Wednesday, August 31, 2016

What to Expect in the Second Season of ‘Weediquette'

Tonight, the season premiere of Weediquette airs on VICELAND at 10 PM. (Watch a trailer above.) In advance of the new season, Weediquette host Krishna Andavolu talked to us about what to expect in tonight's episode—which focuses on pot-smoking parents' battles with Child Protective Services—and the coming season. Read an edited and condensed version of his thoughts below.

We're continuing to chronicle marijuana's move from counterculture into the mainstream, a process that's happened very quickly and with a great amount of excitement. At the same time, though, a lot of people are being left behind.

Our first episode is about parents who have been accused of neglecting their children because they use pot for medical reasons in Kansas, a state where weed is still illegal. For a lot of new entrepreneurs and patients, in the back of their mind they're asking, What am I risking by integrating parenting and pot? That's a question I ask, too, because I'm a young parent—I have a 2-year-old—and I tend to have a lot of pot around me because of my job. We follow the stories of two single moms who don't come from a lot of privilege and are in the midst of having their kids removed because of their weed usage.

With parenting and pot, if you're rich, you're gonna be fine—but if you're not, you're prey to government entities that think that pot is an indicator of poor parental decisions. We lead with that story because it gets at the heart of what Weediquette can do: seeing the larger themes of American life that run through the edifice of pot legalization. I think about why I can do things that I can do and other people can't. As a father, there's nothing that's more important to me in life than my child. What is it like for other people who feel similarly?

While shooting the first season, we found that we're at a point in our culture's relationship with marijuana where it can be commensurate with family life—for a long time, weed was something that was thought to tear families apart. In the second season, we look at weed and community: people forming around their beliefs of what pot can do for them. From football players to Native American tribes, from small business owners in Michigan to people who are trying to kick opiate addiction in Maine—there are so many different pockets of communities that are trying to integrate marijuana into what they think might help them. When you see the world through their eyes, you see that pot is a metonym for other bigger factors in their lives.

Another episode later in the season focuses on how Michigan police use licensed and legal medical-marijuana grows as easy pickings to do raids on. Under the doctrine of civil asset forfeiture, they're able to seize, sell, and fund their police departments from these raids. It's a weird situation, where pot's legal and everyone knows about it but the cops, and it's also another bump in this road to legalization, where the culture of policing—which has been so shaped by the moneyed incentive of the war on drugs—continues despite the fact that weed is actually legal in Michigan. Through stories like these, pot becomes the prism through which we can unpack existential points of conflict that this country still struggles with.

In the episode about opiate addiction, we went to an uncredited backwoods detox facility in rural Maine where former opiate addicts were treating current opiate addicts by giving them massive amounts of THC so they could get through the effects of withdrawal and form a new identity towards treating their pain. A man I met along that way got into an accident, hurt his back, and went to the doctor. The doctor prescribed Oxycontin and the man became addicted; the doctor kept upping the dosage, and at some point the doctor labeled him an addict. The man could no longer get the opiates through prescription, so he went to the street eventually started doing heroin. It's a perfect example of how the institution of pain management in the medical system has failed a gigantic amount of the population in this country, and how that has reached epidemic levels at this point. It affects the life expectancy of white males in the U.S. which hasn't gone down since World War II—but now it has because of the opiate crisis.

As much as medical marijuana is taken seriously, it's still treated as a joke—like, "This is an excuse to get high." But interactions like these provide moments where you see how medical marijuana factors into a profound sense of distrust in this country's institutions. How do you pick up the pieces and move on? What's the next step? It's surprisingly profound stuff, and we scratch the surface of people's motivations and they lay themselves bare. We're forced to confront with how we treat people.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2bK8ZBl
via cheap web hosting

Post Mortem: How Living People Are Wrongfully Pronounced Dead

A few weeks ago, Barbara Murphy was having dinner with her husband at a restaurant in Utah when her credit card was declined. Her husband paid the bill, and when they got home, Murphy's granddaughter called the bank to see what was wrong.

"Of course, it's been declined," the bank's representative told her. "She's been dead for two years."

Murphy is, in fact, very much alive. When I spoke to her on the phone this week, she described the harrowing process of proving her life to numerous institutions, all of which believed she had died.

Murphy has been erroneously added to the Death Master File (DMF), a Social Security Agency (SSA) database of every American who has died from 1936 onward. It contains approximately 88 million records, each with a name, Social Security number, date of birth, and date of death. When the SSA made the database available for purchase in 1980, financial institutions started to rely on it for fraud detection.

Which is why, when Murphy was listed as dead, her bank flagged the activity in her account as fraud. The bank has since unfrozen her account, but now Social Security is trying to recoup two years of payments—about $20,000—that it claims shouldn't have been paid out since she is listed as dead. She's now contacted a lawyer and gone public, hoping to apply pressure for a quicker resolution. She told me she's been getting calls from all over the country from others in the same predicament.

Exactly how many have been in the same situation as Murphy is not known, but the SSA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) estimates that approximately 1,000 people are erroneously added to the DMF every month. A 2013 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that SSA deleted 8,200 erroneous deaths from the DMF in the previous year. These numbers show a very small error rate—less than half a percent of the 2.8 million deaths the SSA records each year, according to a spokesperson from the SSA.

Of course, that's hardly a consolation for someone who's been mistakenly marked as dead. In a 2015 Senate hearing, Alabama resident Judy Rivers described the harrowing ordeal she faced after she was added to the DMF in 2008. Even though she had about $80,000 in her bank account, the bank froze the funds because the account was marked for fraud. Every time she needed to apply for something—a credit card, a job, a student loan, an apartment—she was declined, since her "identity could not be confirmed," or her "social security number was inactive."

Rivers ended up living in her car, and then later in a trailer, struggling to find employment beyond low-wage work, despite having a long and impressive résumé.

So how does this happen? A spokesperson for the SSA told me that reports come "primarily from the states, but also from family members, funeral homes, and financial institutions." Funeral directors are among the largest sources of death reports to the SSA, and because it's easy to make errors, there's been a push to get states (which regulate the funeral trade) to switch from paper records to electronic ones. The Electronic Death Registration (EDR) allows states to automatically verify the accuracy of a decedent's Social Security number before they transmit it to the SSA, "virtually eliminating" the problem of paper records. Nora Menkin, a funeral director at Seattle's Co-op Funeral Home, told me that under the old system, death records "went through just fine about 80 percent of the time," but under EDR, she hasn't experienced any errors.

Of course, living people still find their way onto the list. This past May, a man in Michigan—which uses EDR—was placed on the DMF because a funeral director accidentally entered one wrong digit of someone else's Social Security number.

Mistakes on the DMF also get perpetuated because of the way it's distributed. The database is literally a giant text file sold by the Department of Commerce's National Technical Information Service (NTIS). Subscribing institutions can download the updated file weekly or monthly. But NTIS only makes the last six updates available to download; anything further back, and you have to order the text file on CD. The updates aren't cumulative either, so if someone is wrongfully declared dead in one period and SSA corrects the mistake, they include the same entry with the next update (and only that update) with a "D" for "delete" next to the entry. If the subscriber doesn't record that update, or if their software doesn't translate the "D," then their version of the DMF still lists that person as dead. If they resell or share their version, the error gets replicated.

Because of this, correcting errors can be a nightmare. A New York woman, Patricia LaPorta, was added to the DMF in 2014. The SSA told her they'd fixed the problem in May 2015, but as of March of this year, LaPorta still could not borrow money or file her taxes.

Besides causing problems for the living people who are listed as dead, the DMF isn't even a comprehensive record of those who have actually died. The 2013 GAO report identified 130 individuals with negative ages—likely the result of listing the date of death as the date of birth, and vice versa. They also found 1,941 entries with ages between 115 and 195, most likely due to typos. And a 2015 report by the OIG found roughly 6.5 million individuals believed to be missing from the DMF.

There have been a few attempts to raise awareness for the issue. Tom Alciere, who runs the website Cancel These Funerals, offers a free download of the DMF as well as a list of "undeads"—people he thinks were mistakenly added to the list. Alciere told me he does this to put an end to "DMFing"—his name for erroneous death file inclusion—and claims he's had a few success stories. Four living people discovered through his site that they were listed as dead and worked with the SSA to correct it before it became a problem for them, he told me.

But from the SSA's perspective, the DMF was never designed to be the One True Death List. It was, instead, a way for SSA to administer its own programs—and, based on government audits, it seems the SSA does a pretty good job of using the DMF to ensure it doesn't make unnecessary payments to dead people.

Plus, there are already better private databases of who's dead and who's not, according to a report by the Treasury Department's OIG, and there's no reason private institutions can't use these services today to cross-check the DMF.

Murphy, who is still struggling to resolve the aftermath of being listed on the DMF, believes her fight is far from over. When she visited the SSA's local office to contest her status as a deceased person, she was prompted to enter her social security number into the ticket system. It wasn't recognized. "Of course," she said. "Because I'm dead."

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2bDwYmS
via cheap web hosting

Inside the Fight Between Child Protective Services and Pot-Smoking Parents

On the season premiere of Weediquette, host Krishna Andavolu continues to chronicle pot's journey into the mainstream. This week, he'll talk to people fighting Child Protective Services over their pot usage.

Weediquette airs Wednesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2bCcfmu
via cheap web hosting

Here's How People Are Actually Using Bitcoin


Thumbnail image via Wikicommons

Bitcoin is a cipher—literally and figuratively. The crypto-currency conjures a William Gibson–esque panorama of dark web Tor servers, masked figures cavorting in Eastern European shipping containers, multibillion dollar South American cartel-laundering operations, gaunt college sophomores picking up Silk Road designer drugs at liberal arts–school mailboxes, and so forth. It's also an indicator of libertarian Silicon Valley utopianism where everyone pins their identity to the blockchain, eschewing the globalist banking Nanny State and spending the rest of their lives blissfully playing video games on a seasteader colony in international waters.

All this geopolitical intrigue and philosophical gesticulation omits the fact that, in 2016, Bitcoin is a real currency used by normal people. Following last night's episode of Black Market: Dispatches looking at Bitcoin-driven commerce on the dark web, we've interviewed six of those users, most of whom have asked for their identities be kept anonymous. They use bitcoin for buying drugs, selling sex, evading genome-investigation regulations, exploiting supermarket-account hacks, gambling in Las Vegas, and more. Here are some examples of the type of things people use Bitcoin to pay for.

Drugs (and Tesco vouchers)

I've been buying Bitcoin for four years and have used it on a variety of dark-web websites. I buy it legitimately from Bitcoin sellers on authorized sites, run it through a few Bitcoin tumblers, and deposit them on the dark-web site I want to purchase it through. It costs a small percentage of Bitcoin to do this, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. Law enforcement has gotten sharper in recent years—not like how it was four years ago. The process normally takes a few hours, so I start it at the beginning of the day and try to get it through to the dark web market before postage closes.

When I started buying, it was only £3 per bitcoin—I wish I'd invested more at the time, but I didn't. I've used many dark-web sites, from Silk Road, Silk Road 2.0, Sheep Market, Agora, and now Alphabay. Mostly I've been successful—I've been scammed a few times, though, but only for small amounts. I mainly use it to buy drugs because the quality and price is much better than buying from a street dealer. I've bought ecstasy, hash, cocaine, acid, 2cb, mescaline, and opium, but I've also used it to buy cracks for software and £100 worth of Tesco club card vouchers for around £30.

Sex worker advertisements

I manage locations in the sex industry, an industry very reliant on alternative currencies and untraceable forms of payment. For many years, the industry standard for how sex workers paid for advertisements and online services was using prepaid Visa cards that weren't directly linked to their identity. In the past few years, because of a pretty highly publicized battle between backpage.com and Visa/Mastercard (read more here), a lot of sex workers and industry managers have turned to Bitcoin and other alternative currencies. I use Bitcoin to fund accounts that enable me to put up advertisements for the women who work each day. My boss uses a Bitcoin brokerage firm in Brooklyn—he's wealthy enough to do that, but for many people in the sex industry, that isn't possible. Many young, independent sex workers lack the funds, education, and technology to set up Bitcoin for themselves.

Genome-sequence analysis

I paid $200 to have my genome sequenced by 23andMe, and I was underwhelmed with it. Then I found this website called Promethease—promethease.com—that takes all your genetic data (which, I guess, is a little sketchy) as well as $5 (or the equivalent in Bitcoin); in exchange, you get a zip file with a self-contained web app that presents what associations your single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have with various diseases/traits. The juicy information was more accessible than at 23andMe, and they can get away with telling you things that are more high stakes—even when the science is still incomplete. For example, there are no 23andMe reports for Parkinson's disease, but on Promethease, I can type in "Parkinson's" and see that I may have a slightly increased risk of developing Parkinson's. I take it all with a grain of salt, though—it'd be silly not to.

Gambling

I got into Bitcoin around 2010, when the price per coin was still under a dollar, and there was no real infrastructure or institutional investment associated with it. I tinkered around with it and was able to mine an entire block of 50 Bitcoins on my shitty little PC, and I held onto it because I thought it was interesting from tech and political perspectives. Also, pre–Silk Road, there wasn't anything you could use it for besides weed and alpaca socks.

As the price went up, I started spending it. The first thing I bought was a pizza, and then I bought parts to build a computer from a site called bitcoinstore.com., which shows that you can run a store and sell PC parts cheaply for Bitcoin. I bought acid twice from Silk Road, too. These days, I mostly use it as a really volatile savings account, and for gambling money: There's a "Bitcoin ATM" inside the D Casino in downtown Vegas, and anytime I go out there, I pull out a couple hundred bucks and gamble with it.

Fake IDs

My boyfriend got his Fake ID taken in the Hamptons last week, so now he's ordering one from a site recommended on Reddit that only accepts Bitcoin payments.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2c196KY
via cheap web hosting

Remembering Dead Friends on Overdose Awareness Day

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android.

This piece was published in partnership with the Influence.

Wednesday is International Overdose Awareness Day. Days like this used to feel weird to me: I spend most of my time working with and loving people who use drugs—providing trainings, working at syringe access programs, doing street outreach, and fighting against harmful and racist drug war policies. Being around overdose deaths and communities affected by them is the norm. So official awareness days can feel disconnected from my daily struggle.

This isn't to say I don't want people to know about overdose—though perhaps we should more often talk about "drug-related deaths," since many involve combinations of different drugs, rather than too much of one.

I do want people to know.

I want people to know how horrible it is to have lost so many people that you stop dressing nicely for funerals, and eventually stop going altogether. By the time I was 21, I had more dead friends than fingers. I stopped being able to tell the difference between suicides and accidental overdoses—I stopped thinking that differentiation mattered. I leaned into the temporary nature of friendships and relationships, celebrating connection hard because it could very well dissolve at any moment.

I often want to scream and cry about overdose, to make people know about how crushing it is—but usually this sentiment is strongest when people I know or am connected to die, or when something in particular makes me remember them.

August 31 isn't always that day.

But there's something to be said about holding space. Time for reflection and collective consciousness can be both beautiful and useful. As I've grown and lost more people, I've learned to value sharing the weight of the world with others, the weight that impacts them and me.

Check out the VICE News special on detox in New Hampshire prison

Recently, a friend reached out when someone her son knew had OD'd. She was having trouble connecting with him about this loss, this very palpable tragedy that rips through the chests of everyone close enough to feel.

Her son didn't want to acknowledge his friend's death as a tragedy, she told me. Instead, he wanted to celebrate him for "dying the way he lived, dying living the life he chose and wanted."

Her heart seemed doubly weighted with the grief her son refused. But while every drug-related death is tragic, there's something to her bereaved son's sentiment that resonates in my torn-open chest.

It's reminiscent of the colossal walls of sound that reverberated through the warehouse shows of my teens and early 20s. So many of my midnights were spent in stolen or borrowed spaces, my eyes too glazed to see that I was on stolen and borrowed time. I often laughed with my friends when we would lock our bikes four-high on fences without remembering the ride. My sweat was as wonderfully toxic as the music we loved. We bathed in sounds born of hopelessness and hurt—of alienation from society outside of those narrow confines.

I have had more privilege than many, but something about a junkie rejection of the state hits close enough for me to understand it, at least in glimmers and fragments. Our capitalist society doesn't create accessible opportunities for pleasure, expression, growth and connection. It leaves those of us on the bottom, socially or economically, without the agency to create or find the meaning that makes life worth loving sincerely.

Refusing to engage this hatefully violent system on its own terms feels noble, if not alluring. With drugs, those seeking agency or pleasure need only look so far. It's relatively easy to hit a vein, even easier to snort a line—to find bliss, connection, empowerment, life in a world that offers too little of these things.

Not everyone who uses ends up using frequently or "problematically," but use does become a driving force for some. Bruce Alexander's oft-cited "rat park" study is demonstrative.

Early research on addiction offered lab rats the opportunity to self-administer morphine (or sometimes other substances) in the water they drank. These rats' drug use almost always increased to the point of death, solidifying to some the biological inevitability of addiction once substance use begins.

Alexander, noting the rats' glaring isolation as a variable worth exploring, designed a different study. The lab rats were placed in a large cage with toys and tunnels, where they were allowed to be social and have sex. In this experiment the rats consumed significantly less morphine and never died.

The obvious but vital implication is that drug use does not exist in a vacuum, but is heavily influenced by opportunity and environment. Rather than brazenly assuming that addiction is inevitable, we should recognize that our society creates, for many people, an isolated cage.

This, to me, is the site of the deepest pain I feel today.

While each overdose death is its own devastation to those affected, our collective incapacity to create a human equivalent of rat park—denying people agency, pleasure, community and freedom to the point that they feel the need to reject society in such a harm-associated way—is beyond tragic. There's no amount of candles to hold an appropriate vigil.

On this Overdose Awareness Day I mourn not only the lives lost, but the life lost. So many of those who don't die have wanted other paths that have been denied them. Their isolation is so strong that people may not even realize when they want other opportunities and connections.

Yes, we can and must demand every kind of real help and human kindness and harm reduction intervention. But without deeper structural change, this is a superficial kind of comfort. As deeply committed as I am to harm reduction practice, it is not in and of itself a cure.

A junkie rejection of the state may be deeply resonant, but it is only beautiful if we accept that this heinous capitalist society is the only possible society. This is not a conclusion I assent to. I believe we can do better. We need to do better.

People are dying and have been for a long time—long before white kids in the suburbs started dying and people recognized the "opioid epidemic." Relegating people to the margins will have that effect.

I hope that today you are aware, that you mourn, that you do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself in the face of intractable loss.

But more than show awareness, let's do the work to dismantle a broken system and build a better one. Let's take action. Let's recognize harm reduction as resistance to the social and economic structures that produce the harm in the first place. Let's expand our conception of harm reduction to include struggling to change the system so that it allows for human growth, opportunity, meaning and agency.

Let's take today to grieve, but tomorrow, let's come back and fight.

Soma Navidson studies and works in health care. She's rooted in harm reduction and primarily focuses on housing justice, prison abolition, queer and trans liberation, and fighting the drug war. Some of her thoughts on nursing and the medical-industrial complex can be found at her blog: nursingroar.tumblr.com.

This article was originally published by the Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2bSUFbs
via cheap web hosting

Kevin Smith Will Keep Making Movies Whether You Like It or Not

All photos courtesy of Invincible Pictures

Kevin Smith knows exactly where he wants to die: the Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, New Jersey, It's where the veteran filmmaker was born, where his mother recently spent time for a minor illness (she's fine now), and it's the town where he grew up—where his comic book shop Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash (the staging ground for Smith's AMC reality show Comic Book Men) is located, and where the current Los Angeles residents sometimes wishes he could spend the rest of his life.

"If I'm lucky, I'll get one of those old-person illnesses where it takes a while to take you out or something—then I can go to Red Bank so I can die in the same hospital I was born in," he says while reclining on a cushy leather couch in a conference room in his New York publicist's office. "That would be intense, dude!" A phone starts ringing, and Smith exasperatedly rises from his position to hang it up before flopping face-down on the couch with his chin resting on the armrest—a position he stays in for the remainder of our interview. Today he's decked out in a backwards baseball cap, a hockey jersey styled with the logo for comic book hero the Flash, jean shorts, and scuffed New Balances—the closest thing to what you could call a uniform for the indefatigable indie filmmaker.

Uniforms—and, by extension, the costumes superheroes don both when they're saving the world and when they're trying to hide their identities—play a role in Smith's 12th feature film, Yoga Hosers. A spin-off of 2014's horror-comedy Tusk and the second installment in his Canada-focused "True North" trilogy, Yoga Hosers concerns two yoga-obsessed teenage convenience store employees who tangle with murderous Satanic paramours, cryogenically frozen Nazis, and pint-size Hitler-resembling bratwursts ("Bratzis," as the film calls them). Yoga Hosers is a sensory overload of silly puns, Harry Styles jokes, digitized social-media imagery, spilled maple syrup, and creature-feature oddities that come together to form a movie that feels explicitly comic book-y, even without any connection to an existing franchise. By the end of the film, the convenience store uniforms donned by heroines "the Colleens" (Lily-Rose Depp and Smith's daughter Harley Quinn) might as well resemble superhero outfits—all they're missing is capes.

Yoga Hosers is good-hearted, knowingly dopey, and cartoonishly violent all at once, a pretty rare combination. This singular-ness may be partly responsible for the somewhat brutal reviews it's gotten since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year, but despite the negative press, Smith seems proud of making a truly unique film. "When I showed it to some of Harley's friends, there was this one boy who was like 'It's not like any other movie I've ever seen—it's not like The Avengers.' I was like, 'That was a successful movie, so no, it will never be like The Avengers.'"

Indeed, one element that Smith's kept intact well into the third decade of his career is his capacity for self-deprecation—a way of kicking against the critical pricks, maybe, but also a capable method of deflection that enables him to continue his impressive working pace. "I've been taking shit for this movie since Sundance," he laughs. "People on Instagram keep saying, 'Just give us Clerks 3!' I get it, that's totally fine. I just want to make the movies I want to see."

VICE: Something that stands out about Yoga Hosers is how feminine-focused the film is. What have you learned about women from raising a daughter?
Kevin Smith: So much more than I knew when I started making movies. The female characters in Clerks were written by a guy who didn't know any other females besides his mom and his sister. All of my characters tended to sound a bit like me, including the female characters. My wife is a hardcore feminist, which bleeds into who I am—and rightfully so. I do feel like my feminine side was always there. Most people say, "You're a girly man," because I've got boobs, but I felt like having a wife and kid really put me in touch with my feminine side. There's no way I would have made this movie had I not met either of those two.

With Yoga Hosers, I couldn't write or direct 15-year-old girls better than they could write and direct themselves, so I turned to them all of the time and said, "What would you guys do? What would you say? How would you feel?" It's easier to leave it up to them, and that's one of the things you to learn—sometimes you have to just let other people take the lead.

You were an early adopter of social media. Taking into account the increase in online harassment towards women, how have you seen discourse on the internet change since you first started using it?
When I jumped out on the net, there were two filmmakers on there—me and Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson got smart and started directing Oscar-winning movies, and I'm still on the internet. So I've watched the slow decline from civility. You just see the free-floating hostility. As far back as 2001, though, people were just merciless—so has it changed that much? It's gotten much less civil and it can be a blood sport for people, but that's always been the case.

There are a few bad apples, but you can't let it spoil the bunch for everybody. This technology allowed a lot of us to find each other. When I was a kid, I didn't know any other people that liked the shit that I liked, so I felt alone. Then the internet happened and I was like, "Oh my God, you love Star Wars too? I thought there was nobody left." It's a wholly good thing. but unfortunately, from time to time, people fuck around with it.

There's two paths in life: creation and destruction. Destruction is easy, but creation requires you give a little bit of yourself and risk something. As long as you understand that going in, you get to make things and feel good at the end of the day. I have a sneaking suspicion if shit never worked out for me, I'd probably be a motherfucker online. So I have an understanding in my head and heart for it. But I also wouldn't ever be that because I wouldn't let myself. You never get anywhere attacking people online.

As a comic-book fan who understands the nature of fandom, how do you reconcile negative reactions to your work with what your understanding of fandom is?
You can't not make shit just because you're not guaranteed success. Some shit is worth doing just for doing—I learned that from Mallrats. It died at the box office, everyone hated it, then ten years later, everyone is like, "Mallrats, I fucking love that movie!" I have experience with making something that the world doesn't fucking dig.

The worst part of making movies, for me, is releasing them theatrically. It leaves you wide open for people to say, "You fucking failed!" Failure is immediate to people. They don't see the long game—or, in my case, the long con, which is, "It might not work for you now, but if you give it a minute, maybe it'll work then." If you're doing something different, you're going through the door first, and the first person through the door is the one who gets shot—so you have to decide if it's worth getting shot. To me, it always is. I look at JJ and think, "Goddamnit, I wish I was like JJ." Everything he does, everyone loves. But I'm Kevin Smith, and I like being Kevin Smith—it fucking rocks!

Yoga Hosers is based in Canada, but you've featured your home state of New Jersey throughout your previous work. What is it about the state that keeps calling you back?
It's credibility! Very few states that have that aura. I think I get a lot of passes for being from New Jersey. It's instantly relatable to people, and it makes you more authentic and real in their eyes. It's a big part of who I am, and I always come back to it. Being from Jersey puts a chip on your shoulder because you grow up next to Manhattan—you always feel like you're living in someone else's shadow. But it gives you a thicker skin and it makes you try harder.

Follow Larry Fitzmaurice on Twitter.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2bVWVxZ
via cheap web hosting

Why India's Men's Rights Movement is Thriving

The crowd at the 8th National Men's Conference in Hyderabad, India. Photos by the author

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android.

On August 14, 2016, a room of 170 men and a handful of women in the south Indian city of Hyderabad sat in rapt silence to the image of a bearded Texan man addressing them via Skype. The speaker was Paul Elam, the founder of A Voice For Men, perhaps the most popular website in the men's rights movement.

Elam—a sworn "anti-gynocentrist" and champion of the American men's rights movement—demurred that he was the student that afternoon.

"You guys are lightyears ahead of us," he boomed. "The Indian movement is setting an example for the whole world."

The Indian men's rights movement is thriving. What began in the early 2000s as a series of local support groups for aggrieved husbands fighting the supposed misuse of a law that protected Indian women from dowry-related crimes has grown into a network of men's rights groups with the basic anatomy of a political movement.

Unlike the American MRM, men's rights activists in India are viewed as fairly legitimate lc. In recent years, they've been featured on network news debates, lobbied judges, demonstrated at marathons, and delivered TED talks. Central to the movement, though, are the group meetings held every week in major Indian cities where MRAs council each other on how to stand up for their rights.

"You've really done a revolutionary thing," Elam congratulated his audience seated several time zones away on banquet chairs at the 8th National Men's Conference, an annual Indian MRA event, earlier this month. "You've come together for the benefit of men."

As the movement in India has grown, it has also styled itself closer to the American MRM, moving its focus away from countering specific "anti-men" laws into being a wide platform through which men band together.

One primary grievance was the "dowry law"—formally, Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code—which was created in 1983 to protect women from harassment, abuse, and violence in cases where a bride's family did not provide a sufficient dowry. Under the law, police could automatically arrest husbands and family members accused of committing dowry-related crimes. MRAs saw this as giving women too much power and lobbied to change the law. In 2014, the Indian Supreme Court took their side and removed the automatic arrest provision, purportedly to protect men against "disgruntled wives."

Since then, MRAs in India have embraced a growing number of issues that they claim plague men in the country today: gender-biased laws, a feminist media, and an internationally funded feminist agenda bent on dismantling the Indian family.

Watch: The Women of the Men's Rights Movement

"Feminists are doing certain things that are breaking our society and our world," Partha Sadhukhan, a software engineer from Bangalore in his mid-30s, told me on one of the conference's tea breaks.

Sadhukhan joined the MRM five years ago when a sticky divorce left him in search of brotherhood. It was then, he said, like many others at the conference, that he found the men's rights movement and woke up to the "condition of men in India."

Sadhukhan, who runs a popular MRA blog, calls himself a "human rights activist" and he stays away from dowry law debates. Instead, he devotes himself to other pet causes, including one cherished by MRAs the world over—debunking rape statistics.

"These things," Sadhukhan said in reference to the fatal 2012 Delhi gang rape of a 23-year old physiotherapy student, "they don't happen. It was a very one-off case."

Men gather in a group at the 8th National Men's Conference in Hyderabad, India

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, India's only source for numbers on sexual crimes, 100 instances of rape are reported every day. Just over one-fourth of them lead to a conviction. Skirting some of the reasons why rape cases in India are withdrawn—coercion by family members, victim blaming, and severely backlogged courts—MRAs use this discrepancy to cry foul.

"The media is defaming our country by highlighting rape," said Barkha Trehan, a woman who joined the movement five years ago when a close male friend of hers was accused of rape.

"Seventy-six percent of rape charges are false. Do we ever talk about the acquittals? Do we ever highlight that the charges are fake?" she asked me. Trehan, a petite woman from Delhi with two kids, told me with delight outside the conference hall that she had raised these questions more than once "on the platform of Mann ki Baat," a radio show hosted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But according to Nandita Bhatia, a gender and violence specialist at the International Center For Research on Women, looking at rape In India only through the lens of numbers is troublesome because of the large number of cases that never make it to police stations.

"There is an overwhelming sense of shame and blame that follows rape victims in India and that cuts across all classes," she told me. "When you base your whole argument on cases that are recorded, you are a huge part of the problem."

Still, "false rapes" have become a raison d'etre for the Indian MRM while the conversation around sexual crimes in India continues.

"At first here only focused on the laws," said Uma Challa, an American-educated biologist who entered the movement 11 years ago. "What I realized interacting with men's groups everywhere is that the problems facing men are much deeper."

Challa joined men's rights activism "pretty much like everyone else," after she was implicated in a dowry-harassment case with her brother. While she was an early adopter of the MRM in India, Challa had spent years defending men's rights in the United States, where she told me she created a helpline for Indian husbands living overseas and "visited every office of every Senator and House of Representative" to rally against the signing of the International Violence Against Women Act.

Challa, an occasional contributor to A Voice for Men, holds little sympathy for feminists, calling her time in the MRM as a woman "a learning experience."

"Feminists are driving stupidity into people's minds, infantilizing women and demonizing men as a group," she beamed. "We talk so much now about Black Lives Matter. What I realized is, men's lives matter."

But for many others, the rise of India's MRM—among both men and women—is troubling.

"It is unfortunate that the men's rights movement doesn't acknowledge the sense of hierarchy and power that men here have in every sphere," said Bhatia.

Follow Suman Naishadham on Twitter.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2bD1InT
via cheap web hosting

Nintendo's New Game Where You Run a Clothing Store Shows That Style is Substantial

All images captured by author.


Get the VICE App on iOS and Android

Among my online circle, Style Savvy: Fashion Forward's release date may as well have been a national holiday. Offering a welcome waypoint between No Man's Sky and the tantalizing promise of fall's packed release schedule, it had quite a few of us tweeting blurry pictures of our 3DS screens at each other, sharing tips, and subtweeting the hell out of our more troublesome fictional customers.

Yet based on some of its release coverage it would be understandable if someone unfamiliar with Style Savvy got the impression the latest game in the series was socially regressive, if not outright sexist—a gum-popping mall princess sim spitting in the face of Lara Croft and Emily Kaldwin and Evie Frye and the all the badass lady characters we've been fighting tooth and nail to see more of in our games. It's just for little girls who don't know any better yet, the antithesis of everything that a modern, inclusive, enlightened gaming public ought to embrace.

And yet here we are doing just that, because Style Savvy: Fashion Forward is positive, affirming and fun. It's a good game within a good series and, just as importantly, it's not good "in spite" of being about fashion. Its subject and its quality are not water and oil.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, people love to look down on the femme. They embrace the notion that behaviors and interests often seen as femme (like fashion and shopping) are shallow and vapid. Even people who strive to be progressive and accepting can get caught up in this way of thinking—hell, I did through much of my childhood and adolescence.

It's the "she's not like the others" school of sexism; the one that says the little girl who chooses the superhero costume is making an objectively better choice than the little girl who chooses the princess costume, ignoring that choice is supposed to be the whole point. In a society where gender roles are constructed and enforced, many of us are pressured from an early age to make our choices based on how we want to be seen (or how others wants us to be seen) rather than on what we like. And we internalize that. Depending on the values of those around us we learn to put the princess dress on even if we hate it, or refuse it even if we love it, because of what it represents. When considered more broadly across conventional gender lines things only get more complicated.

You don't have to identify as femme to enjoy fashion, though, and ironically Style Savvy knows this. It makes as much room for tennis shoes as tulle, and provides players with the tools to attract the style of clientele they identify with most. But that doesn't change the fact that interest in hair, clothing and makeup is predominantly seen as a feminine pursuit.

It can be hard to extricate this knee-jerk dismissal of the overtly femme from the history of fashion games, because there've been some bad ones. But here's something I feel absolutely confident in saying: Not a single title in the history of gaming has been bad because it was about fashion. What has made many of these games bad is instead a lack of substance (and not because fashion is itself inherently insubstantial.)

Look at it this way: In a high-quality fantasy RPG, you do a lot more than walk up to a dragon and stab it a few times. Even at the most basic level there are other systems at play beyond this one repeatable interaction—equipment, experience points, skills, story, and so on. Whether we're talking about dragons or dresses, you still need systems, you still need scaffolding, you still need purpose. It's not enough to deliver content if there's nothing meaningful to do with it, or to build towards. And just like any other kind of game, fashion games need to respect their audience enough to deliver those things, to provide a purpose, and that's where so many have fallen short.

If you want to see what it looks like when a game fails to respect its audience then look no further than Barbie Dreamhouse Party, a collection of dry and repetitive mini-games and dress-up based on the Life in the Dreamhouse Barbie webseries. Few seemed surprised that the game was a letdown when it was released; after all, it was just another Barbie game.

Except it really shouldn't have been "just another Barbie game". Life in the Dreamhouse itself is the complete opposite of the game it spawned. It's lively and full of personality, deeply self-aware, and notably presents its characters as well-rounded individuals with diverse interests including fashion. They do more than skitter around collecting hidden shoes, changing their outfits, and stammering out jokes about non-fat yogurt as they did in the game. Life in the Dreamhouse is not without its problems, but the fact remains that Barbie Dreamhouse Party felt like a hot pink husk in comparison. It felt soulless, like a check being cashed.

This is certainly part of why Style Savvy has held my interest over the years. It doesn't feel like it sees its subject matter as shallow, so there's no excuse to make a shallow experience out of it. In fact, the series has historically been quite good at letting the player themselves decide just how deep they want to go, providing not just content (see Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer) but also risks, rewards, and just enough momentum in purpose to keep things interesting.

For example, here's how I personally play. Customers typically come to you with a budget, and if you exceed that budget by too much they'll leave without buying anything—which is bad, because I'm not running some kind of fashion charity over here. I don't look at a budget as a limit so much as a starting point—it's key to remember that budgets are a soft cap. You can safely go a few dollars over just about every time without any risk. So when someone comes in (especially with a big budget) I will always filter my stock by price and pick a few of the more expensive pieces to build their outfit around. I always add a bag. I always add jewelry. I always layer (even if I don't really need to.) If I'm not exactly nine dollars over their budget, I didn't try hard enough.

The mannequin in your shop window, meanwhile, is an excellent place to display your most expensive outfit, because so long as it's well coordinated someone will inevitably pounce on it with no budget massaging required.

Yes, Style Savvy has given me a world in which I am a well-dressed muse to the masses, and I used that position to become a hyper-profitable capitalist monster. Because I could. Because Style Savvy gave me those tools, and proper motivation to use them.

Beyond your business strategy, Style Savvy lays out its own complications as well. One of the better additions in Fashion Forward is just how effectively it mimics the pitfalls of customer service. In the hairstyling portion of the game, customers come in to request cuts and colours, usually with something in mind; except they don't always know how to express that—just ask the woman who told me she wanted her hairdo to make her "look just like toothpaste." Some will respond well to direct questions about what they want, while others are indecisive until you instead ask them something a little less pointed, for instance if they have any events coming up or if they're getting into any new hobbies. Just like a new runner may come to you for practical shoes, they may also come to you for practical hair. Through these questions you can eventually wheedle out what style will make them happiest and (just as importantly) suit their needs. Sometimes they'll still struggle to find the language they want, or just outright forget to tell you something until you're finished, making you redo part of your work to get it right.

I might hate this system if it wasn't so true to life.

It bears mentioning that Fashion Forward has its flaws, many of them are the same flaws the series has always had. But it also encourages a very healthy way of thinking about personal style, and accomplishes that in such a blessedly non judgmental way. You want to wear frilly clothes and spikey two-toned hair? Go for it. Blue blush and yellow lips? You do you.

There's a point early on in the game that encapsulates its philosophy rather well, when makeup artist Arabella tries to foist her taste on another character who's come to her for a new look. Arabella tells her client that she would look prettier if she did her makeup a certain way, and after you show her the error of her ways she tells you that "Everyone should be able to choose how they want to look without being pressured by anyone else." That's the heart of Style Savvy. The point of respecting someone's choice is to respect them regardless of whether or not you personally connect with their choice.

The role of fashion and makeup in our lives is undeniably complicated, and no one should ever feel obliged to conform to something that they don't enjoy or aren't sincerely interested in.

And that goes both ways. Picking up Tomb Raider instead of Style Savvy shouldn't grant me bonus points on some kind of Cool Lady Gamer tally sheet . I'm in this hobby just as much for the rough-and-tumble ass-kickers as I am for the immaculately-groomed boutique owners, and I will praise Style Savvy for years to come for giving me games that at least take that inclination seriously.

Follow Janine Hawkins on Twitter.

Read more gaming articles on VICE here, and follow VICE Gaming on Twitter at @VICEGaming.





from VICE http://ift.tt/2bD2ZLU
via cheap web hosting

Canada's Border Agency Isn't Saying Much About Its 15 Employees Accused of Sexual Assault


Photo by CP/Darryl Dyck

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

Fifteen Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) employees have been accused of sexual assault in the last decade through the agency's internal investigation mechanism, VICE News has learned.

And at least five of those accused employees still work for the CBSA, according to documents obtained through an access to information request.

In the cases included in the access to information request, women and men reported allegations of sexual assault through the agency's internal investigation mechanism, the Security and Professional Standards Analysis section, which looks into the allegations and determines if they are founded, unfounded, or inconclusive. This process doesn't involve police.

In half of the cases identified by VICE News, police were not called in to investigate, even if the accusation was determined by the CBSA to be founded.

In one 2006 case, which was never made public until now, three different women accused a Border Services Officer of inappropriate touching on separate occasions, but the CBSA's internal investigators found their complaints inconclusive, the incidents weren't reported to police—and the officer is still employed with the CBSA.

In another case in 2013, a female border services officer accused a male border services officer of sexual assault, and she filed a complaint with both the CBSA and police. The CBSA says it fully investigated and found the case inconclusive, but police in Quebec found enough evidence to lay charges. Despite the criminal charges, the male officer is still employed by the agency.

Those are just two of four separate cases in which the employees accused of sexual assault are still employed with the CBSA. In the two other cases, involving a total of three employees, the internal investigations determined the allegations to be unfounded, although police were involved in one of the cases.

The CBSA won't explain why it still employs the five accused, or say where in Canada they are working. There are two additional employees who are currently under investigation, but the CBSA refused to disclose their employment status.

The agency has also declined to say where in Canada the incidents allegedly happened, on what dates they allegedly occurred, or which police departments were involved, citing privacy as a reason to withhold the information.

Though the access to information request revealed 14 internal investigations, the actual number of sexual assault allegations against the agency's employees is even higher.

VICE News identified two more cases that were not included in the documents provided by the agency. In 2010, Daniel Greenhalgh was convicted of three counts of sexual assault for taking women to various locations at the CBSA building and conducting inappropriate strip searches. And in another case, an unnamed CBSA officer was sentenced to two years of house arrest after he sexually assaulted and harassed a fellow officer, in one case putting a gun to her head.

These new details come at a time when sexual assault and harassment allegations are emerging at public and private institutions across North America, including at Canadian and US media outlets, inside the RCMP and the Canadian and US militaries, and on university and college campuses in Canada and the US.

On Tuesday, the Canadian Forces released its second progress report on how it's addressing rampant issues of sexual assault in its ranks, declaring some leaders had been stripped of their positions or charged with sexual assault. Since January, six individuals have been convicted of sexual misconduct-related offenses and another 24 received "severe administrative action," according to Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance.

The CBSA says it automatically launches an internal investigation if an employee is charged with a criminal offense, and its internal investigation runs parallel to the police investigation. When the police investigation concludes, the agency says it will take "appropriate action," which could involve disciplinary measures, including firing that employee.

Pending the result of an internal or external investigation, CBSA managers decide if the accused employee can stay in the workplace, needs to be reassigned to other duties, or has to be removed from the workplace without pay. "If the conclusion is that such a risk exists and cannot be mitigated, then management will consider suspension without pay of the employee, pending the outcome of management's investigation," the agency told VICE News.

In April, Halifax Police charged a border services agent with using his position of authority to repeatedly sexually assault a woman who was scheduled to be deported. The alleged incidents date back to 2003, when the agent, Carie Dexter Willis, worked at the Halifax CBSA office. As of April, he was still employed by the CBSA.

That case only became public because the complainant reported it to Halifax Police, who put out a news release, which was picked up by media including VICE News and prompted a request for information about internal complaints. It took five months for the CBSA to release the information in this story.

Though the agency revealed very little information about these cases, the information it did release showed a pattern of mostly female employees reporting allegations of sexual assault against male employees with no concrete resolution. In total, 14 women and two men reported sexual assaults at the hands of CBSA employees, with the number of cases increasing in recent years. It's not clear whether any of the accused officers were fired, although two resigned, and only five of the 14 cases resulted in police charges.

In the most recent case earlier this year, a female recruit with the CBSA accused a male recruit of sexual assault, and filed an internal complaint with the agency. The CBSA determined internally that her allegations were founded, and the accused recruit has since left the CBSA, but the incident wasn't reported to police, and was never made public.

In another case last year, a police agency (the CBSA won't say which one) charged a male CBSA employee with sexual assault, extortion, and breach of trust after a woman filed a complaint with police. The agency's internal investigation is ongoing, and the CBSA refused to say whether the accused employee is still working for the agency.

The agency would not say whether it suspects more cases of sexual assault are happening but aren't being reported through its internal mechanism.

In a statement to VICE News, the spokesperson said the government agency is "committed to nurturing a culture that is founded on values and ethics of the Public Service of Canada and the CBSA Code of Conduct, and in which all employees conduct themselves in a way that upholds the integrity of CBSA programs and demonstrates professionalism in their day to day activities."

The CBSA says it has "no tolerance" for illegal actions, and its employees are subject to "very strict codes of ethics and behavior." The CBSA takes all allegations of improper or illegal behavior "very seriously," and thoroughly investigates when it learns of these allegations, the spokesperson told VICE News.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2c8XUsR
via cheap web hosting

Kim Davis’s Hometown Just Had its First Pride Celebration

A drag performer gives incredible Kim Davis face in the county clerk's hometown of Morehead, KY. Photo by Michael Wallace, courtesy of Morehead Pride

David Moore has spent the last few months of this year going to pride festivals, handing out information, and recruiting LGBTQ vendors and allies. His message: Come to Morehead, Kentucky. Come to pride.

The now infamous hometown of Kim Davis celebrated its first-ever LGBTQ pride festival this Saturday, decades after such festivities first launched in major cities on both coasts. The day was hot—"probably over 100 degrees," Moore told VICE—and Davis was one face missing from the festivities, though a drag queen dressed to impersonate the notorious Rowan County clerk was on hand to take her place.

"I think it was probably the first time people had seen a drag show in their life," said Moore, the executive director and lead organizer of Morehead Pride. Moore and his partner—also named David—were among the first couples to apply for a marriage license after Kentucky's governor ordered the state's clerks to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, and a video of the two men being denied went viral. "One of the first people who ran out and hugged her was one of the couples in the lawsuit against Kim Davis," he said.

Morehead and Davis rose to national prominence last summer, when Davis made headlines through her objection to last June's Supreme Court ruling legalizing marriage for same-sex couples. An Apostolic Christian, Davis said issuing marriage licenses to gay couples violated her religious freedom and temporarily halted marriage licenses to all couples in Rowan County after denying several same-sex couples. She was sued and jailed for contempt of court.

The clerk's office eventually began issuing licenses without her name on them. But just a year later, a few minutes down the road from her very office, the town briefly became a place to celebrate all things queer.

Moore, who works in the marketing department at Morehead State University, finally married his husband last Halloween, and shortly thereafter began planning a way to show his pride. This spring, he filed papers to incorporate Morehead Pride, a nonprofit dedicated to town's LGBTQ community. With the help of friends experienced in event organizing and generous sponsors like Morehead's tourism board, Eastern Kentucky's first ever pride festival came together.

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence show out at Morehead Pride. Photo by Michael Wallace, courtesy of Morehead Pride

Moore says that a lot of people have accused him of only organizing the event in response to Davis's actions. But Moore disagrees. "I think it was a catalyst," he said.

Unlike last summer, when hundreds of protestors descended upon Morehead to show support or criticism for Davis's actions, only one protester showed up this weekend.

Moore said last year's controversy pushed the town's residents to decide where they stood on the issue of gay rights. Before, many could hide in the background, but suddenly, Davis forced them to confront whether they were allies—or not.

Sheri Wright, a poet and documentary filmmaker based in Louisville, drove to Morehead to attend the festival. She said she'd heard of several inaugural pride festivals this year, including one in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

"There've been people who have been afraid to be allies, or people who have been afraid to not voice hatred, for fear of being labeled part of the LGBT community," she said. " they're saying, who cares?"

Morehead's festival was far removed from the political campaigning, lavish floats, corporate sponsorship, and overt sexuality that's come to characterize pride in major metropolitan areas.

Some of Morehead Pride's 50 vendors paid $20 for a slot, while nonprofits got in free. There were no politicians on the festival agenda—not even the openly gay mayor of Lexington, an hour away, who is running to represent Kentucky in the US Senate. ("Unfortunately, Jim has multiple events scheduled that day and will be unable to attend," a campaign spokeswoman told VICE.)

Eastern Kentucky residents turn out for LGBTQ solidarity. Photo by Michael Wallace, courtesy of Morehead Pride

Instead, it was dominated by local drag performers, marriage plaintiffs, and activists. One speaker brought with him the "Sacred Cloth"—a pride flag that's traveled to historic LGBTQ events worldwide.

" had kind of taken the same steps many of us had," said Nikki Stone, a 27-year-old from Charleston, West Virginia, who'd driven two hours to attend Morehead Pride with her girlfriend, a Kentucky native.

Stone said she is a habitual pride-goer, and Morehead was her seventh or eighth stop this year alone. "It was really wholesome," Stone said.

Another of the featured speakers was Dylan Scott, a 16-year-old student and budding poet at Rowan County Senior High School. Scott is transgender, and all of his friends were there to cheer him on, Moore said.

Performing in front of the crowd was "terrifying," Scott told VICE. But a straight friend came up to perform his first poem with him, about the terrorist attack at Orlando's Pulse nightclub.

"Being up there with him for the first reading made things easier, and so did the fact that the entire first row of people in the crowd were all of my supportive friends," Scott said.

The teenagers were awarded $500 for SAFE, a gay-straight alliance-like club at their school. Still, "being a transgender student in Eastern Kentucky is a pretty difficult situation," Scott said.

But just having Scott there signaled a world of change for Moore, who also grew up in the region in the 80s and early 90s.

"I know when I was growing up, I didn't tell anyone," he said. "There was no one in my high school who was out."

And coming out as transgender then was unheard of. It wasn't until Moore came to Morehead State University, in the heart of Rowan County, that he was able to come out as gay and find support. Yet now in Morehead, Moore said that same-sex couples don't typically wander the streets hand in hand.

"You can't really be completely open here. You just can't," he said. When he and his husband did that, they've gotten yelled at.

But Morehead Pride, Moore said, is here to stay—though it might move to cooler weather.

"I'm thinking October," he said.

Katie Zavadski is a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2c8VEBV
via cheap web hosting

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: A Pollster Explains What He Learns from Asking Voters About Harambe and Deez Nuts

When you're a political pollster, the nuts and bolts of your day-to-day work is gathering and presenting data, so there's not usually much fun to be found. But somehow the folks at Public Policy Polling (PPP) manage to have a grand ole time. The left-leaning Raleigh-based firm asks respondents the usual questions about approval ratings and who they'd vote for, but PPP has also done surveys about whether voters think Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer, demonstrated that Republicans hate lunch, and regularly asks readers for question suggestions. This week, PPP asked respondents whether they'd support building a wall not just on the Mexican border but also on the Atlantic Ocean, in order to keep Muslim migrants out of the US—and 31 percent of Trump backers liked the idea.

Maybe the pollsters' best prank came this July, when PPP showed that by some measures, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is a less popular than beloved dead gorilla Harambe. Then they spiked the ball for internet points: When Stein memorialized Harambe on Twitter—something she later revealed to be some sort of point about the media—PPP seized the opportunity to tweet its poll result at her.

It's Really Hot in Amsterdam

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

The weather in The Netherlands is famously grey and dreary—and this summer was no exception. The temperatures might have been a bit higher than during the rest of the year, but the Dutch still had to whip out their raincoats nearly every day. Even the national weather institute officially confirmed this summer has been "disappointing."

That all changed last week, when the temperatures suddenly started hovering around 32 degrees C . Photographer Latoya van der Meeren went out onto the streets of Amsterdam with her analogue camera to capture the Dutch swimming, sunbathing, and sweating, mostly.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2c0zHIa
via cheap web hosting

Unwrapping the 'Truman Show Delusion,' Where You Believe You're Being Watched by the World

Picture this: you're being followed. Not by someone, but by something. A camera. It's hidden somewhere; everywhere—perhaps in the shrubbery outside your kitchen window, or stuck behind the bathroom mirror, or pushed into the soil of the plant your work friend insists on keeping on her desk. And beyond that camera lies a nation of dedicated viewers, watching your every move.

This was the paranoia that Dr. Joel Gold first encountered in October of 2003, when a 26-year-old man entered the psychiatric hospital where he worked, sharing his strong suspicion that his life was being secretly filmed and broadcast to the world. The man likened it to the 1998 film The Truman Show, in which protagonist Truman Burbank discovers he is the star of his own carefully orchestrated television show. Everyone he knows is an actor, and he is being watched by the entire world.

In years to come, The Truman Show would become a staple reference for many of Dr. Gold's patients with delusions, and plenty of these were documented in the book subsequently written by Joel and his brother Ian, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness.

The Truman Show might be the most apt cultural reference point for this type of delusion, but it's just one of many that relate. In 2003, technology was making strides, and it would only be another four years until Facebook really kicked off. Reality television was going strong—Big Brother was already being broadcast in over 40 countries—and, post-9/11, CCTV cameras were being more widely employed across the western world.

Now, in 2016, the idea of being watched—knowingly or unknowingly—is a distinct possibility, no matter who you are. Social media allows us to exist in fabricated realities of our own making, and television provides us with the manufactured existence of others. Our lives are moderated by technology; we write tweets, stack up Snapchat stories, upload our heavily edited photos to Instagram. Every month, Twitter has 115 million active users. So is it so far-fetched to think that someone, somewhere, might be watching?

Tomoaki Hamatsu on 'Susunu! Denpa Shōnen'

When comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu—nicknamed "Nasubi"—began his stint on 1990s Japanese gameshow Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, he had no idea that people were watching him. In fact, it wasn't until over a year later—when his time on the show came to an abrupt end in front of a rabid studio audience—that he discovered he had been seen by anyone at all.

Transported from the audition room to a small, one-room apartment, producers demanded all of Nasubi's clothes, and he was left alone in the apartment, naked. The idea, he was told, was that he must win everything he needed to survive through sweepstakes. Once his sweepstakes winnings amounted to one million yen , he would be free. Nearly a year later, Nasubi discovered he had "won" the show. Like something out of a Black Mirror episode, the four walls of his apartment fell away to reveal a cheering studio audience. Nasubi screamed. He was still naked.

"My house fell down," he said nervously to the host, and the audience erupted into laughter. The host began to show him his best bits from the past year. "You mean everyone has been watching my naked body all this time?" a shell-shocked Nasubi asked, unaware that the show had been aired. "Is that allowed?"

Nasubi had become a character in his own show without even knowing it. He was Japan's Truman Burbank, without clothes and wild with loneliness, with millions of dedicated fans. Oblivious of his new celebrity status, Nasubi had unwittingly launched his own line of merchandise and several of his diaries had been published, fast becoming best-sellers. The producers had transformed Nasubi into a walking, talking gimmick.

Being put in a room by a production team is clearly nothing like suffering delusions brought on by mental illness, but it does serve to highlight a culture in which having your entire life secretly filmed might be somewhat feasible—that there's some kind of real-world precedent outside of Jim Carrey's fictional experience.

While Nasubi had no idea that people were watching him, we're now all too aware that to be watched without our knowledge is a distinct possibility. The Snowden leaks revealed that governments have long been able to monitor our communication; that they can spy on you through your webcam without you ever finding out. Facebook asks us What's On Our Minds and we tell it. People forge careers out of recording their thoughts on iPhones—and sometimes the making of prank and "social experiment" videos mean that a career comes at the expense of unwitting strangers. If you're already mentally predisposed to suffering from these "Truman Show delusions" (TSD), there's now a barrage of exterior factors to reinforce what might be going on in your mind.

Medical historian Roy Porter once said that "every age gets the lunatic it deserves," and so as culture continues to interact with us in a progressively intrusive manner, it also has the ability to interact with psychoses. As technology changes, the TSD can begin to manifest in new ways. "There is good reason to think that if the environment is more 'toxic,' there will be more illness," says Ian Gold over the phone. "If the social world gets more 'toxic,' psychosis is likely to increase."

Which is why the reference to the Truman Show works for the Gold brothers: it allows patients to easily explain their delusions to their psychiatrist. "People who have it resonate with it. They often say it's a relief to know that this is a real phenomenon and they're not alone," says Ian.

But the fabric of our minds is made from delicate cloth, and if mental illness is—as Joel puts it in the book—"just a frayed, weakened version of mental health," then we must be careful not to pull at that thread. So I ask Ian if there was any trepidation in naming a delusion after such a well-known film, for fear of glossing over the serious nature of the illness with a pop culture reference. It was certainly something that crossed their minds: "We don't want to do anything to trivialize psychotic illness," he says. "Joel knows firsthand how much suffering is associated with it. The worry is that associating the delusion with the movie might make the illness worse. So far, we haven't had any interactions with the movie that made us think this is the case."

As there are risks that parts of the illness can overlap with real life, the brothers are often reluctant to let journalists speak to a patient for fear that the experience of "fame" may make their condition worse. However, this is just precautionary: Joel says that it's not exactly fame that exacerbates the symptoms of TSD, but more social stressors.

Kevin Hall, a patient of the Gold brothers, was the only person happy to have his real name put in their book. Kevin is bipolar, and his TSD is brought on by stressful periods in his life. His delusion involved thinking the world was watching what he called the "TrumanKev Show" during his manic episodes. His first outburst came at college as he studied mercilessly for his mid-terms while simultaneously trying to shake a bout of shingles. He had given up on sleeping and instead was replacing rest with energy drinks. He started to think that all songs on the radio were related to his life.

Kevin Hall. Screenshot via

This episode ended with Kevin approaching strangers in Boston and asking them uncomfortable questions, before coming to the attention of police after climbing a tree. His next episode occurred after graduation, in Japan during a sailing regatta where he and his teammates were stuck in a vicious cycle of partying and competing. His delusions deal with the idea that there was a "director" controlling aspects of his life, which led him to think he could drive around Tokyo in a stolen truck because he found the keys hidden in the vehicle's sun visor. The next was after he discovered he had testicular cancer for the second time (he'd had a testicle removed due to the disease in his last year of college but refused radiation to return to his studies). Another came after the breakdown of his marriage. Most recently, the death of a close friend brought on a brief episode of TSD—after 14 years without one.

Kevin is an anomaly. He is very open about his TSD. He has received media attention in the past; his fight with cancer while competing in Olympic sailing was documented by the New York Times and the Washington Post. While he still takes part in a few professional sailing gigs, Kevin is now a writer. I contacted him on Twitter to talk about whether his relationship with technology was strained due to his condition.

As a writer, Kevin is aware that part of his job is to raise his own profile, and so an online presence became necessary, meaning he had to "fold in the dangerous elements of my psychotic trips with my everyday life." Kevin tried a plethora of different meds when writing his book Black Sails White Rabbits: Cancer Was the Easy Part, which chronicles his struggles with mental and physical illness, and while the new medication worked for a while he eventually found himself falling into a new psychotic episode.

"Before the fall," he tells me, "the feedback loop of social media became very compelling—I post more, search more, interact more, and more. At some point the script flips from that prolific posting to believing everyone is really watching." This switch goes from "broadcasting to share," to "being directed to give a show," and this is the point where things get scary for Kevin, who has spent a long time trying to figure out what exactly it is that triggers his eventual turn—something he is yet to fully understand.

The Truman Show delusion might seem novel to outsiders—no doubt because of the link with the Hollywood film—but really, it's a common paranoid psychosis, attached to a modern point of reference. It's hard to say for sure if the proliferation of technology is impacting the amount of diagnoses, but if the opinion of Ian Gold—an expert on the topic—is anything to go by, it would seem that it might be.

If you are concerned about the mental health of you or someone you know, here's how to get help.

Follow Pascale Day on Twitter.



from VICE http://ift.tt/2c8yqMk
via cheap web hosting

How I Trolled Maine's Racist Governor Into an Ugly Public Meltdown

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.