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Canadian Intelligence Agent Allegedly Arrested in Turkey, Accused of Helping ISIS

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Turkish National Gendarmarie car. Photo via Flickr user Dave Conner

If a report from a Turkish daily newspaper is to be believed, the Turkish government, long suspected of supporting ISIS in its war in Syria and Iraq, has a Canadian intelligence agent in its custody.

According to the Daily Sabah, Turkish authorities arrested the agent after they helped three British girls recently join the ranks of the Islamic State. Speaking to Turkish television on the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq from the Turkish border, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu accused a member of a foreign intelligence service of helping to ferry those British girls into the warzones of northern Syria.

"We were informed by Britain about three girls who left to join ISIS a few days after they departed for Turkey," said Çavuşoğlu during the interview. "This person was working for the intelligence service of a country participating in the coalition against ISIS. This country is not the United States or a member of the European Union. I told this to the British foreign secretary and he replied 'as usual."

The Daily Sabah reports that several Turkish media outlets claim that the individual currently in detention is a Canadian, while it is known that the current coalition against ISIS includes Canada, Australia, and other Arab countries within the region.

A spokesperson for the Minister of Public Safety said the department is "aware of these reports," but added "(w)e do not comment on operational matters of national security."

The report comes on the heels of expanded foreign spying powers for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Bill C-51 that promises to bolster the legal capabilities of law enforcement agencies to surveil and arrest terrorist threats in Canada.

VICE Canada has reached out to CSIS, Turkish diplomatic officials in Canada, and the Foreign Affairs department, but has yet to receive a reply.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.


Maple Spring, Part Deux? Quebec Students Know How to Bring the Ruckus

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Hundreds of thousands of protesters thronged the streets in 2012 in Quebec. Photo via Facebook user Occupy Canada

Three years after staging the largest student protest in Canadian history, students in Quebec are gearing up for another one. Various media outlets may have threatened the same thing last year, and the year before, but the protests planned for the upcoming weeks are larger in scale than anything the province has seen since 2012.

As of this writing, 24 student organizations in Quebec, representing over 30,000 students at six university and CÉGEP campuses, have voted to strike as part of a protest against the Liberal government's austerity measures. Student organizations representing another 110,000 students are scheduled to carry out strike votes. The first accompanying protests will be held on March 21 and carry on until May 1, at which point organizers are hoping for a "social strike" that will incorporate support from unions, other left-wing organizations, and the public at large.

Whether or not you agree with the strike, you have to admit: students in Quebec know how to cause a fucking ruckus.

While Quebeckers tend to be more progressive than English Canadians in general, students in La Belle Province are also much more likely to take to the streets if they feel like they're getting a bad deal. The so-called "protest culture" on French campuses can also be attributed to the mobilization efforts of Quebec's radical student organizations. While the rhetoric of these groups tends to border on self-parody (particularly their calls for a "popular struggle"), they can also be very effective. Even when strikes aren't in full swing, student activist groups maintain an aggressive presence, such as the disruption of a presentation by assistant deputy minister Frank Des Rosier this January, or a protest last year that resulted in six arrests.

The Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), which played a major role in organizing both the "Maple Spring" of 2012 and the upcoming "Printemps 2015" movement, are regularly referred to as "militant" in the media. It's a description that they themselves encourage, which would be pretty much unthinkable for an English Canadian student group that represents 80,000 members. "We've been described as one of the most radical student groups in the province, and I think it's one of our strengths" says ASSÉ spokesperson Camille Godbout, who attributes the "militant" label to the "diversity of tactics" the group uses to make its message heard.

Granted, there are people in Quebec who are upset by the "disruptive" campus culture, and the English-language media has no problem finding them. There's David McLaughlin, the UQAM law student who took his student association to court in an effort to stop the strike, or the 14 political science instructors who wrote a letter complaining about the "intimidation, harassment, shoving, vandalism, looting and repeated strikes" of various activists. But on the whole, it's remarkable how effective groups like ASSÉ are at getting students on their side. Even if Quebec doesn't experience another full-fledged Maple Spring this year, the 30,000 students who are currently planning to strike will probably give a migraine to someone in the provincial government.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

While student unions in English Canada are similarly concerned with social justice, their appeals for action tend to fall on a rather apathetic student populace. Even in Montreal, students from the English-language universities lack a similar awareness of social movements. "At McGill especially, there isn't the same culture of political activism," says Amina Moustaqim-Barrette, a vice president of McGill University's student society who is hoping to gather support for the strike from the University's various departmental associations.

"You go to UQÀM and that's what everyone's talking about and everyone's involved; that's not the case at McGill."

As of this writing, no student associations from any Quebec's three English language universities have yet agreed to join the impending strike (although a number of associations from Concordia are scheduled to vote on the matter soon).

For student activists in the rest of Canada, the student protests of 2012 must have felt like something out of the 1960s. In Quebec, where tuition was already almost half the price it was in the rest of Canada, students actually cared enough to do something about a tuition hike. Moustaqim-Barrette considers the protests a success—an example of "mass mobilization affecting policy and decisions being made [from the] top down." By certain measures, she's right. The protests contributed to the Liberal Party's loss in the fall election and lead directly to a temporary tuition freeze that Parti Québécois premier Pauline Marois announced a day after taking office.

But by other measures, like the actual effect they had on student life, the protests were unsuccessful. In early 2013 the Marois government announced a tuition hike that angered the same student leaders they marched with months earlier. Fatigue prevented another widespread protest, but two years and one ill-received fist-pump later and Quebec finds itself with another austerity-driven Liberal government. "Whether it's PQ or [Liberal], it doesn't matter for us," says Godbout, who mentions cuts to social services that were made by Parti Québécois, "We're going to be in the streets and we're going to fight back against the austerity measures."

Even without a specific tuition-hike to protest, student leaders can point to the impending cuts in education as something that will affect student experience. Though it's unlikely that general budget cuts will motivate students to campaign in a months-long protest, ASSÉ and other Printemps 2015 organizers are also hoping to gain the support of Quebec's unions and community groups to oppose cuts to healthcare and other public services. So perhaps it's not too unreasonable for Quebec students to call for another strike. After all, that would be the militant thing to do.

Follow Alan Jones on Twitter.

How a Country Made Its Cricket Hero's Rape Case Disappear

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How a Country Made Its Cricket Hero's Rape Case Disappear

Seven Actual Things Straight People Can Learn from Gay Relationships

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday, in a column called "Six sex and love lessons straight couples can learn from gay relationships," esteemed sex column veteran Tracey Cox took her MailOnline readers tenderly by the hand to the Homosexual Zoo, to see what information could be gleamed from these rare, exotic, and beautiful creatures. Her Attenborough-level of understanding and insight is truly an inspiration to us all: "Gay men understand that men simply like looking at sexy things," she says, at one point. On mutual masturbation: "Gay men love showing off."

Even I feel like I learned something, and I am one of those flamboyantly masturbating gay men Cox is so eager to study. But, as the proud member of a nine-year fully homosexual coupling, I feel I can offer a slightly more justified perspective (i.e. I have actually had gay sex with a gay man, loads of times) on what flawless gay relationships can teach you straight people about how to go out with each other. So here they are.

YOU'RE FAR LESS PICKY ABOUT GENITALS

One of the great joys of being a homosexual man is that you see cocks far different and varied from your own. Dicks are as varied as arms: some are hairy, some are thick and others are covered in tattoos. When in a homosexual relationship you learn not to judge what you are presented with and just chow down on it, for are we not all beautiful examples of God's creatures? Do we not all ejaculate from roughly the same location?

PEOPLE ASSUME YOU'RE STILL HAVING LOADS OF SEX

Sorry to be the one that breaks the news, but in a gay relationship we get just as lazy as everyone else. After a certain amount of time together a Netflix marathon cuddled on the sofa with an excellent cup of tea is far more appealing than the cardio workout of getting your big gay freak on.

If the thought of fucking isn't enough to tire you out, the level of prep work then clean up sure as hell will: semen gets everywhere. It gets everywhere. This isn't to say that a gay couple becomes asexual, it's just that, like all couples, sometimes cranking one out alone is fine and the intimacy of snuggles is perfect. Learn to embrace a wank and a hug in your straight relationship.

YOU GET DOUBLE WARDROBES

Twincest is universally agreed to be the hottest type of family sex. Clothes are also agreed upon to be one of the most expensive outputs of a household. Smart and wily homosexuals can kill two birds with one stone by dating someone similar-looking while also gaining access to their wardrobe.

This leads to fights. Wardrobe sharing is amazing, but full of pitfalls. Rules: never wear something your lover has bought for a special event. Occasionally buy something pretending it's for you, but get it in your boyfriend's size: you make a big fuss that it doesn't fit but looks so much better on them, then they get an ego boost and you get a blowjob. The flip side to that is, if they grow too large for something, make sure you wait long enough for them to have moved on from this grievance before claiming it as your own. Bear that in mind next time you try your girlfriend's underwear on.

YOU'RE NOT EXPECTED TO HAVE BABIES AND YOU GET TO BE INDIGNANT WHEN PEOPLE ASK YOU ABOUT MARRIAGE

Pow pow, double blessing. In the right situation this can be used to make people feel socially awkward enough that they eventually go away: mustachioed old aunties at weddings and bigoted coworkers can all be sacked off with an icy glare and an uptight, "And why would you think we would want to get married?" Because since marriage equality became a thing, everyone assumes it's every gay's goal to walk down the aisle, and there has been a 1,000 percent uptick in moms asking whether they should be buying a hat. Just because we like planning parties doesn't mean we necessarily want a wedding, mom. Fuck off with the hat chat.

Baby questions are also a golden egg for people who delight in starting arguments in empty rooms, the, "So what, would you two just jizz in a paper cup and mix it up like a slushie before inseminating someone, or...?" question seem to be reserved for the more aggressively heterosexual members of the family, which can cause some wonderful arguments and the chance to remind people we are still second class citizens. You say, "AND SHE WON'T EVEN LEND ME HER WOMB!" with enough emotion and your homophobic cousin will guiltily backtrack so hard they sometimes end up having to buy you presents to say sorry.

NB: Similar arguments can be sparked around giving blood, teaching, and the use of the word "gay" as a derogatory term.

A CAREFUL CHOICE IN SAME-SEX LOVER CAN RESULT IN THE UNIQUE SITUATION OF BEING ABLE TO PLACE BLAME IN THE THIRD PERSON

My partner has the same name as me, which is great for egotists (you get to shout your own name as you come) as well as the chronically late. "David, why are you so late?" someone might ask me, and I get to point to him and say, "Well, David spent over an hour doing his hair," even though it was my fringe that wouldn't sit straight. I mean, I don't know how straight people are meant to do this, but... well, maybe if your name is Alex, or something? Sam? Jessie? It's a thought.

YOU DEVELOP A HOUSEHOLD CHORE MIND MELD

On occasions when the gay magic is truly fabulous between two men, they will enter the kitchen together. One man will take firm control of the tap and basin while the other finds the softest towel to dry with. Together, wordless, perfect yings to each other's yangs, they work hard scrubbing the day's dirt off the dishes as the other makes them dry and sparkling for another days use. You think it's just poppers and sauna-fucking. It isn't. We're also really good at washing up.

TWO GAY MEN ARE JUST AS BORING AS A STRAIGHT MAN AND A STRAIGHT WOMAN

Basically, apart from an extra meat wand, a gay relationship is pretty similar to any other relationship: we watch TV marathons, fart in front of each other, and occasionally have a really intense threesome. There's not a whole lot you can learn from us, unless you need the name of an obscure, Japan-only Kylie Minogue album track or information on who competed on which series of Ru Paul's Drag Race. That's about the size of it.

Follow David on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: The Value of Video Games That Aren’t ‘Fun’

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'The Stanley Parable'

The next time you play tiddlywinks, take the time to think to yourself: Am I having fun?

Of course you are. Why else would you be playing tiddlywinks? It's a game, and games are fun. You don't go around a school playground or an old person's home and ask if stuck-in-the-mud or rummy are fun. "Play," "games," and "fun" go hand in hand. They keep your mind active. They pass the time. They distract you from things like war, taxes, and the inevitability of death.

But should a video game be fun in the same way that tiddlywinks is fun? When you sit down to read a book like 1984 or watch a documentary like The Act of Killing, you expect to be gripped, shocked, and shaken; but fire up a PS4 and the word "fun" sways in like a drunk uncle clutching a half-empty bottle of Apple Schnapps. We're told again and again that games are a culturally important medium, so why is there still the idea that video games need to be, more than anything else, fun to play?

"Our medium is still very much seen by the majority of the public as an entertainment medium—using video games as a medium for complex expression or communicating an artist's ideas is still very much in the fringe," says William Pugh, designer of The Stanley Parable, a game that pokes fun at a whole heap of gaming tropes. "I mean, 95 percent of people who buy video games buy them to be entertained, thus if you want to make a living off game development your best bet is to make your game fun to play, and if your artistic vision doesn't allow for that then you'll be fighting an uphill battle from the start."

This assumption that a game needs to be fun to play can be traced back to the roots of the medium. In The Theory of Fun for Game Design, the developer Raph Koster defines games as mental puzzles. According to Koster, the sense of fun we feel when we play a video game comes from learning and mastering systems that need planning and coordination, much like we'd do in Connect 4, Jenga, or tiddlywinks. Aspects such as story and character are just dressing in the same way that knights, kings, and queens are dressing for the mathematical system at the heart of chess. "This is why gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games," says Koster in his book. "They don't see, 'get a blowjob from a hooker, then run her over.' They see a power-up."

Is Koster right, or do comments like this massively misjudge the ability of games to tackle complex emotional situations? Play Pac-Man and, yes, the characters are pretty much dressing for a system. Play something like Lucas Pope's Papers, Please and, while there's very clearly a game system at play, the "ethical implications" of the system, such as who to let through the border and how to feed your starving family, are arguably the whole reason to experience the game.

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'This War of Mine'

11 bit Studios' This War of Mine is another recent game that puts "ethical implications" center stage. Here the player has to survive in a siege loosely based on Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. "Beating" the system involves "beating" grim scenarios such as stealing food from innocent civilians. Can we really dissociate characters from mechanics and boil these experiences down to the type of "fun" Koster says comes from mastering an abstract system, or is there a deeper type of engagement taking place?

"I think the question is actually sharper if you broaden it out to a question about entertainment," says Tom Jubert, writer of games including The Swapper, FTL, and The Talos Principle. "Video games, almost without exception, yearn to be entertaining, even when they're not being fun. There is something active about the way that they seek to engage their audience that we are quite afraid to lose... We need to keep the player's attention, and to do that we often resort to short-term thrills. We fear that if someone has to stop and think for too long they'll just never come back."

With new games coming out every week to tug at player attention-spans, it's understandable that developers who want to tackle serious subjects often feel pressured to walk a tightrope between challenging concepts and entertaining gameplay.

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'The Talos Principle'

The Talos Principle, for example, explores philosophical ideas of consciousness and artificial intelligence but also has a ton of puzzles to complete. Similarly, Minority's Papo & Yo explores a child's fear of an alcoholic parent in the form of a puzzle-platformer, Anna Anthropy's dys4ia plays like WarioWare but is about gender dysphoria, and Christos Reid's Dear Mother is a 2D action-platformer about the developer's experiences of being kicked out of home after coming out.

All of these games give their players tasks to complete in a more-or-less traditional way but also touch on difficult social and personal issues. Are they trying to have their cake and eat it, or are they using entertainment as a way of sneaking through tough questions about gender, consciousness, and abuse?

" Dear Mother, the open-letter video game I made for my mother after being kicked out of my home for coming out, isn't a fun game," Reid says. "It's sad and it's dark but it's important, because it communicates with people about homophobia and religion. Life isn't a series of grin triggers—it's the entire range of glory to bullshit that we go through that defines us, and it's important to represent that in the games we're making."

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'That Dragon, Cancer'

The fact Reid believes games can express such a wide range of human experiences is a sign that developers are broadening the scope of their ambitions. If, as Jubert and Pugh suggested, there's currently a pressure on developers to provide straight-up entertainment, perhaps this too will change as audiences grow accustomed to different types of interactions. That Dragon, Cancer, for example, is an upcoming game that traces the developers' memories of raising their son, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 12 months old. It's a game that sets out to grasp the attention of the player and yet calling it "entertainment" seems a bit reductive.

Casual, playful games will and should continue to be made and enjoyed. That isn't being argued. What is being argued is that "fun" is becoming a uselessly broad word to describe the way some video games hold the attention of their players. Fun is good. Fun is great. It is comforting and we all need a little distraction. But with around 360 new games submitted to the App Store every day, maybe the industry is at a stage when developers and audiences can afford to be a little bit more daring. Perhaps we're at a point where there's room for games that are brave enough to deny the player what they want and challenge them in ways that might not be empowering, that might make them feel upset and uncomfortable. Games that say: "Fuck fun. If you want fun, go play tiddlywinks."

Follow Thomas on Twitter.

We Asked an Expert What Would Happen if the UK Accidentally Legalized Ecstasy

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Illustrations by Sam Taylor

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Ecstasy, ketamine, and crystal meth are temporarily legal in Ireland. But you already know that. Maybe you've booked a trip over with Ryanair, who reduced the cost of a flight from the UK to the Republic this morning from $58 to $15—a move that's presumably completely unrelated from the fact you can, for at least another 12 hours, now openly snort ketamine in Tesco. Perhaps you're in Dublin and celebrated last night with a legality "loophole pop-up party." I just don't know.

Another thing I don't know is what would happen if this kind of thing—a legislative fuck-up leading to the temporary legalization of a whole load of drugs—took place in the UK. To find out I spoke to David Atha, head of the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit, a drug research company offering legal advice to individuals caught in drug cases, as well as crown prosecutors.

David's spent the past 20 years monitoring the UK's drug trends from both sides of the fence, so I figured he'd be the right man to ask.

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Some Dubliners at last night's "loophole pop-up party" (Photo by Sarah Elizabeth Meyler)

VICE: Hi David. Could a similar legislative error to the one that's happened in Ireland ever happen in the UK?
David Atha: If the government hasn't drafted legislation in a particular way, or the court hasn't set a precedent, it could lead to a sudden de facto change of the law, as has happened in Ireland. Obviously in Ireland the government's moving very fast to close the loophole. In Britain, I suspect the proceedings would take a little longer.

Fancy giving a hypothetical example?
You get a medicinal cannabis user that applies for a Home Office license to be able to grow, possess, and use it for medicinal purposes. There is currently no defense in law for using it for medicinal purposes, but if their case to cultivate cannabis was refused, they could apply for a judicial review of that decision. And then, if that was finally upheld by the courts, you could get a situation where home cultivation was legalized temporarily.

Say it happened with ecstasy, ketamine, and crystal meth, just like Ireland; would the UK turn into a free-for-all drugs market?
Twenty-four hours isn't long enough for a free-for-all drugs market to develop. But if [the legalization] was to last a couple of months, certainly things could happen. But that would very much depend on the actions that are taken by the authorities. They may do low-level harassment, as well as arresting people. It's not a question of prosecuting... there are other things the authorities can do to make life difficult.

Could police retrospectively arrest people once the substances became illegal again?
Yes, if they were still in possession or still supplying. But in terms of the law in general, no. It's the law at the time of the alleged offense that applies. I've had cases where people have been arrested with so called "legal highs" that were actually legal at the time of the arrest, but were made illegal a few weeks later, and they got off.

Say the government intentionally legalized and taxed the drugs currently legal in Ireland, what kind of revenue could they expect?
For ecstasy, you're talking [a market worth] £300 [$447] to £500 million [$746 million] a year. Meth, the market's probably less than £1 million [$1.5 million]. Ketamine somewhere between £10 to £15 million. Whereas cannabis is about £6 billion and cocaine and crack together is around £1 billion.

Do you think a sudden legality of ecstasy could lead to an instant upsurge in quality?
Not really. The government's had the law changed in an uncontrolled fashion. If the market was regulated you'd be looking at standard doses, which would guarantee the content. There would be nothing to regulate the content in this scenario.

In what way could authorities study the fallout of this scenario for their advantage?
Twenty-four hours isn't enough time to do anything—there's no project in place that can be rolled out to assess the impacts. There may be one that can be done retrospectively. If there was a big spike in deaths, for instance. To be honest, I don't think most users give a damn whether something's legal or illegal.

A lot of the drugs that have been made illegal recently have become more popular. It's like a British Kitemark to say that they work. We've found that since certain drugs—ketamine and GHB, particularly—have been made illegal, their users have actually increased.

In this instance there'd be a short window for authorities to act. What actions would they likely take?
What I suspect is that the police [would] continue to seize drugs, but they wouldn't prosecute for it. If you've got a white powder and they don't know whether it's ecstasy powder, methamphetamine, cocaine, or whatever, they would seize it, analyze it, and, by the time it's analyzed, it would be illegal again.

Are there any positive ramifications 24 hours of legal ecstasy could have on society?
If it was a for longer period where things didn't get any worse or if certain situations were to improve—like if the quality of tablets did improve, or there was clear quality control: fewer deaths, fewer people needing hospital treatment—then it might provide more ammo for the drug reform lobby.

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Some more Dubliners at last night's "loophole pop-up party" (Photo by Sarah Elizabeth Meyer)

Could it benefit medical research?
I don't think it'll make any difference. In legitimate studies there's a lot of planning required—you have to move through various ethics committees to get proposals approved, irrespective of the legal status of a drug.

OK. Could it affect the black market drug economy, even in such a short timeframe?
There'd be some big parties. And whoever's got the drugs are quite likely to sell out... anyone in the know's going to make the most of it, and anybody that's got the ecstasy at the moment is going to be quids in.

Would that drive prices down?
It's been bought when it's illegal so you're going to pay illegal prices to actually purchase the stuff. It's too short a timescale for people to bring in large quantities that they weren't going to have anyway.

What if ecstasy was made legal two days before Glastonbury? What would happen then?
It depends. In Dublin this has taken everybody by surprise. If people were on the inside track and knew it was happening and could get the stock together, then yes, it might be different. I don't think many people who don't [take ecstasy] will suddenly want to, just because it's been made legal.

I think people who like ecstasy would use it more freely. But those that don't use it—unless they are deterred by the law, which is a small portion—most would continue to use their signature drugs of choice, whether it be alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, speed...

What about public perception? Could studying the effects of 24 hours of legal pills bring about any changes there?
Changes in perception aren't going to come from studying 24 hours; they're more likely to come from [studying] 24 months in Denver, where, as you know, cannabis has been made legal and is being treated as any other commodity.

So any studies of this nature would be focused primarily on economics?
Not just the economic aspects, but the health aspect, the prevalence of users, if it's becoming more or less prevalent among school children—that sort of thing. It's not just the immediate economic consequences of taxation but the wider economic consequences that the relaxation of the law would have on society as a whole. Like if people work better stoned because they're not coming into work with a hangover.

Talking of morning afters, how do you imagine the day after a legal drug binge like this would stack up for authorities, and those enjoying themselves?
Well, there's going to be some very, very tired people.

Follow James on Twitter.

Talking to a Guy Who Found Peace Through Self-Amputation

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Image via Flickr user Batik Kaftan Crafts

Body Integrity Identity Disorder ( BIID) is rare psychological condition that causes sufferers feel like a limb, or limbs, don't belong to their bodies. These people often develop a preoccupation with amputation, and in some cases resort to self-administered surgery. Neurological recognition of BIID only came about in the mid 1990s, but early research indicates that it stems from a flaw in the brain's right parietal lobe, which houses the body's internal body map. This has led many to view it as a physiological defect, rather than a psychological condition.

I've been fascinated by BIID since I heard about it. Just what exactly would drive someone to amputate a healthy limb? To find an answer to this question, I joined a Yahoo group for sufferers called "Fighting it" that's been around since the end of 2001 and currently has 2,356 members, including a 30-year-old guy who I'll call "John." He was reluctant to describe how he actually removed his leg, but was happy to discuss how he got to that point.

VICE: Hi John, can you describe how BIID first affected you?
John: It was my left leg below the knee that bothered me. I was into my early teens when I figured out that I wanted to be an amputee. It was an alien realization—but then looking back, I remember playing as a young child and pretending to be an amputee.

What was it about the leg that bothered you?
It's hard to describe what it was like to have a limb that didn't belong. Every step felt odd and it even felt odd sitting. If I got busy I would forget about it but the feeling come back as soon as I stopped. There were periods when the feeling was less troubling and times when it was worse. I felt like I was probably the only person to think that way but eventually I found a couple of Yahoo groups and that gave me some comfort. But there was always the little annoying buzz in the back of my mind.

Did you often think about getting it removed?
Of course. And obviously a nice, safe, painless surgery would have been the first choice. But that option wasn't open, so I was left trying to figure out the least terrible alternative. I will tell you about a plan I had when I was about 15. I was going to pretend to fall off my bike and put my leg under a train. Then, after the leg was off, I'd coast to a pay phone. I don't know if that was stupidity or desperation.

What was happening in your life when you decided you were ready to be an amputee? How were you feeling?
My life was good and stable and that's what made the time right. I'd decided I wanted it gone a dozen years before. I was pretty level and just knew I could do it. I felt just a little bit more strong than apprehensive.

But then how did you feel the morning you went through with it? Were you nervous?
I was super nervous. I just knew that somehow three dozen lead pellets would find their way through my leg. I was so nervous I almost threw up, but I knew it would give me the best chance to relieve my discomfort, so I counted to three. Later, when it was done, I was awash with relief. It was over and I was free.

How did you feel when you got to the hospital?
Most of the fear left me once the pain really hit and help was on the way. I believed I was going to live and it was just a matter of recovering.

Are you ever tempted to remove the other one?
The rest of my body is mine and I would very, very much like to keep it. I suspect that I'd handle losing another limb better than most due to prior experience, but I'd still be quite upset. I don't find the disease is addictive like tattoos and piercings seem to be. And even if I desired another amputation, I think my bravery was all used up the first time. Imagine, truly imagine, engineering a situation where the bones and muscles in a limb are to sustain such damage as to preclude any attempt at salvage despite the advances of modern medicine.

Do you ever miss your leg?
Sometimes, but I'm not sure if it's because I miss my leg or because it reminds me I'm a nut. Whenever I doubt my decision I just remember the discomfort.

I found it hard to find someone willing to talk to me about this. Why did you decide to share?
I'm not the first to take matters into my own hands, and I won't be the last. The issue is that sufferers of BIID should be accepted enough to ask for help so they don't have to go to such great lengths. That's why I'm speaking out.

Follow Charlotte onTwitter.

Meet the Artist Behind the Awesome Animated Intros in 'Broad City'

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Meet the Artist Behind the Awesome Animated Intros in 'Broad City'

When Did Not Wanting to 'Lean In' Become So Taboo?

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Sheryl Sandberg. Screenshot via.

The whole "having it all" thing has always felt like something that didn't concern me. Not because I have it all, ("all" in this case meaning a career which you need fancy clothes for, a relationship with someone you truly like, and a couple of cherubic kids) but because I'm not old enough to think about it. I'm too young to have that conversation, or face that dilemma. I'm too young to buy Red magazine.

Except, I'm not.

At 29, I might have 40 years left of my working life, if I'm lucky, but probably only one or two in which to decide if my current career is the one I want to fill those decades. Not to mention the to-have-or-not-to-have kids thing. Dramatic? Maybe. Perhaps I've got ages to work it out. Still, when you're squaring up to 30 and still shop in Tesco's reduced aisle for your lunch, there's no denying it's a reasonable age to take stock, to pose the question: "Is it time I bought a salad spinner?" Or, "Am I moving, even shuffling, in the direction I want to be?"

In an interview with The Sunday Times recently, Helen Fraser, Chief Executive of the Girl's Day School Trust, described turning 30 as the beginning of two "lost decades" for women at work, when career options narrow and men overtake them on the way to claim that seat in the boardroom. And no, they won't save you one. Not even if you ask nicely.

Fraser, as well as research carried out by Oxford University, puts women's alleged floundering in the workplace down to a lack of confidence. "What a lot of women find in their 20s is that their confidence gradually erodes," Fraser said. "A young woman of 25 who has been in a job for two years may start to think, Maybe they don't think I'm that good, because no one has told her she is good, while the young man at the next desk is likely to be thinking, I'm doing fine, because no one has told him he isn't."

It's reasoning supported by Owen Radahan, a careers counsellor whose clients largely number women in high-powered city jobs. "Women in their early 20s are beginning to look at their careers and question where they want to go and where they want to succeed," he told me. "When they've been in those careers for seven or eight years and are approaching 30, they are reassessing what they want from their lives."

"Clients come to me because of confidence issues, but that's largely because of barriers put against them," he continued. "Men are expected to move up the ladder more so than women, so they have to fight harder and sometimes their attitude can be, 'I'm getting a bit tired of this, why do I have to do all the pushing? Why do I have to work twice as hard as my male colleagues.'"

But while we might lack the confidence to get ahead at work, or to successfully challenge our male counterparts, do we also lack the confidence to admit that maybe, y'know, it's not the right job at all?

How easy is it to say that the career you've spent the best part of your 20s getting up at 6.30 AM every day for, crying in the toilets for, sacrificing nights out with your friends, or any kind of extra-curricular hobby for, maybe isn't the thing you want to be doing?

Quitting a job without another one to go to is a frightening prospect, especially in the current economic climate. Because, although unemployment is falling, it is doing so more slowly than in 2013, suggesting that people are putting the brakes on hiring. Even more terrifying is leaving a job that not only means you're left selling unused scented candles on eBay to pay rent at the age of 30, but that you're stripped of the identity you'd created for yourself with the job you've just turned your back on.

"I had my meltdown maybe a bit early, at 27, and eventually quit my job," Emma, a successful journalist, told me. "Even though I was utterly miserable, everyone—apart from my husband—told me not to do it. They couldn't understand why I would give up working at a national newspaper for no other reason than that I was unhappy."

It's curious, the whole work-is-more-important-than-your-happiness-and-you're-lucky-to-have-a-prestigious-job-in-the-first-place thing. You'd think your nearest and dearest would put your mental wellbeing before the status of a job, only, several women I spoke to found that, when they did finally decide to leave the jobs that had been making them unhappy, it was—if not explicitly—frowned upon.

"People used to ask about my job," says Emma. "Then, when I went freelance, people stopped asking. I wasn't interesting anymore. I was totally defined by my job, in the eyes of other people at least."

Oh.

See, however much we think we might have moved on from the oft-quoted "societal pressures" on women, that we're beyond those discussions now, we do still care. It's just that the focus might have shifted. The conversation, among city-dwelling, 2:1-wielding 20-somethings at least, is less interested in those women who choose not to have children (which isn't to say they don't still suffer from stigmatization), and more in those who shun the gold-paved Career Path for a more simple job.

"After university I felt pressured to do something career-wise, when actually I think I would have been happy to just bum around and work at HMV forever," says Lucy, 30. "But it's seen as a disappointment or a failure to not be succeeding in every way. If you're not Lorraine Candy, then you haven't made it."

Few would argue that trying to have a career (and get paid) is an easy ride. And yet, choosing not to have a career seems to be the new social taboo.

How easy is it to say that the career you've spent the best part of your 20s getting up at 6.30 AM every day for, crying in the toilets for, sacrificing nights out with your friends, or any kind of extra-curricular hobby for, maybe isn't the thing you want to be doing?

Few questions generate such awkwardness so quickly than the seemingly banal, "So what do you do?" when you haven't got an impressive answer. Bar is OK—if you're in the studio with your band in the day. Cafe's fine—because you're writing your novel in the evening. But working in hospitality, retail, or healthcare because you want to? Because you can actually leave on time and see your friends for more than an hour at a time? Because you don't run the risk of getting an ulcer from stress at age 30? Don't be an idiot.

In this post-American Idol world, where we're all encouraged to "follow our dreams," however ridiculous or unattainable everyone quietly knows them to be, it's easier than ever to feel like a failure. Especially as a woman. Not only should we be making a name for ourselves in a ~respectable~ job (ideally one that will get us recognition beyond the confines of the office's four walls), but we should be loving it, too. And when we've got Sheryl Sandberg talking on behalf of women everywhere, urging us all to Lean In, it makes it harder than ever to say, "You know what, I don't think I want all this."

"Part of our challenge in an age of social media is to not compare. Rather than where everyone else expects you to be, where do you want to be?" says Radahan—something that rings true with many female journalist friends of similar age. When you see your peers tweeting their big, impressive interviews, or weekend supplement bylines, it's hard not to look at your own catalogue of decent commissions and not feel a sting, to not think, Christ, I should be pushing myself harder.

But maybe, for some, accepting that you've got as far as you can is fine. There are women within this "crunch time" age bracket who thrive on that day-to-day push toward career fulfillment, toward reaching an inner equilibrium that says, "Yep, I've kind of made it," and that's brilliant. But every woman is different. And as Radahan says, for those who are floundering, "looking at our abilities quite honestly and realizing, 'this is as far as I can go,'" might be prudent. "I feel very strongly that we should be happy at work and not stressed," he says.

Life doesn't suddenly stop when you decide to leave a job, or change tack and do something completely different for a bit. You don't become a different, lesser person overnight.

People come to cities like London and New York to claim the career they've been promised by their university, that English Literature degree they paid upward of $45,000 for. It's only later, when the novelty of lining up (and paying) to get into an establishment that says it's a bar but looks suspiciously like a squat has worn off, and you can no longer physically get through a day at work on an hour's sleep and a McFlurry (seriously: how can anyone over the age of 24 do that anymore?), that you realize everyone you "left behind" in your home town might have had it right in the first place.

"My [home] friends are, hands down, happier than those in London," says Emma. "Pretty much everyone I know who lives in the city are in crisis, but my home friends talk about anything other than work when we go out." To many women I know, not talking about work is unfathomable. And it's all-too-easy to look down on those who chose not to move to London and try and make it in the status-heavy world of the media, for example. To assume that their reference points and conversations may not be as rich as ours. Because, what could be as edifying as, say, a job in the media? "I'll admit, maybe I looked down on them a few years ago," admits Emma, "but now I envy their freedom."

Ah, freedom. "They're not being judged by how well they're doing and are living really fulfilled lives."

Sarah, 29, agrees. "Sometimes I think that, if I still have my friends and my health, I'd be just as happy working as a florist as I would as an editor," she says, which is probably why she's just quit her job in fashion and bought a round-the-world ticket with the money that was meant for a mortgage. "When I think about coming home and having no work, I'm scared," she says. "But who knows what's going to happen?"

She's right. Life doesn't suddenly stop when you decide to leave a job, or change tack and do something completely different for a bit. You don't become a different, lesser person overnight. Admitting that the coveted position you've spent years of student debt, overdraft fees, and shittily-paid junior roles grafting your way toward doesn't make you happy isn't giving up. If you have learned skills, you can go back to them.

Life is one massive, rolling contract of uncertainty and if, as women, we don't have the confidence to listen to ourselves when we are unhappy, that feels like the biggest failure of all.

Follow Olivia on Twitter.

This Man Wants People to Stop Serving Food on Wooden Boards

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This Man Wants People to Stop Serving Food on Wooden Boards

What's Next for the Ferguson Police Department?

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St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar may be providing a glimpse of the future. Following the overnight shooting of two cops working a protest line in Ferguson, Belmar patiently answered questions from the media Thursday morning. He was cool and calm, collected and measured in a way that former Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson, who announced his resignation yesterday, never was.

The resignation letters that have been piling up in recent days—Ferguson's city manager's and a municipal judge's among them—left the city with a leadership vacuum. For many activists in Ferguson and elsewhere, these new vacancies are the appropriate result of a Department of Justice investigations that found Ferguson cops were engaged in the widespread targeting of African-Americans.

But without the promise of federal oversight—or a comprehensive reworking of laws and regulations passed in public meetings in St. Louis County—it's unclear if the personnel changes will result in lasting change.

"The Justice Department doesn't have the ability to stop everything that's wrong with the courts system in St. Louis County," said University of Missouri law professor Ben Trachtenberg, echoing comments made by Ferguson committeewoman Patricia Bynes following the announcement that Jackson would resign.

"We need to deal with a culture issue here," Bynes said as part of a panel on CNN. "We need to seriously deal with the culture of the police department, of the municipal reports, of the way that the city is run."

While it can't necessarily change the system that has effectively kept minorities in St. Louis County trapped in an elaborate network of fines, fees, and regulations, the DOJ can play a role in reforming the Ferguson Police Department. That task may eventually mean dismantling the law enforcement agency altogether. The recommendations handed down by the agency are more like directives, and if they're not met, Ferguson's police force could cease to exist. That would be precedent-setting, according to David Makin, a research fellow at the Washington State Institute for Criminal Justice.

"Typically, punishments involve withholding federal funds [from law enforcement agencies], going in with oversight, and I guess the extreme would be shutting down a department," Makin told me. "To my understanding, that's never happened."

Law enforcement agencies are usually disbanded only in cases where funding is lacking or absent, with the notable exception of Jennings, Missouri, just a few miles from Ferguson. There, the city council voted to shut down the police department in 2011 after a series of incidents that ratcheted up tensions between the majority white police force and largely black community.

In most instances, Makin noted, police departments that have been investigated by the DOJ try to change their ways. That's the case in Seattle, which on Wednesday learned that four of its top five cops would be replaced as part of an ongoing effort to meet Justice Department recommendations from an investigation that began four years ago.

Seattle police, like Ferguson's, were found guilty of civil rights violations, but the nature of the charges are different. In Ferguson, cops targeted blacks and other minorities in traffic stops that netted much of the city's revenue. In Seattle, police were found to have used excessive force, well, excessively.

Crisis intervention training was part of the department's agreement with the DOJ. But officials within the Seattle police force, at least, appear to be addressing the much talked-about "culture change" that Makin, Bynes, and others have floated since the summer from hell that set off a national debate on policing.

"You can change the policy, but it does nothing. You have to change the organizational culture," Makin said. "Getting rid of the top four command staff is a pretty good way to start it. It's pretty aggressive, but it sends a message."

While much has been made of the racial bias and minority targeting within the Ferguson Police Department, that discovery is just the latest in a line of similar practices found in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Newark, among a long list of others. That's not to mention the host of cities and towns in Missouri that appear to be doing similarly awful things to their black citizens. In light of these investigations, and his tracking of criminal justice and law enforcement issues, the discoveries made in Ferguson's case aren't that surprising to experts like Trachtenberg.

"I think a tremendous amount of police departments in America, if subjected to this level of scrutiny, would be shown to have the same patterns and practices [as Ferguson]," Trachtenberg told me. "The Justice Department could have done the same investigation two years ago, and they could have done the same investigation in cities all over America that didn't have a nationally famous shooting, and I think they would have found similar things."

The situation in Ferguson and St. Louis County may not have come to light if not for Brown's death and the protests that followed. Which begs the question: Where else is the targeting of poor and minority communities occurring en masse? Lot of places, apparently. But, just like politics, all police tactics are local.

"It's out in the open now," Malik said. "But the problem is that no one cares about it until you yourself are at the receiving end."

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

Jeremy Clarkson and the War on British Dads

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Jeremy Clarkson's books. Photo via Flickr user Timothy Tsui

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Jeremy Clarkson has run out of cigarettes. He flips open the lid of his Marlboro packet with his thumb, the only thing inside is some limp silver paper. His expression grows even more hangdog than it was before. He's been involved in an altercation with one of the producers of his internationally beloved TV show, Top Gear. This has resulted in his suspension from the BBC, and has meant that this Sunday's edition of Cars and Casual Racism will not be aired, and neither will the remaining two episodes of the series. Jeremy Clarkson has, in no uncertain terms, fucked it. He has fucked it before—also in no uncertain terms—by being casually racist on his show, making gags about dead prostitutes, calling the Middle East the "ook-stan sort of countries," uploading a photo of himself sleeping on a plane with the words "Gay Cunt" and an arrow pointing to him next to his head. He is like a popular yet unruly schoolboy, always overstepping the mark but using his teacher's fond disposition towards him as a get-out clause. His SATS scores are high, and OFSTED are pleased.

He crumples the empty packet in his hand and walks outside his front door. He's met with the familiar yet jarring sound of a photographer's shutter, of people asking him questions they know he won't answer. "Just off to the job center," he quips. Of course, multimillionaire author, journalist, television presenter, and friend of Prime Minister David Cameron Jeremy Clarkson will only be going near a job center if he's driving a monster truck over it. Though he may be momentarily disgraced his career will no doubt recover, unless it emerges he called his producer a "fucking bent cunt" before laying into him, or something similar.

No, Jeremy Clarkson, though quite a reprehensible human being, clearly, is not bearing the greatest brunt of his suspension. That brunt is to be borne most heavily by the loyal viewers of his show, the readers of his books and columns. That brunt is to be borne by your dad, basically, and though he isn't showing it, he's really disappointed.

Your dad is tired. He feels like he's traveled through time in the last decade or so, and found himself in a future that doesn't want him. Everything he likes is lame, everything he does is boring, everything he says is problematic. He's not quite a relic yet, but he can feel his sheen oxidizing rapidly. The creep of the rust is showing everywhere; face, legs, arms, knob, eyes—nothing is exempt. But your dad will not be complaining about it. He will stuff it deep down into his brain and chest because that's what he's been doing since you were born. Since you came into the world his life has been one criminal disappointment after another, and you're not really helping with your themed club nights and sex politics at the dinner table. You've been exhausting him from the day you came into this world.

Work spurs him on. Work, in the latter days of life, transitions from a necessity that allows you to fund your party lifestyle, to a necessity that keeps you from losing your mind. You stop working and then what? Life becomes a painful series of standing up and sitting down. Each action aching more than the last, until your whole viscera is an agonizing metronome of clicks and strains.

But for one hour on a Sunday, your dad lives vicariously through Jeremy Clarkson. He watches an overweight man in his fifties drive Ferraris across beautiful landscapes, making racist jokes and drinking beer. Your dad is escaping to the only place he wants to escape to: inside of Clarkson's brain.

And now that trivial release is being taken from him. Taken from him like so many other things. Smoking in pubs, affordable pints, soccer, which is now on about 17 different channels and costs about $1,500 to have. For us, the young, these things are irritating, but bearable. We have the wherewithal to say, "No, that's shit, I think that's wrong." But your dad... He just wants a salty wave of easy livin' to come and collect him from this shitty beach covered in broken Sierra Nevada bottles and damp copies of the Guardian.

We all loathe Jeremy Clarkson. We all think he's a ponce. We are united by our hatred of Clarkson; to this generation, Clarkson is basically rave. We are equipped enough to realize that Clarkson's offensive, undignified digging out of anyone who is at even a mild disadvantage has no place in a society that can function fairly or justly.

But your dad is done with all that. No one wants to hear his opinions now, and they likely never will again. These dads, they give a whole lot and don't ask for much, if anything, in return. There's a petition of 500,000 signatures to get Clarkson back on the TV, and a lot of them will be bottom feeders who just want to go around saying "P**i shop" with impunity. Facebook Klan wizards sharing false stories about St Paul's Cathedral being turned into a mega-mosque. But your dad is there too, quietly willing it to pass, so he has something to watch, to enjoy, before it all starts again on Monday.

Spare a thought for this breed of jet-lagged men. They won't be around forever, and you'll miss them when they're gone.

Follow Joe on Twitter.

VICE Exclusive: Take a Video Tour of Fashion Designer Bernhard Willhelm's Frenetic Art Exhibition

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[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/eejuXjcobPo' width='640' height='360']

Iconic designer Bernhard Willhelm is known for bending the fashion world over his knee and spanking the hell out of it, so it's no surprise that he'd bring a similarly in-your-face attitude to a museum. This past February, the artist and creative partner Jutta Kraus to conceive the exhibition Bernhard Willhelm 3000: When Fashion Shows the Danger Then Fashion Is the Danger at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. The project includes creepy mannequins with manic hair and his haute couture on, surreal sculptures, and literal spanking pads. For those who can't make it to LA by the time the exhibition closes May 17, MOCAtv made a video tour that we're premiering on VICE today so you can at least have your eyes spanked.

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Installation view of 'Bernhard Willhelm 3000: When Fashion Shows the Danger Then Fashion Is the Danger.' February 7 through May 17, 2015, at MOCA Pacific Design Center, courtesy of the museum. Photo by Brian Forrest

In the tour, host Niko Da Ikon jaunts around the installations in drag, describing the artwork as his voice gets auto-tuned because... why not? He explains that the work is a "look into the future of fashion," including Willhelm's autumn/winter 2015–6 collection. While it may be hard to enter the time machine based on a four-minute clip, the video makes it clear that Willhelm 3000 undeniably occupies a space between chaos and diversity, which was one of the exhibition's goals.

In a recent interview with VICE sister-site i-D, the designer-cum-fine-artist explained that the work aims to question the uniformity of consumerism through his unique, manic juxtaposition of commodified objects and art pieces. "It's interesting that nobody questions anything," Willhelm said. "It's the question why everybody wants to have the same things, like Abercrombie and Fitch and Starbucks. People are very happy to submit themselves to conformity." If it were up to the designer, the world might be a bit more frenzied, but definitely more interesting.

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Above photo by Josh Paul Thomas via i-D

Watch the video above, and head over to the MOCA's website for more information about the exhibition. Bernhard Willhelm 3000: When Fashion Shows the Danger Then Fashion Is the Danger is on view from February 7 through May 17, 2015, at MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles.

Visiting Seoul's Artificial Limb District

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In December, a team of researchers at South Korea's Seoul National University unveiled the latest advances in artificial limbs: a new type of high-tech prosthetic that involves "smart skin" being attached to an artificial limb to restore the person's sense of touch. The simulated skin can be stretched over the entire prosthesis and is accoutered with ultra-thin single crystalline silicon nanoribbon, which allows people who use artificial limbs to feel heat, pressure, and moisture. The polymer that covers the sensors will even feel like warm human skin to anyone who touches it. South Korea possesses the most sophisticated and futuristic advances in prosthetic limbs.

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These advancements haven't made it across town from Seoul National University to the Garwol-dong neighborhood, where artificial limbs are handcrafted in the back of shops clustered together on a single street. This is Seoul's artificial-limb district, where nine or so shops sell nothing but prosthetic arms, legs, toes, fingers, eyes, breasts, lips, and every other body part imaginable.

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Inside one shop, I found employees hard at work constructing handcrafted limbs on worktables, with pristine examples of their efforts hanging in their window like Chinatown ducks. The shop next door, by contrast, had dusty appendages in its window; inside, I could see a guy watching TV, his bare feet resting on a table. Three lone ghostly hands were propped up in his window, silently waving off into the distance.

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In Korea, it's common to have similar shops clustered together on one road. There are streets lined with shops strictly selling pet supplies, jewelry, potted plants, jokbal (boiled pigs feet), and naengmyeon (North Korean cold noodles). When an area becomes associated for a type of good or service, it attracts more buyers. This sort of grouping is called "agglomeration"; the idea is that individual shops do better when they share the masses of customers they attract together. There are American examples of this phenomenon too, like Manhattan's Lighting District.

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Farther down the street, I found a shop called Doo Son Uhe Soo (in English, "Two Hands"). A man saw me taking photos of the window display and stepped outside. "Do you want to come in?" he asked.

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Inside, I was offered a cup of tea and the opportunity to photograph the piles and piles of artificial limbs. A far cry from the high-tech heat sensing prosthetics developed at South Korea's Seoul National University, Two Hands' prosthetics looked like department store mannequin limbs made by tools found in a high school shop class. Passing a box of fingers, I went to the back of the shop, where an older man was constructing limbs with molds, plaster casts, and blowtorches. I watched as his co-worker put the final touches on a pair of hands and feet, diligently pouring a mold into a forearm and mixing it around with a wooden stick.

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There are few places where an entire street of shops like this could stay in business, but due to the Korean War and ongoing tensions with the North, South Korea sadly has a long history with land mines, raising the demand for prosthetics. In 2009, the LA Times reported that an estimated 1,000 civilians nationwide—mostly poor, uneducated farmers—have been hurt or killed by some of the 1.2 million mines buried in the Korean landscape. I was unable to find more recent numbers, but mines remain an active threat.

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The mines, made of both metal and plastic, can be lethal. Some are designed to explode twice, once at ground level and again after bouncing six feet into the air. Those who escape death often end up missing a leg, an arm, a hand. South Korea has not adopted the Mine Ban Treaty, and the government insists on the military necessity of antipersonnel mines while still acknowledging their negative humanitarian impact.

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Inside Two Hands, the man with glasses turned to me. "Chin says it's all right if you to take pictures in his shop," he said, referring to the competing artificial limb shop next door.

Inside, Chin was hard at work constructing a foot, making final adjustments with a screwdriver as a patient customer who was missing a leg waited for the final modifications. When complete, the final artificial appendage was brought out. The man inspected his new leg, screwed it in, and practically jumped for joy.

Follow Harmon Leon on Twitter.

Texas Is About to Let College Students Carry Guns on Campus

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Danielle Vabner woke up one Friday morning in her freshman dorm room to an onslaught of missed calls from her mother. A shooter had opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Vabner's three siblings attended. It was unclear if they had been hurt, and Vabner immediately hitched a ride back to Newtown, Connecticut. In the car, she got an update: Her 6-year-old brother, Noah Pozner, had been killed. He was the youngest of 20 child victims.

"It was so out of the blue and tragic, I was in shock," Vabner recalled recently, sitting in a food court at the University of Texas at Austin, where she transferred to try to recover after the shooting. But the specter of gun violence has followed Vabner to her new state, thanks to a push by Texas lawmakers to allow students tote firearms on college campuses. "It's another tragedy waiting to happen on campus, and we're here to feel safe and to study," Vabner told me. "I came here to heal."

The Texas state legislature is moving forward on a bill that would reverse the strict ban on concealed weapons at state universities, allowing gun owners with concealed-carry permits to carry their firearms around campus. The legislation is expected to clear the state Senate next week, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has promised to expedite its passage. "Regarding the Second Amendment, our first priority is to pass campus carry this session," he wrote in a recent Facebook post. "I am an avid gun owner, was endorsed by the NRA with an 'A rating,' and have a 100% voting record on second amendment issues for over 8 years."

But even in a solidly pro-gun state like Texas, the idea of letting coeds loose campus with hidden firearms remains deeply divisive. A poll released by the Texas Tribune last month found that voters are split evenly on issue, with 47 percent in favor of the campus carry bill, and 45 percent opposed. The bill has sparked an emotional debate in the state, pitting gun control activists and gun violence victims like Vabner against guns rights activists like NRA poster child Amanda Collins, who argue that licensed concealed weapons are a safeguard against assaults and violent crime.

In a video for NRA News, Collins explains that because of campus rules, she wasn't carrying her Glock on the night she was raped in a parking lot at the University of Nevada in 2007. "There is no doubt in my mind that if I had been carrying that night, I would have been able to stop that attack," she says. "This is a real issue that, when some people, when they're not given a right to protect themselves, they get hurt. It didn't just happen to me."

Texas' education and law enforcement leaders have spoken out against the bill. In a recent letter to Texas lawmakers, University of Texas Chancellor Bill McRaven, a former Navy SEAL, came out against the legislation, arguing that would create a "less safe environment" on the system's campuses. A recent survey of the Texas Police Chiefs Union found that most members oppose allowing concealed weapons on campuses. At UT Austin, faculty and students have voiced loud opposition to the new legislation.

University officials also claim that the bill would come with a hefty price tag for Texas' higher education institutions. According to a UT fiscal analysis provided to me by the university press office, campus carry would cost the system more than $39 million over six years, requiring the schools to put funds toward security upgrades, personnel training, and new systems to track licensed gun carriers on campuses. Teaching hospitals would bear the brunt of the cost, said UT spokeswoman Jenny LaCoste-Caputo; Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center alone would have to spend a whopping $22 million on new security measures, thanks to the high volume of new visitors coming in and out of the hospital.

Proponents of campus carry have questioned these numbers, first reported by the Houston Chronicle, arguing that the Texas bill does not require schools to take additional security measures, and that it would not affect laws barring guns from hospitals.

If the bill passes, Texas will have one of the laxest campus gun policies in the nation, joining Utah as the only states that explicitly forbid public universities from putting any limits on where people can take their guns. Just seven states allow concealed weapons at public universities. But the campus carry movement has gained momentum in recent years, thanks to NRA-backed efforts to promote firearms as the answer to campus violence. At least 15 states are currently considering campus carry laws.

Gun control activists have scrambled to push back against the campus carry movement, and accuse the NRA and other groups of preying on public concerns about violent crime at colleges and universities. So far, though, there is no conclusive data on what kind of effect, positive or negative, concealed carry has had on campus crime rates. Madison Welch, Southwest regional director for pro-gun group Students for Concealed Carry, argues that too few students carry guns to significantly affect statistics, and notes that concealed carry license holders in Texas are less than one-third times as likely to be convicted of murder than the general population, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

"Our push to legalize campus carry is about ensuring that trained, licensed, carefully screened adults are allowed the same measure of personal protection on college campus that they 're currently allowed virtually everywhere else," Welch, a recent graduate of Texas A&M University told me.

To Vabner, though, the close proximity to additional weapons is an intolerable risk. "The thought of anyone carrying a gun here is terrifying to me," she said.


What Makes Someone a Creep?

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Frank Underwood, 'House of Cards,' still via YouTube

When creeps are on TV, we love them. Take Frank Underwood on House of Cards—he's a remorselessly sinister and disturbing human being, but we can't we stop lavishing praise on his presidential performances. Consider how shit we've been at veiling our obsession with Walter White, Breaking Bad's unthinkably evil antihero. And then note how we're already bemoaning the inevitable end of Peep Show, despite the fact every single character is, in his or her own hilarious way, consummately creepy.

But when it comes to real life, people are–weirdly—less keen on creeps. People don't want to hang out with murderous meth dealers. Or, say, the kind of person who goes around sniffing cats' assholes. Or someone who spends the duration of a conversation licking his or her own hand.

Adam Kotsko, an academic at Shimer College in Chicago and an expert in the perverse appeal of less agreeable human character traits, has bravely attempted to work out why we're so obsessed with such characters who should, as the definition of creepiness goes, "cause an unpleasant feeling of fear or unease." The results can be found in his latest book, Creepiness, which essentially picks up from where he left off in earlier works Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television.

I recently gave Adam a call to ask why there's been such an explosion of weirdly disturbing characters on the small screen in recent times. We also discussed the components of creepiness, and how, as he explains in his book (an extract of which can be read here), "We are susceptible to being creeped out because we are always in danger of being creeped out by ourselves."

VICE: Hi, Adam. So when did you first get thinking about creepiness and what inspired you to write a whole book about it?
Adam Kotsko: My initial inspiration was to write about "awkwardness," but then I got the idea to write a trilogy of other negative character traits. It actually started as a joke—a colleague of mine was going to write a trilogy and I was skeptical. I said, "Oh, he can write a trilogy, so I can probably write a trilogy too," and I did in fact wind up writing them. But I think, as soon as I started to talk about awkwardness, it was kind of inevitable that I'd come to creepiness because the biggest fear of the awkward person is that they're going to be perceived as creepy.

What approach have you taken in trying to define the notion of creepiness?
My research was mainly just talking to a lot of different people in a lot of different settings about what they thought creepiness was, and especially what TV characters they thought were creepy. As I say in the book, the Burger King mascot was kind of the ultimate example everyone could agree on.

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To focus on the creepy King then, what is it that makes that guy such a classic creep?
It seems like the key to his creepiness was that he combined a lot of different features. He was invasive, first of all; he's always trying to break into somebody's house or something. He's always trying to shove something onto you. He's not trying to steal, he's trying to give you a hamburger. But I think the real creepy thing is that you don't know what he wants or what he's getting out of it because he's wearing this mask that completely hides his facial expression. He has this perpetual frozen smile, and it seems like some kind of combination of desire that's enigmatic but that's invaded your personal space.

There's also a sexual element, I suppose.
Right. Sexual desire seems to be creeping into areas it doesn't belong. In the adverts, the way they display the hamburgers, or whatever, is often reminiscent of pornography. You probably shouldn't want to have sex with a sandwich.

So who's a good example of a creep on contemporary television?
In Girls, Lena Dunham's character is pretty creepy, at least at the beginning of the series, though I think she kind of grows out of it. An example of how she's creepy is maybe the way her nudity is presented on the show. It's as though it's being pushed at the viewer. It feels excessive. It's not like a normal HBO show where it's just expected as part of the background, it's really over-the-top somehow. And also her relationship with her boyfriend Adam, who himself is pretty creepy. They have this really weird degrading sex thing, and it becomes clear that she is actively trying to solicit that kind of thing so she can write an edgy memoir. It's not that she directly likes it or wants it, it just feels like she should be doing it, and that's a little bit creepy.

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Did you look at the characters in Peep Show?
Oh yeah, Peep Show, definitely. I mean both of them are hugely creepy—Super Hans, also. To take a specific incident, how about when Jeremy wants to do a sperm donation or something and he has to masturbate but they don't have any pornography. He then pulls out a note and starts masturbating to the picture of the young Queen. I hope that counts as creepy. There's also the first scene of the first episode, when Mark sits down on the bus and puts his hand on the seat and Sophie sits down on it and he leaves it there anyway. And Super Hans, it seems like whenever he appears on screen, you realize that he's creepy.

You once said that one of the main things that makes a character creepy is when they can't fit into the "social hierarchy" and they transgress certain social boundaries. How does this work on TV?
I think that there is like just a general pattern, like, for example, a character—a male character usually—who's obsessed with a woman who's out of his league. If he doesn't just give up after a little while, if he persists in it, I think it becomes creepy because the pairing's just never going to happen, so what do they want out of it? I guess Steve Urkel's continual courtship of the neighbor girl after ten years of them being teenagers would be the ultimate example.

So why do screenwriters keep returning to the figure of the creep?
With the creep, there's a kind of double dip going on, because normally a creepy character is scapegoated or expelled or punished in some way for being creepy, so you get to reject it. And that's fun for people. But when the creep is on screen, you also get to see somebody who's actually getting what they want. Their desire, even though it's unconventional or weird or off-putting, is actually being enacted and I think there's a fascination to that as well. So you get the pleasure of seeing somebody do this often-transgressive thing that you wouldn't do yourself, and getting satisfaction from it. And then you get the satisfaction of rejecting them too. I think that the creep is emerging as a weird kind of release valve in contemporary society.

Do you think we're sort of projecting our own weirder tendencies onto these creepy TV characters?
Yeah, there is always an element of projection in creepiness. Like, if you think of the neurotic young man who's afraid to approach women, or even thinks 'they prefer assholes,' or 'they never notice me,' they're effectively projecting their own sexual desire, their own desire that creeps them out, onto this figure of the asshole guy who's always getting the girl. There's always a desire to kind of dissociate yourself from an element of your self and that's what generates this weird dynamic of creepiness.

Follow Huw and Adam on Twitter.

Off Hollywood: Off Hollywood - Richard Stanley

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In 1990, writer-director Richard Stanley was off to a fantastic start with Hardware, a visually driven cyberpunk horror film about technology's execution of man by the hand of a regenerating robot. The film's tagline—"You Can't Stop Progress"—would go on to summarize the rest of Stanley's career as mainstream Hollywood did everything it could to destroy him.

After Hardware pulled in $1.5 million at the box office, Stanley's next film, Dust Devil, proved he was capable of creating spectacular dreamlike visions and had a legitimate shot at becoming one of the next big auteurs in the ranks of Jodorowsky.

Then Hollywood knocked on his door. For years he had been developing a script adaptation of H.G. Well's The Island of Doctor Moreau—a science-fiction novel he had read over and over as a child. His vision for Moreau was crystal clear and ripe for the picking. With a movie studio and Marlon Brando behind him, he was on his way to a major mainstream breakthrough.

But after just three days into production, Stanley was fired. What happened next is an epic tale of one of Hollywood's greatest production disasters and what wound up being one of the worst films ever made. The film's legacy is based on bizarre behind-the-scenes stories about Val Kilmer's ego, people trapped in beast costumes, and Marlon Brando insisting on wearing white makeup and an ice bucket attached to his head with the smallest man in the world at his side.

Leaving the disaster in the dust, Stanley continued to pursue his visions, spending his time as an occult researcher, anthropologist, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. Recently, he has returned to Hollywood to present a retrospective of his life's work at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles and to screen the insane documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. Stanley, it seems, is due for a victorious comeback.

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VICE: When did you start making films?
Richard Stanley: I started messing around with Super 8 movies when I was ten or 11 years old. I was a huge Ray Harryhausen fan and managed to mail-order his book Film Fantasy Scrapbook. From staring at the Famous Monsters fan page I could see that there were other kids around the world who were also making creatures and admiring the same films. It convinced me I wasn't alone and that I needed to get to the outside world.

You grew up in South Africa, right?
As a child, my mother dragged me around while she was researching her book Myths and Legends of Southern Africa. This meant that between one and six years old, I was visiting tribal areas and meeting witch doctors. My reality was a world where people put snakes into their mouths and make them come out of their nostrils and get possessed and talk to spirits and believe in invisible beings who have magic pebbles. When you are young and not told to be scared of things, you're not scared of them—particularly when it comes to the supernatural. It wasn't until later in life when I started going to school that I found out this sort of thing scared the crap out of people.

Do you remember which films inspired you to become a filmmaker?
When I was four, my dad brought home a 16mm print of King Kong. I adored it. Obviously I cried and still cry every time Kong climbs the Empire State Building. I was super impressed that the Denham character was a filmmaker who had gone to Skull Island to bring back images of a world that no one had ever seen before. Immediately I started making dioramas of imaginary worlds and messing around with stop-motion dinosaurs.

Can you tell me more about the film Hardware?
It's extremely detailed and a lot more dystopian than The Terminator, which it's often compared to. I had worked on developing the Hardware world for years and years, since I was as a teen. I was originally inspired by the book Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. After I made a caveman Super 8 film, I thought what's next but to do something set in the far future? It was set in a future city on Christmas Eve in the apartment of a scrap metal sculptress and her drunken one-handed boyfriend. Later, when I was living in London and working in music videos, the Hardware world evolved to become a multi-apocalypse world and eventually my first film.

Is it because you were working as music video director that Hardware features cameos by big-time rock stars like Iggy Pop and Lemmy?
I came straight off of a music video period to doing Hardware. I just phoned them up. John Lydon was a big supporter from the beginning and contributed the main theme, "This Is What You Want This Is What You Get."

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How did you go from doing Super 8 movies to booking top music videos?
Flukes. I blundered into a band that didn't have a recording deal who wanted to shoot a video to land a deal. The band were called Fields of the Nephilim. They were a goth band with a spaghetti western look. I did their first videos and their first few album covers. They carried me through with them into the industry but the first time I ever had a crew was when I shot the P.I.L. video for a song called "The Body."

In order to survive many directors wind up doing commercials. Did you?
I have always despised commercials. I'm a great believer of the Bill Hicks saying that "when you do commercials, you suck the devil's dick forever." I stayed away from commercials and have even turned some down because the concepts offended me—even though they offered me ten times what I earned making a film like Dust Devil.

Your father failed to become a filmmaker, but you continued despite setbacks.
My father is also the one who gave me a copy of The Island of Dr. Moreau. I read it when I was very young and was moved by Moreau's beast people in the same way that King Kong moved me. The beast people were trying to deal with human moral issues and the uses to which humanity puts animals. I was such a fan of the book when I was 12 I managed to convince the school teacher to read it to the class. It is certainly H.G. Wells's most interesting and developed work.

What became of the 1996 film must have cut you pretty deep.
I was surprised, under the circumstances, that they were even able to cut together a series of sequences, let along finish the film. It was totally chaotic. I remember David Thewlis saying one day that he was going to cut off one half of his mustache to see if anyone would notice. Not a single line from my script wound up in the film, which in some ways I am grateful for.

It's obvious in the documentary Lost Soul that the producers wanted you to fail. Why do you think they didn't believe in you?
With The Island of Dr. Moreau, I think it happened too soon. People weren't prepared to see baboons with machine guns [in 1996]. The production's biggest complaint was that I was spending too much time on the animals. Today, the special effects are the most important part of the movie, and people go see films like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to see the creatures, not the actors who support them. They fired me and hired Frankenheimer because he had a reputation for dealing with difficult actors and they thought he could wrangle Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. The first thing he did was back away from the creatures and delegate the direction to Peter Elliott, who was by profession a primate behaviorist. Because he was also in the film he did most of the directing from behind an ape's snout. From there the movie began to drift.

After you were let go, the producers wanted to be sure you left Australia, but you secretly returned to the set. Why?
I returned incognito mostly because I didn't want to leave Faruiza and my other friends who were now trapped on the set. They signed onto the film because they were my friends and now they were stuck there for six months.

What happened after you returned?
At first I found a place to stay out in the rainforest. I was wary of going anywhere near the movie because I was told very emphatically that if I was caught talking to any of the cast members or coming within 40 kilometers of the set that I would lose any financial claims on my fee. As I never raised my voice or threw a punch or stepped out of line on the production they had to pay me and were looking for a reason to hang my neck.

Instead, you decided to dress as a mutant dog and blend in with the beast people on set for the rest of the production. Why torture yourself?
Once you are under makeup you become invisible. They treated the beast people like they were animals. That's why I knew that if I went undercover as a dog, no one would notice me. I did it out of morbid curiosity, really. I was told by the extras that if I came onto the set and saw what was happening I would feel a lot better. Which was true. Before that I was sulking out in the rainforest.

While the Hollywood production turned their back on you, the beast people came to your rescue.
There were so many fantastic, sweet people there trapped under makeup. Even seasoned actors like Temuera Morrison and Ron Pearlman, for instance, would have to undergo hours of makeup and then sit under the sun and melt. Often times they wouldn't even get shot. Their talents were wasted. It was soul destroying. In a lot of ways the film is also a waste of Marlon Brando.

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Seeing all the insane things Marlon Brando put the production through it's pretty obvious he was acting out on his contempt for Hollywood.
He was always very sweet to me. Brando knew I was there as the dog. We were speaking secretly by telephone. He had amazing powers. One day he just showed up in a dress and no one was brave enough to tell him to take it off. He was a genuine genius. We remained friends after the film and he invited me up to his house several times.

I'm sure at your first meeting Brando took one look at you and knew you weren't some Hollywood douchebag.
Every time I saw him I brought a bottle of tequila. I think he liked that. It was very special for me to be able to go up Mulholland Drive and get drunk with Marlon Brando. It was unfortunate that around that time there was the murder and all the dark things that were going on around his home. The last time I saw Brando's daughter Cheyenne she gave me a lift back to my hotel room and as I was getting out of the car she looked at me and said, "Aren't you afraid?" A few weeks later she was dead. There was a darkness around that I didn't understand. I should have been more aware of the storm clouds that were gathering around my head. I was too naive to realize I was doomed.

Val Kilmer notoriously bullied you on set. Have you run into him since? I imagine that would be awkward.
Val actually apologized to me at the wrap party. He hugged me and kissed me and told me how sorry he was. Even though it wasn't entirely his fault, I told him it was a little too late.

Do you still have mainstream Hollywood dreams?
Somewhere deep within me still lurks the original King Kong film. I still have the desire to create lost worlds and civilizations with a decent budget. I think we are reaching a phase where VFX fantasy films are becoming more imaginative. I really liked Guardians of the Galaxy, for instance, because it reminded me of all the places we were hoping to go all those years ago. I also have a soft spot for Avatar. There is definitely a side of me that wants to make left-field art movies that can reach a large number of people.

After seeing your creation destroyed, how did you avoid becoming jaded and bitter?
I guess it stems from Marlon Brando saying, "The industry is run by hyenas. Get out and make a life for yourself." In some ways it is true. But Brando had been in Hollywood for decades and I don't think he realized that there are hyenas everywhere. It's not just the film industry. It's the human condition. I'm not ready to be like Dr. Moreau and turn my back on the human race.

The Richard Stanley Retrospective takes place at Cinefamily in Los Angeles. Check its calendar for showtimes.

Follow Jennifer Juniper Stratford on Twitter.

Scott Disick Helped Me Quit Drinking

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Screencap via YouTube

On Sunday night, the world shall rejoice and dance as one, for the Kardashians are returning to the E! network—or at least the part of the world that, like me, gets its primary source of exercise from keeping up with the royal family of reality TV. I first got into the show about eight months ago, when I watched it with my girlfriend and was immediately hooked. Much like Entourage, another show I pretend to hate-watch but actually love-watch, its magic comes from watching a core group of people have the same conversation, ad infinitum but in different locales, for years on end.

On Kardashians, each character—we should think of the people on reality TV shows as characters, of course—is given a specific narrative arc that sticks with them for at least a few seasons. Kris Jenner is desperately trying to cling to her youth, Khloe is unlucky in love, Rob is fat and sad, Kim is mostly boring and makes bad jokes, Bruce Jenner struggles with being separated from Kris and lacks male friends, Kylie and Kendall Jenner are working to establish identities as adult women, and Kourtney is busy raising three children as well as her partner, the perpetual man-child Scott Disick. Whenever there is a lull in the show's action (which is often), someone either talks about her vagina or reverts to saying something that progresses their given arc. The show is the pinnacle of democracy in that whichever kharacter is the most interesting gets the most screen time.

This season, the show's tenth, looks to be the most dramatic and shocking yet, though you could have said that about every season of Kardashians. Its trailer begins with Disick trimming Khloe Kardashian's pubic hair, and only gets more absurd from there. Khloe confronts Kim about how she (Kim) had fucked her husband Kanye West (who, curiously—or maybe not curiously—rarely appears on the show) in a bathroom. Bruce Jenner chants "Bruce on the loose!" Kris may or may not be shacking up with a younger man. Scott bought four cars and is now broke. Brody Jenner, who is famous for being Bruce's son and being the focus of the extremely short-lived Bromance, drunkenly yells that Kanye doesn't care about him, which is true. It's suggested that Kylie and Kendall need therapy, which is also true. The trailer concludes with Khloe in tears, realizing that French Montana, whom Khloe dated in the spinoff Khloe and Kourtney Take the Hamptons, has broken up with her and un-gifted the white Jeep he gave her for his birthday.

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Of all the storylines set up to play out this season, it's the two that are not discussed in the trailer that are the most compelling. The first is the possibility that Bruce Jenner may now be transitioning to becoming a woman, something the tabloid media has handled without even a modicum of tact. The second is that Scott Disick is a human being who continues to exist.

While at this point it's widely acknowledged that much of what we see on reality TV is at least partially a performance, and therefore part artifice, Disick is the only one on the show who seems invested in stretching reality television as an art form. For Disick, this manifests itself alternatively in him refusing to play along with the game of performative living, acting irrationally, and annoying everyone else on the show. One day he's tooling around LA doing "work" in a van he's conscripted as a "mobile office" and/or "mobile van," the next he is threatening to install a helipad in his backyard so he can more conveniently fly to Las Vegas.

The show took an unexpected turn in its Hamptons offshoot, as Disick spent much of the season bickering with Kourtney over whether or not "club appearances" count as actual work, drinking with his horrible, fratty rich friends, and going in and out of rehab for a cornucopia of addictions (definitely pills and booze, possibly cocaine). Suddenly, this weird piece of pop culture ephemera was depicting the banal, brutal realities of addiction. Kourtney kicked him out of the house for partying too much when he should be helping her raise their young children. He would up in the hospital, and viewers were unsure whether the blots of red on his pants were dye or blood. He waited in the kitchen of his friend's Manhattan apartment, preparing to ship off to rehab, looking like a man headed for the gas chamber. That these scenes were intercut with such trivialities as Khloe trying to convince French Montana to put on his shoes or Kim throwing a mini-Coachella for her daughter's birthday only put the darkness of Disick's situation in sharp relief. He was a portrait of the broken American male: insecure, anxious, and depressed, faced with the stark truth that all of the money and fame in the world cannot save him from himself.

When Disick goes dark, he becomes the American celebrity with whom I identify the most.

My own drinking career is less storied than Disick's, who at his worst seems to the central character in the world's most vapid Greek tragedy. I've never gotten a DUI, I've never gotten arrested for any drunken shenanigans, and the worst physical evidence of my drinking days is a shitty Drake tattoo. Like a lot of people do in their early 20s I drank casually and as a way to avoid the minor problems that inevitably crop up when you're a little bit too self-conscious. Feeling anxious? Not after three whiskey gingers! Writer's block? Why not mix Southern Comfort with water, call it "joke juice," and get to crankin' out content? Alcohol accelerated my nights, often until they blurred, which was by no means an unpleasant sensation. Sometimes I'd be fine, sometimes I wouldn't be fine, sometimes I'd wake up confused about various things. Whatever.

If you're familiar with how this kind of story goes, you'll have already guessed that something bad happened to me because of drinking, and you're right. The bad thing that happened to me bears an eerie resemblance to Disick's Hamptons bottoming out: Kourtney is out of town, so he invites his horrible friends over for what amounts to a nonstop party. He spends the day grilling with his buddies, drinking more beer than is medically advisable, and winds up in bed and takes a forced nap. He rallies, and he and his frat pack head to a club for an appearance. Through some unknown chemical alchemy, Disick ends the evening in the hospital, on the phone with Kourtney, bleating that it's time for him to go to rehab.

Don't get me wrong: Watching Scott Disick flap around as his bodyguard fireman-carries him up some stairs is hilarious. It is significantly less hilarious when you remember that it is the 1-percenter equivalent to the time two summers ago you were found dead-drunk by the police, sleeping on the side of the road sans shirt and shoes, and loaded into an ambulance, only to come to a couple hours later in a hospital bed, panic, try to escape said hospital, and be summarily put back into bed and strapped down. Rich people get to go to rehab. Poor people just get picked up by the cops.

That incident didn't lead to me quitting drinking at first. It took another year and a half—and a whole season of Khloe and Kourtney Take the Hamptons—to realize that drinking wasn't for me. Watching Disick fall apart on screen was more shocking than anything that had happened to me. As a rule, we like to think that we're in control pretty much all of the time, even as we alienate our loved ones—who, we tell ourselves, aren't really mad at us for drunkenly hailing a cab at IHOP and stranding them in Harlem—and slowly torch our bank accounts by spending hundreds of dollars every weekend getting to and from bars. Watching Disick nearly destroy everything around him because of alcohol was like looking in a mirror. I might not own a Rolex or be rich, but I was still a douchebag wimpering into the phone at the hospital.

On Sunday, I will join the other millions of people watching the E! network and take in in the magic of the Kardashians' particular brand of television post-modernism, watching as they complain about paparazzi as they're being filmed by TV cameras, blather about workout classes, and visit celebrity fertility doctors in attempts to get pregnant. Though tabloids have recently reported that Disick is back on the sauce, I've gone an entire month without a drop of alcohol in my system, and I couldn't feel better. (I'm not sober-sober—much to the chagrin of my actually sober friends, I still smoke weed.) I don't have any plans to start drinking again—but then again, you don't plan relapses. That's the nature of the beast. Much like trust, abstinence from alcohol is something that's built up over time, and for someone with a genuine alcohol problem, it can be hard as fuck. My hope is that seeing Disick struggle on TV with the same issues that I do in real life will provide me with the little push I need to keep going and be a little less of a douchebag than I was the day before.

Drew Millard is on Twitter.

Greenpeace International’s Director Slams C-51, Government Spying on Environmentalists

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Greenpeace Poland. Photo via Flickr user Greenpeace Polska

Kumi Naidoo's a bit of an anomaly when it comes to executive directors of Greenpeace International. For one, he's the first African to serve as head of the global organization: born in Durban, South Africa, Naidoo battled apartheid when he was 15, fleeing to England to evade arrest in the late '80s. He later earned a PhD in political sociology from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and has since headed numerous anti-poverty and environmental organizations before becoming the Greenpeace chief in 2009.

Naidoo's also distinguishing himself in the role by carefully injecting some critiques of capital accumulation into the environmental conversation, linking what he sees as ecocide with economic oppression in the Global South in the spirit of Wangari Maathai and Naomi Klein.

On Tuesday, March 10, Naidoo participated in a public discussion in Vancouver with First Nations leaders about the future of environmentalism in Canada and the rise of the security and surveillance state.

VICE Canada spoke to Naidoo about the Harper government's contentious anti-terror bill and Canada's slowing economy.

VICE: Prior to the event last night, you were in Alert Bay, BC, where you attended a potlatch. There were also two prominent First Nations leaders at the talk last night. What sort of role are you finding indigenous people are playing around the world in advocating for environmental sustainability and economic equality?
Kumi Naidoo: Assume you and I were the last two people on the planet. If we continue on the trajectory that we are and continue to warm up the planet to the point that humanity cannot exist—which, to be blunt, we're on at the moment—and you said to me, "Let's write up the history of the world just in case human life emerges again in the future so people can learn from the mistakes of us as a species," we would probably conclude that the "uncivilized" who the "civilized" felt they had an obligation to "civilize" were actually the more "civilized" people on the planet.

If you look at indigenous peoples, the entire culture's spirituality and approach to the economy and so on reflects a very, very symbiotic relationship with nature. They respect the fact that whatever you take from nature, you need to do it in a sustainable way. I think indigenous wisdom about sustainability is fundamentally important. For example, the Arctic is different from Antarctica in the sense that there are four million indigenous people who live there, from Alaska all the way to Russia. Greenpeace, in recognizing that wisdom and vulnerability of the peoples of the Arctic given the plans of certain governments, think it's really important to ensure that we're acting together with and in partnership with; before we took any major actions in the Russian Arctic, we first had an arctic indigenous people's conference in 2012.

I think indigenous people are playing a very important role in also forcing us to rethink about consumption, about what constitutes a good life and also addressing some issues such as inequality and trying to rehabilitate the importance of the sense of community. I think the notion of community—the notion of taking care of your neighbour—in many cultures we live in has been eroded. I think all of these are wisdoms we need to resurrect at the moment.

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A First Nations "healing walk" through the tar sands. Photo courtesy Greenpeace

South Korea requested information on your environmental activities prior to your attendance to the G20 back in 2010. Tell me a bit about how you learned about those spying allegations and what your reaction was to those.
It was in late January that Al Jazeera English came to our offices and presented us with what information they had: they said they had evidence to suggest that in 2010, just before G20, the South Korean intelligence had asked South African intelligence for information on myself and two other people, saying that they considered me a dangerous person and wanted to get a specific security assessment.

Given recent revelations from the likes of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks, I wasn't not shocked by it. I was in South Africa when the story broke. I gave a press conference and said, "In the old days, when we were struggling against apartheid, if you were not being monitored you weren't doing your part as an activist." What's not clear is whether South African intelligence fulfilled that request from South Korea intelligence. An NGO called the Legal Resources Centre is working with me to try to get that information.

The problem with this is too many of us consider this normal. This is what happens. But just because it's normal does not make it right. What we've got is a 20th century approach to intelligence in the 21st century world. It's still stuck in the pre-Cold War era. Quite frankly, we should be spending this expenditure on the public instead of monitoring people who are clearly peaceful activists. I make no apology for my views that how the world needs to change is quite transformative change. Tinkering with the current system is only going to lead to catastrophic climate change and endanger our children's future. The path that we're on is a path that's going to destroy humanity.

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An anti-oil protest in Ottawa. Photo courtesy Greenpeace

Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada recently stumbled across some RCMP documents which stated that Canada's "anti-petroleum movement" is "increasingly threatening" politicians and oil companies. What was your take on the report?
The absolute lack of analytical intelligence in it is really disappointing. It's not just us saying that Greenpeace and other organizations want to get off fossil fuels and curb the development of the tar sands: Canadian climate scientists, together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are saying quite clearly that we need to leave 80 percent of known fossil fuels in the ground. To do a whole report about what we're saying and forgetting that in fact we are taking the lead from the scientific community is disappointing.

Coming back to the spying thing, the reason South Korea made that request at that time is because they were trying to push through their nuclear technology, along with South Africa and Turkey. That was a big part of the G20 summit. I can't say I was surprised, shocked and so on—but just because it's become a normal practice doesn't mean people should accept it's right. Similarly, at a more broader level if you look at consumption, the levels of inequality that exist in the world are absolutely abnormal. But we just accept it. That's just life.

Bill C-51, a piece of "anti-terrorism" legislation that's currently being studied in committee, will grant more power to our federal spy agency and increase information transfers between agencies. Do you any sense of how this might impact the ability for environmentalists to advocate against natural resource development?
I've heard of all of the debates of C-51. Quite categorically: C-51 is soft on terrorism and hard on democracy. It will do absolutely nothing to keep Canadians safe. If anything, it will weaken the approach to dealing with violent extremists. The way extremism is used in the RCMP documents is particularly troubling, because democracy guarantees the right to have any views, however contentious those views are. The diversity of views is what allows government to make good policy decisions because they look at all the different thinking and pros and cons, then arriving at a decision.

There's no question that the RCMP thinks we are a terrorist threat. They don't. But they are playing politics and doing the current government's bidding. Because let's be very clear, Canada was once a country that many parts of the world looked to as one of the more progressive countries on peace: the Montreal Protocol, and Ottawa Treaty, and so on. Today, it seems quite unrecognizable from the outside. It's not only that it's bad environmentally. It's fundamentally putting the Canadian economy on a path to weakness. Substantial weakness.

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Photo via Flickr user Alex Carvalho

Explain that a bit more.
It's clear Harper wants to make Canada into a petrostate. Already we're seeing the way the drop in oil prices is impacting the economy. I have a PhD in political science from Oxford University and am looking at the political messaging from the Harper government as a political scientist: it's very interesting, as they're not selling the economy. They know about the vulnerability in the short-term. I can see that this whole C-51 and security thing is mainly an election strategy to frighten people into submission and to try to get people to go for the devil they know.

But, on a more long-term basis, the only thing that matters in terms of which countries and companies will be competitive in the future will be those that get as far ahead with green technology now. Canada has potential for geothermal, wave energy and wind energy, so it's crazy that the government wouldn't move in that direction when it's so clear that it makes economic sense. It's because the economic model has to be different.

You're not going to get one company like Shell or Syncrude scoring a monopoly on the sun or wind. If you have a more distributive energy system, the control of that system is more distributed as well. Every roof of every home, as we're saying in Africa, can boast an electricity generator as well as an income generator: it also helps electricity efficiency because if people know they can feed their excess energy into the grid and get paid for it, they're more likely to be a bit more conservative in how much energy these use. I think Stephen Harper's government is not only bad for the environment but in the medium- to long-term is going to be bad for the economy.

You've been involved in protesting and working against state oppression since you were 15. What sort of advice would you have for activists or concerned citizens who are seeking to advocate against increased state powers and/or economic mismanagement?
Mahatma Gandhi once said that, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The current state of activism today shows that they're not ignoring us, they're not laughing us: they're fighting us and fighting us very hard. The only reason is because the arguments that we've been putting against the mainstream media and mainstream control of messaging from government is breaking through. The fact is more and more people are beginning to say that this just doesn't add up.

The second thing is that these surveillance efforts have the intention of having a chain effect. That it would intimidate people. I would urge people to build a strong sense of community to be able to have the courage and strength to withstand that. People need to understand that what's at stake here is not only the environment, but the very quality of our democracy and the very key question of what kind of what economy will give us more peace, more justice, more sustainability and more fairness. The current economic model is not helping address that at all and therefore must be challenged. I would say to people that you're being taken seriously. Ultimately, I believe that climate justice, social justice, economic justice and political justice will prevail if people stay on the course and not be intimidated.

I want to believe that there are people within the RCMP and state security structures who have a discomfort with this approach. I even want to believe that there are people within Stephen Harper's own party with a broad sense of Canadian values who feel uncomfortable with the moves that are being made in terms of C-51.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

Comics: Envoy - 'What Is Grak?'

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Look at Lane Milburn's website and get his book from Fantagraphics.

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