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The Beauty and Terror of the Funny Hats at the Democratic National Convention

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Candidates come and go, platforms change, the leadership of parties lose elections, fall to scandal, and die off. The oceans rise, the sun burns, everyone you know and love will eventually die, their bones ground down by time and entropy into bits of carbon. But through all this, one thing remains constant: People will always love wearing funny hats to political conventions!

Now, it's safe to assume that the delegates at the Democratic National Convention this week in Philadelphia are not generally "cool" in their day-to-day lives. Many, many of them look like they are high school history teachers or at least had dreams of becoming a high school history teacher. They are, you imagine, not normally snazzy dressers, not prone to flights of fashion or letting their insides spill onto their outsides. The only sign that they are wonderfully, beautifully insane is the things they have decided to put on their heads.

When you walk around the Wells Fargo Center, it's impossible to miss these hats, which are usually being followed by a camera and/or smartphone lens. Some are there to make explicit political points, like this hat, which makes the point "Donald Trump's border wall is dumb":

Others have a more obscure message, like this cheese hat. It's probably a Wisconsin thing, but honestly who cares? Good hat:

There's also this beer hat, made with cans of an actual beer that a brewery made because it loves Bernie Sanders so much:

This hat's "Vote, F*cker" button is about the most aggro thing at the convention—if it said "Vote, Fucker," you get the sense that this guy wouldn't have bought it, but that asterisk makes it clear he just really wants you to vote, he doesn't actually think you are a fucker:

We could have asked the guy in the chicken helmet what the deal with the chicken helmet was but didn't on the off chance that it was actually an advertisement for some kind of deeply wonky chicken-related activism. It's best to just enjoy this from a distance without knowing the reason why, like a sunset or a food product created by Guy Fieri:

By far the best thing about these hats is that the people wearing them wear them all day, even when they're bored or looking at their phones. Since "being bored" and "looking at your phone" are two of the Top Five Things to Do at the Democratic National Convention (the other three are "cheer," "protest," and "ask where the good parties are"), this means you are treated to a lot of sights like this:

Congrats to the hats, their owners, and everyone who saw them.

Text by Harry Cheadle. Scroll down for more pictures:

Follow Jason Bergman on Instagram.


Renters Turned My Apartment into a Brothel While I Was on Vacation

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This is what Pernille's bedroom looked like before she left for Thailand. It didn't look the same when she came back. Photo courtesy of Pernille Bang


This article originally appeared on VICE Denmark.

Earlier this year, news broke that Copenhagen had seen a rise in the number of apartments that were being rented through online marketplaces like AirBnB, only to be used as brothels. For 26-year-old Pernille, what was supposed to be a fun adventure through Southeast Asia turned into a thriller featuring a Czech sex worker, threatening pimps, and more cum-stained paper towels than the mind can fathom. This is her story.

In January, I left Copenhagen for a six-week-long trip through Malaysia and Thailand with my friend Stine. We were going to backpack, try delicious food, experience foreign cultures, and of course try the inevitable bucket. We couldn't wait. Before we left, I tried to rent out my apartment in Copenhagen through a peer-to-peer property-rental company—which I'd done a couple of times before without a problem. I didn't have any luck in finding any lodgers this time around, though, so I just figured I would have to tighten my budget a little. The company I was using was like AirBnB, only smaller—which gave me the sense that it somehow made the quality of its customer services better. I was about to get a lot smarter.

Halfway through the trip, Stine and I are hungover on a beach in Koh Phi Phi after a night of one too many buckets, when I get an instant message from this girl, who's interested in renting my place for an entire week, starting the next day. I have already overspent, and a week would pay around $700, so I don't evaluate the situation all that critically. All I need is someone at home to stop by the apartment, change the sheets, clean a little, and give this person the key.

The girl's name is Kitti*, and she is from the Czech Republic. She looks cute on her photo—nothing out of the ordinary—and I find her on Facebook too, so I figure she's legit. Her English is not great, but I learn that she and her boyfriend are driving to Copenhagen, while another couple they're traveling with will be arriving by plane. She asks me if they can pay cash because of some problem with the bank transfer. I won't be covered by the rental company if the payment doesn't go through it, though, so I tell her they can't. In the end, she finds a friend with a German bank account, and they're able to transfer through him. The conversation strikes me as a little strange, but I just figure they're just being really spontaneous on their road trip through Europe. The booking is confirmed, and I get the money.

Kitti even promised to "live normally life"

A couple of days pass, and I hear nothing from them, so in my head, no news is good news. Then Kitti texts me and says they would like to extend their stay by another week. Sweet. More money = more buckets, I think to myself. The issue with transferring money arises again, and this time, when they ask if they can pay cash, I reluctantly agree to it. My friend Line had agreed to fix up the apartment for me, so they take a trip to her place with an envelope full of cash. She later told me that Kitti's boyfriend looked kinda old for her and that Kitti had surprisingly bad teeth. Also, they'd said they were late to meet her because they'd had dinner at McDonalds. I'm not sure why that's weird, but I just figured I'd give you all the info I got.

About a week later, Stine and I find ourselves in northern Thailand, where we are blessed by a Buddhist monk in a temple in Chiang Mai. Immediately after, both of our wallets are stolen, so we joke that the blessing was actually a jinx. We have no idea what's in store. We get to Bangkok, and I wake up the next morning to a missed call and a text from my brother saying, "Call me. Something is up with your apartment." I can't reach him due to the time difference, so I text him back telling him to call me when he wakes up—but only if it's really serious.

We're nearing the end of our trip, so Stine and I book a day trip to the historic city of Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok, even though I feel very iffy about it, since we probably won't have any cell coverage, and I still haven't heard from my brother. Stine calms me down, and we end up going. On the way there, we talk about what the worst-case scenario could possibly be. I imagine they've held a giant rave at the apartment and made a huge mess or something. That's as far as my imagination goes.

I'm in the middle of the giant square in front of the temple ruins when my brother calls me. As soon as I see his name on the screen, anxiety kicks in.

"Hi, so did they trash the whole place, or..?" I say, thinking I'm prepared for the worst possible answer.

"Umm, no... but they're sort of running a brothel in there," he replies.

I'm completely speechless, because that is definitely not a scenario I had in mind. Lacking a better response, I start crying, while a group of Thai schoolboys on a field trip start laughing and pointing at me. Stine comes running and asks what is going on, and the only thing I manage to do is shout: "It's a prostitute! There's a prostitute!"

Once I regain my composure, my brother explains that several of my neighbors got in touch with him to say they are getting suspicious because they keep seeing men coming and going form my house, in half-hour intervals, at all times of the day. The night before, my upstairs neighbor had apparently gone down to my apartment to tell my lodgers that smoking isn't allowed, only to be greeted by a smiling Kitti in a tiny, satin-kimono and 6-inch heels, who thought he was a client. My downstairs neighbor could apparently hear her walking around in heels all the time, along with what she judged to be some kind of strip show. And then there was the moaning. Apparently, there had been a lot of it. And it was loud.

I tell my brother to do something, but he's reluctant to go there because the neighbors have told him that there are two older, burly guys staying in the apartment with Kitti. I obviously want these people out of my home as soon as possible, so in the midst of temple ruins, Thai schoolboys, and lousy 3G, I try to get a hold of several of my friends at home, but they're all too scared to go by my apartment. In the end, Stine and I agree that we can't really do much more until we get back to the hotel and have proper cell service.

We've barely made it into the lobby when I call the Danish police and get a hold of a particularly rigid officer. I'm literally sobbing into the phone, as she tells me that "this is the sort of thing you can expect when you rent out your apartment for some extra cash." Because prostitution is legal in Denmark, there really isn't anything they can do, she explains. Instead, I should talk to the rental company.

I start looking for a phone number on the rental company's website, but there is nothing to be found. All they have is this live chat, where I get a "thanks for your request, we'll be back shortly" kind of response. I google the company and find a bunch of one-star reviews, with people claiming that it's practically impossible to get a hold of customer service and that if a problem arises, you're totally on your own.

I found cum-stained paper stuffed into every crack, crevice, and corner of my house. Photo courtesy of Pernille Bang

I don't know what else to do at this point, so I call Kitti. "Hello Kitti, I know what's going on. You're doing something illegal, and you have to leave right now," I say. Her reply is just a high-pitched, "Noooo!" After some back-and-forth, I start to get angry, but then I hear the doorbell ringing on her end. Thinking it's a client of hers, I scream through the phone, "No, Kitti! Do not open that door! DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!" Finally, she agrees to leave on the condition that they get their money back for the extra week they'd already paid for. That sends me over the edge, so I say, "No, no, you're not getting any money back from me," and terminate the call.

Right after, my phone starts ringing again, and it's one of the guys (pimps, I assume) saying that if they are to get out sooner than agreed, they'd need their money back. I threaten to call the police on them, but he threatens me right back, saying that I'm the one who stole money from them. I panic and agree that a friend of mine will come by and hand over the cash. During all of this, I feel like I'm in a bad TV-movie. At one point, I literally have my head in the toilet while on the phone. The feeling of helplessness makes me physically ill. My apartment has been turned into a brothel, and no one can help me. All the while the pimps keep calling me every ten minutes asking, "When your friend come?"

Just when I think this whole thing can't get any worse, my downstairs neighbor starts sending me photos that show Kitti and the guys leaving the apartment in a hurry with a bunch of bags and suitcases. Thinking they are now also robbing me, I finally get a hold of my friend Maria, who goes into total warrior mode, runs to an ATM, and then to my apartment. My neighbor says that they've all left the apartment and are now sitting in their van outside waiting for the money, so Maria meets her at the back entrance of the building, and they both go in to check out the apartment without my lodgers knowing. I'm on FaceTime with both of them, following the action in real time, heart pounding, when they step through the front door.

The first thing they notice is that it's extremely hot in my apartment, and I can see that all of my plants are slouching dead in their pots. They both emit a symphony of "arghs" and "ewwws" from different rooms while checking out the apartment. Nothing has been taken, but all of the sudden, I hear Maria laughing. She's found an industrial-sized roll of paper towels and three trash bags full of cum-covered paper and used condoms. From the looks of it, Kitty and the boys haven't been eating much besides canned fish and cup noodles, which are scattered all over the kitchen. But they've bought six organic, free-range eggs, so at least they were conscious consumers.

Even though Maria and my neighbor are already inside the apartment, I don't want to risk it, so I ask Maria to go outside and return the money. Which she does promptly, albeit with a passive-aggressive "you probably don't deserve this." They don't respond; they just drive off.

Maybe Kitti just watched a lot of sad movies. Photo courtesy of Pernille Bang

A couple of days later, another friend picks me up at the airport, and together we pick up some rubber gloves and disinfectant on the way and go to town on the apartment. I have never seen that many stains on one sheet. The used condoms and condom wrappers are spread all over the floor like confetti. There is also a mask with cat ears and whiskers in my closet, as well as fishnet stockings, makeup covered cotton swabs, and so much cum-soaked paper—stuffed into every crack, crevice, and corner of my apartment. The grand prize, however, goes to the three used pregnancy tests I found stashed on top of my bathroom mirror a month later.

I actually feel totally fine living here now—six months later—but it took me a while. Obviously, I had the locks changed immediately, but I was still worried that Kitti's boys might come back or that there would be clients waiting in front of the apartment when I got home late at night. My case against the rental company isn't over yet, but I hope to at least be reimbursed for all of the stuff I had to throw out. I never thought I would have to use the words "sexual secretions," and yet here I am, typing them into emails to the rental company on a daily basis.

My relationship with my neighbors is fine, and I actually think they felt sorry for me more than anything else. But they still occasionally call me "brothel mama" when we meet by the mailbox.

*Kitti is most likely a cover name, but her photo has been blurred to protect her identity.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: No One Is Going to Be Held Criminally Accountable for Freddie Gray's Death

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Photo by Rachel M. Cohen via

On Wednesday morning, prosecutors dropped all charges against the three remaining officers accused of the arrest and subsequent death of Freddie Gray while in Baltimore police custody, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Prosecutors believed a conviction for officers Garret Miller, William Porter, and Sergeant Alicia White was unlikely after three previous acquittals in the case under Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams, who was likely to hear the remaining trials. Gray died from a spinal cord injury a week after he was arrested and handcuffed in the back of a police van in April 2015. Wednesday was supposed to mark the beginning of Miller's trial, but the Chief Deputy State's Attorney Michael Schatzow said the department would be dropping all charges.

In previous trials, the prosecution failed to convince the judge that officers Edward Nero, Caesar Goodson, and Lieutenant Brian Ricewere abandoned police protocol when they didn't put Gray in a seatbelt in the back of the police van, and that that decision had caused his death.

The move to drop charges means State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby will not succeed in holding anyone criminally accountable for Gray's death. She addressed supporters after the hearing, saying, "As long as I'm the chief prosecutor in this city, I vow to you that I will fight. I will fight for a fair and equal justice system for all, so that what happened to Freddie Gray never happens to another person."

Read: What the Latest Not Guilty Verdict in the Freddie Gray Case Means for Police Reform

Europe: The Final Countdown: How Brexit Is Already Screwing Over Young People

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Photo by Chris Bethell

Young people in the UK overwhelmingly didn't vote for Brexit. Because why on earth would they? Hey, undergraduate, want to ruin the economy and prevent yourself from studying abroad? No way! Young professional, want to make it way harder and a lot more expensive to go on vacation? Nope! Definitely not! Well-informed 20-something, want to blame immigration for absolutely everything wrong with the UK? Of course not! Because you're not a complete idiot!

Still, the Leave campaign stole it, so there's not much we can do now but wait to see how much we're screwed over in the long run. In the short term, however, things aren't looking great—we haven't even left the EU yet, but young people are already feeling the effects of the vote in a very real way.

We spoke to a few to find out exactly how it's affected them.

Katie, 23, Derby

I'm currently studying my MA in translation, and Brexit has hugely damaged my career prospects. EU laws protecting workers' rights and funding languages and translation will be taken away soon, making it a lot harder for translators like me to find well-paid work. It's the EU that helps us set decent rates: about $115 per 1,000 words, which may sound like a lot, but it's actually a good few days' work to complete. Without EU help, we could see this fall to $40 or less.

Also, how will I negotiate with my foreign business partners now? Of course, I could go abroad to do these negotiations in person—but oh, wait, a lack of free movement might stop that. We are now no longer protected from flight taxes, so getting there will cost more. This is more money that I don't have, thanks to my lowered job prospects and the ruined economy—not to mention the fact my pounds will be worthless after converting them to euros.

The Brexit result has been devastating for me. I feel like my future is bleak. I feel like I've spent, like, $65,000 on a career that is going to fall down a black hole. I feel so devastated that people didn't consider the real-world repercussions. We certainly have taken our county back: to the dark ages where we're now stuck and all alone.

Susanna, 18, Harrogate

I voted to stay in the EU. As much as I'm heartbroken by the outcome, I'm more worried by the consequences I will potentially face in the future as a result. In September, I'm going to begin a languages degree, and one of the key parts is the year abroad. I knew, as a language student, that leaving the EU would impact the future of the scheme. I was so excited by Erasmus. It's such a big part of my degree, and I was looking forward to living abroad and experiencing another culture. There's no better way to learn a language than to experience it firsthand in the country it is spoken.

The possibility of British students like myself being excluded from this scheme because of something most of us young people didn't vote for breaks my heart. I am worried that I won't get the opportunity to go ahead and experience it myself, something that my own mother did when she did her languages degree more than 20 years ago. I really hope that the scheme can stay in place for years to come.

I do feel that my future has been robbed. Fortunately, I am dual nationality already as I am full Italian but was born here in the UK. I'm so grateful that I have an Italian passport as well as a British passport, as I'm sure it will make my life a lot easier over these next few years.

Joshua, 25, Coventry

Everyone talked about "getting our country back" as literally the only argument for leaving. I think the old generation all voted to leave because of reasons that won't really won't affect them in the long run, like immigration and getting more money for the NHS—which I don't think will happen anyway. Everything about the Leave campaign was a lie, and that's why the majority of them are backtracking on everything they said.

I work hard all year in construction and now my vacation is costing me around $650 more because of the shit exchange rate. I'm having to go into my savings to get that little extra bit of cash. It's just annoying, not least because I'm trying to save for a house at the same time. It costs an absolute fortune to buy a house regardless, and it's going to become harder and harder to buy one now.

Mark, 28

I work for a company that manufactures and supplies a range of building products that are all made in Europe, but we sell them in the UK. We also sell them worldwide, but our investors are very wary at the moment because there is so much uncertainty over here. We buy everything with euros, and we're now making up to 30 percent less on all of our sales than we were previously because the pound is struggling, which is honestly the nicest way to put it.

No politicians have confirmed what's going to happen or when it's going to happen, which means our investors are basically looking at whether they're going to pull out of the UK because we're making so little money. Because my job is the head of UK sales, if we're not selling in the country, there's not really a position for me. So it's a pretty strange time at the moment—I'm in limbo, but I'm going to find out at the end of this month whether I'm going to be made redundant or not, and it's an example of how people don't realize how much we rely on Europe, as well as Europe relies on us.

I'm a realist; I know sales jobs are easy to pick up when the economy is booming and things are great, but on the flip side of that, with all this uncertainty around the economy, people and businesses probably aren't going to be looking to hire as much as they were. I've had a look about just in case, but there doesn't seem to be much out there that would help me advance my career at my age, so to speak. It's fair enough, too: Why would people invest in the country if they don't know what the political situation is likely to be? I don't think anyone's under any illusions that we have a solution for a long-term problem. It's things like this that the people who have voted to leave don't realize will happen, and how they'll be influenced. The future is bleak, and no one's doing anything about it.

Merisha, 24

There are family members I don't speak to any more as a result of Brexit. Not because of the way they voted, but the disgusting comments they made about immigration that I didn't agree with. As the daughter of an immigrant, I'm not willing to stand by some of my family members any longer. I also keep hearing people around me saying "the economy will get better, it's just for the moment," but nothing good has happened yet; it's all going to depend on the deal our government can do with the EU.

Politically, we're a mess, and I'm not sure it's going to get any better. We are one of the laughing stocks of the world, with a government that ran away when it needed to take control and continue what it fought for. This vote has shown the true colors of people in terms of xenophobia and bigotry; it's truly split the nation. There are too many people on both sides blaming one another for the way they voted and too much name-calling and pettiness. Unfortunately, this is the decision that's happened, and we're going to have to live with it, even if a lot of us don't want to.

Bethany, 19

I really wanted to study abroad for my master's, but because I've only just finished my first year, by the time we actually leave it might mean I can't secure Erasmus funding, which would make it pretty much impossible for me to go. On top of my own worries, I feel like the UK is in self-destruct mode and that we're becoming increasingly isolated. Knowing that we're stuck on this little island makes me want to go and live somewhere else. We're going to end up building a wall like America or something, I swear. This is only the beginning.

Follow Yasmin Jeffery on Twitter.

Follow Salma Haldrani on Twitter.

'Carpool Karaoke' Is the Viral Celebrity Machine America Deserves

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When the first lady of the United States hopped in the passenger seat of James Corden's car for the latest installment of "Carpool Karaoke" last week, a few things became clear. First, that this episode would go down in history as the apogee in a series glutted with high points. Missy Elliott materializing in the backseat to join FLOTUS and Corden in rapping "Get Ur Freak On" surely presented an even more special kind of perfection than say, Sir Elton John in a lion headdress bellowing out "Circle of Life," or Jennifer Hudson singing her drive-thru order, or Corden—in a rare moment of quiet—tearing up to Stevie Wonder crooning, "I just called / to say / James loves you" on the phone to his wife.

More significantly, the FLOTUS episode confirmed a parallel between a late-night talk-show segment and the most historic presidency of the 21st century. What both the Obamas and Corden know is that the best levity, the kind that makes millions of people respond with a yelled inner YES, is that which erupts out of great seriousness, collapsing the gap between power and the public. One thing that has made the Obama administration so appealing and the one thing that makes the format of "Carpool Karaoke" so winning is the special joy that silliness brings when the backdrop is serious. In Corden's case, that seriousness is the magnitude of star power. His guests—Grammy award-winning, platinum-selling, PR-directed, culture-shaping monoliths and phenoms—are better used to performing in sold-out stadiums rather than the front seat of his Range Rover. So to find them belting out their own hits, while belted up and stuck in traffic beside some affably laddy bloke from England, is a special kind of delicious. Its popularity has been so viral—the Adele episode, for example, has more than 119 million views on YouTube—that it was bound to be monetized: Yesterday, Apple Music bought the rights to the series for an undisclosed sum.

Corden tends to begin each episode by having a bit of a moan about the LA traffic—shaking his head, blowing his cheeks out, all weary mundanity at the wheel—before thanking the person to his right for helping him get to work. At which point the camera cuts to someone so famous that his or her very casual presence there is hilarious.

With FLOTUS in the front, there's a nicely accidental moment of solemnity-skewering with Hillary Clinton as its object. As Corden fantasizes about ordering late-night munchies in the White House, FLOTUS jokes, "That's the 3 AM phone call you'll be prepared for, right?" She may not have intended it, but Obama's line recalls Clinton's notoriously doomy 2008 TV ad, the one with the stentorian voiceover redolent of a disaster-movie trailer asking, "It's 3 AM and your children are safe and asleep—who do you want answering the phone?" Both Obama and her husband have the kind of spontaneity and humor that eludes Clinton, in all her professional excellence. Their willingness to do both in moments of unscripted joy have yielded a presidency deemed "viral" from the start. It's the first lady's ability to give hugs and entertain Muppets (actual ones, not just those in the House of Representatives), to have, in short, the confidence with which to be silly, that makes a speech as serious as this week's DNC address so powerful.

With "Carpool Karaoke," Corden has found the perfect, well, vehicle, with which to both poke fun at and celebrate Hollywood fame, allowing the segment to sparkle with a contradiction.

Sometimes, the structures surrounding Hollywood stardom can seem just as complex, exhausting, and self-serious as the American legislature itself. When Corden took over The Late Late Show from Craig Ferguson in March of last year, he was barely known to American audiences—audiences whose late-night hosts tend to treat their guests with a dull and gushing reverence, duly plugging whichever project the star is on to promote. Corden, however, has a quality of guilelessness—eager and puppyish in his fandom.

With "Carpool Karaoke," which first aired in March last year with Mariah Carey, the cheerful host has found the perfect, well, vehicle, with which to both poke fun at and celebrate Hollywood fame, allowing the segment to sparkle with a contradiction. On one hand, it punctures the ludicrousness of any one person being known to several million other people. There's something beautifully leveling about being a car passenger. As in, even J-Lo loses her earrings down the side of the seat and even Adele has to down a mug of tea so as not to spill it. And even Chris Martin on his way to play the Super Bowl (hitchhiking there, so the conceit goes) has to stop for snacks. On the other hand, the smallness of the car enlarges the sense of each guest's talent. Karaoke, a pomposity-puncturing form, actually elevates the stardom of someone singing his or her own hits with DGAF gusto.

All of this is helped along by Corden's evident fandom. Often, he appears as gleeful as you that this slightly pudgy bloke from Hillingdon is sitting next to say, Jennifer Lopez. Trying to pick the most delicious moment in the series is dangerous: It's easy to lose hours watching the extant 24 clips on repeat. But the moment Corden nicks Lopez's phone to text the most famous person he can find in her contacts is certifiably golden. Leonardo DiCaprio must have sat up a little straighter when he saw this message arrive: "Hey baby, I'm kind of feeling like I need to cut loose. Any suggestions?" Corden signed it off, "Let me know, J.Lo. (you know, from the block)." When DiCaprio replies, the hysterical joy—ours, Corden's, J-Lo's, because we're all in this together now, the megastar, the joker, and you and me—is so exquisite as to be almost painful. He texts back, "You mean tonight, boo-boo, clubwise?" and Corden howls so hard he looks as if he might pee himself. Because what could be more serious than a man who spent months freezing on tundras and eating raw bison liver just to prove he was serious enough for an Oscar.

A more appealing kind of seriousness—certainly a more viral kind—is that which knows the real thing is only weightier when you leaven it with the absurd.

Follow Hermione Hoby on Twitter.

I Tried to Get Milo Yiannopoulos to Convert Me to a Gay Trump Supporter

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Photo by Jason Bergman

Even the homophobes in Cleveland are hospitable. On Wednesday night of the Republican National Convention, I was sitting next to a middle-aged local at a no-frills watering hole called Nick's Sports Corner. I asked him his thoughts on Indiana governor Mike Pence, who was about to take the mic right down the block. I tell him I'm impossible to offend, and he really takes my word for it, going on a truly stunning and very laudatory rant that I would rather not reprint. His mug of America (formerly known as Budweiser) was sloshing over the rim as he pounded his fist against the bar.

"Damn right I'm a homophobe," he said before slamming down his glass and offering to buy me a drink.

The gesture seems incongruous, but then again so did the entire convention this year, given that televangelist Jerry Falwell spoke on its closing night, later followed by openly gay businessman Peter Thiel. I'd like to ask this Clevelander his thoughts on the sort-of unholy alliance that Trump is attempting to forge between gays and conservatives in the wake of the Orlando shooting, but I have to decline the drink, as I'm there prepping to meet Milo Yiannopoulos, who I first saw speak at the surreal "America First" Rally on the opening day, orbited again at his relatively boring LGBTrump party the following night, and now had finally nailed down for an interview. In fact, the self-described homophobe I met would probably like the 32-year-old platinum-blond provocateur, given that his whole schtick is railing against the idea that words and identity politics are meaningful. Although he's been a voice of the alt-right movement for years, he very recently received a ton of mainstream attention after allegedly orchestrating a campaign of Twitter abuse against actor Leslie Jones, one of the stars of the recent Ghostbusters reboot, and getting banned from the social-media platform as a result.

While I enjoy at least the idea of Yiannopoulos rankling hand-wringing liberals, I also think that his arguments give permission to people who want to say vile, racist, bigoted things. Meanwhile, I find at least some of his arguments compelling, like, for instance, the idea that we're at a unique moment where after the legalization of gay marriage, liberals now have to work for gay votes rather than just expect them. I spent about an hour discussing this with the infamous troll and challenging him to push me over the fence into full-blown conservatism. Here's what we talked about.

VICE: I'm gay, and I hate both the right and the left. I have been following you around and want to take this as an opportunity for you to convince me. Tell me why I should be more vocal about this at the risk of being socially ostracized.
Milo Yiannopoulos: This is a very strange interview.

I think you can make two choices in life when you have difficult things ahead of you: the easy one with the feelings, or the hard one with the facts. Science tells us that people tend to make decisions based on their emotions rather than reason and use reason to justify them later. It requires a significant degree of conscious effort to avoid that pitfall. Now it seems, to me, fairly obvious that if you are a homosexual, you can choose the mollycoddling and pandering and feel good maxims of the left, so that after a tragedy like Orlando you can buy into the rainbow Twitter avatars and the hashtags and feel good about yourself for saying, "Love wins." It doesn't really accomplish very much. And sometimes the conservative way is a little more counterintuitive—but more affective. Sometimes, actually, the compassion can be difficult to identify in it because it involves hard choices. It's not just about telling everyone that they're beautiful and wonderful and perfect.

I agree that Twitter avatars are not very effectual. What's the counterintuitive approach?
From my point of view, it's the conservative response to Orlando, for instance, a conservative response to the Islamization of Europe, which represents the best hope for gay people to be happy and safe and comfortable. Now that involves saying some unpleasant things about people you know—about Muslims, for instance. Now, not every Muslim you meet is going to want to firebomb a nightclub or take a gun to your head. But significant numbers of them do, and not really in minority. It's a significant portion of Muslims who simply find our way of life completely unacceptable. It's become dangerous to be gay in America for one simple reason, and that reason is Islam.

So what do you make of the ways that both Trump and Hillary responded to the shooting? I've interviewed gay Trump supporters who say that the speech he gave after made them love him.
I looked at responses from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and something struck me, which is that the two responses from the left—one, denial, and two, feeling—led to almost nihilism, really. A denial that there was a link to Islam or a connection to an Islamic antagonism toward gay people. And the sort of Nihilism of "Love Wins." Well love doesn't win. AK-47s win.

Meanwhile, I didn't realize Trump had this speech in him, really. It was pretty much the most terrific speech he has ever given. It was remarkable, and I encourage everyone to read it. Trump's response proved to me, as a British person hoping for the best for America, that he actually had some answers. There was an opportunity there to elect a president who would do something. I don't see that from the political left.

What's a long-term solution if you believe gays and Muslims can't coexist? Segregation? I don't see the end game to this argument.
I'm not sure that I could get behind a full deportation, but I don't have a problem halting immigration in countries where it threatens, not just minorities or another Orlando, but Western culture—which is the best culture. Western democratic capitalism. Free capitalism of the likes that we used to have in Europe, that you still have in America—which gave women the vote, which means that gay people can have a nice life. The places in the world that don't have it—it ain't very nice to be anything but the prestige class. In this country, you can pretty much do what you want to do, and say what you want and go where you want. That's not the case in most of the world. What surprises me about the left is that it doesn't seem to realize where the good stuff came from.

Gay marriage being legal is a moment that is pretty liberating for a lot of people. They don't have to be single-issue voters.
Don't you find it depressing?

Do you?
Of course!

Do you think that gay marriage being over and done with has caused that community to pivot to hand-wringing over other things that aren't necessarily issues?
I think the gay rights struggle is over, and it's time to shut up, stop, and go home, rather than continue to bleat and whine and police language and pivot to transgender pronouns and effectively start doing shakedowns. I don't want to see the Gay Establishment and gay charities turn into these sort of organized Al Sharptons, that go around policing the perceived homophobia, inventing grievances and victimhood where none exists, pretending to see insult and offense where none was intended. I don't want to see gay people be like that. That seems to me to be profoundly antithetical to the best spirit to gay dissonance of someone like William S. Boroughs. That seems to me to be so contrary to all of the best things about being gay. It's horrifying.

You advocate dropping the "T" from LGBT. It strikes me as maniacally self-serving to dismiss a group of people who basically started the gay rights movement as soon as it becomes politically expedient to do so. It's like hitting the lottery and then never talking to your old friends again, no?
Even the L and G shouldn't be together. Gays and lesbians don't really get on very much. We don't mix very much; we're not allowed in your bars. Lesbians and gays are horrendous about each other. Why are the L and G together, let alone anything else. There was a time, sure, in the 50s and 60s, when it payed to stick together. But that time's over. And all of these groups have different priorities. The very lesbianic third-wave feminism has very different priorities from gay men, it seems to me. Both of those groups have very different priorities to the trans lobby.

I kind of think that Jerry Falwell has less in common with Peter Thiel than a gay man has with a lesbian. Looking at the people speaking tomorrow before Trump, I can't tell if he's trying to move gay people into the party, or if it's just a sign that Trump has absolutely no ideology whatsoever.
I would say—I didn't finish my degree—but I went to a very good university in Cambridge, and I was taught that their were dozens of different ways to approach text. You could do a feminist reading, you could to an Lacanian reading, you could do all sorts of things. It seems to me that journalists are so poorly educated now, they literally have one prism through which to view the world, and it's the prism of oppression, bigotry, sexist, racist, homophobic—that's all they see when they look out in the world. I pity them because I would hate to see the world so monochromatically as they do.

But if you snap out of that and realize that the public actually is sick of the one-note preoccupations of journalists and that the allegations of sexism and racism don't have the power they had anymore, and that's good, and people are actually looking for a chaos candidate—I think the dysfunctional coalition that Donald Trump is assembling makes a lot more sense.

Why does this moment feel different than the political correctness movement in the 90s?
In the 90s, political correctness started to pop up, but it was beaten. It was beaten away. So now it's come back, and it's come back with a full force of every civil institution in the country. Politicians, the media, the entertainment industry, academia, the lot of it. But that's good, because that means if we beat it now, we beat it in its final form, in its strongest possible incarnation, and it will never return. That I think is happening by itself, but I'm happy to chivvy it along and also of course document that history as well. It's nice being someone who can give it a kick up the ass and then scurry around the corner and write about it as it comes around.

How does it feel, as a conservative, to know that a lot of the voter base fucking hates you?
Well, a lot of liberals hate you. I'm better educated on politics in Britain, but what I can tell you is––

Liberals don't stand on a street corner holding signs that say "God Hates Fags."
Oh come on, how strong is the religious right in this country, really?

Strong enough that Jerry Falwell is speaking on the final night of the Republican National Convention.
But what purchase do they have on the media? What has Trump said that's been influenced by radical evangelicals or anything like that? Realistically, the era of the religious right was the 90s. This was when people were saying that music and video games inspired school shootings on the basis of no evidence. Now it's feminists saying they can make you sexist with no evidence. It's the same ugly instinct, just from a different political direction. I don't like it anymore from the religious right than I do from the social-justice left. But to suggest that the religious right or that social conservatives have anything approaching the power that social justice has on the left in America is simply ridiculous.

And Mike Pence hates you for reasons that aren't even religiously motivated or easily dismissed as based on an old book. That's actually worse.
Mike Pence doesn't hate gay people. He's a family values and states's rights guy, and I am fine with that.

I wanted to ask you, if you could change whether or not you were gay, would you do that?
Yes. No. Well maybe before my career started taking off. Very honestly, if you did put the pills in front of me, if you really did it, if you said, "If you take this pill, you will be heterosexual," I think I would do it.

Why?
Well, it's not any of the things that people normally expect. People are always surprised by this answer, and it's amazing to me that this has never occurred to other gay people, but, when I'm fucking a person I love, I can't make a baby with them, and that's weird, and saddening, and confusing, and not a nice experience. When you're making love to someone who's most important to you in the world, you can't do what heterosexual couples do, which is create a child. Maybe I'm completely alone in that. But that bothers me.

I definitely expected the answer was yes, but not for that reason.
I don't know why this doesn't occur to more gay people, or if they just lie to themselves about it, or if they never get to that stage in their life or whatever.

There's a combination of things. I very much like the access to that wild abandon and freedom, particularly the cultural freedom that being gay gives me. I've obviously taken full advantage of that in my career. But when I think about where I want to be in 40 years, it's like, "Do I want to be happily married with my own children with the person I made those children with?" It's very tempting.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

How Childhood Trauma Can Contribute to Developing Cancer as an Adult

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

In 1998, Carol Redding's life was in a tailspin. She'd just gone through a breakup and was starting to lose control after what felt like a lifelong battle with nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, depression, thyroid disease, and three bouts with cancer (leukemia, breast cancer, and lymphoma).

A friend, who recognized symptoms of trauma, referred Redding to see Vincent Felitti, then head of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego and a co-principal investigator of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study. Together with Rob Anda, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, Felitti had published groundbreaking research that showed a strong correlation between childhood trauma and many of the leading causes of death, including cancer.

Felitti asked Redding to complete a survey, known as the ACE Questionnaire, which covered ten categories of child abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. Redding received one "point" each time she marked that she had experienced one of these. Those with a score of four or more were twice as likely to develop heart disease, according to Felitti's findings; seven or more, and they were three times more likely to develop cancer.

Redding scored ten out of ten.

"As soon as Dr. Felitti told me about the ACE Study, it was as if all of the messy jigsaw pieces of my life snapped into place," Redding told VICE. "Had it not been for that breakup, I might never have realized how damaged I was. And I was profoundly damaged."

Today, the ACE research is recognized by the CDC and the World Health Organization. Several states have even passed legislation to encourage programs and research into adverse childhood experiences. But when Redding met Felitti, the study had just been published.

"The ACE Study happened totally by accident," Felitti told VICE. In 1984, Felitti was conducting an obesity study at Kaiser. One of the study's most successful participants was a 28-year-old woman who had dropped nearly 300 pounds. But a few weeks after achieving her lowest weight ever, she was sexually propositioned at work and gained back all of the weight she'd lost.

"She told us she was the incest victim of her grandfather from age 11 to 21 and that she ate to feel better," Felitti said. "Weighing 408 pounds was also her way of unconsciously reducing her sexual attractiveness."

As Felitti interviewed more patients, he found that half of the 300 participants in his obesity program had been sexually abused. Toxic stress in childhood appeared to be associated with obesity; Felitti wondered if early trauma could be linked to other adulthood diseases. Soon after, the ACE Study was born.

"Who would think that something that happens when you're three or four years old could cause cancer when you're 40?" — Carol Redding

Although today there are more than 80 published journal articles on ACEs, Felitti says most physicians haven't heard of ACEs and "almost never" ask about a patient's childhood in routine screenings.

Pradeep Gidwani, a San Diego–based pediatrician and director of projects at the American Academy of Pediatrics, told VICE the medical field has been slow to embrace ACE research. Part of the problem, he said, is that physicians don't have adequate training or resources to deal with patients who do show signs of childhood trauma.

Redding said no one before Felitti connected her health problems to toxic events from her childhood—but it was clear that she had suffered trauma.

When she was four, her mother died of a brain hemorrhage. Her father—a World War II vet with PTSD—crumbled after her death, becoming a violent alcoholic. During her childhood, she says her father regularly beat her and her siblings; money and food were scarce, and at one point, Redding's family was evicted and she was sent away to live with their aunt.

Meeting Felitti was a watershed moment for her. "Who would think that something that happens when you're three or four years old could cause cancer when you're 40?" she said.

Bruce D. Perry, a senior fellow at the Child Trauma Academy, told VICE the events in Redding's childhood didn't necessarily "cause" her cancer. The original ACE Study, while groundbreaking, examined correlations—associations between childhood experiences and adult health—not direct causes.

Perry added that because an ACE score doesn't consider the age at which a traumatic event happened, whether it happened once or chronically, and if there were "buffering" factors, like a strong family or community support system, the score "has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by people—including clinicians—all with good intentions."

Even still, Perry said there is clear evidence of what is sometimes called the "neurobiology of stress."

"Over time, a chronically activated 'freeze, flee, or flight' system wears down our heart, lung, gut, immune system, and even brain networks involved in attention, thinking, and mood regulation," Perry told VICE. "Hence, the increased risk in problems in mental- and physical-heath capacities."

According to Felitti, ACEs affect mental and physical health in adulthood in three ways: The first is through coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating, alcoholism, or using drugs, all of which have immediate benefits but long-term risks. The second is the effect of chronic, major, unrelieved stress on certain areas of the brain that control our immune systems and inflammatory responses. The third involves changes to epigenetic mechanisms that control gene expression.

Healing this past trauma can be challenging, but Perry says that relationships are key. "The better predictor of physical and mental health outcomes is the number, quality, and consistency of healthy relationships," he told VICE.

Working with Felitti, Redding began a series of therapies, including cognitive behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, both of which reduce the long-term effects of toxic memories and help develop adaptive coping mechanisms. She started exercising, engaging in community projects like mentoring college students, and spending more time with her siblings to strengthen family bonds. She also started journaling, mostly writing about childhood memories in five-year increments. The memories triggered flashbacks, but they lessened with time and she was ultimately able to forgive what had happened in her past.

It's been 16 years since Redding's crash. Today, she says life is easier—there's less struggle, more joy. "I understand who I really am," she told VICE. "I like who I am."

See more of Dustin Grinnell's work on his website.

An Oral History of 'Degrassi: The Next Generation'

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All photos courtesy of DHX Media

Barring a few rare exceptions, most series spinoffs and sequels are doomed to an awkward mid-season cancellation, relegated to infamy as a sad footnote somewhere on the original show's Wikipedia page. But Degrassi: The Next Generation managed to defy the television odds by becoming as popular, if not better known than its predecessor, gaining viewers well beyond Canada's borders.

TNG birthed a whole new cast of Canadian stars, though none as famous as the 6ix God Aubrey Graham aka Wheelchair Jimmy. The series honoured the original Degrassi's commitment to honest, raw storylines that depicted the reality of teenage life, putting the kids of Degrassi Junior High through pregnancies, internet predators, abortions, shootings, and testicular cancer. In a testament to its success, Degrassi: TNG, which first began airing in 2001, has been on for 15 years, cycling through several different casts and recently celebrated its 500th episode this summer.

As already lovingly chronicled in the oral history of the first Degrassi, there's something really special about the hallways of this fictional high school. So we decided to revisit the sequel's initial class (aka the "Drake Years") to see what's become of Emma, Jimmy, Manny, Spinner, Liberty, and the rest of the TNG gang.

Back to School
Though the original series (Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High) only ran for five seasons, concluding in 1992's downer of a made-for-TV-movie School's Out, it left an indelible mark on Canadian culture. A mere mention of Joey's hat or that goddamn Zit Remedy song was lingua franca for anyone who either grew up in the late 80s/early 90s or spent any time watching reruns on Canadian television (or, if you happened to be Kevin Smith). But for all the high school melodramas and comedies that hit the airwaves in the decade after Degrassi's finale (Freaks and Geeks being the obvious successor), few captured that lo-fi realism or, more importantly, reflected the lives of their viewers. Enter Degrassi: TNG.

Linda Schuyler (co-creator of the entire Degrassi universe): When we wrapped on School's Out, I thought that we were doing a wrap on Degrassi forever. The interesting thing that happened was even though we stopped producing Degrassi, Degrassi never went away. Here in Canada, it played on Showcase, and then it moved—it was re-bought by CBC where they would run it daily after school. The original generation of viewers had grown up with our show, but now, there was a whole new group of kids who are very much interested in it, and the fan mail—and in those days, it was all snail mail—never stopped coming. It was really fascinating to us that we were not producing the show but we were still striking a chord with young viewers.

My writing partner, Yan Moore and I said, "Let's think about developing a new show for teenagers." We weren't thinking it would be Degrassi. It wasn't until Yan said to me, "You know, Linda, if we do the math here, Spike was pregnant in eighth grade, had her baby, kept it, that baby would be about ready to be going into junior high." That's kind of how we ended up in developing it.

Stefan Brogren (Mr. Simpson, aka "Snake"/executive producer of Degrassi): There was an interest of bringing back the show. I think I'd heard this a couple of times since faded a little bit. I just wanted to be a regular person, if I can describe it that way. And so I actually got my real estate license and I've been doing that for the last, I guess a year and a half or so, just to do something completely different.




A Black Lives Matter Painter Explains How Art Can Be Activism

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A mural of devoted to Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, painted by Langston Allston. Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images

In the wake of Alton Sterling's death this month, many mourned what seemed like just the latest in a series of unjustified police shootings of black men. Some people took to the streets in protest. Others reflected and grieved in private. Langston Allston started painting.

Allston, a New Orleans–based artist, has been using his artwork to address social change and stoke conversations since he studied painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010. When he heard about Alton Sterling, Allston hitched a ride to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he picked up a paintbrush to contribute to the city's anguish and healing. There, Allston painted murals, including a portrait of a local protester called Lil' Smurf, who Allston said made an impression outside the Sterling memorial. A photograph of his artwork was later featured in the New York Times.

We spoke to Allston about his murals and why he sees painting as a viable form of protest.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Part of the mural painted by Langston Allston in Baton Rouge. Photo courtesy of Langston Allston

VICE: How did the mural at Alton Sterling's memorial come about earlier this month?
Langston Allston: I've been super active in terms of including in my art how fucked up the world is. I've kind of always had a particular thing about police brutality in my work because it's something that's always been close to me. I went to Ferguson . But we ran into a lot of protestors who were really inspiring—people from the community who came out and were just mad—so I just pinpointed a guy we were talking to earlier in the day named Lil' Smurf. Lil' Smurf was out going hard and protesting and I was like, Man, I've got to immortalize this somehow. Because it's sad how quickly this activism reacting to a sad event fades away. If there's any way to keep people visually energized and plugged in, I think that's a useful thing to do.

Image courtesy of Langston Allston

Do you see your paintings or murals as helping people in some way?
I personally don't think a mural by itself is an incredibly helpful thing. But I find as I'm talking to people that sometimes the things I paint take on a life after I've left that they didn't have when I was there. They mean things to people over time. Creating emblems and icons for people to gather around and talk about is definitely a useful thing to do, but I think there's more that has to get done. The visual element of any movement is always critical because it helps people remember it, helps people identify it, and helps people plug into it who weren't previously plugged in. But everything else has to happen in addition to that. There's definitely room for art in activism, but it's not end-all-be-all by any means.

What are you trying to accomplish with your artwork?
I really want to do work that lets people understand that the issues we're grappling with are complicated, but also understand that they're reversible and changeable. Activist art is something I've wanted to avoid, even though my art features activism, if that makes sense. I want stuff that will talk to people for a long time because these issues haven't gone away. We've been fighting this fight since slavery, basically, to get respect and to get people to stop murdering black people in cold blood. It's obviously going to be ongoing and obviously individual incidents really polarize people or pull them together. It's really important to remain active and aware of what's happening, but it's also important to understand things as being broad issues that affect everybody all the time.

Image courtesy of Langston Allston

If you don't categorize your work as activist art, what would you categorize it as?
I guess I would just call them paintings. I aspire to be active and affect change, but at the same time, I think that my paintings are just paintings.

Do you see this current movement—specifically, the Black Lives Matter movement—as something as significant as the civil rights movement?
I think I do see it as being equally significant. Really, it's a young movement; it just started. But those things we're looking back on and talking about like the civil rights movement or black power, those were things that started as young movements in times where it was necessary for them to exist. There was a gap where people really weren't polarized by it and the conversation wasn't happening on a national scale, and I think we're overdue to readdress this kind of shit because I don't think it's gotten better. In many ways, it's gotten worse.

Where I live in New Orleans, all these problems are extremely real every single day. There's no getting away from the reality of it. The law, in many ways, has lost its legitimacy—especially here in Louisiana. It's the incarceration capital of the world, so everybody down here is on papers in some way. Cops representing justice isn't really a thing. You don't see police come through New Orleans or Baton Rouge and think, Oh that person represents justice and fairness and equality. You already know they have the power to fuck up your life and probably will at some point. It's extremely necessary to start addressing that huge problem we have—especially here, because it is so fucked up. Little changes would do a lot. We just need to get a little bit of movement.

Follow Sean Neumann on Twitter.

Gay Nightlife Is Dying and Grindr and Gentrification Are to Blame

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Clubbers revel at one of the last nights of Trade, a gay night that ruled London nightlife from 1990 until last October. Photo courtesy of Trade

"It's the one thing they've left legal, innit?"

It's 11 AM on Sunday morning, and I'm standing under a railway arch in London's Vauxhall neighborhood discussing poppers—the dizzying liquid high that narrowly escaped a UK government ban this March—with Jay. He wears a string vest that shows off his pecs, over which he sports a huge gold medallion and a red baseball jacket.

Jay lives in public housing just down the road in Stockwell. Despite looking young, he's in his late 30s and has been going out in the UK gay-nightclub scene for the better part of two decades. He's observed a recent shift: "There are still a lot of people going out," he says, "but the vibe's not the same anymore."

That "vibe" of UK and transatlantic gay nightlife is an elusive thing to define. There are more venues, gay partygoers, and different "vibes" on offer than ever before, but, broadly speaking, Jay's referencing his own memories of a dying LGBTQ nightclub culture, largely based around dance music. It's a culture that fizzed with glamour, drama, and excitement in the 90s and early 00s, but that scene—which once thrived at club nights like Trade and FF at Turnmill's, Garage and Pyramid at Heaven, New York's The Cock, and at Michael Alig's outré events—has dissipated into the stuff of legend.

Clubbers at Trade. Photo courtesy of Trade

While London residents lament the loss of several gay nightlife venues over the past two years—from the Joiner's Arms to George and Dragon—once-iconic parties like Trade, which reigned as one of the fiercest events from 1993 to 2008 (with subsequent special events up to 2015), are now a misty-eyed memory.

"Life's changed a lot since the 90s," says Simon, a 27-year-old media planner, by way of explaining the generational shift. "People are more health-conscious. And there's a lot more at stake with their careers. They're climbing the ladder, and places like NYC and London are too expensive. Everyone's chasing money––no one can afford to spend four days off their face anymore."

"A lot of my friends are straight, so I go to the same places that they do," adds Brad, 25, an HR director. "Also, many gay clubs are quite tacky. The music's not great and the people who are there tend to be off their faces and messy. So why would I go? If I want sex, I can just go on Grindr."

Clubbers, ex-clubbers, promoters, and DJs who spoke with VICE cited two main issues in explaining why clubbing today is, well, lamer than ever: gentrification and Grindr.

For former Queer Nation DJ Jeffrey Hinton, they form a problematic constellation: "So-called social apps like Grindr and our modern obsession with wealth reflect a language of surface, greed, and image," he says. "Thus, is empty and lonely––more so when you factor in chemicals people are using to destroy their souls and brains.

"But," he adds, "it's created a landscape that, hopefully, people will want to change."

Nightlife is a product that supplies two demands—sex and music—and the way gay men seek both have seen a historic shift with the rise of the internet. Or, as Clayton Littlewood, author of the seminal 2008 gay book and play Dirty White Boy, puts it: "Why go out when you can order in?"

But whether gay or straight, clubs are closing across the UK: According to the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers, the number of British clubs dropped from 3,144 in 2005 to 1,733 ten years later. It's created a climate where clubs must push envelopes in their programming more than ever to survive. That's a task some parties and promoters are up for, such as Larry Tee's Berlin-based KRANK, a monthly bender where dildo-sporting, PVC-clad bears mingle among beautiful young twinks. But location is important as well—increasingly, such events are held not in London or New York but in smaller, more relaxed cities like Berlin. As Tee points out, the shift bodes poorly for the former.

"When Giuliani started his New York nightlife crackdown, I remember watching the sexiness of sleazy dark rooms and sneaky shared bumps disappear," says Tee. "When was the last time you heard an underground New York record that you couldn't wait to get home and download? Or been in a group grope, like at the Cock when it was on Avenue A?"

"For me, after 35 years, gay nightlife is no longer interesting," says London-based photographer Jamie McLeod, "unless I'm somewhere untouched by commercial Western influences—places like Turkey, Mexico, Lebanon, Egypt, or Iran."

The explosion of chemsex culture, as well, provides further competition for promoters of gay nightlife. "Clubbing has suffered at the hands of home-based chill-out and recreational drugs," says a patron of London's Fire. "There's drinking, using, and shagging all in the comfort of your own home or of near-neighbors thanks to the apps."

Watch the trailer for the VICE Films documentary "Chemsex."

"'The scene' is an eroded idea," says singer David McAlmont. "Gay men are still having a good time." And for a younger generation without the benefit (or detriment) of hindsight, who don't remember how things were, gay nightlife is certainly not for wont of excitement. "We go to Orange every Sunday night," says Simon, 19, who moved to London from a small Sussex town last year. "London's like an explosion of glitter in your face. Too much fun. When people say there's been a downturn, I just look at them and think, And when was the last time you went out?"

"The scene's still exciting—you've just got to know where to look," says Hannah, a 22-year-old graphic designer, originally from Norwich. "I go out in Camberwell, and there are loads of events at places like the Bussey Building or the Flying Dutchman. But Goldsnap at Dalston Superstore is my favorite night. Hot girls DJ-ing R&B and garage all nigh—what's not exciting about that?"

Follow John Lucas on Twitter.

Canada Has a Race Problem and We Refuse to Talk About It

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Abdirahman Abdi died after he was allegedly beaten by Ottawa police officers Sunday.

The Ottawa Police Association is denying Abdirahman Abdi's death at the hands of several officers Sunday had anything to do with race.

Abdi died after, according to witness accounts, cops pepper sprayed him, hit him with batons, and punched him in the head and neck. Afterward, he lay facedown on pavement handcuffed and bleeding for several minutes until paramedics arrived on scene and administered CPR.

"To suggest that race was an issue in this, it's inappropriate. The officers were called to the scene. The officers had to attend. Race, in this case, is a fact, just like your age, your gender, your height. It doesn't have anything to do with our ... decision-making. Our decision-making is based on our training, and our training has nothing to do with race," Matt Skof, president of the Ottawa Police Association told the CBC Monday, adding it's "unfortunate" that racially charged "rhetoric" from the US is making its way across the border.

That conversation, he said, is "not one that's applicable here."

Where have we heard this before?

Oh right. Just a few months ago, after Black Lives Matter Toronto camped outside of Toronto police headquarters for two weeks in protest of systemic racism, the city's police association head Mike McCormack dismissed their concerns outright.

"When people are shouting rhetoric about people being murdered by the police, tortured, and beaten every day, I don't see how that's a debate... Are those legitimate concerns? I would say no," he told VICE at the time. "So far I haven't seen anything that indicates they want to have a meaningful discussion around this... I'm really not interested in taking part in a discussion around that but I'm definitely interested in taking part in discussions that are factually and evidence-based."

A memorial set up for Abdirahman Abdi. Canadian Press/Justin Tan

Meanwhile, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne downplayed her admission that systemic racism exists, by later clarifying that she was not referring to policing. Toronto Mayor John Tory, in the aftermath of the BLMTO Pride protest, expressed his support for cops and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson—after two days of silence on Abdi's death—said "it is always concerning when a life is lost in our city, and my thoughts are with Mr. Abdi's family and friends during this difficult time." Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, has said absolutely nothing on the subject of anti-black racism.

These responses show a complete lack of willingness to even entertain the idea that race could be a factor in how police conduct themselves. But a post-racial utopia Canada is not.

The "evidence-based" discussion McCormack claims he's seeking is harder to have when literally no agency in the country keeps tabs on how many black people are killed by police, though anecdotally, the deaths of Sammy Yatim, Andrew Loku, Jermaine Carby, and others at the hands of cops illustrate a disturbing trend in the way force is administered on people of colour. Here's what else we know: black men in Toronto are three times more likely to be "carded" or arbitrarily stopped by police than anyone else, regardless of where they live; only three percent of the general population is black, but black Canadians make up ten percent of the prison population, while in the last decade, the number of black Canadians in jail has risen by 70 percent; and high school graduation rates, income levels, and foster care rates are all heavily skewed along racial lines.

So, in the context of a national dialogue, at what point does "waiting for the facts to come in" become willful denial?

Abdirahman Abdi's name was absent from the front pages of all three of Canada's national dailies this morning—the Star, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. Online, few headlines make note of that fact that he was a black man beaten and likely killed by police, or even use the term "racism."

In the US, coverage around police brutality is inescapable and focuses almost exclusively on race.

But that didn't happen overnight. Fuelled by outrage over the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and many others, movements like Black Lives Matter made it impossible for anyone to ignore present-day, state-enforced racism.

These types of conversations are uncomfortable, but it's no longer an acceptable alternative to avoid them altogether.

After the shooting death of black Minnesotan man Philando Castile during a traffic stop, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, who is white, asked, "Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white?... I don't think it would have."

President Barack Obama said, "When incidents like this occur, there's a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts, and that should trouble all of us."

Aside from RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, who has admitted dealing with racists in his force is crucial in addressing Canada's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, there aren't a lot of people at the top here speaking that way.

But our tendency to pretend the racism we see in the US doesn't exist here doesn't make these problems go away. It simply erases the experience of those who know otherwise.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

We Went Pre-Gaming with Spain's Veteran Iron Maiden Fans

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This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

When the doors of the Palacio de Deportes arena in Madrid opened for the Iron Maiden show two weeks ago, a small group of fans had been camping out in front of the gates for 24 hours. They were young girls all decked out in Iron Maiden shirts and flags. "We slept here with ten people," they told us about an hour before the doors opened. They were nervous—it was the first time they were going to see the band live.

Meanwhile behind them, Iron Maiden's more senior fans were taking things a bit easier. These Spanish veteran fans met through their Iron Maiden fandom and have been friends for decades, seeing one another only at shows. Before every gig, they come together in front of the arena for a sort of pre-game. They stand around, have a beer, and a chat about the band, the concerts they've missed, the leaked set list, what Resurrection Fest in Viveiro was like last weekend, and how the band members seem to be doing physically during this last tour.

This year's street party—or botellón in Spanish—started small, but as the opening approached, it gradually took over the whole of Plaza de Felipe II. Grocery shops that line the square in front of the arena started to run out of cold beers, but well-prepared fans had brought along coolers filled with alcohol.

One couple told us the first Iron Maiden concert they went to was at this very stadium in Madrid, more than 25 years ago. They couldn't count how many times they've seen the band since then. The same can probably be said of the rest of these pre-gamers—they all seemed to be fiercely faithful to their idols, and they took no note of how much Bruce Dickinson looks like your dad these days. Likely, because these guys are your dad.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: This Guy Started a Meth Ring with His $3 Million Lottery Winnings

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Photo via Flickr user Mark Ou

After Ronnie Music Jr. won $3 million from the Georgia State Lottery last year, he decided to really push his luck and put all his new money into starting a full-fledged crystal meth ring, NBC reports.

Music's investment scheme began when he reportedly used all his winnings to purchase meth, then recruited dealers to resell it for a profit. But then a few of his dealers were caught selling back in September, and they tipped off authorities about Music's Walter White fantasies. Police then raided his base in Ware County, Georgia, where they found more than $1 million worth of meth, $600,000 in cash, a bunch of guns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

In a statement from the US District Attorney's office, Ed Tarver said, "Music decided to test his luck by sinking millions of dollars of lottery winnings into the purchase and sale of crystal meth. As a result of his unsound investment strategy, Music now faces decades in a federal prison."

Music plead guilty to gun and drug charges last week and is set to be sentenced after the state conducts an investigation. According to the Fresno Bee, he could spend life behind bars.

The Human Suit Malfunctions of the 2016 Party Conventions

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Presidential elections are, I'm sure you'll agree, a choice between the lesser of two evils. Specifically, the lesser of two evil, shapeshifting, lizard cyborgs.

When our overlords and their lesser minions hide away in their refuges on the dark side of the moon, or indulge in their annual secret bacchanalia at Bohemian Grove, they don't worry about their skin suits misfiring. But election years require the creatures to stand in front of crowds and on live TV, where the risk is much greater that they might accidentally slip up and let a few words of Reptilese get picked up by a live microphone.

We covered this once before, back when the election was just getting started. A handful of debates had revealed a few cracks in the candidates' disguises at the time. But over the past two weeks at the conventions of the two main parties, anyone awake to What's Really Going On could see the fallibility of the human suit technology on display.


The most telling slips came from supporters, not the candidates themselves. Melania Trump famously caused some problems on July 18 when she attempted to deliver a standard issue convention speech about her human reproductive partner Donald Trump. An antenna slipped out of position and picked up interference from a rebroadcast of a speech by Michelle Obama, and she recited some of it verbatim.

But the glitch in Melania Trump's hardware wasn't unique to the Republican convention. Instead of a political speech, on July 25, Senator Bob Casey, vocalizing at a disturbing, robotic pace, regurgitated the text of an unknown human fifth grader's school report on the state of Pennsylvania, including the word "quote" whenever the text had a quotation mark in it. After 40 seconds, Casey realized his mistake and awkwardly shoehorned Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump into the paper, but his secret was already out.


The following day, Meryl Streep delivered a rousing, female-empowering piece of oratory. However, right when she took the stage, Streep meant to belt out a war cry, and instead cranked the knob too far and dialed in to the frequency that summons vampire bats. Fortunately she was speaking indoors.


Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has already been criticized by reliable sources for throwing up Masonic hand signals during his fifteen minute prolonged scream on July 19, in which he called for the "unconditional" defeat of all Islamic terrorists.

Openly using the sign language of his real species seems like a dumb reptile strategy though. Giuliani just looks like he misjudged the size of his human form. His motions are like those of someone who has been shrunk to the size of a raisin, trying to gesture and yell loud enough to keep a normal sized person from eating them. A few minor adjustments should fix that.

Similar claims have been made about the masonic gesturing of RNC speaker Michelle Van Etten, an employee of a company called Youngevity that markets pills, including some endorsed by Alex Jones (maybe as a kind of false flag).

Van Etten spoke on July 20—the anniversary of NASA's make-believe moon landing—about Donald Trump keeping nasty regulations away from her business, which is essentially a pyramid scheme—the Illuminati's favorite kind of scheme. Who can blame Van Etten for celebrating her good fortune by wearing a traditional reptilian cape onstage, and broadcasting her gratitude to her home world during her very, very entertaining speech?

Gestures like Van Etten's have been the easiest way to spot reptiles at these conventions. Talk radio host Laura Ingraham did this with her arm at the end of her speech on July 20:

It was at least momentarily the same straight-arm gesture used by the Italian fascists, Nazis, Romans, and the Queen of England. But she cycled through several other gestures right after. Something about the roar of these huge crowds after a speech causes many political speakers to short circuit and move in unpredictable ways.

The most famous end-of-speech glitch of this kind happened when Vermont Governor Howard Dean was running for president in 2004, but then he waved his arms around, yelled the names of a bunch of states, and went "Ngaaagh!" and had to stop running for president because it weirded everyone out.

So on July 26, Dean spoke at the Democratic convention, and this time he flailed his arms and yelled the names of states again. But he left off the "Ngaaagh!"

To be clear, the moment wasn't a slip of Dean's human suit. It was a sort of meta-slip. It referenced a past slip, but Dean was ostensibly still in character, making the moment much creepier.

But the creepiest thing at the Democrats' convention so far was this musical number, in which a bunch of the computerized faces from movies and television were animated to look like they were singing a version of Rachel Platten's "Fight Song," modified to be about Hillary Clinton.


The Democrats' mistake was in thinking CG effects are far enough along to make a video like this look realistic enough to escape the uncanny valley. Soon maybe. But for now this kind of animation is still very, very, unsettling.

And speaking of the uncanny valley, Hillary Clinton will be speaking on Thursday night. Will she accidentally call for God to bless the people of "Sol III" instead of America? Will the wrong SD card be inserted into her speech module, causing her to reveal the details of the reptilian plot to murder Vince Foster? We'll just have to wait and see!

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Surprise! Your Office Job Is Slowly Killing You

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A dying man. (via Wikipedia)

As you trundle your grey viscera into your office, that place with the bad lighting that you don't see anywhere else, grab the back of your ergonomic chair, yank it out slightly, park yourself down, yawn, look down at your keyboard and then shut your eyes for a few seconds of black tranquillity before you sigh a deep sigh and enter the password for your machine, you would do well to remember that you are dying at an incredible rate.

Not just normal dying like in the films where someone gets hit by a car or gets cancer or something. I mean bad dying, where every day the unmoving dullness and static monotony of your life burns the gumption from your blood cells until you're just a putrescent bin liner full of pigs' trotters waiting to be crushed by the sticky teeth of an old dust truck.

The World Health Organisation, a body we only hear from when they're turning the global epidemic status from yellow (uh oh) to red (seriously guys do not get bird flu), have stated that at least one hour of exercise or activity per day is required to offset the powerful damage that working in an office does to you. The risk of dying after sitting on your arse for eight hours a day – an astonishing time to be sat down, to be quite fucking honest with you – increases by almost 10 per cent, while the more active among us, those lucky bastards only sitting down for four or so hours are only 6.8 per cent likely to die.

Our feckless laziness isn't just damaging our bodies, though, oh no. It's ruining the fucking economy to boot. Medical journal The Lancet reports that people not running around enough costs the global economy £51 billion in medical bills and lost productivity.

"You don't need to do sport, you don't need to go to the gym," says Prof Ulf Ekelund, lead author of the paper. "It's OK doing some brisk walking, maybe in the morning, during lunchtime, after dinner in the evening. You can split it up over the day, but you need to do at least one hour." But how am I supposed to walk anywhere when I've got this work to do? This work that I will never remember, that no one will ever remember me doing, maybe even forgotten about a mere week after it's completed. I'll walk to Pret to get my daily stomach ache, but you can't make me try and extend my pointless life by briskly walking, World Health Organisation.

The trouble with things like this is that people won't take any notice. "Sitting down for eight hours a day makes you die eh?" people will say. "That's really bad, I don't want to die. But I have an arbitrarily constructed working time and environment in which I have to complete my tasks, so even though it's literally making my heart slow down, I will continue to follow this lifestyle until my bone marrow turns to tar and I have a cardiac arrest at my desk while I'm trying to play Miniclip Pool in between inputting futile digits and letters into a variety of documents, holding back tears for my lost health before I'm allowed to creep out of the exit, by which time the sun itself has died and fallen to the ground and all that's left is the pitch darkness, which I have to wade through to climb onto a tube train where I will scramble to get a seat even though I've been sat down for what doctors are now calling a fatal amount of time. Ho hum!" I'm looking forward to getting buried with a vacuum packed copy of Microsoft Word in my casket, which is an L-shape because of my fucked-up work spine. Ah, the sweet release!

@joe_bish

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Here's Everything That's Going to Happen in Your First Shitty Office Job

The VICE Guide to Your Bleak Office Christmas Party

Ricky Gervais, David Brent and the Destruction of a Comedy Legacy


Nazi Flags and Brexit Fans: I Went to a Massive Festival for People Obsessed with War

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War. All things considered, it's probably one of the things people like least about the world. Unless you're Genghis Khan or Tony Blair, when asked if you'd want to wage war you'd probably go "nah" and make a face like you've just discovered you've been sitting on an unwrapped Twix.

Conversely, the past. People fucking love the past. Old people, yes, because they are hurtling towards the ground at the speed of light and so can't get enough of the past, when they were decades further from death. But younger people, too – the types who grow twirly moustaches and go to Blitz parties, presumably forgetting that The Blitz was the name given to the relentless and not-fun-at-all bombing campaign waged by the Germans during WWII.

So what happens when you wedge these two things – both war and the past – together in a massive field in Kent? You get The War and Peace Revival show, a five-day military and vintage festival at Folkestone Racecourse.

It has all the things you get at a normal festival, like music, beer, mud and people dressing up in embarrassing yet painstakingly-created costumes. It's just that instead of the music being about "getting blunted" or promiscuity, it's about doing "The Lindy Hop" and maintaining stable relationships. And instead of costumes like "sparkly sequined glitter hippy" or "nu-rave native American" it's more "deeply problematic SS uniform".

I've often wondered why people are so obsessed with World War I and II. I mean, sure, it was the last time the world truly came together to defeat a terrifying and genuine evil, and the lessons we learnt from the tragedies that took place have dramatically shaped the course of modern history, but fucking hell, we do love to bang on about it; it feels like there's been a new movie, book or video game released about the Wars at least once a day, every day, for the past 60-odd years.

To find out why people enjoy re-imagining a period that saw some of the greatest losses of human life history has ever seen, I went down to the festival and had a walk around.

The first thing I noticed was the sheer scale of the thing. I had a little wander around to get my bearings and it was probably about two-thirds of the size of Glastonbury, but just absolutely rammed to the gills with tanks, army uniforms and people camping in makeshift barracks rather than bright orange Halfords £30 jobs.

The campsite genuinely looked like a bit like a scene in Full Metal Jacket, complete with signs saying things like "God Is My Shotgun" and "You Yell, We Shell, Like Hell". They even still did that annoying "wacky flag above our area so we know where we're camped" thing, but instead of being Spongebob Squarepants or an acid house smiley it was giant American, British and, in some cases, Nazi flags.

I started talking to a guy called Marcus, who was sitting in the Vietnam section dressed as an undercover CIA agent and drinking what looked like JD and Coke, despite the fact it was 10 in the morning. I asked what drew him to playing dress up in a giant field of other people playing dress up.

"I used to be in the army," he said. "To be honest, doing this is the closest thing you can get to the camaraderie of being in the army – I think that's why a lot of people do it."

In between sips of his drink he told me he was a history teacher in his spare time, and that this is only one of many re-enactments he attends, his favourite being the Tudor-themed War of the Roses re-enactment where he likes to play an Italian merchant.

"The thing is," he continued. "The thing is, my rank is actually pretty high as a CIA agent. Basically, I'm on the same level as a colonel, so I can tell anybody here if I wanted to to let me use their helicopter or tank and they'd have to let me."

I'm not sure if he was in character at this point, or if he actually believed what he was saying, but either way he let me try on this fancy gas mask so I couldn't complain.

There were various sections of the site dedicated to different facets of war. Some contained just tanks and vehicles. Some contained tanks, vehicles and fake battle scenes, complete with guys (and it was 99 percent guys) just kind of sitting around in their uniforms looking nonplussed.

I struck up a conversation with an owner of a tank-type people carrier thing, who was more than happy to explain where he got every single tiny part of the vehicle, down to the side lights and the authentic German hip flask on the inside.

One common trait among everyone there was that they were extremely keen to talk. This guy had come all the way from Latvia to show off his rustic Batmobile and wasn't prepared to let me go without chewing my ear off about every little nut and bolt. It was actually quite sweet to see a grown man essentially reduced to the level of a teenager discussing his latest Pokemon Go catch, until you remind yourself that his Pokemon Go catches are relatively ideologically unsound.

As I pottered around the dusty fields I started to see more and more incredibly detailed uniforms, most filled out by slightly overweight guys who – although I couldn't ask every single one – I safely assumed have never been in the army.

I got talking to this lovely-looking fella who, even in midday heat burning the top of my bald head, was so dedicated to his outfit – one worn by henchman from the shady Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil universe – that he wouldn't even take off his face mask to talk to me.

"I just love how everything looks, and how it feels to be in full uniform," he said. "For me, it's more about collecting all the individual parts and then designing the costume myself. I take a lot of pride in how good it looks."

Next, I wandered into what looked like a massive branch of Rokit – a vintage clothing arena full of rockabilly, polka dot type stuff, which didn't chime with the trenches I'd seen a minute earlier, but hey-ho. There, I got speaking to Natalie, who was selling vintage gear out of a 1950s style camper van called Twiggy.

"I just think the whole look exudes class – that's why I'm into it," she explained when I asked why she dresses the way she does. "It's something that I think is missing from modern society. People in those days had a lot more time to do themselves up; they took care over their appearance. These days, girls just put their hair in a scrunchie and go outside like it doesn't even matter."

Needless to say, a lot of people at the festival were pretty enamoured with the "good old days", a simpler, sepia-toned time when children respected their elders and nobody got angry about halal butchers because they didn't really exist. You get the impression that, for the people who attend War and Peace, nationalism is a thing to be proud about, rather than shied away from. There will have undoubtedly been some Remainers among their number, but I got the sense that these were the kind of people an emotionally-led, nationalistic campaign like Vote Leave would have worked a treat on, because they're already so heavily invested in a rose-tinted version of the past that they would be willing to ignore stuff like "facts" and "expert advice" in favour of returning to an age where jingoism wasn't a bad word.

To guns now, and: there were a lot of guns. Extremely realistic BB guns, paintball guns, shooting ranges, deactivated guns, old guns, new guns, even this £2,500 golden AK-47 gun, which I'm fairly certain Gaddafi owned at some point. The owner told me its story:

"It was actually found in the Middle East," he said. "When it was found it was covered in blood and guts. You see the bullet hole at the back of it?"

Sure enough, there was a big old bullet hole on the other side of the gun.

"That's where someone had obviously taken a shot to the stomach and died."

It's good to know there are still people out there who are committed enough to looking like evil dictators gone mad with power that they're willing to spend thousands of pounds on gold automatic weapons.

I also noticed there was a black SS flag hanging up behind his counter. The SS being the Schutzstaffel, AKA the guys in charge of enforcing Nazi racial policy, AKA some of the worst bad guys in history. I saw a lot of Nazi memorabilia around the place – people in uniforms, swastika flags, skull and crossbones patches; y'know, evil stuff – and so had to ask the attendant at yet another stall bearing a large Nazi flag what makes it OK to so brazenly display the kind of iconography that would offend hundreds of thousands of people.

"I just specialise in bomb fuses. I really like bomb fuses, and the German ones were really well made," said Tony, adding: "I think, for a lot of people here, they just like the beauty of it. Everything the Nazis made was incredibly well-made; the knives are all hand-crafted, the machines are all still great examples of their kind."

But what about the inherent awfulness associated with it all?

"I think you don't come to a place like this if you are sensitive about things like that. I think some people might share that ideology, but most people are just here to collect and trade."

In fairness, Tony didn't actually own the flag – it belonged to his stall manager – and did seem like he was genuinely just really into fuses, there to collect rare items, as many others were too. And because of the rarity of German war items (most sell for double, if not triple, the amount of Allied gear), the market for Nazi stuff will always be stronger and therefore more revered in these circles, purely on a financial basis.

But that's not to say the festival didn't feel quite problematic in parts. Throughout the whole day I didn't see anyone who wasn't white, bar a Japanese guy in full Japanese WWII uniform who shouted "Banzai!" a lot. It wasn't a problem for me, as "white bald guy" seemed extremely on trend at War and Peace this year, but I can't imagine what it would be like for a Jewish person if they had to walk around, seeing what – at surface level, at least – sometimes looked like a very lackadaisical Nazi rally in a field in south-east England.

As the day was winding down, I decided to take a quick breather in this tank. I spoke to its owner, John, about how he came to own such a tank. "I built it from scratch over three-and-a-half years," he said, proudly. "It took me a lot of effort to make this vehicle, and I'm pretty much retired now just so I can focus on my vehicles."

John seemed like a very nice guy, and his enthusiasm for "vehicles" helped me understand the festival a little more. Away from its dodgier facets, the event – and the entire culture around it – is essentially an extension of those little Aircraft kits, only absolutely massive and about 40 times as expensive. And instead of toy soldiers in toy vehicles and tanks, you dress yourself up in full regulation uniform and sit around all day getting pissed, talking to whoever will listen.

@williamwasteman / alexandermcbridewilson.com

​Where No One Knows Your Name: Returning to the Bar I Learned to Drink In

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The first time I was ever offered coke was at Bifteck St-Laurent. I was maybe 16, sitting at a small round table near the front of the bar, already intimidated by the mob of people swirling over and around me. It's all hazy now, but when I close my eyes I can see a moving wall of leather jackets patched with logos belonging to bands like SNFU, DRI, and Dayglo Abortions. Dead Kennedys probably, and the Dead Milkmen. The air is blue with cigarette smoke. There is a guy in a wheelchair with a dog on a leash, and others with dreads and those thickly knit Peruvian hoodies.

And the coke guy. He's older—maybe mid-20s?—with sallow skin and yellowing teeth. He oozes a general air of scumbaggery. He also has crazy eyes, and an aggressive, faux-friendly demeanor, leaning in with a hand on my shoulder. A furtive look around, as if anyone might hear us or care if they did.

"You want some coke?" A quick shake of the head, and he's gone. Who was that guy? He freaked me the fuck out, and maybe that's why I retain a certain fondness for it, even two-and-a-half decades into my drinking career.

The Bifteck in all its current glory. Photo by Farah Khan.

The Bifteck was, and is, an unassuming bar, nothing special to look at inside or out. It's long and narrow and dark, with a seating area at the front, looking onto St-Laurent Boulevard's west side just south of Pine Avenue. There are pool tables and a foosball table in the back. There used to be a DJ booth but that's gone now, and at some point the upstairs was opened for more seating.

At its arguable zenith as a drinking hole, the Bifteck was a locus for Montreal's then-underground culture scenesters, an incubator for musicians, artists and writers, who'd network while ruining their guts on cheap pitchers of Boréale. (I stopped drinking Boréale rousse after a night drinking there while I was an undergrad at McGill. I was nursing a bad hangover in a comparative religion class when I let out such a disgusting fart I nearly sickened myself. I could only imagine what it was like for people sitting near me.)

There was a lot to not endear Bifteck to the non-regulars, besides the gassy beer. The bathrooms were usually crowded with people doing blow on the back of the toilet seat. There was free popcorn at the bar, but it was often stale. The foosball table was uneven. The chairs were rickety. It was smoky and loud and everybody was weird. But for teenagers looking for something other than the downtown club scene, with its terrible music and legions of douchebags, it was our living room. Those who didn't get it weren't welcome.

My Bifteck phase, which occupied a good chunk of the early to mid-1990s, ran parallel to an era of economic decline and stagnation in Montreal, and maybe that's why I associate it with a time of empty storefronts and dark streets. I'm not naïve enough to suggest that those were the glory days. Things, frankly, kind of sucked in Montreal. As a student, the only thing I remember going on was live music, and Bifteck was within walking distance of many of the city's most vibrant (well, cheapest) venues.

So we made do, through the darkness and the winters and the hangovers. On any given night my friends and I would go through half a dozen pitchers and leave good and drunk. It was a comfortable constant.

All vintage Bifteck photos courtesy Susan Moss

Gradually, though, the bar, like the city around it, changed. Punks and junkies were being replaced by McGill bros, dreads by backwards baseball caps, those stupid Peruvian hoodies by Abercrombie & Fitch. Not, I think, coincidentally, the vacant storefronts around Bifteck also began to slowly house tenants again—a cafe here, a burger joint there, a store selling gaudy kicks down the street, an oxygen bar (seriously) a block or two north. Life was creeping back up the Main, and with it came a bunch of dicks.

By the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, St-Laurent had become the poster child of classic gentrification, for good and ill. And as much as some local die-hards tried to deny or fight it, there was no turning back. Not for a while anyway.

I stayed away for much of the intervening 15 years, dropping in now and then with friends to see if it had changed. There was usually a kind of uncomfortable feeling when I did, especially when I was with people from way back when, the kind of people who'd go there before an Asexuals or a Me Mom & Morgentaler show and knew what the Bifteck was and what it meant. Those visits wasn't melancholic—we weren't that sentimental—but rather functional. We'd sit, drink beer and go about our business. If the danger and the mystique were long gone, the convenience remained.

On my last visit—I don't know how long it had been since I'd sat inside for a proper drinking session—I remarked to my friend, an American who'd moved here half a dozen or so years ago and had only recently discovered it, that the bar hadn't changed at all, other than the addition of some flat-screen TVs. We were drinking in the early evening of a late June Saturday, lazily watching the foot traffic up and down the Main.

It didn't take me long to find my thoughts drifting back to the early 90s, but it wasn't out of nostalgia or any sense of wistfulness. I was looking at empty storefronts again. I was looking at musicians and artists and other weirdos and hipsters walking or biking by. And for a moment it felt eerily familiar: the telltale signs of tough economic times, a simmering vibrancy underneath the rust and dust, the seemingly natural gravitational pull this stretch of the Main exerted on locals.

I have no idea what kind of space Bifteck occupies in the collective mindset of young local artsy types these days. I suspect it won't ever be as vital to the city's alternative culture as it once was (or at least appeared to me to be. I may be totally wrong and delusional.) But judging from the crowd of younger drinkers filing in as evening slipped into night and my friend and I near-staggered out, I felt that the bar really hadn't changed its essence all that much since my time.

When you got down to its essentials, Bifteck remains a bar that welcomes day drunks and night crawlers. The biggest surprise was the uncomfortable realization that I'd changed from the latter into the former.

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by ROBYN BECK / Staff via Getty

US News

Obama Urges Voters to Carry Clinton to Victory
President Obama said he was ready to "pass the baton" to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and urged the American people to "carry her the same way you carried me." Attacking Donald Trump as a "homegrown demagogue," Obama said, "I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump."—NBC News

WikiLeaks Releases Hacked DNC Voicemails
WikiLeaks posted 14 minutes of audio of what it claimed were hacked voicemail messages from top Democratic officials on Wednesday night. Some appear to show donors trying to get favors from top-level officials, while others show dissatisfaction with Bernie Sanders's campaign.—CNN

Police to Rally Against Black Lives Matter Banner
The mayor of a Massachusetts city has refused to remove a Black Lives Matter banner hanging outside city hall, despite state police planning a rally against it. Somerville mayor Joseph Curtatone said standing up for the town's black residents and supporting police officers were not "competing interests."—CBS News

Next Presidential Library Set for Chicago's South Side
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have reportedly chosen Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago as the site of the future Obama presidential library. The Obama Foundation will oversee construction. A formal announcement is expected in the next few days.—The Washington Post


International News

ISIS Bombs Kill 50 in Kurdish-Held Syria
Two explosions have struck the Kurdish town of Qamishli in northern Syria, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens of others. A truck loaded with explosives blew up, followed by an explosion from a motorbike in the same area minutes later. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack.—Al Jazeera

Australian Cardinal Denies Sex Abuse Claims
Cardinal George Pell, Australia's most senior Roman Catholic, has denied allegations he sexually abused children. Police in Victoria state are investigating several allegations against the cardinal, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has broadcast details of alleged incidents from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.—ABC News

Second French Priest Attacker Identified
French prosecutors have identified the second man who attacked a priest in a church in Normandy as Abdel Malik Petitjean, 19. ISIS had released a video of what it says are the two attackers, Petitjean and Adel Kermiche, pledging allegiance to the group before killing Father Jacques Hamel in his church on Tuesday.—BBC News

Turkey Shuts Down Dozens of Media Outlets
Turkish authorities intensified their crackdown on suspected sympathizers of the failed coup by shutting 131 media outlets. The government said that three news agencies, 16 television channels, 45 newspapers, 15 magazines, and 29 publishers have been ordered to shut down. Another 1,700 military personnel have been dismissed.—Reuters


Mark Zuckerberg at a TechCrunch event in 2014. Photo via Wikimedia Commons


Everything Else

Facebook Posts Huge Earnings Growth
Facebook earned a higher-than-expected $6.44 billion in the last business quarter. CEO Mark Zuckerberg hailed video for attracting new advertisers and said video would soon be "at the heart of all our services."—The Guardian

Michael Jackson's Nephews Launch Libel Suit
Jackson's nephews Taj, TJ, and Taryll Jackson, members of the group 3T, have launched a $100 million libel lawsuit against Radar Online. Radar alleged that Jackson sexually abused young boys and that his nephews knew about his crimes.—Pitchfork

Trump Rushes Through His Reddit AMA
Reddit users were left disappointed after Donald Trump promised a "huge" Ask Me Anything (AMA), but answered only a handful of questions. Users submitted hundreds of questions, but Trump replied to only eight, with mostly one or two sentence answers.—VICE News

Most Americans Scared of Biohacking
A new survey by Pew Research Center reveals the majority of Americans are afraid of biomedical technology. The idea of brain chips was disliked by 69 percent of those surveyed, and synthetic blood was disliked by 63 percent.—Motherboard

British Columbia Freaks Out over Birth Tourism
A petition filed in parliament is calling on the Canadian government to stop "birth tourism" in British Columbia. Locals have accused Chinese mothers of delivering their babies on Canadian soil in order to get citizenship.—VICE News


The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: How Barack Obama Stole the Democratic Convention from Hillary Clinton

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Full disclosure: My eyes watered a bit during Barack Obama's long, wide-ranging description and defense of America at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night. It was a sympathetic response, perhaps, to the thousands of teary eyes around me—the president's included—or maybe just some kind of innate vulnerability to the Capra-esque emotional patriotism. I'm sure the speech will be picked apart ad nauseam by the political pundits tasked with that job, denounced by Obama's opponents on both the right and left as they drill into specific questions about his claimed legacy and praise of his would-be Democratic successor.

My eyes, though, idiots that they are, just sort of did their own thing. They'd never seen someone control an entire arena of people like that, not in real life. It was a reminder that Obama could have been a preacher, or a stand-up comedian—but instead, he became president. And now, he's Hillary Clinton's most powerful weapon.

His speech Wednesday was the most compelling rebuttal Democrats have laid out so far to Donald Trump and the apocalyptic vision of America that he offered at the Republican National Convention last week. Of course, most of the speakers in Philadelphia have gone after Trump; before Obama took the stage Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden had already effectively called the real estate mogul a dangerous idiot, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg had labeled him a shyster—"I know a con when I see one," he told the audience sagely—and Clinton's own vice presidential nominee, Virginia senator Tim Kaine, had tested a bumbling but surprisingly funny impression of the Republican nominee.

But Obama, who is not prone to hatchet jobs, instead presented a deeper, more intellectual contrast to Trump's fearmongering claim that America is broken and he's the only one who can fix it. "America is already great," the president told the rapturous delegates. "America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump."

The country, Obama continued, draws its strength from people like his Kansan grandparents and their small-town ancestors. "They didn't like show-offs. They didn't admire braggarts or bullies," he said. "They didn't respect mean-spiritedness, or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, they valued traits like honesty and hard work. Kindness and courtesy. Humility, responsibility, helping each other out. That's what they believed in. True things. Things that last. The things we try to teach our kids."

That kind of laundry list of flat-state virtues can easily come off as hokey or cliché. And the next section of Obama's speech, in which he suggested that those values are fundamental to the American experiment, could be scoffed off as standard-issue political rhetoric, even as he built to an anti-Trump applause line: "That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end."

What made the speech powerful was that it was essentially a paean to quiet strength, a subject that has been sorely ignored in an unusually loud election season. A video introducing Obama praised him for his empathy, preparation, and calmness in moments of crisis—and while any kind of hagiography has to be taken with a grain of salt, it's true that Obama is essentially the anti-Trump. No bluster, no violence or end times in his rhetoric, no promises to build monstrosities or break the world apart. Just steady pragmatism that attempts to advance an agenda through the slow, grinding steps of governance.

"It can be frustrating, this business of democracy," Obama said at one point. "When the other side refuses to compromise, progress can stall. Supporters can grow impatient and worry that you're not trying hard enough, that you've maybe sold out."

This was an implicit reference to the progressives who have spent the week protesting the coronation of Clinton as the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. Dozens of Bernie Sanders delegates walked out of the convention in protest on Tuesday, and it was presumably Sanders supporters who heckled both Kaine and Obama with chants against the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership when the two men addressed the arena Wednesday.

Naturally, Obama praised Clinton effusively, calling her the "woman in the arena," a reference to an old Teddy Roosevelt line, and saying "there has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America." But he also defended Clinton from her left-leaning critics, addressing Bernie diehards who are threatening to stay home on election day, or cast their ballots for Green Party candidate Jill Stein:

"If you're serious about our democracy, you can't afford to stay home just because she might not align with you on every issue," he chided Democrats. "You've got to get in the arena with her, because democracy isn't a spectator sport," he said. Earlier, he made a similar point, saying, "Even when you're 100 percent right, getting things done requires compromise... democracy doesn't work if we constantly demonize each other."

Obama has critiqued partisan purity before, of course—his "purple states" speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention that launched his national political career was about just that. Some Sanders supporters would surely call Obama out for being too quick to compromise on progressive priorities on issues like healthcare, free trade, and foreign wars. But after a month of terrible news and a Republican convention that painted a portrait of America as on the brink of collapse, a dose of Obama's optimism was powerful, even empowering.

Trump, Obama said, is "selling the American people short. We are not a fragile or frightful people. Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order. We don't look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago." When he then launched into the preamble of the Constitution, the crowd roared with approval.

They cheered for Clinton too, naturally, and at the end, when she made a surprise appearance onstage to receive a hug from Obama, the audience devolved into a happy bedlam. But this wasn't Clinton's night. When Obama gives a speech like this, it's always going to be his night and his party.

With the exception of a few Sanders diehards, everyone in the convention hall on Wednesday will likely be casting ballots for Clinton come November. But you had to wonder how many people agreed with a small voice that yelled out, during a quiet moment in Obama's speech: "Don't leave us."

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

The Best and Worst Speeches of the DNC's Third Night

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Over the last decade, no one has been better at making us laugh at Joe Biden than the Onion. "Shirtless Biden Washes Trans Am in Driveway," read a headline on May 5, 2009—just a few months after he and President Barack Obama were sworn in to their respective offices. And last night, as the vice president spoke to the Democratic National Convention, the long-running satirical newspaper absolutely unloaded an avalanche of Biden headlines, each more hilariously dead-on than the last: "Biden Busted in DNC Parking Lot Selling Bootleg 'I'm With Her' T-Shirts," "Biden Chokes Up While Describing Hardworking Americans Who Can Only Afford Shitty Ditch Weed."

Far from portraying him as a scumbag or parking-lot weed dealer, the joke is that Biden is a "cool dad" type—a suited-up, Secret Service–detailed alternate-universe version of one of the subjects on True Life Presents: My Dad Is a Bro. And he's not alone, for a fair number of the speeches on night three of the DNC were either peppered with dad jokes, or engineered to trigger dad jokes about dad jokes. (Insert your own "domination of the patriarchy continues" remark here—it's warranted!)

Amid chants of "Joe," Biden used his 18 minutes of time to speak rousingly about the middle class, telling the audience at points to quiet down in a way not unlike a father telling his kids in the backseat to stop messing around; after ruminating on Donald Trump's "You're fired!" catchphrase with the amazement of someone who just ripped from a bong, he exhaled, "That's a bunch of malarkey!" like your pops yelling at the TV after someone in the outfield missed catching a fly ball.

In the opening minutes of President Obama's beautifully delivered, pitch-perfect speech, he pridefully referred to his daughters as "two amazing young women who just fill me with pride," before cracking wise on Sasha and Malia, observing how eight years of governing our increasingly rancorous nation has weathered his own physical appearance.

Notable Rock Dad Lenny Kravitz performed "Let Love Rule" backed by a choir and without risking, uh, overexposure, and shortly after a speech delivered by the vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, the FADER and Buzzfeed ran nearly identical Kaine-as-ultimate-dad-joke articles, owing to his folksy, just-fine delivery and his silly Donald Trump impression.

Incidental or not, fatherhood may have been a hot topic during the DNC's third night—but the constant, unending torrent of gun violence in America was a far more potent topic addressed throughout. Film director and Empire creator Lee Daniels gave an impassioned, touchingly shambling speech, urging the government to tackle gun control in a meaningful way. Legendary actress Angela Bassett's appearance with survivors of the 2015 Charleston church shooting was absolutely heartrending, as well as a reminder of the total uselessness that "thoughts and prayers" have accomplished in pushing our country toward a meaningful solution to ending gun violence. And Arizona House representative and victim of gun violence Gabby Giffords's speech provided a moment of equal emotional potency: "Speaking is difficult for me, but come January, I want to say these two words: 'Madam President.'"

After last week's largely agenda-less parade of xenophobia and paranoia, it has been a startling and comforting change to hear actual policy being discussed on a convention stage. The DNC's overall approach in attacking Trump may have been largely unfocused this week, but the issue-focused orations have been specific and effective—especially Sigourney Weaver's speech focusing on climate change, an issue that hasn't been touched on by either side of the political aisle in this election.

"What we're really talking about is people," she said before a powerful doc played. "People whose lives are affected by climate change in America, right now." As is the case with many of the social issues that the US faces during this election cycle, the sentiment might amount to not much else beyond "too little, too late"—but, especially after peeling back the corpse flower-esque layers of cynicism required to get through this year, it's at least a start.

Follow Larry Fitzmaurice on Twitter.

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