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VICE Vs Video Games: If a Game Is Great, Who Cares if It’s Short?

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Characters from 'The Order: 1886'

The Order: 1886 is beatable in an afternoon. I can confirm that, now that its review embargo has lifted. The new, much-heralded PlayStation 4 exclusive from Californian studio Ready at Dawn will take up five to six hours of your time, assuming you repeat some of its cruel quick time event sequences (don't worry—they play the same every time) or fall under the gunfire of enemy NPCs (there's a shootout in a burning warehouse, fairly late on, that left me floored a couple of times). But if you've played a modern third-person cover shooter before—Gears of War, Uncharted, Binary Domain, Vanquish, Bulletstorm, Army of Two, Spec Ops: The Line, recent Resident Evils—you'll cruise right on through.

Drop-dead gorgeous visually, The Order: 1886 makes the most of its powerful platform in that respect, and its mythology-meets-science story and setting resonate with terrific potential. Its grimy London environments, from blood-smeared hospital wards to filthy Underground tunnels and the cobbles of a dilapidated Whitechapel, bounce from the screen. And it's well acted, too—Steve West brings a Mark Strong-like tone of upturned authority to the lead protagonist, Galahad, and Frederik Hamel has a ball hamming it up as French-American colleague-turned-pursuer the Marquis de Lafayette.

The steampunk-inspired alternative-timeline Victoriana atmosphere is inviting, indeed—but the whole thing's over long before a number of narrative strands are tidied. It's a pretty ballsy—or, more accurately, entirely naïve—move given there's no certainty of a sequel, and it's greatly disappointing that Ready at Dawn didn't do more to make The Order entirely self-contained. A memorable story would have served it well, as its gameplay is certainly nothing to slap a seal of approval on. Shoot, duck, reload, repeat—save for the brief stealth sections with fairly poorly implemented cover, and a single instance of touchpad deployment, where a Morse code message is sent to a patrolling airship via a series of holds and pokes.

To me, it doesn't matter if a game is short so long as it's good. I don't agree with this idea of more gameplay hours representing better value for money, or that we, as gamers, are owed a certain amount of playtime for every pound we put in. The Order: 1886 isn't a great game. It's OK, perfunctorily engaging for a fleeting period, familiar to handle and possessing a few neat twists (and a couple of telegraphed ones) as it makes its way to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Would I pay $60 for it, or whatever retailers are asking for? Hell no. Halve it, and we'll talk. Wait for the sales, people. But there are plenty of other short games that I have loved, and even revisited for further playthroughs.

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'Journey' is over in two hours, and perfect

This is no definitive list of brilliant games that won't eat up your every waking hour, but off the top of my head Journey, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and the aforementioned, Platinum-developed bullet-hell-goes-Gears-of-War blast of Vanquish stand out as superb examples of games that get in, deliver maximum bang for moderate buck, and get out again before the sweat's soaked into your pants. I've played all three more than once. I'm still picking my way through the charming Wii U exclusive Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and I'm reliably informed that's not a slog—I've put in maybe five hours so far, and I'm only a handful of puzzles from the end (albeit with a few of those diamonds yet to discover).

There's no equation for producing a perfect time-in-versus-money-out gaming experience. But I do know that, for me, life's cluttered with family, work, and other responsibilities enough that devoting substantial time to any single game really requires effort. It can actually be an off-putting factor for me if a game is said to be full of hours-consuming content. I've had BioWare's critically acclaimed Dragon Age: Inquisition since it launched, but reports that it takes a good ten hours to even begin to reveal its sweetest charms is proving an obstacle. I'm slowly playing my way into Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on the 3DS, but when you've an hour-plus train journey of a morning, portable gaming becomes an essential pastime. That's a game bulging with possibilities, and I'm only just beginning to scratch at its potential six or so hours in.

Perhaps it's a generational thing, though. Fellow 30-somethings will remember completing games in a single sitting, the classic platformers of the 1990s. Maybe not Mario games, but certainly Sonic's top titles—you could easily wiz through the second game in that series inside an hour once you'd had it a while. It's no surprise that these retro games comprise the bedrock of competitive speed-running, even before their codes are exploited for cheat routes through proceedings.

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The Marquis de Lafayette provides the few laughs in 'The Order: 1886'

Gamers who grew up during the PlayStation 2's period of industry dominance are used to deeper time sinks: Grand Theft Auto III was a 20-hour commitment, and Clover Studio's magical Okami necessitated double that, at least. Neither wasted a second of their epic durations, either, which reinforces my argument that, so long as a game does everything it needs to, exactly how long it takes to do so really shouldn't matter.

The Order: 1886 does not achieve everything it should in its six-hour runtime. The criticism it's received pre-release, regarding its length, is entirely justified. But not because the hours are so few—more because they're so poorly used. Ready at Dawn had the chance to lay down a powerful precedent-setter for a new, eighth-console-generation franchise. The world they've built, and the characters they've created, are great. The story they've attempted to tell, though, is completely shot, a mess of open-ended arcs and unrealized redemption. It aims for Naughty Dog-style success: immediate gameplay matched with emotionally engaging drama. It succeeds as only an undeniably attractive but wholly hollow interpretation of that model.

Its fictional takes on real-life figures incorporates the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla, who provides The Order's Knights with an array of gadgets and (some really quite brilliant) weaponry, and plays a big role in the game's underwhelming climax. He was in America in the 1886 that history documents, and is said to have called that winter a time of "terrible headaches and bitter tears." Perhaps he'd experienced a vision of future gaming framing his brilliance in such a disappointing manner.

Follow Mike on Twitter.


Why Is Lil Wayne Suing Cash Money?

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Why Is Lil Wayne Suing Cash Money?

This Guy from Edinburgh's Estates Made a 'Real-Life Trainspotting' About His Youth

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Garry Anthony Fraser has encountered more death and pain in his lifetime than most of us would in ten of our own. During the 80s, when Garry was growing up in Muirhouse, an estate north of Edinburgh, heroin and AIDS were rampant, with a huge 51 percent of the local population testing positive for HIV.

Brought up around drugs, death, crime, and a sense of hopelessness, Garry found himself in trouble from a very early age. With parents who couldn't handle him, he spent eight years of his young life moving through a staggering 36 care homes. He suffered both physical and sexual abuse in many of those, can't keep track of how many friends he lost to drugs and violence, and ended up with a crippling crack addiction.

Now drug- and crime-free, Garry is a BAFTA and MTV Award-winning director. Dubbed the "documentary version of Trainspotting," last year's Everybody's Child is a document of Garry coming to terms with his past, a film teeming with pain, misery, and heartache. Yet it's Garry himself—a determined, impassioned person who clearly believes in the transformative power of art—who gives the documentary its bite and drive.

Keen to learn more about his life, I recently caught up with Garry.

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Garry on location

VICE: What are your earliest memories of growing up in Muirhouse?
Garry Anthony Fraser: Oh fuck, I don't know. Growing up there, everything was normal—drug dealing was normal, police brutality was normal, getting battered off the police every week... I just thought that was normal. It wasn't until I went to college that I started to realize that not everybody had been stabbed, lost people. I grew up among death—I was accustomed to death. Once you're accustomed to death it gives you another outlook on life, you know?

I grew up expecting that my life was jail. I didn't think anything else. I thought it was jail. I thought that life was set out for me. Muirhouse was an area that was completely cut off, and I don't think the government gave a fuck if anyone died there.

When did you realize what AIDS was and the impact it was having on your community?
I heard about it growing up, so every time I was in jail or young offenders or secure units people would say, "AIDS—blah, blah, blah," and they had all these pejorative terms for AIDS, so I kind of knew the stigma. It flew around, but it wasn't until I went to college and my addiction worker, Steph, told me about the amount of deaths from it that I realized it was wrong—that something needed to be done.

The statistics of people testing HIV-positive in Muirhouse during that period are terrifying.
It was madness. If you were caught with a needle, that was essentially like being caught with heroin, so everybody started sharing needles. You had 30 people in one house sharing a single needle. That's why the epidemic happened—why all the shooting galleries started up.

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The trailer for 'Everybody's Child'

One thing that really stuck with me was a scene where you meet up with an old, HIV-positive friend who recalls when someone asked him to inject them with his blood so that, once they were infected, they could be eligible for a higher Disability Living Allowance. That was obviously very sad and upsetting, but it seemed to represent a complete sense of hopelessness and lack of options for people at the time.
It was absolute despair. It wasn't even just Muirhouse, either. I can't believe that I've suffered with post-traumatic stress, and I think a lot of these kids growing up now are suffering from PTS, but they're not getting diagnosed with it. Violence becomes their only achievement in life... drug dealing... all they think about is the money, but not the sentences. There's a system set-up designed for people like me to fail: jail, the legal system, the addiction services... none of them are there to help; they're all there to keep us down.

When did drugs start to become a part of your life?
When I was about 11. I just started selling acid, speed, hash—whatever I could get my hands on. At 14, 15 I was in secure units—I was locked up with lifers, rapists... all that shit since I was 10-years-old. That criminal mentality seeped into my brain. When I came out at 16, I thought, 'Fuck it: it's a gangster's life, it's a gangster's death, that's what I am.' Once Garry J [Garry's son] was born, that was a big change—I just knew that something had to change, otherwise I'd be doing a lifer.

You ended up dealing for the Turkish Mafia. How did that happen?
I was dealing smack up here and it was piss—it was cut to fuck. A guy who's dead now—and who went to jail for 15 years—was pure gangster, and he took me down to London to introduce me. I then started popping up on people's radars after that. I kind of thought that that was my destiny—jumping around in a BMW. But it was all fake; it was insecurities, but I didn't know that at the time.

You then got a pretty heavy habit yourself?
If I'd have gone back down to London with a habit like that—if they'd have known—they'd have just taken me out of the game. You can't have habits with these guys—you're not supposed to touch anything. I hid that well when I was down there.

So how did that all stop?
September 11. I was sitting in my house, counting loads of money, and then looked at the news and those planes going into the towers. From then on the heroin route just completely dried up. That was it: the price of heroin shot through the roof for about five months, because whoever was controlling it stopped the supply. That stopped my dealings going down to London with the Turkish people, then at about 25 a few things started happening that I can't really say, and I thought, 'I'm going to get killed soon, I can feel it.' When Garry J was born the dealing stopped because I didn't want the drug squad coming. That happened a couple of times, the armed response and the drug squad busting the house—but I wasn't dealing, and I was trying to get on a script. That's when I became a fully-fledged prescription junkie.

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Garry in Muirhouse

Which is a very tough cycle to break in itself.
The whole system is rigged, top-to-bottom. The drug companies are the biggest drug dealers out there. I've been on valium, dihydrocodeine, methadone—even that becomes tiring when you're going to a chemist every day and not making any money. I was writing while on them. I passed my HND at college on them. I can barely remember a fucking day of college. Obviously I passed having not had any schooling, and that gave me a sense of identity. My first film, In for Life, got an MTV Award, and I was going to London and stuff, and I thought, 'Yeah, I like this lifestyle. This is me.' Education saved my life.

Why did you decide to make Everybody's Child?
I got a video called Heroin, a three-part TV documentary from 1986. I'd grown up with the guys in the film, and unbeknown to me at the time most of them had AIDS. It wasn't until I got to the end of the documentary that i thought, 'Fuck—nobody knew they had AIDS in the documentary, they were just talking about heroin addiction.'

I wondered if I could do a follow up—that was my initial idea. And because I feel I have a moral duty when I make films, I thought, 'That's something close to my heart.' So, initially, I wanted to make a documentary about why Muirhouse was the AIDS capital of Europe, basically. I didn't want to put my life in there initially because, as a director, I thought, 'Save your stuff for drama, Garry. Don't give all of this away at once.' Although, with the doc I couldn't go into it with half a heart, so once I realized what I had to take on I said, "Fuck it, let's do it."

In a bizarre way, it seems like the difficulties you faced when you were younger have almost now benefitted you, acting as creative fuel for your art.
Yeah, absolutely. I still think we live in a very stereotypical society, so when you have someone like me who is intelligent and creative, it says to society, "Oh, I didn't realize someone from Muirhouse could be like that." I've used my creativity to survive since I was 14, so hopefully that transcends. Looking back on all the gang stuff and that, I'm not bound by masculinity any more. A lot of my friends from my past are still trapped in a macho world, and they'll never be able to break out of it because they can't talk about feelings. I write poetry every day, so I get to vent anger, frustration, all that stuff.

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Making the film, did you ever want to look up people who you'd hurt or attacked in your more violent, criminal days?
I never spoke to any criminals in the film because my biggest fear was sticking someone up. There would have been so much stuff that would have been so easy to incriminate myself with—I needed to be careful about that. The guys who had the violence done to them? I don't know. I should be sitting here thinking that I feel sorry for them, but, at the end of the day, they were going to do me; it was a dog-eat-dog world, it was do or be done.

That sounds horrible looking back on it now, because that's not my attitude to life, but that was my psychology back then—everything I've done to them I've had done to me. I've met people who I've given scars to who thought the film was great. That's surreal, because I do feel guilty if I see someone who I've done injuries to. What can I do about it now? I've made amends; I work with children to try and show them that there's an alternative.

So is Muirhouse doing a little better these days?
I don't know about doing well—they've got the highest fucking crime rate in Scotland. The smack's out of the way a little bit, but legal highs are fucking people up. Not just in Muirhouse, either, but, again, the government just cut these poor areas off, so if people are left to defend for themselves there is no employability, there is no industry—it's just slums; slums created by rich people. The area is still ghetto, but the difference now between the have and the have nots is massive—you've got one house with three BMWs and people working, then two houses down you've got poverty. I've been working with the violence reduction unit; I've made films on the dangers of knife crimes. I've even been working with the police, which is very weird.

How has the police's role in the area changed compared to when you were younger?
I don't know. There's cameras everywhere now so they can't get away with battering people any more—that's subsided. I'm not really in that world any more so I can't really speak on stuff like that. If I'm not involved in it then I'm not educated in it.

How did you and Irvine Welsh get to know one another and start working together?
I was on Twitter and I needed source material for a new film, and I thought, 'Fuck it, I'll ask Irvine Welsh, he's from Muirhouse, he might understand.' I messaged him and asked him for one of his short stories to turn into a film, and he said, "Yeah, of course." Irvine's now coming on as an executive producer for my next films. I met him in Edinburgh and he gave me a pile of signed books to give to the kids in my social enterprise. I don't think anyone like myself has ever taken on Irvine's work before; when someone like Danny Boyle takes on this work he has to research it all, but I know it—it's my life. So being able to bring that to life, I can't wait. It's called State of the Party. This is going to be my next step before my feature drama, Tolerance, which is my signature piece, due in 2016.

Garry is currently looking for investors and like-minded people to get involved with his social enterprise, "to bring a voice to the voiceless through art." If you're interested you can get in touch through www.wideomedia.org.

Everybody's Child is available to buy and download through iTunes.

Follow Daniel on Twitter.

NDP Vows to Fight Anti-Terror Bill as Conservatives Limit Debate

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NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has vowed to oppose sweeping new powers for law enforcement. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The opposition New Democrats are gearing up for a bare-knuckle fight on the Conservatives' new anti-terrorism bill, as Justin Trudeau's Liberals opt to forgo the battle.

Bill C-51 has been decried as a massive increase in power for Canada's main spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), without any corresponding oversight. It, along with a slew of other changes pushed by the Harper government, promises to revolutionize how Canada's law enforcement agencies investigate threats, stop plots, and, perhaps most worryingly, how they surveil and deal with protesters and activist groups.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair told reporters on Wednesday that his party is willing to pull out all the stops to prevent the bill from becoming law unless it undergoes some serious changes. In the House of Commons later that day, he offered a fiery salvo against the new legislation.

"The Conservatives have proposed legislation that goes too far," Mulcair said. "We, the NDP, are going to fight it.

The Conservative Government introduced time allocation on the bill to speed up the parliamentary consideration of the legislation, after just two hours of debate. That means the bill could fly through in the House of Commons in a matter of just weeks.

"We're going to do everything that we can to make sure that the bill is studied properly," Mulcair promised. "We're going to bring in amendments that we hope the government is going to listen to. And if they're not willing to listen to that, we are going to use any techniques at our disposal to ensure that it doesn't get rammed through."

The motion to limit debate passed in the House on Thursday afternoon, with the NDP voting as slowly as humanly possible to stall the process.

Mulcair left the door open to pulling similar parliamentary tricks as NDP's ill-fated attempt to stop back-to-work legislation that forced Canada Post workers back on the job. He did note that their lobbying efforts on the Conservatives' changes to the Election Act actually ensured that the bill was completely re-written.

The NDP leader chastised the Prime Minister for introducing this new legislation, but also took aim at Trudeau, saying he had been "intimidated" into supporting the bill.

Trudeau took exception to that remark, saying that although he supports the bill, the endorsement isn't unqualified. He lamented that the NDP never supports anti-terror legislation, and that this bill obviously isn't any different.

"We welcome the measures in Bill C-51 that build on the powers of preventative arrest, make better use of no-fly lists, and allow for more coordinated information sharing by government departments and agencies," Trudeau told the House of Commons on Wednesday. However, he added, the Liberals would be introducing amendments to create a parliamentary oversight committee and to tighten the definition of what constitutes a "threat" that can be investigated by CSIS.

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney rejected NDP criticism and appeared to wave-away the suggested Liberal amendments, telling journalists outside the House of Commons that the NDP don't understand the bill and that "they are taking an ideological stance." He added that while they're open to changes, they think the bill is good as-is.

Indeed, public support for the bill appears to be quite high: an Angus Reid survey found that 82 percent of Canadians support the bill.

However, that poll has obvious limitations. The survey was not conducted over the phone—it was done by asking over 1,500 online panelists who had signed up to do Angus Reid polls. As such, the firm can't offer a margin of error on the poll.

And while the polling firm asked about some measures contained in the bill, they did not ask any questions about CSIS' broad new powers to investigate "threats" or raise any of the concerns about the ill-defined nature of what that could entail. Indeed, the poll also found that 20 percent of those asked had not read or seen anything about the bill at all, while another 36 percent just scanned headlines about the legislation.

But opposition to increased powers is mounting. The NDP says more than 20,000 Canadians have signed their petition to fix the bill, while four former prime ministers and a litany of former ministers and Supreme Court judges penned a letter calling for increased intelligence oversight.

Indeed, critics have begun singling out changes made by the bill that could see CSIS getting new powers the Conservatives have loudly said the agency won't have.

The Conservative Party contends that the bill won't catch lawful protesters—indeed, the bill reads that "it does not include lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression"—yet the NDP see it differently.

"It's evident for us, with its large definition, could catch individuals who are protesting in a lawful manner," Mulcair said.

The bill gives broad power to CSIS if the agency believes anyone is limiting the government's ability to collect intelligence or enforce the law, or if it infringes on "diplomatic or consular relations," and, even more broadly, if it impacts "the economic or financial stability of Canada." The section that has worried many, especially anti-pipeline protesters, is language that gives CSIS power to investigate anyone believed to be interfering with "critical infrastructure," which hasn't been defined in the Criminal Code yet.

And, of course, CSIS is already spying on lawful protesters.

A litany of theories have cropped up about who could be caught by this bill. For one: could encrypting your emails be considered "interference with the capability of the Government of Canada in relation to intelligence"?

The Conservatives have tried to assuage fears over the bill, explaining that all of CSIS' powers would be subject to review and approval by judges.

"It doesn't give new powers to police or intelligence agencies, but rather to judges, to courts," Defence Minister Jason Kenney told reporters on Thursday.

VICE originally reported that these so-called "disruption warrants," which would allow CSIS to do anything short of murder and sexual assault, would required a judge's signature in every case. That may not be the case.

"There is nothing in the Act that says 'warrants all the time,'" says Craig Forcese, a University of Ottawa law professor who has launched a campaign to study and analyze the legislation.

He, and others, contend that the bill is actually quite explicit—a warrant is only required if CSIS has "reasonable grounds to believe" that it's required. Specifically: if they believe that the agency's actions will infringe Canadians' constitutional rights. Otherwise, they may engage in activities without ever consulting a judge or court.

"If the government wishes a warrant to be required for every measure [created in the bill], it will need to modify its language to ensure make this intent very clear," Forcese says.

When asked by VICE, Blaney's office simply pointed to the section in the bill that details when a warrant is required. It reads: "If there are reasonable grounds to believe that a particular activity constitutes a threat to the security of Canada, the Service may take measures, within or outside Canada, to reduce the threat." It goes on to say that CSIS can't infringe Canadians Charter rights "unless the Service is authorized to take them by a warrant."

There are other parts of the bill that could draw fire as the bill receives greater scrutiny. C-51, for example, gives the government the power to introduce illegally obtained evidence for the sake of keeping someone on the no-fly list. It also codifies new powers for Canadian Air Transport Security Authority officials to search anything in an airport or on an airplane. Airport security officials have wanted the power to break the locks on air travellers' luggage for some time and this legislation might allow them to do just that.

Parliament spent Thursday morning debating a motion that would fast-track the anti-terror bill—Mulcair called it "railroading"—after the government allowed just 120 minutes of debate on the highly technical omnibus legislation.

That debate turned quite heated after one backbench Conservative launched a truly weird attack on the NDP. Rob Clark, Member of Parliament for Northern Manitoba, rose in the House to suggest that the opposition's objections to the bill are tantamount to a pro-terrorist, anti-cop mentality.

"Their position is hug-a-thug," Clark began, to a chorus of boos from the opposition benches.

Clark then invoked the memory of his former colleagues who lost their lives on the job—Clark is a former RCMP officer—and began citing a mishap that occurred with the NDP leader, when Mulcair quite seriously asked an RCMP officer on Parliament Hill: "Don't you know who I am?" when they stopped his car.

Clark went on to accuse the NDP of tacitly supporting terrorism by opposing the government's legislation. Eventually he was cut off by a sea of angry New Democrats. Once he sat down, he began loudly yelling "Don't you know who I am?" and "You have no respect for the police!"

"No doubt unwittingly, the member has just done us all a service," Mulcair responded. "If there was any lingering doubt in anyone's mind that this is simply a political ploy, he has removed all doubt."

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

The Enduring Power and Beauty of Artist Kehinde Wiley's Representation of Black Men and Women

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'Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence),' 2001. All images courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

In 2004, the artist Kehinde Wiley opened his first solo museum exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum entitled Passing/Posing. On view were portraits of young black men that presented a challenge to the way they are viewed in real life, as well as a challenge to history. In one painting, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), the French political leader is replaced by a black man wearing Timberlands and camo—a revisionist response to how there are not enough black men in most museums' collections. In another work, Female Prophet Deborah (Infinite Mobility), a young black guy who the artist scouted on the street near his old studio in Harlem floats in blue jeans, blue jacket, and orange T-shirt, and backwards matching baseball cap, gazing into the distance amid a detailed blue and gold ornate background. It is easy to get lost in the beauty of the painting. However the strength of the work—as with most of Wiley's portraiture—lies in his ability to reposition power by drowning out the world (and all the discrimination and oppression that comes with it) around his subjects, so they can see themselves more clearly.

Passing/Posing marked the beginning of a meteoric career for Wiley—the New York Times described him as one of "the most celebrated artists of his generation" in a recent profile—and a retrospective on the artist entitled Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic will open this Friday, February 20, at the Brooklyn Museum. The show will include 60 works of painting and sculpture that span the 37-year-old's career. More importantly, the show will offer an in-depth look into Wiley's examination of representation, status, and power. On top of the work from Passing/Posing, the exhibition will feature the South Central–born artist's lesser-known work, which is essential to understanding the full scope of his oeuvre.

For example, the retrospective will showcase Wiley's portraits of black sisters, juxtaposed with paintings of multiple black men in the same frame. The particular curation raises questions about gender and sexuality in the black community, as the paintings seem to be engaging in a conversation with one another. These works also interact with the artist's own creative process, as he describes finding his subjects as "this serendipitous thing where I am in the streets, running into people who resonate with me," based on simple glances or prolonged eye contact.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Wiley to talk about the power of his portraits, his foray into sculpture, and what has changed in the decade since he had his first solo show at Brooklyn Museum.

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'Femme piquée par un serpent,' 2008.

VICE: This is your second show in a little more than a decade at Brooklyn Museum. What has changed over the last ten years?
Kehinde Wiley: Nothing has changed and everything has changed. I started off leaving Yale and coming to Harlem to witness the exchanges in the streets—looking around, trying to create portraiture that responded to this very vibrant, youthful energy of America. Later on, when the work became successful, I began traveling the world and recognized that the very same America, that urban sensibility, shows up all over the place. My work then began to respond to that story, and the story of that story. So really, it started with this concern around black American youth culture and that story led to Israel, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, all within following the cultural temperature of something that is very American and very black.

I know that in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, you are going to exhibit sculpture and stained glass works. How was working in those mediums different for you?
Those materials are radically different. Although I followed the same type of material trajectory, for me what I have always tried to do is look at the language of art history and think about staying present. The material reality is very different, but the human aspirations and the things that are being spoken about are quite similar. At the core they have to do with ego, valuation, and empire. So much of what I do is to look at the beautiful, terrible past and try to square that with a very nuanced reality that I know we all live in today.

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'The Two Sisters,' 2012.

Some of the work from the Economy of Grace series will be on view, too. Thinking about the politics of representation and the body, how are the politics of painting women different from painting men?
In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be. I think that there are different strategies in depicting women in paintings than men. I think it was an exciting opportunity to build upon the vocabulary that I created with all the work coming out of America, coming out of black masculinity, and turning it all on its head. I was able to look at the notion of dominance—how someone fills up the four corners of the tableau. Domination of that space is a very revolutionary act. And to be able to hand those keys over to the depiction of black women is a really magical thing to do.

Do you think your Two Sisters painting truly represents the lived experiences of the women depicted?
It's a tough question to answer because I'd go out to Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, where I'd run into women whose backstories are diverse as you can imagine. I don't necessarily know how to create something that is a catchall. I was much more concerned with power of the trappings that existed in older paintings.

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'Two Heroic Sisters of the Grasslands,' 2011.

Given the fact that your work deals with power and vulnerability, do you think the recent events surrounding the shooting of unarmed black men in this country will inspire a future body of work for you?
For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing. And as a thinking, working artist you can't help but have your trajectory altered by the reality of the streets. For me, this is not a new story. I'm that kid who grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s in the specter of Latasha Harlins and LAPD police brutality. For me, all of that stuff is a very tried and true way black bodies are policed, controlled, and consumed. My work has always been a response to that.

Going back to the beginning of your career, why was depicting black masculinity important to you?
Well, I happen to be a black man, and it was a self-reflective exercise on the ego and a way of reaching out and making sense of the world. At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking. In doing so, you have to start with where you are. Then the next question became, "Do you have some kind of fidelity to the world that you were handed, or do you try and dream up an alternative vision?" And both of those options seem to be missing something and so where my work exists is at the crossroads of where those two, twin desires meet and can be re-imagined into a new republic.

What does a Kehinde Wiley republic look like?
Well, it is a new possibility. A new republic is an ability to hold a mirror to what is and to be able to dream about what could be. And what you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world and there is no limitation of what is conceivable.

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'Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps,' 2005.

The Brooklyn Museum Presents 'Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,' an Overview of the Prolific Artist's Career, February 20 through May 24, 2015. For more information visit the museum's website here.

The 'Poor Man's Coke' Called Cat Is Gaining Huge Popularity in South Africa

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The 'Poor Man's Coke' Called Cat Is Gaining Huge Popularity in South Africa

Why Are British and Irish Suicide Hotspots Allowed to Exist?

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Wexford Bridge, Ireland. Photo via WIkimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Wexford is a town in southeast Ireland that's connected to a suburb by a 600-meter-long bridge. At its center, the bridge rises about 20 feet above the water, which, if one jumps, isn't a very big drop. However, with icy water flowing in from the Irish Sea, it has the potential to freeze someone to death within minutes on a particularly harsh winter night.

This bridge has been Wexford's go-to suicide spot for years, and many have taken that awful plunge before invariably being found washed up at the local harbor 20 minutes down the road.

Wexford is one of Ireland's premier suicide counties, where, with a population of only 145,000, 29 killed themselves in 2011. My childhood there was littered with mentions of these jumpers, whom people had very little empathy for. "They're crazy" was the dominant consensus.

Nearly every region of the world has some place like that, some landmark to which the suicidal are magnetized. In the UK, Beachy Head is one of the most infamous, with 34 killing themselves there in 2013. The London Underground is popular, too, with 80 deaths in 2011. Londoners may also be familiar with Hornsey Lane Bridge—nicknamed "Suicide Bridge"—from which seven have jumped and died since 2010.

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"Suicide Bridge" in North London. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

There are countless others around the world: Niagara Falls, the "Suicide Forest" in Japan (you may have seen the VICE documentary about that one) and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, where roughly 1,600 have perished since it first opened in 1937. One of the main reasons people commit suicide there is that it works all to well. In comparison to only a 12 percent "success" rate for overdoses and 5 percent for wrist-cutting, the Golden Gate offers a near-perfect 99 percent, with almost every jumper exploding internally upon impact.

According to experts, a person in the grips of suicidal behavior will often idealize what's about to happen. "Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics," Dr. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, told the New Yorker in 2003. "Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it's a gateway to another place. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they'll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver."

Landmarks contribute to this kind of thinking: Places like Beachy Head give jumpers idyllic views of oceans, landscapes teeming with beauty that they might want to enter into. Even from Suicide Bridge one sees London in a certain type of light: faraway yet near, the Shard and Gherkin calling out over the skyline, offering more as distant beacons than they ever could up close.

Landmarks bring about what psychologist Sandra Sanger calls "a collective sense of connection with other people"—people who, like them, have suffered there as well. Killing oneself in public can also act as a "fuck you" of sorts, a hammer blow to ignorant passers-by and a world they feel has neglected them.

Take Ashley Riggitano, a fashion worker from New Jersey who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after leaving a "suicide diary" containing a list of friends who were "never there". She also named a man, hoping he'd get "what he deserves" at her funeral. A suicide expert from Leeds Metropolitan University, Gavin Fairbairn, writes, "Some people who kill themselves do so as a way of getting at others, or having a negative effect on them. We might refer to suicides of this kind as 'revenge suicides.' Perhaps the most frequent purpose that suiciders have in acting—other than to end up dead—is to hurt and punish others who they believe have offended against them in some way."

That people commit suicide is something taken for granted. Sadly, thanks to cultural figures like Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis and Elliott Smith, it's seen as an idea that sensitive young men, in particular, might do more than merely flirt with. I remember the attitude around Wexford was that those jumpers were doomed anyway, that if they wanted to die there was nothing we could do about it.

In actual fact, the urge to commit suicide is frequently extremely transient, and if the intended method is removed or complicated it'll most likely pass not just in the short-term, but also the long. The Prince Edward Viaduct in Toronto claimed a life every 22 days in 1997. In 2003—after which barriers were finally put up—the overall death-toll was 500. Since then? Zero. Barriers were also erected at the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, where the suicide rate's fallen by half.

Yet many still think that if one method's removed people will find another. Not true. In Britain, in the late 50s, oven suicides accounted for nearly half of the overall suicide total, with 2,500 Brits thought to have perished in their own kitchens. Back then, ovens were powered by coal gas, meaning that, unlit, they could emit carbon monoxide capable of poisoning humans to death in minutes. (This, of course, is how Sylvia Plath died.) But when British Gas switched to natural gas, not only did oven suicides fall to zero, but by the late 70s the overall British total had dropped by a third.

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The Duke Ellington Bridge, Washington, DC (Photo by Michiel1972 via Wikimedia Commons

Consider also Washington, DC's Duke Ellington Bridge. Once a suicide magnet, people complained that putting up barriers was a waste because another bridge, the Taft, stood parallel with a similarly massive drop. However, when DC did it anyway, suicides in the city fell by almost half, the amount previously accounted for by the Ellington.

Richard Seiden, a suicide expert from the University of California, Berkeley, says, "People who attempt suicide... get fixated—and that fixation extends to whatever method they've chosen. They decide they're going to jump off a particular spot on a particular bridge... but if they discover the bridge is closed for renovations or the railing is higher than they thought, most of them don't look around for another place to do it."

Remembering failed attempts, survivors often feel regretful, like they shouldn't have done it, or like they never even tried and are now recalling a movie. Though survivors of the Golden Gate are minuscule, of the few dozen that have, two have recalled regretting their decisions to jump midair, feeling like everything in their lives could be fixed except for the fact that they'd just let go of the handrail. Essentially, their experiences changed them: neither tried to kill themselves again—and, in fact, only 10 percent of near-fatals do.

Clearly, preventions save lives, but you'd think we have no control over anything. Like I said, at Hornsey Lane Bridge, seven have died since 2010, yet the preventions that do exist there are basically invisible: two-inch-long spikes and a rotating bar that even small dogs could step over. Though residents call for more measures continuously, plans currently in front of Haringey Council are being held up over cost—previous ones to install a net were rejected at an estimated £95,000 ($147,000) plus tax—and aesthetics: Objections have come from English Heritage because the group doesn't want the Victorian architecture of the bridge tampered with.

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Memorials at Beachy Head. Photo by Peter Standing via

A team at Beachy Head patrols the area in the hopes of intervening with potential suicides, but with no funding from government they rely entirely on donations and recently had to lay off four of their ten staffers. Though 34 killed themselves there in 2013, the team did successfully intervene with 364 others, meaning that—with 40 percent less staff—surely, this year, a worrying number of potentials won't be dealt with. (The entire team of ten cost £500,000 [$771,000] a year.)

And on the Tube, the biggest preventive measures are PEDs—Platform Edge Doors—which only exist at stations built during the Jubilee line extension. Installing them elsewhere is seen as too expensive.

Expense comes up frequently. Forgetting the fact that endless millions are spent on terror prevention at these same stations—something that kills far fewer people—the reality is that preventing suicide actually saves money: when someone kills themselves at a landmark, lots has to be paid for —cleanup, emergency services, counseling for witnesses and families. So though a net on Hornsey Lane Bridge would cost £95,000, each suicide in England ends up costing £1.45 million.

Obviously, we can't prevent every suicide, not when certain parts of the NHS spend 6.6 percent of their budgets on mental health when it accounts for 23 percent of their burden. But maybe there's a bit too much focus on the "Why?" rather than the "How?" when the relationship between successful suicides and long-term mental illnesses aren't as strong as we might think. Though sufferers from depression, schizophrenia and addiction are likelier to attempt suicide, they generally use more premeditated methods—like overdosing and wrist cutting—the success rates of which are, of course, fairly low. Conversely, those who try it using more lethal methods—like jumping off or into things, or guns—are less likely to have a history of mental illness. This means, essentially, that those prone to contemplating it regularly are actually less likely to successfully commit it.

Dealing with mental illness is obviously a large issue, but surely when people are dying unnecessarily every day we should start with the easiest, most effective ways of combating suicide, like putting up barriers and cameras at bridges, increasing patrols elsewhere, and installing PEDs at stations. We should generally be directing more money and attention towards something that's been criminally ignored on every level, not just by national and local governments, but in the homes of all who think there's nothing to be done.

There's plenty to be done: on Wexford Bridge, a patrol team was installed in 2012, and in its first year it intervened with 20 potentials. It was also the first year since records began that someone hasn't died there. That's 20 more people walking around who, most likely, are happy to have been given the chance.

Follow James on Twitter.

If you are feeling hopeless of suicidal, there are people you can talk to. Please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Girl Writer: Online Dating Made Me Realize I'm a Shallow Person

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I've never considered myself shallow. In my mind, shallow people only care about appearance. They have no depth, or real intellect. All that matters to them is that they find someone who looks good standing next to them.

That's not me. I could care less if my hypothetical boyfriend is fat, bald, short, or all of the above. Honestly, his face could look like it was cut in half and then glued back together by a three-year-old, and I'd still be fine as long as we had everything in common, and by "everything," I mean mutual taste in music, movies, books, and comic books. The stuff that really defines a person. For years, I deluded myself into believing that my "It's what you like, not what you are like" attitude was the antithesis of shallow. I was deep. Deep for demanding someone match my definition of intellect and if they didn't have any sort of appreciation for say, a film where a drag queen eats dog shit, they were clearly not an intellectual.

By the time I began internet dating, I had accumulated a very large list of "dealbreakers"—many of which made absolutely no sense. Like if he wore a Sublime shirt in his profile picture, or thought it was more offensive to burn a flag than burn a book. If he had gel in his hair or took being a Virgo seriously, I was sure it would never work out. Not once did I see the hypocrisy in dismissing men for such insignificant things because even when I was writing them off for aesthetic reasons, I still managed to convince myself that it wasn't about looks. I just happened to be incredibly skilled at knowing exactly who a person was based off of an item of clothing they wore, or how they styled their hair. I was unknowingly digging my own shallow grave.

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The author's OkCupid profile

This has led to some disastrous dates. You see, much like one small thing could be an immediate "no" from me, one small thing could also be an immediate "yes." If a profile listed something I found especially impressive, I was quick to convince myself this person was perfect for me, not really caring to notice any more obvious warning signs. For instance, the guy who listed the Wipers as his favorite band also asked to move in with me on our third date. (I later found out that it was because his roommates kicked him out due to his heroin addiction.) The guy who messaged me that he wished he could draw an image of me in style the of R. Crumb, choking him with my thighs, ended up accusing me of giving him roofies because he was "unusually tired" on his drive home one night. (For the record: I did not.) Worse than that one was with a guy who liked the same 70s power-pop bands I did and convinced me to take shrooms with him. Long story short, I ended up believing that he was a literal demon. (Not only that, but he also made me watch The Fountain with him.)

Then there's the guy I thought might be a serial killer. This one's actually a cute story, depending on how loose your definition of "cute" is. We messaged each other back and forth a lot before we actually met. Right off the bat I noticed something especially odd about him: his obsession with murderers. I mean, I know that it's not that strange to have a fascination with the morbid or the frightening—heck, it was one of the things we bonded over. But it was all he wanted to talk about. Anytime I tried to change the subject, it would somehow go back to some dude who raped and killed a lot of people. One of his messages to me was, "You should really think about what Charles Manson has to say." Then he asked me out. I, of course, said yes.

I was living in Oakland at the time, and he told me to meet him at the Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco. From there he told me that he would take me to a secret location that I was not allowed to know about. Now, I know that most women interacting with a murderer-obsessed man they've never met in person would read that date proposal, and immediately back out. What can I say? I'm not like other girls! Besides, he promised to give me several issues of Peter Bagge's Hate, so it would've been stupid not to go through with it.

The secret location ended up being Fisherman's Wharf, and he was searching desperately for a specific pier. The fear of my immediate death crept in when we arrived and he immediately grabbed my arm to pull me closer to the edge of the pier. He told me to look down and stare at the water beneath us. I complied, unable to say anything. My heart beat frantically as his hand firmly clutched my arm. Finally, he spoke. "I wanted to bring you here, because it's at this pier where a woman from Oakland came and drowned all her children." He then released me from his grasp and that was that. My fear of being murdered subsided, and we went on to eat a delicious seafood dinner, his treat. All in all, it was one of the most romantic dates I've been on—but the chemistry wasn't really there, and we never saw each other again.

Nearly every man I deemed right for me ended up being a mistake. The sensationalized version of them I created in my desperate head was, more often than not, shattered within minutes of us being in the same room. But I kept sticking to this shitty pattern anyway. I was like a big dumb dog furiously running in circles chasing its own tail. It wasn't until a few months ago that I was even slightly self-aware about all this. It happened thanks to Jack.

I agreed to go on a date with Jack, whose initial message I ignored without even looking at his profile. It was a lame "hey," which has become a giant pet peeve. If you're going to put effort into messaging someone, try to at least write one full sentence to get things started. Anyhow, a week later, he messaged me again. This time with a complete sentence—chivalry is not dead. He told me he wanted to go for drinks. I ended up looking at his profile this time. One of his favorite movies was The Boondock Saints, and he made sure to write that he was passionate about protecting the environment. These two things alone would typically be enough to let me know that him and I were highly incompatible (I don't hate the environment; I just don't care to save it). On this particular night, though, I had no plans. I was bored and convinced myself to go.

We met at a bar near my place. I didn't even shower. My hair was greasy and I had no makeup on. When he arrived, I noticed that he was more attractive than in his profile pictures; still, I refused to hold out any sort of hope for this. Well, after only a few minutes of conversation I was shocked to find that we were hitting it off. He was funny, and had a lot to talk about. Not once did he mention recycling, or overrated late 90s crime thrillers. Things were going so well that I invited him back over to my place. We ordered Dominos, then made out for a while, and fell asleep on my bed.

At around four in the morning, I woke up feeling incredibly nauseous. I ran to my toilet and started throwing up. He woke up and assumed I just drank too much. I tried explaining to him that I might have food poisoning, because at this point in my drinking career, four or five vodka sodas was not going to make me puke. On the plus side, he was not feeling sick, so it couldn't have been the pizza. Whatever it was, I kept on feeling worse. I got up every hour or so to both puke and violently shit.

Things never came to fruition with Jack, but he at least helped show me what a stubborn idiot I've been all these years. What would my love life be like if I had just hung out with the hardcore Sublime fan or the guy with gel in his hair? All this time, I had been limiting my search for love because I was caught up in a kind of superficiality I didn't even recognize as being superficial.

Since gaining this newfound awareness, I have made a stronger effort to go on dates with men that the old me would have never said yes to. Admittedly, as of now, none of them have felt as compatible as Jack did, but at least now I have a little more hope than I had previously.

Also, one guy who I ignored several months ago now comes over about once a week to eat me out. So that's something.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.


VICE Vs Video Games: What Can Be Done About Gaming’s Culture of Distrust?

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A skeptical Elizabeth from 'BioShock: Infinite', via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You might've noticed that games went a bit wrong in 2014. It seems so long ago, now, that the hottest topics of forum discussion were suspect frame rates and the secrets of Shadow of the Colossus. That was before the tidal wave of shit that was Gamergate swallowed most rational conversation, smashing hobbyist bloggers and full-time critics, hardcore players and casual participants alike into a chorus of cacophonous cackling over issues that, for the most part, had fuck all to do with games.

But while we're still seeing the aftershocks of last summer's explosion of corrosive social media exchanges, the very worst of Gamergate appears behind us. (That hasn't stopped the harassment that some unfortunate, high-profile targets are receiving, as their Twitter feeds make perfectly clear.) We've all learned from it, be that something useful to shape our profession going forward, or reinforcing long-held fears regarding immature, regressive attitudes amongst a very small community of games enthusiasts.

Developers themselves, at least those that spoke up, were almost unanimously onside with press outlets throughout Gamergate's tumultuous beginnings. After all, why would anyone making games go after those covering them? Whatever the profile of YouTubers' Let's Play series, the traditional press plays a considerable part in influencing not only mainstream consumers but also the marketing men behind new releases. It's just like music, film, theater, food, sex toys, whatever: You want the best-known names on your advertising, and right now Edge and Polygon are more, let's say, authoritative endorsements than a squealed seal of approval from "speedyw03." (No offense intended to "speedyw03".)

But now, belatedly, developers have entered the fray in a fairly public fashion. What was a dispute purely between a minority of those who play games and small number of those paid to report on them has enveloped games makers of such high standing as Ken Levine, the man who (as head of a very talented team) gave us the BioShock series. He endorsed, via Twitter, a Change.org petition posted by MEK Entertainment CEO Mark Kern, asking that Polygon and Kotaku "lead the way in healing the rift in video games." Sounds noble enough when put like that, but read on a little and there's plenty that's suspect about Kern's published perspective on this disagreement.

"We're asking you, as the vanguard of the face of gamers to the mass media and the wider non-gaming masses, to help heal this rift and fix the damage you have caused." Seems a little unreasonable, doesn't it? Attributing the Gamergate blame to the websites that covered it, rather than the—come on now, they are—absolute dick weasels whose campaign of hostility across Twitter and various forums threatened to permanently ruin the reputation of gamers in the eyes of those "non-gaming masses." Websites report on happenings relevant to their audiences—and when shit goes south in gaming, you can bet that Polygon and Kotaku are going to be among the first to not only deliver the facts, but also publish related opinion pieces. It's what their readership comes for.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/bLHW78X1XeE' width='560' height='315']

'BioShock: Infinite', Beast of America trailer

Some accusations of "yellow journalism," directed at these sites (and others, including VICE), have held a little water along the way, and it's entirely correct that these businesses need to maintain a certain level of traffic, and that controversial headlines (note: not entirely misleading ones) are the ideal carrot to get the socials-browsing audience to chow down on your content. Complain about that model all you like, but it's existed forever; you might call it "clickbait" online, but the print media's been calling it "headlines" since newspaper presses first cranked into action.

Writes Kern, regarding what he perceives as yellow journalism on the parts of Kotaku and Polygon: "...the gaming press are accountable for conflagrating [the rift] through a slew of articles that only served to fan the flames, celebrate the hate on both sides, magnify the rift and sensationalize the issue. There is a term for this, called yellow journalism, and it has started wars before. It has no place in a gaming press that is supposed to support our industry and gamers, in particular, of all walks."

Stop right there, Mark, because I think you're asking us to back the views of people like Milo Yiannopoulos, a confessed non-gamer who's been piggybacking Gamergate purely to benefit his Breitbart clicks, with some spectacularly yellow journalism. To side with the actions of those who'd threaten "the deadliest school shooting in American history" to prevent games industry commentators from appearing in public, just in case they might suggest that gaming's representation of women hasn't been All That Good to date. To agree that, absolutely, these girl gamers probably should be raped, or worse, because they dare to dream that, one day, they might not have to play as Generic Muscle Man. That the swatters and doxxers have got their reasons, right?

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Ice-T here, getting his game on in a recent episode of 'Law and Order: SVU'. (Still via)

And so on, until you're blue in the face. I'm of the opinion that almost every person who calls themselves a gamer is completely cool, open minded, and wants both greater diversity in the kind of games we can play today, and for women to feel absolutely accepted in a culture that's several generations away from being close to defined. Not all gamers are alike, just as fans of music aren't alike, just as followers of a single band aren't all alike—what unites us is a passion that's both deeply personal and widely shared, depending how you slice it. It is only the tiniest number of tools who've caused unrest since day one. The whole Law & Order-doing-Gamergate debacle that seemed to influence Kern's petition was directly inspired by this miniscule section of an otherwise disparate, progressive group of people: an instance of art imitating life, but more the scum that grows in its stagnant corners than the colorful cornucopia below.

Just who can the uninitiated turn for trustworthy correspondence on the continuing, albeit receding, rot at the heart of contemporary games culture? The press? Any outlet worth its URL is going to have an agenda—that's why you choose one site over another. That's why in the UK we have the Telegraph and the Guardian, the Sun, and the Daily Mirror, so as to best serve a population split on the kind of content they want to read on a daily basis, and the political bias contained therein. You can typically only trust the press to tell you what it needs to in order to best serve its audience, and if you're not part of it, you're best off elsewhere.

The gamers themselves, then: what's their stance on Gamergate's fallout? Most simply don't care, and didn't when Zoe Quinn's name was being dragged through the mud, because they had no idea who Quinn was, and still don't. They buy the games, play the games, trade in the games, get new games; lather, rinse, and repeat. I dare say that the greater percentage of Call of Duty players isn't going to rush out to buy the console release of Gone Home when it comes out, but all but the smallest number from that demographic aren't about to flame up over whether or not it should be so critically acclaimed, whether it's part of some wider feminist propaganda, or whether it's even a game at all. Couldn't. Give. A. Fuck.

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'Gone Home' is a game. Get over it.

And that leaves the developers. At the time of publishing, Kern's got 2,005 signees on his petition. I don't actually know what Polygon or Kotaku feel they need to do once the arbitrarily magic number of 2,500 signatures is achieved, but at a guess: a cloud of smoke billows around the staffers, and their real forms are finally revealed. Ahahaha, look at them, the hideous, odious, scumbag little... Oh, no, wait. They're just guys and girls who like games, and want them to grow up and be more accepting of the many walks of life that people lead in the 21st century. Kern says he supports women in gaming, but then of course he does, because he's not insane.

Levine's not nuts, either. In 2013's BioShock Infinite, his Irrational Games studio realized one of the most significant female characters of recent gaming generations. She wasn't playable, but she wasn't simply there to be saved, either—Elizabeth was an invaluable partner, with a compelling backstory and essential role to play in a complicated narrative. He told me, just before Infinite came out, "We knew that if we got Elizabeth right, then we could get the game right." He's talking about her AI, but you can easily enough explicate the sentiment to mean something more important: how women are presented in video games today.

I trust that these people, Kern and Ken, are right-minded fellows, with their hearts on what's best for gaming, today and tomorrow. Kern's petition was ill-advised, though, and will ultimately achieve nothing except further arguments. (Patrick Garret's takedown of it for VG24/7 is a must-read if you've any interest in industry politics.) Kotaku isn't about to dramatically alter its editorial policies because a few thousand people who don't even read the site requested it. It knows what its audience wants.

Critics will always disagree over whether a game is a worthy investment or ripe for a kicking, and we're about to see that merry dance play out just as soon as the embargo for coverage of The Order: 1886 lifts (oh, what a scene that'll be). Developers will always be cut by negative feedback, but they're only people: Of course it hurts to be told that something you've spent so many years on is a crock of shit. Journalists aren't in a bind at all; we just don't always think you're amazing, Ken.

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Image via

Gamers? Some will always suspect that the press is paid for a glowing review, and that it missed out on a backhander when it puts the boot in. That we're all corrupt, broken, and it's not just the page views we do this for, but also the worst thing of all: filthy, stinking lucre, at the expense of the people whose money actually feeds the creation of new games. We're pocketing the notes that the publishers dish out, like naïve citizens of Gotham circling Joker's float full of triple-A cash. If that was the truth of the matter, I wouldn't see gaming editors tweet about only having $90 to get them through until next week's payday. Nobody's driving around in a Lamborghini for caring about games culture beyond the current iteration of popular football franchises.

The only way that this distrust that's grown up around us—and it was here before Gamergate, which was merely an amplifier—is going to recede is to... Shit, I don't know. If I did I'd have shared the solution it long ago. A pacifist stance probably isn't the answer. Action's needed, and it's not petitions; but to agree with Kern it's definitely not needless sensationalizing of an issue that really doesn't need any more televised flights of fiction for it to seem utterly absurd. Weaponizing our words won't lead to any sensible end, although by all means keep them sharpened for the few insufferable chumps that need cutting down to size.

At some point we do have to club together, to extract the poison and get on with what's important: making games that matter, for an audience that cares. And that can mean many things. Call of Duty is no more or less worthy a piece of gaming's culture than Gone Home. Liverpool FC's winning of 18 league titles does not mean that natives of the city can't pledge their allegiance to the comparatively underachieving Everton. That's one hell of a bitter rivalry, but just the other week a tribute to the 96 Liverpool fans that died in 1989's Hillsborough Disaster was unveiled at Everton's home ground, Goodison Park. Sometimes darkness can only be chased away by the bridging of apparent enemies. It's worth a try, isn't it?

Follow Mike on Twitter.

The UK Is Too Busy Cooperating with Ethiopia on Anti-Terrorism to Help a British Citizen on Death Row

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Andy Tsege with Yemi Hailemariam and their children

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Andargachew Tsege, known to his friends and family as Andy, is a British citizen who has been held in a secret prison in Ethiopia since June. The government of the East African country has used its stringent anti-terrorism laws, adapted from British and American ones, to charge Tsege with plotting a coup and has sentenced him to death. While he's unlikely to actually face a rarely-imposed death sentence, he is on death row.

Now, UK Foreign Office (FCO) emails obtained by Tsege's partner Yemi Hailemariam and shared exclusively with VICE, reveal that while an FCO analysis of Tsege's appearances on Ethiopian television concludes that he has been "broken" by his recent experiences—which are thought to include torture—a phone call shortly afterward between Britain's then minister for Africa, Mark Simmonds, and the Ethiopian minster of foreign affairs, Tedros Adhanom, concluded with Simmonds inviting Ethiopia's intelligence chief to London to discuss increased cooperation on anti-terrorism initiatives between the two countries.

Prior to this, Simmonds had merely raised "concerns about lack of consular access" and had mentioned increased parliamentary attention to the case. At a recent African Union summit in Ethiopia, British officials failed to bring up Tsege's case with their Ethiopian counterparts even though, Yemi tells me, they'd promised her they would.

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Former Africa Minister Mark Simmonds. Simmonds quit politics last year citing "intolerable" parliamentary allowances restrictions

The legal charity Reprieve has taken up Tsege's case. Maya Foa, the head of their death penalty team, told me, "Eight months after Andy Tsege's abduction by Ethiopian forces, it's astounding to see that British ministers knew he was being tortured from the start—but still chose to make nice with their Ethiopian counterparts. This is a British citizen facing a death sentence at the hands of a notoriously brutal government—one that appears to face no consequences for its actions. It is high time the UK took decisive action to end his ordeal."

Tsege fled Ethiopia in 1979 and was granted British citizenship, thereby renouncing his Ethiopian citizenship. He is the secretary general of Ginbot 7—one of the many opposition groups banned by an Ethiopian government that, a source in its foreign ministry told me, sees democracy as being low on its list of priorities. In 2009, he was sentenced to death at a mass trial held in Ethiopia in his absence, for supposedly planning a coup. On June 23, 2014, he flew to Eritrea to meet other members of Ginbot 7. He was abducted in transit at an airport in Yemen by Ethiopian security forces and brought to a facility in Ethiopia.

Reprieve attorneys have been allowed no contact whatsoever with their client. Tsege has spoken to Yemi and their three children only once, and has met with the UK's ambassador to Ethiopia twice in the eight months he's been detained. On both occasions, he had a hood put over his head and was driven to a secret location away from the secret location of his prison. Reprieve and Tsege's family accuse the British government of being afraid to upset Ethiopia, which is a key regional ally in the war on terror and a recipient of hundreds of millions of pounds of British aid every year.

The FCO analyst's email calls Tsege's arrest an "important symbolic victory" for the Ethiopian government, the ruling party, and its supporters. Alongside this it notes "a worrying tendency of the security agencies of the GoE [Government of Ethiopia] to act in disregard of international standards and consequences." A number of journalists have been arrested in the last year and Ethiopia has also exercised its power to abduct opposition politicians living in neighboring countries.

The FCO notes Ethiopia's increased projection of power in the region and the desire of neighboring governments to co-operate with it. Just over a year ago, two senior members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front—a separatist militia from a region in the east of Ethiopia, which the government calls terrorists—were abducted by Ethiopian security services in Nairobi. And last September, the former president of one of Ethiopia's Gambella region, was kidnapped in South Sudan, charged with terrorism and then allegedly beaten up in prison by a government mole. Reflecting on the recent arrests and the Ethiopian government's desire to link Tsege's illegal Ginbot 7 movement with legal opposition groups, the FCO analyst reports that it "bodes ill for the prospects of democratization and a reasonably competitive election next year."

It also continues to bode ill for Tsege himself. Ethiopia has this month refused to allow a delegation from the British parliament to visit him. Rachel Nicholson, Amnesty International's campaigner on the Horn of Africa, said that this decision reflected the "severe restrictions on access to detention centers to monitor the treatment of detainees more generally in the country. Amnesty International continues to receive frequent reports of torture and ill treatment, usually in the early stages of detention."

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Andy

When I spoke to Yemi this week, she told me that "nothing has changed" since her partner was abducted by Ethiopia, and that she believes the FCO is practicing a form of "malaise diplomacy" that sees ministers treat Tsege's case as some sort of dutiful "obligation" they must briefly mention before getting on to more important matters. "They aren't fighting Andy's corner," she says. "There's no clarity in the message. Andy is being kept in solitary confinement, exposed to artificial light 24/7 and prevented from having any private access to lawyers or the British consulate... The Ethiopians have classified him as a terrorist, which is what they classify anyone who disagrees with them. But regardless of what they think, there are legal ways of going about doing what they are doing."

The government, she believes, would be doing a lot more to help Tsege if he was a white, British-born citizen. Yemi says that after he was abducted, it took the British government two weeks to determine whether her partner was a British citizen or not. "They don't think we're English," she told me.

Responding to the record of Mark Simmonds' phone call and its analyst's email, an FCO spokesperson defended what they had been doing for Andy. The "documents quoted cover only a small amount of the considerable effort the UK has put into this case," he said, adding that, "the foreign secretary raised Mr. Tsege's case with the Ethiopian Foreign Minister shortly after his detention in June and again in August, September, November, and December."

It seems that, without any force or threat behind them, these efforts are easily ignored. With the British unwilling to rock the boat, the dialogue between the two countries remains focused on aid and intelligence co-operation. Meanwhile, Andy Tsege's lawyers and family wonder if they will ever see him again. On the phone, Yemi sounds exhausted. "What is becoming harder is for me to remain hopeful," she says.

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

Saving the Environment with Criminals from Bucharest

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This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

The screen you're reading this article on contains toxins which, at a certain level of dosage, could actually kill you. Electronics have all sorts of evil stuff inside them: The mercury found in electronic circuits can instantly fry your brain, and in the time it takes to drink a glass of water the arsenic found in microchips could turn your liver into pâté. Hexavalent chromium and cadmium wouldn't make you feel any better either, as they're both carcinogens.

In Romania, these substances are kept out of our air and water thanks to criminals.

There are warehouses in cities across the country where tons of electronic waste is taken apart piece-by-piece and sent for recycling by thieves, thugs, or small-time drug dealers turned defenders of the planet. They protect the nation from cadmium, mercury, and hexavalent chromium like environmental power rangers in a high-tech purgatory.

These guys spend their days among electronic circuits, coils, and cables because since 2007 Romania's courts have been giving criminals a choice between prison and community service smashing old stereos, telephones, laptops, and TVs in these warehouses. A month or so ago, I visited one of these places to see how it all plays out.

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In the depot of an ex-communist factory in Bucharest, I found ten people hacking down a computer. They were all silently bending over a workbench, reminding me of fishermen trying not to scare away the fish. I put on an apron and sat down at the convicts' table. I thought I'd seen one of them before. Turns out, Dragoş used to work as a bartender at one of the biggest clubs in Bucharest's Old Town Center. That's until he got busted for a serious-sounding offense which was in fact a petty crime: drug dealing.

"I felt like I was in Dumb & Dumber. Without any actual knowledge of how the mob works, I sold two ecstasy pills to a cop," he said. Dragoş might not have had any street schooling, but he knew al he needed about drugs—he had tried them all, except those that come in needles. "And when I say 'everything,' I really mean 'everything'—from huffing glue to LSD." Out of the kilograms of substances that Dragoş smoked or snorted or inhaled during his career as a drug connoisseur, he ended up going down for two pills.

Back in the day, the Organized Crime Division of the Romanian police was taking down a massive network of ecstasy dealers—a mammoth case that involved at least 1,000 people. New arrests were being made every day, with hundreds of people ending up in police station basements, while hundreds more went under the radar waiting to get ratted out. Basically, everyone was ratting out everyone in the hopes of earning a couple of years of freedom.

"And so, shit went down and they got to me too," said Dragos. He got arrested and sentenced to do community service in the disassembling warehouse. "This warehouse is the best thing that's happened to me out of everything that the Romanian probation service has to offer." By "probation service," he means that he sometimes has to go to the Antidrug Center in the city of Târgovişte for sobriety tests. "Their offices are in a school for disabled children. I have nothing against the poor things, but every time I go there I instantly get depressed," he said.

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Dragoş has in fact quit drugs, except for one. "I've always tested positive for marijuana. Because I still don't want to give up weed, even with all the risks involved." Apparently he's got ADHD.

"This is a cross-head screwdriver. It's called "cross-head" because if we bisect it, we get the cross sign." On the wooden surface of the workbench, the master workman draws me a cross, and I exclaim: "Cross!" His name is Eugen Neacşu and he's the emperor of warehouse dismantling. He gives me an introductory speech filled with platitudes like, "No jumping over the workbench, we walk beside it." It's a mean job, but someone's got to do it. "All sorts of people come here," he said. "I asked a guy to swipe the floor and he asked me how one does that. He had never picked up a broom in his life!"

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Eugen Neacşu was an electrician at an airplane factory in Balta Albă. He made modules for military planes until Ceaușescu's regimes fell and someone put a lock on Eugen's assembly line. These days Eugen teaches others how to destroy things instead of making them.

Like the VHS he threw in my arms. I took pity on the old machine and open it carefully as if I'm not supposed to take it apart, but fix it. The guy sitting on my right side noticed my exaggerated care and told me, in a consoling tone, "Leave it, it's just waste. Wa-ste!"

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His name is Cătălin. He's 22 and ended up here after being charged with robbery. "I'm innocent!" he said and started reciting his story. "It happened one night. I was drunk. I stopped, please excuse my language, to take a leak on the street." But he wasn't pardoned by a pedestrian, who confronted him about his indecency. Cătălin pulled out a knife and... the guy pulled out a briefcase. "I was pointing the knife at him and he was slamming his briefcase into the knife. He really scared me so I ran away."

His misfortune was that the briefcase aggressor was also a lawyer, who put on his gown and represented himself in court. Apparently, it was there that he got Cătălin indicted for robbery and sentenced to 180 hours of community service."What's this?" I ask Cătălin pointing at a large piece of metal which, to my untrained eye, could have just as well been copper, iron, aluminum, or stainless steel. "Stainless steel," he said.

After working on dismantling the VHS for almost an hour, it seemed like I had got a long way to go. The number-one rule is that a small component always has a smaller component inside, and an even smaller component will inevitably hold a smaller-smaller component. Labor becomes completely unbearable when you unscrew a half-a-finger-sized little shit that contains a bunch of other little shits made of plastic, stainless steel, aluminum, and copper. So you have to open it and separate into piles so copper goes with copper, stainless steel with stainless steel, plastic with plastic, aluminum with aluminum. It felt as if someone gave me a tooth brush and sent me to clean the highway. All in all, this is what working here is about: repenting.

Those who finish their work can actually breath a sigh of relief. Like in the case of Andrei, who put on his coat and is looking at us with a smirk. "Ready!" he said and shrugs just like boxers do before a fight.

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The community service system was brought to Romania after a successful experiment in Switzerland, thanks to the Foundation for Promoting Community Sanctions.

"Firstly, community service is the cheapest way to punish a criminal. Imprisonment is an aggression imposed by society on the individual as a result of the individual's aggression towards society. No matter how civilized a prison might be, it leaves a mark on the individual and the cost of his reinstatement into society can be huge," said Alin Păun, executive chief of the foundation, who has established three warehouses of this kind in Bucharest, Timişoara, and Braşov through a Romanian-Swiss grant.

Every year, the foundation's warehouses manage to safely put away a few hundreds of tons of extremely dangerous electronic waste. The work that these convicts do is even more valuable since Romania holds the last place in the European Union when it comes to recycling high-tech junk. Only 1 percent of the total toxic waste produced by Romanians gets recycled—the rest ends up scattered around and from there straight into our livers.

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But warehouses have another positive function. For a lot of these convicts working here, having a job is no longer something to be afraid of. "It's the first time they start waking up and working on a fixed schedule," Alin said. "And they tell me with excitement: 'You know what? After I'm done here I could really get a job!'"

Back on the workbench, the VHS spilled its last bolt into the box of bolts and has disappeared into the ash heap of history. Its iron parts sat in the iron place for recycling, stainless steel was with stainless steel, and plastic with plastic.

The difference between that VHS and your laptop are not their components. They both contain iron, stainless steel, aluminum, and copper. The difference is in the way people have put together these elements to create a perfect circuit. All the convicts in the recycling warehouse do is look for their place in our perfect circuit.

Indigenous Groups are Calling for the 'Decolonization' of Australia

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Protesters march on Parliament House in Canberra. Photo courtesy of Elenor Gilbert, Enlightening Productions

On February 9, members of the National Freedom Movement gathered on the lawns at Parliament House in Canberra to present the Australian minister for Indigenous affairs, Nigel Scullion, with the Aboriginal Sovereign Manifesto of Demands. This document calls for negotiations between the Commonwealth government and Indigenous nations across the country to set out a framework for what's known as "decolonization."

The National Freedom Movement was born out of the Freedom Summit that took place in Alice Springs last November. The summit saw a delegation of Aboriginal leaders from around the nation meeting to declare the independence of Australia's First Peoples and address the growing disparities they face. These include increasing levels of incarceration and suicide, the continuing forced removals of children from their families, and the Western Australian government's intentions to close down up to 150 remote Indigenous communities.

On January 26, the delegates along with 500 supporters converged on Old Parliament House in Canberra to stage a sit-in, protesting the occupation of their land for the last 227 years. When they returned on the day federal parliament reopened to present the manifesto, politicians from both sides of government met with the leaders to discuss their grievances.

The National Freedom Movement is not alone in demanding decolonization. Other Indigenous movements, such as the youth group Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, are also calling for an end to the colonization of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

So just what would the decolonization of Indigenous Australia entail?

The Aboriginal Sovereign Manifesto is built around the 1992 High Court Mabo decision which recognized that Aboriginal land title survived British settlement, when it agreed with a ruling from a 1888 British Privy Council case.

Based on this, the manifesto calls for the Commonwealth of Australia to undertake a series of treaties with all Indigenous nations—a process that would require Australia to become an independent federated republic. These nations would then become self-governing territories within the republic. And a new constitution would be drafted, which would incorporate Aboriginal law as part of the legal system.

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An Aboriginal passport. Image courtesy of the Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance

"Decolonization is about giving the people the freedom to exercise their right of self-determination. It's about taking ownership of our issues and affairs and developing an economic base that we control and own," Ghillar Michael Anderson, leader of the Euahlayi people, said. "In this country Aboriginal people are not allowed to control our own economics because governments have ownership over everything."

Anderson, a co-founder of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, wrote the manifesto. He believes that the new constitution would put Aboriginal people in a position to start asserting their self-determination, but this can't happen if the government keeps "destroying our population."

"Out in the bush, you see hundreds of people dying. We're losing a generation in the group between 12 and 18, because of drug use, as well as hopelessness and despair. The suicide rate is endemic in this country right now amongst Aboriginal kids," Anderson said. "We're saying that the government is killing our people."

Included in the manifesto are demands for a share of all revenue raised from the exploitation of natural resources, a moratorium on the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, and reinstating classes taught in the original language of each nation.

These demands have been made by members the older generation. But are the voices of Indigenous youth movements fighting for the same thing? According to Meriki Onus, the representative of the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance are chasing the same ideals, just somewhat differently. She supports the call for negotiated treaties and the establishment of autonomous Indigenous nations. But she ultimately sees this as based on the colonizer's laws and questions how this would affect people on an individual level.

"I think it's deeper than political," she said. "In a practical sense we need to go back to a time when things really did work for us. We need Aboriginal self-determination. Our freedom will never be found within the Australian legal system."

Decolonization can be undertaken on a personal level through everyday acts, Onus explained. She lists such ways as being conscious of diet and the clothes that are worn, as well as an awareness of where money is spent and what it's contributing to. She believes an important part of the decolonization process is not exposing oneself to corporate media.

"And also reviving your language, going back to country, learning your creation stories and forming a relationship with your people," she added.

Onus, a Gunnai and Gunditjmara woman, travelled to Canada last year to visit local Indigenous communities. She warned that although treaties have been established there, these communities are still facing high suicide and imprisonment rates.

Controversy marked her return to Australia when the group she travelled with re-entered the country using Aboriginal passports instead of Australian ones, an act Onus sees as "liberating our lives from colonial control."

For Terry Mason, senior lecturer at the Badanami Centre at the University of Western Sydney, decolonization is linked to the concepts of sovereignty and treaty. He envisages an Australia where there are multiple treaties which allow "Aboriginal people to be able to respond in a modern world in a way that reflects their cultural and social continuum." Treaties would reflect the circumstances of different nations. Those in the outback may be able to get their land and resources back, while those on the coast may not.

Mason, an Awabakal man, said decolonization relies on self-determination, which allows people to have the ability to imagine their own future. But in Australia there's been an internal colonization of sorts. "If you've had five generations of Aboriginal people with all their decision-making rights over their lives removed, then people don't grow up with the concept of imagining futures," he said.

He also points out that Australia moved toward greater colonization with the Mabo decision and the establishment of native title. As land use under native title is co-managed with government bodies, Aboriginal rights are often subsumed by other stakeholders.

"In '88, we weren't walking down the street saying 'native title now.' We were marching down the street saying 'we want land rights now,'" Mason said, highlighting that land rights result in actual Aboriginal control of the land and its resources, rather than just nominal ownership. "Land rights carry with them your spiritual, your cultural, your social links but also an economic base."

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The Terrifying and Hilarious World of Pace Car Driving

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The Terrifying and Hilarious World of Pace Car Driving

Two Kids Died in a House Fire on a Reserve as Firefighters Stayed Put Over a $3,300 Unpaid Bill

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Early Tuesday morning before the sun rose, a house filled with smoke and flame, eventually burning to the ground on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation in northern Saskatchewan. A call to 911 at 1:30 AM brought RCMP and EMS to the scene but it was too late to save two-year-old Harley and 18-month-old Haley Cheenanow. Their bodies were carried out by their father as RCMP arrived and the two children were pronounced dead on the scene.

The 911 call was automatically forwarded to the rural municipality (RM) the First Nation shares a border with, but the Mayor of Loon Lake, who is also the volunteer fire chief hung up the phone and went back to bed. The slight possibility of saving the two young children was ignored over $3,360.89 in unpaid bills for fire services between the neighbouring communities.

This tragedy highlights the wider problem of first protection services on First Nations where you are ten times more likely to die in a fire than in a neighbouring community.

The town of Loon Lake is bordered by farmland, boreal forest, and beautiful lakes. But the border it shares with the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation is more like one between different worlds.

"For two communities who are in such close proximity to each other I would say that the relationship is pretty dysfunctional and has been for a very long time," Loon Lake village administrator Laurie Lehoux told VICE.

That contentious relationship is at the heart of the blame game playing out in the wake of the fatal fire. The RM has said they had a deal to respond to fires on the First Nation for an annual fee of $5,000, which was cancelled in favour of a "pay-as-you-go" system beginning in 2013. With the new contract, signed by the chief, payment could be provided up to 30 days after billing. If they weren't paid, services would be suspended.

Lehoux said that the deal was working well enough until a string of grass fires in spring 2014 increased the First Nation's billing amount significantly. She said after failed attempts to contact the band through the finance director Kurt Shultz and through the band office to collect the fee, the Fire Board—consisting of the mayor, deputy mayor, reeve, and deputy reeve — decided in November to end the services. A letter at the end of January 2015 officially told the First Nation that there would be no more fire response from the RM. A few weeks later the fatal fire would claim the children's lives and the First Nation's Chief Richard Ben would tell inquiring media that he thought they still had a deal with the RM.

The community's anger is close to boiling over, as a 27-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday morning for threatening Loon Lake's mayor over Facebook. But the adversarial relationship between the two communities is ignoring the larger issue.

"It boils down to a lack of services. We don't get the same funding as everyone else does with the federal government," Band Councillor Dean Mitsuing told local outlet News Talk Radio.

In less than two months, six people have died in house fires on First Nations reserves in Saskatchewan alone. On December 29, Donna Kay, 61, and Teegan Ahenakew, 10, died on the Ahtahkakoop First Nation in a house fire linked to a wood-burning stove. On January 18, Natalia Wolverine, 24, and her little brother Jerome, 10, died in a house fire on the English River First Nation after the First Nation's fire truck broke down while responding to the scene.

"You are 10 times more likely to die in a house fire on a First Nation than an RM that's 30 miles away," former Keeseekoose First Nation fire chief Shylo Stevenson said referencing a 2007 federal study on fire safety on reserves.

Stevenson now runs the Blues Brother consulting business, which works with First Nations to navigate the uncertain and confusing world of fire prevention funding. He started the company after helping to transform the Keeseekoose First Nation's fire services. When he was appointed fire chief in 2001, there was "a pickup truck, four friends, and some shovels in the back." Stevenson said after watching the local school burn to the ground, the community rallied together and called for media spotlight on the issue.

The community fundraised and reallocated money from elsewhere in their budget, trained local volunteers, and eventually bought a pump truck for $200,000. At the time, the federal government provided around $7,000 for their Fire Protection Funding; after pressure from media and First Nations groups it has since gone up to around $10,000. Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) had also just started a program where they provided a reimbursement of 50 percent of the cost for the truck and other capital investments into fire safety. For smaller communities, AANDC will provide up to 75 percent reimbursement. Now, Stevenson says Keeseekoose is the "only First Nation full-time fire department."

Although his is a success story, Stevenson is the first to say that it's no easy feat.

"At the end of the day the Fire Protection money is not enough," Stevenson told VICE.

An access-to-information request by The Canadian Press shows the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation was given just over $11,000 for fire protection in each of the 2012-13 and 2013-14 fiscal years. Stevenson says that barely covers the gas to run the fire truck—that is if the First Nation is one of the few to get one. Then the rest of the funds and more can get eaten up just during a week or two in spring when grass fires are common and unpredictable.

"On a First Nation there [are] no guidelines, no rules and regulations for anyone to follow so, we are just expected to go fight a house fire in our civilian clothes," he said.

"All the money that comes into a First Nation is already spoken for because it's got to be in the budget and going into certain programs. So, to invest more money into a fire department, they have to take out from another program and leave that program short, which a lot of First Nations are not comfortable doing."

Stevenson said there also needs to be training and work to improve relationships between First Nations and neighbouring towns and RMs. Many of these issues are included in a federal government five-year strategy to improve on-reserve fire protection, prevention, and suppression. The strategy was launched in 2010, but in an email to VICE News AANDC did not provide any information on improvements, updates, or deadlines for the strategy.

"The health and safety of First Nation communities is a priority; that's why we provide funding to First Nations to support operations and maintenance, fire protection infrastructure and fire protection training on reserve—through which First Nations manage fire protection services on reserve to meet the needs of their communities," according to an emailed statement from AANDC Minister Bernard Valcourt's office.

But on Wednesday in the House of Commons, when Minister Valcourt was questioned by Manitoba Churchill MP Niki Ashton about the lack of funding on First Nations specifically for fire and emergency services, Valcourt claimed she was trying to "score cheap political points over the death of children on a reserve."

"First Nations manage the fire protection services on reserve to meet the need of their communities and we also know...that education and awareness play an integral role in fire safety and that's what we are funding," Valcourt said.

That's not the world that Stevenson, as a former First Nation fire chief and a consultant sees.

"It's frustrating in my mind seeing a lot of these provincial departments come into a First Nation just to fight the fire but they won't come out during fire protection week. They won't come offer their services to inspect a rink to help out...It's like you don't have any rules so we are not going to bother with you," he said.

Thursday morning the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN) said that the federal government bears responsibility for the tragedy by deliberately underfunding emergency response programs on reserves.

"The families affected by this tragedy cannot be overlooked and the leadership must be allowed the time required to assist the families in need. Rather than using this tragedy as an opportunity to attack First Nations, the question should be—What has to be done to prevent tragedies like this from occurring in the future?" said FSIN Vice Chief Dutch Lerat in a statement.

"Legislation alone will not solve any of these problems. These services cost money. Unless there is a significant increase in funding, there is no way First Nations can meet any kind of fire safety codes and regulations. The federal government has to meet with First Nations immediately to begin finding solutions rather than unilaterally imposing legislation. We do not want to see any more lives lost."

Three Toronto Police Officers Have Been Charged with Gang Sexual Assault of a Colleague

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[body_image width='879' height='569' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='three-toronto-police-officers-have-been-charged-with-gang-sexual-assault-of-a-colleague-and-released-on-bail-875-body-image-1424378212.jpg' id='29213']Suspended Constables Leslie Nyznik (left) and Joshua Cabera (right) strike a pose at a Toronto police fundraiser. Photos via Community Police Liaison Committee

Three Toronto police officers from the city's 51 Division have been arrested and charged with sexual assault and a separate charge of gang sexual assault.

According to a Toronto Police Services press release, the officers involved are Constables Joshua Cabero, Leslie Nyznik and Sameer Kara who have between four and six years experience on the force. They appeared in a Toronto courtroom this morning and were each released on $15,000 bail.

The initial report by CityNews claimed that the sexual assault took place during an "after-work party" during which the accused and the alleged victim were off-duty.

Cabero, Nyznik and Kara had already been suspended with pay after an internal complaint was filed by a female Parking Enforcement officer regarding the incident.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

VICE spoke with Mark Pugash, the Toronto police's director of communications, who said that these officers could lose their jobs but only after an internal investigation following the criminal proceedings.

"I can't go beyond what's in the news release other than saying that at the end of the criminal process there will be a separate Police Services Act investigation and the most severe punishment is dismissal," Pugash said.

Toronto lawyer Barry Swadron told VICE that an eventual internal investigation is not ideal, even in extreme cases like this one. "A Police Services Act investigation is not the best in the sense that these officers would be prosecuted by the police. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it's the police prosecuting the police."

Swadron, who began his career as a criminal lawyer in 1963 and whose practice now focuses primarily on civil suits against police forces added, "It would be better if they got a retired judge to sit, that would add some dignity and respect to these investigations. The more independent the better."

This is not Constable Nyznik's first time in hot water. In 2013, he was scolded by a judge for giving "incredulous" and contradictory testimony after his partner repeatedly elbowed handcuffed suspect Raymond Costain, all of which was captured on dashcam.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/ZfOqRAjsV1g' width='500' height='281']

That specific incident lead Police Chief Bill Blair to chastise his entire force in an internal video obtained by the Toronto Star, saying "If you want to be an idiot, you don't get to be an idiot wearing our uniform. You don't get to be an idiot diminishing our organization and you can't hide behind the badge."

The trio are not the only Toronto police officers facing criminal charges currently.

Const. James Forcillo is facing a second-degree murder charge for the on-duty streetcar shooting of teenager Sammy Yatim. He returned to work in April 2014 after the summer 2013 shooting.

Additionally, a Toronto police officer pleaded guilty to assault in December for repeatedly punching a drunk man in the face. Const. Gary Gould escaped with only probation and did not have to spend any time in jail.

Constables Cabero, Nyznik and Kara are presumed innocent and remain suspended. They have also been ordered to avoid any contact with each other or with the alleged victim, whose identity is protected by a publication ban. They are scheduled for another court appearance on March 20.


​Keep Your Friends Close but Your Anxiety Closer

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[body_image width='1200' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='keep-your-friends-close-but-your-anxiety-closer-381-body-image-1424375365.jpg' id='29186']

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Something weird happened. I asked my editor if it would be OK to write another column about panic attacks, since I don't know how many columns about panic attacks I am allowed to write. While working on my last column, I didn't suffer from any full-blown attacks. But now that it's finished, I'm back in the gauntlet. I guess I'm not done. Maybe I have to write about anxiety forever.

My editor said that would be fine. He also said that he was sorry to hear I'm still having attacks. He hopes I feel better soon.

It was weird to hear someone express sympathy for mental illness in the way that they might for physical illness. I mean, I know my panic disorder is an illness. I take medicine for it (an SSRI). I see doctors: a Psychiatrist monthly and a therapist weekly. The symptoms are palpable. Like a person living with chronic pain, I view every area of my life through the filter of visceral anxiety. From the sensation of suffocating to dizziness and dissociation, my entire nervous system is involved—adrenal glands included. Scientifically, this shit is real.

But there is something about the classification of panic disorder as a mental condition, rather than a purely physical one, which prevents me from extending compassion to myself. If it were solely physical, I might be nicer to me. I might actually have some self-love.

Instead I play the tape of "you're so fucked." I even buy into some antiquated notions around mental illness that it is "all in my head" or that I am "imagining it."

Well so what if it were all in my head? I'd still be suffering. Would I not deserve compassion and self-love? Intellectually I'm like yeah. But emotionally I'm like no fucking way. Buck up, gurl.

Even writing the word "self-love" makes me feel stupid. Is anything more bullshit, kale-eating, juice-fasting contemporary American than the notion of self-love? "Be gentle with yourself, you deserve it." Do I really?

My feelings of shame around the condition create a drive in me to overcompensate, overachieve, and never appear vulnerable. These then serve as a catalyst for the condition. I put pressure on myself to perform like a completely healthy person, lest people find out that I am "not OK." I don't take sick days. I fear my condition and its implications for my life. I'm like "something is very wrong with me" and then I'm like "what the fuck is wrong with me that I feel like something is wrong with me?" None of this is good for the nervous system.

Like, right now I'm scared that I'm not being funny in this column. I'm not wearing my mask, the one that lets you know that shit is fucked up yet also under control. The mask says: You don't have to worry about me. I've still got it together enough to get outside the anxiety and be funny. I'm safe.

Recently, a woman said she likes my writing because I'm not a whiny cunt. I think what she means is that she likes my funny mask. But now, the panic attacks are stripping me of my ability to not be a whiny cunt. I want to be in control of my whiny cunt levels! If I'm going to alienate you, I want to curate that alienation. I want to craft the persona that turns you off. I don't want the real me, my vulnerabilities and humanity, to leak out and make you run. I don't want to have needs.

Like, what if you found out I am really not OK? What if you knew that I am suffering a lot right now and really scared. Would you flee? I don't want to find out. So I deflect my vulnerability into humor or "wise platitudes."

That's what I did when my editor extended his kind words. I was like, "Oh, well, our curses are our blessings. If I didn't have a panic disorder there would be no So Sad Today."

That's sort of true. I mean, So Sad Today wouldn't exist if I never suffered. And I like that So Sad Today exists. But it's also sad that I am afraid to just say thank you, human to human, when someone extends sympathy. Like, to receive compassion means I am weak. And I am terrified of being weak.

I'm also terrified of other people's narratives. I don't want to be perceived as falling apart. Like, it's fine that I'm frightened of me. But if you are frightened of me then the problem is more real. I don't really know how much I am allowed to fall apart. I don't think I want to find out.

At the same time, I kind of do want to find out. After all these years of preserving my facade in daily life, I'm fucking tired. It would probably be a real relief to just crumble. I wish I could trust that the universe has me and that I could just let go. Or, like, even if I don't trust that the universe has me (and I don't), it would be a relief to just surrender anyway. I think my biggest fear and deepest wish is to surrender.

Like, I would love to just stand up at a work meeting and be like "Hi, I'm sorry, I can't do this. I may be talking about 'our brand' but I'm definitely dying. You are too. We all are. But, like, I think I am dying right now. My throat is closing in and my chest is constricted. I have to go. I don't want to die here."

I would love to tell a creative collaborator, "Hey, I know that you want to talk about narrative arc. But I'm actually not inside my body anymore. Did you know that in my head you are the enemy? You have become the enemy, because you've trapped me inside this Starbucks."

I'd like to tell a friend, "I have more panic attacks around you than anyone else. I am supposed to feel comfortable around you, and the fact that I am supposed to be comfortable adds to my shame around not being comfortable. This makes me anxious. I think we should just text for the rest of the friendship. Thanks."

[body_image width='1200' height='862' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='keep-your-friends-close-but-your-anxiety-closer-381-body-image-1424376403.jpg' id='29196']

I'd like to tell a lover, "The panic attacks I have around you are more painful than the ones I have around anyone else. This is because I am supposed to feel intimate with you. The pressure to feel close to you, while I am having a panic attack, makes me feel totally and completely alone."

It's probably good that I don't say these things to people. It's probably good that I keep pushing myself to leave the house and maintain my social masks of competence, engagement, and comfort. But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me? Would I end up jobless, friendless, and loveless? Would I vanish entirely?

One time I saw an interview with a female musician whom I greatly admire, someone who is known to suffer from mental illness. She is brilliantly talented and has exhibited some eccentric behavior over the years, including a few rather public breakdowns. She contains both madness and talent.


The interviewer asked her about her typical day. He was like, "Do you wake up and make breakfast? Do you make some eggs?" She looked at him coldly and responded, "I don't eat eggs."

At that moment I realized that the one question I would want to ask her, the only question for me worth asking, would be "Is the talent worth the craziness?"

But I don't know if she could even answer. What if she wants to possess her talent and also be free of torment. What if she doesn't want to have to choose. I think it's OK to just want your blessings to be blessings. It's OK to not be grateful for your curses.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its anonymous author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website. Read the first, second, and third installments here and here and here.


The Real: The Real 'Mad Men'?

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Don Draper is a character that could only exist in fiction: impossibly handsome, endlessly talented, and crippled by alcoholism and other impulse-control problems. VICE was curious to see if there was any truth behind Mad Men protagonist, and that's how we found George Lois.

A leader of the Creative Revolution, Lois helped create the campaign "I Want My MTV," and make companies like Xerox, Jiffy Lube, and Tommy Hilfiger household names. He also designed 92 iconic covers for Esquire. Lois is often referred to as an inspiration for Don Draper, but there are stark differences between the two. Here's his story.

Why Does the NYPD Think Dance Teams Are Street Gangs?

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[body_image width='2000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='why-does-the-nypd-think-subway-break-dancers-are-gangsters-219-body-image-1424378911.jpg' id='29221']

A group of New York City Lite Feet dancers trades moves and tricks at a "lab session" in mid-February. Photo by the author

It was below freezing and spitting sleet, but the men gathered in the back room of the community center in Brooklyn's Atlantic Terminal public housing project were sweating bullets. Malcolm Fraser peeled his T-shirt up around his ribs, gripping the hem in his teeth to cool his body. It was early February, and in a few weeks he would be headed to Shanghai to teach Chinese hipsters how to dance like he does, so the moves had to be perfect.

To most people, this might sound like the establishing shot of a lucrative Hollywood film franchise. To the New York City Police Department, it's a possible criminal conspiracy.

Fraser is nobody's idea of a gangster. At 20, he retains the lightswitch smile and megawatt energy of a grade schooler, and when he hasn't got shoes or hats or shirts in his mouth, he's a passionate and convincing evangelist for a style called Lite Feet that is popular among—though far from exclusive to—performers who dance in the New York City subway.

Dancing on the train is illegal—Fraser knows that as well as anybody. Over the past nine months, the NYPD has redoubled its efforts to drive performers from the system, and the MTA has piled on with an anti-dancing PR campaign.

What's less visible and more alarming to young men like Fraser is what appears to be a police policy that lumps dance teams in with violent street gangs, effectively criminalizing the activity.

"Todays kids are very acrobatic, they're good dancers, and they go out there and compete in competitions and form these crews," NYPD gangs expert Sergeant Dwayne Palmer told the crowd at the 115th Precinct in Corona, Queens, during a December presentation on the hundreds of loosely affiliated youth groups.

The audience listened as Palmer described how teams of performers exact bloody revenge on one another for pride wounded in dance battles, and known gangsters raise cash for their criminal exploits doing backflips on the morning commute.

"We saw [notoriously violent Brownsville rivals] the Hoodstarz and the Wave gang, they would go out and compete for money," Palmer told the crowd.

That claim made Fraser laugh out loud, as in actually double up on himself in a genuine burst of childish giggling.

"Are you serious?" the Brownsville native cried when I related the expert's comments to him, his tone incredulous. "I grew up with all of them, like literally, I know every single one of [the gangsters] that's arrested or that's there. We were PS [Public School] 165, PS 183, it's like those two schools." He shook his head in disbelief. "These guys, they're not dancers!"

In fact, many of the Wave Gang and the Hoodstarz are behind bars, swept up in the same style of conspiracy prosecutions that put away members of the Gambino family and the Trinitarios in years past. Starting in the early part of the decade, the NYPD began a dramatic overhaul of its gang policy, shifting attention from brand-name organizations like the Bloods and the Crips to smaller, younger, and more casually associated groups like the Bad Barbies and the Brower Boys.

Between 2012 and 2013, city law enforcement indicted more than 400 people—most of them, like the 43 alleged members of the Hoodstarz and Wave gang, between the ages of 13 and 21—for crew-related crimes, and the number of neighborhood cliques with clever names being monitored as violent criminal conspiracies climbed into the hundreds.

"It's total madness," said Dr. David Brotherton, a gangs expert and chair of the sociology department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The cops "don't have any definition [for crews]—they make it up as they go along. The definitions they use are simply definitions that are self-serving."

Those definitions are also exponentially more elastic than they once were. Mafia families were called that for a reason: Outside of blood kin, entry was extremely limited. The prison-born gangs of the 80s and 90s warred over colors and exacted lifetime membership through brutal initiation rites. By contrast, the ranks of modern NYC crews come and go as they please. What ties them together in court can be as ephemeral as YouTube videos and hashtags.

"They're not using the word gang, they're using the words like team, family, set," Palmer explained. "With this new structure that the kids have decided, I can be a Blood, I can be a Crip, but I don't have to identify with that organization. We can say we're Northern Street Boys. We [the NYPD] call that crew gangs. The thing that's important for us to know is that once a crew commits a criminal acts—all crews once they commit a criminal act—they're considered a gang."

The trouble is, without tattoos, colors, or even set names, defining who is and isn't a part of a group committing crimes is murkier than ever before.

"There's no public agency that [the police] have to go to and say, 'We're about to engage in this practice where we're monitoring the behavior of groups of dancers because we think they're related to the criminal activity of gangs,'" said Robert Gangi, who heads the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), a law enforcement watchdog in Manhattan. "If they had to, there might be some instances of somebody saying, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'"

If the definitions of criminal conspiracy expand to cover more and more young people, the punishments remain fixed: a conspiracy charge automatically ups the mandatory sentencing minimum on other offenses. Increasingly, and especially in the case of youth crews, the tapestry of such charges are woven out of online correspondences.

"I've been arrested before by police, I have friends who've been arrested before by police, and they'll ask you, 'Oh, you're in the [Facebook group] Lite Feet Nation chat?'" explained performer Elijah Soto, who teaches dance through the Lite Feet group Mindlezz Thoughtz. "They watch us from Facebook. I've seen my friends, their profile pictures in the police station. I've seen my own comments on Facebook written in printed paper."

Fraser recalled an equally chilling tale from the one and only time he was arrested, after dancing on the train a few weeks back.

"They asked me when I was in the cell, 'Oh, are you down with Lyve Tyme?'" he said. "I was like, 'What does that have to do with anything, what's going on?' They were like, 'Oh, we just wanted to know.' I was like, 'That's a dance team, it doesn't matter, even if I was down with it, it's not a gang that you could indict me for.'"

It's unclear whether the NYPD currently considers Lyve Tyme, Lite Feet Nation, or any other specific dance group a criminal crew; the department did not return calls or emails for comment on this story. But if, as Palmer's lecture suggests, the department is beginning to label them that way, dancers could presumably be indicted just like gang members, simply for their association.

"You go away for a long time," Brotherton said of young people charged in crew conspiracies. "It's really very serious—once you start throwing that around, the defendant often cops a plea very quickly. He knows he faces some pretty dire consequences if they go to trial."

There is a streak of the absurd in all of this: A decade before most Lite Feeters and their dancing brethren were born, DARE instructors were already dreaming them up as the bright alternate futures for would-be drug dealers. Even today, gang prevention is largely structured around youth engagement, much of it funded by law enforcement in the form of group activities like sports and arts programs. At their most fundamental level, shoe tricks and ankle formats turn idle time into positive energy, whether on the train or in the park or at home in front of an iPhone.

"Dancing on the train is the smallest part of any dancer's day. They dance and go get something to eat and then they go battle or they cypher or they do stuff like this," Fraser told me, straining to be heard over the noise of a late Sunday night lab session—slang for practice—in mid February. "No killer you know is doing that. I'm sorry, you could be the most cold-hearted person, [but] after you kill somebody, you're not gonna feel like dancing."

Gangi, the police reform advocate, agreed: If what were happening to Fraser and his friends weren't so terrifying, it'd almost be funny.

"That's painfully ironic, that China of all places—what we think of as an autocratic-at-best country with little freedom artistic or otherwise—they're inviting this young man to teach them his skills and give them the benefit of his creative inspiration, and in New York City we criminalize him for it," Gangi told me. "It's deeply fucked up."

Follow Sonja Sharp on Twitter.

Dub Kartel Is What a Reggae Group from Halifax Looks Like

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Dub Kartel Is What a Reggae Group from Halifax Looks Like

Oklahoma Reconsiders Nixing AP US History for Focusing on 'What Is Bad About America

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Oklahoma Reconsiders Nixing AP US History for Focusing on 'What Is Bad About America
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