On September 6, a day-long ceasefire in eastern Ukraine was broken when pro-Russia forces shelled Ukrainian tanks driving into Mariupol. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky was in the city before, during, and after the ceasefire, and traveled to Mariupol's Eastern checkpoint as it endured the attacks.

Supporters of 2012 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson at a campaign rally. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Police militarization suddenly became mainstream news this summer after unarmed teenager Michael Brown was killed by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri. For many libertarians, that burst of attention has been a welcome development—albeit one that came at a tragic cost.

Here was a national spectacle highlighting what libertarians have been saying for a long time now: The government (and its various armed proxies, whether military or police) have way too much power. But since the initial furor over Brown’s death died down, the libertarian crowd has found itself on the defensive, first for allegedly not caring about the shooting, and next for having somehow caused the situation in the first place. Both are bullshit slurs, as are many of the down-punching critiques of a relatively marginal ideology that is primarily about helping the powerless hold their own against the big, bad state.

According to the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal, libertarians are wrong to blame militarized police because they “didn’t shoot Michael Brown, or kill [Staten Island resident] Eric Garner in a chokehold. And aggressive police reactions to protests haven’t required extensive military equipment over the past 40 years.” Franklin Foer at the New Republic got in on the action, too, under the headline “Ferguson’s Lesson: Local Government Poses the Real Threat to Liberty.” Likewise for New York’s Jonathan Chait, who, when he isn’t cheerleading for Barack Obama, enjoys writing about how small government is the worst.

All three men wildly downplay the threat to individual liberty posed by the federal government, while suggesting that libertarians aren’t annoyed by local tyrants. That is surely a joke. Have you ever mentioned former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in front of a libertarian? If you do, you’re likely to endure a profanity-laden rant.

In a commendable act of almost but nope, Foer mentions the importance of civil asset forfeiture while skirting around the fact that forfeiture laws incentivize making drug cases into federal ones, so as to get around states with higher burdens of proof for taking property. (Plenty of state forfeiture laws have low enough standards, but the feds make them irrelevant.) Include a DEA agent in your drug bust—making it a federal case—and suddenly you get up to 80 percent of the profits from the seized cash or goods. In short, it’s a hell of a lot easier for local police to steal your shit thanks to federal law.

Konczal, at least, is correct that the problem goes beyond the Pentagon’s 1033 grants, or the Department of Homeland Security’s version of the same program, which provide even small towns with all sort of war tech like the absurd MRAP (Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected) vehicles. But to act as if the state of policing in America hasn’t gotten worse, or at least more noticeable, over the past few decades—as the federal government’s reach has steadily expanded—is to be deliberately obtuse. The prison population has exploded since the 1980s. The use of SWAT teams (mostly for searches, 62 percent of them for narcotics) has also increased to a staggering extent. The Controlled Substances Act, for one, is federal law, and the war on drugs is integrally tied to police misconduct and to the fact that the United States now has 2.4 million people behind bars.

There is unquestionably something to the idea that until comfortable, middle-class white people are unable to ignore the police, cops’ flaws will not become an issue worth solving. And as Konczal points out, SWAT was invented in part to quell 1960s unrest. But so what? Modern gun control emerged out of a desire to quell the Black Panthers’ propensity for carrying firearms around and terrifying all the squares. Our law-and-order society has more than a few parents, including racism and a hysterical media. The Supreme Court also plays its part by upholding immunity from prosecution for cops and other government agents who violate individual liberty.

Still, the war on drugs—that libertarian pet issue—is the greatest catalyst for the warrior cops we see around us today. This makes “just Republicans who smoke pot” more than a little cheesed off. The war on drugs is not just about SWAT teams kicking doors in more than they used to. It is also a fantastic excuse to profile and search minorities with no recourse. So are gun laws. The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program used (and, to a lesser extent, still uses) both to disproportionately target black and Latino men for punishment.

Federalist urges notwithstanding, libertarians do not magically think that local tyranny is not a problem. But a city or county is easier to leave behind than a state—and certainly much easier than abandoning one’s home country. That does not mean that a locality where police treat people like lesser beings is some kind of libertarian fantasy gone wrong. Smart libertarians know that police don’t themselves cause institutional racism, and that expensive riot gear didn’t make Darren Wilson pull the trigger on Michael Brown.

Foer is correct that libertarians often concentrate on big, splashy news of federal outrages at the expense of local tyranny, but that is not unique to the ideology. National news is bigger news, and it’s easier to keep abreast of it. Certainly, we could all use more—and tougher—local news reporting. Cable news and national media are often a joke, or perpetuate the very same hand-wringing and hysteria that gave us “tough on crime.” And local newspapers are dying out (not that their reporters were the pavement-pounding heroes most of them think they were). But none of this changes the fundamental dangers of a sprawling federal government, and its part in making our police more powerful.

The progressive idea that a federal “police tsar” would solve the issues at play is a nerve-wracking one. Federal law enforcement, from the Drug Enforcement Administration to the bumbling Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (and an FBI that seems to spend half its time creating and then “preventing” terrorist plots), is no more trustworthy than local or state forces. The Feds are, in fact, capable of doing more harm, and all of these entities are less likely to encounter the victims of their overreach than a local police official. Likewise, the Department of Justice—a joke in the Obama era—isn’t some outside savior that can be trusted to save the day. Sometimes they annoy local jerks like Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, sure. But they also help melt little kids in places like Waco, Texas, and run guns to Mexican cartels.

Again, nothing about distrusting the big, bad feds should translate to allowing local cops to do whatever they want. But local cops’ hold over the lives of ordinary individuals is enhanced at nearly every turn by national money and power. The problem is top-down and bottom-up, but since libertarians (and some conservatives) tend to mention the federal connection, progressives feel threatened and need to undermine them.

Konczal’s strangest argument betrays his lack of understanding of what libertarians really think. One thing libertarians don’t believe is that “having people who ‘use’ the criminal justice system pay for it” is what our law-and-order system should look like. He says libertarians believe that to simply privatize—or monetize—a service usually provided by the government is to end all debate over it. But Blackwater killing civilians in Iraq instead of American soldiers doing so is still a problem for libertarians. Public prisons have plenty of warped incentives for continuing to exist, such as heavy lobbying from police and prison guards’ unions, but making those into private, financial incentives does not solve the problem of there being hundreds of thousands of people behind bars who have no business being there. A more moderate libertarian might consider contractor options in order to diminish costs to the taxpayer, but they don’t solve the moral issues.

Good libertarians care about police and the right to not be tossed into prison. And as Radley Balko recently demonstrated in a beautiful piece of reporting from Missouri, we’re not really down with ruining people’s lives over court costs, speeding tickets, or other bureaucratic price tags that often lead to jailtime for folks who desperately need to take care of kids or get to a job. Forcing poor people, who sure seem to “use” the criminal justice system a lot more than rich people, to pay fines for failing at lawn upkeep or driving too fast is not remotely consistent with libertarian principles.

Pretending that militarized police completely explains the Michael Brown shooting is silly. Local cops in this racially polarized town did wrong. But ignoring the federal government’s role in making our police forces what they are today is equally absurd. Leave the libertarians alone. We may focus more on the federal government, since it has the appearance of an immovable (and intangible) object, but our favorite pastime is loudly complaining about oppressions large and small. To pretend otherwise is to admit you don’t know us.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

A few headlines that don't seem pro-welfare (Photo via)

Welfare recipients tend to have a pretty hard time. In 1989, 60 percent of the British population agreed that the government should spend more on welfare; in 2011, support had dropped to below 30 percent and it looks set to continue plummeting. Is this part of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy—the lasting impact of an ideology that encouraged us all to compete and regard those at the bottom as lazy and feckless? Or is it a symptom of tabloid demonizing, and shows like Gypsies On Benefits & Proud, which are essentially those headlines stretched out into prime time programming?

Whatever the reason, things aren’t looking good. A report published on Tuesday found that nearly a million people living on welfare have been abused because of their financial situation, with over 200,000 claiming to have been physically attacked. Responding to the report on Twitter, one user wrote that her husband had been called a lazy cripple for being on welfare; another claimed to have been called a scrounger while they were out in their wheelchair.

I called Katharine Sacks-Jones, head of policy and campaigns at Crisis UK—and spokesperson for the campaign group Who Benefits?, which commissioned the report—for her take on its results.

Katharine Sacks-Jones

VICE: Were you shocked about what you found out from this survey?
Katharine Sacks-Jones: We were shocked, but we sadly weren’t surprised. We’ve heard these kinds of stories before—people facing discrimination and abuse—and we wanted to look into it further with the research. What we found was pretty horrific. Hundreds of thousands of people were telling us they’d faced discrimination—they’d faced verbal abuse and, in some cases, physical abuse as well. And it’s not even just them—people are telling us that their children are being bullied at school.

Did the respondents specifically say that they were attacked because they were collecting benefits?
Yes, that’s exactly what we asked. It wasn’t just, "Is this something that’s happened to you coincidentally?" It was asking, "Do you face any abuse as a result of being on benefits?" So, on the discrimination front, what people told us was that they struggle to access housing because landlords often won’t rent to people on welfare. You may have seen "no DSS" on the ads for housing—DSS is an old term for Department of Social Security, but some people still use that on the ads. It’s nothing to do with people not being able to pay the rent, it’s just discrimination, plain and simple. 

That's presumably got to make people feel marginalized.
Lots of people talked about how it made them feel—how they were made to feel like the "dregs of society," in one woman’s words. For most people, needing support from benefits can be quite demoralizing, and to have that compounded by feeling that people are looking at you in a certain way and making judgments about you, and that slipping over into discrimination and abuse, just makes the situation worse for people.

One woman told us that she’d had to flee from an abusive partner with her children, had needed housing assistance, got it, and really welcomed the support and benefits. But she couldn’t find a landlord who would rent to her because so many people—landlords and real estate agents—turned her away simply because she was in receipt of benefits, even if she could pay the rent. One 62-year-old man suffering from a heart condition and a lung condition, who's unable to work, says he’s been verbally abused and shouted at in the street.

Yeah, I read about people being victim to that kind of thing.
Since we’ve launched the report, many people have shared similar stories via social media of being shouted at, being attacked and their children facing bullying just because they collect benefits. One of the women who shared her story on Twitter had a walking stick and said people on the bus had said ‘you’re obviously putting it on’.

There seems to be a bit of conflicting evidence on this on both sides. One side says attitudes towards benefits claimants have softened in the last few years, the other says attitudes have become gradually more negative since the late-1980s. Which side is right?
There might have been a slight upturn in attitudes in the last survey, but if you look at trends the British Social Attitudes Survey shows people's views getting a lot tougher towards people on welfare. There was a little bit of an upturn in support for people on benefits during the last recession in the late-1990s, but this time people haven’t become more sympathetic.

What do you think has caused that?
I think it’s really complicated to identify what the cause is. There seems to be a kind of vicious circle, which is between public opinion, political dialog and the way the media portrays things. As each one of these toughens over time, they reinforce each other. It’s hard to point out causally what’s happened, but that seems to be the trend we’ve seen in recent decades.

(Image via)

What kind of role has the media played?
Some in the media choose to highlight some real extreme examples of welfare recipients, and that has a big impact on where the debate is going. In some of the shock TV programming, and in some news outlets, there does seem to be a trend towards presenting people on very low incomes in a very negative light—so-called "poverty porn." I think that’s a really worrying trend, and we do see that feeding through into people actually facing discrimination and abuse.

It seems you only have to open a newspaper or turn on the TV these days to see some extreme case of someone on welfare. What we never hear is the reality of over 5 million people on welfare who need the support and who are in low paid work, have lost their jobs or have become ill. They just don’t get a hearing at all. Instead, there’s this kind of continual focus on extreme cases in shows like Benefits Street—that’s all we seem to hear.

The truth of the matter—far more mundane, as it is—is that the vast majority of people who need support from benefits are just anyone who’s had a bit of bad luck and need to get back on their feet, or are people who’ve got longer term conditions and need the support in order to live with dignity. It can’t be right that we live in a society where losing your job means you’re shouted at in the street, or being ill meaning that your kids face abuse at school.

Thanks, Katharine.

Inside the office of the Free NK newspaper. Photos by Thomas Hjelm

There’s been plenty written about North Koreans fleeing the homeland. Just how close to starving they’d been before they left, and how many countries they’d had to cross before they were safe, jailbreaking from a state that never lacks creativity when it comes to punishments for those who’ve displeased the Supreme Leader. However, it’s harder to find information on how those defectors settle in once they’ve found their new homes—especially those who end up in the UK.

To find out firsthand what it’s like to adjust from a life under a dictatorship to the freedom, non-regimented haircuts and wide range of internet service providers available in the UK, I went to New Malden—a suburb of southwest London—to meet Joo-il Kim, a North Korean defector and editor of the Free NK newspaper.

New Malden’s most notable feature is its 20,000-strong Korean population, with North Korean defectors making up over 600 of that number. This makes New Malden the most popular location in Europe for the North Korean diaspora, and one of the world’s largest communities of North Koreans outside of the DPRK itself. Unsurprisingly, the majority of businesses in the area are geared towards its Korean residents; along with a high street full of Korean restaurants, I’ve been told there are also three karaoke brothel bars nearby, giving their customers a taste of Seoul’s red-light districts 5,000 miles from home.

Outside the Free NK office

The Free NK office sits between two large warehouses—one for the Seoul Bakery, the other for the Korea Foods Company—in an area called the Wyvern Industrial Estate. It was here that Joo-il Kim introduced me to Joong Wha Choi, another North Korean defector and the current president of the North Korean Residents Society, an organization aimed at helping refugees settle into their new lives in the UK.

Joong Wha, 48, works at the newspaper when he isn’t at his day job at Korea Foods, a stark difference from his former life as a soldier and government business consultant in North Korea. He arrived in the UK more than six years ago, settling in Newcastle before hearing about the Little Pyongyang nestled just outside London. At the time, he was struggling to learn English and, subsequently, finding it hard to secure proper work. If New Malden really was populated by as many Koreans as he’d heard, he thought, he could surely find a better support network there.

“I did think that, by living in New Malden, it would take me longer to integrate into wider British society, as I’d just be surrounded by Koreans,” Joong Wha told me. “But I needed to solve my immediate problems.”

A Korean butchers in New Malden

What Joong Wha found when he arrived in New Malden was something familiar to many defectors: a language barrier between those from the North and South, which can often make it difficult for the expatriate northerners and southerners to understand each other.

“In North Korea we used a lot of foreign words, coming from Russia, Japan and China,” he said. “But there was a [regime] movement called the ‘Making Our Own Language Alive’ movement. Through that we got rid of all the foreign-influenced words. All the words [North Koreans] use now are ‘pure Korean’, so my generation learned these pure words. Therefore, when I converse with South Koreans and they use these words influenced by English, I sometimes don’t understand what they mean.”

Joo-il raised an additional issue for North Koreans planning to find work in the UK. When you come to a country with a totally different economic state of affairs, whether you speak the language or not, you need to ensure, as a North Korean, that you aren’t taken advantage of. North Koreans may offer their labor too easily, he said, and find themselves in the same position of poverty they were hoping to escape.

The majority of defectors from North Korea are women, which often comes as a surprise—perhaps because many assume only men could survive the grueling journey across the border. For over a decade it’s been reported that the fate of many North Korean women who escape to China is one of sexual slavery and exploitation, forced to work as prostitutes in order to survive. As recently as June there was a report by Radio Free Asia that explained how, fearing repatriation, these women operate as prostitutes under handlers, only to end up facing deportation anyway when Chinese authorities discover their extra-legal work.

Joo-il leafing through Free NK

Stories like this increased Joo-il and Joong Wha’s certainty that the UK was the place to resettle when they defected. “The UK is a great place, not only because it is hailed as a nation respectful of human rights,” Joong Wha eagerly explained, "but because of the Industrial Revolution.”

Turns out this famous period of British history isn't just a fixture in GCSE history class; it also apparently features heavily in textbooks in North Korea, where the age is hailed as exemplary of the sort of economic success that its own society should strive for. This was slightly odd to hear at first, but its at least comforting to know that thousands of North Korean school children will mourn the loss of UK industry when its government eventually declares nuclear obliteration of the West.

“It’s seen as a very positive, very good country,” said Joong Wha. “I thought of it as a good society.”

Joong Wha

I asked Joong Wha and Joo-il if they thought the recent curbs on immigration into Britain had dissuaded any defectors from heading to the UK, or whether any defectors they knew had experienced trouble seeking asylum here.

“Yes, there have been some cases where people have experienced some trouble, where a North Korean defector is mistaken for a Korean-Chinese or a North Korean defector that has already been to South Korea," answered Joo-il. "The UK government may be clamping down on immigration, but as far as I know this doesn't affect political asylum seekers or refugees. Even if they were affected, it wouldn't affect the good impression North Koreans have of the UK. They will only feel disappointment.”

The difficulties Joo-il was referring to have been addressed by the British government before. Though, rather than deeming them "mistakes," the government claimed it had found defectors seeking asylum in the UK who had already received South Korean citizenship, which voids their refugee status. Furthermore, South Korea immediately recognizes North Korean defectors as their own citizens, so even if they're not intending to settle in South Korea it's difficult for them to claim refuge elsewhere, as they're treated instead as ordinary migrants. 

In 2008, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) announced that it was forcibly deporting any North Korean defectors claiming to have arrived directly from the DPRK who'd already been granted asylum in South. The move was a reaction to the increase of asylum applications from apparent North Korean defectors to the UK, with the UKBA frustrated at having to differentiate legitimate applications from the large amount of fraudulent ones coming from Chinese immigrants who were attempting to pose as North Korean defectors.

A North / South Korean language cheat sheet

Joong Wha reminded me that, on leaving North Korea, where you end up doesn’t really seem like a choice. South Korea is one of the three official enemies of the North Korean government, and although this is where many defectors go, settling here would ensure that any family members back home would receive “the strictest of punishments.”

“Growing up in North Korea, you are told South Koreans only care about money, and you are worried about discrimination on the basis of wealth. To live in a society where money is considered the top priority, it would actually be very painful to us, considering our past,” said Joong Wha. “Their own country was cut in half and they’re not interested!”

I first met Joo-il when I attended a talk that discussed how to better integrate North Koreans into the New Malden community. A local South Korean woman raised the point that she had found it hard to overcome the prejudice instilled in her from a young age towards North Koreans. Su-Min Hwang, our translator for the day, seconded that problem. She lives in New Malden now, but grew up in South Korea, where she was never taught much about why the North and South had split, or their differences in ideologies. In fact, all she really remembers hearing are utterances from her parents about the “red devils” of the North.

The North Korean Residents Society has been running for six years to help refugees overcome problems like this and settle into life outside of the DPRK.

The society also helps to inform people of the human rights offenses taking place in North Korea, leading a demonstration in front of the North Korean embassy four years ago after the UK organized an event to celebrate UK-DPRK relations. Understandably, this championing of relations with a totalitarian state was something that baffled Joo-il and his contemporaries.

“I do not see the embassy as much of a threat,” said Joo-il. “Plus, they don’t have a very big budget.” (A budget that'll presumably be eroded even further when they get around to paying the $400,000 worth of unpaid parking tickets they now owe.)

A page in the Free NK newspaper

With a break in conversation, the two men gestured that they were going outside to get some air, so I took the opportunity to leaf through the newspapers spread around the office.

The Free NK newspaper was established to bring news from the rest of the world to North Korean citizens, as well as raising awareness of what really goes on in North Korea to the international community. This might explain why, flicking through the pages, the content morphs from reports on UN Security Council meetings into stories about porn stars rallying for better labor laws.

When Joo-il returned to the room, he told me with a smile that the date they began publishing the paper online was strategically chosen as the 10th of October, 2011, the Party Foundation Day in North Korea. The 8th of July, 2013—the day the newspaper began publication in print—was the date that Kim Il-sung died.

“We see this as the first stage, where we distribute the newspaper to the international community—mainly to the European communities—in order to raise awareness of what really goes on in North Korea,” said Joo-il. “Some articles are provided by the correspondents in North Korea, and some are provided by other news companies that we have contracts with.”

Stacks of old Free NK newspapers

Joong Wha, who was back in the room by this point, remarked that he didn’t always feel the same level of duty or purpose as he and Joo-il do now.

“When I went to China, it was painful,” he said. “On first defecting, you’re hurt by the fact that a country you gave your life to—a country I trusted—actually deceived me and failed to protect its own people. My initial reaction was to swear to myself to never be deceived again, and I wanted to give up any sort of principles, ideologies and any goals. I just wanted to protect myself and my brothers and sisters; I didn’t think about doing anything for the greater good or for other people.”

Joong Wha would send money he earned in China back to family in North Korea through a network of brokers happy to undertake the illegal transfers for a hefty commission. However, he soon realized that all the money in the world wouldn’t change life for his relatives like he wanted; the government in North Korea had to change for anything to become truly different.

“I came to the UK and I met Joo-il, and that changed a lot of my thinking,” he said.

I asked if many North Korean defectors felt a duty to bring about change in their home country.

“I sometimes say to myself that it would be great if there was somebody else who risked their life to escape and could be the one to get things done.” He paused, and then continued, looking weary. “In the past, we’ve had systems run by kings and queens, and even then these monarchies would give some acknowledgement to the welfare of their people. But not the North Korean government—all they want to protect is their own power. I live a comfortable life now here in the UK, but this is a society that somebody else has worked hard for, and I have come to enjoy somebody else’s sacrifice.”

For Joo-il, the eventual goal is reunification of the North and South, and he sees the current community in New Malden as a good model for this—a place where North, South and Chinese-Koreans all live together without incident.

“It is my duty to change things for future generations in North Korea.”

Follow Roxy Revanzy on Twitter

"Pioneers" aboard a Millenial Trains Project car. Screenshot via YouTube

Things aren’t looking very good for America right now. International threats—or at least the political fear-mongering about them—will likely divert scarce public dollars from civil society to the war machine. Record inequality is changing the country from oligarchic to neo-feudal, while schools are more segregated along racial and class lines than they were in the 1960s, cementing current social divisions well into the future.

The basic structures of society seem weak enough to collapse, but what if the solution to our woes is right in front of us—in the form of entrepreneurial millennials who see the future not as a compendium of crises, but as an opportunity to innovate?

This is the essence of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP).

Photo via the Millennial Trains Project

The MTP is a ten-day, cross-country train ride that chauffeurs a few dozen young people through dilapidated urban areas across America. Each rider is on a crowdfunded mission to develop their own civic project in each place they stop. Some participants hustle energy-saving apps for students, some solicit funds for art installations, and some blog about their meetings with local small business owners.

The MTP was founded on the idea that post-recession America is a land of “new frontiers,” and its problems are just waiting to be settled by a new generation of “pioneers.” The language used to sell the program closely mirrors the language of colonial Christian frontier missions, used to impose the good word on native populations. The MTP pioneers aren’t bringing the word of God, however, but the cure-all gospel of entrepreneurship.

“Technology and time has opened up 3,000 miles of new frontier,” declares a narrator in an informational video on the MTP’s website. “Those that claim [the frontier] will travel by train,” it says. “It’s the ghost of Jack Kerouac, staying up all night, with the spirit of Steve Jobs.”

The founder of the MTP is Patrick Dowd, a former Fulbright scholar who went on a similar train ride through India called Jagritiyatra. The Indian ride is funded by American companies that have recently made huge investments in the country, including Rolls-Royce, Google, and Coca-Cola. But Dowd emphasizes that the crowdfunding aspect of his project gives the MTP a democratic edge.

“Everybody who shows up knows they’re there to accomplish something,” he told me, “and [they] approach travel in a manner that has been sanctioned and supported by a wide range of people who believe in them.” While each participant’s project is crowdfunded before they board, the program itself is sponsored by a number of associations and non-profits, including the Fulbright Program, the US Small Business Administration, and a handful of globally recognized consulting and corporate law firms.

Dowd decided to launch his project after watching Occupy Wall Street break out. At the time, he was an analyst for JP Morgan who had grown discontented as protesters raged in the street against his employer and soon quit to start the project. “Those protests needed to happen, but at the same time, the [Jagritiyatra] model from India provided a positive avenue for dissatisfaction,” he said. “The Millennial Trains Project…[is] an alternative and it’s based on locomotion and moving forward.”

The people who will move society forward, Dowd believes, look like the people on his train: savvy, young, college-educated men and women. Around 40 participants rode the train, and while the cohort featured some racial and cultural diversity, most were still white and seemingly from privileged backgrounds.

“The idea is to use the trains as a platform for leadership development and national inspiration,” he told me. “We need that leadership from our generation.”

The most recent ride from Portland to New York ended in late August, stopping in Rust Belt towns like Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Detroit. All of the pioneers were bound together by their collegiate education and confidence that they had ideas people needed to hear.  

One participant, a rising senior in college, wrote on her crowdfunding webpage that she wanted to “remind people that life is more than a steady paycheck” by encouraging them to “break outside the norm” and start small businesses. Another young woman wrote she wanted to “give people reasons to see things differently” by installing geometric art installations of her own design in public spaces. While nearly all of the projects required the “pioneering participants” to meet with community members in each city, all had an agenda to accomplish that was his or her own. Culminating visits to the US Mission to the United Nations and the White House solidified the sense of personal mission among the pioneers. 

Photo via the Millennial Trains Project

For all its focus on civic duty, when it comes to improving society, the MTP champions individualistic traits like gumption and ingenuity, not systemic change. That’s as clear as the neocolonial connotations of the MTP’s public relations pitch, which pushes a perception of the impoverished American heartland as a tabula rasa frontier, valuable only insofar as it can serve as a laboratory for the ideas of privileged youth. Certainly, an image of a retrofuturistic train slowly rolling through deindustrialized wastelands—which many low-income people still call home—as young do-gooders look on, dining on meals cooked by onboard professional chefs, may be unsettling to some.

Dowd argues the pioneers are more like wayward wisdom-seekers than white saviors, despite a stated focus on leadership development. “The spirit in which people are participating,” he told me, “is in the spirit of wanting to learn about what people at the front lines of change are doing in their communities.”

One train rider who embodies a cross-section of civic engagement and entrepreneurship is Jessica Myers, who used a recent train trip to develop her vision of a community learning center (or a “skillshare”) in Detroit called 313exchange. Myers writes on her crowdfunding page that the 313exchange will be “a knowledge and skillshare community designed to tap into the hidden talents, skills, and experiences of… veterans, the unemployed, ex-inmates, autistic people, and the elderly.”

Myers, who is from Chicago but moved to Detroit three years ago to work in the nonprofit sector, got the idea for 313exchange while completing classes through D-Hive, a nonprofit that offers lessons in small business development and that is part of a swelling complex of privately funded nonprofits in Detroit. She spent her time on the trip meeting with similar skillshare groups in different cities and developing partnerships with interested organizations.

“I spent half the time looking at knowledge and skillshare organizations, just looking at how it works,” she told me. She eventually formed an informal partnership with the Library of Congress and became more determined to launch her skillshare in Detroit.  

“I was so encouraged by the fact that if you want to [start something], you can do it, and it doesn’t matter if you have money or supplies as long as you have support,” she said. “The [train] environment pushed me to be the best person I can be.”

Myers also embodies the pioneering ethos of the Millennial Trains Project. On her crowdfunding webpage, she writes, “If you are a millennial then Detroit is the city for you!… [N]o idea is too outlandish and no challenge is too big.”

Detroit itself, tattered and broke, is the avatar for an America pulverized by capitalism into a frontier of opportunity for ambitious transplants with access to capital and powerful social networks. 

Ruins in modern-day Detroit. Photo by Bob Jagendorf

When a promotional video on the MTP’s website says that its pioneers will travel “3,000 miles to blast a whole in the theory that America is in decline,” it’s an implicit reference the trope of the once great American city decimated by decades outsourced labor and industry. This archetype fits basically any of the Rust Belt cities, but nowhere was the fall as dramatic as Detroit, which once symbolized American industry. As recently as 2000, Detroit was still number ten in American’s largest cities by population, but as revenue dried up and buildings crumbled, its population fell by a quarter.  

But even as it was hemorrhaging people, something else was happening: Young people with degrees were moving in. According to the Census, between 2001 and 2011, the number of college grads under 35 in Detroit rose 59 percent. And as others have reported, this trend is likely accelerating as the cost of living remains low and private sources of capital proliferate.   

“The Motor City has become the testing ground for an updated American dream: privateers finding the raw material for new enterprise in the wreckage of the Rust Belt,” wrote Ben Austen in New York Magazine, although it could have been written by Patrick Dowd, who wrote in National Geographic that the pioneers on the MTP “evidence my generation’s search for a refreshed, compellingly remixed version of the American Dream.” What better place to find that dream than a hollowed-out metropolis where “no idea is too outlandish” because everything is already fucked up?

And it’s in Detroit we glimpse the idealized frontier imagined by the Millennial Trains Project: a city where fantastically wealthy private interests have replaced an eviscerated public sector. The city doesn’t even have a mayor anymore and longtime residents have virtually no say in what happens to their city, but Wall Street and a handful of foundations have pledged hundreds of millions in loans and philanthropic dollars for new business enterprises heralded mostly by newcomers, who can even receive tax credits for moving in. It’s the perfect place for ambitious pioneers and a nightmare for disenfranchised natives who just want the horror to end.

“Detroit is not a blank slate,” Michelle Martinez, an environmental activist and community organizer from Detroit, told me. “There’s a lot of knowledge inside of the community… that should be acknowledged before anything new is laid down.”

Martinez said that while many of the new non-profits are well intentioned, and even effective, they mostly operate independent of the municipality, which means they’re unaccountable to those they serve. Furthermore, she said, they can displace efforts that have been in place for years.

“When you have folks coming from the outside with great new initiatives and they scoop up funding that may have gone to nonprofits that have been in the community for decades… [you’re] undermining decades of social capital.”  

Another longtime activist, organizer, and member of the DPS school board Elena Herrada told me that much of the newer development in the city has been directed by online social media campaigns (similar to the ones that financed the projects of Millennial Train passengers). This is a problem, she said, because less than 40 percent of households in Detroit have access to broadband internet.

“The kinds of things that are going on [in Detroit] are for younger and more privileged people who have more access to technology,” she told me, adding that most newcomers are white.  

Yusef Shakur, a local activist and businessman, echoed Herrada’s concerns of a disempowered local populace. Shakur is Detroit native and black, like 82 percent of the city’s residents. He was imprisoned for over a decade as a teenager after a rough upbringing. Since being released, he’s founded two community organizations and continues to organize mentorship programs, entrepreneurial leagues, and grassroots fundraisers.

“The community, the people from here, should be at the forefront of leading the changes to be made in the community,” he told me. Outsiders can help, “but don’t need to lead us.”

Photo via Yusef Shakur

Shakur doesn’t oppose newer nonprofits, but he resents their tendency to sap momentum from grassroots initiatives. He described to me a neighborhood wealth-generating effort he leads through his Urban Network without help from wealthy philanthropists.

“You get 20 working people to put five bucks or more into a pot every two weeks, then after six months you use that money to host a fish fry. We raise money with the fish fry, then we make t-shirts to sell. Then we keep going like that—and folks on the outside look at us and say, ‘Hey, they’re doing it!’”

Fish fries and t-shirt sales are not nearly as cool nor fun as traversing the country like a Jack Kerouac-Steve Jobs hybrid, but they’re more democratic, and ultimately give people more agency to decide what happens in their lives and communities. They’re more empowering, giving the people who live in a community a stake in its future, which means a stronger community in the long run.

In addition to colonial logic, the MTP reflects the very vogue idea that we can parse social problems from their broader context and apolitically solve each one with technology. But revelations in economics have shown that inequality will likely rise under current conditions, and as everybody knows, politics is a zero-sum game that fulfills the will of the rich. Any solutions that don’t deal with this extremely political fact are doomed.

Despite the good intentions of the pioneers, the MTP is an extension of neocolonial tradition and is complicit in the decades long co-opting of the public sphere by elitists channeling their influence through banks, nonprofits, and philanthropic foundations. It won’t save America, and that’s the sad, hard truth.

Follow Aaron Miguel Cantú on Twitter.

The new 'iWatch'

Last month, CNET pointed out that the name for Apple’s new watch—what people were then calling the "iWatch"—was far from certain: “The more important question is still to know how to finish this sentence: 'Hey, I got an i(....)!'” Of course we all knew that it was going to be called iSomething but, as CNet explained, ”watches in themselves are a dated concept.” Apple’s tablet device wasn’t called an "iTablet" but an "iPad"—perhaps the company's wristwatch would use a different word too? Something like "iWear" or "iBand" or "iMode," for instance. But yeah—whatever it was, it would definitely, 100 percent be the iSomething.

Yesterday, Apple released the "Apple Watch" in a blaze of middle-aged men playing guitar music. It’s not the iAnything but it is a magical, wrist-mounted computer with a heap of health and fitness sensors on it. Apps appear on a display made out of a single solid crystal of sapphire. A magnetic buckle uses materials developed for the Mars rover. It connects you to your friends via phone, text, or even a gentle touch on the wrist. It can measure your fitness, and even let you feel the pulse of a lover’s heartbeat.

It also contains the bodily fluids of Irish rock stars. "We are the blood in your machines, oh Zen master Tim Cook,” Bono cried at the launch ceremony. Which sounds a bit fucking gross. Have you ever *tried* cleaning blood out of a MacBook? It almost made me wish I’d actually paid for one, rather than just robbing mine off some guy in the street.

Anyway, 20 months or so have passed since the first concrete mentions of "iWatch," when tech sites reported that Apple and Intel were working on a wristwatch with a 1.5-inch screen that would launch in mid 2013 (both the size and the delivery date were completely wrong). By February, the iWatch name had become so well established that, after yesterday's announcement, journalists couldn't seem to accept that it was actually called something else. “The iWatch is HERE but it's Called The Apple Watch,” wailed one reporter in abject frustration. “Why isn’t it called the Apple iWatch?” huffed the Telegraph.

The name wasn't the end of it. Throughout 2013, bullshit spewed forth from the ass-end of the Apple-obsessed internet rumor mill.

“Apple could adapt its iOS mobile software to limit what information is sent to a wrist device,” speculated one Bloomberg article from last year (wrong). Others suggested the device would be technologically simple (wrong). It was going to use photos for ID authentication, asking you to identify pictures of your friends and colleagues in order to unlock the device (wrong). A former Apple designer talked about its "button-free design" (wrong).

It would feature a wrap-around display, patents suggested, with a screen that followed the curve of your wrist, presumably so that small children could see magical things displayed on the underside of your arm (wrong). Or maybe, as Reuters reported, the screen would be a 2.5-inch rectangle (wrong).

How would it charge itself? Solar power was one option (wrong). Or how about charging wirelessly? “The iWatch is also said to include wireless charging capabilities which will allow the device to charge from up to a meter away,“ we were told (this was wrong). “Wireless charging would be one way to reduce the burden of frequent charges, but it is unclear exactly how it would be implemented by Apple.” Yesterday we found out how—with a big fucking wire.

It would be easy for me to start banging on now about how the tech gossip sites are wrong a lot of the time because, well, they are, obviously. But to be fair, by the time the infernal machine that will adorn my wrist next year was launched, a clutch of websites with "tech" or "mac" in their names had come up with pretty good approximations of what we’d eventually see. They pinned down the health features and sensors, the screen dimensions, NFC capability, and so on. But that only came at the end of nearly two years of continuous bullshit. Never before has so much copy been written about a product that doesn’t exist yet.

Here’s a funny thing, though: I love the bullshit. I can’t get enough of it. I’ve been using these sites like I use caffeine, getting my ten-minute hit of gossip each day, gobbling up every bit of information, whatever the quality, like a fat goat. I don’t really care that it’s wrong—it’s still very interesting.

And in a first for this VICE column, I actually think the bullshit is a good thing.

What the Apple Watch actually looks like

It’s so easy to think that science, technology, and design are things that happen elsewhere. The insides of our cars, TVs, and vacuum cleaners are as familiar to most people as the depths of the oceans or the farthest reaches of space—inaccessible, unfathomable. With each passing decade, our technology looks more like magic, and we fall more out of the touch with the ideas, decisions, and processes that make it happen.

The Apple rumor mill brings that magic back to us. It may be wild, it may be wrong, it may be 90 percent BS, but it doesn’t harm anybody in the way that medical or political BS does. Nobody is going to suffer pain or death because they thought the iWatch might have a 1.8-inch display.

At the same time, it engages tens of thousands of people in deep discussion. It gets kids and students debating the relative merits of 4-inch vs. 5-inch screens. It inspires young designers to spend their evenings sketching out exciting visions of the future, and tomorrow’s engineers to think about the cutting edge in user design, materials, sensors, and features. Students around the world produced their own images of what the final product might look like. They imagined circular displays in traditional-looking timepieces, miniature iOS clones wrapped awkwardly around clunky wristbands, or something in between. Even Jimmy Kimmel joined in, fooling the masses with a Casio calculator watch. “I like the big numbers,” one user commented.

For all the nonsense, and whatever you think about its products, Apple and its enthusiasts in the press generate a higher level of conversation around science and technology than you see almost anywhere else in public life. And that can only be good for us.

And there’s one last thing: At the heart of it all is a chip developed by British hardware architects, in a product crafted by a British designer. Cynical? Nah, not today thanks.

Follow Martin on Twitter.

Previously: Gingers Are Not Being Wiped Out by Climate Change

Abdul, an UberBlack driver in New York, leads a protest outside of Uber's offices in Long Island City. Photos by the author. 

If you live in a major city, chances are your local taxi industry has been upended by Uber, or will be soon. Created in 2009 by founders who “just wanted to feel baller in San Francisco," the app has become a ride-sharing juggernaut, waging a techno-libertarian insurgency against politicians and regulators stand in the way of its plans to dominate the global car service industry. With an estimated worth of $17 billion, the company is the darling of Silicon Valley’s cult of disruption, viewing itself not so much as a car company, but as a technology platform that will end ownership as we know it.

Increasingly, though, that techno-libertarian vision has come bumping up against the more mundane realities of running what is still essentially a taxi service. That was definitely the case in New York this week, where more than 100 irate black car drivers surrounded Uber’s headquarters in Queens protest what the company’s deceptive treatment and unfair payment policies. For the better part of the morning Monday, the drivers rallied on the corner Jackson Avenue, shaking their fists at the black U logo, waving handmade signs, and shouting down bewildered twentysomethings that the company sent out to reason with mob.

The main beef, it seems, is Uber’s recent decision to start forcing drivers who signed up for its premium UberBlack and SUV service to receive ride requests from the lower-tier UberX and UberXL services. Previously, luxury drivers were able to opt-in to accept cheaper rides, but now Uber has effectively removed that choice. In an email last week, the company informed drivers that it would assign UberX fares to all drivers, regardless of their vehicle tier; drivers who canceled those trips risked having their accounts suspended or being kicked off the app altogether.

Uber insists that the changes are actually good for black car drivers, giving them the opportunity to pick up more rides, and theoretically at least, make more money. “What this does is increases earning potential,” said Taylor Bennett, a chestnut-haired spokesman who pulled me away from the protest to give me Uber’s spin. Over the summer, he said, the company found that black car drivers who opted to take UberX trips earned 35-to-50 percent more than those who just took luxury rides. “There is a 50 percent guarantee that people are going to earn more money than they are currently making,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s more trips and more money for our partners.”

Cabbies gang up on a stunned Uber employee. 

Clearly, the chanting drivers around us did not agree. When Bennett walked away, I was besieged by protesters clamoring to give me a lesson on the economics of driving a hack in New York City. The gist of their argument is that while drivers might technically make more money by accepting UberX, the fares are lower and the rides are typically shorter, which means that drivers are taking more trips for less money. And taking more trips means higher gas costs and increased wear-and-tear on the vehicle, so while drivers might technically be able to make more money per hour, they are actually losing money on many of their UberX rides. On top of that, drivers said they felt like the company is playing a shell game, signing people on to be luxury car service providers (two drivers told me that Uber had actively encouraged them to purchase a higher-end vehicle), only to have the company turn around and demand that they be taxi drivers.

“The price of gas is not going down, the price of insurance is not going down,” said Michael Ogbonna, a Nigerian-born driver who has been driving livery cars in New York for the past 10 years. “Nothing is adding up. We can’t even pay our house rent. It’s not worth doing.”

“How can they compare us to a yellow cab?” he added. “They don’t have customers, they have passengers. We take care of our customers, believing that they will come back again. We dress nice. We wear suits. You can’t compare us to yellow cabs.”

More broadly, the protest signals a breaking point in long-simmering tensions between Uber and its “driver-partners.” In its pursuit of global car service domination, Uber has lured in thousands of drivers with the promise that they could earn up to $90,000 working full-time for the ride-sharing service. But a growing number of drivers are now saying that Uber is pulling a bait-and-switch, and that aggressive UberX price cuts, lack of gratuities, and an opaque driver ratings system have made it impossible to earn a living working for the service. UberX drivers vented these frustrations with demonstrations in Seattle and San Francisco this week, as well as in Los Angeles, where the hacks have aligned with the Teamsters Union to demand better treatment from the company.

An army of hacks.

Of course, there is no indication that Uber gives a shit about any of this. So far, the company has strong-armed its drivers in the same ruthless way it has steamrolled regulators and sabotaged its competitors. In fact, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has quipped that he is waiting for the day when he can get rid of drivers, or “the other dude in the car,” and replace them with robots. "The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car—you're paying for the other dude in the car," Kalanick said at a recent tech conference. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."

The underlying paradox here is that while Uber’s success relies on its ability to recruit armies of drivers, the company has no interest in being a car service. Instead, Uber’s founders and investors see it as the future Amazon of the “sharing economy”—a technology platform that will create techno-utopias where people and their shared possessions will be ferried around on demand by driverless Uber cars.

As exciting as all that may sound, though, the reality is that Uber is still essentially a car-hailing app. And while the company has a huge lead in the taxi wars, the disruption Uber has wreaked on the consumer transportation market could eventually stop working to its advantage.

The good news for drivers is that the free market is in their favor. Uber and its competitors are drawing from a finite pool of qualified drivers. If the company continues to steamroll its drivers, there are other options. In Queens on Monday, it was clear that the black car drivers had a sense of this opportunity. Most of the people I spoke to had already signed up as drivers for Lyft, the ride-sharing competitor that has been branding itself as a kinder, gentler Uber. Others had their own ideas for how to disrupt their industry: Drivers passed around a book of cell phone numbers for something called “The Uber Driver Network,” which organizers described vaguely like a text-based attempt to cut out Uber as the middle man. A group of Algerian drivers told me they were looking for investors to start their own luxury car service. Another driver told me he is developing his own ridesharing software to compete with companies like Uber and Lyft.

“This is New York City. There is always money on the street,” he said. “All people have to do is go on their smart phones and link two people together—that’s the billion-dollar innovation. It’s an app. In a year from now you’re probably going to have 10 different companies exactly like this.”

Map and photo by Sonja Sharp

On the sweaty September morning I went to visit Doris Torres and Angel Juarbe, the weather was warm and the skies as eerily clear and blue as the day they were killed. Except it’s Sunday, not Tuesday, and this is not Manhattan but the Bronx. At the corner of Doris Torres Way and Angel Luis Juarbe, Jr. Avenue in the Melrose section of the South Bronx, mostly everyone appeared already drunk.

Like many of New York’s sacred dead, Angel Luis Juarbe, Jr. was a firefighter. Doris Torres was an office worker. Both died 13 years ago this week, in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Both names haunt New York City’s urban landscape in quasi-official limbo, on the city’s records but not its maps, sometimes on its street signs, clinging to the periphery of its collective memory. Not quite forgotten—to forget them would be blasphemous—but not really remembered either.

By all rights, the opposite should be true: Juarbe and Torres number among more than 400 of the nearly 3000 9/11 dead whose names are not only on carved on the popular Downtown Manhattan site where their lives were cut short, but cemented onto honorary stretches of concrete where those lives were once conducted, ghost streets like theirs scattered across the five boroughs. Most are forlorn byways on forgotten edges of the city where no tourist has ever intentionally stopped to pay respects.

Staten Island alone is home to almost 200 of them.

Salman Hamdani Way EMT, NYPD Cadet 9-11-01 is a random, lonely corner of a brick-and-leaf lined maze of residential streets in deepest Flushing. 9/11/01 Hero - Abe (Averemel) Zelmanowitz Way is the western edge of an overgrown traffic circle on Kings Highway, rededicated in 2007 with someone else’s name on the plaque. A few people remember the story of how he sacrificed his life to stay by the side of his paraplegic colleague. His family must live right here, they muse.

“I remember reading about him,” said former neighbor Elise Matis, who stopped in the turnabout to chat with a friend early Sunday. “It’s tragic,” she conceded, but that was then. “Everybody's involved in their own lives now.”

A group of 14 year olds folding their underwear together inside the laundromat at 147th Street and Wales Avenue in the Bronx agrees, it was sad. Very sad. Lots of people died or whatever. We were born, they say, and wave their boxer-briefs like handkerchiefs against the window on Doris Torres Way toward the murals of Firefighter Angel Luis Juarbe, Jr.

“I think about it every day,“ said 25-year-old Zev between long, slow sips from a bottle of beer, one hand on the stroller where her three-year-old son naped while the clothes spun in the wash. “I remember I was in class [at a vocational school on Wall Street] and I saw people running away covered in ash. Human ash,“ she added, as an afterthought.

She’d never heard of Doris Torres, and only knew Angel Juarbe from his mural.

Rosie Perez, 43, knew Angel better, and wanted her picture taken with the neighborhood’s fallen hero, of whom there are two adjacent murals. In one, a square-jawed firefighter backed by the statue of liberty and a translucent American flag overlooks a fire engine careening down a suburban street toward the smouldering World Trade Center, a billboard for the musical Stomp further orienting us to the New York of the early aughts. In the other, a baby-faced young man smiles from beneath a black firefighter’s helmet like the one he undoubtedly wore when he charged into the wreckage 13 years ago.

Rosie’s sweat smelled like gin. She posed: chin down, hip out. I asked whether she also knew Doris Torres, who also died heroically in the aftermath of 9/11, on whose honorary street we were technically standing. She ran back to her floor to help her coworkers and later succumbed to severe burns. Rosie stared at me blankly. I pointed to the street sign.

“Angel and I even have the same birthday,” she replied, pulling me back toward the mural. “We grew up together.”

Follow Sonja Sharp on Twitter.

Ever since filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson's first movie, After the Axe, earned him an Oscar nomination in 1982, the Vancouver-raised, Toronto-based director hasn't bothered to slow down. Perhaps best known recently for films like Air India 182, Such a Long Journey, and Beowulf & Grendel the director has established an oeuvre that specializes in spinning forces of nature into something visually stunning and fascinating.

This year, Sturla returns to the Toronto International Film Festival with his feature documentary, Monsoon, a gripping meditation on the annual rains that descend upon India, and the alternatively disastrous and beneficial impact on Indian society, economy, agriculture, and lives.

For his episode of the Director's Canvas, we visited Sturla at his canoe club for a ride on the waters of Lake Ontario, and visited his studio for a chat discussing his expansive 32-year career in cinema.

If you get the moms smoking then you can get almost anybody. That's the plan of the legal cannabis industry, and they're searching for ways to get moms around the country to set down their wine and light up.

We travel to Denver with Jessica Roake, a mother of two from the suburbs of Washington, DC, for a mom-friendly cannabis tour. She gets blazed beyond belief in the name of market research.

All photos via Stephanie Mercier Voyer.
I have a broken relationship with cats. Once in a while, they take a moment from shitting in boxes and lurking in dark corners to glare at me with indifference or distrust, but that’s about it. Up until now, we’ve been working under the unspoken agreement to not really give a shit about each other. So when VICE asked me to visit the new Cat Café that had just opened in Montreal, my dysfunctional relationship with cats came to the fore.

Café des Chats is the first establishment of its kind to open in North America. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a cat café, is basically a regular coffee shop with a bunch of cats living inside it. I thought the concept seemed a little contrived, and the thought of drinking coffee in a room that’s crawling with eight unimpressed and distrusting creatures initially sounded like a bit of a nightmare. But, framed in the right way, this could be a great opportunity to face my fears and heal my relationship with felines. Maybe throwing them into our neighbourhood cafés is actually a great, simple idea.

Either way, I probably wasn’t going to enjoy myself or learn anything by going in my current headspace, so I decided to take some mushrooms before crossing the cat café threshold.

I spoke with the owner Nadine a few days before my visit, and she agreed to have me come by half-an-hour before it opened on Friday, at 9:30 in the morning. I met up with Stephanie (our photographer) beforehand to drink mushroom tea and have some grounding, sober thoughts while I still could. I sat on the edge of her couch at 8:45, taking careful sips as the sun glanced off her bookshelf. I watched the cluster of green mushroom bits swirl into the tea, thinking of how the fate of my morning rested in its murky depths.

After I finished my cup, we biked over to the café in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, and stood outside to take a photo of me nervously laughing outside.

I was still clear-headed, but knew by the way my fingers were tingling I was on my way to ShroomTown. I watched Stephanie fiddle with her camera and realized that while we were in there, she would be the only other human that knew I was tripping. I made a mental note to remember that if things got out of control.

The co-owner Youseff saw us standing outside and came out to greet us.

“Welcome,” he said. “Come on in.”

On the way to the door, I locked eyes with a white kitten staring ominously by the window. I wondered if he could sense my duplicitous intentions.

We walked through the door into the waiting area, where framed black-and-white photos of the cats lined the wall. We browsed the wall with our hands behind our backs like we were in some kind of art gallery, even though the display is much closer to a cat-shrine.

Nadine came in wearing a big warm smile and a collared polo cat shirt, and let us into the café. Without anyone there it looked like some kind of private cat academy with a fountain, shiny bowls, a climbing gym, and an inscription on the main wall that read “Le chat est roi” [the cat is king]. As I took it all in, I started to see sparks at the corners of my vision, like little fireflies popping in and out of the air.

Nadine led me around and told me about the different cats, of which they have eight. I was feeling a little bit giggly, and this whole place was starting to crack me up. What was this ridiculous cat oasis? Where did these delightful little furry dumplings come from? Nadine carried herself like the lord of the cats; she picked the feline creatures up at will as if they were fruit baskets. It was fucking amazing. My mouth was drying up and I asked for some water. It felt like a cold hug rushing through my body.

At that point, things shifted, and the room felt like it was slowing down—like an engine gearing down or the lights dimming at the start of a movie. The walls were starting to get glossy now, and her voice was getting a weird, wavy texture to it. I was trying to hold it together while also maintaining eye contact and appearing present, but I could feel myself slipping into the rabbit hole. I was very aware of my skin, like it was some kind of elastic frog suit. I watched her eyebrows jump up and down like two excited caterpillars as she continued talking.

“I have to go to the washroom!” I said in my most composed voice.

I closed the bathroom door and took a deep breath. I went to the sink and splashed water on my face. How cool is water? No, come on, focus, I told myself. You came in here to get it together.” I glanced up at my reflection, which was a mistake. The skin on my face was breathing in and out like some kind of fish gill and I felt like a Navi from Avatar. My eyes had dilated into two black saucers.

I spun around and got a sense of this sink-toilet box I was in. The morning light was filtering through a small window like golden angel fingers, and the toilet was smiling at me like a piece of furniture in the Brave Little Toaster. It felt so nice in there and I really didn’t want to leave. But my sense of responsibility outweighed my immediate obsession and I burst back out the door into the café.

Youssef sat waiting at a table for me with a coffee and a snack by an empty spot. I sat down as casually as I could and stumbled through a question: “So how did this idea of yours that you have now get started?”

I wasn’t making any sense.

He told me that he and Nadine had been planning it for a while, and that he slept in the store for three months with the cats before it opened, to make sure leaving them there at night could actually work. I was preoccupied with my coffee and pastry and I hadn’t really looked at him yet. After some time I knew I couldn’t just stare at my pastry forever, so I finally looked up at him. His eyes were spinning slowly like disco balls and his cheeks were flapping around off his face like two pieces of lunchmeat. He looked like he was from a Wallace and Gromit cartoon and I stared at him, equally terrified and fascinated, trying to figure his face out as he told me passionately about his business.

I decided to compromise by keeping my head at the same angle, while occasionally shifting my gaze to the brick wall behind him. As I kept watching, I realized the bricks were playing some kind of musical chairs game; they kept rearranging themselves, but one would always getting left out, and would have to join a game somewhere else.

Yousseff had stopped talking, which I realized meant he’d just asked me a question: “How do you like your pastry?” His lunchmeat flapped at me, “We get them imported from Italy.”

I realized I had scarfed that down while watching the bricks and remembered it being delicious but that it felt strange going down my throat. I really wanted to ask him if he was aware that his bricks were moving, but I just told him that the pastry was good.

Yousseff had to go so we shook hands, and I wondered if he suspected anything or whether I was just the strangest interviewer he had ever met. I felt love and a little bit of guilt toward the well-intentioned duo, but was exhausted from the mutating face interactions and needed a change of pace.

I was immediately drawn to the sunny carpet tower with cats lounging on it by the window. I stood a few steps away, and watched them lounging in the sun. What magical, majestic creatures. What hopeful beacons of life. They hung off of different platforms of the carpet tree, stretching their magnificent paws out to readjust themselves and recharge, so they could prowl nobly over their kingdom. I was feeling much less panicked than when I had to deal with people.

The people were secondary to the reign of the cats. As Nadine put it, “they are the stars of the show.” I thought to myself: What were these strange flesh monkeys with giant teeth doing stomping around your home, opening up doors and being loud?

As I shared a cup of water with one of the sun-drenched kittens, he started telling me about the recent tragic death of Joan Rivers. It felt like he understood the fragility of life better than anyone I'd ever met. Staring into his eyes it became clear that he was Joan Rivers's reincarnation and that this great lady of comedy was letting me caress her all over, which felt weird and comforting at the same time.

I was a bit reluctant to manhandle these magical creatures, but Stephanie egged me to approach one and began piling cats on me. One glided across the floor and climbed on the back of the chair like a walking carpet. How could I have been in a psychological war of attrition my whole life with these endlessly wonderful creatures?

I got as close to the tree as possible, to feel like I was part of the community. I was catching the attention of some of the customers, who were about as low-energy as the cats, but were shooting me disapproving looks. I noticed one guy sitting nearby with an awesome aura, so I pretended to read a cat book and talked to him for a bit.

He was wearing open toe sandals and was diligently sipping the straw of an iced coffee while reading a book. He told me he had been a writer for a very long time, and that he had spent about 600 dollars on vet bills for his cat because it kept shitting outside the box due to its digestive problems.

While he was talking, I daydreamed that he was from an imaginary dimension called Gork, where pickles were the main currency and this guy ran shit there. Nobody fucks with him because he runs the most successful pickle farm in Central Gork, and has cousins that could send you back in time and make you shoot your own grandfather.

By this point, Stephanie and I had well overstayed our “short” interview we had arranged for and decided to head out. I had abandoned any attempt to appear normal because the cats didn’t give a fuck if my mind was on psychedelics. I said goodbye to the moving bricks, carpet tree, fountain, Nadine and Yousseff, and stepped back into the real world.

Compared to the soothing, therapeutic air of Café des Chats, the street outside was a psychotically paced ratrace. I wanted to tell them all to slow down. I don’t know if all cats have the ability to imbue that kind of wisdom to the world, but the eight cats in that magical little café on St. Denis definitely do, especially if you go on mushrooms.

@keefe_stephen

Photo via Twitter.
History has a funny way of repeating itself. For the second time in recent memory, a moderately earnest Change.org petition is asking Vancouver’s mayor to pretty please return a mysterious piece of DIY public art back to East Vancouver.

In 2012 it was the "Dude Chilling Park" sign—a bit that Jimmy Kimmel couldn’t pass up. This time it’s a larger-than-life statue of Satan with a raging boner, which appeared on a stone pedestal in Grandview-Woodlands early Tuesday morning. Predictably, a crew of City of Vancouver staff removed the well-endowed demon within hours. As of this morning over 1,000 people have signed Darryl Greer’s petition to put that shit back where those city workers found it.

Speaking of history: the now-empty pedestal has already housed some serious dick. Ten years ago a bronzed Christopher Columbus stood there—you know, the guy attributed for “discovering” America but also known for smallpox blankets, kickstarting the African slave trade, and other colonial bullshit.

Anyway, we caught up with Greer, an outspoken defender—and possible worshipper—of the penis-devil (or the devil-penis, depending on how you want to look at it). He had some serious things to say about free expression and the “plastic smiles and empty suits” at city hall. We talked artist grants, metal bands, and the all-too-mockable poodle statue the City of Vancouver actually paid $100,000 to install on Main Street.

VICE: Hey Darryl. Why did you start this petition?
Daryl Greer: It started with a Facebook status update pointing to the irony of the city paying $100,000 for that porcelain dog on Main Street, which is universally condemned as lame, and then dismantling a hilariously awesome Satan statue put up by rebel artists for free.

I thought the Satan statue was funny and cool, and figured that somebody should start a petition to bring it back; so why not me? I went over to Change.org—didn’t realize how easy it was to set up one of those things—and then with tongue firmly in cheek, started writing.

Could you describe Vancouver’s public art scene for me in five words or less?
Too expensive and fucking lame.

You must really hate that porcelain poodle.
I would say hate is a strong word, I just thought it was lame. Like from the estate sale of an aging hipster who met Andy Warhol once. I’m more disappointed at the price tag. They basically spent $100,000 on a thrift store find. I know plenty of artists who could use a tenth or a hundredth of that money to make something much more thought-provoking—beautiful or ugly—something with a lot more intrinsic value than that ridiculous dog on a pole.

As a musician myself, I can’t draw or sculpt worth shit, but grant money comes from the same places. You guys actually did a story about how most FACTOR grants go to bands within 5 kilometres [actually 20 km] of their offices in Toronto. A lot of the people I’m around aren’t getting big FACTOR grants, they’re maxing credit cards just to buy equipment. Meanwhile bands like the fucking Arcade Fire get money to go on tour even though they’re fucking millionaires.

Arcade Fire is the porcelain poodle of Canadian music. So, what’s the petition response been like so far?
I was refreshing the page every once in awhile. It was around 170 when I went to bed [on Tuesday]. Then it got posted around Facebook, people are having fun with it, so it’s going more viral, if I can use that term.

People are getting a kick out of it. I read one comment: “Everybody needs a little devil dick in their life.” A friend of mine said if they can put a dick like Columbus up there, you know, demon dong should be fine.

What do you think of the “Dude Chilling Park” sign finally winning over city hall this year?
I guess I thought it was funny, but I didn’t think it was that controversial. It’s just a lighthearted news story, of no consequence to anyone. “Dude Chilling Park” didn’t offend anyone… If it’s not offending people it’s probably not good.

When I looked up your name on the interwebs, I found you listed as bassist of a pretty gnarly death metal band called “Harvest the Infection.” Is HTI still a thing?
No, I play in another band now, we’re called “Revenger,” we actually have an album coming out and a release party at the Rickshaw on Saturday.

Cool. The statue artist is presumably still out there. Do you have a message to pass along?
Keep up the good work! Inundate this city with as many offensive statues as you possibly can. For every statue the city takes down, make three more… I wish I knew the guy or girl or individual responsible, I would shake their hand and buy them a beer.

Any suggestions for the artist’s next installation?
A “Buddy Christ” with a boner through his toga. Who knows? Anything to keep the people in power on their toes. I’m not the artist, I can’t sculpt worth shit.
 

@sarahberms

Going to college doesn’t guarantee you much any more. You’ll probably still learn how many rum and cokes you can handle without being hospitalized, but what was once a given—a good degree leading to a good job—is now far more ambiguous. Youth unemployment may be falling, but from April to June of this year 767,000 young people in the UK, and 5.8 million in the US didn’t have a job, and with the next batch of graduates starting to fire off resumes at already overwhelmed HR departments, they're even more fucked than they were before.

Tactics have had to be upgraded to suit this new climate, and the primary strategy that graduates of the Instagram age seem to have latched onto is standing in train stations holding signs that tell everyone how under-appreciated they are. You’ve seen stories pop up in your Facebook feed every now and then about signage success stories; Omar Bashir, for example, in July of this year, or Alfred Ajani, who made headlines this week after advertising his academic accolades at Waterloo Station.

Alfred was apparently flooded with offers from “impressed executives” and secured a marketing job with a recruitment firm just a day after pulling that stunt. So to see whether getting a job in the post-recession economy is really as easy as airing your qualifications to a bunch of commuters, I went to Liverpool Street and held up a few signs touting my various imaginary skills.

"FINE ART GRADUATE (BA HONS)"

People always say mean stuff about fine art degrees, which is probably because employers would rather hire trained accountants than someone who spent their higher education swallowing and regurgitating acrylics onto a canvas. With that in mind, I thought I’d see whether the sign strategy would help elevate this lowly degree to something worth anything to anybody. 

As soon as I held the sign up, passers-by began wishing me well, and within a couple of minutes someone approached me and took a resume. He was a nice man who told me his friend was the head of a recruitment agency. Seemed promising. Another guy, Geoff, walked over. He was dressed like a dandy and smelled like furniture polish. Geoff’s business card said he was a charity and education officer. I didn’t know what that meant at first, but made a good guess of it after he offered to pay for me to do an MA.

In real life, I already have an MA, but it’s done little to increase my creative industry job prospects. I thanked Geoff for his huge display of kindness, but told him no thanks. It was time to move on. (While swapping signs, Jake, the photographer, told me one guy stood near him had said, “Bless her, all she wants is a job,” which made me want to find him and hug him tightly.)

"FALCONRY, MASSIVE EXPERT, TRUST ME MATE"

Next, I advertised my expertise for falconry. A little niche, perhaps, but the first thing they tell you at business school is to find your "unique selling proposition" and exploit, exploit, exploit. 

Once again, it wasn’t long before someone came to my rescue. A gentleman in a red tie, suit and unbranded baseball cap asked what kind of job I was after. I told him something in ornithology. He suggested I come and join him at his accounting firm. I didn’t feel qualified for that, so I declined, but at least I've now got a decent backup plan.

A man in a hoodie told me he was also looking for a job. I asked him if he wanted to join me. He laughed and said he did not. 

"PITHY OP-ED WRITER, PRETTY BIG OPINIONS"

From animals to editorial, next was an ad for a pithy op-ed writer with pretty big opinions. 

The only person to approach me was that same red tie and cap guy. This time, he asked me out and tried to give me his number. Again, I declined, and with that he retracted his original job offer.

What did I learn from this? No one wants a writer. In hindsight, this was a little close to home.

"MARKETING GRADUATE (BA HONS)"

Slightly downtrodden, I went where plenty of failed young journalists go: to the world of marketing and PR.

This sign was a little slow at first; presumably marketing execs are already tired of this method of self promotion. I asked a nice Scottish couple if they were looking for a marketing graduate. They said they were looking for a train. I told them they were in the right place. In return, they called me a "good wee bairn," and said they’d hire me if they could.

After that, the job offers came bulldozing in. A guy took my resume and told me his firm were doing interviews all week and that he’d call me in. A very busy, flustered lady from a PR and marketing agency took my resume and said she’d be in touch. Next, a guy told me his firm was hiring and he’d get me in.

Fuck writing, I thought. The time is nigh to throw in the towel on this dying trade and dive headfirst into the hot, bubbly jacuzzi of sandwich board marketing!

"HUMAN TROLL, REALLY RUDE"

On a high from my recent success, I was ready for my final job hunt. If my decent GPA could get me three potential jobs in as many minutes, then so could being a really rude human troll.

Or so I thought. Holding that sign up, the offers weren't exactly rolling in, but it did at least get me the most attention.

Before my hunt could begin in earnest, the police came up and stopped me. The conversation went like this:

Cop: What are you doing?
Me: Just looking for a job.
Cop: You can’t do that here.
Me: Why not?
Cop: [Silence] I don’t know.
Me: Can I stay then? 
Cop: Well, you’re only selling yourself aren’t you?
Me: Yes, I suppose I am.
Cop: [Turns to second cop and a security guard] So, why can’t she stay here again?
Cop 2: I dunno. This bloke says it’s against the rules.

The security guard then said that if I registered where the street performers and charities register—and went through the evacuation process—I could come back and try again. It seemed like a lot of effort. I wasn’t there to raise money or earn pocket change with a bad acoustic cover of a Dave Matthews song; I was just a graduate with two degrees, looking for a job.

- - -

I'm part of the last generation to be told, with conviction, that if you graduate, you'll get a job, and if you go to college, you can be anything you want to be. Of course, we now all know that to be a lie, and I have no idea how long—if ever—it'll become a truth again.

For now, though, there's this. I was only holding signs up for a couple of hours, but it still made me feel pretty drained—worse than the feeling I get every single morning after checking the ads to find that no new entry-level journalism jobs have been added. Admittedly, it was quite a good way to attract the attention of potential employers, but I wonder if I'd have had the same rate of success if I was a boy. All the people who approached me were men. One even offered me a job I was blatantly unqualified for (I was holding a sign touting my falconry prowess), then took the offer away when I wouldn't give him my phone number. 

But hey, if you’re a marketing graduate? Go ahead. At the very least, someone will write an article about you. 

Follow Hannah Ewens Twitter.

Joan Rivers in A Piece of Work

When I found out that Joan Rivers passed away last week, it wasn’t through Facebook or Twitter or an alarmist 72-point headline on the Huffington Post, but from a stream of emails and text messages that flooded my phone last Thursday. It felt personal. I didn’t know Joan Rivers, not really. But I did spend a year working on documentary about her life, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. I was just a production assistant, but in that year, I spent hours and hours watching and transcribing footage of Joan, living under the gigantic presence of this tiny 76-year-old lady’s life.

That same year, I had a part time job walking around the Central Park reservoir each morning with another elderly lady, who couldn’t quite see well enough to walk on her own. We’d spend about an hour each morning, talking about her life as a United Nations translator (among other things) and then she’d slip me a $20, ashamed her doorman might see our illicit transaction. Then, I’d spend the rest of the day watching Joan Rivers. If there was ever a young woman with more access to the daily insight and reflections of fascinating older women, it was me in 2009-2010. While there is a lot to glean from Joan Rivers about being a comedian/performer/businesswoman, in all that footage from her 76th year, I learned a lot more about what it means to be old.

The few times I actually did meet Joan in person, it was like seeing that girl crawl out of the television in The Ring; I spent every day seeing and hearing Joan, but when she could see and hear me back, it was scary and uncomfortable. This is a sensation I don’t think Joan Rivers felt very often. Even into the final years of her life, Joan Rivers did not watch people from afar. She stomped right up to them and punched them in the face with a manicured, QVC-ring-clad fist. Maybe they didn’t always deserve it, but then that wasn’t really the point.

Joan Rivers lived her life pushing the limits, putting one toe over the line, and then sneaking her whole foot over when no one was looking. What’s amazing about her career is that the line never caught up with her. There are plenty of comics who were daring and shocking for their time, but Joan never really had a time.  Her name doesn’t elicit nostalgia, because she didn’t allow herself to be tied to any particular moment in history. As Kathy Griffin explained it in A Piece of Work: “You know what the real pinnacle in a comedy career is? It’s not an Oscar, it’s not one thing, it’s the fact that you’re still doing it.”

When you watch Joan, you aren’t seeing another aging comic reminiscing about the good old days when people could get drunk on TV. You saw a wide-eyed girl taking in the world and relishing all the silly, shitty things in it. Sure, maybe we didn’t always need another Miley Cyrus crack, but when it’s being tweeted by the woman who once joked about Liberace’s boobs to Johnny Carson, it’s worth admiring. After Oprah did an exclusive interview with Whitney Houston in 2009, I saw Joan do a set at a comedy club in Hell’s Kitchen and joke about Whitney leaning over to snort dandruff off Oprah’s shoulder. Maybe she was mean, but at least she was punctual. Her compulsion to stay current, to stay young, was the most obvious and special thing about her. You could see it written all over her face.

Though her changing physical appearance is a much more complex, intimate part of her life than anyone can really claim to understand, it too is an apt reflection of her career. She physically looked like a different person in each major phase of her life. But, her thirst for youth was not the same as a desire to go back in time, and given some of the well-documented shit she’s been through in her life, I can’t blame her. Her husband Edgar committed suicide in 1987, around the same time her Fox talk show was cancelled, and she famously fell out with her longtime champion Johnny Carson. It’s not surprising that a person in that circumstance would have a strong desire to move forward, to make fresh material, to propel herself out of the past.

In one of my favorite lines from A Piece of Work, Joan says, “If one more woman comedian comes up to me and says to me, ‘you opened the doors for me’…,you wanna say go fuck yourself, I’m still opening the doors.” She’s blunt, but she’s right. It would be an insult not to acknowledge how hard Joan was still working up until her fantastic final year. She knew that she couldn’t stop, because the world wasn’t stopping around her. She had to catch up, and she always did. 

Image of Ray Rice, via Flickr user keithallison.
I sit here clacking away in a café (OK, it’s a bar, and I’m slugging something called The Godfather II, concocted of whiskey and ginger beer). The man next to me is on what is very clearly a first date facilitated by the internet. He is presumably a wannabe member of Toronto’s illustrious media scene, and he is wailing to the near-mute woman across from him about what a travesty it is that the “strippers and hookers” will no longer be able to advertise if C-36 goes through. “I’d be perfectly fine to look at the strippers and hookers if it meant I could a job out of it,” he says, while she titters in response.

Charmed, I’m sure.

Similar attitudes, as per usual, have shown up in the media this week. It's been revealed that women can expect to be penalized by losing a percentage of their income per child. Not shocking. But men, on the other hand, can expect to earn more if they have children.

As for people who identify as trans? Well, those in power are still questioning whether they even exist.

Image via Flickr user raebrune.
Mothers, Expect To Earn Less While Your Baby Daddy Earns More

Any person who has borne a child, birthed it, and chooses to care for it will tell you the challenges are very real. You’re going to be sleepless for the next few months while cleaning up a lot of poop and milk-vomit. You’ll be hearing a lot of screaming. You’ll be judged for breastfeeding. You’ll be judged for not breastfeeding. The general populace will provide much unsolicited input on how to raise your new human. (Funny how that seems to be the only instance in which the “it takes a village” adage comes into play anymore.) Aside from that, mums have internal struggles, too. Anne Theriault, creator of feminist site The Belle Jar, writes about the feeling of losing her identity after she gave birth to her child.

And now, it’s become clear that, for each child a woman has, her income drops four percent. And if a man has children at home, his income will increase by more than six percent. This is according to a paper by Michelle Budig, a sociology prof at the University of Massachusetts. Hmm, I wonder why this could be? For men, children act as a kind of insurance in the workplace. Being a “family man” signifies that he is trustworthy, dependable, reliable and, dare I say it, maybe even conservative. Mothers, on the other hand, are seen to have their brains entirely dominated by their offspring. As Budig says to the New York Times:

“Employers read fathers as more stable and committed to their work; they have a family to provide for, so they’re less likely to be flaky. That is the opposite of how parenthood by women is interpreted by employers. The conventional story is they work less and they’re more distractible when on the job.”

According to the paper, high-income men receive the biggest increase in pay, while low-income women lose the most money. Capitalism reigns, ladies, gentlemen, and people of other genders. And while we’re on that tip, let me point out that this is not only a class, but a race issue: While feminists frequently bemoan the fact that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, women of colour can expect to make even less. (In the US, Hispanic women make about 53 percent of what white men earn. African American women make about 64 percent of what white men earn, and indigenous women 60 percent.)

Budig’s research shows that unmarried, childless women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns. Married mothers, on the other hand, earn only 76 cents.

So, evidently, mothers are seen as largely incompetent, and at the same time, women who are happily childfree are seen as cold-hearted bitches who can’t get their priorities straight. They’re told they’ll change their minds.

People tell me this all the time. Complete strangers are always asking me in scandalized disbelief why I don’t want children. Here is why: when I was a kid, I had a silver Nano Baby (90s kids, throw your hands up!). It lived on a blue nylon cord around my neck, and I would tuck it into my shirt for safekeeping so my teacher wouldn’t steal it. But that’s about as far as I went into mothering the thing. It would routinely drown in cute little piles of its own poop. I have no desire to see this scenario play out IRL.

Now, I have at least one other quantifiable reason, other than “I don’t want one,” which never seems to be a good enough response.

Screenshot via Everyday Feminism.
It’s Not Only Women Who Can Bear Children, So Let’s Start Including Everyone Else When We Speak About Reproductive Rights

Hi. Some people who don’t identify as women also have uteruses, and can also become pregnant. That means we need to be more inclusive when we discuss birth control, abortion, pregnancy, and other aspects of reproductive health. Nonbinary folk, trans* men, and others are routinely left out of the discussion when it comes to bearing children, and in this time of enlightenment on trans* rights, we’d all do better to be more sensitive.

Now, this wonderful little explainer has been published by writer Jack Qu’emi, who is nonbinary. From the article:

“The “War on Women” is a war on me, but I’m not a woman… Some trans people have abortions. Some trans people need access to birth control. Some trans people could use the clinic access to get hormone replacement therapy. So why is it that in the five-plus years I’ve been involved in this movement, no one has bothered to even mention people like me?”

Qu’emi suggests that we be careful of our use of the word “women” to mean “people with active uteruses” and suggests using gender-neutral language instead. The article also suggests remembering that you can’t label someone just by looking at them, and to make an effort to expressly mention trans* people when discussing reproductive rights. In a world in which Toronto School Board trustee/terrible bigot Sam Sotiropoulos says he “reserves the right” to not believe in trans* people, those of us who recognize the grey spots in the gender spectrum need to ensure we’re always paying attention to the harm careless language can do.

Photo via Flickr user keithallison.
Violence Against Women Is Not For Your Entertainment

Please don’t watch the video of Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée in a casino elevator and then dragging her from it, unconscious. Rice’s fame is not an excuse for us to watch a recording of his now-wife’s extreme emotional and physical pain, and we have no right to devour that pain from the safety and comfort of our couch or office chair.

Rice was fired by the Ravens and suspended from the NFL this week after TMZ posted the video online. But the abuse happened in February, and at that point, NFL’s response was to suspend him for a mere two games. It took visual evidence for the NFL to do anything about it. (His wife, for the record, doesn’t agree with his punishment).

Last week, I wrote about media responsibility when it comes to stolen photos of nude celebrities. This is a very similar situation: media outlets are quick to air the personal lives of public figures, profiting from the pain of “leaked” photos, videos and other information. The Huffington Post, for example, posted the video on Facebook, with the caption “Disgraceful.” It’s also, IMHO, pretty damn disgraceful for them, or anyone else, to spread the footage.

People are posting this video without Janay’s consent. This should be a trigger for us to discuss violence against women, to research, to take note of stats, and to get off our asses and be activists about it. Not to pick Janay apart or criticize her choices. Violence against women is not entertainment, and Janay herself issued a statement on the video and the vulture-like nature of media in handling the case:

“No one knows the pain that [the] media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass [off] for all his life just to gain ratings is horrific. THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don't you all get? If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you've succeeded on so many levels.”

I can’t overstate the importance of awareness when it comes to violence against women. But it is not Janay’s job to inspire us to be more aware. She is not a charitable organization, she did not ask to be a catalyst for change, and her personal choices are not for us to judge.

Too often, we frame violence against women as “domestic assault,” which relegates the violence to the boundaries of the home, sending the message that it is a private matter not to be meddled with by those outside of the relationship. Too many media outlets completely gloss over the reality of abuse with their euphemisms.

If we truly care about women who are abused by their partners, we need to listen to them, and to understand the cycle of abuse. People who are abused by their partners are often financially or otherwise dependent on the abuser. They also often still love the abuser. Whether we like it or not, this is a complex issue. Let’s not embarrass Janay anymore by offering more unsolicited opinions.

@sarratch