George Orwell's 1984 opens with Winston Smith carving out a pocket of privacy by crouching in a corner of his apartment where the telescreen—and thus Big Brother—can't see and writing a diary entry. These days, that Stalin-inspired nightmare seems quaint.

We carry our personal telescreens around with us, and take it for granted that if someone wants to watch us, they can.There is nowhere to hide, even in the Hong Kong hotel room where Laura Poitras filmed Edward Snowden talking to Glenn Greenwald about the revelations about the NSA the whistleblower unleashed on the world. At one point in Citizenfour, Poitras's film about the surveillance state and Snowden, an impatient Snowden yanks the hotel phone's plug from the wall. All VoIP phones can be bugged, he explains, tossing away the cord. The NSA could know what he ordered from room service.

Much of Citizenfour was shot over the eight days that Poitras and Greenwald spent with Snowden. In contrast to the gray poverty of 1984's Oceania, the documentary's dystopian setting is sleekly modern. Poitras shoots NSA data centers, Occupy Wall Street privacy training sessions, and the posh no-placeness of the business-class hotel. Snowden proves what the two journalists already suspected and, thanks to him, we all now know: The US government is spying on everyone. He then trains them in the cumbersome feints with which they might evade its gaze.

Citizenfour is about surveillance. But its also about what surveillance does to you. How does authority's gaze change us? In a world where every keystoke is potentially watched, and every heartbeat potentially counted, does knowledge of that change how you act? Will you still allow yourself to question? How can you organize against power when you live entirely in its sight?

While Snowden's NSA revelations are most associated with the internet, "online surveillance" is a bit of a misnomer. The web long ago bled into meatspace. A CCTV camera could easily capture your face, then link that up to your Facebook profile, your purchases, your friends. You shed data like strands of hair. You're both made up of data and more than the sum of it, like DNA.

Critics sometimes chide the American anti-surveillance movement for the whiteness and maleness of its public faces. While women and people of color have done brilliant, under-recognized work against surveillance, this perception might be no coincidence: White men are the last people in America who thought they had privacy.  

"Invasive spying and government surveillance in the name of fighting terrorism is hardly news for Arab and Muslim-American communities," wrote Anna Lekas Miller in the Guardian last year when Snowden's leaks went public. Since 9/11, the US government has flooded Muslim communities with informants. FBI and NYPD plants haunted mosques and bookshops, sometimes trying to pressure innocent men into making plans, or even expressing sentiments, that could get them charged with terrorism.

The history of black people in this country is one of even more intimate—and bloody—state intrusions. Think of the FBI infiltrating black power groups, of the government blackmailing MLK. America's prison system disproportionately cages the black and brown, capturing not just the incarcerated, but their families, in its nets. Those visiting loved ones at Rikers must submit to fingerprinting, lift up their tongues and shake out their bras in front of a prison guard. Outside the cages, this lack of privacy is reinforced by police who grope and question black youth just for walking—is it any wonder that young men in these communities are finely attuned to the movements and whims of the police? That they internalize a fear of authority that's proven expert at wielding fear as a tool.

Women, especially women of color, also live under that gaze. Who they sleep with, whether they bear children, how they raise them—all of that is subject to scrutiny by the government and society at large. At the level of public policy, laws are made restricting their reproductive decisions. At the level of the street, we're told to "smile!" by strange men. Just another reminder we're being watched. 

Not that most people are hiding, exactly—the internet is a radical tool for self expression, and there are addictive benefits to living in public. On Twitter, we often type like we're drunks babbling at a cocktail party, but the sentences sit in cyberspace forever. Our former selves live in the cloud, in the Wayback Machine, on the servers of the NSA's data centers. They lie waiting to betray us. Online, as in middle school, everything goes on your permanent record.

Few people hold up under this sort of scrutiny. Most people are good, but everyone is fucked. We've all been cruel and cowardly. We all nurse our shameful secrets. Some heroin snorted, a coworker fucked, a friend gossiped about, a lie told. Everyone's done something they hope no one finds out—and chances are, a trace of it is lingering on a server somewhere.

Getting away with expressing complexity is still a privilege. That's means that exceptions notwithstanding, mostly its white men who are allowed to have done wrong. This is a lesson that Citizenfour unintentionally reinforces by showing us Julian Assange, a persecuted and courageous publisher of government secrets, without hinting that he's been accused by two women of rape. 

“We get the vapors over dark, brooding gritty men. But when confronted with.. flesh-and-blood women who have had to make hard choices and whose moral scorecard includes more than a few red marks, suddenly… we barrage them with... invective,” wrote Katherine Cross of Jane Doe, a teenage trans girl who was then locked in solitary confinement in a men's prison without a charge. Jane had been accused of hitting a guard at the juvenile facility where she lived. One alleged act of impulse during a hard life of abuse, and she got thrown in a hole. Without a concerted campaign by activists, almost no one would have objected.

In the past few months the hashtags #NoAngel and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown spread on social media, inspired by the tone of coverage about black men and boys who had been killed by the police—if a victim had frowned in a selfie or Instagrammed himself wearing jewelry or (God forbid!) been photographed with a joint, articles would imply that the victim was a dangerous “thug” who no doubt had it coming. There was no room for a black teen to be complicated in the way a white teen could be. In America, to not embody arbitrary standards of perfection is to be asking for it. What does it cost you to contort yourself?

In the words of that wise Twitter account, Infosec Taylor Swift, “Mass surveillance is the elegant oppression, a panopticon without bars. Its cage is... behind the eyes—in the mind.” Under authority's gaze, many people become smaller, more obedient, less daring.

Surveillance leaves scars.

Privacy activists rightly denounce the blanket surveillance of “innocent Americans.” But what about those who, because of skin color or faith, power has marked as guilty? If you're not a “person of interest” technologies like PGP, Tor, and Jabber OTR can be enough to keep your most of your communications out of the NSA's dragnet. If you're a member of a marginalized group, the stakes are higher. Pockets of privacy become more scarce.The government's gaze is not only fixed on your laptop. You're watched by the CCTV camera, the neighborhood informer, the cop loitering on the corner. Surveillance bleeds into your life, online and off.

If power has already decided people like you are guilty, even the smallest transgressions can be disastrous.

Snowden is free, living with his partner in Moscow. Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald are justly feted on the Lincoln Center stage. But countless people live under the government's gaze, because of nothing more than their skin color or heritage. Too many of them know what Winston Smith learned by the end of 1984. Once the state starts paying attention, hiding from the Telescreens does no good.

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter.

In September, Islamic State militants launched an offensive to seize Kobane, a predominantly Kurdish town in Syria just across the border from Turkey. In the following weeks, Turkey closed its border, leaving thousands of civilians stuck inside the war zone and preventing Kurds in Turkey from coming to the aid of their comrades. Violent protests subsequently broke out all over Turkey as Kurds accused authorities there of supporting the Islamic State.

More than 30 people have now been killed in clashes between Kurdish supporters, Turkish authorities, and Islamists. In the town of Diyarbakir, banks and public buildings have been set ablaze and destroyed.

VICE News went to Diyarbakir to meet with the youth wing of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and discuss their involvement in the clashes. We then spoke to both the family of a young man who was purportedly killed by Islamists, and to an Islamist leader.

Da, a 64-year-old woman from Ban Mae Toen with an enlarged thyroid gland. Photos by the author

Ban Mae Toen is a small rural village in the Thai province of Lampang, 300 miles away from Bangkok. Unfortunately for the villagers, it is close to a fluoride mine. Though the mine closed 40 years ago, the area has become home a polluted artificial lake that overflows during the rainy season. Given the lack of other water supplies, years of people drinking from the lake has made Ban Mae Toen a very sick village. The symptoms still can be seen across three generations. The children may experience brain damage, deaf-mutism, or slow brain development; some older people, particularly women, have an enlarged thyroid gland on their necks, as did their parents before them.

Da is 64 years old. When she was 34, she drank water from the lake. As a result, the thyroid gland in her throat is massively enlarged. It’s known as a goiter. She says it is not painful, though it looks awful.

"I have thyroid problems since some time ago, and I have become accustomed to it. I can work at home and it doesn’t hurt. I can go everywhere around the village," Da says.

When her lump appeared, Da didn’t give it too much thought. She didn’t bother to go to the doctor because she already knew what was going on. When she was younger, she had seen a similar swelling on her mother's neck and the necks of other older villagers who had also drunk from the lake.

"My mother had the same lump as mine but smaller," Da says. "For the last 20 years the lump hasn’t grown. The doctor told me that they can remove it, but I won’t. I am weak and I could bleed to death." Da currently works as a housekeeper and has three grown children who do not have health problems. Like others who have been poisoned by the lake, she does not receive any government assistance.

The polluted lake

"The problem we have is that in Ban Mae Toen, the groundwater is used for eating and cooking, and this is contaminated by with fluoride," says Dr. Chatpat Kongpun, who works at the Ministry of Public Health Thailand. "Some of the younger generation still suffer health problems, but their problems are not as severe as those of the older people," he says.

In Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, the lack of drinking water is a serious problem because it usually only rains during the monsoon season between May and October. That’s why people in Ban Mae Toen drink from the lake.

At the time of a report by the Australian University of Tasmania in 2007, the village had 1,092 inhabitants, 11.2 percent of whom had lumps in their throats like Da. Much of the rest of the population was affected by other conditions. One in three men and two out of three women over 45 years old had some degree of limb deformity. Twelve were unable to walk, 21 had walking difficulties, and 65 percent had stained teeth.

The report pointed to iodine deficiency as the cause of the health problems, saying that ingesting water contaminated with fluoride hinders the absorption of iodine, which is necessary for the human body to function properly—especially the brain and the thyroid gland. When the thyroid does not have enough iodine to perform, it has to work harder, and this causes it to swell, making a goiter.

Iodine is especially vital for the development of the brain and nervous system of babies during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. “The fetuses of pregnant women who have drunk contaminated water may experience brain damage, deaf-mutism, and mental disability," says Pornithida Padthong, who was head of communications at UNICEF Thailand until 2013 and worked in the village of Ban Mae Toen.

To help solve the problems caused by fluoride in the village, the Rotary Club of D'Entracasteaux of Tasmania, in Australia, which also funded the report, introduced a water tank supply in 2003 and provided the villagers with receptacles to store the rainwater.

“The main water tank of Ban Mae Toen comes from a borehole three kilometers [two miles] above the village, and has been piped to houses since 2003”, says Neil McGlashan, who worked on the report. The foundation also gave sacks of iodized salt to the villagers.

Officially, nobody drinks from the lake anymore, but according to a report by the organization from 2007, the supply may not be enough to see people through the dry season. “About 50 percent of pregnant women [still] suffered from iodine deficiency when I worked in the village last year," explains Pornithida Padthong, suggesting that people in Ban Mae Toen may still be drinking poison to this day.

Follow Ana Salvá on Twitter.

A visual representation of hate-following someone online

Finally, science has proven that all those dumb-dumbs you're friends with on Facebook have a purpose. That high school acquaintance who's always inviting you to play a social media game based off of Storage Wars, that miserable couple who now mostly spend their statuses bitching about the price of ammo at Walmart, that one girl who's inexplicably just qualified as a nurse, even though you remember, vividly, her sitting on a sofa at college bemoaning her period, saying, "Honestly, Joel, it’s like a tap," which makes you think she should be seeking urgent medical help rather than providing it. 

All these people have a function. And that function is making you feel better about your own dumb-dumb awful life. Because this month, an Ohio State University study into social networks found that when people are in a bad mood, they're more likely to linger on the social media profiles of people who are worse off than them: the poor, the damaged, the trainee nurses with unconventional vaginal discharges.

They found this by taking a group of 168 students, dividing them into two, putting one group in a bad mood (they asked them to do a test and then told them all they did "terribly") and one lot in a good mood (ditto, but said they did "excellently"—who knew mood manipulation was so easy?) then asked them to look at some fake social media profiles they'd made up on a thing called "SocialLink."

A selection of profiles on "SocialLink"

I love shit like this. I love that grocery-store brands of soda all have names like "Arnold's Good Cola." I love on sitcoms when the characters go to the bar and say, "I'll have a brew, please," because they’re not allowed to say brand names. This is what this is: academics, clearly not allowed to use actual Facebook profiles for actual academic reasons, having to invent an entire social network just for the purpose of their study.

And it’s a ridiculous one: "SocialLink" has names like "Raymond Doty" and "Phillip Mulkey," with pixilated-like-the-dude-in-Doom user profiles and a five-point rating for wealth (signified by a dollar sign) and hotness (signified by a heart). I like to imagine the design meeting for that: "Yo, can we make this mangled face slightly less hot? Make those—no, Brian, you’re not listening—make those distorted pixels look a bit sloppier."

But the point is the findings of the study, which were as follows: Overall, people spent more time on the profiles of those rated richer and more attractive, but those in the negative mood group spent more time wallowing on the profiles of the poor and the ugly. In conclusion, as the study’s co-author Benjamin Johnson says, “Generally, most of us look for the positive on social media sites. But if you’re feeling vulnerable, you’ll look for people on Facebook who are having a bad day or who aren’t as good at presenting themselves positively, just to make yourself feel better.”

This is brilliant, because it fully endorses my own not-proven-by-a-fake-social-media-platform-and-a-university-study theory—that following someone on social media just because you hate them is important for the heart, soul, and everything in between. There is, of course, a whole gamut of emotions between pity and hate, and looking at the profile of someone who's desperately trying to sell a race-car bed on the Facebook group page for his alma mater ("$40 only!! Mattress barely soiled!!!") is completely different from poring over the tweets of someone you hate from afar. But I think they scratch the same itch. I think they tingle the same knot of synapses in the brain that only light up at the social-media wailing of others. Digital schadenfreude, if you want.

Tiny impulses of delight garnered from social media is a definite Thing. Earlier this year, a Frontiers of Human Neuroscience study found that gaining Facebook "likes" or Instagram "likes" or retweets, or whatever—getting those #numbers, basically—lit up the reward center in your brain. Scientists from Berlin's Freie Universitat scanned the brains of 31 Facebook users as they looked at pictures of themselves accompanied by positive captions—and yeah, essentially we’re all big dumb parakeets enamored with our phones instead of tiny mirrors. 

But it proves social media has the ability to alter our mood and our well-being. And it works the other way: When I see someone publicly sounding off about an airline mis-booking them on a 5 AM flight, I'm delighted. When I see someone sincerely say the words, “Really, Twitter?” I get mad in a way that gives me energy. And god, when I see someone doing a manual retweet of that picture of some-pigeons-about-to-drop-the-most-fire-album and adding "BRILLIANT" or "TWEET OF THE DAY," I feel a foot taller, like I can shoot fire from my very fingertips. Everyone is awful and it’s brilliant to watch.

I’m not alone; I can’t be alone. I know someone who has an entire alternate Twitter account, locked down like Alcatraz, which they use to follow purely the people who infuriate them with their bad opinions. I know several other people who check in on people they don’t follow just to see if they are still being wrong. "Yes," they will say, in email or over WhatsApp, linking me to a deeply buried tweet of theirs, a screenshotted glimmer of someone else’s outrage. "They are still being wrong."

So there it is: A bit of hate (or at least "aggressively enjoying the fact that you are not someone else") can be good for you. 

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

High cigarette taxes in New York City feed the black market on the street. Photo via Flickr user David Tan

It’s a cloudy and cool September morning on Staten Island when I make my way to Bay Street looking for someone to sell me illegal cigarettes. I don’t smoke, but ever since Eric Garner’s haunting death here a few months ago after the police approached him for selling “loosies”—individual, untaxed cigarettes—I’ve wanted to know how easy it is to find someone who will sell me illegal smokes on the street.

As I walk into a bodega across from Tompkinsville Park, which sits a couple of blocks from the Staten Island Ferry terminal, a tall, dark-skinned man overhears my conversation with the owner and offers me a pack of “Newps,” or Newports, for eight dollars. He tells me his name is Debo Lato. He’s 51 and his “office” is just outside the bodega, right in front of the spot where Garner was killed on July 17.

A makeshift memorial—candles, cards, and flowers—still rests on the spot where Garner, a six-foot-three, 350-pound African American father of six, was placed in an illegal chokehold and held down by NYPD officers until he stopped breathing. Selling loosies was a crime he’d repeatedly been busted for in the past. Garner’s death, which was ruled a homicide, sparked weeks of high-profile protests against NYPD brutality. A special grand jury took up the case this month and will determine—eventually—if criminal charges should be brought. But how profitable is it to sell cigarettes on the street, and who's still got the guts to do it?

Lato is unhurried and nonchalant as he sells Newps to a dozen or so people on the street in the hour we stand there talking. Newport was the second-best selling brand of cigarettes nationwide behind Marlboro in 2013. It’s also the only brand Lato is selling this morning.  

Photo via Flickr user Steve Snodgrass 

It's illegal, but Lato isn’t hiding what he’s doing, nor is he furtive as he pockets dollar after dollar. After all, there are no uniformed police officers in sight.

He pays a mere $50 for one carton, each of which contains ten packs, and claims to sell anywhere from six to ten cartons a day. That adds up to at least $300 in gross sales—not counting what he makes from selling loosies one or two at a time.

“Everybody on Staten know that Bay Street right here is the market for cigarettes,” he tells me. “Everybody on Staten Island know if you want to pay $8 for a pack of cigarettes, go to Bay Street. Any place else is $9 and better.”

That's an amazing deal in a town where the average price of a pack of smokes is somewhere around $13. I’ve seen them listed for as low as $11 in Harlem and as high as $15 in Midtown. Those prices include the state excise tax of $4.35, as well as the city’s local tax of $1.50. That makes New York the most expensive state in which to buy cigarettes.

That hasn't stopped New Yorkers from choking down cancer sticks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that most smokers in the state are black males between 18 and 24 years old. The majority also don't have a high school degree. Staten Island is the borough with the highest percentage of smokers in New York City at 16.5, the majority of them black and Hispanic males, a 2012 survey by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported. 

Staten Island also was home to the highest percentage of smokers a decade ago, at 27.2 percent—when a pack of cigarettes in New York City cost about $6. The sharp decline helps explain why researchers often conclude that high tobacco taxes push people to quit smoking. In a widely cited 2012 article published in Tobacco Control, a British journal that studies the nature and consequences of tobacco use, a trio of experts analyzed more than 100 studies and concluded, “Tobacco excise taxes are a powerful tool for reducing tobacco use while at the same time providing a reliable source of government revenues.”

But is that really what’s happening? It is true that there are fewer smokers in the city today than there were in years past—that downward trend is reflected nationwide. But in New York, it’s hardly clear those taxes are what spurred the decline. The smoking rate in Staten Island has dropped just 4 percent since 2007, though the cigarette tax has been raised twice in the meantime, by $1.25 a pack in 2008 and by $1.60 a pack in 2010. According to these studies, the decrease since then should have been precipitous. Instead, the most significant effect seems to be a rise in street sales.

Nearly 57 percent of cigarettes bought in New York are smuggled into the state—the highest percentage nationwide—according the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington, DC, think tank that has ties to the controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and advocates for a simpler tax system. The foundation based its conclusions on figures from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a right-wing research firm funded by tobacco companies.

“One consequence of high state cigarette tax rates has been increased smuggling as criminals procure discounted packs from low-tax states to sell in high-tax states,” the report reads. “Growing cigarette tax differentials have made cigarette smuggling both a national problem and a lucrative criminal enterprise.”

A vintage Lucky Strike billboard near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Photo via Flickr user Bruce Henschel

“I just came from North Carolina the other day,” Lato says when I ask him where he gets his cigarettes. “You know how much cigarettes cost out there? Five dollars.”

According to a survey by the the Awl, a pack of Marlboro Reds costs an average of $5.45 in North Carolina, one of the lowest prices in the nation. It's also just a quick ten-hour drive down I-95 from New York City.

“I just run out there maybe twice a month,” Lato says. But he’s not as cavalier on these trips as he appears on the street.

“Let me tell you something,” he continues, “Number one: You cannot just go out there and just go into one store and buy it like that ‘cause they know. When you go out of town, you buy cigarettes, you buy too many cartons, they suspicious. You gotta go in this store and buy two or three cartons, this store, buy two or three cartons, that store, buy two or three cartons. You got to do it like that. You can’t go into one store and buy more because they know that we’re taking them out of state.”

Upali Dunaratne, the owner of the bodega in front of which Lato does his thing, has a more straightforward supply line, but a harder time moving product. Cartons costs Dunaratne about $110 when he picks up his shipments in Brooklyn. He sells only about three cartons every two days, however, and a pack of Newports in his 300-square foot store, which stocks the standard fare of snack foods, drinks, and household items, costs $12.25. The shopkeeper says his profit is just $10 to $12 off cigarette sales in any given week.

“People who cannot afford it at this price buy it outside [from Lato] for a cheaper price,” Dunaratne says. “People who work, make living, they pay that [higher] price. I’m not gonna stop selling cigarettes. I still get some customers.”

Kelly Cooke, 45, has been smoking since she was 13 years old. Both her parents smoked. So did her brother and sisters. Her twin brother is the only one in the family who shunned cigarettes.

“I used to smoke four packs a day,” she tells me on her way to work after I approach her in a deli on Bay Street. She’s now down to a pack and a half. I ask her how much money she spends on her habit.

“Oh my God! Forget it,” she replies. “Maybe $26 a day—every day. If I go to Brooklyn, it costs me $18 for two packs.”

When I saw her, she was haggling with George Reyes, the deli manager, to let her pay for her coffee at the end of the day.

“That’s why he gives me the coffee until I get off of work later, ‘cause I don’t have a dime before work,” she says. This is why she buys loosies on the street. I ask her how easy it is to get them.

“It’s not easy,” she replies. “Nothing’s easy. They have to know you there. This is their neighborhood, their area. I work around here.”

She tells me she’s going to keep smoking “until my brain goes backward and I come to my senses.”

Low-income smokers now spend nearly a quarter of their income on cigarettes because of high taxes, according to one 2012 study. The study concluded that these taxes had no significant effect on their smoking habit and that, in fact, smokers with annual incomes less than $30,000 doubled their spending on cigarettes between 2003 and 2011.

More affluent smokers, on the other hand, have found that buying cigarettes on the street is a way to keep smoking without, well, really smoking. A friend refers to her habit as the “loosie-a-day smoking plan.” She no longer smokes a pack a day, but still buys one to two cigarettes per day for high-stress situations.

Protesters march after Eric Garner's death on Staten Island in August. Photo via Flickr user coolloud 

Some people do have a problem with black-market smoke dealers like Lato, however. The New York Daily News reported in August that in the days and weeks leading up to Eric Garner’s death, the city had received numerous 311 calls complaining about the sale of untaxed cigarettes on Bay Street. In an interview with WNYC in August, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton addressed these quality of life calls.

“If we were to stop responding to 911 emergency or 311 quality of life calls, there would be a phenomenal hew and cry that we were neglecting the minorities of the city,” he said. “For many minorities, the neighborhoods they live in, some of the circumstances they find themselves incumbent with in their neighborhoods unfortunately... They want something done about that.”

Lato admits he’s been harassed by police officers, but shrugs that sort of thing off.

“So? So?” he asks. “They’re gonna kill all of us for a fuckin’ Newport? Well, get to killing, man! ‘Cause it’s not gonna stop. You understand? We just selling cigarettes. We’re not selling no crack. We’re not selling no heroin. We’re not selling no nothing—just only cigarettes.”

Solange Uwimana is a student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Bludgeoner86

I’ve been writing about video games for close to nine years now, and I’ve never been able to write about my favorite game in a way that satisfies me. It’s become my white whale—every so often I go after it, catch a bit of flesh, and the sea stinks of hot blood until it passes again.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is about hunting. And eating. It’s a game where you lie in the grass with your knife out and watch the pale green blades flatten in the distance, a rustling of something moving ever closer. You must not be found. You have to hold still for long stretches, the enemy’s footfalls incidentally retreating while you think about dinner. While the snake comes within your arm’s reach.

It’s also about the low ache of human bones and how a big man’s body can break and bruise inside, with deceptive ease. How I have to fix it, with splint and styptic. This big, big man, this military machine—and it’s me who has to dig out the slugs and sew up the holes.

It’s about how he wants his mama.

It’s a Japanese game about the Cold War between America and Russia, about the fear of nuclear proliferation. Your adored mentor, an elite military agent, unexpectedly and inexplicably defects to the Soviet Union, and you have to go and kill her. You have to; it’s an order, and the third World War will start if you don’t. 

At the end of the game’s prologue of sorts, our hero, Snake (a.k.a. Naked Snake, later Big Boss), a CIA operative who’s just had the world yanked out from under him, lies battered and addled on the bank of a river as a rogue mushroom cloud blooms into the sky. We have just been put in charge of nursing him. We feel the shudder of hellfire flickering over his eyes and skin. We feel the heat of humanity’s capacity for evil against itself, and we feel for our burly and brutalized young charge. We can pledge to bring him nobly through this—not because he’s a hero, but because he is breakable.

Here’s a thing I tell everyone: It’s the only war game where mastery is dictated not by how many people you shoot, but how few. You wanna be a badass? Play it only with a tranquilizer pistol, an Mk22 “Hush Puppy.”

Metal Gear Solid 3 is an indictment of patriotism, about the grim manipulation that underlies most of the duties publicly marketed as noble. It’s the salute that hurts, the handshake you don’t want to return, the grave you planted yourself.

The Metal Gear Solid 3 trailer, as shown at E3 2003

Until I played it for the first time, a few years after 9/11, I didn’t actually know that nukes do not just go away. That their rods and their fetid coolants remain thrust into the guts of this planet forever like bad cells—the fear of them freezes us all forever, leaves us counting our breath, lying there and thinking of our countries.

It has a doomed Russian cosmonaut walking in systematic circles, immolated by his own memories, still wearing his space suit, counting grandly down to a takeoff that will never happen. That boss fight is such a fucking pain.

MGS3 has secret frogs, and you get a special outfit if you shoot all the frogs in the whole game. From someplace in this dead-serious Russian wilderness, the frogs sway back and forth in response to your attack. Bleating loudly, they’re toys. Remember: Games are toys. MGS3 also launched with a brand tie-in to Sony’s Ape Escape. You can play a little optional mini-game where you catch cartoon monkeys. “Gotcha!” Snake gloats. “You’re mine.”

MGS3 is a ridiculous parade, a silly and off-putting video game. It has interminable cutscenes and bad dialogue—detached jawing about the movie Godzilla, about microfilm containing the secret fortune of nations, about bipedal tanks that hurl warheads; nerdy sci-fi garbage. It has weak sex jokes, heavy-handed references to James Bond and Austin Powers alike in the same self-satisfied breaths. I couldn’t exactly tell you to play it. I couldn’t tell you to sit through it.

I mean, I feel like you just wouldn’t be able to appreciate it, mostly.

Like all of director Hideo Kojima’s work, it’s a game about video games—the ambitious, rebellious act of taking "level design" outside of the familiar military buildings and molecular structures of the previous two games and depositing you, the eager player, into the wilderness. At the time MGS3 was unveiled, we’d never seen a character’s crawl physics adapt to uneven land before, to weave, snakelike, over its peaks and hollows rather than to skim along its geometry superficially. The tech is the thing; the onward march. The grass physics. It was Kojima’s idea of an innovation, and it also meant to be a message about how climate and environment shape intent.

You could crawl across grasslands, through logs, into swamplands full of Indian gavials (in Russia?) and dangerous mushrooms. Bright, poisonous frogs. You must always watch your camouflage index—a percentage that changes based upon what you’re wearing in what kind of biome, your clothes and face paint. Thrill: Russian soldier rooting around in the grass just a few feet away, unable to see you hiding in plain sight.

You have to kill to eat, because your nation has abandoned you. Everything you kill goes bad if you save the game, shut the machine off, and come back later. You are not protected from the passing of time.

If you die you don’t get a “game over” screen, you get a “TIME PARADOX” screen.

The best part of the whole game is a long, slow climb up a ladder, to music.

The ladder climb

It’s all a lot of nonsense, actually. Make sure you get the Crocodile Cap and the Poop Camo. It’s funny. In this game about patriotism and how climate shapes intent, you will have to listen to interminable cinema puns and weird bathroom jokes.

Actually, I don’t know what to tell you any more about Kojima’s sense of “humor.” MGS has a stupid gay joke, and in its PlayStation Portable sequel Peace Walker, you can have sex with a 16-year-old girl in a cardboard box. In the recently released Ground Zeroes (which VICE covered here) you can find a bomb planted in that same character’s vagina. I’m not going to try to solve this cognitive dissonance—my loving Metal Gear Solid, my hating this shit—with another good old Western swing at “othering” the Japanese. I don’t know what to say.

See, I love answering these kinds of questions, but I don’t know what to tell you when it comes to Metal Gear Solid. It moves sinuous and dark and slimy ahead of me in the water. Yet MGS3 remains the only war game where I can aim perfectly, hover the weapon sights perfectly—even quickly, if I have to do it quickly—and, pew, my silencer, my tranq dart, the choke and crumple of my enemy.

Very rarely when I’m playing, I’ll forget that I’ve accidentally equipped the real gun, the one that causes red-brown blossoms of blood to explode unexpectedly on the bodies of foreign soldiers. A BANG that causes me to panic and reload. I mean, reload the entire save file and go back. I want a no-kill game.

There isn’t really a game that knows me as well as this one. Where I cry at the end every time. Where I love this sad, grim, muscled man named “Snake.” Like, really love him. Maybe because I’ve been entrusted with his care. Maybe because he doesn’t have answers about love and country, like I don’t have answers.

MGS3 is a perfect video game. Just perfect. Well-paced, well-plotted, technically flawless, meta as fuck.

OK. It’s not perfect. But it’s perfect to me.

But come on—you should play it. You should see if you’re up for it: a no-kill game. You should see if you can feel the flicker of history over your wrists and arms—chilly gooseflesh—when they talk about Cold War, and the little tiny role video games can maybe play in teaching you what that means. The nobility of de-escalation, of invisibility. The sick, spoilt vein that throbs inside patriotism’s animal.

There’s this one boss fight, several areas wide, where your enemy is a man who’s a hundred years old. He’s been saving his energy for this final battle. This sniper—can you find his scope glittering in the jungle? Can you sniff out his heat signature from his footprints? Can you sneak up behind him and whisper, "Freeze," into his brittle, wrinkled earlobe?

The end boss battle

Can you? Instead of just beating the boss, can you do this? Are you able? How does it feel?

Come on. Come on. I can’t do "game criticism" about MGS3. But I have nothing else to tell you. This is the end.

OK, actually, what if I tell you it’s really fun? You spread your spider-fingers all over that Japanese-made Sony controller, and you attain silent mastery. It’s up to you if you wanna think about Lyndon Johnson and Nikita Khrushchev when you pull those video game triggers. Think about the walls between “East and West.”

Aim and let go—pew. Succeed in perfect silence. Hush, puppy, here’s mama.

I mutter at the siege I’m simulating, when my aim is perfect: “I’m the fucking Boss.”

Never forget: nukes are still pulsing deep in the body of this planet like slugs, like bad veins. My favorite game about it is made in Japan, full of stupid jokes and long, distended periods of embarrassing dialogue.

Just play it, though. War games are your language. You can do it, right? Don’t move. Don’t make noise. Just aim, then believe. Pew.

Missed. Shit. Unsatisfied. Cold.

Follow Leigh Alexander on Twitter

Chocolate has always been an elite skateboarding brand, so we jumped at the opportunity to do a "20 Years of Chocolate" episode. It gave us a chance to tap a lot of skaters that have never been featured on the show before, and its an honor just to ride in Chocolate's wake.

We filmed more interviews than we have for any episode before—and this is still a fraction of the stories we could have told. The brand has gone through many different incarnations and endured its fair share of hardships. Enjoy.

Banff is close to Kevin Drew's heart. Not only has he spent time in the gorgeous Alberta town, honing his craft at the Banff Centre, he's in love with the mountainous nature that inarguably inspires creativity. In this episode of our FACTOR-funded series, Tripping Out, Kevin goes heli-hiking, takes a canoe trip, hangs out with his friend Charlie, and plays a killer show for an intimate crowd at the Banff Centre. Enjoy!

Technology has made it so everyone can be a photographer, but that means it is even more difficult to make an iconic photograph. Photo School is a new monthly column that will teach you all the things you need to know about photography, without the hassle of having to attend art school. Because who needs an MFA?

'Nachtstilleben (Night Still Life),' 2011 (negative); 2013 (print). Wolfgang Tillmans, German (active London), born 1968. Chromogenic print, Image and sheet: 53 1/8 × 79 3/4 inches (134.9 × 202.6 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art 

Until recently I didn’t know much about Wolfgang Tillmans’s work, but I knew he was supposed to be really great. In art school I had only noticed a few Tillmans photos of European club culture, and I’m ashamed to admit that I never really “got it,” though many of my peers seriously worshipped him. Luckily, there’s a show currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) geared toward introducing Tillmans’s work to a broad audience who, like me, may not immediately gravitate toward it. 

Who better to fill this embarrassing gap in my photography knowledge than Nathaniel M. Stein, Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the PMA? Stein came up with the idea for the show, titled In Dialogue: Wolfgang Tillmans, on his first day working at the Museum, after he noticed and fell in love with a recently acquired still life while touring the storage facilities. The exhibition positions that monumental photograph, Nachtstileben (Night Still Life), as a hub onto which pictures by other artists from the PMA’s permanent collection are connected, in addition to other works by Tillmans on loan from Andrea Rosen, his first New York gallery. Stein and I walked around the exhibition, from piece to piece, and as the connections became clear to me, I started to understand what all the fuss is about.

VICE: So, the show started with this picture (above) called Nachtstilleben (Night Still Life). It was acquired by the museum last year?
Nathaniel M. Stein: Last year, 2013, so we are very excited about it. It was the first work by Tillmans in the collection. He obviously is a massively important contemporary photographer, but for some of our core photography audience, this is something that may seem a little bit outside the established aesthetic, a little bit challenging in some ways. So, part of the project for us is to bridge why we as curators think this is exciting and fantastic, while our audience on first glance might be like, “What?” The point of the exhibition is to get the photograph out there, to get people’s eyeballs on it, but also to talk about what Tillmans is about, by looking at things from the collection in connection to ideas that come out of his work. Beyond the fact that it’s just a drop-dead amazing photograph, there’s a lot going on. I actually think Wolfgang Tillmans is some sort of a genius, like on an intellectual level, so there’s a lot going on there intellectually.

Installation view of 'In Dialogue: Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Why do you think Tillmans may be hard for people to access at first?
All the reactions people have to this picture can be used as entryways into understanding it. People could look at the photographs and say, “Oh that’s a gigantic snapshot”—meaning that they are perceiving that there is something going on in the way the aesthetic of the picture works, the way that it is apparently organized that’s different than what they are used to seeing in an art museum as a photograph. They also may have the reaction that it’s just a bunch of junk, not conventionally beautiful subjects of artwork. And the both of those things are interesting ways to start a critique.

Actually, there are references to a language of still life symbolism all over that picture. Almost all of the objects in the picture have resonance with traditional still-life symbolism.

You mean like still lives in painting?
Totally. Like batteries, a scale, gold—all just modern versions of very old still-life symbols. The compositional components of the picture are absolutely jaw-dropping. I mean, there’s this crazy reference to the classical triangular composition, there’s also these really amazing shifting planes. It’s very stark, and bold. Then it becomes a question about why. This is one of the things Tillmans pushes us to do, to think about how this has become a picture. Does it become a picture because we have some idea that he carefully arranged all of this stuff and put it together in this composition? Can it rise to the level of being a picture if what he’s done is simply to recognize this in the world? Because I think that is probably more what happened here. 

What is it that makes fragments of the world coalesce into something that counts as a picture? He’s challenging us to think about that. 

Installation view of 'In Dialogue: Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

How did you go about making relationships to other things in the collection?
Some of the people in the show are artists who are important to Tillmans. For example, Tillmans has identified Andy Warhol’s flower posters as important work. There are some people that just made sense to include, thinking about Tillmans. Other things came from doing a lot more reading and thinking about Tillmans and what themes I could most feasibly bring out of Nachtstilleben. For example, there’s a lot to be said about Tillmans and queer desire, sexuality, and many more social issues, but It’s harder to get there from this picture out of all of the pictures that he has ever made. 

He started making pictures for magazines right?
Um, well, no, not really. He started with photocopies that were actually installed in galleries and sometimes coffee shops. He never actually did commercial photography. That’s a confusion: He accepted magazines as a place to distribute his work, but he didn’t become a magazine photographer. It was always a vehicle to get his work out there. Which is actually really interesting as a part the way he thinks about photography. It’s not like one format is derivative and not real. Each one is its own thing.

So for a photograph in a magazine, “magazine” would be the medium for that photograph.
Yeah, the photograph you actually get in the magazine is a thing, it’s an offset printed edition, if you will, of 40,000. Whereas a lot of people just lay the blame at the door of photography for this massive confusion of images that we live with now, Tillmans has this way of thinking about it that’s almost more like an ecology.

Installation view. (Left) Wolfgang Tillmans's 'Kopierer,' 2010. (Right) Ray K. Metzker, untitled (from the series 'Without Camera'), 1995

Some of the TIllmans photos are Scotch-taped to the wall. What's up with that?
There are many reasons why he does that. It has to do with his interest in you knowing that the photograph is a piece of paper, not a window through which you see the world. It’s not unmediated, it is a thing. It also has to do with an interest in undoing conventional hierarchies. Mixing up taping and framing and presenting things in perceptual constellations on the wall is, to me, about blurring categories of hierarchies. There is a sort of deft awareness of the fact that things are different, but what’s interesting about their differences is how they are the same. 

Look at a picture like Garten, for example. Because it’s a picture of flowers, you can think of it as a still life. It’s also a sort of classic, “photography-of-the-world” approach: It’s Tillmans recognizing a slice of the world that is outrageously beautiful when it’s photographed. But it’s also him just thinking about color and light on a surface. So, those are three different ways that that picture can be a picture. He’s interested in making one object in which all of those coexist. 

Installation view. Wolfgang Tillmans's 'Lighter, black convex III,' 2013. Chromogenic print, plexiglass box

So this is a piece of photo paper that’s been exposed and then shaped or crinkled or something, right?
It comes from a series where photographic paper is crushed, folded, or sculpted in some way. Here’s another interesting place where categories overlap. It is absolutely a photograph; it’s been exposed, it’s been developed. It’s a photograph on the most fundamental level. But it is pushing back on the notion that a photograph is a window through which you look to see a picture of something else. Going back to the notion that the photograph is an object, it pulls you back to the surface. It’s a photograph that is a sculpture, and then there’s that great way that sculpture is both a representation of something and also is the thing that it represents.

Do you think it makes it more of a “thing” because it’s unique, and an edition of one?
That’s actually an interesting and kind of complicated area. Tillmans is very aware of the contradiction that comes up when you think, OK a photograph is an object, but it’s also multiple objects. 

Installation view. Editions of 'Parkett,' 1992-1998

At some point in the 90s, Tillmans starts realizing that prints he’s making that technically contain development errors are also unique photographic objects which can never be precisely repeated. So he starts to experiment with that, and you get pieces of paper where the content of the image is sort of very subtle and difficult to see. He’s thinking about objects that are inherently singular and completely unique because they cannot be repeated. Yet they are also photographic, and he’s distributing them in a format that suggests editioned work, that suggests multiplicity.

Parkett is a magazine?
Yeah, this is the actual issue of the magazine in which his edition was sold. Essentially it’s a mail-order catalog format, like a mail-order format, like there’s articles that relate to Wolfgang Tillmans there, and then a page where you can order work from his edition. Usually that suggests you’d be buying a print in an edition, but in this case, you’re actually buying the exact unique object depicted in the magazine. 

Marcel Duchamp, American (born France), 1887 - 1968. 'Dada: 1916-1923,' Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 15 to May 9, 1953. Letterpress exhibition catalog and poster designed by Duchamp; crumpled version. Image and sheet: 38 1/4 x 24 3/4 inches (97.2 x 62.9 cm). Gift of Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother, Alexina Duchamp, 1998 

What is this crumpled thing?
The crumpled thing is a Duchamp. This is an instance where what you’re able to say on a plaque in the gallery is relevant, but maybe not the reason I wanted to put it in the show. What I say there is true, but the more compelling reason to have Duchamp in the show is that when you’re introducing a work into the collection of the PMA, you have to introduce it to Duchamp, because he is an absolute backbone of the collection. We have one of the best collections of Duchamp in the world. 

In any case, knowing the ideas of what makes something a piece of art then doing whatever it takes to completely turn it on its head is related to what Tillmans does. They do it in very different ways, and have different attitudes about it (Tillmans is not flippant in any way) but to me there is a common interest in undoing hierarchies. 

William Eggleston, American, born 1939. Greenwood, Mississippi. 1973-74 (print) Dye transfer print. Image: 12 13/16 x 18 1/2 inches (32.5 x 47.0 cm) Sheet: 15 7/8 x 20 1/16 inches. (40.3 x 51.0 cm). 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Gift of Walter Hopps and Caroline Huber, 2001

Moving this way, we’ve got Eggleston. I understand this part of the show has to do with surface qualities.
Yeah, it has to do with the sensuality of surfaces. For Tillmans, photography is a way of engaging with and interacting with the surfaces of the world. There’s a completely unabashed connection between photography (the act of looking at and really engaging with those surfaces) and erotic experience. Surfaces, for him, are where the two-dimensional world become meaningful beyond two dimensions. 

If you look at images on paper—photographs—it’s all about the connection between the two-dimensional world and the world of much deeper meaning. You have this blank piece of paper, and it’s mute and dumb, completely without significance, and you can invest it with this entire world of experience and meaning through photography.

So, these are images which engage with the tactile sensuality of the surfaces of the world. This Eggleston picture is about sexuality on some level, but you can also think of it as an object you could have an erotic response to, with that crazy, crazy lavish red. So there’s that sort of slippage between what’s depicted and the object itself. 

Pear and Orange, Studio/Pacific Palisades, 1996. D. W. Mellor, American, born 1947. Gelatin silver print, Image and sheet: 7 1/2 x 9 5/8 inches (19.1 x 24.4 cm) Mount: 12 1/16 x 13 15/16 inches (30.6 x 35.4 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Jo Ann and Stephan Leimberg, 2009. 

This Friedlander picture looks like The Birth of Venus. 
There’s an insanely close relationship between the central figure of that painting and this girl on a swing. Some of the ideas I’m chewing on in pairing it with this photo by D. W. Mellor (above) are that these pictures make reference to a long history of art, whether they’re quoting something from the Renaissance or using a still-life language that’s 400 years old. They represent different ways of grappling with art history, and that can be a route towards making something count as a picture.

One of the things that I think about here, in terms of something “counting” as being a work of art, is, Does it have to do with the intention or thought or the artist, or a process of labor that goes into it? One of the things people think when they look at Nachtstilleben is that it’s a snapshot, that he just clicked the shutter in the direction of some things on the windowsill. Obviously that’s not true, but that’s a perception that people have. So, is there resistance to the idea that that counts as a picture, or a work of art? Is it because they feel there was not enough labor that went into it on the part of the artist? What are the things that pictures are required to have in order for them to count as art? Does it have to be able composition? Does it have to be about somebody knowing a lot about art history? Does it have to be a beautiful object? Does it have to be hard to make it? 

'Black Kites,' 1997. Gabriel Orozco, Mexican, born 1962. Graphite on skull, 8 1/2 x 5 x 6 1/4inches (21.6 x 12.7 x 15.9 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, © Gabriel Orozco

Well, this skull isn’t a picture. What’s the story there?
This is one of the more popular things in the show, the Times actually chose to reproduce this in their article on it. Again, this is a traditional subject of still life. It also engages with the idea of the tactility of surfaces, and how something that is a surface can also be connected to a three-dimensional experience of depth. So here the the process of putting squares onto the skull’s surface—which is also a three-dimensional object—suggests skin, or maybe even thoughts, asks you to think of the embodied process the artist goes through creating it. 

Because the Tillmans photo may be difficult for people to access, were you compelled to include things in the show that people could get into for other reasons? Like, people might identify this as a skull, and think it’s cool for the same reason they’d buy a T-shirt with a skull on it. Was there a conscious decision to create points of accessibility?
Yes, because people will walk into museums and do what they want to do. A lot of the themes in this show are more cerebral or harder to access, even difficult to explain. So if there are that many things asking you to do a lot of thinking, there also need to be some things that, at least on the surface, are just really engaging.

In Dialogue: Wolfgang Tillmans will be on view through Friday, October 24. You have one more day to go see it in person. You might have missed it already. Sorry!

Matthew Leifheit is the Photo Editor of VICE, and also teaches photography at School of Visual Arts. Follow him on Twitter. 

After a two-week break, it's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: The cast of La Traviata at the Opéra Bastille

Screencap via Google Maps, niqab photo via Wikimedia Commons

The incident: A Muslim woman wore a niqab to the opera.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: The cast said they would stop performing unless the woman removed her veil.

Earlier this month, an unnamed "tourist from a Gulf state" was sitting front row for a performance of the opera La Traviata at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. She did this while wearing a niqab (a full face covering, like the one in the above photo.)

According to a report in the Telegraph, performers in the show noticed the woman during the second act and said they would not continue the show unless the woman removed her facial covering. (It is not specified how they thought she might affect their ability to sing songs.)

During the interval, an attendant reportedly approached the woman and told her that she could only stay to watch the rest of the show if she removed her veil. 

"It's never very nice to ask someone to leave... But there was a misunderstanding of the law and the lady either had to respect it or leave," Jean-Philippe Thiellay, deputy director of Opéra Bastille, is reported to have said. 

The woman and the man she was with then got up and left.

Wearing a full-face covering in public has been banned in France since 2011. People who violate the rule face a €150 ($190) fine.

“What possible harm could a woman sitting quietly in the audience with face covered do to anyone?” frequent opera attendee Guy Laurent told the Daily Express. “The woman would clearly have felt utterly humiliated by what happened—French culture should be more tolerant, it is not the job of theaters to enforce petty laws.”

Cry-Baby #2: Decoris Rucker and Chris Hackett.

The incident: Some guys lost a game of beer pong at a party.

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: They allegedly opened fire on the party with a gun.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, a bunch of people were playing beer pong at a house party in Ames, Texas.

According to a police report obtained by the Smoking Gun, this game was lost by two men named Decoris Rucker Jr. and Chris Hackett. The police report also notes that the two men are known by the aliases "Red" and "Crazy Chris" respectively.

The men were, allegedly, not very happy about losing. They're reported to have run away from the house "firing wildly" at other party guests with a gun.

One bullet struck a 19-year-old girl in the thigh.

An hour and a half after the shooting, Rucker checked into a local hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg. It's not known if this is related to the beer pong shooting. The other suspect is still at large. It's expected they will be charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll here:

Previously: A woman who pulled a gun on some children who were "tormenting" her dog vs. a school that told their female students they looked like prostitutes

Winner: The prostitute school!!!

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on Twitter

The frontrunners for Toronto's new mayor, via Twitter.
Not sure who to vote for in the Toronto Mayoral Election on October 27?

Who can blame you, guy?! There are three whole candidates competing at a serious level, each of whom has at least one major policy point which may impact your life. To give you a sense of who’s offering what, here’s a handy, totally unbiased, election scorecard. It includes the main, non-joke candidates: Doug Ford, John Tory, and Olivia Chow. We’ve also taken a look at the cool-guy decision of showing up on Election Day only to spoil the ballot.

There's nothing alarming about this smile. Nope. Nothing at all. Image via Facebook.
DOUG FORD

Like his brother, Doug Ford sees himself as the inheritor to some totally spurious Ontario political legacy—a kind of blue collar Camelot—because his dad was a backbench MPP for the Harris government and ran a semi-successful sticker company. Unlike his brother, Doug Ford doesn’t even seem to like people at all. He lies as if it’s a metabolic function. There’s never been a more unconvincing smile in the history of Canadian politics. “Folks.”

Standout policies: A powerful business man and adhesive paper impresario, Doug Ford’s big thing is “putting taxpayer’s first.” He regards citizens as clients transacting business with Toronto, instead of human beings living here who view the city as something other than a line item impacting our own bottom-line. He wants to run the city like a business, even though reports suggest he is shitty at running his own business. He wants to cut the number of city councilors, which would be a good idea if he, and his maybe-to-be-reelected-as-councilor brother, were among those cuts.

Sloganeering:  DoFo’s new big thing is asking, “What’s the story Mr. Tory?” as a way of implying that front-runner John Tory has some hidden agenda. And also because “story” rhymes with “Tory.” Here are some more words that rhyme with Tory: gory, Corey, allegory, Montessori…

Character: The main thing Doug Ford has going for him is that he’s the Ford who’s not Rob Ford. Or Kathy Ford. Or that cowboy-hat-wearing other brother Ford, who looks sort of like Neil Young if Neil Young was allergic to bees and then got stung by thousands of bees.

Chances: In a world with a God, the universe would collapse into itself before another Ford becomes mayor of Toronto. But, as we live in just one of the tens of thousands of solitary, huddled human enclaves burrowed into a piece of rock adrift in a cruel, uncaring, throwaway universe spinning ever outward into the inky nothingness, whose pitilessness has no outer periphery, he will probably win in a landslide, securing 100% of the vote.


 

Johnny Toronto, via Facebook.
JOHN TORY

John Tory denies that white privilege exists, but it’s kind of hard to blame him for this. It’s like that joke about a fish being asked, “How’s the water?” and then responding, “What’s water?” John Tory is a beige wash of compromise, neither progressive enough to satisfy progressive types, nor bull-headed and overweight enough to satisfy Ford Nation types. The best that can be said for John Tory, as my girlfriend put it when she happened upon him at Dundas West Fest this summer—where he was walking around, without an entourage, looking charmingly confused and ill-at-ease among the hungover throng—is that he’s clean.

Standout policies: The lynchpin of Tory’s platform is his transit plan, called SmartTrack. It’s so instrumental to his campaign that it even appears on his yard signs. The message seems clear: voting for John Tory is voting for SmartTrack. In an admittedly desperate Hail Mary play, rival candidate Olivia Chow recently tried to debunk SmartTrack’s feasibility by scribbling it on the back of a napkin during debate. Others have been more exhaustive, poking substantial holes in the plan. So the question is essentially reducible to this: if John Tory is SmartTrack, and SmartTrack is a poor, impractical plan (more like…DumbTrack), then isn’t voting for John Tory stupid?

Sloganeering: Doug Ford likes to accuse John Tory as being born into privilege, which is pretty rich coming from Doug Ford, who is also a rich millionaire. Tory’s real privilege—beyond, you know, all that privilege—is the conspicuous “TO” in his name, which he’s been highlighting as a way of suggesting how he’ll bring candidates TOgether. Diabolical. From a name-recognition standpoint, he might as well be called Johnny Toronto or Mr. Mayorman.

Character: John Tory is the pair of pleated Bermuda board shorts your dad was wearing when he clamoured down the stairs to intercept a Hawaiian pizza and mortify you in front of your best friend when you were 13. He’s the dad’s dad: the daddish dadderman to out-dad all other daddies. The kind of dad who dresses in the billowy windbreakers he got for free in a case of golf balls. And speaking of golf, he recently—recently—said that women should learn to play golf if they want to make more money. Maybe he should learn to play a game called: shutting up.

Chances: When it comes to politics, John Tory is a career loser. But all the polls suggest he’ll win. But if people don’t follow the polls then he’ll lose. Which leads me to the conclusion that John Tory will either win or not-win the election.
 

The hopelessly earnest candidate, via Facebook.

OLIVIA CHOW

If John Tory is Toronto’s prospective new dad, then Olivia Chow is its weird aunt: the one who always gave you itchy hand-made sweaters or super-chewy organic baked goods for your birthday. She’s kind of embarrassing in her sincerity, but you know she means well. 

Standout policies: Tellingly, Olivia Chow is a vocal supporter of ranked balloting, a system that allows voters to order their political preferences, and a system that would likely benefit candidates like Chow. She also supports a ban on the racist practice of police carding, and 15,000 new affordable housing units. Her transit plan—which relies on increased bus service—may not be especially sexy. But unlike John Tory’s, it seems actually reasonable. And unlike Ford’s, it’s not just her screaming “Subways, subways, subways, folks!” as if it means anything.

Sloganeering: Chow’s initial slogan, back when she was the front-runner, was the punchy “New Mayor, New City.” It was sort of made irrelevant when Rob Ford ducked out of the race, and was replaced recently with “Working with you and for you.” Like a lot of things that come out of Chow’s camp, it’s hopelessly earnest, but darn it if it isn’t nice.

Character: Granted, until the last few weeks her campaign has been a disaster, and we all watched with shame and horror as she squandered her early lead. Some people maybe even jumped ship to Team Soknacki. But to Chow’s credit, she alienated her base by playing to the centre, and trying to bait bottom-line-oriented Ford Nation types by basically talking like Rob Ford. Ever since she stopped all the citizens-as-taxpayers talk, she's seemed a lot more like herself.

Chances: Look: according to the polls, admittedly not great. Still, plenty of people are making the case for Chow, and it’s easy to feel like if all the so-called “progressives” who are voting for John Tory because his last name isn’t “Ford” swung back left, Chow could still bound ahead and take this thing. And just think of how nice it would be if Olivia Chow won.

Imagine waking up on October 28 in Olivia Chow’s Toronto, a place predicated on ideas like inclusion instead of division, or just straight-up madness. It’d be like in a disaster movie when the hurricane or Godzilla or whatever leaves town, and everyone puts on gardening gloves and starts sifting through the rubble and twisted metal, bruised and bloodied but warmed by the knowledge that a new day has dawned. Then, like, a tiny deer gambols through the debris, and everyone knows everything will be OK.

SPOLING YOUR BALLOT

Image via WikIMedia Commons.
Character: Spoiling your ballot is a hot, new voting alternative endorsed by morons who think that they’re “sending a message” to governments that no candidates speak to them, as if there would ever be a mayoral candidate whose platform would be coming over whenever you wanted to allow you to own him at Halo, while providing all the weed and Red Stripe.

Standout policies: Literally none. It’s like wiping your ass with the ballot. Except at least if you wiped your ass with the ballot, you’d have a clean asshole to show for it.

Sloganeering: Again, nothing. But “spoil your ballot!” is basically short-hand for “I am an apathetic piece of trash who thinks I’m smarter than everyone ‘cause I got a 71% in OAC Calculus, and I do now, or have at one point, owned a TAKE ME TO YOUR DEALER black-light poster.”

Chances: If you spoil your ballot, the chances that you are a total loser approach 100 percent.
 

@johnsemley3000