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This Salt Lake City Day Care Has Become a Magnet for Conspiracy Theories

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All photos by the author

Visit Salt Lake City in February, in inversion season, and you'll hardly see further than 50 yards. The rocky mountain ranges, the dozens of craft breweries, the looming Salt Laky City Temple are all shrouded in gravy-thick smog. But even through the haze, if you wound up at the intersection of 1300 South and 300 East, it's impossible not to see the Fun Time Kidz Day Care, a DayGlo-green building with purple doors and yellow trim around windows blocked with pictures that look like they've been torn out of old coloring books. There's a deserted playground out back which, if it existed in a Silent Hill game, would definitely be a place where a zombie child would lurch out at you.

Depending on who you ask, Fun Time is either a normal day care (albeit a slightly creepy one) or a cover-up for something insidious. Possibly a CIA black site, a drug front, or an organ harvesting operation. For the people who suspect something sinister, it's become the subject of an enduring mystery: What's going on in this building, and why has nobody seen kids come in or come out?

The Fun Time Kidz Day Care conspiracy began on January 25, 2015 when user discogodfather6922 posted a photo to Reddit. He wrote that he'd lived nearby for five years, but he'd never having seen any "kidz" having a "fun time" inside. (The original thread, now completely redacted, is preserved on Imgur.)

Soon, other Salt Lake City locals weighed in. One user had admitted to seeing children inside, despite the cardboard in the windows. Another user claimed to be a letter carrier who had been inside the day care and said it was fully functioning. "The only strange thing is," the user added, "no matter what time of day I showed up with their mail, it always seemed to be nap time." Another user claimed to know someone who broke into the facility out of curiosity and found one room with a "chair facing a TV displaying a live video of another room in the building."

Later, users claiming to live in the neighborhood chimed in to say the place was just a normal day care, swept up in paranoia from digital sleuths. But their defenses aroused suspicion from other users. "I'm just going to point out that every person in this thread saying this place is legit registered their accounts in the last 15 or so hours," posted a user called Gthing.

The conspiracy theories reached a fever pitch so quickly that after only a few days, Reddit admins deleted the original thread from r/saltlakecity. At that point, there were already hundreds of posts and users had begun harassing the business and posting personal information about the owner, which the admins said amounted to doxxing. Banning all discussion of the day care, the admins argued, was necessary to stop future "witch hunts" and to " by an ignorant person who doesn't know what's going on," Dolan said. That said, he conceded the place was "creepy as hell."

And perhaps that's it—our hunger for the strange, bizarre, and fantastical can outweigh the more boring truth. The conspiracy against Fun Time took a peculiar building and turned it into a larger-than-life legend, much like shadows on a wall appear large and scary, and take on an entirely different shape than the objects they come from. "They have these steel spring playground animals," Dolan said, "and on a winter night, or any night really, when it's desolate, those things take on a creepy vibe."

Follow Eric Peterson on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: Australia Just Passed a Bill to Legalise Medical Marijuana

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Australian-grown cannabis products will soon be available for medical treatment. Image via

The Narcotic Drugs Amendment Bill 2016 was passed in both houses of parliament today, paving the way for medical marijuana in Australia.

While Australia already has laws surrounding the import and exports of cannabis products, growing and distributing medical marijuana here isn't legal. The bill is very specific, establishing "licensing and permit schemes for the cultivation and production of cannabis and cannabis resin for medicinal and scientific purposes."

Today's debate in the Senate was overwhelmingly in favour of the bill. Some senators spoke of the positive impacts medical marijuana had on people in their electorates, many of whom had to risk jail to obtain cannabis treatment. At one point Tasmania Labor senator Anne Urquhart became visibly emotional as she recounted the experience of a mother from the state's north west coast trying to get treatment for her young daughter April.

"April suffers from Dravet syndrome that causes her more than 1000 seizures a day," the senator explained. "At their wits end Jessie and her partner Paul turned to cannabis oil in an attempt to contain April's attacks.

"It wouldn't be an overstatement to describe April's turn around as miraculous. With her attacks dropping from triple digits to as few as six."

Health minister Sussan Ley, who had first tabled the bill, also thanked those who had campaigned for legalisation. "I would particularly like to acknowledge the many patient advocates who have played a tremendous and tireless role in bringing this important issue to the attention of the nation," said Health minister Sussan Ley, who had first tabled the bill.

Minister Ley also announced the establishment of a national regulator, which will "closely track the development of cannabis products for medicinal use from cultivation to supply and curtail any attempts by criminals to get involved."

The Greens have been pushing the Therapeutic Goods Administration to consider reclassifying medical marijuana, as it is currently a schedule 9 drug, alongside heroin and ice. "Cannabis, as the law now stands, is an illegal drug," Greens leader Richard Di Natale said. Following today's debate Minister Ley confirmed the government would be down-scheduling the drug to Schedule 8, a "Controlled Drug," where it will join fentanyl, methadone, and oxycodone.

"This is an historic day for Australia and the many advocates who have fought long and hard to challenge the stigma around medicinal cannabis products so genuine patients are no longer treated as criminals," Ms Ley said.

Follow Maddison on Twitter.


What It's Really Like to Be a Popular 'Weird Twitter' Personality

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If Charlie Brooker is right and Twitter is the most significant video game ever made, then the people I spoke to for this succession of Q&As could be seen as democratically-elected final bosses.

With an average of 50,000 to 100,000 followers, each one of these Twitter comedians (I say "comedians" – I mean people who are great at making others laugh in 140 characters or less) has become a weird type of celebrity, their jokes reaching tens of thousands of people at a time, while nobody actually knows what they look like or who they are because all their AVIs are pictures of turtles.

I wanted to know what it feels like to go from tweeting the occasional gag to five or six followers – your three regular pub mates, your aunt, that old geography teacher who's somehow found and added you on every social media platform going – to having a captive audience of thousands. So I spoke to a few funny tweeters who have experienced exactly that.

GoaT FacE ThrillA (@EndhooS) – 38,000 followers

VICE: Hi. What's your deal?
@EndhooS: Hello, I'm Matty, a pretend killer goat off the internet. Despite the daily war of attrition making it seem like I've been writing dumb stuff on there forever, I've only been doing this sort of thing for a few years.

What do you do for a living?
I put steam on the table for my family via my job in engineering. It acts as a clever sideshow to my all-consuming Twitter empire.

Was there any particular moment where you found yourself getting loads of new followers?
In my experience, Twitter is a series of peaks and troughs where followers are concerned. It tends to take an agonisingly long time when you first start out, but then you might write a tweet that proves to be very popular and it can really help get you noticed by the community. I can certainly count back to certain tweets that just blew up and seemed to gain me a big jump after being retweeted by celebrities or the big guns of joke Twitter.

How has Twitter changed your life
Besides giving me a platform to act like a moron on a global scale? Not a lot, actually. Despite having all the trappings of adulthood, I've never really grown out of being the class clown at school. Twitter has given me a handy little space to blurt out my musings. I'd have never been interviewed like this without Twitter. It's slowly starting to open the door to doing a bit more comedy writing. Now I just need to find a way for it make me filthy rich. Having tens of thousands of followers hasn't earned me anywhere near enough to buy a giraffe or whatever.

Have any companies approached you to advertise on your account?
Not really, but it would be nice if they would. I've recently been propositioned about a bit of scriptwriting for short animations, which is something I've always had an interest in trying my hand at. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out. But seriously, if you're reading this, pay me money to be an idiot on the internet. Or just give me some free shit. I'm open to either, to be honest.

jomny sun (@jonnysun) – 136,000 followers

Hello. Tell me about you.
@jonnysun: I'm @jonnysun! On Twitter I suppose I write very loosely through the perspective of an alien trying to learn his way around being a human. In real life, my name is Jonathan Sun. I'm from Toronto originally, and I've been tweeting for about three years.

What do you do for a living?
I'm a PhD student at MIT. Being a student is very fulfilling because I feel like I'm constantly learning and being challenged, but it's not entirely fulfilling creatively – that's where Twitter comes in. It's an incredibly fulfilling creative project that is direct and immediate. I guess, in a way, it's a big part of my life in the sense that it consistently keeps me creative and sane and active. I've always said that if any opportunities to survive and make a living come out of Twitter – in terms of being able to do full-time comedy work and/or other creative work – then I would absolutely jump at it and pursue it. Slowly and surely things are happening.

How do you come up with your ideas for tweets?
Oh man, I could go on about inspiration for hours. Ultimately, I'm constantly trying to consume information and media and entertainment all the time – which is actually something that Twitter and social media is great for doing. I believe that ideas are fuelled by ideas – the more things you can expose yourself to, the more creative ammunition you have to work with. In terms of actually writing, it comes and goes. I keep an Evernote document that is just a giant list of ideas, topics or even just funny words or phrases that don't really mean anything – basically, it's just so whenever something flashes through my brain I can write it down immediately and not lose it.

What do you think of the 10,000 word limit structure that Twitter was considering implementing? Would it change the way you work, or do you think you'd still keep to short tweets?
I think I get whyJack wants to do it – and there are a lot of reasons that are completely justified and make a lot of sense for Twitter, including providing extra value for content creators, journalists and readers (and advertisers...) But I don't think I'd use it that much. The 140-character constraint is by far the most important factor that has shaped what comedy on Twitter means – it's created an entirely new language, and I do believe that Twitter has become an entirely new and unique medium for comedy and for writing. I think a lot of that uniqueness will vanish the instant the character limit no longer matters. Of course, it could – and will – create new types of Twitter humour, but I personally fail to see how something more long-form would differ from essentially any other social media or blogging platform.

What does it feel like to be somewhat of a celebrity on Twitter?
Totally bizarre. I actually am unable to comprehend it still. There's a cognitive dissonance between writing something alone in a room on my phone and knowing that over a hundred thousand people may see it instantly. I sometimes try to think about what one million impressions in a day really means and I get totally spooked out. It's all very strange. But also very wonderful – I love connecting to people through Twitter, and I love reading how people react to what I put out; the good and the bad. People are always sending me cool stuff or pointing me to great authors or comedians or artists that I need to check out, so I'm learning a lot too. It's all-in-all pretty wonderful and enriching.

The other really cool thing, again, is just being able to connect to a huge variety of inspiring people and talk to people that I never, ever in my life thought I would get the chance to. Like, I have the opportunity to talk to journalists, novelists, filmmakers, comedy writers, actors, a Broadway genius, rappers, musicians, stand-ups, poets, brilliant tech people, scientists, people who've given TED talks, people who've won Emmys or Grammys or Tonys or Oscars – all in one day sometimes.

Have any companies ever approached you to advertise via your account?
The best interaction I've had with a company is that one time @spaghettios sent me a care package consisting of a SpaghettiOs hat, a SpaghettiOs T-shirt and a can of SpaghettiOs.

Thanks, Jonny.

eric c (@dubstep4dads) – 103,000 followers

Who are you in real life?
@dubstep4dads: Hello! My name is Eric. I am 21. I am from the suburbs northwest of Chicago, Illinois, now living in Los Angeles, under a blanket held up by empty paint buckets behind an Olive Garden.

What do you do for a living?
I have a job that allows me to work at home or from the office at the hours of my choosing, which is great for me, because I am a lazy piece of shit. Basically, I find strategies to grow social media accounts and campaigns, and occasionally create content. Millennial shit, baby. I am not getting by very well. Do you want to hire me? Is that what this interview is about?

Whats the background to your Twitter character?
There's not much background to it; I've always liked turtles. I actually used to "crank my hog", AKA "masturbate", to the 2002 film Master of Disguise. I know you're probably thinking, 'Why not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?' Because that's gross and seriously fucked up. So anyway, I found a picture of a turtle somewhere on the internet and edited it a bit. Then a friend of mine made it into a GIF, and here we are. As far as the name, "dubstep4dads", I don't exactly know where it came from. When I made the account I was 18. I guess I thought it was funny. I also was definitely listening to dubstep at the time. As far as the display name, "cool as h*ck turtle", which I've recently changed to my real name, something I do from time to time, it basically just explains the AVI. I mean, it's a turtle in sunglasses. I don't know.

Was there one particular moment when you noticed a huge jump in followers?
It really picked up after Rob Delaney retweeted me one time. Once I asked Rob to send me a picture of his calves in front of his fridge, and he did it, within like 15 seconds. He is a nice hairy man.

How has Twitter changed your life?
Twitter has changed my life in a couple of ways. If not for Twitter, I would probably still be in school in Michigan, or perhaps working a job in Chicago. I would probably be making more money than I do now. I feel like my answers to these questions so far haven't been very good. I apologise for that. If anyone reading this wants to come and beat me with large sticks I will give you my address. I'll be out in the yard playing with a hose.

k e e t (@KeetPotato) – 71,000 followers

Who are you, where are you from and what do you do?
@KeetPotato: My name is Keith potato and I work part time at the local zoo giving haircuts to animals. It's truly amazing work. I currently tend to all the animals except the giraffes. I love them to bits, but when I was 12 I fell off a stepladder and spoke Japanese for six weeks.

And how did you get so many followers? Was it a sudden or a gradual thing?
I've been tweeting – let's call it what it is – utter horse shit since 2013, but how my account has grown from 93 followers to the ridiculous size it is now is anyone's guess.

How has Twitter changed your life?
A girl sent me a taxidermy duck, which although truly terrifying, I still have to this day. I spray it with aftershave 'cause it smells funny. Had it not been for Twitter I also wouldn't know words like "fleek" or "updog", so you could say Twitter has had a pretty huge impact on my whole world.

What does it feel like to be somewhat of a celebrity on Twitter?
To be considered a Twitter celeb, on first thought, at least, doesn't strike me as being a good thing. But I guess it does open some unexpected doors. Last year I randomly received a two-month supply of Toilet Duck, I can only assume because my avatar is a duck and my writing belongs in a toilet.

Who do you think are the funniest people on Twitter?
Some of the funniest people on Twitter are the people who never intended to be funny in the first place. The girl who thought Barrack Obama was President of England and referred to him as barraco barner – to this day, she is still my favourite human.

ruined picnic (@ruinedpicnic) – 27,000 followers

Introduce yourself to the world.
@ruinedpicnic: I'm @ruinedpicnic, my name is Josh and I am from the UK. I've been on Twitter since 2009, but I didn't start making jokes and stuff until just over a year ago.

What do you do for a living?
At the moment I'm working part time for a charity. People usually sound impressed when I say that, but I get paid, so I'm not being a good person or anything weird like that.

How do you think of stuff to tweet about?
Honestly, most of the time when I start writing a tweet I don't even have a punchline for it – I just start typing into the box and it works itself out. Sometimes it doesn't work itself out and I end up tweeting utter garbage or deleting it. Actually that happens a lot.

What do you think of the 10,000 word limit structure that Twitter was considering implementing?
I don't really like that idea – I feel like the brevity and restriction is part of what makes Twitter unique.

How has Twitter changed your life?
In the year or so that I've been doing it, I've made some of the best friends I've ever had, probably because someone's mind is sort of laid out in front of you so you can read a tweet and say, "Hey, this person is like me" and start a friendship based on something as simple as that.

What does it feel like to be somewhat of a celebrity on Twitter?
People have sent me pictures of Starbucks cups with jokes from my tweets given as the names, which seems silly, but that's insane to me – that from my tweet someone said a nonsense word to a stranger and made them write it on a cup.

Thanks, Josh.

@williamwasteman

More on VICE:

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Obama Still Wants to Close the Prison in Guantanamo Bay, but Don't Hold Your Breath

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Photo via Flickr user The US Army

When he first started running for president nine years ago, Barack Obama, a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, spoke frequently about wanting to close the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

"As president, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions," Obama said in an August 2007 speech.

Back then, everyone from George W. Bush to Obama's rival, John McCain, agreed the prison needed to go. It was an albatross, a symbol of the horrid brutalities committed in the name of the war on terror—not to mention the most potent propaganda tool terrorist recruiters abroad could possibly have at their disposal.

Eight years later, despite some success here and there trimming the population at the extra-legal Cuban purgatory—mostly by shipping inmates overseas—Obama hasn't been able to wipe it off the face of the earth. He hasn't even come close.

On Tuesday, however, the president laid out a last-ditch plan to make that happen.

Speaking from the White House, Obama outlined a proposal detailing how cost savings from closing Gitmo could help pay for a new facility—location TBD—to house a few dozen inmates in the domestic United States. The rest of the 91 people incarcerated there (Obama inherited 245 detainees in 2009) would be moved to other countries.

At this point, any proposal Obama makes that requires congressional approval is a long shot, but the Gitmo plan in particular doesn't seem likely to become reality. Just last year, he signed a 2015 defense funding law that essentially makes doing what he wants to do impossible unless the law is overturned. But the plan gave Obama a chance to reiterate that despite his failure to close the notorious facility. He's still deeply troubled by its existence.

"I don't want to pass this problem on to the next president, whoever it is," Obama said. "And if, as a nation, we don't deal with this now, when will we deal with it?"

It's only fair that a second-term president who is such a lame duck it's hard to imagine him getting a Supreme Court justice confirmed before leaving office might look ahead to his legacy. And Obama has made real strides when it comes to criminal justice reform for US citizens, leveling out the prison population after decades of growth and engineering the largest release of federal inmates ever.

But for a guy who has overseen everything from NSA surveillance to widespread drone attacks in the Middle East, Gitmo remains a black mark in Obama's civil liberties record—and advocates for closing the facility aren't exactly optimistic he'll finally shut it down.

"The fact that he announced the plan doesn't indicate any growing optimism on the part of the administration or any of the players involved that they're going to close Gitmo," says Joe Pace, an attorney with the human rights group Reprieve. Pace points out that the same defense bill that blocked Obama from spending cash on closing Gitmo required him to send Congress this very proposal.

Which is to say this wasn't some ambitious administration initiative so much as a "homework assignment," as Pace labels it.

The fact remains that Congress controls the government pursestrings, and it will cost a significant chunk of change to build a new facility to house foreign terrorism suspects.

Of course, that wouldn't be necessary if lawmakers didn't see apparently the men in Guantanamo as super villains capable of breaking out of any prison that is not an island.

"The president is correct that the security arguments against bringing detainees into the United States are way overblown," Matthew Waxman, a Columbia law professor and senior national security official in the Bush administration, wrote in an email. "We already imprison many hardened terrorists in US prisons, and although bringing detainees into the US entails some serious security and logistical challenges, they are certainly manageable if the political will is there."

The problem, then, is less some massive moral shortcoming on Obama's part than NIMBYism—a desire from members of Congress to keep these supposed terrorists as far away from their constituents as possible. And with the Republican presidential field generally supporting waterboarding and other extreme, questionable methods of fighting terrorism, it seems unlikely that Obama's successor will be able or even willing to shut down Gitmo.

"If a crystal ball told me 15 years from now we'd be in the exact same place, I would not be surprised," Pace says.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

It's Not Over Yet: Remembering New Rave, 10 Years On

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There are some stories that never stop being told. If you'd taken a huff through one of Altern8's gas masks at Fantasia, or spat at someone at the Sex Pistols 100 Club gig, if you managed to get past Steve Strange at the doors to the Blitz Club, or remember seeing Sonic Youth on their first UK tour, then people will be asking you about it forever. They'll be buying you drinks, asking how tall Thurston Moore is in person, if the pills were really that strong then. You might even be asked to be a talking head on a BBC Four documentary, reminiscing about how brilliant it all was. You'll stare down the lens and say that when you entered the room, every stranger felt like your mate and you'd never seen anything like it before.

But nobody wants to know what new rave was like. Nobody asks you what it was like buying red jeans in the women's section of H&M because nowhere else was stocking them yet. Nobody wants to know the real reason ADHDJs split up. Nobody asks you what it was like getting kicked in the face by Dandi Wind at 333.

This month we should be celebrating new rave's 10-year anniversary. Instead it has been expunged from our cultural consciousness. It's strange knowing that the music scene where you spent your most formative teenage moments has been whitewashed by some kind of totalitarian nostalgia committee for being in bad taste.

To be fair, at the time, people didn't take it seriously either. The Guardian's John Harris called it "a piss-poor youthquake that will soon go out of fashion". Even Klaxons, the band that started it all, later claimed it was just "a joke that got out of hand". Essentially, new rave was something that existed for about eight months in 2006. It started out in New Cross, moved into the fashion world and died when T4 presenters started wearing primary-coloured jeans.

I'm not bitter about new rave's bad reputation, but I do think the scene's influence has been underestimated. I believe it was singularly responsible for extinguishing the dying embers of the Camden indie atrocity, and paving the way for the inclusive, experimental self-aware music scene that we're living through today.

To see how important new rave was, you have to go back to London in the mid-2000s, a time when like The Libertines, The Rakes and The Others weren't just popular, they were sexy. It seems difficult to believe now that being in a guitar band is considered a financially unviable hobby like model trains or World War II reenactments, but back then indie had captured the city's imagination. There were hundreds of bands and hyped gigs every night of the week. The likes of Hot Club de Paris and GoodBooks had young fans queueing up round the block to see them. It was absurd.

The only problem with that period was the music - which was undeniably, unequivocally terrible. It was very male, very white, very concerned with looking clever and very dull.

The indie discos of the time had cottoned on to that. In the grand of palaces of north London and the pre-Crossrail West End, where boys in M&S singlets used to prance about hoping to scouted by Hedi Slimane, the big tunes of the night, the ones they brought out when everyone was at peak-fucked and ready to rut, were never really guitar tracks. It was more stuff like Justice Vs Simian, "Deceptacon" by Le Tigre, the Soulwax version of "Standing In The Way Of Control", the Soulwax version of a lot of tunes.


This realisation that the tracks with synthesisers, big beats and robot voices were infinitely better club fodder than say, Thee Unstrung, was, I think, what birthed new rave. The simple truth is that electronic music is just more fun.

Klaxons, the band who ended up as the scene's leaders, were the embodiment of that indie unease. They met in New Cross, south London, and wanted to bring something into their sound that wasn't just lumpen guitar. So they started reading futurist literature and listening to old rave records. There was never a plan to change the course of music, or even to incorporate a big chunk of rave culture; they were just trying to make something more literary, more colourful, more British, a sound that wasn't just another pastiche of the Ramones.

It was actually Angular Records founder Joe Daniel, the man who released the Klaxons' first few singles and helped engineer their success, who invented the term new rave, and even he believed it was just a subtle adaptation of what was going on in London then. "It was convenient that it looked like a reaction, whereas we were just trying to add ideas to a scene that was less inventive. At the time, a lot of the New Cross scene was into early Rough Trade bands – indie pop, post-punk – whereas Klaxons kind of seemed like a breath of fresh air, a bit of fun. It was a sense of 'let's get wasted and have a good time', rather than argue about whose trousers are tighter."


Daryoush Haj-Nafaji, now fashion editor at Complex, was in the thick of the scene at the time, as a nightlife reporter and a collaborator with the designer du jour of new rave, Cassette Playa. He sees it as a totally necessary swaying of the pendulum from America to the UK. "The coolest night in London back then was called 'Back To New York'. You had this overarching idea that being cool was about recreating late seventies New York. And it was incredibly white, very "rockist", very retro. People were hungry for something British and a bit arty. It was reaction against "indie indie", because only an idiot couldn't like hip-hop, couldn't like grime, dance music. It became impossible to only like indie."


Our writer in the new rave years.

My first experience with the scene came through a MySpace bulletin promoting a warehouse rave hosted by Klaxons and possibly Matthew Stone, somewhere in Shoreditch. There were lights, lazers, smoke, rolling pupils, people telling each other that they shouldn't worry about their A-Levels because they were beautiful. The DJs were playing old piano hardcore tracks and nobody seemed like they were there to sleaze. It was the night I took my first pill. The police kicked us all out after about 15 minutes and it was superb. Everyone was dressing in unity, consuming as one, but unlike previous incarnations of youth culture, there was an implicit understanding that it was a bit ridiculous. We knew that what we were getting up to was never going to earn much reverence in the annals of British music history.

"Everybody knew it was a joke," says Haj-Najafi. "There was a seriousness to it, Klaxons definitely liked rave, but the whole point is that the term 'new rave' was a joke."

But regardless of how silly it was, a wider scene soon sprung up. The internet seems to remember new rave as bands like Shitdisco and New Young Pony Club, who signed to major labels and released proper albums. The NME even put on a "rave" tour which featured Klaxons, CSS and The Sunshine Underground. This side of the scene was basically indie bands who had the odd synth player and fans who covered themselves in glowstick juice.

But for me it was something much more nebulous and niche than that. It was a general movement towards dance music and colourful streetwear which is mostly unrepresented on the internet now, bleached from the earth in Justin Timberlake's great MySpace purge.

New rave lived in the Sodom and Gomorrah of the underage Hackney Wick warehouse raves, lawless parties where feral teenagers cried tears of glitter and ketamine.

To me the scene was personified by young DJ collectives like Teens Of Thailand, Silvelink, Faggatronix, Cleft Palettes and Str8 Necklin who moved away from the "Ferry Corsten in a white linen shirt" clichés of dance music at that time and presented an eclectic, anarchic take on club selecting, bumping grime, 8-Bit, Baltimore, house and crunk tunes from beneath the brims of their fitted caps.


Famous for a minute. Niyi and Namalee in SuperSuper

It was a scene that had its superstars, MySpace versions of the Warhol crowd, in the shape of ad-hoc fashionistas like Molaroid, Niyi, Carri Munden, Namalee and Matthew WOWOW. All of them DJed, all of them designed, all of them partied, but none of them really did that much. It even had its own unofficial magazine in the shape of SuperSuper, which became the scene's equivalent of punk zineSniffin' Glue, a near-definitive guide to the scene's character and aesthetics which never really referenced the name of the scene it was covering.

New rave never had its own nightclub. Instead it lived in the outlandish east London fashion night Foreign and later the Sodom and Gomorrah of the underage Hackney Wick warehouse raves, lawless parties where feral teenagers cried tears of glitter and ketamine. There were also regular clubnights like Chalk, Troubled Minds and Transparent, which played mostly Soulwax remixes of indie tunes downloaded off Palms Out Sounds and were filled with kids in ludicrous clobber, desperately trying to turn anything into a party.

Much like the New Romantics, it was a scene without a real sound, but with a definite look. It marked its territory with its visual identity, in the way kids were trying to out-do each other by looking more weird and ad-hoc and cartoony. At one point, my look was as follows: purple and yellow Air Force ones, red girls' jeans from H&M, a vest, a plaid shirt and a lop-sided haircut. It was perfect teenage experimentation, a way of finding a cohesive identity through sartorial competitiveness. Throughout the new rave years, a friend of mine was wearing an intact tea-pot around his neck. He's never really lived it down.


A Cassette Playa lookbook shot.

It was only natural that the fashion world would take notice. It began with a few in the know designers like Cassette Playa, Kim Jones, Nicola Formachetti and Gareth Pugh. But once new rave reached the fashion world, it went global. "It was really weird but somehow, by some ether, all the Paris shows in 2006 were doing new rave," says Haj-Nafaji.

Soon after, a diluted, reduced version of the scene was in action. TopShop and H&M started making boys' versions of coloured jeans. Lesser acts with little of the original idealism - remember Does It Offend You Yeah? - started to self-identify with the scene. The outrageous looks of the early months had been co-opted by the norms. At sixth forms across the land, Cassette Playa hoodies and neck-crockery had became close to uniform.

"I remember Klaxons playing Liverpool, and then Coventry, noticing that people had started to copy the looks that were on their MySpace, almost exactly," says Daniel. "Another massive moment was Reading 2006, where Klaxons were playing the new bands tent, which was rammed. Afterwards there were countless kids running up to them, telling them how amazing they were, and they were all dressed like Klaxons."

By the time E4 youth series Skins came along the year after, it was clear that the whole thing was now just a series of clichés, a bunch of glowsticks and coloured Wayfarers. This was a Madame Tussaud's imitation of the new rave I knew.

But even as a series of day-glo formulae, it's easy to look into new rave and see that it helped lay the foundations for a lot of what's around today. For my generation, it helped us move away from guitars and towards producers, teaching us that house, techno, jungle and garage weren't just for people that wore silky black trousers and Paco Rabanne aftershave. It got us into things that weren't just hash or Carhartt. It formed the basis of our future nightlife experiences.

It saw what was going on in the grime scene at the time, for example, and presented it to a wider audience, nearly a decade before Cottweiler or Kanye did. "Casette Playa was putting JME in shows, nights like Troubled Minds were putting grime artists on when no one else would. So grime was definitely a part of it. Obviously it's a futuristic sound, so people appreciated it, especially as there was no real 'new rave' music," says Haj-Nafaji.

Grime wasn't the only genre embraced by the scene - house, electroclash, queer-punk and the new wave of disco all found a home within new rave. Compared to the indie gigs of a few years earlier, the new rave scene felt diverse and open, just as accessible to kids who grew up on UK hip-hop as it was to Cajun Dance Party fans. "It stopped England becoming a vessel of New York - it helped us embrace the beautiful productive reality of London life, which incorporates all classes and races," says Haj-Nafaji.

It seems to me that through its inherent ridiculousness, its total disregard for considering what might look or sound good in years to come, its flagrant disposability, new rave opened up a generation of kids to a much wider culture. Because nobody knew what it was, anything could be part of it, and it probably was, at some point or another. It introduced a lot of people who were blinkered by the dominance of the indie scene to more culturally grounded musical movements like grime and dubstep. It stopped people dressing the same, and encouraged outrageous lawless fashion. It took away that useless sense of seriousness from youth culture, a feeling that had dogged it since the Strokes stopped smiling back in 2001. It stopped people using the phrase "Albion" and it took club culture away from the heads. In a way, it set the precedent for everything going on right now. Young people are obsessed with Skepta and Nazir streetwear and illegal parties and, alas, ketamine. It's almost as if nothing has changed.

More on VICE:

NOS Balloons, Shotter Bags and Squat Parties: Understanding the New Urban British Teenager

Whatever Happened to the Metrosexual Man?

The Death of British Lad Culture: How the Uni Lads Finally Grew Up


What Life Is Like Inside the Massive Jail That Doubles as Chicago's Largest Mental Health Facility

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This piece was published in partnership with The Human Toll of Jail, a storytelling project from the Vera Institute of Justice and Narratively that was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge.

A man bound hand and foot struggles to sit upright and hollers, "This is inhumane!"

Another pulls his knees to his chin and, wide-eyed, whispers about telekinesis and the CIA. "Someone cut off all my toes," a third man with scars streaking his face says quietly. "I'm so glad I'm finally in the hospital."

But this isn't a hospital.

The Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago is one of the largest single-site pre-detention facilities in the world, with an average daily population hovering around 9,000 inmates. It is estimated that 35 percent of this population is mentally ill.

According to a May 2015 report by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Illinois cut $113.7 million in funding for mental health services between 2009 and 2012. Two state-operated inpatient facilities and six City of Chicago mental health clinics have shut down since 2009. The report goes on to detail that Governor Bruce Rauner's 2016 budget proposal to slash $87 million of funding for mental health services could cause an estimated 16,533 adults to lose access to care.

Watch the VICE News documentary on Cook County Jail and mental health behind bars:

Emergency room visits for patients having a psychiatric crisis increased by 19 percent from 2009 to 2012. A 2013 report by Illinois mental health care provider Thresholds found that the increase in ER visits and hospitalizations resulting from the $113 million budget cuts cost Illinois $131 million—almost $18 million more than the original "savings."

Now more patients than ever are being treated in jail rather than at a mental health facility. Cook County Jail has become one of the largest, if not the largest, mental health care provider in the United States. The Cook County Sheriff's Office estimates that it costs $143 per day to house a general population inmate. But when taking into account the treatment, medication, and security required to incarcerate a mentally ill person, the daily cost doubles or even triples.

When people are arrested—even before they visit bond court—within hours they are interviewed by social worker Elli Petacque-Montgomery and her team to screen for mental illness, a procedure unique to Cook County. Among the 60 people screened for mental illness on November 10 of last year after their arrest, 63 percent of women and 37 percent of men were considered mentally ill. Five had previously been involved with the Department of Children and Family Services, often indicating childhood abuse or neglect.

Petacque-Montgomery's team quickly assesses crisis situations and immediately places acutely psychotic, violent, or suicidal arrestees in single cells away from other inmates. People who are psychotic are then sent to CERMAK, the jail's division for physically ill and acutely mentally ill patients. Those with minor mental illness are sent to Division Two, Dorm Two, where they live in dormitory-style bunk beds instead of cells and receive therapy and medication.

After being diagnosed with mental illnesses when they were arrested, the four men interviewed below—Milton, Daniel, Tommy, and Andrew—were all serving time and receiving treatment in Dorm Two.

Recruiting People to Jesus During O Week Was Lame and Humiliating

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All illustrations by Michael Dockery

If you think starting university is hard, try doing it as a 17-year-old virgin going through a breakup, while spreading the word of God in a really pretentious, aloof way.

I'd discovered religion a few months earlier through my girlfriend at the time. This had lead me to the only church with parishioners under 50 in my rural South Australian town, which just happened to be a batshit-crazy Pentecostal Church. That's why by the time I started uni, I was in the peak of my Jesus phase.

I started university with an act of rebellion—I skipped O Week. I felt I had better things to do, like reading the entire Old Testament. Besides, I figured there'd be hardly any Christians around aside from the ones operating the Evangelical Students' Club stall, and those guys looked freaky. Yes, as I said, I was aloof. Little did I know that one year later I would be one of those over-smiley club members desperately trying to ensnare innocent passersby in a "conversation about the lord."

Things didn't go too well in my first year. When classes finally started I introduced myself in tutorials as "Mat, the Christian" and began wearing a homemade "I heart Jesus" t-shirt. Then my Christian girlfriend broke up with me, and having already acted like a total weirdo in front of the school, I was alone and desperate to connect with anyone. So I turned to the only people left: The other Jesus freaks.

They had a clubroom in "Oasis," the uni's religious hub, which was just a badly furnished room that smelled like a dusty confessional. A couple of dingy couches were scattered at the entrance where you could sit and browse books on anything from Buddhists to the pope. The first time I visited, we read the Bible and talked about evolution. It was a hot topic for me at the time because I was deciding whether, as a Christian, I was obliged to take Genesis literally and swallow the idea that God created the world in seven days, which is obviously pretty difficult to reconcile with modern science. But the group leader, a disheveled mature age student who looked like he worked at a secondhand bookstore, was adamant that the principles of evolution (survival of the fittest) were incompatible with the loving ways of old-mate Jesus (revival of the faithiest). I didn't get along so great with other Jesus people either, but on the whole they were friendly and relatively welcoming.

A few weeks later I was in conversation with some other, non-Jesus-freak people. Someone said, "Jesus!" and I asked them to please never use the word Jesus in vain. I was given a weird, disgusted look and from there I realised I would never be accepted by the general school community. A lot of people might change their attitude at this point but not me. Instead, I decided to go whole hog and—on my own initiative—ask to speak to the class before our property law lecture.

In front of a class of around a hundred people I stood up and invited everyone to participate in our Wednesday discussion group on whether there is proof Jesus existed (you wouldn't believe which side of the debate we took). Needless to say this didn't go well. My invitation to was met with silence and awkward looks and I retreated to the back of the hall.

Soon after came the highlight of the evangelically minded uni student's year: religion week. We had plans to reach the entire student population with the wondrous word of God and we went all out. We had posters, we had stalls, we had debates and meetings. Of course, it was all to no avail. In the words of Paul McCartney, "No one was saved." But we clung to our faith and said to ourselves, "Next year. Next year it will be better."

With an optimism unsupported by reality (this is religion we're talking about) I volunteered to run the O Week stall for the following year's incomers. I didn't really reflect on it so much at the time but I'd somehow come full circle. We set up our nice table with our flyers and smiles, polo shirts, and sandals. We said "hi" to people, we called them over, we had so many arguments and great things to say about God, and no-one gave a fuck. Everyone walked right past, avoiding us like the plague, including the Young Labor Party leader with the mad look in his eye.

Between that horrendous stint at O Week, and next year's O Week, I gave up on religion. I wrote a thing about it for VICE last year, but I will say that it was a complete relief. No more forcing my beliefs on would-be friends, no more feeling guilty for not talking about Jesus enough, and no more exhausting stalls. Sure, it was too late to make things right with anyone from university, but at least I couldn't sink any lower.

Joining a university club wasn't the best experience of my life. In fact, it turned out to be one of the most humbling, humiliating, and demoralising things I've ever volunteered to do. Memories of the O Week I didn't skip will haunt me forever. Nowadays I feel sorry for the well-meaning, soon-to-be disillusioned people working those stalls, as you should too. But I still always avoid eye contact with them.

Follow Mat on Twitter.

What Hitler's Supposedly Tiny, Deformed Dick Tells Us About How We View Evil

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Hitler with a phallic monument

According to a book by the respected historians Jonathan Mayo and Emma Cragie, Adolf Hitler may have had a tiny, deformed penis and only one testicle. This has made the news, but at first it's hard to see why. Because you knew, didn't you? You always knew. Somewhere in the deep crevices in the back of your mind you've been keeping the incontestable truth that Hitler's dick was tiny, and probably kinda weird; it's one of those natural axioms that seems built in to the structure of reality. Shoplifting is basically legal if you don't get caught, Australians are grown in a vat under the bars of chain pubs, your friends all secretly hate you, and Hitler had something seriously wrong with his genitals.

It's even in that old British Army marching song: "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball." How did they know? Had they seen it? They didn't need to: it's just so obvious. Look at how strange the guy was. That fussy little mustache; it's clearly just a mirror. His weird hand gestures, or the those strange baggy jodhpurs he had everyone wear. His furious desire to conquer Europe. This is not a man who had everything to industry standard between his legs. And it's a comforting idea: Messed-up people have messed-up ideas; the world is basically a good place, except for the men with small penises.

Of course, it's not just Hitler. Everyone knows—without any evidence except its bright, searing, tautologous truth—that Donald Trump's is probably miniature. (The cartoonist Eli Valley, for instance, captured this axiom perfectly.) What kind of person goes about erecting big gaudy skyscrapers, and then putting his own name on them, in letters 12 feet tall? You don't need Jacques Lacan to tell you that the signifier is always a replacement for the potency of an absent phallus; just go anywhere in Chicago, and look upwards. This stuff is always funny; it's the same kind of bitter humor with which you look at some idiot with 5,000 times as much money as you have, tearing through town in his Lamborghini, and decide that he's compensating for something.

In 2007, a list started doing the rounds online, purporting to describe every rapper the writer and video model Karrine Steffans said she had slept with, and what their dicks were like. And it all made perfect sense: of course Big Boi from OutKast is "bigger and fatter," while Andre 3000 is "long and slim." You can play the same game with politicians, if you want: It's possible to assume with some certainty that Tony Blair's is sleek, streamlined, and revolting, like a single strand of spaghetti, that George W Bush's is a perfect cube, that David Cameron's smells of frying bacon. It's a strange way of humanizing them, pulling away their universalist pretensions, like the pornographic satires of the French Revolution, or the inherent republicanism in the fact that sometimes the Queen has to use the toilet like everyone else.

Funny as it is, though, this is not good historical practice. So Emma Cragie, one of the book's authors, was forced to give an interview with the Independent in which she clarified that the records only show that Hitler's urethra was placed somewhere on the shaft of his penis, not that the thing itself was necessarily any smaller than usual. For all we know, it was huge. This arrangement, known as hypospadias, is described in the book as a "rare condition," but it's actually relatively common: One in 300 men are affected, and there aren't currently millions of people plotting to seize the German state and take over the world. All this is very sensible, but it looks like a strange and incredible spectacle: a Carnegie-nominated author publicly defending Adolf Hitler from the accusation that he had a tiny dick.

Related: Watch our documentary on the deadly asbestos industry

We want to believe. This is why just about every newspaper in the country ran headlines on Adolf Hitler's micropenis, even though the claim wasn't even in the book. Never mind the Fuhrer's gonads, what does this particular fantasy say about the world we're living in right now? There's something Disney-ish about it. The bad guys are bad because they're deformed; you can spot the villain by his scarred face or the warts on her nose. If Nazism is just a function of Hitler's bad dick, all the thousands of perfectly normal people who willingly took part in the mass exterminations are written out of the picture. (And that's how a worrying amount of the folk understanding of the Third Reich goes: a man had hateful ideas, and others were swept up in them; Nazism is decoupled from its base in class society and the state.)

To overanalyze: As Jacques Derrida argued, the history of Western metaphysics can be seen as the persistence of an ontology of "pure presence," a total and complete being that's closely tied up with the unity of the penis—this is why Derrida's term for it was "phallogocentrism." The micropenis is a defacement or a diminishment of this pure presence; in other words, a disruption of phallic coherence that can be coded as evil.

But that's not the world that faces us today. Evil is everywhere, dispersed and omnipresent—not just in the banks and the government; the food you buy is evil, your clothes are exploiting Bangladeshi children, your phone is fueling wars in Africa and sending workers jumping off the roofs of their factories. You might be evil, it's hard to tell. There is no coherence whatsoever. But Hitler's tiny dick helps solve that problem: it localizes all the fracture and confusion of existence into one damaged object. That mad, dizzying ethical circus we're all trying to push our way through coalesces into something clean and simple, where evil can be identified by its physical traits. But in the end, this is very dangerous. Spend too long thinking like this, and you'll end up concluding that a complete, healthy body is good, and any ugly, broken, or deformed body is a pollutant that needs to be got rid of. And who else had ideas like that?

Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.


The Ringling Bros Elephant Sanctuary Is Hardly a Paradise

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An elephant calf trained with bullhooks and ropes at the Center for Elephant Conservation. Photo via PETA

By most accounts, the life of a circus elephant isn't easy: There are long stretches of traveling by train, from town to town, chained in place and standing in your own shit. There's performing bizarre tricks for literal peanuts, and if you don't do what you're told, your trainer might just whack you on the head with a bullhook—a long, sharp-ended implement traditionally used to keep elephants under control.

While performing elephants were the main draw to America's three-ring circuses in the 19th and 20th centuries, circuses don't have much appeal anymore. Even the Ringling Bros, the "The Greatest Show on Earth," recently announced that its remaining cast of elephant performers will soon be sent into retirement. Their new home, as of May 1, will be a remote, 200-acre facility in Central Florida, where the elephants will live out their days feasting on hay and fruit and grazing in quiet fields.

Animal rights activists applauded the decision, but they aren't as stoked on this conservation facility, where the circus company will continue breeding its elephants, and also take blood samples from them for its cancer research program. According to a new report from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the site is little more than a glorified breeding compound where elephants spend hours chained up in barns, live under control of the bullhook, and deal with rampant foot injuries and tuberculosis outbreaks.

The Ringling Bros' Center for Elephant Conservation, which originally opened in 1995, currently houses 31 elephants. Recent news reports describe it as an idyllic place far away from cheering carnival crowds. They show retired elephants with giant tires to play with, bamboo and big piles of sand to romp on, and experienced handlers and veterinarians to care for them.

PETA's picture of the facility is significantly darker. The 13-page report, culled from court testimony, veterinary records, and medical research, offers accounts of bullhook abuse and examples of electric prods being used on elephants at the center. It argues that the center has been a "hotbed" for tuberculosis—according to medical documents cited in the report, 29 of Ringling Bros' elephants (most of them living at the center) had tested reactive to tuberculosis in 2011—a potentially deadly disease that's transmissible to humans.

The report also says that elephants at the center are chained in place by their legs every night and held in barns with hard concrete floors—conditions that, according to medical research and veterinarian testimony, make them "prone to arthritis, infection, and psychological stress."

Elephant calves are separated from their mothers and chained on barren concrete in the barns at the Center for Elephant Conservation. Photo via PETA

Stephen Payne, a spokesman for Feld Entertainment—the parent company for the Ringling Bros, which owns the conservation center in Florida—called PETA's latest allegations as "a complete work of fiction." Yes, the elephants sleep on concrete floors, and yes, they use bullhooks (Feld Entertainment insists the implements are harmless, akin to putting a leash on a dog; animal rights leaders disagree). But Payne says vets continually examine the elephants' feet to make sure they're healthy, and as for TB, only one elephant currently in their care has tested positive for the disease and is undergoing treatment. (Payne denied there were 29 cases of TB in 2011.) He argued that elephant-to-human transmission is "quite rare," though, and both the staff and elephants are tested regularly for everyone's safety.

All in all, he maintains that the Florida facility is a safe and healthy environment for the circus's herd of 42 Asian elephants, and its breeding program is a way to preserve the Asian elephants in North America.

"We are working to save an endangered species," Payne told me.

But other experts say forcing these elephants to breed in captivity misses the point. Susan Nance, a historian at the University of Guelph in Ontario and the author of two books on circus elephants in America, says public opinion on elephants shifted in the 1940s—first, with Disney's release of Dumbo, and later with the advent of wildlife documentaries. Nance said that these showed audiences that elephants were intrinsically valuable outside of our own self-serving interests. Now, people are more wary of forcing animals to do unnatural things for our personal benefit—but places like Feld Entertainment's facility show otherwise.

"It just shows, I still think, how they don't get what the public sentiment is," Nance said. "The whole premise of the Ringling point of view is that these animals are here for us to use."

Payne balked at the PETA-approved sanctuaries listed in the new report, which includes a 2,300-acre site in San Andreas, California, that's run by the animal welfare nonprofit Performing Animal Welfare Society, or PAWS. The sanctuary has green grass, ponds, large barns, and an indoor pool, and its staff relies on a hands-off approach known as "protected contact," in which they forego bullhooks in favor of safety barriers and let elephants basically do what they want.

"These quote 'sanctuaries' that PETA lauds so much praise on are managing the species to extinction," Payne said. "They're not conserving an endangered species. If we don't do what we do with the zoos and other conservation institutions, within a generation, there won't be any Asian elephants in North America."

Ed Stewart, the president and co-founder of PAWS, told me lasting elephant preservation will not happen by making more elephant babies in North America. Instead, we need efforts to save elephants' natural habitats back home in Africa and Asia from encroachment and development. The very idea of captivity, even when it comes to his own sanctuary, makes him uncomfortable.

"I don't drive through our place and look at the elephants up on the hill eating grass and say, 'Gee, this is so great for them.' I look at the fence and say, 'They're going to go to the end and hit the fence.' I wish elephants weren't behind fences," Stewart said. "I think, basically, it's unethical to put an animal in a situation where you know they're going to be deprived their whole life."

Follow Peter Holslin on Twitter.

What This Leaked Training Manual Tells Us About the UK's Counter-Terrorism Strategy

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"Neil"

Since last year, various public sector bodies (schools, prisons, hospitals) have held a duty to have "due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism", under the government's "Prevent" counter-terrorism strategy. What this "due regard" actually means in practice has continued to baffle many, including those who are now encouraged to act as intelligence gatherers for the British state.

The University and College Union, for instance, which represents the lecturers in higher and further education expected to implement the Prevent duty, have called it a "draconian crackdown on the right to debate controversial issues" and that it "risks stifling our right to question and challenge ideas with which we disagree".

This month advocacy organisation CAGE leaked the Prevent training manual and videos to try and get some clarity on the situation.

In a script for a workshop called "Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent" (WRAP), it is made explicit that the training public sector workers will receive is far from ambitious. If someone had 0/10 knowledge of what Prevent was at the beginning of the session, they're only going to get to 2/10 in the session. Then they'll be sent off to interact with students, patients and other members of the public in their new capacity as part-time spies. Completing Prevent training will probably leave you with more questions than you had going in and with a general air of suspicion – which is presumably the point.

The training even has a hard time telling you what extremism actually is. You're told to imagine an iceberg, that the visible tip is the violent public terror attacks that we have all come to fear, while the submerged portion is all of the things that lead up to it which the recipients of Prevent training should be looking out for. It is freely admitted that "while some of this is criminal activity, the further down we travel, that might not be the case..."

Because having a different opinion can't be deemed criminal, Prevent gives another justification for monitoring the murky bit at the bottom of the iceberg. The government's WRAP handbook suggests these should be treated as "safeguarding" issues, which is the category public bodies that look after children and vulnerable adults call their duty to look out for abuse and neglect. Having bad thoughts is being treated the same as abuse.

The handbook notes that this could be seen as a convenient leap, but trainers are pressed to suggest that this concern simply comes from a narrow conception of what terrorism is. From there they are meant to bring people's minds back to tragic events like 9/11 and 7/7, or an example local to where the training is taking place – such as the murder of Lee Rigby if the sessions happening in Woolwich – in order to refocus them on the task of weeding out "a threat to our communities".

Prevent training largely consists of video case studies where intervention from workers such as teachers, mental health staff and police have managed to steer someone away from an extremist position.

Trainees are walked through a three-part process of identification, which asks them to pick out emotional, verbal and physical signs from the videos watched.

The table above examples outlines just how impossible it is to differentiate the Prevent image of a potential terrorist from someone who is just a bit miffed, or reinventing their image.

If you don't want to be suspected of being a terrorist under Prevent guidance, you should probably avoid doing the following things: crying, being angry or depressed, using the internet, getting tattoos, asking inappropriate questions or making any new friends.

If you can avoid doing those things here's another tip: don't be Muslim. The training does absolutely nothing to address or change the inaccurate perception that terrorists are mainly Muslim. In fact it absolutely feeds into that stereotype. One case study even cartoonishly depicts prisoners from Iraq promoting the benefits of jihad in the aftermath of 9/11 to "Neil", who has severe mental health problems.

The videos that make up the training suggest mentorship and pastoral conversations with teachers are part of how potential terrorists were turned from the brink. But the WRAP handbook essentially backtracks on this and admits that that part of the videos is misleading, instead saying that referrals "will have most likely have been a Channel Panel or Prevent Professional Concerns meeting". In other words, it would be nice if a friendly chat with your teacher would allay any concerns about your terrorist thoughts, but in fact we'll have to set up a panel with some police officers.

Watch: Roger Deakins and Matthew Heineman On Depicting the Drug War in Their Oscar Nominated Films

The results of the training are plain to see. Ill-informed and ill-equipped public sector workers are being pressured into bypassing standard safeguarding in the case of Muslims, and instead raising their concerns to the government through Prevent. For those not racialised as Muslim, depression, crying and withdrawal might prompt support and mental health care. In the case of Muslim,s this stuff could land you in an intimidating meeting where you are asked uncomfortable questions about your internet habits and tattoos.

Samayya Afzal, from Bradford University Students Not Suspects, told me:

"The idea that practitioners can walk away from these scant training sessions instilled with any sense of "expertise" in counter-terrorism is almost laughable, were the consequences not so serious – as we have seen so vividly just these past few months.

"This lays bare the fact that Prevent is not guided by evidence or any real intelligence: Prevent is driven by paranoia, and it inspires fear in return. It is built on conjecture, yet demands unquestioning obedience in return."

UCU, CAGE, 383 professors, campaigners and politicians, as well as the UK's terror watchdog have raised concern about Prevent. This is no surprise when it seeks to label Muslim students, patients and clients of the public sector as potential terrorists based on bad psychological profiling not even fit for a spy drama.

@WailQ

More from VICE:

Arun Kundnani on the Propaganda War Against British Muslims

The Government's Anti-Terrorist Strategy for Children Is a Twisted Assault on the Freedom to Think

Does Monitoring Kids for Terrorist Traits Mess with Their Heads?

Celebrity Psychic Lisa Williams on the Importance of Not Screwing Up Her Customers

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Lisa Williams looking like a celebrity. Image supplied.

Lisa Williams was born in the UK but now lives in upstate New York, which is testament to her success as a TV-friendly psychic. Lisa has done readings on Oprah, had TV cameras follow her into old houses to soothe restless spirits, and even been whisked off stage in New Zealand after revealing names of people connected to the murder of farmer Scott Guy.

According to Lisa, she first realised she had a talent at the age of four when she saw a man standing at the dining table warning her not to eat her peas. She later found out her great-uncle choked to death eating peas. It wasn't until Lisa was in her 20s that she began doing readings for friends. Word-of-mouth spread quickly and she quit her sales job to work full time. Her big break into show business came when television producer Merv Griffin (Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune) signed her for for a show that became Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead. From there on she was famous.

As Lisa is on her way to New Zealand, we called her up to pick her psychic brain.

VICE: When were you last in Auckland?
Lisa Williams: I was there last year teaching mediumship and oracle cards. I teach teachers to teach. I want to try to get the crap off the streets. The ones that really are putting fear into people. What we've got is someone's life in our hands. We can screw someone up if we don't know what we're doing.

Have you ever screwed someone up?
I've never done it to a client but I've had it done to me. Many years ago I was what I'd call a psychic junkie. I'd have another reading to back up another reading to back up another reading. I was at a desperate place in my life. I would base a lot of my decisions on what these psychics would say. It's crazy. Anyway, I let myself be governed and led by this psychic. I realised that I was in such a fragile place that actually she had the ability to really, really crucify me. She could have said anything and I'd have given her so much money. That's the reason why it's so important to have some form of regulation on it.

There are psychics out there who will say, "You've got a curse around you, I need to get rid of it, it's going to cost you $1500." A classic one, and it happened to me, "There's a man around you who is in grave danger. However, if you want to find out who this person is, it's going to cost you X amount of money for another 25 minutes." It's bad.

But is regulating the psychic industry even possible?
I can't personally regulate around the world but I can certify mediums and psychics to be in a directory. People can then look it up and say, "This is someone I can go to and trust because Lisa endorses her." I think that has quite a lot of weight about it.

What is the most common question people ask of the dead?
The first thing is "are you ok?" Second is "could I have done anything differently?" Third is "do you want me to pass a message on to someone?" I understand it's powerful to let people know that their loved ones are OK. It helps so many people move on in life.

What countries around the world are most accepting of the spirit world?
I say the English accept it very, very well. The US has a great understanding of it. I do believe Australia and New Zealand are probably next in line to England, mainly because you've got an indigenous culture. I think that helps. There is a massive spiritual underlying context within the nationality. It's like the Native Americans over in the US, it very much helps.

Have you ever used psychic ability to solve a crime?
Yes, many times. I work with a lot of law enforcement agencies with regards to crime investigation—missing people, a lot of different things.

Any New Zealand cases?
I was on stage in New Zealand. I didn't realise what I was getting myself into. I remember I started talking to someone about Scott someone. It was a big gang murder of some sort. [Scott Guy was found dead at the gate of his family farm in 2010. His brother-in-law Ewan Macdonald stood trial for his murder and was found not guilty.] I had an off-duty police officer backstage. He was kind of getting antsy on the side of stage. Apparently I was coming up with so much evidence that they'd only just found out that day and I was sharing it with the audience. Next thing I knew, flights had been changed. Everything had been changed. My protection, my security had been upped. It was kind of crazy. It's a curse.

It's a curse?
Sometimes. In many ways. It isn't the first time I've had heightened security and whisked away into a little room and someone's said, "Do you know what you've just said?" With high profile cases you have to be very careful. It's something I teach as well: How to deal with law enforcement, how to deal with the FBI.

You moved from the UK to Los Angeles and are now living upstate New York? Why did you ditch LA?
I've got great friends and I got used it to there but as far as I was concerned I'd done my time. I'd done eight and a half years and it was time to go somewhere quieter so I moved to the home of spiritualism. It was just the right time, right place, right move.

Was LA all about ramping up the celebrity side of your business?
Yeah. The entertainment industry is in LA. But over the last couple of years I've really just had a couple of years off. I've done private readings. I've toured a little bit. I haven't focused as much on my work as I would normally do. We all get burnout. We all get tired. My family life needed to take over. I have a son who is 15. I had to focus on him. It was important for me to have some time off. Being a mum and being a friend and being Lisa.

This German MMA Fighter Was Mistaken for a Refugee and Mistreated by Paramedics

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Dib at the hospital on Monday. Photo courtesy of Dib Akil

This article was originally published on VICE Germany

After German MMA fighter Dib Akil returned home from his training session on Monday night, he suddenly found himself in such severe pain that his family called the paramedics. But when they arrived, they were extremely rude to him and his family – which according to Akil was down to the fact that he has foreign roots.

That same night, he angrily took to Facebook to complain about the treatment he received from doctors and nurses at the hospital in the town of Bad Oeynhausen, where he lives. I called Dib to get the full story.

VICE: Hi, Dib. Are you feeling better now?
Dib Akil: Yes, I have two more doctor's appointments and then I'll have to see how it goes.

Why did call the paramedics in the first place?
I returned home from my training session on Monday and suddenly I was in such pain that it made me scream. Then I felt dizzy and nauseous and keeled over.

What happened then?
The paramedics got to mine and my mother was trying to explain to them what kind of painkillers I'd taken. But she doesn't speak perfect German, so they just went, "Yeah, yeah lady, whatever." They also pretty much ignored me – nobody really tried to speak to me, to find out how I was feeling. I was born in Germany by the way, I am a German citizen.

How did it go on from there?
They did ask about the pain once we got to the emergency ward, but it was already so bad that I couldn't respond anymore. So I guess they must have thought that I was an asylum seeker and did not speak German. And then they started talking shit, thinking I didn't understand them. My mother and my brothers had followed the ambulance to the hospital, which is normal – it's what families do. But once she saw them the nurse went, "Whoa, who are you?" When they said they were with Mr. Akil, she said, "Poor Germany." I didn't say anything. Next she said, "That's the last thing Germany needs, for them to be chauffeured around on top of every other problem they cause!"

What did you do when you heard that?
I screamed with rage. My brother came in and I said, "Come, let's get out of here. I'm not staying here unless I completely lose control of my body." That seemed to scare the hospital staff, who said that I misunderstood and that the comments were not directed at me. But there was nothing to be discussed for me and so I left feeling pretty angry.

You're actually a well-known martial artist, right?
I'm definitely a name in the local Martial Arts scene, also because I often visit schools and poor children. I'm a heavyweight MMA fighter in Germany and I also fight for the Lebanese national team.

Did you expect to be treated like that?
Never. I mean, I didn't think that you could get that kind of treatment from people who've sworn to treat anyone without bias. Many Germans who work in hospitals now write to me, telling me that they've also heard their own coworkers talk shit about immigrants.

How do you feel about the whole thing?
I'm very angry. That is the kind of racism that lives on, inside people's hearts. I'm German; I was born here. I mean, I'm talking about what happened at that specific hospital now and not all of Germany. But I think everyone needs to have a conversation about this. My main point is, what if this had happened to someone who actually doesn't speak German? It's incredible and it's an injustice.

VICE Germany asked Mühlenkreiskliniken – the large regional hospital corporation that runs the hospital in Bad Oeynhausen – for comment. A spokesperson replied that they had not heard about this incident but would investigate and make a public statement.

Did Australia Just Legalise Marijuana to Avoid Embarrassment?

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A still from the very weird NSW anti-weed ads. Image via.

A few months ago, the New South Wales government was mocked for a series of ads in which teens were warned that excessive marijuana use could lead to literal transformation into an anthropomorphic sloth. It was such a bad campaign, full of weird hyperbole and oddly un-scary scare tactics that even the international press picked up on the fun. Soon, the campaign was the jazz cigarette butt of the world's joke.

So embarrassed was Australia by the world's laughter that it overreacted, and took the illegal thing they spent $350,000 warning people against, and have now legalised it. Australia, previously the chilled, hip cousin of the world, had one taste of being Earth's square, and did not like it.

In the drug legalisation equivalent of going out and buying a leather jacket, on Wednesday Australia passed the Narcotics Drugs Amendment Bill 2016. And did so with surprisingly little fanfare.

As VICE reported, the new laws have opened the doors for medical marijuana to be cultivated, produced, and distributed within Australia. The debate in the Senate was overwhelmingly in favour of the change, with many Senators sharing touching stories about constituents who were struggling with agonising conditions, desperate for a respite.

The most surprising part however was just how much consensus there was on what has traditionally been a contentious issue. Especially given our two biggest national debates are focused on should we systemically abuse refugee children and the controversial choice to stop LGBTQIA being subjected to regular bullying. How did the cultivation of marijuana bypass this sort of pathological auto-opposition?

It could be because there's no political upside. Even if you are a fiercely anti-drug Senator who still pines for the fierce prohibition you once saw in Some Like It Hot, it will not be in your best interest to take a stance against the issue. A poll by Roy Morgan found that a mere 7 percent of Australians were against the legalisation of medical marijuana. With numbers like this you can safely vote for a bill like this without looking like Hunter S Thompson.

Nevertheless, it is surprising that there has been no significant public debate over the slippery slope that this could conceivably represent. Before you say, "But wait, it would be foolish to assume that the legalisation of medical marijuana would necessarily lead to the legalisation of recreational marijuana, and even if it did, would that be so bad?" then welcome to the foolishness that is politics, where flawed syllogistic assumptions are basically what passes for debate.

Senator Cory Bernardi once suggested that the best argument against same-sex marriage was that if some people get equality, it will lead to a slippery slope in which too many people will get equality. Too much equality. Yet in a chamber where rhetoric like this is considered par the course, rather than cause to revoke a driver's licence, there's been no substantive debate to suggest medical marijuana will turn Australia into a Cheech and Chong movie. And not even one of the good ones like The Corsican Brothers.

Here's that expensive and embarrassing ad

But the most likely explanation is that the sloth ad was so damn embarrassing that both houses of Parliament came together to fix our national shame. And this is where we need to take a negative and turn it into a positive. The $350,000 spent on the anti-cannabis campaign should not go waste. So here are three ways we can use the sloth footage in a way that reflects our newfound pro-marijuana national identity.

1. Sloths are cool. Everyone loves sloths. Christ, have you seen Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell reacting to the news that she was going to meet a sloth? That's how much people love sloths. So keep the "marijuana use will turn you into a sloth" stuff, but get a more upbeat voice-over artist to underscore that this is a transformation that's actually for the best. I'm sure you could get Kristen Bell to do it.

2. Sloths have very poor eyesight. Honestly, most of them can't even tell the Hemsworths apart. It's one of their defining characteristics. (Sloths, not Hemsworths.) And what is one of the top causes of poor eyesight in humans? Glaucoma. And what's acknowledged as the best treatment for glaucoma? If you answered by solving a supernatural mystery with a talking Great Dane, then you are correct. Smoking cannabis turns teens into sloths? No, smoking cannabis gives sloths their eyesight back. That's even better spin than the sort of spin when you mix your weed with tobacco to improve the burn quality and prolong the stash. We didn't even have to google that reference.

3. Sit down, because here's the big one: in 2014, a study found that there are fungal isolates growing in the hair of sloths that are resistant to the parasites that cause, amongst other things, human cancers. In other words, sloth hair might lead to a cure for cancer. That sloth campaign is looking a whole lot different now, isn't it? "Medical marijuana could revolutionise human health... just like this sloth!"

In his definitive King Arthur novel The Once and Future King, TH White suggested that totalitarianism could be defined as "Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory." There's no reason the New South Wales government's marketing department can't take a cue from White. "That thing we told you not to do a few months ago? Now it's great!"

So long as we get sensible health policy out of the deal, we'll go along with anything.

Follow Lee on Twitter

Revisiting the First Virtual Reality Wedding

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Hugh and Monika Jo after their wedding. Photo courtesy of Monika Jo

In 1994, the news heralded the world's first "wedding in cyberspace," and my prepubescent imagination really went crazy. The future is now, and it's amazing, I thought, I never have to worry about touching a girl in real life. Never mind that the virtual reality of the time was nothing more than an exciting trip into a world of colored geometric shapes.

The so-called "Information Age" really was about to change our everyday lives in countless ways, but headset-based VR went into the trashcan in short order, and "cyberspace" came to mean "the place you go to via a modem so you can find porn." Then cyberspace became a dated cliché, and the internet became a utility and a basic human right. The thought of a wedding in virtual reality became, in retrospect, a dorky detour along the highway of progress.

In case you haven't heard, VR is back. The consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset is due out next month, VR content is starting to proliferate, and the whole thing has suddenly become worth taking seriously again. It made me wonder if those people who got married in virtual reality were some kind of pioneers, or prophets.

So I tracked them down. Monika Jo is still married to her husband Hugh, and she is still an evangelist for VR. I asked her for her story, and she happily obliged. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Hi Monika! How'd you get into the world of VR in the first place?
The company was called CyberMind, and it exclusively featured VR machines by a British company called Virtuality. They were the standard back then. I just wanted to be as close to VR as possible, and not being an engineer back then, I kind of gravitated toward a retail location.

VICE: What were those machines like?
You stepped up to the platform, and the attendant would lower the ring over your head and that was kind of how you were protected, so you don't wander off and hurt yourself.

The games back then weren't like the VR experiences we're seeing today. Was it hard to sell people on VR?
I think that posed a lot of challenges. In the popular media—TV and movies— VR was portrayed as something much more advanced. So we were sort of on the front line of fielding the public's questions about VR back then. People would say, "What am I going to see? Is it going to be like the holodeck?" They had imaginations that ran wild, but then they were immersed in this mostly primitive shape kind of world. It was a novelty, but there was such a big gap between what they were seeing on TV and in the movies. It's escaping me what the sitcom is called with Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt...

Mad About You!
Yeah Mad About You!

Yeah, if people thought you could really do the stuff they did on that show—fondle Christie Brinkley or Andre Agassi—they were definitely going to be disappointed. So from there, how'd you end up getting married in virtual reality?
My fiancé and I were young and broke back then. We had told some of our friends that we were getting married, but we had decided to elope. One of my friends very casually said, "So why not have your wedding at the theme arcade?" It kind of made me pause. I started to think, What if we could create a VR experience to get married in as a demonstration of how you could use the technology? a price tag of a million dollars. It was kind of my dad's favorite joke—that he was only virtually broke.

An early design sketch of Monika and Hugh's VR wedding platforms

What kind of headset did you have to wear?
It was lighter than the gaming one from Virtuality. But it got hot really fast. That was one of its limitations: You couldn't be in there for an hour or even a half an hour, because it would just start feeling like it's frying right in front of your face.

Yikes! So that headset took you on an undersea journey to the Lost City of Atlantis?
This was pre-cataclysmic Atlantis, so we were above the water.

Excuse me. So what was it like in there, and how did the carousel horses fit in?
It was based on Plato's description of Atlantis but with some artistic license. We decided on a chariot instead of horses that would need to move, and that was too complicated. We needed something more whimsical, so they were actually like carousel horses.

Right. Carousel horses don't have to move their legs. So then what happened?
We started on a carousel ride. It was me by myself on the carousel—my virtual bride avatar—and then it took me toward a bridge where I met my husband's avatar. We move toward the palace on top of a hill. Jesus, this is really taking me back, talking about it in detail!

So at that point you were only side-by-side with the groom in virtual space, right?
Technically we were about 12 feet apart, but in the virtual space, we were right next to each other for the chariot ride and then when we moved toward the palace, the virtual palace in Atlantis. Then we kind of moved and walked together toward the minister.

How much detail was there?
The modelers and the engineers asked us questions like, "We're going to assume that palace has marble floors. What kind of shoes are you wearing? What kind of sound effects should we have?" It takes a lot of everything to replicate the real world, and an imagined world is even more challenging. Then we did the standard Christian ceremony with the minister.

With a Christian minister wearing a VR headset?
Yes, we were definitely rejected a couple of times before we found someone who didn't have any kind of problem with it.

We did an interview with BBC radio—it was a live radio interview—and the reporter said, "Don't you think this is immoral?" It really caught me off-guard on live radio, because it didn't even cross our minds really. It was one thing to sort of find someone who was willing to take on a short ceremony that was so different—someone just open to it. But there was nothing that I thought about performing the ceremony itself in cyberspace to be immoral.

Weddings are supposed to be this symbolic coming-together, and you're across a room from each other. I'm sure you got questions like that, right?
I don't think he went into this type of specificity, but if two people may be far away from each other, but maybe wanted to get married in cyberspace, could that be considered legally binding? Like, have you been entered in a marriage contract by putting on virtual rings?

How'd you get around those kinds of concerns?
We did re-create the exchanging of the rings and the kiss afterward. My mom wanted an entirely other separate, non-circus kind of wedding. I said, "I'm actually only getting married once because once is already chaotic and hard enough."

In that case, when you think back on your wedding, which kiss feels like your wedding kiss? The virtual one, or the real-life one?
I think equally both. In the virtual space when we kissed, the engineers coded—without telling us—a big fireworks display, which we couldn't have indoors. And because we did the virtual ceremony first that elicited a lot of clapping and cheering. So that felt as real as doing the kiss afterwards.

After the wedding, I know you were all over the media, because that's how I found out about you. But what happened to CyberMind?
It was eventually bought by a German company, which continued longer than the US division did. And then eventually it sold the name, and the assets and logos to another company in Europe. The US company closed down the various locations across the country. I left there before it closed down. I probably left them around '95 or '96.

A couple years later, virtual reality really fell out of favor. What was that like, given that you'd made it so central in your life?
It was tough. It went from being so significant and intriguing, to the punchlines of jokes, and that kind of hurt personally. We had our fifteen minutes of fame, and then it was kind of like, OK I can't talk about VR anymore.

Why not?
Because there was this thing called the web, and the internet, and that was the shiny object, which of course was very significant also. But it hurt on a personal level because there was this technology that I really loved, which then became kind of the butt of jokes.

How do you feel now that VR is popular again?
Last May, I curated a small pop-up VR museum. I kind of gathered and curated different artifacts from different luminaries in VR. So one of the things that was part of the pop-up museum was our wedding outfits, because our wedding attire in real life matched our avatars. I was proud to display those as a piece of VR history. Being there, and giving that pop-up museum as a gift back to the community, and talking to people during the conference, to me, that's what I would call kind of a personal turning point for me.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Remembering Peggy Guggenheim, the Sexually Liberated Socialite Who Shaped Modern Art

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Peggy Guggenheim. Image courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Archives, Venice

Two images define art collector, socialite, and muse Peggy Guggenheim for me: the headstone of the 14 beloved dogs she had buried beside her; and the enormous dolls house she had as a child, full of mini bearskin rugs and ivory furniture, which she kept locked and allowed nobody to touch.

These images, put together in a new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, show a woman overflowing with affection, which was often directed at the unexpected. She was a collector of the precious and the ridiculous almost from birth; a woman who imbued objects with almost more value than people; someone who would name a pet dog Pegeen and then be surprised that her daughter of the same name could be offended; a product of two of America's most wealthy families who served up cheap, tinned food at her legendary dinner parties; a flamboyant, eccentric, ambitious, Jewish woman who pushed to the front of one of the male-dominated art world at a time when being both female and Jewish were, to say the least, challenging.

Peggy Guggenheim was the centre of mid-century art world. She dragged together a collection of some of the most successful, weird, difficult, and progressive artists of her generation; Pollock, Mondrian, Beckett, Nash, Kandinsky and Picasso all showed at her galleries and contributed to her art collection. It's hard to image the art world today without her. She made modernism happen.

Roloff Beny / Courtesy of National Archives of Canada

Born in 1898 in New York City on East 69th Street, she was the daughter of businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, and niece of Solomon Guggenheim – founder of the famous New York museum. She was 13 when her father died on the Titanic, after which she describes being demoted to a "poor relative", moving to a "cheaper apartment" with 'fewer servants'. It's hardly poverty, but it did mark her out from the wealthy Jewish girls at her school. So she shaved off her eyebrows and planned her escape.

By 1921 she had moved to Paris where she played tennis with Ezra Pound and decided to "get rid of my virginity" with the writer and artist Laurence Vail. A son, Sinbad, followed who, according to most interpretations, she gave up in order to follow her new lover, the writer John Holmes. "She was a single woman, a divorcee, with a reputation, travelling on her own, with an influence in London, Paris, New York and Venice," says Lisa Immordino Vreeland, the director of Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict. "There aren't many figures in the art world in an influence in so many places. I'm not sure that she was even aware of it; this was just her life and she lived it in her own terms and her own terms were to just push forward and do it."

This was just her life and she lived it in her own terms and her own terms were to just push forward and do it.

In 1938, just before the outbreak of war, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery on Cork Street, London, exhibiting the work, among many others, of Jean Cocteau, Henry Moore, and Yves Tanguy, whose wife apparently once tried to throw a fish at her during dinner after finding out they'd been having an affair. At the time, they were all struggling artists whose work was misunderstood. But they survived thanks to her determination to foster them.

At the outbreak of war she decided to buy one picture a day, using the money she'd inherited upon her mother's death. During this spending binge, she bought up Picassos, Ernsts, Mirós, Magrittes, Man Rays, Dalís, and Klees. From 1941 to 1947, fuelled by the art-hating Nazi regime, she shipped the lot to New York, to open The Art of This Century Gallery in 1942. The gallery was as much an artwork as the pieces it displayed – she hung paintings at strange angles on huge jutting poles, jumbled in with sculptures and vitrines, so visitors could walk right round the exhibits.

In 1941, she married her second husband, notorious painter Max Ernst, who she would divorce in 1946. One image that stands out from this period is that of him dressing up in her clothes. While cross-dressing in the art world is hardly revolutionary, it says much of Guggenheim's give-a-shit attitude that she discusses this in interviews featured in the documentary with the same matter-of-fact tone in which she describes her seven abortions and botched nose job. As Gore Vidal wrote in his foreword essay to her memoirs, "Although she gave parties and collected pictures and people there was – and is – something cool and impenetrable about Guggenheim. She does not fuss."

She may not have fussed, but Guggenheim certainly fucked. In Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, we hear about the four days she spent in bed with Samuel Beckett, about her "wholly unsuccessful" sex with Jackson Pollock and her voracious sexual appetite well into her grey-haired years. "Her outlook was more progressive than the people, the men, around her," says Lisa. "There were no rules attached to her life when not many people were living like that."

Courtesy of the Peggy Gugggenheim Collection Archives, Venice

Despite being mentored by Marcel Duchamp, she is perhaps an ambivalent feminist icon. In 1943, she put on an exhibition of 31 women exhibited an all-female collection including work by Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Xenia Cage, Guggenheim's own daughter Pegeen and even a self-portrait by the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.

When in 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, she stayed on and in 1949 established her own gallery in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal. She started to get grief for the sculpture at the entrance to the museum – a huge Marino Marini figure of a naked man on horseback with a huge boner – so made the penis detachable, so she could unscrew it when cardinals and other puritans came to look round. Sara Carson, who worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, writes in an email to me: "Art was built in to every aspect of her life – she had so many paintings she had to stack them in her bathroom, where they got splattered with toothpaste."


Courtesy of the Peggy Gugggenheim Collection Archives, Venice

One of the later pictures taken of Guggenheim was her in the Palazzo, lying on her bed, below an enormous sculptural bedstead. Even in her last days and in her most intimate spaces, Guggenheim brought together sex and art to produce a powerful, lasting collection and impression. "She grew up in an environment with certain rules and she broke them all," argues Lisa. "That speaks to a sort of courageousness."

An art-lover who acted as muse and mentor to much of the modernist movement; a single, divorced, globe-trotting Jewish woman who built a collection during the era of Hitler and Moseley; Peggy Guggenheim was, as Gore Vidal puts it, "the last of Henry James' transatlantic heroines – Daisy Miller with rather more balls." More balls, perhaps, and also a detachable penis.

@NellFrizzell

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is out on DVD now.

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There's a New Way to Listen to Music and It Has Nothing to Do with Genres

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(Photo by Jake Lewis)

"It's like there's this warehouse of music, and we've all just been given the keys for the first time. And we can walk in, and there's just miles of music, heaps of it, going all the way to the back. But there's no map telling you where to go and what to listen to. So how are you going to find all the good stuff that's hidden out back? Or are you just going to spend your time listening to the stuff that's immediately in front of you?"

I'm on the phone to Ben Ratcliffe from his apartment in New York. As the New York Times music critic since 1996, Ratcliffe's spent the best part of two decades watching the music industry change beyond all recognition. We're talking about his book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now, which suggests we should do away with conventional ideas of genres and become more flexible as listeners. Rather than categorising music as jazz, or minimal, or techno, we should think about concepts that cut paths across genre – like "dense" music, for instance, or "sad" music.

Below is the rest of our chat about why Spotify is creepy and why genres suck.

VICE: You've been a music critic for 20 years. Have you always wanted to write this book?
Ben: The job I've had since the 90s involves listening to all types of music, apart from classical music, which forces you to think really broadly about music. I started thinking about writing this book five years ago – I was inspired by music appreciation books, which were really popular in the first half of the 20th century. Books like What to Listen for in Music, by Aaron Copeland. I started thinking, 'What would one of those books look like now?'

The music industry has changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years, particularly with the advent of streaming services like Spotify. Do you think that abundance of choice has, in a way, made it harder for people to find music they like, because there's so much out there?
I hear that a lot from people – that they feel overwhelmed by choice. But I feel that idea is reinforced by the people who are trying to sell them music. These are the forces that are trying to define and limit our tastes – forces like Apple Music and Spotify. And it's going to be like this for the foreseeable future. So the question is: are we going to let the three major record companies define us? Because that seems like a problem to me.

What's wrong with just finding all your music through Spotify?
Marketing works on fear. Somebody can sell to you better by making you feel anxious about something. And nowadays, many people find out about new music through recommendation engines, like Spotify's weekly playlist. I find this sort of stuff creepy, because it gets you right to a certain extent, but also doesn't get you right. It's very powerful being told by a sophisticated machine that it knows what you are like.

READ ON NOISEY: Our Boy Drake Went on a Great Big British Night Out Last Night

And you don't want to just end up relying on that machine to define your tastes for the rest of your life.
Yeah, it's easy to just fall down that hole and be comfortable forever, just listening to the music it recommends you. So I think we're at a crossroads now. We can either listen to what these data engines are telling us about our tastes, or we can seek out music with a little more vigour and curiosity. Listening to music is a more creative act than a lot of people think.

Your book suggests a new way of listening to music – rather than splitting sounds up by genre, you say, we should define it by qualities like "loudness" or "virtuosity". Is that not just going to get really confusing?
So when I listen to a piece of music – at home or out in a club, or whatever – I'm always looking for the key. Like, if I can just find the key for this piece of music and stick it in the door, then maybe I can find the essence of what this music is. That's what I set out to do in the book – to help people find that key.

What's your beef with genre?
I suspect that part of the reason we think so much about genre is that we've been trained to think that way by the people selling music to us. But what we should be doing is being more open to music.

Isn't it nice to be able to say you're into Detroit techno, or whatever, and just get really into that? You seem to be rejecting specialism.
Expertise is fantastic, and it's useful to listen to certain people who say, "You think you know about such and such, but let me play you the good stuff." But, I don't know, those people are useful, but are they more useful than casual listeners who just really like something? It's no fun if you have to understand the entire history of post-minimalism to understand where John Luther Adams is coming from. It's much more fun to just feel the shit, you know, and let it act upon you and tell you what it's trying to tell you.

Ben's book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music, is available now.

@thedalstonyears

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Meet the Sydney Accountant Who Wants Ageing Labeled a Disease

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Peter Xing, founder of Transhumanist Australia. Image by author.

If you've heard of transhumanism, you probably first think of the people putting LED lights in their skin, magnets in their fingertips, and RFID chips in their arms. You might expect transhumanists to seem pretty, well, extreme. But Peter Xing, co-founder of Transhumanist Australia, doesn't fit the cliches.

For the past seven years Xing has worked in business tax. He presents himself as a businessman with big dreams. Someone who believes society is accelerating so fast that people have become desensitised to the many possibilities available at our disposal.

It was at his workplace, Deloitte, that Xing first went "full nerd," after his research brought him into the world of artificial intelligence. In 2014, he dove deep into transhumanism, which he describes as the transformation of the human condition through technology.

Xing has made immortality Transhumanist Australia's biggest priority. The group has been petitioning for several months to get ageing deemed as a disease and force governmental change. On one level, they have succeeded. The Science Party, after forming an allegiance with Transhumanist Australia, has agreed to include this anti-ageing policy into their health strategy for 2017. Xing, also an executive member of the Science Party, says this is a big step in the right direction.

Not all transhumanists agree with the concept of immortality. But Xing is closely following in the footsteps of Zoltan Istvan, leader of the Transhumanist Party in the US and current independent presidential candidate. It was after watching how effective Istvan's public relations campaign was and garnering thousands of members, that Xing last year decided to start his own official movement in Australia.

"Everyone is already connected through technology," Xing explains to me as we sit in one of the many meeting rooms at his high rise office. "It has become an extension of our human brain, tapping into that collective knowledge of society."

Images by author.

While the concept of immortality feels as though it's verging on science fiction, Xing insists this resistance is misled. "It's very poetic to say there is a narrative arc with life and death," he says. "But it's a social construct. As society matures, we're starting to see this."

Xing tells me that recent scientific studies support the idea that ageing is not a fixed certainty. Earlier this month, the lifespan of mice was extended by 35 percent after removing stagnant cells, a study which has the potential to be adapted to humans. Trials of Metformin also start this year, a drug that could possibly increase human lifespan to 120 years.

"For me it is an existential risk. We will have a finite life if we don't encourage innovation towards the field of health span extension," Xing says. "One example is the Human Brain Project. These types of projects help find ways to kill Alzheimer's and other types of neurological diseases."

It's hard to fathom what the implications of age extension could be. The idea that we could live forever contravenes aspects of religion, culture, and ethics that we often think of as fundamental. There is also the question of how society will survive under the strain of an even larger aging population.

Xing; however, is confident that as society progresses, we will learn how to cope with any impediments. "People will look at resources and say 'I can live indefinitely, why not have children later?'" he says. "We are also only a speck in the grand scheme of things. Eventually, for society to survive, we will become a multi-planetary species."

There are times in our conversation when Xing strays into the higher concepts of transhumanism that are beyond what I can understand and/or Google. He notes that a counter argument to his movement is that society will become conservative, because old generations aren't dying and making way for new generations and new worldviews. "But we'll be constantly connected to the collective intelligence of everyone so we will actually get fresh ideas," he assures me.

"People will look at resources and say 'I can live indefinitely, why not have children later?"

He speaks of mind uploading: "You could potentially do this by synthetically adding on neurons while slowly letting go of old ones, so that you're still conscious as part of the process."

As you would expect from an accountant, Xing has a well sorted five-year plan. He is gradually building up a membership base through collaborations at Deloitte, where he tells me bio-hackers, virtual and augmented reality enthusiasts, effective altruists, technology entrepreneurs and space enthusiasts meet regularly.

On the political side of things, a party is already in the works for Transhumanist Australia. Their alliance with Science Party is to maintain influence until they have enough members to form their own party. He views the Science Party as a bridge between technological advancements and what society is ready for.

In the meantime, Xing says he is concentrating on eradicating the negative stigma that surrounds transhumanism. "We're trying to use the word as often as we can," he says. "To shy away from the concept is not accelerating the progress."

Xing is planning a gradual change to give society time to adjust. "It still has its danger, like what happened with the Nazis and eugenics. But that's when the moralities of society don't catch up to the technology. That's very important to address and we want to bring it to the forefront."

"We don't expect to win the 2020 election. 2045 is the singularity date, where technology exceeds human intelligence. We've got a due date probably a bit before that."

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A New Report Shows How Hard It Is to Keep Guns Away from Domestic Abusers

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Photo via Flickr user lifesizepotato

VICE is tracking mass shootings in America in 2016, and comparing the numbers with their European counterparts. Read our rationale for the project and the metrics we're using here.

In the broader scheme of American's gun problems, domestic violence might not seem like the most urgent piece of the puzzle. After all, the United States bore witness to hundreds of public mass shootings last year, including high-profile terrorist attacks in Charleston and San Bernardino. But a new report from two gun control groups serves as a reminder that domestic violence actually accounts for a huge share of gun deaths in America. These incidents are also some of the easiest to predict and prevent, with abusers leaving a trail of 911 calls and other hints that trouble might be coming. And while policymakers have crafted laws in hopes of keep guns out of the hands of abusers, the report suggests they're riddled with loopholes and bedeviled by poor enforcement.

The authors—the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy and Prosecutors Against Gun Violence—offer a prescription for how to plug up those gaps. The report serves as a solid goal post for states with lax laws and those struggling to enforce decent ones. But even the folks behind the recommendations concede they won't tackle domestic gun violence alone, which speaks to the ongoing and existential challenge posed by the patchwork of weak gun laws in America.

After all, domestic gun violence is "a multi-pronged problem," according to Hollye Dexter, an activist with Women Against Gun Violence. "We've got to come at it from a lot of different directions."

Domestic gun violence often involves a man killing his current or former partner or family, and almost never makes the news like random public shootings. But these tragedies take a toll: Of 2,707 female homicide victims in 2013, nearly half were related to or involved with the killer. Going by recent FBI data, over half of such "partner-related" murders would have been shootings. According to the gun control advocacy group Every Town for Gun Safety, domestic incidents also made up a disproportionate number—57 percent—of mass shootings under the FBI definition (at least four people shot dead in one incident) between 2009 and 2015. Eighty-one percent of the victims in those shootings were women and children.

Rather than inevitable bloodlust, this violence seems linked to guns, the presence of which increases the chance that a partner will be killed in a domestic violence event by about 500 percent. Domestic gun violence also wounds many more, and it keeps more still in a perpetual state of fear as firearms are used for terror and control even when not fired.

Thankfully, it's rare for domestic gun violence to explode in a vacuum. In up to 70 percent of cases, it follows a series of threats or less deadly violence, all of which offer points of contact with authorities before things get deadly. In one study, at least half of all women killed by their partners had been in touch with the criminal justice system at least once over the previous year. Recognizing this, Congress has enacted laws that allow states to prevent firearms purchases and even seize guns under certain domestic violence protection orders. When officials do remove guns from those deemed dangerous enough to merit a protection order, risk of intimate partner homicides dropped in at least one study by 19 percent.

Unfortunately, many states choose not to make removing guns from violent abusers mandatory, or fail to identify the guns, serve the order, or execute successful retrievals. Federal law also limits the right to remove guns to those with protective orders issued by (ex)spouses, people the abuser lived with, or those they share children with, and does not apply to temporary protection orders issued after abuse is identified but before a full hearing can be carried out for the protection of a victim.

The problem being, that "is the most important time to remove a gun," according to Dexter. "When people are in the situation to need a temporary restraining order, that means they feel like they're in immediate danger, and something's probably going to go down at any minute."

A number of states have fixed these loopholes locally, but many allow them to persist.

The report suggests states adopt gun removals in permanent and temporary protective orders, and where gun removals are optional, at least get key legal stakeholders to pledge to use them. The authors also lay out a comprehensive outline for how to best identify, remove, and (if need be) return abusers' guns. "To do removal and retrieval properly, you need to develop a comprehensive system," says Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Education Fund to Stop Gun Violence and a co-founder of the CRBFP. "You can say, 'We have removal in the state,' but unless you work with the stakeholders to develop processes... these things won't happen by themselves."

But even if states followed the recommendations of the report to a tee, they wouldn't be able to remove guns from all dangerous abusers. That's because there are a host of parallel loopholes in the definition of just who qualifies for domestic violence protections. The report only addresses in passing that domestic violence protective orders typically don't extend to non-cohabiting dating partners or stalkers, who are more likely to commit domestic violence than, say, a spouse. (There are other types of protective orders for these individuals, but they often don't carry tough restrictions.). The report also skits the issue of people who have trouble navigating the court system to successfully secure an official form of protection despite facing a clear risk of violent abuse.

Perhaps most importantly, weak background check data and exemptions for private or gun show sales make it exceedingly easy for someone prohibited from owning a gun under a protective order (or any other restriction like a felony or violent misdemeanor) to get one anyway. This at least partially explains why states with stronger background checks see 46 percent fewer women shot to death in domestic violence incidents than more lax states on average.

Horwitz sees creating a strong universal background check standard as key to bolstering gun removal and reducing domestic violence risks, a policy he believes many Americans support. Lindsay Nichols, an attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, adds that Congress is considering legislation to extend gun restrictions to stalkers, dating partners, and other loophole classes, which could go a long way in strengthening the benefits of domestic violence firearm removals. She also points to a recent California law that allows wider categories of people to get courts to restrict gun access to those who pose a plausible threat, which could help nip potential disasters in the bud.

There's almost always going to be a way for abusive people to do harm in America. But as the report's authors argue, effective policy can put up barriers that block the worst of that violence without unduly violating the constitutional right to bare arms. Frustratingly, no single volley of gun policies exists in a void, making the success of any one law or set of best practices in part contingent on the airtight implementation of different sets of ideas. But detailed proposals like these show that despite the tricky politics and enforcement hurdles, America is capable of giving victims of domestic violence access to better legal protection—and a chance to escape the peril of their partner's gun.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Some Lessons From a Guy Who Writes Essays for Cheating Students

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Image via Flickr User Rachel Johnson

It's drilled into your head during O Week—don't cheat or plagiarise anything. If you do you'll be caught, expelled, and you'll end up working at McDonald's, forever.

Despite this warning untold numbers of students find ways to cheat every year. In 2015 Sydney's Macquarie University revoked the degrees of two students and prevented 10 from graduating when it was found they'd paid an online service to complete their assignments. Actually, after I asked a few universities about the more common methods to wrought the system, a few mentioned ghostwriting services.

To find out more I got in contact with the owner of such a site. He only agreed to talk if I wouldn't disclose his name or website, so I'll call him Todd and say only that he's based in Canada.

Cheating Isn't Expensive

Clients start by sending in their assignment requirements. Todd will then allocate someone on his team to write the paper and send it back. Pretty simple. Todd tells me the people who write for his site are found through regular job vacancy sites including Gumtree and Craigslist.

Like with everything, the price depends on how quickly the service is needed. Obviously a paper due in six hours will cost considerably more than one needed in a week. The cost also differs depending on pages and length, but on average a regular three-page essay will cost between AU$80 and $200.

Not Getting Busted Is on the Student

Todd told me it's not his responsibility to provide "completed work." Instead he provides students with a guideline, and if they don't make alterations it's their fault if they're caught. "We provide research guides," he told me. "We tell all our clients to not hand in word for word what we provide them, but the ultimate decision is up to them."

Todd knows the majority of students don't follow this. "I would say 90 percent of our clients don't amend or alter the work we provide," he said. "Handing in work written by someone else does infringe university policies and can be considered a form of plagiarism."

But Getting Caught Is Rare

As Todd pointed out students are probably suspected of cheating all the time, but "the burden of proof is on the school itself." He says that most of the time they can't prove whether someone else wrote a paper because "everything we do is 100 percent original written from scratch." As mentioned before, the only times Todd knows his student have been caught is when they hand in something above their English skills.

It's All About Hooking Clients

For me, the only part of Todd's business that crosses into unethical territory is the way he relies on students becoming hooked. Changing tone between university papers arouses suspicion, Todd says, so a lot of students stick to his papers long term. "I would say our retention rate is around 70-80 percent," he admits. On top of this students are only too happy to tell others about the service. "Success in our business is based on referrals and repeat clients."

Scarily enough Todd admits that some clients who have used his services throughout their entire degrees. "They key is getting the client in first year and turning that want into a need," he says.

But Maybe Todd Isn't the Bad Guy

As a student himself Todd struggled with essay writing, which is part of the reason he claims to operate the website. Another reason for the site's existence is that he believes his services are giving a lot of students the fair chance that universities aren't. "The majority of our clients are international students predominantly from the Middle East and China. Universities are accepting a record number of international students who pay three to five times what a native student is paying." Given that they're hampered only by language and not ability, Todd says he has no qualms helping them out.

"Universities also understand that the majority of students who they accept do not speak English and are destined to fail when they begin school, it can be impossible for someone who doesn't even know the language to pass."

It's Just Business

According to Todd, he's just trying to help out in a bad system. "Universities know that we exist and in a way need services like us to continue to profit off international students," he says. "In the end it's all about money and governments and universities will willingly allow students to use services like ours to make money."

Follow Charlie on Twitter.

‘Far Cry Primal’ Is a Stone Age Setback for Open-World Gaming

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Far Cry Primal isn't a game about rugged, back-to-basics combat. Far Cry Primal is a game about mystical supermen, equipped with the same extraordinary abilities and gadgets as Watch Dogs' Aiden Pearce, or Far Cry 3's Jason Brody. The only difference is that instead of a smartphone or a GPS, you send an owl to go and scope out your location, and you use "Hunter Vision"—a variation on the Arkham series' detective mode—to track down your enemies.

Surely the point of taking Far Cry back to 10,000 BC, when clubs and spears were the equivalents of shotguns and assault rifles, is to play on limitation. Surely what this game ought to be saying to players is "no," "you can't do that," and "remember where you are." But Primal's structure and mechanics are precisely the same as a sandbox game based in the modern era, or any era for that matter (see Assassin's Creed). You skip across the landscape, acquiring new and incredible abilities, picking apart plants, animals, and enemy bases as you go. You are the One. This is your domain. And any notion of survivalism or struggle—the "what now?" feeling promised by this advert—is completely out the window.

The characters—an earnest woman who wants to save her people, a larger-than-life shaman who sends you on hallucinatory spiritual journeys—are lifted from previous Far Cry games, and everything you do here you've done a thousand times before: You find resources, spend them on upgrades, and complete missions and side-quests. Then you find more resources.

Last year saw Mad Max, Just Cause 3, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Dying Light, Metal Gear Solid V, and Fallout 4, all going-nowhere sandbox games in terms of their basic structure, all riffing on the same mechanics and stories. Far Cry Primal is another title on the pile. It took thousands of years for the part of northern Europe that Primal's set in to break apart into the clearly bordered countries we have today. But in a drag race between current open-world games and historical political debates regarding where one territory ends and another begins, you'd be hard pushed to predict a winner—this genre, in regards to fresh ideas, has slowed to a stop.

More specifically, so has Far Cry. Since 2008, and the definitive Far Cry 2, this series has been flailing for something to say. Primal, at least in its marketing campaign, is an indictment of human nature: In one form or another, we've always been at war. 2014's Far Cry 4 sketched the cyclical nature of violence—you depose one dictator and another rises in his place—while 2012's Far Cry 3 delved into philosophical... stuff.

This kind of smug, half-cooked moralizing has been Far Cry's narrative bread and butter now for three games. Maybe, if you're incredibly generous with your interpretations, you can find something in these games—perhaps Primal plays the same as modern combat games because war never changes. But those kind of readings feel inserted after the fact. I don't think Far Cry has anything that nuanced to say.

Instead, Far Cry postures. It foretells. But there's never anything underneath. This series prides itself on mysticism and spirituality, promising always "discovery" and "a journey." But all it delivers are obvious and condescending moral lessons. It's like the guy who can't wait to tell everyone what his tribal necklace means, or that rich kid at university who last year went to Delhi and had her "awakening." All the stuff with cave paintings in Primal, temples in Far Cry 4, and tattoos in Far Cry 3 is watery, pseudo rubbish. Far Cry isn't interested in telling us anything. It's determined that we believe it has something to say.

Unless, of course, you're playing Far Cry 2. It's an open-world game with as much to do and as rich a landscape as any open-world game from 2008, but it's still thematically and mechanically consistent. Before Spec Ops: The Line, Kane and Lynch 2, Receiver, Hotline Miami, or LA Noire, Far Cry 2 questioned video game violence.

You play a mercenary, sent to assassinate an arms dealer who's providing guns to both sides in a civil war. But that mission is quickly forgotten as you become caught up in the conflict—your character realizes that as long as this war keeps going, he'll continue to have work, so the game becomes less about stopping the fighting and more about stirring things up. When a foreign special forces team arrives to intervene, you sabotage their supplies and force them to retreat. When one side of the conflict develops a remedy for malaria, you infiltrate the factory where it's being made and destroy it, lest it be used as a propaganda tool to curry favor with the locals.

Your character in Far Cry 2 is interested not in ending violence or achieving for himself some great, personal status but rather perpetuating war and earning, simply, money. And when we sit down to play it, and what we desire are more missions, more gunfights, and more upgrades and unlocks, we are in his mindset—how we behave in the game is synchronized precisely with our character's profile.

Characterization that rock solid barely occurs in the most scripted, linearly structured video games, let alone an open-world shooter, and yet Far Cry 2 avoids easy nihilism. It's a violent game, and wholly accepting that both the character and the player are hungry for violence, but it ends on a moment of bittersweet optimism. At the end of Far Cry 3, you're either the returning hero or the doomed, dead idiot. In Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal, good or bad, you've at least ascended to power. In Far Cry 2, you, your friends, and a lot of the people you decided to try and save end up dead. But you make a moral choice. You at least attempt to do a good thing, and that saves the game from a simple, defeatist tone.

Compared to Far Cry 2, an insightful illustration of video game violence and an excellent story in its own right, what Far Cry Primal lacks is relevance. When Call of Duty went into the future, I took it as confirmation that the writers had given up trying to make sense of the realities of modern warfare and decided to extricate their games from all moral and political questioning. Going the other way, thousands of years into the past, feels similarly motivated.

After eight years spent scrambling for something to say, the makers of Far Cry seem to have given up. It's just a game about stabbing guys, killing animals, and finding plants now. It has no substance. To that extent, Primal is at least somewhat true to its premise. Its empty mechanics, repeated ad infinitum, purely for their own sake, belong not to the present but video games in their saddest, most primordial form.

Far Cry Primal is out now for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, with a PC version released on March 1.

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