Photo via Flickr user Peter Stevens

The night after the San Bernardino massacre, some loony emailed in a gun shooting threat against my city's middle schools. For those of you keeping track at home, that's the People's Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the left-leaning, college-heavy enclaves in the NPR archipelago. Each of our middle schools is housed in a K-8 school building, one of which is across the street from me. Which means that four police cars and three news trucks were parked across from my house all day last Thursday. As is often standard practice in larger cities, everyone from toddlers to new teenagers to teachers had to pass through a security check before taking jackets and backpacks inside.

Welcome to 21st century America, where we all know the sickening script—and where my town is hardly exceptional. At least one school in a neighboring city yielded a similar threat. So I can only assume that across the country, officials at schools, malls, colleges, clinics, government buildings, and God only knows what else were assessing incoming threats as well.

But was it terrorism?

I have a low resting body temperature, both physically and emotionally, so I assumed it was some kid who was having a bad week. But I'm an outlier. Around here—and, I imagine, wherever else threats were disclosed—most parents I knew were, at a minimum, unnerved, and at a maximum, virtually immobilized by fear and anxiety. Some kept their kids home from school; others sent the kids in but kept hitting refresh on a local news site just in case.

In so many words: They were terrified, which may well be what was intended. But does that make it terrorism?

When I went looking for a nice clear definition of the word, I found that—as with so many large abstract categories—it doesn't really exist. Oh, every expert I spoke with knew exactly what it meant. But no two agreed precisely with one another. Terrorism turns out to be a big, baggy word that you can stuff a lot of things into, a word that, like "pornography," is blurry at the boundaries--but that everyone is sure they will recognize when they see it.

There is some common ground. Contemporary terrorism means, at the very least, an attack on civilians designed to send an intimidating political message to a community beyond the victims themselves. The terrorism that much of the world is now focused on—radical, violent Islamists—fits in a tradition that goes back about 150 years to the bomb-throwing anarchists who assassinated the Czar in Russia and President William McKinley in the US. The Paris attacks, the San Bernardino shootings, the Madrid train bombings, the London subway bombings, and of course, 9/11: Our minds now quickly toss incidents like these—spectacular, random, unexpected and yet dreaded—into the bucket we call "terrorism."

But the category encompasses far more than radical Islamists. Just within recent memory, it includes the Basque separatists bombing across Spain, the IRA bombing of London parks, pubs, and department stores, the slaughter at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Weathermen, and more. The word descends from the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, when the Jacobins deliberately terrified (and executed) opponents and civilians to keep counterrevolutionaries and other "enemies of the state" at bay. The political scientists don't use it to talk about what a government does any more, though; they reserve it for "nonstate actors," paramilitaries, rogue sects, and loners inspired by ideology.

So what about the indie shooters, who aren't trying to connect up with a group and aren't claimed by one? Yep, that can still be terrorism. Most experts also agree that the word takes in attacks on a Planned Parenthood clinic or assassinations of gynecologists on behalf of extremist religious beliefs about abortion and contraception. When a gunman shot up two Brookline, Massachusetts, Planned Parenthood clinics in 1994, killing two and wounding five, the state's Republican Governor Bill Weld and the then-US President Bill Clinton both quickly condemned it as terrorism, plain and simple. And before San Bernardino wiped what came before out of our minds, Colorado's Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper and Colorado Springs' Republican Mayor John Suthers both suggested that the attack on Planned Parenthood at the tail-end of November sure smelled like terrorism, too. (And sure enough, that shooter has since said he's a "warrior for the babies.") And it includes someone who shoots up an iconic black church's prayer group or a Sikh temple on behalf of a racist ideology, or who bombs two abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the Atlanta Olympics to clarify his hatred of cosmopolitan modernity.

Of course, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. It's a dismissive and accusatory word, a term applied when you despise both the means and the reasoning of this political "speech." In their own minds, these folks are freedom fighters, or the revolutionary vanguard, or martyrs for God, or warriors rescuing babies from heartless murderers. As Arie Perliger, a West Point political science professor who directs terrorism studies there, explains, "Terrorists will rarely use it. They'll call themselves the Irish Republican Army, or the Red Army Faction," or the Islamic State. "They prefer a military identity to a terrorist identity." That's true today for some of the Christian extremist groups, like the Army of God. They are deep in an ideological war, and only one side can win.

Which brings us to the more difficult group to parse. How do we categorize the misogynist shooters at UC Santa Barbara or Umpqua Community College in Oregon or Dawson College in Montreal, who kill because they are outraged that women won't date them? Is that terrorism against an entire gender, committed by someone spouting a dangerous ideology of aggrieved superiority? What about online communities seething with resentment against feminism, whose true believers threaten rape, beheading, and shooting so persistently and credibly that terrified women have to cancel public appearances or flee their homes, forcing other women to silence themselves lest they, too, be made to fear for their lives?

And here come some still harder ones: How do we talk about the school shootings, the sociopathic adolescents who shot up Columbine, the unhinged man shooting up a grade school in Newtown? What about the movie theater shootings, when an angry man shoots up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado or Lafayette, Louisiana to gain a place in the annals of infamy, to reject a social order based on a mutual respect that shades into mutual indifference, to make us see him instead of ignoring him, at long last? They're not explicitly political. They're not tied to a group ideology, even loosely. But they're most certainly spreading terror.

Profit and politics, as everyone from Tammany Hall to Wall Street knows, are not so far apart.

The political scientists would say they're just troublemakers, not true "terrorists," since the latter are trying to influence public attitudes and policies. But I'm not the only one for whom all these shootings and bombings are starting to blur together, never mind the motive. The screaming tabloid New York Daily News published an in-your-face front page calling them all terrorists—not just the San Bernardino killers, but also the shooter at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, the white-supremacist shooter at the Charleston church, the Newtown school shooter, the Aurora movie theater shooter—along with Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, the front man for the gun manufacturers who get an extra special payday every time a mass shooting spurs more gun sales. On the other end of the intellectual spectrum, the New York Times said essentially the same thing with a once-in-a-century editorial published on its own front page, which read, "Let's be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism."

God knows these killers are, indeed, influencing behavior and policy: gun sales spike after each publicized mass murder when the nation goes into a spasm of considering robust gun control. They are changing our polity and our politics both. And they're not so separate: terrorists traffic in drugs and guns, while criminals and gangsters become terrorists. Profit and politics, as everyone from Tammany Hall to Wall Street knows, are not so far apart.

Jack Levin agrees. He's a criminologist and sociologist, a professor emeritus at Northeastern University, and an expert on murder, mass murder, hate crimes, serial killing, and other hideous acts that few of us can bear to think about for very long. Terror, as he sees it, is a tactic. It can be used by criminal gangs to intimidate for profit, or by seething loners seeking infamous celebrity, or ideological fanatics intent on establishing the rule of God (or Mao) on earth.

Remember the Beltway snipers, the two men who drove around shooting people at random from a blue Chevrolet Caprice? Their motive, according to Levin, was to terrify the region so as to coerce authorities into shelling out $10 million to make them go away. He knows it drives political scientists crazy—they want to keep the word assigned to politics—but he calls that terrorism, too. Another security expert told me, with tongue only partly in cheek, "Crime is perpetrated by people like us. Terrorism is carried out by the scary Other," the brown and foreign and people who worship in a different way. Laura Beth Nielsen, a Northwestern University professor of sociology and the law, concurs, suggesting the word's use has become a shorthand for those whose race and religion differs from that of most Americans.

But here's something you might not expect: Levin argues that we're seeing less terrorism and fewer mass killings today than there were in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, what's spread, he says, is the wall-to-wall, dawn-to-dawn media coverage that reports campus threats even when there's no actual threat, just someone who panicked and called campus security. It hasn't gotten worse, he argues—it's just gotten better media.

So does it matter whether we call a particular event "social terrorism" or "spree killing" or something completely different? In the law, it does. Calling it "terrorism" makes it a federal crime, which gets the FBI and US Attorneys involved, boosting the possible punishments; it makes citizens more willing to sacrifice liberties for security in everything from airport lines (are you old enough remember when you could just walk onto a plane?) to the privacy of your phone calls, location, and bank transactions. And it matters to those so designated and the people affiliated with some of their professed beliefs—cf: Operation Rescue –because it imposes a different frame on how we think about their beliefs and actions, reducing public tolerance for what they're doing.

Perliger thinks it's important to keep a clear distinction between political terrorism and all the rest. He argues that since those different kinds of violence come from different motives and causes and have different implications, we need to parse the differences carefully so as to know how to prevent it. He maintains that lumping together the San Bernardino shootings and the Aurora movie massacre and individual men who terrorize their wives and children and everything else makes it harder to think about how effectively to counteract and prevent future incidents.

"Terrorism is psychological warfare. They want to change the psychology of your society."—Arie Perliger

Levin snorts (rhetorically speaking) at the desire to keep the definition political. But I say, fine. Let them use it their way. We'll use it our way. We know that all of them are terrifying us, subway bombers, school shooters, and all the rest—and not merely because, as the Onion ironically "reports," CNN executives hold a meeting each morning to decide what viewers should panic about the rest of the day. Unfortunately, all that coverage of mass shootings breeds copycats—of all kinds of terrorism, political and apolitical alike.

But many of these experts agree on one thing: whatever we call it, we need to get a new perspective on these violence events. Levin's view comes from his sense that such mass murders have actually dropped since the heyday of airline hijackings and bombings in the 1970s. Today, we're more likely to be crushed to death by furniture than attacked by a terrorist, however defined.

Perliger's perspective comes from his childhood in Israel. He urges Americans to "just see it as part of reality, like traffic accidents and any kind of ordinary risk." You develop instincts, he says, that are comparable to slowing down at busy intersections, like watching out for stray bags and packages. "Everyone knows that from being a child."

But what's more important, Perliger says, is to remember that "Terrorism is psychological warfare. They want to change the psychology of your society." If we cower under the bed, inviting the government to listen in on all our phone calls, search laptops at the border, and follow GPS devices without warrants, they will have succeeded. Or as he puts it, "Resilient societies can adapt to these kinds of events without changing their nature, norms, values, or beliefs."

Terrorism, in other words, doesn't have to leave you terrified.

E.J. Graff is managing editor of The Monkey Cage at the Washington Post, and a senior fellow at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Follow her on Twitter.

Pope Francis photo via Wiki Commons

Read: What It's Like Being Young and Catholic in 2015

In 1966, the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council released its "Declaration of the Jews," a document that repudiated "the ancient charge of collective Jewish guilt in the death of Jesus." The report was written, in part, "to open the door to vastly improved relationships between Catholics and Jews." In the years since its publication, the relationship between the two faiths has continued to grow a bit more buddy-buddy.

On Thursday, perhaps to commemorate the looming 50th anniversary of that 1966 report, the Vatican released a new document saying that Jews don't need Jesus to be saved—something that's long been a sore spot between the religions.

"Although Jews cannot believe in Jesus Christ as the universal redeemer, they have a part in salvation, because the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable," the church wrote in a press release, according to Israel National News.

The report continues on to add that Catholics should not seek to convert Jews to Christianity.

The idea that the only road to eternal salvation is through a belief in Christ and his resurrection has long been a fundamental tenet of Christianity. The new report affirms that people can seek salvation through Christ's death and resurrection, but also accepts that Jews don't need him to validate their ticket into Heaven.

A screenshot from 'Limbo,' by Playdead

Mike Diver: OK, to get the ball rolling here, Jake my man... I'm going to draw some lines around what I mean by "indie game" in this context, for this piece. I'm thinking independently produced video games that have emerged since, and not before, the advent of Xbox Live Arcade. So we're looking at the winter of 2005, to now, Xbox 360 onwards. "The modern era" of gaming.

Which leads me to say, straight away, that some of the most important, foundations-laying indie games of the HD era came out through that service: Castle Crashers, Braid, Super Meat Boy, 'Splosion Man, Limbo, Fez. Do any of those leap at you and scream: yes, Jake, I am the most impressive indie video game you set eyes on in recent history?

I think, for me, it was actually Limbo that most impressed the case that indie games could go places and say things, while retaining immediate playability, that titles in the triple-A sphere were never going to. It was so personal, but almost totally silent, and so stripped-back in so many ways. I had a massive emotional attachment to it, straight away.

Jake Tucker: I'm going to show my failures immediately here and say that I've never played through Limbo.

Shameful, I know. I don't want to rock the boat by bringing in more comparisons, but I think it's key to look at the flash games of the time, too. Many of the games on your magic list got their start either with a direct prequel in flash, or with the developer(s) doing previous work there. But I'm muddying the waters.

Looking solely at the list I'd say Super Meat Boy and Fez jump out at me as being the most inspirational. Super Meat Boy was just re-released for the PS4—assuring that developer Ed McMillen has a perpetual money making machine while he's working on Mewgenics—and Fez is the product of one of the saddest personal stories in indie games.

I think what I love about many of the games on this list, is that it used to be that an indie was a couple of hours long and hung directly on a central concept. You could get the full experience of a game quickly and easily, without sacrificing anything for not experiencing the entire game as you would in the triple-A space. Does that make sense?

A screenshot from 'Fez,' by Polytron Corporation

MD: Totally. Even the bigger (by which I mean longer) games didn't overload their, I suppose, mechanics too much by introducing completely new ideas at the four-hour mark. Limbo worked for me as it gave you all the abilities you needed at the very beginning; then it was just a case of applying them appropriately, ideally without dying horribly, which I did. A lot.

And here's my admission: I've played about ten minutes of Super Meat Boy. I'll get around to it, hopefully, again—I downloaded the PS4 version when it was on PS Plus. But that's my shameful fact for today's discussion. Moving swiftly along, where do you think indie games changed from being this "something else," which Fez and the like certainly felt on the other side of 2010, to generally accepted as every bit as "viable" for the mainstream as anything that EA or Ubisoft is churning out?

Or, am I totally wrong here, and the "mainstream," whatever that means in gaming terms, is still blissfully unaware of independently made games? I suppose I'm looking at the 2015 successes of Rocket League and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (both of which are in VICE's top 20 games of the year) and naively concluding that their sales must mean that more people than ever are switched onto indie productions. Is it the greater access to indies through today's consoles that is having the greatest impact on their commercial visibility?

JT: I think, though many internet commenters will tell me I'm wrong, that the single biggest reason for uptake in indie games of late is their visibility on the consoles, primarily the PS4.

They're regularly given away with PlayStation Plus and often launched with exclusivity there. 2015 is the year Mike Bithell's Volume graced the subscriber cover of Official PlayStation Magazine, and we've seen so many strong titles: OlliOlli 2 was given away free on launch day to all PS Plus subscribers. You didn't get that sort of push before now.

We're also seeing massively increased visibility from the Steam marketplace, and the additional support of cool little indie services like Itch.io.

I think people are starting to wise up that indie games aren't necessarily just curios anymore, and as a result the market for them is growing stronger, which a few companies are getting on board with. Devolver in particular has published a string of independent hits; Focus Interactive have done a good job of bringing a variety of strong indie strategy titles to a bigger market; and developers like Klei are knocking it out of the park, most recently with my 2015 GOTY, Invisible, Inc.

A screenshot from 'Super Meat Boy,' by Team Meat

MD: So we've just run a piece on Invisible, Inc.—what is it about that game, that you feel only an indie studio can get its head around? Is it the fact that you can lose, and that's OK? Indeed, it's part of the process. Whereas so few big games tell you: no, seriously, you're not doing it wrong, this is how it's supposed to play. I guess the (Dark) Souls series establishes that early doors, but it has a whopping barrier of entry, difficulty wise, that you're not going to get in something turn-based. Well, not in the same way.

Is it in the indie sphere—and boy do I ever feel like a douche for writing "indie sphere," but it's done now—that difficulty has become a real selling point for games, perhaps since Super Meat Boy? Super Hexagon is a game that's entirely based around crushing your spirit until you nail a stage. I've played Eitr, coming out in 2016, and that is built to punish idiot mistakes. But part of the fun is failing—and I can't see, like, the next Far Cry having that built in. You lose, you put the pad down, see ya. It's like Just Cause 3 could have had some of that, "Oh, I'm a fool, let me try that again" factor, because there are bits of it that do require several attempts, where the actual play might only last 20 seconds. But then it hits you with massively long loading screens and uh, forget about it.

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going here, so to drag it back: toughness, is that something that only really "sells" in indie games, and has it been a substantial factor in some of the best titles on the market these past few years?

JT: I don't think it's toughness, and I don't think it's losing. X-COM and Jagged Alliance were showing us that stuff was OK 20 years ago.

I think the biggest thing here is that indie studios can take risks. Some of the better triple-A games have been bold reinventions, and indie games are often bold reinventions. Klei's games are great because they understand genres and conventions. Invisible, Inc. is amazing because it understands the stealth genre and the turn-based strategy genre, and turns them both on their head.

Super Meat Boy was great because it understood that 2D platformers are supposed to be fuckin' nails and the movement needs to feel fantastic, and it got both of those down. Rocket League understands that sports games are kind of bullshit and injected a heavy dose of fun while keeping some tactical depth and teamwork. It's all about "getting" your material, which I think indie devs are great at.

Indie games are reinventing the wheel, so to speak, and I think that's why they do so well.

Related: Watch VICE's new film, 'Life Inside Japan's Aging Biker Gangs'

MD: OK, accelerating straight ahead with your "reinventing the wheel" point, right there: What indie games of this modern era do you think have brought something decidedly fresh to video gaming, that bigger studios have then taken and used themselves?

I think, in horror games, a lot of what we saw in Alien: Isolation was quite clearly "nicked" from Frictional's Amnesia, the first game at least. Can you think of other mechanics that have translated from indie productions to the triple-A market?

JT: I'll list a few in bullet points because the audience might dig them, and it'll emphasize that triple-A steals stuff from indies all the time.

Triple-A publishers usually can't take risks, the budgets don't allow it. But they can steal ideas from indies that have taken risks, backing up your point on Alien: Isolation half-inching some of the mechanics from Amnesia.

The Hunter from Left 4 Dead lifts his pounce and melee from the enemy in source mod The Hunted.

Sony's H1Z1 is basically DayZ with more shooting.

The portal system in Portal is from Narbacular Drop, an indie game. In fairness, Valve hired most of the people that worked on that game to work on Portal.

I think this is fine. In movies, directors rip each other off all the time, and it brings indie games, in one way, to a whole other audience. I like a lot of indie games—it's where my career started and I'd love to see more gamers getting their hands on their inventiveness.

A screenshot from 'Thomas Was Alone,' by Mike Bithell

MD: Do you think that indie games need more recognizable "names," behind the scenes? Perhaps we're getting there in studio and publisher terms—you previously mentioned Devolver as a publisher putting its money where its mouth is, and I'd say that Curve is in a similar position. But do we need more of the games equivalent of, say, Quentin Tarantino, or Thom Yorke—people who are recognized as being independent of spirit in their chosen mediums?

I mean, I know who a bunch of people like Jonathan Blow (Braid), Mike Bithell (Thomas Was Alone), and Sam Barlow (Her Story) are, but do these names mean anything to that outdated but still proverbial "man on the street?" I had a conversation with a gaming critic earlier this year about indie games, and she said the easiest way she found of explaining what that meant, to people on the periphery of the games industry, was to parallel it with movies and music. Do we need a couple of proper breakout talents whose games do numbers on a par with, not a FIFA or something, but certainly an Assassin's Creed?

JT: I think we've already got that. The fact you can pull out a Fez or a Super Meat Boy explains it all. I disagree with the theory of video game auteurs, but I think for an indie it's essential to have something to buy into.

This can be a publisher (Devolver, Focus, Curve) giving you marketing money, or a recognizable talent (Bithell, Blow), but also a proven studio (Roll7, Klei, Vlambeer).

I think the biggest problem for indies looking to make it big in 2016 is finding the answer to one simple question: "Why does your game matter?"

MD: OK. What indie games of the last, let's say seven or eight years, have mattered? Just hammer me out a list off the top of your head. I guess it'll be some we've already talked about.

And for newcomers to development, is it super intimidating to see these successes and know you can't simply ape a proven gameplay system in order to do likewise?

A screenshot from 'Hotline Miami,' by Dennaton

JT: I'm going to miss a bunch here, because I think most indie games are valuable, but: Amnesia; Mark of the Ninja; Stealth Inc; Super Meat Boy; Invisible, Inc.; Fez; Braid; Hotline Miami; Nidhogg; OlliOlli.

Those 10 were the ones I came up with in 15 seconds—I could do this all day. I don't make games, but I don't think anything should be dissuaded because everyone starts somewhere.

I think indie, and gaming in general, is at its best when things are being torn apart and redone, better and shinier. But do I think this means indies should be scared of starting out or reiterating a good mechanic? Not at all. I think the more people we have making games, the more new ideas we'll see—I want to see every risk taken, even the ones that don't come off.

The problem with this, of course, is that indies need to feed themselves just the same as everyone else, so I'm talking from a position of privilege. But I've always got a soft spot for a game that's taken a gamble.

MD: I think I feel the same, though it's no comfort to a developer that does something genuinely different to have critical respect but no sales. I guess Sunset stands as a 2015 example of that, even if it wasn't the most thrilling game "experience."

Would you say Gone Home took a risk, or two? I'm interested to see how it does on port to consoles in 2016—and if some of that section of gamers who berate such a game without playing it might now be tempted, in the privacy of their own homes, away from message board cliques. Do you think that the level of acclaim that Gone Home achieved was warranted, and if so, does that deserve to be considered as one of the best indie games of recent years?

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A screenshot from 'Gone Home,' by the Fullbright Company

JT: Honestly, I think a lot of gamers who have slaged off Gone Home or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture would actually enjoy them.

The level design is absolutely sublime. The idea I've been floating for a little while is that the hyper-detailed tiny maps of Rainbow Six Siege are largely inspired by the level of detail shown in these "walking simulators."

Gone Home is a masterpiece in environmental storytelling, and I think lots of people would get a kick out of it. And that's what we all want, right? Better stories, better mechanics, and more opportunities.

With all of that in mind, I'd be inclined to say Gone Home probably was one of the most important games of the last few years, indie or otherwise.

MD: OK, Gone Home's a big one. I've already gone and said Limbo's the one that really clawed its way into me. So let's go for crunch time: Is it even possible to declare one indie game, in this post-XBLA era, "the best," as we could a game from a specific genre, or on a single platform?

The answer is no, obviously. Not definitively, anyway. But everyone will have their favorite. There's a lot of love for World of Goo. Likewise Spelunky. Hotline Miami. Cave Story. To the Moon. FTL. Braid. We could both be here all day. However, I'm going to go ahead and pick one indie game out as the most important made. In terms of what it's done for widening gaming's demographic. Its educational applications. Its incredible depth and scale. The creativity it promotes in players of all ages. I expect you've guessed. Weird that neither of us has mentioned it sooner.

Would you agree that Minecraft probably is the indie game of our times?

A screenshot from 'Minecraft,' by Mojang

JT: I think it's definitely the biggest money-spinner. Minecraft single-handedly invented both its genre—building shit—and its payment model—early access, something I loathe.

For its sins with early access, Minecraft's also revolutionized education, gaming... it's the real deal. It's made everyone involved more money than really should have been expected. YouTubers, writers, Microsoft, Mojang, they've all benefitted financially. And all this from a game that took Notch's earlier ideas with Wurm Online and super-sized them.

MD: Are we saying that's "the one," then? Or can we argue a case for anything else? Because we do have to pick one, or we get subjected to nothing but Call of Duty campaigns from now until next September.

JT: I don't think anything else has had the same impact as Minecraft.

The problem with round ups like this is they're reductive, right? Gone Home tells a better story, Invisible, Inc. has better mechanics, Fez is prettier...

But in terms of influence? Nothing comes close. I can't think of a video game since Minecraft's release that's had the same staying power. It's going to be here for a while.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Follow Jake onTwitter.

Art Basel is apparently about looking at cool new art, but for most people I know it's four days of exclusive wild parties, VIP lists, and misogynistic bouncers. I was lucky to have an "in" most nights, but other nights I spent my time getting kicked out of the Versace mansion or being too drunk to explain what party I was there for. Every night would end on the beach where we'd hear faint sounds of the art parties that actually sounded like corporate Christmas parties blaring oldies and Adele. I soon realized that the exclusivity was the least appealing thing about Art Basel. We snuck into pools at 4 AM, ate a lot of crab, and attempted to enjoy the art through our hangovers.

Follow Maya Fuhr on Instagram.

There's a tendency for multinational energy corporations that are heavily invested in climate change to throw wads of cash at good causes. BP, for instance, has a longstanding deal with the Tate Galleries, so you can look at art instead of documentaries about their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Shell, meanwhile, controversially sponsors a climate change exhibition at the London Science Museum (a deal that's soon to end), but they want creatives to make films about the subject that don't mention plans to drill in the arctic.

The folks down at Italian oil company Eni S.p.A, meanwhile, run an educational program that teaches children about science. It's called Eniscuola, or Eni schools. Materials are designed for use at home, as well as for teachers in the classroom. That sounds good, but unfortunately, as Greenpeace Energy Desk points out, the information they're giving is a little skewed.

Eni, Italy's largest energy company, claims the project's website receives 1.8 million hits annually, and has users in 15 countries worldwide.

Teaching kids about the planet sounds pretty noble for a company that has a rap sheet including an ongoing court case in Italy, in which prosecutors are investigating a $1.1 billion oil field deal in Nigeria, where it's alleged up to half of the money was spent on bribes.

Educational materials from Eni include pieces of work designed for teachers explain how manmade objects like oil rigs and mining platforms have a positive impact on the environment and wildlife, basically arguing that Eni's fossil fuel gluttony is basically doing us all a favor. A section translated from Italian as "life platform" ("vita in piattaforma") "aims to inform students on the richness of biodiversity in the Adriatic Sea, and the habitats that are created around the mining platforms."

Eni's info about what happened to the Haven oil tanker after the disaster killed five crew members

Another, titled "an artificial paradise under the sea," talks up how oil rigs can become homes to marine life and increase fish stocks, and describes how disasters like the sinking of the Haven tanker in 1991 can be "turned into an environmental and tourism opportunity." Every cloud, I suppose. Unfortunately they forget to mention how the disaster saw a million barrels of oil flow into the Mediterranean and five crew members die.

Claims of the ecological benefits of offshore oil rigs and mining platforms are controversial to say the least. Environmentalists point out that the benefits of leaving piles of industrial equipment in the sea to rot as are usually outstripped by the risks of accidents, and the disruption to marine life caused by dumping the man-made material in the great blue.

Professor John Shepherd, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton, told VICE that Eni school's claims were "rather extravagant."

"There is plenty of evidence that man-made structures can provide extra habitat for sessile organisms in areas where hard substrate is in short supply, and wrecks are very popular locations for sport divers and fishermen," he said. "However, hard evidence that this has any significant effect on the abundance of living things at the population level, i.e. other than very locally, is very hard to find. 'Rigs-to-reefs' is a popular policy in the Gulf of Mexico, both with rig operators and sport fishermen, because the 'reefs' attract fish to the area to make them easier to catch, but there's no evidence this does any good for fish populations as a whole."

According to an Eni spokesperson, the Haven tanker is referenced simply as an example of an artificial barrier, and special attention is paid to the "sensitivity of language" when discussing the disaster.

Since competitor Shell admitted defeat in their battle for arctic oil this year, pulling their Polar Pioneer rig out of the Chukchi Sea, Eni has made a big deal out of its own Arctic plans.

Related: Watch 'TOXIC: Gulf'

Days after Shell's announcement, the company told the Guardian its Goliat rig was ready for imminent production; despite the project being hampered by delays for years. Eni estimates that the Arctic outpost could be sitting on as much as 175 million barrels of oil, prime for the taking.

Eni schools tell students the Arctic is a "sensitive climate," which is "not spared the negative impact of some of man's activities," but fails to mention the impact of climate change, or even refer to it by name in a series of worksheets and information packs on the area.

Instead Eni schools material reads: "Recent studies actually showed the permafrost is getting thinner, probably because of the earth's general overheating." The impending climate change obliteration facing the planet sounds a whole lot less worrying when it's called "general overheating."

Asked why no reference to climate change is made in Eni school's Arctic section, a spokesperson said: "Eniscuola is not a website dedicated solely to climate change" but the project "promotes all scientific subjects, including climate change" and has a section dedicated to the subject online.

The spokesperson also pointed in the direction of the International Centre for Climate Governance, a Venice-based research body founded in part by the Eni Enrico Mattei Foundation.

Either way, these "educational" materials are at best irresponsibly selective in their coverage, and at worst are an attempt to birth a generation of toddlers who'll believe that mining is great for wildlife, and oil spills are nothing short of a miracle.

Follow Michael Segalov on Twitter.

A scene from Action to the Word's 'A Clockwork Orange'

"People say Alex Delarge is dangerous. Of course he's dangerous, he's a teenage boy," says Alexandra Spencer-Jones, whose hyper-sexualized stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange has just returned to London from Singapore. She has something of a soft spot for Anthony Burgess's maligned anti-hero. "Alexander literally means 'defender of my kind,'" she says. "We have to see him as a savior."

It's a fitting choice of words. In 1971, Stanley Kubrick's film version of Clockwork was banned in Singapore, a restriction which lasted 40 years before permission was finally granted for it to be shown for the first time at a national film festival in 2011. When Spencer-Jones's company Action to the Word took its show to the island in November, she was shocked.

"I spoke at a writers' conference over there where the host was homosexual, which is also essentially outlawed," she says. "It isn't illegal, but it's such a Christian place that it basically is. You'd never see two men kiss in public."

"At the end of this conference the host was so emotional he was almost crying. It was such an incredibly big deal to him that two men would be able to kiss on the stage."

And they do kiss. Hard. Action to the Word's Clockwork is scarcely recognizable from the 1970 film which shocked cinema-goers and censors. The stage is stripped bare leaving space for ten actors dressed only in snug-fitting trousers and braces to writhe among each other in a homoerotic carnival of sweat, muscle, and skin.

Related: VICE talks film with Gaspar Noé

It's also uncompromisingly faithful to the sadism that made the story famous, but this wasn't the focus of the moral censors. "When we performed in Hong Kong two years ago the government of Singapore came to see the show to see if we could get it past the censors," she says. "We did have to modify it a lot, but it was mostly the references to Christianity. Which was just bizarre."

"We weren't allowed to emulate any sexual reference at the same time as holding the Bible, but we were allowed to show a woman being beaten over the head to death. There's a moment where Alex masturbates whilst holding the Bible that had to go. But the point of that scene is that he enjoys the violence in the Bible, and how hypocritical it is that the Bible is the only book you have access to in prison, yet it's the most violent book of all time.

"You can't talk about crucifixion flippantly in Singapore, so when Alex says he'd like to hammer in the nails himself, all that had to go too. That didn't offend me though; what did offend me was them saying that two men kissing was OK, but emulating any sexual activity between men was a problem. So you can be gay, yeah, but not too gay. The censors were very, very clear. They can kiss but they can't touch each other's knobs."

But audiences were accepting of what they saw. There were none of the placards or protests outside Singapore's Esplanade Theatre that Spencer-Jones had expected; the press lauded it, too. So much so that the director feels the company could have made a more public show of the fact that they were giving two-fingers to a ban that had left a nation deprived of the work for four decades. "We should have gone further" she concedes, albeit from the relative safety of a rehearsal room in a south London youth club. "We should have really said 'yeah, we're changing history.'"

Here the moral compass begins to feel a little scrambled. Singapore is a country where you can legally play Grand Theft Auto with all its incumbent flesh-based indulgences, yet whose moral guardians placed Ben Stiller's Zoolander alongside Clockwork on the blacklist for three years between 2001 and 2004. Kubrick's film itself fell foul of the censors on account of the frivolity with which it presents and addresses rape, but the ways in which sexual violence bleeds into other media across the country's entertainment culture leave the picture feeling more than a little incomplete.

ATTW's most hostile reaction was received not on the ultra-conservative shores of Singapore, however. That came at the world's biggest gathering of art lovers at the Edinburgh Fringe back in 2009, when a stag party took exception to the scantily clad all-male collective, exiting literally via the stage with a succinct review of their own. "'Fucking faggots,' I think they said. They'd basically just turned up because they thought they were going to see a girl get raped."

Back in south London there does seem to be some unresolved ambivalence amongst Spencer-Jones's own thoughts about her protagonist, the sociopathic and violently indulgent Alex Delarge.

"I spent a lot of time back in 2009 when I was planning the first show speaking to people who had been through borstals and other correctional places," she says. "I spoke to one guy who'd been through a borstal and then onto Cambridge University. He was incredibly academic but his brain was exploding with too much thought. Another guy I spoke to was very honest about acting out because of frustration.

"But I don't think Alex is frustrated, I didn't see him in these people that I spoke to. I actually found more of him when reading about people like Stalin and Hitler. I found Alex in educators, politicians, and world leaders.

"His philosophy is that there's no reason not to be the best you can be as a human. He's very Spartan in that way. Everything about the way he's written is justified, he never thinks I'm going to be a little shit now. He's not a good guy, I don't think it's as straightforward as that. But he's not a bad guy."

Spencer-Jones's relationship with a character she's lived alongside for six years appears deep, dark, and permanent; you feel there isn't a living artist who is as moved by, nor as responsible for, Alex Delarge and the mark he's left on our culture. Thanks to her there is one less part of the world shielded from his peculiar story.

Action to the Word will be bringing A Clockwork Orange back to London in the new year.

Image by Flickr user Rexness

A classic young person job in Australia is doing social research over the phone. As work goes it's pretty easy. Sure, you have to irritate strangers all day long and you get told to fuck off a lot, but at least you're in the comfort of an air conditioned call center where there are dozens of other people, just like you, who are ostensibly all in it together.

Earlier this year I picked up a job with a different kind of social research company. The company (I won't bother naming it) had been commissioned by local governments to independently collect data. My job was to go door-to-door asking people what they thought about council programs and services. Later, someone from the office would compile that information into a set of statistics and write a report.

Each weekend for three months, I found myself in a different part of Melbourne—Maribyrnong, Yarra City, Stonnington, Mitchell Shire—with a quota of surveys and a lanyard displaying my dinky ID card. Forgetting the constant rejection and long commutes to out-of-the-way suburbs, listening to people whine about their lives in parts of the city I'd never seen was kind of interesting. In fact, for a few months it was interesting enough to keep getting up in the morning. Here are some things I learned.

People are Suspicious and Impatient

People in newer apartments protect themselves from people like me with locked gates and intercom systems, making them the hardest demographic to engage. The big houses in the outer suburbs, the ones inner-city Australians call McMansions, are the most likely to have signs at their doorsteps that say "No Unsolicited Salespeople." Other times they just say "No Door Knockers." These are some of the small but effective things people do to avoid strangers coming to their doorsteps.

If I managed to engage someone face-to-face, about two thirds of the time they would decline to do the survey, mostly in a polite way. Of the ones who agreed to do it, barely any would let me inside the house, which meant I'd have to ask the questions while standing on the front door step. Some people would even stay behind a locked gate. On the rare occasion that I was actually permitted entry into someone's home I was sometimes offered a glass of water, but never tea or coffee. Not even once.

Old People are Starving for Human Contact

I would often survey elderly people who seemingly hadn't spoken to another human in weeks. Often this was due to physical disabilities that made it too difficult to leave the house. These people relish any chance to chat. Sometimes I would listen to an old-lady talk for 25 minutes about her issues with the council, family dramas, or what's happening in the news. At times you'd get the feeling that they didn't want you to leave. This was a weird feeling that hit you at the base of the stomach. Sometimes it felt good to provide that social space for someone who needed it but in the end I'd have to excuse myself and get out of there. There are a lot of lonely people behind closed doors.

Sometimes People Will Give You Beer

One day in Maribyrnong I saw a man on a second story balcony with a beer in one hand and a length of PVC piping in the other. He leaned over the railing, put his lips to the piping, and shot a cardboard blow-dart at me. It missed by about a meter. Our conversation went like this:

Me: Wanna do a survey?

Him: Nah, not really... What's it for?

Me: Just for the council, you can rate their programs and services.

Him: (considering for a couple of seconds) All right, let yourself in, go to the fridge, grab a six-pack and bring it upstairs. Have a beer with me and I'll do your survey.

It turned out his name was Matt and he was celebrating his 24th birthday. He took me in, gave me beers, and did the survey. Then, when carloads of young men from country Victoria arrived with slabs of beer, he commanded them to do my surveys too. I fulfilled my quota and we had a good-old Aussie barbecue, complete with white bread, tomato sauce, processed meat, joints, whippits, and ecstasy. That was a really good day.

People Are Opinionated About Things like Parking

Along with the lonely old people, there are the ones who talk in detail about how they want the community to improve. Sometimes this will translate to clever and considered suggestions for the future of the community. Unfortunately though, most people just whine about little things. It was alarming how often—when asked an open question about the most important issue for the future—people settled on a trivial gripe about a parking ticket or an unpruned tree on their street.

Social Research Is Poorly Designed and Badly Carried Out

Although the research was independent, it was by no means objective. The questionnaire seemed designed to make it hard to criticize the council and its projects. For example, a question like: "What are some of the benefits you can envision for such-and-such-council-project?" carried the assumption that the project would actually have some benefit. This makes it difficult to respond negatively and I found people would sooner skip the question than deconstruct the assumption.

My last day on the job was in the outer suburbs where the urban sprawl thins out into bigger blocks and Melbourne comes to resemble a small country town. It was a particularly hot day, there was a lot of walking in between houses, and I was finding it hard to engage anyone.

Around lunchtime I went back to the company car, turned on the air conditioning and began filling in the surveys myself, repeating the data that I'd already gathered and throwing in some of my own opinions. Lazy and unethical as it was, it wasn't the first time I'd done it. When all but one survey was completed I decided I should cap off the day with a shred of honesty.

Twenty more minutes of door knocking was interspersed with "no thanks, mate," "no speak English," or no answer at all. Then, at the doorstep of a big house made from beige bricks, a man told me to "piss off" before I could finish my sentence. And that was when my job as a door-to-door social researcher abruptly ended.

I quit the job via text message. The boss didn't seem to mind. I got the feeling that staff came and went fairly regularly.

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All photos by Siv Channa

On the northwestern edge of the Cambodian capital in Phnom Penh Thmey, or New Phnom Penh, they still do some things the old fashioned way.

Every evening people from all walks of life come to Restaurant 999 for the mystical signature dishes that are said to hold various medicinal powers. Some come with open wounds, others come to treat skin irritations or soothe backache. And some come simply because they like eating dog.

"We go through 40 to 80 dogs a day," the chef said while working a rack of ribs over his streetside charcoal grill.

On a dusty industrial thoroughfare, Restaurant 999 specializes in three canine classics: Coconut dog curry, dog meat sour soup with red ants, and flame-grilled dog—each dish complimented by a banana flower salad and a dipping sauce made primarily of a pungent paste of fermented fish.

Every evening people from all walks of life come to Restaurant 999.

Children eat dog fat to treat rashes. Wounds are said to heal faster in those who eat the meat. And, according to staff, seven straight days of rare dog flesh will loosen any stiff back, or strengthen a weak one.

"Doctors acknowledge that dog meat is a healer," said one young waitress. "It truly is ancient medicine."

At less than $2 a plate—or about $5 per kilogram for a whole roasted dog—the dishes attract local laborers, men in suits, expats from Vietnam, Korea, and China, teachers, students, sick families, the odd curious westerner, and, occasionally, the country's business and political elite.

"Rich people are shy to sit and eat at places like this, but sometimes, we do have people in Lexus cars stop here to eat dog meat," said the restaurant's Chinese-Cambodian matriarch, who did not want to be photographed or named due to the intermittent outcry—locally and globally—over the consumption of man's best friend.

The meat sells for less than $2 a plate—or about $5 per kilogram for a whole roasted dog.

"Even if you buy a whole dog, I do not permit you to take my photo," she said. "Nowadays, many foreigners look down on those who serve dog meat."

The Western world was up in arms in June, venting its distaste at reports of thousands of pet dogs stolen and killed ahead of the Dog Meat Festival in Yulin, China (which VICE has covered before). But the canines that turn up in the stews and steaks at Restaurant 999 are the same strays that roam the streets in gangs at night barking at strangers and making rabies shots an absolute necessity.

British MPs, Chinese pop stars, and animal activists around the world condemned the Yulin festival as barbaric and cruel, calling for it to be outlawed. But the international outrage isn't likely to register with Cambodia's decision makers.

When a few dozen mostly expats attempted in April to demonstrate against eating dog meat by walking with their leashed pets through a Phnom Penh park, armed military police and security guards swiftly shut them down. City Hall later said that foreigners conducting a dog parade was "strange" and "not proper."

In 2003, the Phnom Penh governor urged citizens to help rid the city of its plague of feral dogs—by eating them, according to The Cambodia Daily. "Come on, dog meat is so delicious," he said. "The Vietnamese and Koreans love to eat dog meat."

Popular menu items include coconut dog curry, dog meat sour soup with red ants, and flame-grilled dog.

Regardless, the market for dog meat has mostly been pushed to the backblocks and fringes of a rapidly modernizing Phnom Penh; an age-old tradition somehow usurped by the stigma emanating from the West. But for Restaurant 999, every dog meat restaurant that goes under means more customers for them.

And business, which peaks around midnight as wannabe-crooners stumble drunk out of nearby karaoke clubs, is booming. With sorrowful Cambodian pop tunes blasting from a stack of crackling speakers, two men in their late 20s sat down to a platter of freshly roasted canine.

"After drinking beer, dog meat helps us sleep," said one, picking meat from a rib and eyeing the waitress fetching two plastic bottles of Sra Tinam, or "medicine wine," a potent home-brewed concoction of fermented rice, ginseng, and a personalized assortment of roots, spices, leaves, and insects.

The meat is believed to help a wide range of median conditions.

"The dog meat relaxes our bodies and the wine relaxes our minds," he added, a sigh of satisfaction following his first swig of the tonic. "Foreign people don't understand; they think these things are just for Cambodians, but they should just try it and see."

Buzzing around the restaurant taking orders sans notepad and pen, the matriarch—who in 2009 quit her job as a wedding hall waitress to open Restaurant 999—had one parting shot for anyone of the belief that dogs should only be pets, and never protein.

"What, are you really worried about the lives of dogs?" she asked provocatively, nodding toward the grill, her own pet canine—called Tor, or "Lion"—relaxing beneath it. "If you are worried about the lives of dogs, maybe you should think about that every time you go to the market to buy pork or beef."

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Veridiana Pardo Meo Erbskorn

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A 12-year-old boy wore eyeliner.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: His mother attempted to scrub it off with steel wool and soap.

Veridiana Pardo Meo Erbskorn was arrested at her home in Coweta County, Georgia, last Tuesday, after a 911 call was placed by one of her children. According to a report on Fox 5 Atlanta, police arrived on the scene to find the 47-year-oldVeridiana with a recently used Brillo pad—a steel wool scouring pad infused with soap.

Veridiana's 12-year-old son was, by that point, at a nearby hospital with his father, receiving treatment for injuries sustained when Veridiana allegedly used the Brillo to scrub eyeliner from his face.

The boy reportedly had a sore face and scratches to his right eye. At the time, doctors were not sure if the damage to his eye would be permanent.

Police say that Veridiana admitted to using the pad on her son's face, and said she did so because her son was going through "a rock and roll phase." According to Fox 5, this phase also included a leather jacket and red hair dye.

Veridiana was charged with two counts of child cruelty, reckless conduct, and battery.

Cry-Baby #2: Students at Lebanon Valley College

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A college building, which is named after a person with the last name Lynch, was called Lynch Memorial Hall.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: Students at the college asked that the building be renamed, because the word "lynch" has racial overtones.

Lebanon Valley College is a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. There is a building on its campus called Lynch Memorial Hall, which is named after Clyde A. Lynch, who was president of the school from 1932 to 1950.

According to the Associated Press, students at the school are asking that the name be changed to something entirely different, or that Clyde A. Lynch's full name be added to the signage.

The request for the building to be renamed was one of a number of demands made by Lebanon Valley College students last Friday. The students also reportedly asked for "a more diverse curriculum, more sensitivity training for staff, and regular surveys of the racial climate on campus."

In a statement posted to the school's website, the school's current president, Lewis E. Thayne, said the list of demands "is being read with care." The college will respond to students at a forum next month.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll here, if it's not too much trouble:

Previously: A guy who freaked out so hard over a spider that someone called the cops to report a murder vs. a judge who threw someone in jail for handing out fliers on jury rights.

Winner: The judge!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

People like to compare Donald Trump to Hitler, both for legitimate reasons and because people love comparing people they don't like to Hitler. After he announced his proposal for banning all Muslim travel to the United States, actual Nazis announced their support of him, which essentially functions as an anti-endorsement of the Republican presidential candidate, who despite logic and reason, continues to lead in the polls.

It's not just the Nazis who like Trump. It's the white nationalists, too. Take Richard Spencer, who heads up the nationalist think tank National Policy Institute and has been described as an "academic racist" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Spencer is of a new breed of white nationalist, who on the surface eschews outright racism and instead prefers to remain upbeat, simply stressing that he's really, really amped about being white.

" seems to genuinely care about the historic American nation that is white people." —Richard Spencer

He is also, to a lesser degree, amped on Donald Trump. He told me he appreciates the fact that Trump brings identity into politics in a way that few other candidates have done, and that Trump is actively driving people towards the nationalist cause.

Charming in a sociopathic sort of way, Spencer bristled when I asked him over the phone if he identified as a white supremacist; he prefers the terms "alternative right" and "identitarianist" over "racist" or "white supremacist." To be an identitarian, Spencer says, is to say, "Identity is the most important question to answer. Who are we racially? Who are we historically? Who are we in terms of our experience? Who are we in terms of our community?" This is a fancy way of saying that he is a racist.

He repeatedly referred to himself as a "nerd," professing a love of classical music and a philosophical alliance to Heidegger (after we got off the phone, he sent me an article he'd written on why the "alternative right" should go see the new Star Wars movie). Being affably racist is sort of Spencer's "thing"—a 2013 Salon profile of him found the writer agreeing with his views on big-box stores one moment, only to become horrified once he started calmly advocating for sterilizing minorities.

Speaking to me from his Montana home, Spencer and I had a conversation about why he likes Donald Trump, why Trump's campaign makes space for more candidates with white suprema—uh, "identitarian"—views, and why the "alternative right" is not particularly interested in Jeb(!) Bush.

Richard Spencer. Screen Grab via YouTube

VICE: Would you say that Donald Trump is expressing "identitarian" values when he advocates for banning Muslims from the United States?
Richard Spencer: I'm glad Donald Trump is running for president. He's brought an existential quality to politics. He's talking about, "Are we a nation? Is America a nation?" That's a big question. I think in a way, his proposal to ban Muslims is obviously being sparked by the Paris terror attacks, as well as the ongoing refugee crisis throughout Europe. I think one thing he's saying is just, "We don't want that here." I think identity does play a role in this. He's basically saying that if you are a nation, then at some point you have to say "There is an 'Us,' and there is a 'Them.' Who are we? Are we a nation?" In that sense, I think it's really great.

Besides this specific initiative, would you say he's an identitarian candidate?
Look: I don't think any mainstream candidate is going to satisfy me. I don't think he's an identitarian—to some degree he's a mainstream Republican. I think the fact that he brings identity into play and asks these big questions means that it's a great thing that he's running. He's making people think. Mass democracy is usually either boring or stupid. It's about all these wonky, technical things that no one understands, or it's like a reality show—which candidate had an affair, which candidate you'd like to have a beer with. And I think with Trump, politics is real. It's existential. I don't think he speaks for me, but I do think he's getting at these questions that I really care about. He kinda came out of nowhere. I never expected him to run, and I never expected him to be this radical.

You said politics sucks because it's like a reality show, so I find it very ironic that you're enjoying the campaign of a guy who's essentially a reality star.
That's the funny thing about Trump—he's used his power as a celebrity and his aura of fame not to acquire more fame like Kim Kardashian taking an Instagram photo of her butt. He seems to genuinely care about the historic American nation that is white people. The fact that he's using celebrity in order to be a radical politician... I never expected it. It's almost as if Kim Kardashian decided to talk about Nietzsche on YouTube.

Watch Our Documentary on Towson College's White Student Union

Actually, Kim Kardashian has been petitioning for the acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide this year.
I did not know that. That is interesting. Maybe I should rethink Kim Kardashian.

Are there any other candidates that you like?
Not really, actually. I don't like the Republican party, generally. I don't see any other candidate who talks about things the way Trump does. I think Trump is really sui generis. I have no interest in Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, or any of these other people. I definitely think I speak for a lot of people on the alt-right and Twitter when I say it's really about Trump. If he drops out or loses, we're not all going to become fascinated with Ted Cruz or Ben Carson. Trump is something different.

Do you think he might turn more people towards your views?
Yes. Unquestionably. I think it's happening. It's amazing how many people I've met who have said, "I just discovered these ideas six months ago." You could say something's in the air, maybe Trump opens up space because he's so bombastic and willing to talk about the things that people don't want to talk about. Even if you don't agree with him, there's almost a liberating aspect to him. He's willing to go there. He's willing to talk about the things that make people uncomfortable. Trump has unquestionably brought people to our ideas.

Do you think he's a sign that an identitarian candidate could have a shot at public office?
The conservative movement—like National Review nerds, the leaders of CPAC—these people hate Trump with a passion. But he's just defeated them; he's made them look stupid and weak. The Republican establishment hates this; this is not what they want. Maybe all of these forces are old in the tooth and they're going to go the way of the dinosaur. Trump has shown you don't need to kowtow to those forces to win. I never would have expected it.

It seems like Trump has been able to use this celebrity to clear out all this space, and even if he doesn't win, it's very likely that the next guy saying the same stuff that he's saying could win some sort of office.
I've never thought about that before, but I totally agree.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

The Holy Emperor in jeans and sheux. Photo via ITV

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

It is the year of our Lord 2015 and in the tiny corner of the planet we call the 'United Kingdom' we are all quite pleased with ourselves. And, yes, fine: there are lots of reasons to be proud of our little island. We gave the world fry ups and Kat Slater and conversations about weather. But probably the jewel in our collective crown of smugness, the case upon which we've based our secret conviction that we're better than the rude French and the loud Americans, is the fact that we've built an entire national identity on politeness. We like drinking tea, and when someone pushes in front of us in a line we'll emit a loud sigh but very rarely actually say something, and if we're annoyed at people in another country we tend to prefer dropping bombs on them from up in the air so we don't have to acknowledge the messiness of blood and limbs. We are, for all intents and purposes, what you might call a civilized society.

And so the deep truth of it all:The X Factor, so bubbly and Caroline Flack-y on its surface, has an underlying message which is at once extremely complex and astonishingly simple. Though we've got iPads and Starbucks now, our tastes have not changed, our bloodthirst undiminished. Our enduring fascination with The X Factor and the many copycat shows like it show us that we—people, humans—are just the same as we always were. So it always was, so it always will be. The only way the cycle will ever break is if Che Chesterman goes 'full Spartacus' and slaughters Simon Cowell live on ITV.

Follow Lauren on Twitter.

Photo of the office being evacuated via CAIR's Facebook page

On Thursday afternoon, firefighters and police were called to the Capitol HIll office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington DC, after the Muslim rights group received an envelope in the mail containing a white powder. The letter came around 1 PM, CAIR spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper told BuzzFeed News. Employees of CAIR were promptly evacuated after the discovery of the foreign substance, and currently some employees are being quarantined at the building.

Though the incident was reminiscent of the 2001 anthrax attacks, preliminary field tests indicated the foreign substance is "not dangerous," but the letter has now been taken by the FBI for further testing, CAIR wrote on its Facebook page. Even so, the envelope with the mysterious white powder represents an escalation in the type of hateful messages the group says it receives on a regular basis.

"We receive hate messages daily because of our advocacy on behalf of the American Muslim community" CAIR's staff attorney Maha Sayed said via the group's Facebook. "It's frightening to experience the hate manifest itself to such a real level. This will not deter us from continuing to protect the civil rights and liberties of all Americans."

The envelope to CAIR is perhaps the most serious example yet of widespread Islamophobia that has ratcheted up across the globe in the wake of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Just in the past month, vandals ripped up a copy of the Koran and flung poop at a mosque in Texas, a medical student was shouted down for texting by a paranoid New York City moviegoer, a severed pig's head was left in the toilet of a mosque at an Australian University, another pig's head was thrown at a mosque in Philadelphia, and a Muslim in Fredericksburg, Virginia, was shouted down at a town hall meeting when he proposed building a mosque on property he owns.

Meanwhile, GOP presidential candidates have been competing to see who can talk toughest. Ted Cruz has declared that we are currently "at a time of war" with radical Islam, Mike Huckabee compared Syrian refugees to spoiled Chipotle burritos, and Ben Carson compared them to a rabid dog roaming the neighborhood. And, of course, this week Donald Trump upped the ante by suggesting we bar all Muslims from entry into the US.

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So necessary. Photo via Terradyne Incorporated.

The Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) spent $343,000 on an armoured vehicle, citing concerns for the safety of police officers following the fatal shooting of three RCMP officers in Moncton, NB, last year.

Photo by Salvatore Barbera via




If you've been single in the last five years and like having sex with someone other than yourself, you'll be familiar with tech-based dating. It's currently riding the crest of a wave that doesn't look like it's going to break any time soon; statistics vary in both size and reliability, but a Global WedIndex report claimed that 91 million people worldwide use dating apps, with around 50 million people on Tinder alone.

According to the 2012 US census, 44 percent of the population is single. That means about 102 million people were offering any plus-ones they were given to their best platonic friends. 

So what do the start-ups and Silicon Roundabout bosses have planned to bring that number of singletons down?

"People really, really want to get laid," says Michael Raven, one of the founders of Tinderus, a consultancy service that, for $50, will tailor your Tinder profile to make it super swipe-right-friendly. 
"A trend I'm seeing is that, particularly on the female side, standards are going up. Instantaneous access to potential dates and sex means we get to see all that's available. Why settle for average when you can attract someone of a higher standard?"



It's a theme that David Buss, author of The Evolution of Human Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, agrees with—though he speaks a little more cautiously on the topic. "A pretty sound prediction is that college-educated women will find it increasingly difficult to find good mates," he tells me. "This is because of a confluence of factors: higher and higher percentages of women compared to men are getting educated, and because women have strong preferences not to 'mate down,' their pool consists of educated, intelligent, stable-income guys."

With this in mind, a question is raised: if 62 percent of dating app users are men, and women are looking for clever, reliable guys, what's going to happen to all us poor, uneducated idiots?



Michael says that "dating apps will become more niche; they will start tapping into the average Joe/Jane market." We've already seen this with Ten, an app that matches you to people in a similar looks-league to yourself. Elsewhere, on Bumble—an app launched late last year by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe—it's down to women to initiate conversations with matches, and if their match doesn't reply within 24 hours they disappear. Sarah Mick, Head of Product and Design at the company, says the world of online dating has been "lopsided" and that Bumble is trying to create an environment where "there's mutual respect and balance of power that fits the wants and the needs of each individual person or couple."

Michael adds that we're likely to see a more invasive, in-depth app come along pretty soon—one that notes "waist size, breast size, penis size, all out there on the app, ready perfect match." 

In the location-based app race, he rates Happn as the "first mass market app to integrate beacon technology in an interesting way," though feels the ability to see how far away the person you're messaging is from you is "relatively creepy."

Read on Broadly: The Girls Who Use Grindr



The issue of "creepiness" is something that has dogged dating sites and apps since day one. Julia Spira—who founded the website cyberdatingexpert.com and claims to be "America's Top Online Dating Expert and Digital Matchmaker"—runs with this idea. Like Michael, she thinks we're going to see a move to more niche dating apps, but also "ones where it's easy to meet on the fly."

Read between the lines and it's clear we're talking no-strings hook-ups. 

This, of course, raises the issue of who the stranger is you're sexting at 11 AM. "Safety will be an important component, and singles will want to meet someone who a friend can recommend, or someone who has mutual friends on their social networking sites, such as Facebook," says Julia.



One company that could provide a solution is Hello Soda. Utilizing the principles of the Bayesian Belief Network—a tongue-twisty phrase that basically means "looking at data and making a considered analysis"—the company can analyze what you've done online and confirm that that you are in fact Sally from New York and not Simon from Jersey. The crudest way of describing how it works might be to compare it to a credit check, but one that—with your permission—dredges your Facebook, tweets, blog posts and social interactions rather than your bank account.

James Blake, CEO of Hello Soda, says the service could identify fake profiles or "catfishes" outright—and, on a more harmonious level, "extract members' likes and interests from their social profiles, providing a means to match members based on their shared or disparate personality traits."



Of course, depending on your imagination, the terms "fake man" or "fake woman" could mean all sorts. A report was released recently that predicted sex with robots would be more popular than human-human sex by 2050. Granted, the report was funded by the sex toy company Bondara and obviously geared toward generating headlines, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider the wearable technology everyone's going to be strapping to themselves over the next five years.

Related: Watch 'The Digital Love Industry'

You may have already heard of Oculus Rift, a headset that allows you to enter immersive virtual reality worlds. VICE actually already tested out its sexual capabilities last year in the documentary The Digital Love Industry, and, frankly, it left a lot to be desired.

Ayliffe Brown from Wearable Technologies says that "in five years I would consider wearable tech—hands-free sex toys that work with your smartphone—to be popular." 

Take a company like Lovense, which has two toys: the Nora (a vibrator) and the Max (a contraption similar to a Fleshlight). Through the Lovense app on your phone you can control the vibrating and the rumblings of either of these, as can your partner, whether they're in bed with you or on the other side of the world.

Elsewhere, Fundawear make wearable underwear that can be remotely vibrated by a partner, while Frixion—a beta social network platform—uses "real-time, bi-directional force feedback telemetry to achieve convincing and organic intimacy." In other words: you use your computer to make a robot fuck someone.

With all these different methods of courtship going on—each of them quietly teasing us away from the time-honored tradition of person meets person on a night out, drinks six beers and does some sex—the question is whether or not technology will eventually become the one and only way humans form romantic relationships.

Of course, even if that unlikely outcome is realized, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. As David Buss points out, regardless of the technology used to get two people to that point, meeting in person is indispensable, because it's the only true measure of whether "the chemistry is there or not."

Follow David on Twitter.

Judge Dredd, 1977. All images via Rebellion

In 1995, Sylvester Stallone put on a plastic codpiece designed by Gianni Versace, then smirked and bellowed his way through 96 minutes of nearly 20 years' worth of Judge Dredd comic storylines mashed together into a gaudy highlight reel of a motion picture. It was a commercial and critical flop, emerging at the tail end of one of the worst creative slumps that the UK comics industry had ever seen.

Yet somehow, 2000AD persevered. Founded in 1977 and continuing to this day as a weekly British sci-fi anthology comic, no other title has evolved and survived trends in comics, society, and culture quite like it. It's why it endured long enough to see its principal character Judge Dredd again revived on screen—this time successfully—by Karl Urban in 2012's Dredd. But it isn't the spin-off films and video games that have placed 2000AD in the comic book firmament. Born out of punk and political frustration, that all started in the 1970s, when it first began to shake up newsstands.

2000AD is the Black Mirror of comics, able to give a dark and absurdist inversion to whatever cultural or social ill is terrifying the British public on any given day.

Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD is a new documentary that chronicles why 2000AD has been able to call itself "the galaxy's greatest comic" since 1977. Among those interviewed for the documentary—alongside Neil Gaiman, Alex Garland, and Portishead's Geoff Barrow—is the founder and first editor of the title, Pat Mills. Still writing for the comic today, some of his creations—Nemesis the Warlock, The A.B.C Warriors, Slaine—are among the most popular of the comic's near-40 year run.

"It's the last man standing, isn't it?" he says. "It's the last significant British comic. There's a great affection towards British comics, and a lot of people grew up reading 2000AD and they're going to carry that onward into adulthood. It's subversive in a way that mainstream American comics are not. It has a....particularly British quality."

Among Mills' launch stories in the first issue of 2000AD was Invasion!—a twisted what-if scenario where the "Volgons" (a rather transparent analogue for the Soviet Union) invaded Britain and gunned down "Dame Shirley Brown" (an equally transparent Margaret Thatcher stand-in) on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral. The story then follows a shotgun-wielding East End truck driver Bill Savage as he resists the occupation. The story was the exact kind of violent and paranoia-stoking stuff that 2000AD used the pretense of a science-fiction banner to deflect criticism.

Space Girls, 1997

But it hasn't been an easy ride for 2000AD. As the 1990s rolled in, the comic's former publishers decided to move with the times, chasing lad-mag titillation and cheap headlines. The effects were disastrous. Fans are divided as to exactly when the comic truly hit rock bottom—some say it's the universally—loathed Space Girls, a sexualized parody of the Spice Girls (but in space), with nicknames Baby, Scary, Sporty, Posh, and Ginger replaced by Deep, Inner, Hyper, Free, and Wide-Open Space (a blonde nymphomaniac with the superpower of being irresistible to all men).

Others, however, argue that its real low was the self-referential satire B.L.A.I.R.1—a hellishly unfunny amalgam of 2000AD's own 1970s Six Million Dollar Man rip-off, M.A.C.H.One, and the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. It featured a bionic Blair fighting an evil supercomputer by the name of Dr. Spin. The subversive, degenerate, but above all intelligent comic that had once been an incubator for the cream of the industry's talent had been reduced to peddling cheap shots, cheap cleavage, and sterile cinema adaptations.

"Hellishly unfunny" B.L.A.I.R.1

In 2000, however, the comic was bought up by video game developer Rebellion. "What the readers wanted was 2000AD," Pat Mills remembers. "They didn't want Loaded, they didn't want it to be a disciple of NME. In the past, all of those publications had an unwarranted influence of 2000AD. But we didn't need them—so we decided that basically, they could just fuck off."

So in 2004, he rebooted he rebooted his Invasion! storyline with truck driver Bill Savage making a return in the titular Savage. Updated so the occupation allegories now echo the British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than Cold War paranoia fantasies, Savage has covered abuse of power by occupiers, the morality of Abu Ghraib-style torture facilities, and more recently, mechanized drone warfare. Although this being 2000 AD, the drones aren't flying missile pods, but 12 ft tall hammer-wielding war robots at the command of a Richard Branson-esque figure called Howard Quartz. Who, incidentally, eventually gets killed by his own creations and became a talking brain in a jar.

"There's a fascination that people have with alternative histories, and the idea of an enemy occupying Britain has always been of interest," says Mills. "But even in the original Invasion!, there was always an element of science-fiction as well. When I began the reboot, I felt we could retain that noir element with little bits of science fiction."

The original Bill Savage, 1977

As the clock ticks past another year in the real world, so does it with the comic's main character Judge Dredd. His origin in the middle of the 70s punk explosion might have been as a parody of Thatcherite authoritarianism, but compared to the conservative nature of his transatlantic rivals, Dredd is as progressive as comic book creations get. In Dredd's world, there are none of the flimsy reboots and reimaginings that sees Marvel and DC's flagship characters die, marry, and stay encased in inky-amber. Stories in 1977 depicted a young Judge who still believed in maintaining the letter of 2099's oppressive laws; Dredd in 2015 is an old man in the year 2137, hardened by the practicalities of decades on the streets and a more nuanced understanding of the difference between law and justice. It's how a comic can continue to push boundaries when a generation has been raised since its inception being able to watch the worst that the real world has to offer on LiveLeak.

Take the recent story of 'The Beating'—over the past month, 2000AD has run a Dredd story where Dedd is filmed beating a suspect to death, with the footage going viral over social media and the consequences threatening to destabilize the entire justice system of Dredd's world. It covers surveillance culture, privatization of public services, police corruption, citizen journalism, and delivers a twist to give Dredd's behavior a less brutal, but no less sinister motive to our modern mindset. And it does it in just 18 pages of strip.

"One of the arguments is that kids today don't look at comics; that they're more interested in video games. That there's changing technologies, and changing demographics," Pat scoffs. "That's all weak and rather pathetic excuses for complacency... if you maintain the style and give the readers what they want, you will never lose them."

It's that kind of pragmatic approach that has made 2000AD the Black Mirror of comics, able to give dark and absurdist inversion to whatever cultural or social ill is terrifying the British public on any given day—if that means running a story where gang riots are melded with Cronenburg-esque body-horror, or illustrating the horrors of autocratic states via swashbuckling Russian lothario Nikolai Dante then 2000AD will, and has, done it.

2000AD is—and always will be—just that kind of comic.

Follow Hugh on Twitter.

Aaron Maté interviews Mubin Shaikh, a former jihadist.

Born in Toronto and raised Muslim, Mubin Shaikh became a radical Islamist after a trip to Pakistan in the 1990s. Back in Canada, Shaikh recruited other young Muslims for the cause of jihad. But 9/11 led him to question his path. After a stint in Syria studying the Quran, he returned home changed once again, this time determined to fight the militarism he had espoused. Working with CSIS, Shaikh was a government agent in the "Toronto 18" case, where a group of mostly young Muslims were convicted of plotting to attack Canadian institutions. Today, Shaikh campaigns against Islamophobia while also trying to stop radicalization in his own community, using social media to engage directly with Islamic State sympathizers. And while he still works with Western governments, he's not afraid to criticize Western policies that he says fuel the radicalization he fights.

Just months ago, it was widely believed that the Islamic State's threat was confined to the Middle East, where it seeks to establish a so-called "caliphate." But the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino show IS has joined if not surpassed Al Qaeda in recruiting or inspiring Western Muslims to commit murderous acts against fellow civilians. VICE sat down with Mubin Shaikh to discuss how vulnerable young Muslims are radicalized to commit violence; Shaikh's own path from jihadist to government agent; and how groups like IS distort the religion they claim to represent.

VICE: What makes vulnerable young Muslims prone to being recruited by groups like the Islamic State?

Mubin Shaikh: You're dealing with a social movement. It's beyond a terrorist group. And social movements have grievance narratives. The reason why those grievance narratives resonate is because they are based in fact. It might not be complete fact and it might be their way of interpreting world events, but the reality is that when they say that their grievance is about western foreign policy, particularly the bombing of Muslim countries—they're not wrong when they say that.

When I was around in 1995, we would watch videotapes these are hard core Al-Qaeda trained guys. And they were not. They were bumbling amateurs, their reach exceeded their grasp. Yes, they had all these lofty ideas of storming the Parliament building and kidnapping members of Parliament and cutting their heads off, but there was no way for them to realize that plot.

The Muslim community now understands. They're realizing that, 'Listen, we're going to lose our kids. And we're going to always have to answer every time there is an attack, we're always going to have to say 'Islam doesn't have anything to do with terrorism.'' But now what's needed is for the Muslim community to close ranks in that sense, to understand that we are at the forefront of this, we are its number one victims—from both sides—and we are the ones that can bring a better solution than anyone else.

This interview has been edited for context and length.

Follow Aaron Maté on Twitter.

The absolute office Christmas party right here. Ironic Santa hat? Check. Detached disinterest? Check. Bleak little wiggle of tinsel? Check. Shit party game? CHECK CHECK CHECK. Photo via Flickr user Matt Brown

Tinsel around the whiteboard. Is there ever a more dreary icon of corporate Christmas than tinsel round a whiteboard? Tinsel—dragged out from the kicked and destroyed cardboard box in that little cupboard only reception has access to—pulled from the archives and affixed using blu-tack to the top of a whiteboard. Someone has pulled the red, green, and blue whiteboard markers out and written "Happy Holidays" with a picture of a candy cane. It's here again. It's happening again. Christmas in the office.

And so it begins anew, beginning as it always does with a fun email from HR telling you about the Christmas party. "DRINKIES / NIBBLES / FUN," it says. "DRESS CODE: GLAM-CASUAL. MEET AT RECEPTION AT 5PM. SECRET SANTA. DON'T STOP TIL YOU DROP!" This annual tradition. Sometimes you fool yourself into getting excited for it. Sometimes you do not. Maybe you have learned a lesson from years past, when you woke up in the office with a festive McDonald's menu on your face. Maybe you are bright eyed and young and yet to make a mistake. But it is always the same. You will always see a pre-menopausal woman whining to Journey. Someone is always puking into a mesh trashcan. Someone always jokes about photocopying their ass in the copy machine, but they don't actually do it.

The OCP, or office Christmas party, is a groundhog day from which you cannot escape. There will always be "desk drinkies" of warm prosecco from the small office fridge served in watercooler cups. There will always be a few shop-bought packs of mince pies that nobody can quite be bothered to slide out of their cardboard sheath. Someone starts going around the party with a big bag an hour before it ends, tidying up paper plates rendered grey and transparent with coleslaw stains. There is a meal at a restaurant which is just a toned down version of your actual Christmas dinner, and you spend the whole thing desperately trying to hear the banter happening at the other end of the table, since you're stuck in the chatter vacuum with Dave from accounts. And then you get so drunk you don't remember and wake up wearing a paper hat. Also all this shit happens:

The fun starts here! Photo via Jirka Matousek

SECRET SANTA

You know how Secret Santa goes by now—someone stands by your desk with a felt Santa hat full of printed and folded little slips of paper and emotionlessly tells you "ten dollar limit," and then you get the name of someone who it takes asking three people in the office before one of them knows who it is. "Chris," they say. "You know Chris. Extremely hard, humorless guy who has a load of Stanley knives on his belt and works in the stock room." And now here you are, on the hook for $10, burdened with a month's worth of fretting over a Secret Santa present for a man who does not know or like you. First fucks: there is nothing you can buy for $10 that is in any way good or fun. Second fucks: even if there were, nobody would want it. Every shopping trip you go on from now until the Secret Santa has you picking up shit in random aisles wondering if a man you're pretty sure you once saw eat an onion for lunch would like. Plastic reindeer that shits chocolate raisins? Silly putty? Would Chris like an attachable Santa beard that has an invisible button on it you can click and it sings? He would not. But you buy it and wrap it anyway, and watch as he—almost instantly—festively puts it in the trash.

On MUNCHIES: Catalonia Celebrates Christmas by Beating a Log Until It Poops Nougat

EXTREMELY HORNY DIVORCEE

You know Linda got her divorce finalized this year because she did a really exaggerated "Yee–yes!" and air punch combination when the legal paperwork came through in January, and booked Valentine's Day off to take her sturdy friend Rosie to a spa for vagina facials, and keeps telling the weeping temp with the boyfriend who keeps fingering other girls in his Impreza that "all men are shits, hon." But now it's Christmas and the meeting room with the Sainsbury's own red and white wine selections has been drunk dry, and she's oscillating sensually towards you, one leg arched up against the water cooler. "I've had a sexual awakening," she's hissing. "I'm an... experienced woman." She does not care about your gender or your sexual preferences. She does not care that everyone can see into the stationary cupboard through that little grilled window. She doesn't care who sees it. She is going to feel your bottom through your slacks.

Photo via Flickr user Charlie Dave

BOSS TRYING TO GET DOWN WITH THE KIDS

And the lights are dimmed and the for-hire disco ball pulses yellow and purple on the ceilings and on the walls and oh no you've fucked it and now you're backed into a corner making smalltalk with your boss. There were a group of you, but three people all decided to hit the buffet at the exact same time and now you're trapped in a conversational vacuum with a woman in an extremely aggressive trouser suit who wants to ask you, an empirically young person, about young people things, in an effort to recapture the time when she was young. "My daughter likes this... what's his name? 'Fetty Wap,'" she's saying. "Are you a 'Fetty' liker?" Pretend you don't like Fetty Wap. "Explain how Skype works to me," she's saying. "What's your favorite emoji?" Oh god, she's read an article on the Buzzfeed about how to speak to young people! It's 25 points long! You're not getting anywhere near the beers until she's asked you about Rihanna or when you're ever going to buy a house! Run now, run. She's going to ask you next if you "have a bae."

Read on NOISEY: Seven Grandmothers Who Rock Harder Than Noel Gallagher

SOMEONE GIVING YOU A REALLY INTENSE DRUNKEN CAREER TALK

Some time in that sweet spot about eight drinks in—somewhere between "back to the office!" post-meal joviality and "screaming along to Mariah Carey" in terms of drunkenness—there's a moment where you've looked around and the lights have dimmed and you're looking at a 43-year-old dad-of-two in a pinstripe shirt, pink tie, and paper hat and gone: That's me, that is, that is me in less than 20 years, I am going to die here, I am going to die here like Martin, slowly shuffling on a grey static carpet until my hair falls out and my shoes wear down to the leather, until I'm legitimately excited about the Next Christmas Sale, until I have to keep leaving the office for ever more alarming and invasive prostate exams. And that's the exact moment—just before the next round of shots, before the intern is back from the liquor store with more beer—when you spiral into a tailspin, thinking about your life and your career and your future, and you're in a corner with someone with them going going, "You know what, you know WHAT? You're BETTER THAN THIS SHIT, you are!" and you're saying how you always wanted to be an artist, always wanted to create, and they are saying, "You SHOULD! You should DO THAT!" and you're like "YEAH!" and they are like "but shh, shh: there is an opening in accounts in January and I can put a good word in," and that would be a three grand raise, and maybe—maybe you should do it, right? Maybe you could move sideways, do the art in the evenings, little evening course, make that zine you always wanted to do in all that spare time you have, when you're not at the bar or with friends, starving artist only less starving, maybe you should apply, maybe you sh—

And then you wake up and it's 2035 and you're head of accounts, and the resident office 22-year-old is looking at you and having a crisis, and so the sand washes into the sea, and the cycle continues anew.

Standard office Christmas party attire. Photo via Flickr user US Corps of Engineers

A FUN AND IMPROMPTU AWARDS CEREMONY

Every single in-joke that the office has shared this year in a desperate attempt to fend off the aggressive ennui of working there has now been printed off onto a faux certificate template and is being handed out by someone with zero banter and a microphone as you all sit at a table littered with dirtied plates and hasty Secret Santa wrapping. Best Joker has already gone. Most Flirty. Now it's down to just making up something that vaguely happened to you, once, because nobody has a clue about your intricacies, your layers, your mystery. And the award for 'Best Orderer Of Yellow Printer Paper When We Needed White Printer Paper' is—drum roll, please—you!

LOCATION OPTION #1: THE Restaurant Closest TO THE OFFICE

The person planning the office party has Googled far and Googled wide and phoned high and phoned low and then gone: "Actually the place we always go to is good." The restaurant you always go to, the restaurant you go to every day, the restaurant where the landlord knows you by name but also hates you after you spilled that whole bottle of vinegar everywhere, the restaurant that for some reason—despite your office's patronage essentially keeping the place open all year round—can only seat you all for lunch at 10 AM in the morning. That restaurant.

LOCATION OPTION #2: THE RESTAURANT FURTHEST FROM THE OFFICE

The person planning the office party has Googled far and Googled wide and phoned high and phoned low and then gone: "Let's go somewhere new, a thousand miles away." And that's how your entire office—apart from that one woman with rheumatoid arthritis in one knee who insists on taking a cab with three managers and when you turn up they've eaten all the complementary grub—ends up getting a Megabus for 50 minutes just to go to a slightly different restaurant.

AN ALL-Office Email THAT SUGGESTS TAKING AN AFTERNOON OFF TO DRINK WARM PROSECCO OUT OF PLASTIC CUPS BEFORE WALKING EN MASSE TO A RESTAURANT IS SOME SORT OF GENEROUS TREAT

SUBJ: Party time!

Hi guys—

Just to let you know that we'll be finishing up early today at 3PM!

As thanks for all your hard work this year you are invited to down tools and join us in reception for a complementary glass of bubbly!

CEO Alan Boring will be jetting in from the Bournemouth office and will be giving a brief presentation that you think will only last about five minutes so you just stand to watch him do it but 45 minutes in and he's still going so you sort of have to lean against a plate glass window and hope for the best while he says "growth" and compliments the sales team a lot before entirely ignoring you and the department you are attached to.

We'll then be walking over to The Jolly Lion for a festive meal (woo!) and more fun and fizz!

Please do remember to take your building passes with you and any drivers will need to take their vehicles as security will be locking the gates at 4 PM. Also I'm clearing the fridge out for the holidays so any Tupperwares or old large cartons of yogurt need to be disposed of or taken away.

x x x

Photo via Flickr user Jirka Matousek

PEOPLE DRESSING UP

Always one person at the Christmas party who's gone into the whole "being festive" thing a bit two-footed and dressed up as either Santa (oversized velour trousers over grey slacks; oversized Santa jacket over work shirt and tie; Santa hat; absolutely no false beard, no sack), an elf (rented elf costume, circles of blush on cheeks) or some sort of "Mary Christmas" character (Sue Pollard got into a locked bin full of flashing Christmas tree earrings). We know who you are, festive costumers. We see you every day changing toner cartridges. Who are you trying to fool.

JANUARY BOOKINGS

I don't think it's a great stretch to say that it should be illegal for companies to try and cheap out of buying you a Christmas meal by organizing for it to happen in January, a month that essentially already has a grey-blue pall over it at all times anyway, and there you are in a quiet bar and grill—with some repurposed and out-of-place tinsel and a cracker someone had to bring a box of from home, and nobody wants to be there and they don't have the proper festive food anyway—trying not to break. If your company tries to inflict this on you, report them to the army.

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A REALLY MISERLY AMOUNT OF MONEY BEHIND THE BAR

SUBJ: RE: Party time!

Hi guys—

Just to mention: there will be $300 behind the bar tonight! Go wild! There are literally 60 of you!

!

x x x

INEXPLICABLY HAVING TO GO TO WORK THE NEXT DAY

The Office Christmas Party is never on an actual Friday because that would be practical, wouldn't it, that would make sense, and also they negotiated a good rate on the lunch for a Thursday night and honestly they'd rather have you in the office green with hangover than spend an additional $3 per head to get you a Friday evening turkey dinner. And so you find yourself rolling in to work at 11AM the morning after, crusty bacon sandwich, sunglasses, and your manager is there, inexplicably fresh, as is everyone else, all sober and all furious, all looking at their watch and going "What time do you call this?" Scabs, them lot. Scabs. Scum, absolute scum.

Photo via Flickr user Matt Brown

A BUS FULL OF PEOPLE FROM AN OFFICE YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED TURN UP

Oh, god: The alt-universe office from Peterborough are here, and they are all weird and misshapen, a funhouse mirror reflection of your own office, plus that woman from accounts who fucked your pay up for three consecutive months is here, standing next to you in seething silence, undoubtedly thinking about that HR complaint and the ensuing process. An extremely tall man leans over to you and tells you they've all been drinking since 11AM. He smells like scotch someone forgot to refine. Sweat has caked his trousers to his legs. "Four hour coach, mate," he says. "Please, I'm begging you: Do you have any Charlie?"

SOMEONE WHO HAS HAD A BOTTLE OF ALCOHOL ON THEIR DESK ALL YEAR REFUSES TO OPEN THE ALCOHOL

It's a bottle of Glen's that the dude who does the stationary orders got for being part of the "Viking-Direct 2015 Paper Chain™ High Volume Sales Hero Team" back in January, and it has just sat there, behind his monitor, part of the office furniture now where once it was amber and exotic, slowly accruing dust, 24oz of potential fun unrealized. Once you idly picked it up and cracked the lid and smelled it. Everyone is waiting for the day he breaks it out. He says he is saving it for a "special occasion." Is today a special occasion, Roy? Is Christmas a special occasion? He looks up from his stationary spreadsheet and looks over his bifocals and shakes his head: No. The special occasion is definitely going to be the day he ceremonially shoots himself at his desk, isn't it?

Everybody hit the dance floor! Photo via Flickr user Heather Williams

EVERYONE WHO IS LOW-KEY FUCKIN SUDDENLY GETS VERY HIGH-KEY ABOUT IT

WHY DOES THE PHOTOCOPY ROOM SMELL LIKE SOMEONE JUST SALTED A HAM, SHARON AND PAUL?

CONFUSION ABOUT WHICH FUCKER ORDERED THE VEGETARIAN Meal A MONTH IN ADVANCE

For some reason, whoever organized the Christmas meal organized the $24 for two-, $29 for three-course dinner at one of the locations detailed above, and for some reason the ordering for such has to be completed somewhere between four and six weeks in advance, which means when the food comes out—and it is never just Christmas food, always Christmas food with a twist. And the sole fucker who ordered a vegetarian meal will not stand up and own their mistake. There is a plate of "pizza dough sprout mouthfuls" here and someone won't claim them, and meantime we're down a portion of gravy mashed potatoes. This is chaos. This is madness.

Photo via Flickr user William

SOMEONE FROM THE OFFICE THINKS HE IS A DJ

Now you have to listen to "Cha-Cha Slide" clumsily crossfaded into "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and then back into "Cha-Cha Slide" again, an occasional bark of "Is everybody ho-ho-having a good time?" over an airhorn sound effect ripped at 28Kps from YouTube, and when you go up to whisper a request you are legitimately asked the following question: "What's Drake?" Six-hour set, this guy has. Oh, good: a 2AM mash-up of "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" and the "Cha-Cha Slide."

THE FEAR

But then you wake up and—oh, Christ, what did you... Christ. Hangover Fear is one of the worst adrenaline spikes that can be inflicted on the human body—and I am including heart attacks, in this list, I'm including being shot at while parachuting—but that goes quadruple when there's a chance you told your boss he was a "dick-sucking tithead" or shouted in the face of the reception temp that you loved her or very openly did gak in front of the CEO while crying.

Isn't it time you figured out why you—why we all—always go so crazy at the office Christmas party? Is it that end-of-year near-endorphin rush, the swooping realization that the culmination of 12 hard months have come to an end, a chance at rebirth, renewal? Are you only going so hard because you fundamentally hate your job—you're not treading water, anymore, are you? This is a career now; this is all you have—and can't seem to escape it? Is it just the job you're unhappy with, or it is more? Would this pain and energy be better managed if you regularly vented in the way you did last night, only with therapy instead of shots, with sharing over consuming, speaking rather than shouting? Maybe this is the year it has to change. It's time for a change. Yeah. Yeah. Starting now, starting righ—fucking hell, how did you spend $180? Fuck this. Gatorade, bath, Domino's for lunch. Call mom and see if you can come home early for Christmas.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

This photo is really pissing off Canadian media. Photo by Norman Jean Roy/Vogue.

Another day, another news cycle focused entirely on the appearance of Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

This time around it seems Canada's media pundits (read: schlubby old white men) are pissy because Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau did an interview with Vogue magazine and they didn't look like shit in it.

The spread, cleverly titled "Justin Trudeau Is the New Young Face of Canadian Politics," features a fairly brief and yes, fluffy, profile of the Trudeaus alongside a photo shoot in which Grégoire-Trudeau wears a borrowed $5,700-dress. Trudeau wore his own blue button-up. This, apparently, qualifies as scandal in the exciting world of Canadian political journalism.

"In one black-and-white photo, Trudeau looks off-camera in a manner certain to evoke comparison to Zoolander," wrote Ottawa Citizen columnist Glen McGregor, who has gone on to tweet a bunch of nonsense about how "playing dress-up for the photo was silly" and the story "was supposed to be a news feature, not a fashion spread."

Newsflash, dude: you can do both. Not everyone wants to emulate a print journalist aka look like they just stepped out of the Gap circa 2001. (Looking at you, Spotlight.)

Ottawa Sun Parliamentary Bureau Chief David Akin seemed fairly dismissive of the magazine itself when he confessed "this is the first time I've ever read an article published by Vogue." He then characterized the piece as gag-worthy. I'm willing to bet Vogue hasn't heard of the Ottawa Sun, either.

The truth is, the haters are the ones who really come off looking stupid in the face of this whole fake controversy.

Yes, Trudeau did an interview with a fashion magazine (the most influential one in the world, btw.) He also gave the New York Times Magazine an in-depth interview, which went live this week; made a throne speech; and his government launched an official inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. So the argument that the guy is all style and no substance is ringing a little hollow.

With all that said, does anyone really care if his wife borrowed an expensive dress and looked good in Vogue? (McGregor says Trudeau will have to report that to Canada's Ethics Commissioner as a potential "conflict of interest" though I'm skeptical that wearing couture for an hour would actually constitute as any kind of conflict.)

On a larger scale, the blowback over this photo shoot shows that Canada's Inferiority Complex is still very much A Thing. We crave approval from the rest of the world and then when we get that attention, instead of being chill, we analyze every possible (non) angle. The ratio of US stories about Canada to Canadian stories about US stories about Canada is like 1:10,000. (editor's note: this seems like a conservative estimate.)

It wasn't so long ago we had a PM who barely spoke to the media, save for the rare "exclusive" with Costco magazine. We've graduated to Vogue, dudes—can't we just be cool about it?

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Look at all that weed. Still courtesy of Canadian Cannabis.

Canadians, known for their sensibility (aka boringness) and love of weed, want the Trudeau government to legalize pot and sell it through government-run stores, a new poll says.

The Forum Poll, made available exclusively to VICE, shows 40 percent of those polled want a legalized model where a few large companies grow cannabis and then distribute through government run stores where it can be taxed.

The most popular answer for what to do with those green tax dollars is to put the money into Canada's debt (21 percent), followed by drug addiction programs at 17 percent. Putting the money into law enforcement or government surveillance didn't make the cut as an option.

Kind of surprisingly (to be fair, this might be a self-selecting bias), only 19 percent of Canadians say they smoked weed in the past year, although the number rises to 36 percent in the coveted 18-34 age bracket.

Continuing the stereotypes-being-proven-by-data section of this story, Green Party supporters are the most likely to have smoked up in the last year (34 percent), while Conservatives supporters are the least likely (10 percent).

The government is just thinking of your wellbeing, dude. Photo via Flickr user Bruce Szalwinski.

If you glanced at the news in Alberta at any time in the last three weeks or so, you probably saw a lot of very angry farmers. They have been pushed around by their tyrannical socialist government for too long and they're making a stand for freedom and the family farm. They're mad as hell and they're not gonna take it anymore.

But what, exactly, are farmers so mad about? They are mad about Bill 6, a brand new law that will make bog-standard workplace safety regulations apply to the agricultural sector and bring farm employees into the orbit of the Worker Compensation Board.

Why are they so mad about this? That's a good question. Let's try and figure that out.

THE WILD WEST OF WORKERS' RIGHTS

For a bill that has sparked lots of protests (and counter-protests) at the legislature, the actual content and purpose of Bill 6—the Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act—seems to be pretty innocuous.

Although farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in Canada, farm and ranch workers in Alberta have historically been excluded from basic workplace safety regulations. The agricultural sector is largely exempt from minimum wage and overtime pay laws. Workers have no right to refuse unsafe work, anyone injured on the job has little or no recourse to compensation, and there are no child labour laws. This (arguably) violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It's also worth pointing out that safety laws similar to those proposed by Bill 6 exist in every other western province.

It's not surprising that Alberta's NDP government would put a high priority on expanding workers' rights. They even announced that agricultural reform was on their agenda in July. In its initial form, Bill 6 would bring every farm up to code with other industries in the province. Farms would be required to register with the WCB for coverage starting on New Year's Day 2016. In the event that someone was injured or killed on the job, Occupational Health and Safety inspectors would visit the premises and launch an investigation—under present laws, accidents don't need to be reported anywhere.

If all of this seems straightforward, you would never know it to hear the government's sales pitch. Depending on which NDP spokesperson you asked or which document you read, Bill 6 was either meant to apply to all farms in Alberta (allegedly as a response to recent farm accidents involving children), or only to those farms employing full-time paid employees (and thus omitting family only farms altogether). The left hand, it seemed, didn't know what the right hand was doing.

Worst of all, despite announcing its intentions to bring in this legislation over the summer, the government opted to introduce the bill first and consult with farmers second. This is a stark contrast to the breathtaking deliberation that went into the province's new climate change strategy. It's not hard to understand why farmers feel like they've been slighted by the NDP.

HOME ON THE RANGE

Once upon a time, a snub like this would've been unthinkable. Farmers used to be the most powerful social and economic bloc in the province. They were strong enough to stampede the legislature 90 years ago and set up an (almost) entirely farmer-run government. But even though the United Farmers of Alberta have been long, long gone, farming and ranching still hold pride of place in Alberta's political imagination.

You don't fuck with rural Alberta. There's a reason the Tory dynasty didn't fiddle with farm safety legislation at any point in the last 44 years. As Jen Gerson observed in the National Post, rural reform remains the "third rail of Alberta politics."

A man and his horse. Photo via Flickr user Juan Camilo Trujillo.

But the family farm ain't what it used to be. Agriculture as a whole makes up less than 2 percent of the province's economic activity, and within the sector itself, small family-run farms are being squeezed out by massive corporatized acreages staffed by paid employees. Fewer people are producing more food on larger farms. Although the biggest agribusinesses made up less than 5 percent of all farm operations in the country in 2011, they accounted for nearly half of all food production in Canada, no doubt helped by a generous regime of agricultural subsidies. Combine all this with the urbanization of Alberta—urbanites rose from 48 percent of the population in 1950 to 79 percent in 2010—and you can definitely appreciate that the small family farm faces an existential crisis.

If not already dead, it may be in terminal decline. But this has more to do with the dynamics of agricultural capitalism than any oppressive labour laws proposed by the NDP.

Not that this has stopped conservatives from making political hay. Between this agricultural angst and the NDP's communications breakdown, the Wildrose Party—Alberta's official opposition and premiere performance art troupe—has been happier than a pig in shit.

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

Eager to weaponize legitimate grievances in its war against the NDP, the Wildrose have crowned themselves defenders of the faith for their largely rural constituents. Last weekend alone, they hosted more than a thousand Albertans at seven different town hall meetings about Bill 6, including one where Wildrose MLA and human temper-tantrum Derek Fildebrandt got to sit back and watch 500 angry farmers yell at Agriculture Minister Oneil Cartier. Presumably, they can only hope that no one remembers Wildrose Leader Brian Jean going on record last spring in support of extending WCB coverage to farm workers. You know—the substantive content of Bill 6. Maybe they're hoping farmers don't know how to use Google.

Not that any one group has a monopoly on going hog wild in the anti-NDP department. Ric McIver—leader of that shambling husk of an ex-governing Progressive Conservative party—doubled down on claims that Bill 6 is an effort to transform Alberta into a "Socialist Disneyland." He then offered Saskatchewan as a model of a good, conservative farming province, apparently forgetting that a) Saskatchewan is the birthplace of Canadian socialism and b) their farms have workplace safety laws. Apparently when your party implodes, the fact-checkers are the first to go.

But far and away the most insightful analysis of agricultural safety regulation in Alberta comes from Toronto transplant Ezra Levant, spirit guru to disgruntled cranks all over the Great White North. To hear the Rebel Commander tell it, Bill 6 is a communist plot to destroy the rural family, forcibly unionize and collectivize the entire agricultural sector, and possibly also round up farm children so they can be murdered by Alberta Child Services.

Despite the NDP issuing two amendments to Bill 6 on Monday that explicitly exempted small family farms from the new legislation, Levant is still postingnew vlog meltdowns about Rachel Notley's plans to destroy freedom forever. I guess this is the kind of quality journalism we can expect from an outlet that blamed suicide statistics from the first half of 2015 on a government that didn't take power until May. Chalk it up to the Costanza Principle: it's not a lie if you believe it.

But hey—at least we got some great music out of this.

Nope. Photo via Flickr user Peter Dutton.

GIDDYUP

The groups who most viciously opposed Bill 6 should be overjoyed right now. With the amendments announced this week, the new WCB coverage will only apply to large farms with paid employees, totally exempting small family farms and thereby drowning the most controversial part of the legislation. Given that both the Wildrose and the Tories are on record supporting safety reforms like this, they've basically gotten everything they wanted on the content front.

But they aren't satisfied, and they never will be, because this fiasco was only ever ephemerally related to the actual letter of the law.

Farmers are not monsters. None of them are mortally offended by the concept of farm safety. The real outrage is the government's failure to consult or communicate with them before introducing the bill at the close of this legislative session. But most of the emotional energy around Bill 6 is the very real anxiety about the fate of the family farm in the 21st century, cynically weaponized by the Wildrose-Rebel bloc in their crusade against the NDP. For all their rhetoric invoking the Soviets, it's the conservative elites in this province cribbing the most from the Bolshevik playbook, playing small farmers as useful idiots in their efforts to curb workers' rights.

Everyone in this province knew that agricultural safety laws have desperately needed an overhaul for years. But everyone in a position to do anything—including the once-invincible Tory dynasty—was terrified of antagonizing rural Alberta. The NDP were likely fucked among rural voters no matter what they did, which may end up putting them in a strangely powerful position to do this heavy lifting. Urbanization being what it is,the future of provincial politics is in the cities. Assuming they are playing the long game, getting an unpopular decision like this out of the way off the cuff may actually be a good way to go.

But even if there was no easy way to do this, the way they actually handled Bill 6 was a hot mess. The NDP needs to cool their jets, not shoot first and hold consultations later. Invoking closure on controversial laws is not a great way to win friends and influence people.

The NDP has a progressive beachhead in Canada's most conservative province and that's a precious thing. There are lots of things in Alberta that need a major overhaul. But if they push too aggressively and keep feeding into right-wing paranoia, they will be prey to the Wildrose – of even a united provincial conservative party – in the next election.

And what good is restoring Rome if you let the barbarians storm the gates?

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