone in the big city and makes a name for himself, then travels west to uncharted territory, encountering vibrant fragments of society at every stop. But in the last section one gets the sense that Winogrand has learned something troubling as a self-proclaimed student of America that he could not contain. The scenes no longer burst with a joyful kineticism; now, they either appear on the brink of peril or seem to linger in a haze—a man in a suit and cowboy hat snarling as he charges forward at a cattle auction; a horse rearing up onto its hind legs as its handler ducks for cover at a rodeo; a long shot of Los Angeles depicting two smokestacks rising over the ocean. The chaos and the foreboding quality of his photographs are still there, but the organic beauty and the vitality is not.

The last photograph of the exhibition, posthumously contacted, is a medium-distance shot of a mixed group of people seemingly waiting at bus stop, taken out the windshield of a car. The photograph is noticeably detached: distinguishable features are hard to make out, to the point that some appear to blend into the hill behind them, and people are not moving or shouting or laughing, they’re simply waiting. The viewer might even strain to look for a clue to reveal some greater activity, but there isn’t one. Compared to Winogrand’s earlier work, where it is difficult to imagine how he even got so close to the people he photographed, here it almost seems like he’s spying. Once one moves through the entire exhibition, Winogrand’s obvious distancing of himself, literally and metaphorically, from the society he was once so fascinated by, is heartwrenching. But this sort of disenchantment is just as fundamentally American as the rest of Winogrand’s work. And if he ever admitted to having a message, that might have been it.

Giancarlo T. Roma is a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of one to RACIST, with “one” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

–Sierra Mannie, an English and Classics major at the University of Mississippi (home of the Rebels!) wrote a scathing op-ed that was republished by TIME.com in which she shook her substantial fist at white homosexuals for stealing black female culture. During the course of her epic screed, she invoked twerking, large asses, Beyonce fandom, and "bottoming" for black men. To sum up her thesis, allow me to quote the master:

"You are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood. It is not yours. It is not for you. Let me explain. Black people can’t have anything. Any of these things include, but aren’t limited to: a general sense of physical safety, comfort with law enforcement, adequate funding and appreciation for black spaces like schools and neighborhoods, appropriate venues for our voices to be heard about criticism of issues without our race going on trial because of it, and solid voting rights (cc: Chris McDaniel)."

This rhetoric is, in a sense, a cousin to the tantruming child that screams to their mommy about life not being fair. Ms. Mannie (which sounds like a P.L. Travers character or something) is saying that because African-Americans are struggling as a group, white gays shouldn't say "you go, girl." Ignoring the fact that gay men have suffered plenty in just about every country, and often face violent respones to their sexual orientation, Mannie fabricates a universe in which the mere fact of being white and gay is some kind of privilege.

She also seems to forget that the many "black" cultural signifiers she is so fond of were made popular by black gays. Would there be a Beyonce without Ru Paul's drag persona? Ru was saying "fierce" and throwing shade in the 1970s and 1980s. Half the time, I can't tell the difference between Beyonce and Ru Paul. They probably buy their weaves from the same person.  

On Mannie's Facebook page (which I will not link out to here, because I am not a monster), under religion, she lists "What would Beyonce do?" Well, she'd probably start by not being so oblivious to cultural history, and just might be a bit more willing to accept the free-flowing share of ideas that makes for a harmonious society rather than choose to cast stones all day. That's, sadly, the problem with our discourse, and in some ways this very column is a part of that.

In certain circles of the internet, the game is to figure out who's "got it worse," whose privilege needs to be checked, and who is the most persecuted. Ranking news stories on their levels of racism is one of those things, though I've always hoped that this column's purpose was to shine a light on injustice in a humorous fashion. And yet, there are those who see this column as divisive. In truth, I believe we've all got it bad—white, black, Asian, Latino, LGBTQ, etc. The struggle is for everyone to stop asking for special treatment, and stop seeing their pain as more valid than others'. That concept of privileged pain is never more apparent in Mannie's piece than when she claims that gay men can hide, whereas black people cannot:

"The difference is that the black women with whom you think you align so well, whose language you use and stereotypical mannerisms you adopt, cannot hide their blackness and womanhood to protect themselves the way that you can hide your homosexuality."

This, of course, completely ignores the mass struggle of LGBTQ individuals to live out in the open. This discounts the fear of reprisal that gay men and lesbians had to accept as common when being affectionate with a lover, identifying publically as queer, or god forbid, having a more fluid gender identification. Mannie assumes gay people want to hide, and I believe that's as far from the truth as it gets.

Mannie really takes it home when, after what she must have assumed was a really cogent point, stopped to soak in the cheers. She imagined a world where her enraptured readers were "gasping at the heat and the steam of the strong truth tea I just spilled." This is the literary equivalent of calling your shot moments before striking out. 5

Photo via Flickr user Ron Cogswell

–Following a backlash from 12 black law students, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has agreed to remove replica Confederate flags from their campus. The flags were replicas of original Confederate flags in the campus's Lee Chapal, which also contains a statue of General Robert E. Lee. The group of 12, called the Committee, also demanded the school apologize for its role in the institution of slavery and condemn General Lee.

The old "heritage, not hate" argument reared its head again, when the school's paper published an editorial which called the notion of the school's display of the flag being an endorsement of slavery "ludicrous." I realize that there are people who hold up the secession of the southern states as a symbol of the fight for states' rights, but the right those states were fighting for was slavery and racial prejudice. Understanding and respecting history is admirable, but I find it very hard to justify this particular usage of the flag. The whole point of the statue and the flag is to lionize a man and a movement that supported an objectionable practice. Having the flag and the statue is, in fact, a sign that the school wants to honor those who endorsed a practice that hopefully, we all find objectionable. 7

–Just Add a Kid, a novelty shirt company, got "put on blast," as the kids say, for the above display which features a cardboard cutout of a black child wearing a monkey t-shirt. The company quickly issued a statement claiming a "mix-up" after the photo started getting shared around the internet. Granted, not every sales clerk at a novelty t-shirt store is aware of racial sensitivity. Perhaps the clerk just thought, "hey, black kids are cute and so are monkeys! Let's put 'em together!" By the way, does this mean I'll get in trouble when I refer to my young son as a "little monkey" in front of his friends? He loves bananas and lives in the jungle, so what's the problem? 8

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

SO SICK OF THE WORLD CUP OMFG ITS SO FUCKING ANNOYING UGH STOP NOBODY GAVE A FUCK BEFORE AND NOW ALL OF A SUDDEN EVERYONE IS A WETBACK

— HydroponicWeed (@Frankieshteen) July 8, 2014

I sent my nigger neighbor a postcard. It was a picture of a showgirl and I colored her face black. He should get it today.

— President Nixin (@PresidentNixin) July 10, 2014

I celebrate the Fourth of July not the force of jew lies.

— Kriegsson (@Kriegsson) July 3, 2014

Facebook has frozen me out multiple times for using the term nigger.

— Alex Linder (@AlexLinder5) July 10, 2014

Officially reached dune coon status.Middle gibberish is my name in camel jockey.Pajamas and flip flops 24/7. #racist? pic.twitter.com/KY7qwcaErM

— Christopher (@ChrisMMorin) December 18, 2013

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