Nelson Mandela shaking the hand of his predecessor Frederik de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president of South Africa. (Photo via)

Dr Renfrew Christie was jailed during the early 1980s for passing on the South African government’s nuclear development plans to the African National Congress (ANC), the political party that spearheaded the campaign to end apartheid. There was some talk he would be hanged for his troubles, but the judge spared him. Instead, he was imprisoned right next to the hanging area in a Pretoria prison.

He recalls beautiful singing in the prison for two or three days before an execution, presumably to make the last days of the condemned more joyful. Or morbidly bittersweet, depending on how you look at it. He says the consecutive crash of doors signalled that the hanging party was moving its way through the prison. There was silence before the hangings, then the slam of a trap door – “that’s when you knew their necks were broken” – then more silence and then the banging of nails into the coffin. He estimates he heard about 300 hangings during his stint in prison.

Christie’s story reads like Jean Le Carre fan fiction: conscripted into the South African army at 17, he soon “saw something I wasn’t supposed to see that told me they [the government] were playing with nuclear weapons. From then on I was hunting the apartheid atom bomb."

He wrote his PhD thesis on the electrification of South Africa – a subject area that allowed him access to plants where he could observe “how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium".

“That enabled me to work out when they would have nuclear weapons by,” he tells me. “Because you can calculate from the amount of electricity used just how close they are, just as people are doing now with Iran.”

Christie, a fierce anti-apartheid activist from a young age, sent his information to the then-banned ANC, as well as the plans for a nuclear power station and “anything else I could lay my hands on”. He was outed by a double agent and found guilty of multiple charges under the country’s Terrorism Act. However, the ANC’s campaign against nuclear development in the country continued. In 1982, Umkhonto we Sizwe – the ANC’s militant wing – bombed the unfinished Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, causing 500 million rand (around £33 million, in today's money) in damage and delaying construction for a year and a half.

Now, Christie is dean of research at University of the Western Cape.

His country finds itself in interesting times. Two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa is still one of the most unequal societies on the planet. The ANC – the political party he risked his life for – continues to be mired in corruption and cronyism, and the country’s talismanic unifier – Nelson Mandela – continues to be in fragile health. Christie spoke with me about what all of that means for South Africa’s future.

Dr Renfrew Christie at his daughter's graduation.

VICE: Let’s talk about Mandela. Was he an inspiration for you when you were incarcerated?
Dr Renfrew Christie: Absolutely. Remember, I was in Pretoria because my skin is white, he was on Robben Island because his skin is black. We were 1,000 miles away from each other. But there was a joint effort, if you like, by the prisoners on the island, led by Mandela, by the white male prisoners in my prison and the white female prisoners down the road in Pretoria to improve the conditions of imprisonment, which did happen. As the government realised they might actually be imprisoning the future president of the country, they started to treat him better.

Do you know Mandela? What kind of interactions have you had with him?
Well, he was in jail for most of my life, but I knew his wife well. She was released from detention in 1971, but put on house arrest at a house owned by the guy I was sharing with. I knew Winnie very well in the early 70s. I met Nelson Mandela when my university was the first to give him an honorary doctorate soon after he was released from prison in 1990, and I met him again in the run up to the elections, but I don’t know him well.

So, did he have any hand in the cloak-and-dagger stuff you were involved with, specifically regarding the nuclear plans?
The CIA shot him in 1963 and he was jailed, by which stage I was 12 or 13 years old. He would have no hand in the next 27 years worth of [operations], other than to have little messages smuggled out of prison. Of course, he set up the armed struggle. He gave the wonderful speech in the dock about why one had to fight for one’s freedom. But he wasn’t in any way involved in the nuclear stuff because he was in prison.

Oliver Tambo (on the left) in 1978. (Photo via)

What were his greatest successes?
You have to see him together with Oliver Tambo. They were a team, even when he was in jail. Their first great success was in the middle of the Second World War. Forming and completely recasting the ANC Youth League into a much more pro-democratic, less subservient thing than the rather tame ANC of the 1930s. They caused, if you like, a revolution in thinking during the 40s.

He's then at the forefront of all the great campaigns from about 1949 onwards. The anti-pass campaigns, eventually the writing of the Freedom Charter and, as he gets more mature and more respect, he and Tambo give leadership of immense maturity. It’s not a cheap strategy. It’s a, “We are the people and we are the majority of the country. We want a democracy. The country will be much better as a democracy.”

Eventually, Mandela becomes the great icon who can say, “I’ve been in prison 27 years but I forgive. We are all South Africans together. There are good and great people in all of our communities. We've got to work together to build a new country.” He says, "We’re not going to victimise white civil servants. They won’t lose their jobs."

Mandela then leads the unification of the country, which gives us the next 20 years of peace and increasing economic prosperity. We brought electricity to 12 million people, we brought clean water to 12 million people and so on. The result, in the end, isn't perfect – only my wife and daughters are perfect – but, with Mandela, this is the guy who started the armed struggle, the guy who, back in the 60s, said that the only solution is the gun. And then he's the one who brings everybody back to the negotiating table in the early 90s.

Mandela with Bill Clinton in 1993. (Photo via)

What about his failures? 
I think the whole movement, not just him, could have done better for women. We do have a significant number of women in parliament in societal leadership roles, but we could have done better. This is the glorious great beginning – we’re beginning to use the other half of humankind that we’ve excluded for the last 10,000 years. And the ANC was a part of that, but not enough. I’d have liked to have seen him find ways to do better in terms of liberating women.

Mandela didn’t speak out as some ANC figures got rich at the expense of some of the poorest South Africans. Is that a valid criticism?
I do think that, in all these sorts of democratic revolutions, the process of enabling people to do economic things that were illegal before is going to be patchy. You’re going to get people who just look after themselves. I’m quite sure that, internally, he was quite rigid on the subject.

But again, for the sake of unity. Remember he was the unifier. He keeps the broad church that is the ANC together, and you can’t attack a bit of that church. Should he have found somebody to put in jail as an exemplar? Maybe. But I think his need wasn't that. His need was to keep the ANC in power – keep the ANC respected by the people – but above all to achieve unity and have it not fall apart. But you get total unity going up to the democratic revolution. Everyone works together. There’s a united democratic front, they all unite. And then, after revolutions, you always get the squabble. What’s the phrase? "The revolution begins to eat itself"?

What he did was to avoid huge fissures, huge fallings apart, rural/urban splits and so on. So the unifier had difficulty being as strong as he would have liked to have been with people enriching themselves. People enriching themselves is a problem worldwide. America has yet to jail the crooked bankers that ruined the world in 2008. I don’t know why. 

South African president and current leader of the ANC, Jacob Zuma. (Photo via)

What would Mandela make of the current ANC? From an outsider’s perspective, whenever I’m reading about the ANC, I’m reading about corruption and cronyism. Jacob Zuma has been investigated for misusing millions of public funds. There were killings at the mines last year. The ANC didn't emerge from that unscathed. Would Mandela even recognise this iteration of the ANC as his own party any more?
Absolutely. The ANC is still the majority party. Around two thirds of the people are voting for it every time. In open democratic elections. It has a vigorous internal politics that's actually not a crooked politics. It’s contested. It develops its policies very thoroughly. It's currently giving social grants to 13 million unemployed people when the United States Congress is busy voting against food stamps.

The ANC is still an excellent political party. Are there crooks in it? Yes, of course. But we are in an era of crookery. Just run through the names: Enron, Arthur Andersen, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Royal Bank of Scotland, HBSC, I can go on. That's what happened in this century. We’re not exempt from that. But we are bit players. We are minor compared to that long litany.

Is there any heir apparent to Mandela? Or is he a once in a lifetime political personality?
We have a serious depth of political talent, not only in the ANC, but in all of our political parties. Remember that, for the first time, the majority of people – black people – can now also go into private enterprise. So quite a lot of the talent is going into big business. Which is fine and good, but there’s no lack of political skill. This is a highly politicised system that has outcomes that work.

Is there a Winston Churchill? A Roosevelt? The Churchills and the Roosevelts come up in a particular context and Mandela was in a context. So whether we actually need a Mandela in 2015 is not clear. What we do need is an adept politician who can keep everyone together and who can further the interests of the ordinary people, the common people. The thing about the ANC is it’s absolutely based in the common people – that it’s got faults, obviously. I’m not one of those who thinks you need an absolutely charismatic, glorious leader at every step along the way. You sometimes just need a simple, old-fashioned politician who can deliver the goods.

Mandela in 2008. (Photo via)

South Africa is still one of the most unequal societies in the world. If Mandela couldn’t change that, can anyone?
It has to do with education, education, education. You had a deliberate policy for 100 years of not educating the overwhelming majority. One of the ways of getting out of inequality is really good education. You’ve got some perfectly willing but not particularly competent teachers in the ordinary schools of the ordinary people, and they’re not teaching kids well enough.

The route out of inequality has to be urbanisation, because inequality in rural areas is very difficult to crack. And we are slowly urbanising. I would prefer us to have a much stronger urbanisation plan so that we actually know what cities are going to be built and why. And we're in the trap that the whole world finds itself in, in that the Chinese manufacturers can undercut you by a hundred times. So, just as the United States manufacturing production hit a brick wall, so has ours. So that’s going to lock us into inequality for a very long time.

What we mustn’t be is just a mining economy. We do have to be doing advanced manufacturing. And we do. We build the best quality Mercedes Benzes on earth, technically measured. But there’s not enough of the new forms of education that would get people out of the inequality trap. So I think we’re stuck with that one, structurally, for a very long time.

When he does pass on, what effect will that have on the nation?
There will be a huge period of national mourning. We’ve been prepared for it for some years now, but the death of a hero – the death of a national saviour – we will go through all the rituals. He will remain our unifier, even in death.

Last off, what's his legacy?
Taking a country that had become the polecat of the world, which was practicing perhaps the second most despicable form of racism after the Holocaust, and turning it into a viable democracy with an independent judiciary, superb bill of rights and a working economy that all South Africans, regardless of colour or gender, can thrive under.

Thanks, Dr Christie.

Follow Danny on Twitter: @DMacCash

More stories about South Africa:

What Were the South African Military Doing in the Central African Republic?

The ANC Are Ruining South Africa

Chris Hani's Assassination Put South Africa On the Brink of Civil War

Things Fall Apartheid

Image via.

The last few months have not been kind to the gay conversion industry. The loudest mouthpiece for the trade, Exodus International, disbanded after the ex-gay ex-president of the organization, Alan Chambers, issued a letter of apology for the “shame,” “false hope,” and “trauma” Exodus caused, which admitted that "reparative therapy" didn’t work. On top of that, the State of California banned the practice for minors and the federal government started recognizing same-sex marriages with the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. 

To get a better look at the state of the industry before it takes its final bow, I decided to join several gay conversion groups. I am a straight male, however, for the sake of this piece, I presented myself as a malleable young man with a history of homosexual behavior, looking to acquire a taste for female genitalia. 

Conversion groups differ in their methods and supposed "causes for homosexuality," but the one thing they can all agree on is that two dudes doin’ it is totally gross. 

SETTING CAPTIVES FREE

The first group I joined was an online one called Setting Captives Free. 

It was about 2 AM when I created my account. I was tired, buzzed, and ready to be ungayed. 

Setting Captives Free is a 60-day Christian course of reading scripture and answering both personal and religious questions. To help you along the process, members are assigned an email mentor, whose job it is to send daily inspiring emails of salvations and are there 24/7 to answer any questions or concerns.

Day one started with a nice introduction by founder Mike Cleveland and author Shon Bruellman. They informed me, despite what I have been told, I don’t have a "homosexual gene." In fact, I can be set free "by the way of Jesus Christ and the cross." I was encouraged to discuss my sexual history with my mentor, but to eschew the graphic because “Satan has received enough glory and attention in our lives.” 

Then we moved on to what was expected of me during these 60 days. First and foremost, I was to abstain from homosexual activity. Secondly, I was to immediately stop frequenting places where "homosexual activity takes place," and also to stop using “porn and chat rooms," and to totally stop calling "phone hotlines," which apparently still exist.

To prove I wasn’t being tempted I had to install software on my computer that would send my mentor daily copies of the websites I visited. I got around this Orwellian requirement by claiming I was on a public computer. Lastly, and much to my horror, I had to abstain from all masturbation (they were apparently too busy writing bullshit therapy courses to watch Seinfeld). 

Within a few hours I received my first email from Jim Houser, my mentor. Jim emailed me daily for the next month, with testimonials and scripture to help me through the course. He would read my answers as I went through the program and give me his input. Throughout the process we got to know each other fairly well. He was a "former" gay man who had been through Setting Captives Free, as well as a 150-day mentorship program. He was now married with four kids. As I got to know Jim throughout our month of emailing back and forth, he admitted to me “I still struggle with temptation at times but I no longer choice [sic] to live a life of sin.” 

The next two weeks of the course were increasingly bizarre, consisting of scripture readings and my interpretations of them. One of my favorite lessons was Genesis 19, where I was taught that God believed a man raping and impregnating his own daughter was less of a sin than Adam getting a BJ from Steve.

Jim would send me tips on how to stay pure. When the Superman movie came out he sent me an email, “We went to go see [Man of Steel] this weekend and for those of you who are visually triggered I want you to know that there are several scenes that he is shirtless and he shows his physical physique very well along with an unshaven chest.” He also recommended I stay away from places where my lust could be triggered including “Swimming pools, beaches, theme parks, malls, high school, or college campuses.” 

Jim's wife, like most wives of people taking the course, knew about his “homosexual struggles.” One of Jim's former students wrote a testimonial that Jim sent along to me. “In restaurants, my wife makes sure that what is in my field of vision is OK. She still will take the seat that has "the view" and let me look at non-tempting people.” Another man wrote that he stays pure because “My wife knows everything that I do” and “I never go anywhere alone.”

NARTH

Dr. Gerald Schoenewolf's offices. Image via Google.

The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality or NARTH is an irreligious group devoted to the promotion of gay conversion treatments. NARTH consists of psychologists and religious figures alike that reject scientific consensus (and common sense) in believing homosexuality can be cured with therapy. They believe homosexuality comes from some combination of the lack of a father figure, molestation, or a rejection from a male peer group. Apparently, once you get over these repressed problems, you will become straight. 

Dr. Gerald Schoenewolf is NARTH’s most prominent and loudest member. He published an essay entitled "Gay Rights and Political Correctness: A Brief History" that, needless to say, was not too kind to the gay community. Further, he claimed, despite being a member of the American Psychological Association, that it "has been taken over by extremist gays." Anti-gay wise it wasn’t getting better then this, so I gave him a call. After a brief chat it turned out I was in luck. Not only would he be happy to see me, but my insurance would cover me becoming straight. And my mom said I wasn’t smart with my money.

I was immediately impressed by the coziness of his office. Artwork adorned the walls and a parrot (or some kind of bird) climbed around the room. I made small talk with Dr. Schoenewolf about the parrot, and he put it in its cage because I "seemed distracted by it.”

With the parrot away it was time to get down to business. We discussed my familial history, and the fact that a single mother raised me the first 12 years of my life (which is true). We got to the good stuff once we moved on to my sexual history and I gave a pre-rehearsed answer about my previous steamy man-on-man experiences. “Have you ever had a relationship with a woman?” he interrupted. When I told him I hadn’t, he responded with “Can you see yourself having sex with a woman?” I scratched my head, “Well, eventually. That’s the goal.”

I got re-distracted by the parrot for a few more minutes before I was informed homosexuality is not something you're born with. According to them, it is developmental and brought on by experiences like being raised by a single mother. Terrific, we have prognosed the problem, but how to cure it? He told me I would have to come in once a week for that. During our weekly secessions I would get take-home assignments to help me become heterosexual. They started out easy. At first, all I had to do was “make eye contact with at least three women,” and then, “When you make eye contact and one of them looks back and smiles, approach that woman, and say ‘how are you?’” After all that effort, I was sure to have my P in some Vs. 

EXODUS INTERNATIONAL

Before Exodus shut down I called and asked if they could recommend a pastor in the NY-metro area who would make me appreciate rock concerts, football, and labia. They recommended Robert Ramirez in Farmingdale, NY.

I spoke to a woman who answered the number Exodus provided me with. She told me Pastor Ramirez  was not present but he would be in the following morning until noon. 

I woke up at some ungodly hour to take the train to Farmingdale, only to discover there was no church at the address provided. Instead I found an empty office front with a "for lease" sign in the window. I rang the number I had for Pastor Ramirez and the person on the other end of the line only knew a handful of English words. “No… no Ramirez is not here.” It took me all of my strength to not yell “What the fuck?!” into the phone. It turns out Pastor Ramirez is a pastor for some Spanish radio station, and the address, even the town Exodus provided, was wrong. Fuck me (as long as you are a woman, of course).

I called the number for the next few weeks trying to find Pastor Ramirez, talking to multiple different people, but to no avail. Everyone seemed to know the elusive Ramirez, but they couldn’t get me in touch with him. Much to my excitement I was provided an email for him at one point. After taking care to send him a nice message, it bounced back.

And then Exodus disbanded. The website is now nothing more then a letter by former CEO Alan Chambers apologizing for hurting people over the years. So, in a last ditch effort to be cured of homosexuality by Exodus, I purchased one of the speeches they'd previously published.  

Because it was the cheapest publication offered, I downloaded a speech entitled Enjoying the Gift of Being Single by Jonathan Barry for $5. I opened up the MP3 and, much to my surprise, I was told I can’t become straight, so I should just be celibate for the rest of my life. As it turns out, Jonathan Barry is part of an Exodus International splinter group called True Freedom Trust that believes reparative therapy doesn’t work, but since someone with a penis kissing someone else with a penis is an abomination to the Lord, they just teach you how to not have sex. Why Exodus would endorse (or used to) something that flies (or used to) in the face of their own beliefs is beyond me. 

Exodus International was by far the worst conversion therapy group I joined. Moral 180 aside, I am not surprised that they ended up shutting down. 

JEWS OFFERING NEW ALTERNATIVES FOR HEALING

Jews Offering New Alternatives For Healing (or JONAH) is a group founded by a guy called Arthur Goldberg. Arthur is a former Wall Street executive and attorney who was convicted of three counts of mail fraud, and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States government before being disbarred as an attorney. He is now full-time in the boobie-appreciation business. 

Arthur is also mentioned multiple times in a Southern Poverty Center lawsuit. JONAH is being sued for violating the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act because “gay conversion therapy has been rejected by all major mental health professions.” 

Considering JONAH encourages members to inflict pain on themselves every time they have a homosexual thought, I don’t see how they're going to make it through the year before being run out of the state, so it was now-or-never in terms of joining. 

After exchanging a few emails, I talked with Arthur on the phone. Surprisingly, he was pretty open about the lawsuit, bringing up the topic himself. “They claim by telling people they can change, we are committing consumer fraud, so obviously everybody knows nobody can change! You know, bullshit bullshit.” He used his own conversion as proof that conversion works and to refute “conventional thought.” 

I got fed the typical line that my homosexuality was my mother's fault, however with a new twist. Now I had “sexualized envy.” I was attracted to men that had a “physical characteristic … or a personality characteristic that I envy.” Unfortunately, as I'm not Jewish, Arthur told me I couldn't be a part of his program. 

He did, however, send me an email later that day saying, "If by any chance you become aware of some benefactor types who would help us financially, please let us know. We can certainly use financial assistance.” 

PEOPLE CAN CHANGE

I am absolutely enamored with the concept of "Journey into Manhood." The idea is a bunch of gay men go into the woods for a weekend and somehow become straight. The videos are the creepiest things in the entire world.

Unfortunately for me, the next few months’ retreats were on the West Coast. However, People Can Change, who organize the retreats, has an office in Jersey City, in the same building as JONAH's office, staffed by a "life coach" named Alan Downing.

Alan is also being sued by the Southern Povery Law Center, on behalf of two of his former students who claim that he made them strip down and touch themselves in front of a mirror. They seem to be on the verge of getting litigated out of existence.

I went to visit Alan in his spacious office and he immediately gave me a bunch of papers to sign. After a few futile excuses about "next time," I reluctantly gave him my signature. This is something I've been freaking out about ever since. Hopefully it was nothing that means he can sue me for writing this.

As I grew up in Jersey City, we had a nice conversation about the gentrification of the area. The conversation wandered to my other experiences with groups like NARTH and Setting Captives Free, and Alan held up a sign with the word "shame" circled with a line through it. This was a No Shame Zone. 

Alan Downing, a Mormon, like most people in this industry, has had his struggles with homosexuality in the past. Luckily for him, he went on the inaugural People Can Change retreat and he is now married with kids. There is just something about a bunch of dudes hanging out together in the woods that can do that for you. 

Anyway, I was once again the same line about how being raised with a single mother made me gay and sex is for making babies not orgasms. I had confidence issues, I saw myself as more of a "boy than a man." He was enamored with the idea of "becoming a man" and one's "journey into manhood." Somehow this journey would occur in his office. 

Just when I was mentally throwing him under the bus, out of the blue he comes out with “If having sex with other men is a fit for you that’s fine, you have choices.” I couldn’t believe it. This flies in the face of everything I have ever learned while becoming straight. I sat up from the overstuffed chair, “Really, so homosexuality is right for some people?” “That’s not for me to judge, if someone finds happiness in expressing themselves as a gay man, I am not going to try and change them.” What great news! I don’t have to be straight after all. He even told me masturbation wasn’t a sin!

Maybe it was because I met and talked with so many crazies in this process, but I found him to be quite refreshing and down-to-earth. Does he occasionally get naked with his counselees? Sure. But at least he didn't think I was heading to Hell. People Can Change was definitely my favorite gay conversion group that I joined (so seriously, guys, please don’t sue me.) 

Reading these articles will not make you gay, because that's not how it works:

An Interview with a Gay, Russian Neo-Nazi

Gay Men Can't Donate Blood, but Some Are Trying Anyway

Gay-Proofing the Bible

The Pope with a levitating child. via Flickr.

Perhaps you haven’t been following the comings and goings of Pope Francis the way I have, but the pontiff is currently in Rio for the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day—a celebration that comes around every four years, like the Olympics, without all of the sweet acrobatics and exciting competition. Even the most intensely devoted Catholics probably can see that the Church is certainly not at the height of its popularity. Brazilians are particularly upset at the ridiculous amount of cash their government has spent on the Pope’s visit. Plus, as a result of ol’ Francis touching down in Rio, the city has a few major protests and a bomb scare. But, despite all that, I say we should cut Francis a little bit of slack.

I was raised a Catholic. Even though my angelic sweet baby face once graced the cover of a small French Canadian magazine called La Famille Chrétienne (The Christian family), I by no means share my family’s beliefs. To be honest, I believe in extraterrestrials more than I believe in some kind of God. Most people I surround myself with would also say the same. However, I must admit that Pope Francis is gradually changing my perception of the Church as a boring pile of antiquated rubbish. The dude is rad.

As white smoke came out of the Sistine chapel in March, the Catholic world was faced with a relatively unknown figure, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The newly elected pontiff chose to become the first Pope Francis in papal history. The name Francis comes from Saint Francis of Assisi, the saint of the poor who really liked to frolic with birds and squirrels and parakeets. Pope Francis was immediately dubbed “the simple Pope,” and he was the first Pope to ever wash a woman’s feet on Holy Thursday (oh, and she wasn’t just any woman—she was a Muslim inmate). Francis also decided not to move into the papal palace, which he deemed too fancy for his simple lifestyle. Unlike his predecessors, who liked to dress like fabulous queens in gold Christian Dior petticoats, Francis rocks a simple, white gown paired with a rosary. The guy knows he’s a baller at heart and doesn’t need to compensate with extravagant designer papal gowns. As the rap adage goes, it ain’t trickin’ if you got it.

But where Francis really differs from previous Popes is that he quickly understood the need to get in with youth culture, if the church is to survive and prosper. That’s why my main man in Vatican City has decided to take social media by storm. Pope Benedict shocked the world when he became the first tweeting Pope in history, but his Twitter game was sparse and crappy. In contrast, Francis’s approach to social media brings a breath of fresh air to papal communication.

One of Francis’ first tweets referred to this week’s WYD. Several subsequent tweets were directly addressed to young people, stressing the need for them to follow their dreams, as big as they may be. I’ll admit that Francis could make better use of hashtags in order to get his message across more efficiently. I’m thinking #dreamBig or #StartedFromTheBottom or even last year’s trendy Drake-ism #YOLO would have been appropriate here. I know he’ll get his tweetiquette right eventually. And even if he doesn't, the guy is offering any of his followers a "get out of Purgatory free" card, which is truly next level. WIth an offer that good, you really have no choice but to have faith in @Pontifex.

Then there’s Pope Francis’s Facebook page, which is a veritable goldmine for anyone looking to get a good look at his godly smile and classy swagger. They even have Catholic memes on there, which don't make a lot of sense to me but hey! They're probably funny to someone.

Catholic humour... via the Catholic Memes Facebook page.

If you’re like me, you can’t get enough of everyone’s favorite pontiff (sorry Jean-Paul II—you had a good run), so I would definitely recommend that you get those praying hands of yours all over the Pope App. This is where Francis really innovates with the most comprehensive source of everything papal. You can stream live events attended by Francis, browse through pictures, and read his sermons. Users even have access to webcams placed around Vatican City. That way, Pope fanatics around the world can see the sun set over St-Peter’s Basilica, knowing that somewhere, Francis, in his white silky gown, is staring at the same magical view. Or you can also spend hours creeping on JP II’s tomb… but that’s a little freaky for my liking.

My favourite section of the Pope App has got to be the video library. Francis looks like a total rockstar. He’s waving back at you and smiling ‘cause he knows just how effortlessly rad he is. Banners that read “Angelus Domini, Every Sunday at Noon” makes you forget it’s Sunday mass he’s hosting. Instead, it makes you want to tune in for the Sunday best talk show in the world.

All of this might be too much to take for some of you who would rather scrape the inside of their mouth with a rusty knife than spend any amount of time catching up on the goings on of Catholicism but c’mon, this guy is trying really hard. And somehow it’s not coming off as forced or creepy. This is a big step forward for a desperately out of touch institution, so even if you’re an atheist, remember, radness is universal, and Mr. Francis has it oozing out of his simple pearl beads.


Follow Stephanie on Twitter: @smvoyer

More Popeness:

When Will the Next Antipope Rise?

Papal Infallability Is a Problem for the Catholic Church

Members of the ubiquitous security force that keeps everything so oppressively quiet. Photos courtesy of the author.

Qawdhan slouches on the floor of the wicker-frame hut across from me, his back to the old UNHCR banners serving as a wall. He sits in silence, calmly chewing a bundle of khat while stealing the occasional glance at a TV on the other side of the dim and sparse room. My eyes dart back and forth from the TV as well—a gaggle of children cluster around it to watch English-language cartoons with Arabic subtitles, even though they all speak only Somali. But whereas Qawdhan just seems calm, my eyes are everywhere because I’m nervous. I’m about to start a sensitive conversation, and I can’t shake the thought that it could go very badly.

“Are you connected to Al-Shabaab?”

“Yes, I am affiliated with Al-Shabaab.”

Qawdhan and I sit in awkward silence for a moment.

A friend introduced me to Qawdhan a couple of weeks ago, saying that he’d be a good person to meet. It was the sort of connection that gets made all the time here in Hargeisa, the capital of the de facto independent but unrecognized nation of Somaliland. You sit at a café, shaking hands as your friends shoehorn new contacts into your network. But when that same friend claimed that Qawdhan was linked to Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group that’s been periodically ravaging and ruling parts of Somalia for the past six years and, in 2012, officially became a subsidiary of al Qaeda, my interest was piqued. After asking around several other acquaintances backed up the claim, and so my friend and I invited him to break the Ramadan fast with us so that I could ask him about this accusation. To my surprise, he agreed to join us.

I expected him to deny his involvement with Shabaab; it’s a dangerous affiliation for a Somalilander. Eager to differentiate itself from the violence of south-central Somalia and earn enough international credit to gain recognition of its independence, the nation has amassed a formidable security force and promoted public hostility toward groups, like Shabaab, associated with the notion of a violent Somalia.

The name Al-Shabaab literally means “the Youth” in Arabic, representing its origins as the militant youth wing of the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Islamically inspired entities of diverse ideologies and functions, which wrested power away from south-central Somalia’s warlords in 2006. But Qawdhan is an old man, somewhere in his 50s, with a droopy face and a skittish gaze.

“What was the nature of your affiliation with Al-Shabaab?” I ask, thinking he might just be a supporter or a funder, or maybe the father of a fighter.

“I was a soldier with Al-Shabaab,” He tells me. “I served in 2006 when the Court Union broke up, because I was in the Court Union. The Court Union and Shabaab are the same thing, their ideologies match.”

This makes some sense. The name Al-Shabaab is more reflective of a pre-2007 reality, when the group was a specialized wing of a diverse whole. But since the movement broke away, it’s sucked up fighters of any age wherever it could find them. The leadership even considered changing the name in 2011 to Imaarah Islamiya (Islamic Authority) to better reflect both a localized, nationalist mission of Somali liberation and the true demographics of the group (the name change was opposed by leaders who wanted to keep the movement explicitly tied to international jihad).

Qawdhan’s choice to join Shabaab seems to have been as much about clan as ideology. Qawdhan explains that one of the members of his clan (the Arab sub-clan of the Isaaq, the dominant kin group in Somaliland), Moktar Ali Zubeyr (AKA Godane), a former leader of the Courts Union, had become the leader of Shabaab, and many of his clansmen in the Union followed him over. By Qawdhan’s count, 90 members of his clan are still alive and fighting with Godane in the south.

It’s hard to square the kinship bond Qawdhan’s talking about with the fact that his clan hails from Somaliland, which vehemently denies that Shabaab or its sympathizers exist therein. But it’s clear that the government just means there is no official, public Shabaab presence. When one pushes the question with citizens and government officials, they will admit that perhaps individuals in Somaliland harbor pro-Shabaab sympathies, and that perhaps isolated, minor Shabaab foot soldiers live amongst them. But, stresses Haji Mohamed Haashim, the head of the avowedly apolitical religious organization blatantly named the Committee for the Preservation of Good Deeds and the Deterrence of Bad Deeds, these are mostly naïve, misled peoples. And besides, the fact that no one publically supports Shabaab is what matters.

Qawdhan eventually left the ranks of Shabaab and denounces elements of the current organization. But he still supports it as an abstract entity and ideology—the platonic Shabaab of his memories before its devolution.

The Committee for the Promotion of Good Deeds and Prevention of Bad Deeds, the anti-Shabaab group run by the religious elite.

I ask him how many people in Somaliland he thinks share his belief in Shabaab.

“Three-fourths of the adult population,” he says, matter-of-factly and without missing a beat.

My Somalilander friends vehemently dispute that number. The refrain here is simple: there is no Shabaab here; we are anti-Shabaab.

But when one takes the name away and tries to express the ideology Qawdhan ascribes to Shabaab, things change.

I ask Qawdhan what he believes Shabaab, as he knows it and sees it, wants:

“We want to take power and rule according to Islamic tenants. These people [the rulers of the country] have given out [Somalia] to Western powers and when the Courts Union broke they took our leader and made him their own [Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the former commander-in-chief of the Courts Union who later became the president of the internationally created and backed Transitional Federal Government].”

My friends Liibaan and Yusuf currently both dismiss Shabaab categorically, but their thoughts still resonate with Qawdhan’s. Yusuf expresses distaste for violently implemented Islamic rule, but fondness for it when properly administered; to him, Shabaab started out as just another set of freedom fighters against international interlopers. Liibaan admits to having supported Shabaab in its early days—before the al Qaeda influence, suicide bombings, and infighting—as did many people, because he believed the youths would revive the world of the Courts Union.

Liibaan is not alone in his disapproval of al Qaeda’s involvement in Shabaab. When I ask Qawdhan when and why he left the group, he tells me, “I left when they joined al Qaeda. I do not support al Qaeda and their principles. They have caused a lot of fractures in Shabaab. So I surrendered to my government.”

I push Qawdhan to tell me what these principles were.

“We had foreigners working with us—a lot of foreigners. But al Qaeda was against the white people [meaning Arabs as well as Americans and Europeans] and the outsiders. People I worked with and ate with started getting killed. There were many foreigners in general—Arabs, Asians, then Europeans—who were being killed.”

The infighting, mostly between those with nationalist goals and those with international jihadist goals, was inevitable. In its pragmatic quest for manpower, the group sucked in ideologies. As early as 2010, Godane promoted ties to al Qaeda. And in October of 2011, anecdotal reports suggest Shabaab solicited support from pirates—not a logical ally for a group whose hardliners violently oppose thieving. By the time that Qawdhan left, supposedly around 2012, tensions ran so high that a high-ranking jihadist from America, Abu Mansur Al-Amriki (nee Omar Hammami) expressed public fear that his fellow Shabaab members might kill him for his differing opinions. More recently, the infighting and danger has grown so severe that Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a former Shabaab leader (of a more nationalist bent) fled the group, surrendering to arrest by the TFG.

Those who’ve lived in Mogadishu say there are people like Qawdhan still in Shabaab, trapped among ideologies hostile to their own by the threat of retribution for defection. But leaving the group—at least for residents of Somaliland like Qawdhan—isn’t as difficult as it once was. Somaliland’s Minister of the Interior, Mohamed Nur Arale Duur, offered an amnesty last year to members of Shabaab originally hailing from Somaliland. If they turned in their guns and renounced their ties to the group, they could live quietly, anonymously, and securely.

Yet when I ask Qawdhan about the 2008 attacks on the presidential compound, Ethiopian consulate, and UN offices in Hargeisa, which killed 28 and wounded more—the kind of violence against locals which disquieted him and alienated people like Liibaan—he tells me, “2008 just proved to me and to the world that we [Shabaab] are very strong here [in Somaliland],” blurring differentiation between his loyalty to the idealized Shabaab he joined and his disloyalty to the factional, violent Shabaab.

“So do you think that Al-Shabaab, the organization, still has agents in Somaliland?”

“Why would it [Shabaab] be absent?” Qawdhan laughs, for the first time in our conversation, at my naiveté. “Seventy-five percent of the senior command is from here. The people who facilitated the 2008 bombings are still around. The government can shout from the rooftops all it wants, but they’re still here.”

The entrance to the Presidential Palace, one of the places Shabaab bombed in 2008. The barriers are a poor attempt to mimic the anti-suicide-bombing barriers in Baghdad and outside new US embassies.

It’s unclear whether Qawdhan is referring to active agents of the current incarnation of Shabaab or remnants of the idealized group of his memories. I try to tease out a fuller picture.

“If that is true, why do you think there have been no major attacks since? There have been attacks in Puntland [the neighboring quasi-independent federal state of Somalia to the east], but not in Somaliland. Why is that?”

“Because there must be no strategic message to be sent by another attack in Somaliland for now.”

Shabaab actually threatened in February to carry out suicide attacks in Somaliland from bases in the Sanaag highlands in the east, but has yet to do so. I hoped that Qawdhan’s response might shed light on his knowledge of Shabaab’s operations or his differentiation between the activities of modern Shabaab and his idealized Shabaab. Instead, it just seemed that Qawdhan was unaware of these threats.

I try a different tact.

“But does Shabaab really need to be active here? This country is Islamic. The government claims to be inspired by sharia and Islamic studies are taught in schools.”

“No, there is nothing like sharia law here. It is just in the books. In reality, they are using colonial penal laws and courts. It’s like how Arabic is the second language in Somaliland and English is the third, but in truth English is the second language and they don’t even really teach Arabic in the schools.”

“Then do you think you would be able to establish an Islamic government, if people do not receive adequate training?” I ask. “Could you have qualified qadis [Sharia judges]?”

“Despite everything, people still have the knowledge, so it will not be hard to establish a government. We will take the good from English law and sharia. Most of the laws, they rhyme.”

I’d hoped this might prompt Qawdhan to talk more about his beliefs and his grievances, to see how his interpretation of sharia holds up to statements of current and past Shabaab spokesmen. But, as my friend reminds me, Qawdhan was a foot soldier, not a qadi.

When he speaks of Shabaab’s presence, power, and popularity in Somaliland, I want to believe he’s talking about the sentiments and concept of the old-school Shabaab he joined. I suspect he’s projecting the potency of his beliefs into his reality and denying the ownership of the term Shabaab to the factions he fled, downplaying their relevance. But you never know with foot soldiers. I push forward.

“Would you be willing to negotiate with the government here? If they were to agree to pay more attention to Islamic education and governance, would you work with them?”

“There is no way to negotiate with Somalia, but in Somaliland we can enter into a deal. We have tried, but we have received nothing. Al-Shabaab’s existence is a sign of the failure to work together.

The flag of Somaliland.

“But at least we have a common history, and common enemies in Mogadishu [the Transitional Federal Government, which periodically asserts its sovereignty over Somaliland as nothing but a federal state of Somalia]. We can work with Somaliland.”

I suspect the appreciation of Somaliland is based on Isaaq clan affiliation and its origins in solely Somali activism, versus the TFG, which is a wholly international construction. There’s a clear nationalist bent to this image of Shabaab.

“What about the foreigners? What about my people? Could you work with America?”

“Yes, government to government, we could work with them. We have the same principles, but they see us in the wrong way. It’s the British and the Americans who have the problems.

“The Turks and the Egyptians [often used here as a collective term for all Arabs] are big here now, but we prefer the USA to those people. We know each other and we can sit down and negotiate. These Egyptians are newcomers and they have their own intentions that are unknown to us. But American intentions are known. The first thing we would do in an Islamic government is establish good relations with the USA and keep the Egyptians at bay.

“Our organization is forced to be violent with the world. But I would urge the Americans to talk as we have talked tonight. Right now, whenever we make something good, they spoil it, but when they leave us alone we will make our own good government.”

This condemnation of international Islamic powers and predilection to negotiate with familiar actors smacks of a nationalist agenda. Qawdhan seems to live with two simultaneous conceptions of Shabaab: One that accords with the Somalilander reality of a factional, socially cannibalistic, and irredeemable entity; and one that inspired the loyalty of people like Liibaan and Yusuf, and which most believe is dead, but which Qawdhan appears to believe still has acolytes and power.

Of course, this might just be me projecting.

A stock photo of responders following the 2008 bombings.

Throughout our conversation, Qawdhan periodically turns to my friend, who acts as an interpreter, and asks why I am so interested in Shabaab. He gets wary and leery-eyed.

He asks if I have any affiliations with intelligence agencies, and why I want to know so much.

At first I laugh the question off with a simple “no.” But he remains anxious, and I find myself going to great lengths to explain that I am no threat: Look at me. I’m a tiny, weak man. No intelligence agency would hire me. I’d be incredibly incompetent. Apparently, though, protestations couched in self-deprecating humor are of no avail here.

Suddenly, an hour and a half into our conversation, Qawdhan just leaves. My friend and I sit for a moment. Then, only half in jest, he turns to me and says, “Maybe we should be going now. I don’t know that I trust this. He just gets up and puts on his boots and leaves without a word. I don’t want to be picking up your pieces later today.”

So we leave. And I’m still a little unsure of just how Qawdhan walks the line between two Shabaabs—if it’s possible to maintain a devotion to the ghost of Shabaab past without falling into the gravitational pull of the current Shabaab. I suspect that the Shabaab Qawdhan joined is dead. People like him are probably trapped within Shabaab by decaying bonds of fear and inertia, but even if they were to wrest control from the competing ideologies that dominate them, the name Shabaab is too sullied to be revived. Qawdhan’s nationalist-Islamist sentiments, in abstract, still have potency and popularity. But a man like Qawdhan, who frames these ideas in terms of Shabaab, is only a memory of a recent yet antique phase of Somalia’s ever murky history, desperately trying to impose the orders, terms, and ideas he knows onto a reality he split from long ago. 

Read more on Somalia and Somaliland:

Somaliland Is a Real Country, According to Somaliland

Firing Grenades at Somali Pirates was the Best Fun I Ever Had

Can Britain Handle the Rapes, Killings, and Clans in Somalia?

The Royal baby makes Diane Hodges want to twist and shout. Photos by Joel Balsam.

My first reaction to the wall-to-wall news coverage that a couple of tax-funded billionaires—in some far away island across the ocean—were having a baby was probably a lot like yours: who the hell cares!? Being born “vaginally” from two human adults is not BREAKING NEWS, CNN:

After shaking my fist at my laptop for a few minutes I stuck my hand in my pocket to fish for a pack of gum, and out fell out a Canadian $20 bill where, low and behold, the Queen of England was looking up at me. That’s because after 146 years as a country, Canada is still a part of the Commonwealth, and according to a 2012 Canadian Press survey 51% of Canadians are still down with that.

Sure, most of the Monarchy’s power is symbolic, but did you know that as part of our Constitution, Stephen Harper, King Robbie Ford, Governor General David Johnston is Canada’s true head of state? In reality, his job entails shaking hands and signing what he is told to sign, but one only needs to point to 2008 when the fate of the country was in the governor general’s hands. In that case, Michaëlle Jean, the governor general at the time, decided to side with Harper and prorogue parliament (end work for the holidays) to prevent an election.

So, why don’t we get rid of the royals’ inbred influence over Canada? The only way to get the Monarchy out of Canadian politics would be to change the Constitution, by getting all provinces to agree. That’s like seeing a Sopranos movie—never going to happen.

Quebec is a province that would most definitely tell the governor general and any other British influence to GTFO. Only 24% of Quebecers, according to that survey I mentioned, support the Queen. In my mind, that sounds pretty generous.

Quebec is a province where separatists (like these people I interviewed) live. It’s a province where a complaint was made about the Englishness of the word “pasta” on a menu, and yet we’re okay with pizzaghetti. It’s a province where a girl had to quit her job at a grocery store for speaking English while working. It’s also a province where a store exists for the sole purpose of selling British swag, and according to its owner Diane Hodges, a lot of French-Canadians are obsessed. I wondered if she could tell me what the big deal about the Monarchy is.

Bramble House in Montreal is your one-stop shop to appease any British fetish you might have.

VICE: Why do you love the Monarchy?
Diane: I was raised in those traditions. My mom is from Northern Ireland, and my Dad is from England. I loved the Beatles. I just loved everything British. It’s just a cooler culture because it’s so condensed. They seem to have a richer history in terms of music, especially in the 60s, when everybody was looking at England. But also, my Dad was in the War, so we’ve always had that relationship with them. There’s a meme that goes around the Internet that says anything said with a British accent is sexy, I mean there’s something to be said for that accent too.

Do you get a lot of flak for having a store in Quebec?
We’re the only shop that is exclusively British; even all our signs are in English we’re almost arrogant about it at this point.

Quebec’s relationship with the British is a bit different. The rest of Canada is pretty strong with the Commonwealth, but in Quebec there are some tender points. I think their beef is not with Britain. I have so many French-Canadian customers that are absolute anglophiles—they adore England, they are mad for the Queen, they love everything Royal.

English people: questioning your masculinity since 927 AD.

Has there been an influx of people buying British stuff because of Will and Kate?
I think the Royal Engagement launched a kind of renewed interest in the Monarchy, and that’s when I saw a big spike in new people coming in, because they wanted to know more about the Engagement. Then they got married and then there was the Jubilee, now the baby. So every year there has been something going on in England that has had a kind of significance globally.

Why do people even like the Royals?
Because they are the voice of the people, all of their work, they generate a lot of income for England, and they do a lot of good. I know a lot of people don’t see that, they just see the life of privilege and assume that they are just takers. Anyone that’s grown up with the Royals knows that’s not what you see. What you see is they are always out there plugging some charity or another, and that’s their job.

But do we need to give them so much attention?
Will and Kate, something about them has captured a lot of people’s imaginations. They’re just such a nice couple. I think Kanye West and Kim Kardashian get a lot more attention than they do, but nobody complains about it. I find it so much more offensive when Kanye and Kardashian are in the news, I mean what are they doing for me?

Diane is throwing a Royal baby shower at Bramble House this Saturday. Be there in time for tea!

Joel likes tea. Tweet him: @JoelBalsam

VICE cares about the #RoyalBaby:

We Went Along to the Royal Baby Party at St Mary’s Hospital

In Euripides’s The Bacchae, Dionysus comes to the city and enchants all the women. They follow him out to the woods where wild dances take place under the trance of the god. This is Dionysus before he becomes the chubby guy depicted in all the paintings. This is Dionysus when he is at his most beautiful, almost like a woman. The women who follow him are the Bacchae, and their dances of revelry are called Bacchanalias. In these trances they are not in their usual minds, they have transcended normal consciousness and entered a hyperactive realm where they are capable of anything, both mentally and physically: orgies are implied, great orgies with the young male god at the center. They also tear wild animals limb from limb with their bare hands.

I read The Bacchae in high school, during my Jim Morrison obsession. Morrison identified with Dionysus. He got into Dionysus through Nietzsche, whose ethos balanced the Dionysian artistic drive with the Apollonian drive for order. You can see all of Morrison’s person bound up in this Nietzchean idea of Dionysus: the music as ritual, the lyrics (always calling for people to follow him, to let him fuck them, and for them to kill the father figure), and a stage persona that basically revolved around trying to seduce and screw the audience.

In the play, King Pentheus goes out to the woods to confront Bacchus (the Roman name for Dionysus) because Pentheus doesn’t believe the young stranger is a god. When he meets the women in their wild trance, his mother among them, the women tear Pentheus apart with their bare hands. His mother decapitates him because she knows not what she does.

It’s scary in this age to think about a leader proclaiming himself a god and then leading people to do awful, murderous things. If read through a literal, contemporary lens, Bacchus becomes Charles Manson, or Jim Jones, or that spooky Do dude from the Heaven’s Gate cult. Bacchus out in the woods with his women, screwing them all vigorously, and encouraging them to kill—this could easily be the basis for the Spahn Ranch playbook, or that recent film with John Hawkes and Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene.

In 1969, the Performance Group—which would eventually spawn the offshoot the Wooster Group—staged an interactive performance of The Bacchae. Later, Brian De Palma filmed the performance and presented it in split screen, titling it Dionysus in ’69. It’s awesome: they depict the birth of Dionysus by creating a birth canal out of their bodies, and then they murder Pentheus in a similarly grandiose fashion.

We wanted to make a video inspired by Dionysus, especially because we were in a place that has its own special relationship to the god of inhibition: New Orleans. One of the biggest parades during Mardi Gras is called Bacchus, and each year a King of Bacchus is elected.

One year, pre-Katrina, I was in New Orleans filming a movie called Sonny, directed by Nicholas Cage, in which I played a male prostitute. Nic was named King of Bacchus, and as a result, one of the producers and I landed highly coveted spots on a float. We did something disgusting. Before the parade, we stocked up on knick-knacks from a cart on the street: plastic flowers, pins, and blow-up Spider-Man dolls. We added this stash to the boxes of beads we were given to throw from the float. Everyone knows people go crazy for beads during Mardi Gras, but they went full-on bananas for our cache of crap. Everyone wanted a $3 Spider-Man doll, something they could buy from any cart on the street, but ours were ten times more desirable because we were tossing them from a float.

Our bright idea was that instead of asking women to show us their breasts for beads and goodies from our stash, we would ask for kisses. We must have leaned over the side of that float 50 times for kisses from strangers. We're lucky we didn’t walk away with scorching cases of herpes. When the parade finally ended at a huge warehouse where the Bacchus Ball was held, I looked at myself in a bathroom mirror, I saw that my face was covered in grime from all of the smooches. On the float they make you wear jester outfits; I looked like a clown who had been rolling in a pigpen. It was pretty.

A few years later, I was back in New Orleans to film this short. It was in collaboration with Gucci, so of course we had to bring in some influence from Fellini. Our Bacchus was also inspired by Mastroianni Marcello from La Dolce Vita, wandering around New Orleans like his character wandered around Rome. That film, like our video, embraced all the levels and excesses of culture: from the spiritual, to the intellectual, to the aesthetic, to the sexual. It is an attempt to contain all artistic levels.

A god is birthed into the world and he engages with the world. He studies it as a newcomer, but as someone who can perceive it for what it is: beautiful, dangerous, sexual, chaotic, vengeful, karmic, and ultimately harmonious.  

More by James Franco from VICE: 

Are You a Nerd?

Brand-Funded Films and the Trailer for La Passione

American Psycho: Ten Years Later/Twenty Years Later

My Name Is Tom and I'm a Video Game Addict

Oh shit—the game just changed again. Limp Bizkit has emerged from a ten-year hiatus from being popular to drop the video for their pant-tightener of a comeback single, "Ready To Go," which features Lil Wayne laying down a guest verse. It might seem like an odd combo, but Weezy's got form when it comes to terrible rock music, having previously paid more than just lip service to the genre by actually releasing 2009's nu-rock family funeral, Rebirth.     

However, his commitment to having awful taste was only truly cemented when he became the Justin Timberlake to Fred Durst's MySpace, signing the band to his label Young Money in February of 2012. "Ready to Go" is Bizkit's first Young Money single, and the first of their tracks to include a proper rapper since 1999's legitimately good stoner-rap joint "N 2 Together Now" with Method Man. It's also been uploaded to Vimeo (meaning that Limp Bizkit are serious artists now), so I thought it deserved a bit of an examination.

Let's begin at the beginning: America is now the sort of place where Limp Bizkit logos have replaced traffic signs. Limp Bizkit aren't just a nu-metal band, or a shortcut to the cringe mechanisms of a generation of twenty-somethings, they're also a physical place. A place where every traffic violation is presumably punished by a man with a "chainsaw" who "will skin your ass raw," where the army where Red Yankees caps, where women try to dance to metal on podiums and where the word "fuck" still shocks.

Sure enough, the track itself opens with Fred screaming "GO FUCK YOURSELF!" at no one in particular. Welcome home, old friend; your rage is just as directionless as it ever was.

This shot shows Fred stopping to meet some fans. These particular ones don't definitely drive forklifts for a living, but they probably do, in the same way that not all cab drivers are serial killers. If you think that was snarky, intellectual snobbery, belt up. It's only getting worse from here.

Cut to Fred arriving at a venue in full 2011 snapback swag. Yes, he's a little behind the streetwear curve with that Day-Glo number perched on his big bald fucking head, but give him a break guys, he's 42 years old!

Jesus, he really is 42. This is Fred doing "Glaswegian Alcoholic In Stolen FUBU Hoodie Swag" and knocking it completely out of the park.

On paper, three-day-old grey stubble and a quilted MCA tribute hoodie made by his road manager's wife for her Etsy site are not a winning combination. In real life, it's just as awful as it is on paper.

If Fred Durst was a Mortal Kombat character, his special move would be the Hammered Wedding Dad Simian Wigga Shuffle, and to execute it you'd have to press A, B, then select, then mash the keypad with your fist and live with your parents well into your thirties.

Can you believe we're only 37 seconds into the song?!

This is Fred's guitarist, Wes Borland, applying his stage make up. There's nothing snarky or mean-spirited to say about Wes Borland; he's a genuinely talented eccentric who should probably be ranked alongside the likes of Mike Patton and Buzz Osborne in that weird school of inventive and imaginative 90s American rock musicians. He's also a more than accomplished oil painter.

Sidenote: he gets his black contact lenses from the people who did the contacts for Babylon 5. The more you know.

At 0:43, just when he's being tight with his bros, it sounds exactly like Fred's saying, "We're drinking jizz / till we pass out and fall on the floor." But azlyrics.com says he's saying, "We're drinking gin / till we pass out and fall on the floor."

But you should never trust lyrics websites. They're run by liars. He's definitely saying "jizz," maybe for the same reasons as Jenna in that 30 Rock episode where she writes an intentionally innuendo-filled parody song so that Weird Al can't parody her. Do you watch 30 Rock? It's pretty much the exact opposite of Limp Bizkit.

The image of Fred Durst laying unconscious on the floor of a frat house with jizz all around his mouth might be a discomfiting one, but Wes's costume game is still really, really strong. He's like a Guitar Center-sponsored version of Blue Man Group. He's also probably quite good company at a dinner party, at least until Fred Durst turns up with  bottles of jizz. Then it's game over.

Is this a Make-A-Wish kid? Poor little guy. It's probably a competition winner who's destined to spend the evening getting too drunk on free Jäger and spitting into Fred Durst's ear until he's discretely led away by Fred's personal security. That or Florida Man.

"Throw them fingers up and fingerfuck the sky!" Oh, you.

It's true, though. A man who is tired of finger-blasting is tired of life. If you're not still finger-blasting chicks and/or the sky at 42, then you're not living, my friend, and that's God's honest truth.

Oh wow, the quilted hoodie is actually a crust-punk Snuggie romper onesie. Which is so distracting I literally only just noticed that for some reason there's a shark in the background and it took me about 12 attempts to get a semi-decent screengrab.

Then a not-unattractive lady turns up, pushing a child in a stroller across a road. It's not a particularly extraordinary scene and at this stage it's difficult to figure out why she's in the video.

But then, suddenly, Weezy and a few of his boys appear (sorry for cropping you out, anonymous grunt #3) and they begin gesturing in the not unattractive lady's direction.

Wait, what is she doing? Are you serious? The not-unattractive lady is pushing her baby away!

Ohhhhh, she's a slut. Totally had me for a few seconds there, I genuinely believed that a woman in a Limp Bizkit video might not be a slut.

Weezy opens with, "What the fuck is up? / Fuck the world, buss a nut." Which—without wishing to take a turn for the Pitchfork—is everything that was wrong and right about nu-metal and, by extension, male adolescence circa-2001, conveyed in 11 syllables. If this track were a room, Weezy would be the rug that tied it together.

We're winding down now, and Wes is showering off his body make-up post-show, which brings to mind Iggy Pop defending punk rock on Peter Gzowski's CBC show in 1977:

"I don't know Johnny Rotten, but I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is, in fact, the brilliant music of a genius. And that music is so powerful that it's quite beyond my control and, ah... when I'm in the grips of it I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain."

That said, Pop's quote might have been slightly heavy-handed language to describe a video with this scene in it:

Previously by Robert Foster - Reviewed: The Worst Music Video Ever Starring the World's Biggest Dickhead

WATCH – Noisey Raps - Trinidad James, the Underachievers, Fredo Santana and More

A photo of the author during her high school years.

Monster High dolls are currently one of the best-selling dolls in the world.

The dolls are like Barbie’s Goth cousin—the one who buys black and white Argyle sweaters at Hot Topic and sits in the cemetery rolling her eyes in disgust at the thought of blonde people smiling.

"The message about the brand is really to celebrate your own freaky flaws, especially as bullying has become such a hot topic," Cathy Cline, Mattel's vice president of marketing, told NPR.

Mattel wants to stress that these dolls aren’t just Nightmare Before Christmas-ized Barbies with waists that wouldn’t support an actual uterus—one of them is a socially-conscious vegan!

I joined the recycling club in high school—not because I was socially conscious but because I had a crush on the grunge-y founder, Jeremy. He didn’t like me though. He liked Tara. I took up art not because I had any talent but because I liked Adam. He liked Tara. Tara was neither jockette nor weirdo. She had pouty lips, wavy hair, and never spoke. She was emancipated from her parents and even though we lived in Massachusetts she lived in an apartment in New York City on the weekends. She floated through the hallways. I called her a ghost. I was exactly like my guy friends and my guy friends didn’t like me “in that way.” They didn’t want a clone. They wanted mystery.

I learned this in Boston in the late 90s when I got backstage at a Cure concert on the Wish tour. I stood before Robert Smith with my red lipstick smeared, black eyeliner, and teased hair. I said to Goth’s God, “I know everyone thinks this, but with me it’s true. I’m the female you.” He looked frightened in an Edward Scissorhand-onian way and walked off. Years later I met a Barbie-like blonde chick at a party who said that on the Connecticut leg of the Wish tour she had sex with Robert Smith on a fire escape. Oh.

Now that Goth has been made to be beautiful, normal, and even more beautiful than the usual standard—it reminds me of when I was in high school in September, 1991. “Smells like Teen Spirit” was the number one song in America and within weeks of its release the jocks who used to spit out of their cars and scream “FREAKS!” at my friends started dressing like us. “When did Jonathan and Vanessa figure out where to get Doc Martens?...” we wondered as the star soccer player and female lacrosse team captain walked around looking like if Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love ate their vegetables instead of heroin.

I won’t bore you with more of the same argument that these “Goth Barbies” are doing nothing to empower girls and are just the same old cause of body dysmorphia but with black hair and fishnet gloves. Instead, I’d like to use this op-ed to pitch Mattel their next cash cow. The outcasts are going to need a doll to separate them from the other outcasts. May I present a list of what it takes to make the Teenaged Freak Doll:

1.) Pale, pale skin. Not from a powder that makes you go porcelain but from a crippling commitment to the lyrics of Morrissey and spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse.

2.) One blemish mid-cheek that has been picked at but won’t pop, covered with dark brown-tinted Clearasil that in the daylight looks like a shit swipe.

3.) Blistered heels from wearing John Fleuvog men’s shoes without socks. Socks are for cheerleaders. And conformists. Don’t even get me started on scrunchies.

4.) Line of black hair dye underneath the hairline. Pull the string on the back of the doll to hear, “Mom. It’s not PERMANENT! It will wash out in two days. Leave me ALONE.”

5.) A bra that is not filled out in one cup due to the left one growing faster than the right.

6.) Self-cut chin-length bob after seeing Mermaids.

7.) Pack of cigarettes purchased with a fake ID after watching the Brenda in Paris episodes of Beverly Hills 90210.

8.) Note in the other hand from your best friend Teri that says, “Jen, I talked to Adam for you and told him you like him but he says you’re too loud.”

9.) Baggy men’s t-shirt that covers up a flat stomach you would kill for in 20 years.

10.) Diary for writing down deep thoughts like, If I feel but chose not to scream would you hear me anyway?

What do you say, Mattel? Let’s make a whole new generation of girls feel inadequate but this time because they aren’t as flawed, loud, or trite as a doll. Sure, let’s throw in a New York City dream apartment, too.

Fuck you, Tara.

Previously from Jen Kirkman - Have You Seen This Old Rich Lady?

@JenKirkman

Photos by Martin Parr & text by Kate Fox.

I don’t read books much. I prefer my inspiration to come in the form of films, art, and photography. But I stumbled across one book, which I read cover to cover in a few days, Kate Fox’s Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Inside I found all of my own observations that I had made about my fellow English folk, built up over many years, but articulated with very sharp and witty prose. It really is funny—the sort of humor that makes you laugh out loud on your own!

I got in touch with Kate, and she said that her publisher was thinking of doing a new edition of the book with photographs, and that some of mine were being considered. Sadly, this project never happened, so when VICE asked me to nominate a person to collaborate with for this year’s Photo Issue, I immediately thought of Kate and sent her a selection of unabashedly English images that I had taken over the past few years. She selected a few explicitly English themes to write about, and that is what you see here. — Martin Parr

A Nation of Closet Patriots 

Looking at these patriotic images, what strikes me immediately is how unusual they are. To capture them, Martin must have waited patiently—like a wildlife photographer hoping for some shy nocturnal creature to emerge—as patriotic displays like this are a rare sight among the English. Only a tiny minority of us ever indulge in such public displays of national pride, and even this minority only do so on very special occasions. 

In fact, it is often said that the English suffer from a lack of patriotic feeling. And there is some evidence to support this claim: English people, on average, rate their degree of patriotism at just 5.8 out of 10, according to a European survey, far below the self-rated patriotism of the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, and the lowest of all the European nations. Our national day, Saint George’s Day, is on April 23, but surveys regularly show that at least two-thirds of us are completely unaware of this occasion. Can you imagine a similar number of Americans being oblivious to the Fourth of July, or Irish people ignoring St. Patrick’s Day? 

Based on my ethnographic research, however, I had a hunch that our reluctance to engage in public patriotic displays may be related to what I would call “hidden rules of Englishness,” rather than an absence of national pride. So I conducted my own national survey, just before Saint George’s Day, asking what I felt were more subtle questions about patriotic feelings. The results confirmed my impression that we are actually a nation of “closet patriots.” 

My findings showed that the vast majority (83 percent) of English people feel at least some sense of patriotic pride: 22 percent “always,” 23 percent “often,” and 38 percent at least “sometimes” feel proud to be English. 

Three-quarters of my respondents thought that more should be done to celebrate our national day, and of these, 63 percent would like us to “embrace” Saint George’s Day as the Irish do St. Patrick’s Day. Nearly half would at least like to see more people flying the English flag on Saint George’s Day. Only 11 percent, however, would go so far as to fly the flag themselves, and 72 percent said they would not be celebrating in any way or had no plans to celebrate, even though Saint George’s Day fell on a Saturday the year I conducted my research. Even the few who freely admitted their plans to “celebrate” said this would, at most, consist of having a beer or two in their local pub—hardly comparable with the Fourth of July or St. Patrick’s Day extravaganzas. 

But why? If so many of us are proud to be English and feel that more should be done to celebrate our national day and flag, why not actively celebrate or fly the flag ourselves? 

First, there is a clue in the English quality of which we are most proud: a key element of our biggest source of pride, the famous English sense of humor, is something I call “the Importance of Not Being Earnest.” One of the unwritten rules of Englishness is a prohibition on earnestness or excessive zeal—and the sentimental, boastful, heart-on-sleeve, flag-waving patriotism of other nations is frowned upon and makes us cringe with embarrassment. We may feel proud to be English, but we are too inhibited, and perhaps too cynical, to make a big gushy patriotic fuss about it. Ironically, the English quality in which we take most pride, our sense of humor, prevents most of us from publicly displaying any patriotic pride. 

Second, looking at my survey findings, you may well have noticed that the high percentage of English respondents who think more should be done to celebrate Saint George’s Day (75 percent) is almost exactly the same as the percentage who have no intention of celebrating our national day (72 percent). This contradiction is also typically English. It reflects two of the “defining characteristics of Englishness” that I previously identified in Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour: moderation and “Eeyorishness.” 

Our sense of moderation means that we tend to be rather apathetic—we avoid extremes, excess, and intensity. It has been said that the English have satire instead of revolutions, and I feel that a truly English protest march would see us all chanting, “What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!” Our Eeyorishness means that we tend to indulge in a lot of therapeutic moaning about a problem rather than actually addressing it or doing anything about it. We whine and complain that “more should be done” to celebrate our national day, but we don’t actually organize a celebration, or even so much as fly a flag.

To be fair, our reasons for not flying the English flag are only partly rooted in these qualities. Although it has now been “reclaimed,” at least to some extent, the flag has in the past been a symbol of the political far right and racism, and is still contaminated by these associations. In recent years it has gradually become more closely associated with football fans, but this in itself is off-putting to many for whom the flag is now tainted with a “chavvy,” lower-class image.

A few of us do emerge from our patriotic closet every so often, as Martin’s images show, for big royal occasions, such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 and the royal wedding in 2011. For this minority, royal events are brief episodes of what anthropologists call “cultural remission” or “festive inversion,” like carnivals or tribal festivals, where some of the usual social norms and unwritten rules are temporarily suspended and we do things we would never normally do: waving national flags, cheering, and dancing in the streets—and even talking to strangers.

But those involved in the celebrations Martin has captured represent a tiny percentage of the population (6 percent at most)—and surveys show, for example, that Americans were significantly more excited about the royal wedding than the English, the majority of whom remained underwhelmed, despite all the media hype. At least two-thirds of us either “couldn’t care less” or felt “largely indifferent” about the event, and only about 10 percent would admit to being “very excited.”

I write “would admit” because I know that even with anonymous surveys we have to be aware of what researchers call the social desirability bias—defined as a standard error on self-report measures due to respondents attempting to present themselves in a socially desirable and acceptable light (otherwise known as “lying”). But socially desirable responding of this kind can itself be highly revealing: the fact that so few English survey respondents will admit to being excited about a royal wedding may not necessarily tell us their real feelings, but it does tell us that the social norms prohibiting excitement about such things must be very powerful.

Martin’s images have captured a sense of patriotism that many English people at least sometimes secretly feel, but that only a few are willing to display in public, and then only during occasional episodes of cultural remission. So, to me, these images are like a total solar eclipse, or a rare comet, or some elusive flower that only blooms once every few years.

Queuing

What do you see when you look at these images of English people queuing? To the naked or untrained eye, these queues might seem almost comically dull and uninteresting: just orderly lines of people, patiently waiting their turn. Indeed, many commentators have joked somewhat sneeringly about the English talent for queuing, implying that only a rather predictable, plodding, sheeplike nation could be so good at standing long-sufferingly in tidy lines. 

But that is because they have not looked closely enough at English queues. When examining such orderly behavior under an anthropologist’s microscope, one finds that each queue is a microcosmic minidrama—not just an amusing “comedy of manners,” but a vivid human-interest story, full of scheming and intrigue, moral dilemmas, shame, face-saving, shifting alliances, anger, and reconciliation…

As part of the field research for Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, I spent many hundreds of hours observing English queues. And to test the rules of queuing etiquette, I forced myself to conduct experiments involving a deadly sin: queue-jumping. I am very English, so this was a truly horrible ordeal for me—perhaps the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in the name of research. 

In order to test the social rules of a nation, however, one sometimes has to break them. My preferred method in these cases is to get an unsuspecting research assistant to break the sacred social rule while I watch the outcome from a safe distance. But this time I had decided that I really had to act as my own guinea pig. Like those brave scientists and doctors who test drugs or viruses on their own bodies—except, of course, in this case I wasn’t in any real danger. And that was the weird discovery I made: the irony about English queuing is that it is actually easier to get away with queue-jumping in this country than almost anywhere else in the world. Although queue-jumping is a big taboo in England, we have other social rules that come into play, such as not making a scene, not drawing attention to yourself in public, not confronting strangers, and always moaning about a problem rather than actually addressing the source of the problem. 

This means that the worst that can happen to you if you try to jump an English queue is a lot of really vicious body language: frowns, glares, raised eyebrows, heavy sighs, pointed coughs, scornful snorts, and tutting and muttering. English people faced with the threat of a potential queue-jumper will even break their usual rule of not talking to strangers in order to mutter indignantly to each other. But you will very rarely see them actually confronting the offender directly. This does happen sometimes—if the queue-jump is exceptionally blatant—but it’s very unusual. 

So, it is easier to jump a queue in England, where queue-jumping is a deadly sin, than in other countries where it’s treated as a minor misdemeanor. But only if you can bear the humiliation of all those eyebrows and coughs and tuts and mutters—in other words, only if you are not English. I think maybe you have to be English to know just how deeply wounding a raised eyebrow can be! 

And just because the people in these queuing images appear to be patient and uncomplaining, do not assume, as many commentators have done, that the English somehow actively enjoy queuing. We don’t. We hate it, like everyone else. It makes us cross and resentful and irritable, perhaps even more so than other nations, because we take the rules and principles of queuing more seriously—and all of our constant vigilance and deterring of potential queue-jumpers with eyebrows and coughs and the rest of the nonverbal “body English” repertoire is jolly hard work. 

We may not actually complain out loud about being kept waiting in a queue—or at least we are unlikely to address our complaints to the cashier or ticket collector or whoever is keeping us waiting—but do not mistake our silence for contentment or even patience. Look closer, and you will see that we convey our intense displeasure and frustration with queuing through yet more nonverbal microsignals: heavy sighs, exasperated eye rolls, pursed lips, fidgeting, tutting, coughing, finger tapping, and pointedly looking at our watches every few seconds. We mutter to ourselves under our breath, and we may even break our own contact-avoidance rules to exchange raised eyebrows and grimaces with fellow sufferers (and perhaps, if we are really furious, we may even speak to each other, quietly). 

As with many of Martin’s images, I can’t help imagining what the people in these queues might be saying. And again, this is predictable. The word you are most likely to hear—the word that is probably being muttered among the apparently patient queuers in these images—is “Typical!” 

With this one quintessentially English word, almost always accompanied by an eye roll, we will somehow manage to sound simultaneously peeved, stoically resigned, and smugly omniscient. And that pretty much sums up the English attitude to queuing, rain, mediocre food, slow service, and most other national frustrations and disappointments. 

When we mutter “Typical!” we are expressing annoyance and resentment, but also a sort of grudging, humorous forbearance—and there is even an element of perverse satisfaction: we may have been inconvenienced by the rain and the endless queues, but we have not been taken unawares. We knew this would happen, we “could have told you” that it would rain (it always does on weekends, bank holidays, and special occasions), and that there would be long and tedious queues for the exhibition, the tea stall, the lunch counter, the bar, and the loos. For we in our infinite wisdom know that this is the way things are: there are always queues, you always choose the slowest queue, you always wait ages for a bus, and then three come along at once. Nothing ever works properly, something always goes wrong, and on top of that, it’s bound to rain. We start learning these mantras in our cradles, so by the time we are adults, this “Eeyorish” view of the world is part of our nature.

So, in a strange way, the people queuing in these images are enjoying themselves. They are experiencing a peculiarly English pleasure—that of seeing one’s gloomy predictions fulfilled.

Dogs

These images capture a very special and complex relationship. Sure, other nations keep pets—especially dogs—but the inordinate love of animals displayed by the English is still one of the characteristics for which we are renowned, and one that many foreigners find baffling. 

It is often said that the English treat their dogs like people, but this is untrue. Have you seen how we treat people? One would never dream of being so cold and unfriendly to a dog. All right, I’m exaggerating, but only a little. The fact is that we English are far more open, communicative, and demonstrative in our relationships with animals than with our fellow humans.

We suffer from a condition that I call the English Social Dis-ease—my shorthand for all our chronic social inhibitions, our insularity, our emotional constipation, our inability to engage with other human beings in a normal and straightforward fashion. Both the famous “English reserve” and the infamous “English hooliganism” are symptoms of the Dis-ease: when we feel uncomfortable in social situations (i.e., most of the time) we either become overpolite, buttoned-up, and awkwardly restrained, or loud, loutish, crude, violent, and generally obnoxious. 

We seem to be incapable of the kind of spontaneous, friendly, street-corner sociability that comes so naturally to most other nations. Most English people assiduously avoid any social interaction with strangers; even maintaining eye contact for more than a fraction of a second is interpreted as either flirtation or aggression. We have no difficulty at all, however, engaging in lively, amicable conversation with dogs. Even strange dogs, to whom we have not been introduced.  

The English are in fact capable of Latin-Mediterranean warmth, enthusiasm, and sociability; we can be just as direct, approachable, emotive, and tactile as any of the so-called contact cultures. But these qualities are only consistently expressed in our interactions with animals. And unlike English humans, our dogs are not embarrassed or dismayed by these un-English public displays of emotion. No wonder dogs are so important to the English: for many of us, they represent our only significant experience of open, unguarded emotional involvement with another sentient being.

An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but his dog is the real king. In other countries, people may buy luxurious five-star kennels and silk-lined baskets for their dogs, but the English let them take over the whole house. We allow our dogs to sprawl all over our sofas, chairs, and beds, and they get far more attention, affection, appreciation, and “quality time” than our children. (It is perhaps no accident that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established for more than half a century before the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which appears to have been founded as a rather derivative afterthought.)

A typical English household is often ruled by one or more boisterous, noisy, and chronically disobedient dogs, whose ineffectual owners indulge their every whim and laugh affectionately at their misdemeanors. And there is an unwritten rule that absolutely forbids any criticism of a person’s dogs. However badly someone’s dog behaves—and however much you may dislike being jumped on, climbed over, scratched, crotch-sniffed, leg-humped, and generally mauled—you must not speak ill of the beast: this would be a worse social solecism than criticizing that person’s children. 

We do, of course, criticize our own dogs, but this is always done in tender, indulgent tones: “He’s so naughty, that’s the third pair of shoes he’s destroyed this month, ah, bless!” There is more than a hint of pride in these sort of “Isn’t he awful?” complaints, as though we are secretly rather charmed by our dogs’ flaws and failings. I suspect that the English actually get great vicarious pleasure from our pooches’ misbehavior. We grant them all the freedoms that we deny ourselves: the most inhibited people on earth have the most blatantly uninhibited pets. 

Our dogs are our alter egos, perhaps even the symbolic embodiment of what a psychotherapist would call our “inner child” (you know, the one you are supposed to “get in touch with” and hug, or heal, or something). Only our dogs represent something more like our spoiled, ill-mannered, demanding inner brat. Our dogs embody our wild side: through them, we can express our most un-English feelings and desires; we can break all the rules, if only by proxy. 

This factor can also have beneficial side effects in our relations with other humans. An English person can even manage to strike up a conversation with a stranger, for example, if one of them is accompanied by a dog. (Although both parties are inclined to talk to the canine chaperone, rather than address each other directly.) Both verbal and nonverbal signals are exchanged via the medium of the blissfully oblivious dog, who happily absorbs all the eye contact and friendly greeting and touching that would be regarded as excessively forward and pushy between newly acquainted English. I always explain to foreign visitors and immigrants that if they want to make friends with the natives here, they should try to acquire or borrow a dog to act as a passport to conversation and facilitator of social interaction. 

But although dogs are universally popular, the type of dog you choose is a class indicator—and in what George Orwell rightly referred to as “the most class-ridden country under the sun,” this is not a trivial matter. The higher social classes tend to prefer Labradors, golden retrievers, King Charles spaniels, and springer spaniels, while the lower classes are more likely to have Rottweilers, Alsatians, poodles, Afghan hounds, chihuahuas, pit bulls, and cocker spaniels. 

English dog owners are highly unlikely to admit that their choice of pet is in any way class-related, of course. They will insist that they like Labradors (or springer spaniels, or whatever) because of the breed’s kind temperament. And they are probably telling the truth, as the class-driven element of their choice may be largely unconscious. But the higher classes will be looking at some of the dogs and dog owners in Martin’s images with a sense of slightly condescending amusement.

They will also be judging the social class of the owners by what their dogs are wearing. Upper-middle- and upper-class dogs wear plain brown leather collars, whereas middle-middles and below are inclined to dress their dogs up in colored collars, bows, and other twee accessories. Only a certain type of rather insecure working-class male goes in for scary, aggressive-looking guard dogs with big, studded black collars.

Generally, only the middle-middles and below are really keen on showing their dogs at dog shows—and only these classes would put a sticker in the back window of their car proclaiming passion for a particular breed, or warning other drivers that their vehicle may contain show dogs in transit. The upper classes regard showing dogs and cats as a bit vulgar—although they love showing horses and ponies. There is no logic to any of this, but again, the higher classes will be raising their eyebrows and smirking at Martin’s images of “show dogs.” 

The dogs’ owners wouldn’t even notice these snobbish microsignals, though. Like all English dog owners, they are happily getting in touch with their inner brat.

More photo stuff from VICE:  

Interfearance

The ‘LBM Dispatch’ Brings the Good News

Exogenesis

Just over a week ago the Satanic Temple, unwavering disciples of the Prince of Darkness and aspiring adopt-a-highway participants, performed a Pink Mass over the grave of Catherine Idalette Johnston, the mother of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr. Westboro has yet to officially comment on the eternal gaying of its leader’s dead mom, but the owner of the cemetery where the ceremony was performed has filed charges with the local police department. The captain of the Meridian PD, Dean Harper, told local news station WTOK-TV that they are “in the process of constructing affidavits” and “will have [the satanists] arrested as soon as [they] can.” He added, "It is an unusual crime that we haven't come across—to my knowledge—in a while." Lol.

If this sort of case was thrown onto the desk of another small town police department, one that, say, was located in a community with few serious crimes, it would be fine for the department to pursue what is, essentially, an exercise in the misuse of police time and energy. People—including police officers­—get bored and need something to occupy their time. Meridian, unfortunately, is not one of those sleepy towns.

According to Neighborhood Scout, a website owned by a research and data-mining company that collects crime statistics from around the country, Meridian is—and I’m paraphrasing here—sketchy as fuck. Based on a crime index of 0 to 100—100 being a crime-free utopia and 0 being the inside of one of Trevino Morales' vats of acid—Meridian gets a four. By way of comparison, Brooklyn, New York, clocks in at 40. Detroit, one of the most dangerous cities in America, is a two.

One would think that a town with a population of 41,115 and a crime index rating almost on par with a city that has become a byword for blight and criminal activity would take a pass on devoting time and resources to chasing a few out-of-towners who performed a harmless little Satanic ceremony in a graveyard. After all, the Satanic Temple and its members are based in New York, meaning—as the Huffington Post and the Gauntlet have mentioned—an arrest for charges filed in Mississippi is unlikely.

Photos from the gaying of Fred Phelps' mom at Magnolia Cemetery.

Another statistic of interest concerning the Meridian Police Department is the number of officers they employ. If they were understaffed due to city budget issues their stratospheric crime rate might be understandable. As of 2011, however, the department had 109 full-time law enforcement employees, 98 of them officers. Hate to go all stat-nerd over here, but that comes out to 2.37 police officers per 1,000 people. The Mississippi average is two officers per 1,000 residents. Why, then, was the violent crime rate in Meridian in 2010 higher than the Mississippi average by 89.29 percent? Could be because the department spends its time doing stupid shit like chasing Satanists from New York City.

I reached out to Captian Harper for comment, but he has not returned my call.

When I asked Lucien Greaves, the Satanic Temple’s spokesperson, via email whether or not they had to jump a fence or if there were any "no trespassing" signs around, he told me “There were no gates, no ‘no trespassing’ signs, no hours of appropriate visiting times posted at Magnolia Cemetery. Further, at the time we arrived there were other people wandering the grounds, apparently without fear of arrest. The fact is, we were visiting an open cemetery, during the daytime, with no indication that visitors were unwelcomed. We caused no material damage to anything, and the cemetery was left exactly as it was when we entered it.”

It should be mentioned that one of the charges leveled at Lucien and the Temple is indecent exposure (the other two are tresspassing and malicious mischief). That one was brought about from a photo of Lucien teabagging Catherine Johnston's grave, which can be seen here.

On the off chance the Meridian PD extradites Lucien from New York, I asked him if there were any spells he could cast on the officers to turn them gay like the spirit of Fred Phelp’s mom. “I predict that if I were to be arrested and extradited to Mississippi,” he wrote, “my very presence would raise unholy psychological Hell among the sheriff and his colleagues. Just as medieval demon panics gave rise to episodes in which repressed people took the opportunity to act out in mindless abandon—exonerated from their own deeds by the idea of 'possession'—I believe it quite possible that I could find myself in a holding cell witnessing the Meridian Police devolve into a sweaty, grunting, savage orgy of uncaged homosexuality... all influenced by the idea that they were utterly powerless against my sexual conversion magic. Perhaps they are merely looking for such a scapegoat.”

And not for nothing, but Magnolia cemetery seems to have a great deal of respect for the members of our armed services. Their Facebook page isn’t updated very often, but the vast majority of posts are dedicated to their annual “Memorial Day Program,” which, in years past, has involved a dove release and a flag retirement (they buried it and everything). Now obviously you can be sympathetic to our fallen soldiers and dislike Satanists at the same time, but pressing charges against a group of people who were protesting, in their own small way, against the Westboro Baptist Church, an organization notorious for picketing the funerals of dead soldiers, seems like a conflict of interest.

Previously - Satanists Want to Turn the Founder of the Westboro Baptist Church's Dead Mom Gay

@Jonathan_Smth

Protesters at a sit-in for Trayvon Martin in Sanford. via Flickr.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman has left millions in North America with an uneasy feeling about the state of criminal justice, and an uncertainty about who our courts are really working for. Zimmerman was granted due process, and was found not guilty by a jury of his peers (the prosecution was unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman had not been acting in self-defence when he fatally shot the unarmed 17-year-old). Yet, Trayvon Martin’s death remains both a tragedy and an indication of the systemic problem that young black men are often unjustly perceived as threatening. From street stops to the courts, from police to neighborhood watch, profiling is a serious problem in the United States and Canada. In a democratic society, shouldn’t we grant due process to every person, no matter whether or not we like him or her? Speaking with defence attorneys on both sides of the border, I was able to glean some insight into this disconnect between justice and the justice system.

Columnist Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times that America's “system of justice—both moral and legal—failed Trayvon Martin and his family.” He might have gone further; the system of justice in the United States has been failing youths of colour for a long time, locking them away in disproportionate numbers. In Canada, racial disparities also plague criminal justice. The Toronto Star has reported extensively over the past few years on the problem of racial profiling in Canada’s most populous city, calling being profiled a “rite of passage for many black men.” According to Star reports based on contact card data, black men are 3.2 times likelier to be stopped by the police and I.D.’d. The Toronto Police Department is now conducting a study to analyze how pervasive this disparity is. Ottawa police also began collecting data earlier this year in order to understand the problems posed by racial profiling. The study, conducted with Lesley Jacobs, a legal scholar and professor at York University, was spurred by a case brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission by a young black man named Chad Aiken who recorded being pulled over and harassed by police while driving his mother’s Mercedes.

The Zimmerman verdict has brought these imbalances of justice into the public consciousness in a serious way. Those who would have never been part of any discussion about legal matters, are now starting to learn about racial disparities in criminal justice. Many bemoan the tragedy that Zimmerman could kill a young man and still walk free. Others argue that even when we don’t like the result, we have to trust the courts.

One contingent on the left defends the Zimmerman verdict. This group includes Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, who has also advocated that members of the Bush administration be tried for war crimes. He argues, in a column for USA Today, that Zimmerman was “overcharged”—meaning that the evidence against him was not strong enough to justify a conviction.

“Ultimately, it was the case and not the prosecutors that were weak,” he writes. Turley’s words represent an opinion shared by many legal practitioners which is an underpinning principle of democratic criminal justice: the notion that requiring a strict burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is just, even when the outcome may not seem fair. Former United States President Jimmy Carter notably shared this view recently in response to the Zimmerman verdict, on local television in Atlanta: “It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.” Logically this works, but according to many, it's not an acceptable response.

“The verdict wouldn’t have been the same if the roles were switched,” says Toronto criminal defence attorney Loui Dallas, speculating that a black defendant would not have fared so well. “It’s easier to talk about the right to bear arms and the right to due process when you are middle class and established.”

Dallas, who is Macedonian, grew up at Markham Rd. and Eglinton Av. in Toronto, and remembers having himself been harassed by the police on one occasion as a teenager. After he described the incident to a teacher at his school, she told him “it's good the police stopped you, because that’s a bad area.”

This would prove to be a formative experience for Dallas, motivating him to become a teacher in Scarborough and downtown Toronto, and then a lawyer later on. During his years as a teacher he witnessed the kids he taught being profiled based on their socioeconomic status. He tells a story about a kid whose house was robbed, which prompted another teacher to ask: “I wonder what he did to get his house broken into?”

Asked about police profiling in Toronto today, Dallas says that the cops are generally very good, but that there are nonetheless people who are marginalized. “I don’t think its risqué to say that some people are over-policed and some people are under-policed,” he says, “What I see is a lot more young black kids from Jane and Finch get stopped than white kids from Bayview and Eglinton.” Coming back to the Zimmerman verdict, Dallas says that the reasonable doubt created by the pathologist’s report is “the price you pay to live in a democracy.”

Ken Montgomery. Photo by Dan Epstein.

Ken Montgomery, a former prosecutor and current criminal defence attorney in Brooklyn, thinks that the notion that the Zimmerman verdict was just a failure to produce proof is intellectually dishonest. “Most in this system are guilty until found innocent,” says Montgomery. “That’s because most in the system are black or brown and they are not afforded the presumption of innocence that Zimmerman was. Trayvon in his death was not awarded that presumption.” Montgomery is representing the family of a 16-year old boy named Kimani Gray, who was shot and killed by undercover New York police officers earlier this year, in an upcoming civil trial.

Montgomery repeats what many of us already know: mainstream American society has been taught to see a young black man as a threat. He describes the system of racial injustice in American courts as one instigated by people who treat youth of colour differently than white youth. During his years as a prosecutor in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, Montgomery was privy to many cases where these biases played out: “I had to listen to cases from cops who were stating what they saw as facts but who were obviously imputing race from names and addresses.”

Montgomery tells a story about transferring evidence at the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn when he heard a room full of police and his colleagues at the D.A.’s office clapping and cheering. “It turned out they were cheering for the Diallo verdict,” he says. Amadou Diallo was a 23 year black immigrant from Guinea who was shot and killed by New York police officers in 1999. The officers in question were acquitted of all charges.

“I cried,” says Montgomery, remembering that day. For Montgomery, the Zimmerman verdict is just another in a long line of lethal examples of the imbalance in American criminal justice.

Toronto attorney Nader Hasan admitted that, by trade, defence attorneys represent “unpopular clients.” Hasan has worked in the United States and Canada, and notes that the system in Florida may not be so different from Ontario and Canada at large, even despite the lack of the controversial “stand your ground” law. “I don’t think the real problem is the law that exists on the books. The problem is that society treats black defendants differently from white defendants.”

For Hasan, the reality of racial profiling comes up for his clients every day. And to him, there is a systemic denial plaguing the halls of North America's justice systems that is allowing this unfair trend to continue: “Our ability as defence counsel to prove [racial profiling exists] is hampered by the government's failure to collect statistics on prosecutions that tracks the race or ethnicity of the accused.”

Dan Epstein is a writer, photographer and documentarian who covers criminal justice. His recent exhibition, "Defenders," was featured in Toronto's "Contact" photography festival. You can watch video clips from that show here.
 

More on Trayvon Martin and racial profiling:

The George Zimmerman Trial Reminded Me of Who I Am in America

How to Cash in on Trayvon Martin

Lots of People Protested for Trayvon Martin in Los Angeles

For three days straight in Wardak Province, we went on early-morning, joint foot patrols with an American Army platoon and a squad of Afghan National Army soldiers in a valley flush with summer wheat and clover.

As dawn broke over the mountains on each of those successive days, the sun painted the landscape a dazzling hue of gold, making it hard to imagine anything violent could ever happen there.

But we knew it could—and it did, just one day after we left for another military outpost.

On Tuesday at 8:30 AM, about the time soldiers wrap up their patrol around the mud houses and walled compounds of the Sayadabad district, a suicide bomber riding a donkey came close enough to kill three US soldiers, their Afghan interpreter, and wound four Afghan National Army troops. The Taliban quickly took credit for the attack.

While I was initially surprised by the concept of a beast-borne IED (improvised explosive device), the absurdity of these killings seems in keeping with the intensity of this vicious 12-year war, where some of the world’s most rugged and inhospitable terrain is forcing a battle of high and low technology in which drones and donkeys are employed to achieve the same ends.

And this is not the first use of donkey IEDs devised by the Taliban. In April of this year, an Afghan policeman was killed at a checkpoint in Laghman Province by a bomb attached to a donkey. Two years earlier, in April 2010, a donkey carrying explosives blew up at a police post in Kandahar, killing three children and wounding five others. And last August a policeman was killed by a donkey bomb in Ghor Province.

General Abdul Raziq, commander of the Afghan National Army’s 4th Brigade, responsible for Wardak and Logar Provinces, warned his officers at a meeting this morning that the Taliban will resort to almost anything to kill coalition and Afghan troops.

“They place IEDs on donkeys. They are using women with burkas and all kinds of different tactics,” he said. “They are using some that no one has seen before. Previously we had a village elder that called out to get the attention of coalition forces, and as they came closer, he exploded himself. They are using the darkness of the night and mealtime to conduct their attacks. We are facing the enemy all the time. We have to be alert. We have to keep our mind, our eyes, and [our] ears open.”

On a personal level, when my colleague Alex Pena and I heard the news, we wondered if we knew any of the guys who had been lost. Was it the young specialist who wanted to go to nursing school, the sniper on back-to-back deployments, or the sergeant who loved bass fishing?

Sergeant Jongin Choi, a Korean-American from New Jersey told us near the end of one of our patrols, “Now comes the most dangerous part.” He was right. 

I felt a small relief, quickly replaced by guilt, when I learned that the platoon that was attacked was not one of the two we had been with. The loss is obviously no less great, but the deepest mourning shifts, unfortunately, to those who knew them best.

Still there’s a whiplash of cognitive dissonance when news of violence in a time or place disrupts your recollection of its former calm. I remember during those patrols that we had walked passed animals too, joked with boys herding sheep, watched a farmer load tufts of wheat on the back of  a “harmless” donkey.

But that’s just how it existed in the short time we were there. The conflict was still present, just invisible to us. Wardak, an eastern province close to Kabul, is one of the most violent in the country. The main national transportation route, the so-called Highway 1, is a critical supply channel to and from the capital and it is littered with burned out big rigs and fuel tanker trucks destroyed by the Taliban.

Jawed Kohistani, a Kabul-based military/political analyst, told the the Los Angeles Times that the Taliban are using these efforts to “show off their power.”

But the brunt of that “power” has been directed at Afghan security forces. On Monday the Ministry of the Interior announced that more than 2,700 Afghan policemen have been killed in the last four months alone. That compares with a total of 90 coalition forces killed since the beginning of the year. That trend of higher Afghan casualties is likely to continue as they start to assume control of all of the coalition’s former battle space.

Still, as Tuesday’s incident indicates, Afghanistan remains a very dangerous place for American troops as they conduct joint patrols out of remote combat outposts like the one we visited in Wardak Province, preparing their Afghan counterparts to take on the fight without them. 

Watch the soldiers patrol around the mud houses and walled compounds of the Sayadabad District:

All video, text, and photos by Kevin Sites.

Kevin Sites is a rare breed of journalist who thrives in the throes of war. As Yahoo! News’s first war correspondent between 2005 and 2006, he gained notoriety for covering every major conflict across the globe in one year’s time and fostering a technology-driven, one-man-band approach to reporting that helped usher in the “backpack movement.” Kevin is currently traveling through Afghanistan covering the tumultuous country during "fighting season" as international forces like the US pullout. Keep coming back to VICE.com for more dispatches from Kevin.

More on VICE from Kevin Sites:  Afghanistan's Opium Plague

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kevinsites

And visit his personal website: KevinSitesReports.com

As Assad’s troops and the Free Syrian Army continue to battle in the middle of Aleppo and Syrian doctors try to flee the country, Dar al-Shifa’a hospital serves as the only option for birthing mothers. VICE photographer and videographer Robert King recently visited the hospital, where he met and interviewed a 14-year-old boy nurse who helps deliver babies in the war zone. The teenager explained to Robert the challenges he faces from depleting medical supplies to attending to newborns with no electricity.

The eviction of Rushcroft Road. Photo by Jake Lewis.

Last week, police and bailiffs descended on Brixton to evict a community of squatters. However, when they arrived on Rushcroft Road and poured through the six buildings owned by Lambeth Local Authority, they found the properties empty and abandoned. “Most of the people left over the weekend,” explained one resident, hurriedly loading their belongings into a van a few hours before the eviction teams arrived. “They were scared they might have a another ‘Clifton Mansions' on their hands.”

Located on nearby Coldharbour Lane, Clifton Mansions used to be one of London’s most famous squats. Once derelict council property, squatters first occupied its 22 flats in the 1990s, turning them into a de-facto cultural centre that apparently provided the artist Jeremy Deller and Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan with temporary shelter. Condemned by the council for “anti-social behaviour” and sold off to a private company, ten vanloads of police assisted in evicting its residents in July 2011. The building was converted into luxury apartments, some of which are currently fetching rents of £535 per week.

Today, the memory of this – as well as the chaos of Clifton Mansions’ “leaving party” – has ostensibly driven out many of Rushcroft’s residents before the death knell. Clifton Mansions’ final bash had been intended as a swansong to its legacy. What unfolded, however, was an over-attended party that descended into gate-crashers urinating from the roof and others attempting to strip the building of valuable copper piping. One man was also assaulted and robbed by strangers.

The Clifton Mansions leaving party. Photo via urban75.com/brixtonbuzz.com.

In a written press release, Lambeth’s cabinet for housing councillor Peter Robbins was unapologetic about evicting the residents of Ruschcroft Road.
 "We are taking this action because it is unfair on the thousands of residents in need of housing in Lambeth that a small minority are unlawfully squatting in six mansion blocks on Rushcroft Road and not paying any rent or council tax,” he said.

In response, protesters began gathering on Rushcroft Road at 7AM, claiming that Lambeth’s motivations lay elsewhere. “The council has already had property guardians living in some of the flats for the last three or four months,” said one ex-resident, noting that during the period between the evictions of Clifton Mansions and its subsequent renovation, property guardians – custodians who waive tenancy rights in favour of cheap “rent” in properties that frequently contravene housing legislation – were also installed to prevent squatters reoccupying the property. “There wouldn’t be so much resistance to this move if these houses were all being returned to social housing stock,” suggested another protester. “But they’re not. They’re going to be sold as million-pound flats.”

Marginally outnumbered, the protesters doggedly attempted to prevent bailiffs from entering the designated properties with no success. By law, bailiffs are permitted to use reasonable force against householders attempting to protect their goods. On this occasion, they seemed violent. When approached about this subject, police dithered, maintaining that they were preventing a breach of the peace. Nonetheless, protesters defied the council’s decision by blocking entrances and lighting fires. Conspicuously absent were the snatch squads and riot police that have become regular features of demonstrations in London. Instead, a mixture of police and community support officers confidently escorted bailiffs from property to property, unfazed by the protesters’ resistance and responding to hecklers with opinions including: “We have a law in this country that if you own something you can do whatever you want with it.” And, “You’ve had a long time to organise something, is this all you can come up with?”

Bailiffs break down the barricades at the Rushcroft Road evictions. Photo by Jake Lewis.

Indeed, the question of what to do with Rushcroft Road has concerned Lambeth for years. It bought the flats in 1975 with a view to demolishing them as part of the abandoned “Barrier Block” regeneration scheme – in which plans were made to erect more than a dozen 50-storey blocks of flats to soundproof the noise caused by a planned flyover through the centre of Brixton. Today, the only extant part of the scheme is the long, sloping, brutalist housing block, Southwyck House. Following the scheme’s abandonment, the flats on Rushcroft Road were occupied by squatters and subsequently designated as “short-life” homes by the council, in which its tenants were expected to pay little or no rent while the authority deliberated over a long-term decision. Until this week, the six blocks on Rushcroft still hosted a mixture of council tenancy and short-life dwellings, as well as the squats that became prominent after 2000.

In April, Simon Childs reported for the Guardian noting that Lambeth is also “[the] last borough to deal with its short-life portfolio, which peaked with about 1,200 properties. It is now looking to sell off its remaining 50 homes. At the end of last year, Lambeth council committed to bringing its existing council housing stock up to the Decent Homes Standard. However, with only £450m raised there is a £56m shortfall.”

The need to refurbish council housing elsewhere in its jurisdiction means that, from a council perspective, the sale of three of its six properties on Rushcroft Road for an estimated £5.5 million is not without reason. Since 2010, Lambeth council has also had its local authority budget cut by 45 percent as part of government austerity measures, so its commitment to returning the remaining three blocks on Rushcroft Road to social rent isn't without its merits. However, the positive impact of providing more council housing is undermined by the fact that, in doing so, they will make other people homeless. Julian Hall, a spokesperson for the campaign group Lambeth United Housing Co-Op, is concerned.

“There does not appear to have been any attempt at reaching a settlement with the residents,” he says. “Irrespective of their legal status as squatters or council tenants, there are some people who have lived at Rushcroft for over 30 years but have not been provided a ‘plan B’. No one will deny that councils are challenged by budget cuts, but Lambeth has reserve funds, so to be purging long-term communities is not a good precedent to be setting.”

Southwyck House. Photo by Matt Brown.

No spokesperson from Lambeth council was available for comment, but a recent document published on its website maintains it has offered advice and assistance to Rushcroft Road’s residents in finding accommodation. Given that there are 16,729 households currently awaiting social housing in Lambeth, the nature of the assistance offered to the 70 evictees is uncertain. Additionally, benefit caps and the Bedroom Tax are likely to exclude some from accessing essential welfare. Eviction plans are also in place for nearby Carlton Mansions, a housing co-op that the council has recently assessed as being unsafe due to a fire hazard, despite having largely ignored the property since it was first occupied in the 1970s, fuelling suspicions of a local land grab.

Regardless, Lambeth is not an isolated example in the UK’s housing crisis. In London, one in ten families are awaiting social housing; in England and Wales, the same figure stands at one in 12. As a result, many households have been forced into the private sector, which has increased 86 percent in the last three years, while others face homelessness, which has risen 26 percent in the last two years. Underpinning this problem is the UK’s lack of affordable housing. Currently, the average British salary is £26,500. Comparatively, the average house price is £238,976 – nine times more than most people will earn in a year. In the last decade, house building has also slumped.

To remedy this, the government has committed to building 170,000 new affordable homes by 2015, which is a sharp increase in construction but insufficient in addressing the one million homes needed by 2021 if the housing shortfall is to be solved. Elsewhere, government-funded financial products aimed at first-time buyers – such as the five percent mortgage – are only likely to burden households with long-term debt, and represent a trend of public money being used to fund private ownership.

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who owns £10 billion pounds' worth of property in London, including Harrods and the Shard. Photo via Doha Stadium Plus Qatar.

One major factor in the lack of affordable housing in the UK is that house prices have risen due to property speculation in London from overseas, wealthy investors attracted by the lucrative benefits offered to foreign buyers, including exemption from capital gains tax, inheritance tax and stamp duty. According to "London For Sale", a report carried out by the Smith Institute, 60 percent of new property sold in London last year was bought by foreign buyers. In 2011, overseas investors spent £5.2 billion purchasing London addresses – a figure that exceeded even the budget for affordable homes in the same year.

As such, Lambeth’s sale of one of its most valuable assets is consistent with the global narrative of austerity seen in Greece, Italy, Spain and even the UK. By now, it should be a familiar story, in which the 2008 financial crash and the 2010 Eurocrisis were apparently not caused by the failure of free market economics, but by the profligacy of government spending, which therefore must be ruthlessly cut in order to save us all. And if that means the stripping of vital public assets, such as the Royal Mail and the NHS – as well as scrapping nuisances, like legal aid for immigrants – then all the better.

In the UK, what this narrative conveniently omits is that the spending and borrowing of Labour under Brown and Blair was broadly consistent with the aims and thresholds set by the previous run of Conservative Governments. Nonetheless, when even Labour leader Ed Miliband has indicated that voters should not expect any U-turns on austerity if Labour win the 2015 general election, it seems there are few political institutions left where this myth is not treated as a given.

Another shot from the leaving party at Clifton Mansions. Photo via urban75.com/brixtonbuzz.com.

One such place, of course, was Rushcroft Road. Indeed, it’s not difficult to make the wider connection between these evictions and a broader opposition to anyone deemed to be challenging the nature of property ownership. Last year, Westminster passed legislation banning squatting in residential property. "Squatters who break the law [must] receive a proper punishment,” declared prisons minister Crispin Blunt, in a consultation published before the ban in 2010. “There are avenues open to those that are genuinely destitute which do not involve occupying somebody else's property."

But are those avenues effective? Not only is it extremely difficult to access social housing, but a report by the Resolution Foundation suggests that rent is now unaffordable for two thirds of families on lower incomes. A House of Commons select committee report on the housing crisis published last week highlighted plans to tackle bad landlords and letting agency fees, but not rent control. This weekend, the Guardian’s Patrick Collinson suggested that this is due to the Conservative Party’s concerns that imposing such controls would cause landlords to spend less money maintaining their properties. On a more basic level, it also seems to indicate the extent to which the party is devoted to protecting the rights of property owners over those of their tenants, despite the critical circumstances. 

When even councils with a Labour majority, such as Lambeth, are in agreement with this, it seems that the confidence with which the police and bailiffs evicted the residents of Rushcroft Road was not just a matter of tactical conduct, but a symptom of the extent to which the ideology of austerity is now an unquestionable part of mainstream politics – a politics that has now begun dedicating itself to the forcible clearance of centres of opposition.

Follow Huw on Twitter: @HuwNesbitt

More on London's housing crisis:

Angry Squatters and Burning Barricades Aren't Halting the Yuppification of Brixton

Are Yuppies Ruining London?

Lambeth Council Are Kicking People Out of Their Homes

The Future of London

Photos by Petra Collins & Arvida Byström

More from VICE's 2013 Photo Issue:

The English Way

Manic Botanic

Place of the Inside Out

An eccentric gentleman using his right to free speech to dress up as internet porn itself. via WikiCommons.

Some Conservative MP over in Winnipeg named Joy Smith—a woman with approximately zero understanding of how the internet works—is proposing that the Canadian government install a massive filter to block out pornography unless a user “opts in” to see boobies and dicks flashing all over their MacBook. While this may seem like a good idea to four or five people out there, who truly believe that the internet can be regulated in such a way, this kind of proposal is indicative of a widespread misunderstanding of the internet and, worse still, a deep-seated desire to censor it dramatically.

Joy needs to use her powers of determination to Google the results of David Cameron’s so called “war on internet porn” over there in the UK. One would imagine that David sat down with a team of advisors and internet security experts who told him, “What are you talking about?” “How would we do that?” and “No.” While David came out against internet porn in a dramatic fashion, saying that it was “corroding childhood,” the idea that porn at large could be censored out is a dizzyingly absurd idea.

In short, it’s kinda too late to start pulling the porn out of our interweb tubes. It’s been estimated that as little as 4% and as much as 37% of the internet is made up of porn. And this, of course, presents some tricky semantic issues. Is erotic fiction porn? Is an animated GIF of a butt, porn? David Cameron also ran into trouble from people who suggested that sexual health sites would get caught up in his massive porn filter.

Plus, if we start collecting the names of everyone who wants to opt-in to porn viewing, we are allowing the government to have a database of everyone who wants to watch a little bit of sex on their computer screen. What could possibly go wrong there? If the Conservative government is going to attack Justin Trudeau for being a drama teacher, what would they do if someone “leaked” information that he also enjoyed a little bit of Spankwire and LobsterTube after his hippie-dippie yoga session? And vice-versa. What would a Liberal or NDP candidate do with the information that Stephen Harper willingly checked out some titty-flicks in his spare time? It’s madness. David Cameron also admitted that by installing such a policy in his nation’s lawbooks, husbands and wives would have to disclose to their spouses (if they were keeping it a secret in the first place) that they were porn watchers.

I would like to think that David Cameron and Joy Smith have their hearts in the right place. Child exploitation is an incredibly serious issue and the way it is policed online certainly has room for improvement. On top of that, I certainly do not believe the internet should be fully unregulated. There are a lot of terrible things happening online right now, and those terrible things need to be policed. In December of last year, I reported on a network of men blackmailing young women to death on the internet. And that still exists. The suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons earlier this year reminded us how a horribly traumatic sexual assault can be exponentially amplified by online harassment. In response, the government of Nova Scotia is setting up an investigative cyberbullying task force that will hopefully prevent and properly prosecute future harassment crimes that live online. Likewise, Twitter is introducing a Microsoft-built (uh oh) technology called PhotoDNA that will help identify when child abuse pictures are posted. That’s a great thing, and these are the kinds of precise, strategic actions our governments should be taking.

Legal porn, on the other hand, is a chaotic force that we should not be wasting our time trying to contain. The first time I saw internet porn was because of the 90s children’s show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? In the episode that introduced me to porn, the host of the game show asked what the website of the president was, during the Bill Clinton era. Given that the internet was a flashy new invention at the time, a question like this was actually somewhat difficult for a child to answer. The options included the correct answer (whitehouse.gov) and a fake one (bubba.com). Bubba was, of course, the codename for the president of the time. Even though the answer was obviously not bubba.com, as a curious nine or ten year old with an internet connection, I wanted to see what was on Bubba anyway. As the site loaded through my painfully slow dial-up connection, I remember seeing boobs. Very clearly. Even then, I was shocked that PBS had officially shown me my first porn site—but I wasn’t necessarily mad about it. Likewise, there were the Playboy magazines that would always appear in the garbage cans at my elementary school, or the one kid in my class who found his dad’s favourite porn VHS, taped under the pool table in his basement. Porn is part of society, and for a lot of kids, it’s part of growing up. Even if they’re not searching it out. That may not be something to be proud of, but it’s also not necessarily something we need to spend mass amounts of public resources trying to contain.

The internet is a massively confusing and scary place for a lot of people. It’s growing up faster than most would have expected, and it is certainly providing new avenues for sexual predators to act out on their sick impulses. But, to create a governmental registry of porn watchers is a poor, blanket approach to a very specific problem. People should be concerned anytime the government proposes a massive infrastructure change to the internet, because we know from SOPA and all the other iterations of it that they don’t really know what they’re talking about. We already know the internet is being completely surveilled by our governments, so what more do they want? Hopefully, instead of these catch-all proposals for internet censorship, we will see more focused attempts to weed out the child abusers and sexual predators online. That’s what the internet needs right now. Not more moralistic politicians trying to remove all the consenting adult cocks and butts from the interweb.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

More on internet porn:

Tumblr Is Making its Porn Disappear

I Watched James Deen Make the First Ever Google Glass Porn

SPLA soldiers in South Sudan. Photo via

South Sudan celebrated its second birthday earlier this month. But festivities for the anniversary of its independence were quiet, presumably because there was little to be festive about. The world's youngest country is currently embroiled in a number of crises, and recently came fourth in Business Insider's list of the world's top 25 failed states, achieving the worst possible scores when it came to foreign intervention, group grievances, and the status of refugees.

Since splitting from Sudan after two brutal civil wars that, added up, lasted nearly 40 years, South Sudan still doesn’t seem to have been able to find much in the way of stability. In fact, the news broke yesterday that President Salva Kiir Mayardit had sacked his entire cabinet, a move that doesn't exactly indicate a stable political system and one thought to be the result of a power struggle between Mayardit and his political rival, Vice President Riek Machar.

The announcement has prompted concerns that the president could start applying authoritarian rule to his country, and that elections, scheduled for 2015, might not happen. This latest political crisis is wedded and adds to the dire situation in Jonglei, South Sudan's largest state, where violence has caused food shortages and the displacement of thousands of refugees. It's threatening to spiral into a major humanitarian crisis, but civil war and social unrest in Syria and Egypt has caused South Sudan's problems to be largely overlooked by the world's media.

The chief source of the trouble in South Sudan is rebel leader David Yau Yau. Originally an aspiring politician who ran in the 2010 local government elections, he turned out to be somewhat of a sore loser when he failed to win his seat, his frustration manifesting itself in the launching of a rebellion against the government in May of 2010.

Yau Yau's insurgency consisted of arming youths from the Murle tribe—of which he is a member—and letting them loose on government forces and any civilians unlucky enough to find themselves caught in the middle. After a year or so of violence, the new government of South Sudan managed to broker a ceasefire.

President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayadit. Photo via

However, the peace and quiet only lasted another year before it was announced that the ever-antsy Yau Yau had defected to the north and was going to start causing trouble again. In April of last year he resumed his arming of youths from Jonglei state, specifically Pibor county, and carried out attacks on the South Sudanese army (SPLA), foreign organizations, and civilians.

The government of South Sudan alleges that he has been doing so with support from Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Forces from the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) have spotted suspicious aircraft dropping supplies into the jungle and the Small Arms Survey found weapons and ammunition taken from defectors of his army to be the same as those used by the Sudanese Army and other Sudanese-supported insurgent groups.

The conflict rages on, with estimates gauging that between 4,000 to 6,000 Murle youths have joined Yau Yau or used weapons supplied by him. And, to make matters worse, the Lou Nuer tribe—a long-term rival of the Murle—has mobilized in large numbers, comprising a third side in the fighting that has clashed with both Yau Yau's army and South Sudan's security forces.

Of course, all this fighting doesn't bode well for the country's civilian population. I spoke to Ariane Quentier of UNMISS about the current situation. “We are very alarmed and concerned by the reports that we’re getting,” she told me. “We already have troops down there, and we're reinforcing our presence in that area with more troops to make sure that the bases are properly protected.”

A woman registering with UNHCR at the Kaya refugee camp in Upper Nile State, South Sudan. Photo courtesy of UNHCR/T. Irwin

As peacekeepers, the UN obviously isn't one of the combative sides, but I asked Quentier if any UN personnel had been wounded during the conflict. “We’ve had two attacks," she told me. "One was a helicopter being shot down, four killed. The other was an Indian convoy being attacked in an ambush where we had 12 people killed—five Indian peacekeepers and seven civilians.” She went on to tell me that the main problem the UN is facing is that they don't know exactly where fighting is taking place.

"Everyone agrees that there is a deteriorating crisis—that’s why we’re sending more people in—but we just don’t know exactly what’s going on," Quentier told me. "The main problem we’re having to deal with is a lack of helicopters. Without them we can’t get around and see who’s moving where.”

Jonglei state is huge and has very few roads, making it pretty inaccessible to those who don't know the area well or, in the UN's case, don't have a fleet of helicopters at their disposal. Unsurprisingly, the information that they have been able to gather isn't great. Reports state that civilian property has been looted and torched, and facilities like schools and health clinics have been burned down or occupied by armed forces.

This lack of information and the security problems that it presents has also made things difficult for humanitarian groups operating in the area. The UNHCR has a presence in South Sudan, but it has largely been confined to dealing with refugees escaping into South Sudan from conflicts in neighbouring countries. Tim Irwin, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, told me, “We have a presence in Jonglei, but it’s very much on the fringes as it’s not really an area that you can go into. These areas are very tough to reach—especially at the moment, as it’s the rainy season in South Sudan so many areas of the country are cut off by flooding.”

The Kaya refugee camp in Upper Nile State. Photo courtesy of UNHCR/T. Irwin

The primary source of humanitarian aid in Jonglei has come from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs (OCHA). I spoke to OCHA’s Michelle Delaney about the crisis. “The UN estimates that over 100,000 people have been affected by the recent wave of violence, which started in March 2013," she told me. "Of that number, about 23,000 people have fled to the neighboring countries of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda, where humanitarian assistance is also being provided.”

Although OCHA hasn't come under attack yet, some humanitarian groups have, with facilities being looted and burned and reports from the UN that trucks carrying aid have been fired at by armed groups. Delaney told me, “The humanitarian community is gravely concerned about the situation in Jonglei State. Even without the current hostilities, people in Jonglei State are some of the most vulnerable in the country. Civilians in Pibor County have already experienced several cycles of violence. This was exacerbated by extensive flooding across Jonglei in September 2012, which resulted in a largely failed harvest, destruction of property, and loss of cattle. These cycles of crises have likely reduced the coping capacity of those who are currently displaced.”

Medecins Sans Frontieres—the humanitarian aid organization that provides medical assistance, along with other services, to war-torn regions—has also reported that they have treated over 4,000 people since the beginning of this year and are struggling to reach the hundreds of thousands who have fled into the bush, afraid to come to the towns for fear of being exposed to more violence.

A girl at a school in the Kaya refugee camp. (Photo courtesy of UNHCR/T. Irwin)

The UN and the government of South Sudan have called for an end to the violence in Jonglei, but so far Yau Yau has ignored them, and the continued movements and clashes between his forces, security forces, and the Lou Nuer tribe are worrying.

Another issue is that the South Sudanese public are wary of their government's security forces, which is understandable considering the SPLA have a range of documented atrocities and human rights violations under their belt. Everybody seems to be fighting everybody else, and the only people who aren't fighting don't trust those who are supposed to be looking out for them. So, two years into its independence, there does seem to be serious cause for concern in South Sudan.

Quentier agreed: “It’s true that it has been a very hard two years, but when you have to start your life under these conditions—and with this sort of instability—it’s never easy. There has been progress in the sense that the state has stayed together, that we are working on the rule of law. Slowly but surely the state is advancing and establishing its authority. Unfortunately, the situation in Jonglei is worrying. It’s the biggest state, so what happens in Jonglei tends to reflect what happens in the rest of South Sudan. If everything’s fine in Jonglei, everything else is fine.”

For now, the world’s youngest country must continue to falteringly find its feet, even if the rest of the world seems to have largely forgotten about it. 

Follow Jack on Twitter: @JBazzler

More from South Sudan and its neighbours to the north:

Darfur’s Tribes are Killing Each Other Over Gold and Water

WATCH: Sudan's Forgotten Warriors

Inside Sudan

CODA is a studio for architectural and urban research and design established by Caroline O´Donnell in New York in 2008, and now based in Ithaca, NY. Caroline is currently the Richard Meier Professor at Cornell University and has many awards and competitions under her belt. Along with a team of Cornell University architecture students, teaching associates, and alumni, she recently entered the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, an annual series of competitions that gives emerging architects an opportunity to build projects conceived for PS1's space in Long Island City, Queens.

CODA's winning design, Party Wall, provides visitors with a unique and refreshing experience. It's a large structure that creates shade for visitors, as well as cooling pools and floating mist. VICE and Ray-Ban had the opportunity to meet Caroline and her team while documenting the construction of Party Wall for the Ray-Ban Envision Series, an event and video series that features individuals who have found their purpose in life and stay true to their vision.