BANS KICK SMOKERS’ BUTTS
BY HARRY CHEADLE
PHOTO BY ISTOCKPHOTO/THORNBERRY
We live in contentious, troubled times: Millions are out of work, protestors fill the streets of practically every major city, the global financial system is in ruins, and just about everyone feels disenfranchised. It’s enough to make you want to smoke three packs a day, but from the looks of things the powers that be are moving toward revoking Americans’ inalienable right to give themselves lung cancer.
December was a tough month for everyone who enjoys the sweet, sweet taste of burning nicotine. First, on November 29, the city council of Boise, Idaho, passed resolutions banning smoking in bars and clubs, near bus stops, on any outdoor patio accessible to children, and basically on any type of public property, including parks. Remember, this is Boise, in fucking Idaho, a state where there’s nothing to do but form militias, be very cold in the winter, and smoke. If people there are adopting the ridiculous “cigarettes are basically as bad as heroin” mentality, the antismoking movement has gained some serious momentum.
As if to prove that point, the very next week, the town of Vancouver, Washington, adopted a similar measure, prohibiting smoking in rec centers and parks. An article in Vancouver newspaper the Columbian contained some telling quotes from hardcore antismokers such as “[Smoking] makes me gag just thinking about it. It is just something I can’t see us saying it’s OK to do” and “I sincerely believe that parks are for healthy living.” Statements like these hint at a bizarre, insidious pro-health agenda where any objectionable behavior—drinking soda, cursing, not wiping your ass—is grounds for being kicked out of parks and, if these busybodies had their way, probably thrown in jail until the offending habit is kicked.
The argument for bans like these is that when you light up you aren’t just killing yourself, you’re killing others via evil secondhand smoke. Some hard-line smokers’ rights advocates question that secondhand smoke is bad at all, but let’s not get into that, because antismokers hate smoking even when it doesn’t hurt anyone else: The city of Boston just banned e-cigarettes in the workplace. Yes, e-cigarettes, the smokeless alternative to cigarettes that don’t hurt anyone but the smoker. The ban was put into place because someone thought that maybe e-cigarettes might be harmful, and probably because they commit the unpardonable crime of looking like cigarettes—which validates the secret belief of some smokers that they want to ban our smokes because we look so damn cool.
THAI ROYALS DON’T “LIKE” FACEBOOK
BY ELEKTRA KOTSONI
ILLUSTRATION BY SAM TAYLOR
If you happen to find yourself enjoying a Wi-Fi connection on one of Thailand’s charming beaches, think twice before “liking” any funny memes about the Thai royal family, unless you want to spend your vacation scrapping for cigarette butts in the Bangkok Remand Prison. Under the long-standing tradition of lèse-majesté (a law that makes it illegal to insult the dignity of the monarchy), the Thai government can send you to jail for sharing anything offensive to the royal family.
This law makes no exception for foreigners or even 61-year-olds suffering from mouth cancer like Amphon Tangnoppakul, who was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for sending an SMS deemed offensive to the monarchy. “Being in an overcrowded jail has worsened his ailment and he always cries when people visit him,” says his lawyer, Arnon Nampa, who has worked on many similar cases in the past. “Our legal team is working hard to get him released on bail, but the appeal is likely to take years because the Thai judiciary system has determined his charges to be severe, and we have no witnesses as no one wants to get involved in a lèse-majesté case.”
Tangnoppakul’s trial isn’t an isolated incident either—last month an American citizen named Joe Gordon was tossed into a Thai prison for posting links to a bio of King Bhumibol Adulyadej several years ago while Gordon was in Colorado. What’s the reason for these numerous lèse majesté incidents? Are the royals really that touchy? Nampa blames the tense political situation in the country for the arrests: “Most Thais are loyal to the royal family. However, as we’re undergoing a period of political transition, some ultra-royalists use the flaws of our legal system as a political tool against their opposition. What boggles me is that Mr. Tangnoppakul is far from being [antigovernment activist] Surachai Sae Dan; he’s an unemployed grandfather of five who can barely spell.”
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RIOT INTERRUPTED
BY JOSHUA HADDOW
PHOTO COURTESY OF CEASEFIRE
Last August, a documentary called The Interrupters premiered in London; it follows a trio of workers from an organization called CeaseFire as they go around Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods attempting to stop people from beating the shit out of one another. Coincidentally, a week after the premiere, rioting broke out all over the UK. The government’s response was more “Throw the bums in jail” than anything like CeaseFire’s model.
We talked to Dr. Gary Slutkin, the man who invented the practice of violence interruption, which is based on his work with the World Health Organization on epidemic control. Here’s what he said about whether “interrupting” could be used to stop the crowd-based violence that continues to erupt across the world.
VICE: How can violence interrupters help control rioting?
Gary Slutkin: In the film you see more interpersonal violence, fighting over money, girls, or gangs, but there have been episodes where we have interrupted what could have been riots. There was an incident on the west side of Chicago about three years ago where the police shot somebody. His friends saw what happened and ran back into their houses to get guns, aiming to start a riot and shoot at officers. The interrupters cooled them down, but it wasn’t easy to do; it took hours.
A lot of the rioters in the UK follow the reasoning that their behavior is OK because bankers and politicians are immoral.
The inequity is infuriating. The human mind does assessments of fairness in day-to-day life. The unequal ways in which the law is being applied are very upsetting to people.
How does this all relate to disease control?
Inequity is like the dirty water in diarrheal disease epidemics. Sometimes you can’t clean it up fast enough. If you can’t reverse the inequity quickly, then you have to find a strategy to control violence in the meantime.
So interrupters are literally like medicine. It’s a real innovation to apply that process to behavior instead of diseases.
Don’t forget that decades or centuries ago we were punishing people who had illnesses and diseases. We used to put people with leprosy in dungeons; we misunderstood the problem.
Do you have any suggestions on how police can peacefully curb these types of behaviors?
Police interacting positively with the community has a dampening effect on crime and violence. Highly aggressive policing has been shown to aggravate the situation, and if they’re showing aggression the population shows aggression back. I think we’ve expected too much from law enforcement.
MITTEN SMITTEN
BY JOSH SCHNEIDER
ILLUSTRATION BY MAIA RUTH LEE
In this fraught political climate even the normally placid Midwest is ready to boil over into conflict. It started when the Wisconsin travel board unveiled their new winter tourism campaign, which featured a Wisconsin-shaped mitten, essentially giving longtime mitten look-alike Michigan the middle finger.
We asked Dave Lorenz at Travel Michigan which state deserved the mitten designation, and he replied, “Michigan. But we understand Wisconsin’s mitten envy. They are the Cheese State. Their state looks like a big chunk of cheese. It’s no big surprise with all those cheeseheads out there. Obviously they’ve been wearing those hats way too tight if they think their state looks like a mitten.”
In a poll on Travel Michigan’s website, nearly 18,000 respondents identified Michigan as the one, true mitten. Continuing the debate on the message boards, commenter Clifford Conor wrote, “Wisconsin is retarded. They don’t even look like a mitten unless you have a retarded hand which they probably do being retarded and all.” “Dave672” kept it more concise: “Wisconsin will always be the penis.” And a guy going by “Moonpoppy” took it to another level: “Michigan is the only place where God touched the earth and his imprint remains.”
Even Lisa Marshall of the Wisconsin Department of Tourism admitted, “We’re not the Mitten State. We want to be known as the Fun State.”
Before things got out of hand, the states decided to call a truce, parlaying the press exposure into a clothes drive. “Call it a truce,” Dave said, “or as I like to call it—victory.”
HEAVEN IS A WATERSLIDE
BY ANNIE CARROLL
PHOTO BY ANNIE M.V. NGUYEN
Suoi Tien, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is the first and only Buddhist amusement park in the world. For around $2.40, you can experience Buddhist philosophy in ride form. Nirvana is represented by giant waterslides emerging from the beards of 12-story-high faces, each plunging into swimming pools decorated with dragons. The deceptively named Unicorn Palace, a cavernous corridor filled with severed heads and high-pitched screams, represents the Buddhist version of hell.
Suoi Tien has recently undergone a multibillion-dollar expansion, lifting the place to surreal, technicolored heights. The park emphasizes nature in its most bizarre form. Want to feed slabs of meat to 1,500 crocodiles? Go right ahead. If that’s not quite savage enough, take a zip-line ride over the crocodile lagoon and into a bat cave. Or perhaps a leisurely jaunt in a swan-shaped boat along the gloriously artificial beach is more your speed. Whatever your fancy, be it daring or not, the Vietnamese seem to have taken the idea of the amusement park and fed it LSD for, like, a gazillion years.
NAZIS SUCK AT MAKING BOARD GAMES
BY WILBERT L. COOPER
ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH KUNKLE
When German neo-Nazis aren’t gunning down immigrants, robbing banks, and making pipe bombs, apparently they like to get together for a nice game of Pogromly—a Nazi-themed version of Monopoly where the phrase “Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200” has more to do with turning people into soap than dropping it. This horrifying abomination was designed and sold for about $78 by National Socialist Underground members Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos, and their female accomplice Beate Zschäpe to raise funds for their racist terrorist activities. The two guys, a girl, and their blitzkrieg board game are believed to be responsible for the “Kebab Killings,” a series of point-blank executions in Germany between 2000 and 2006 that targeted eight Turks, a Greek, and a policewoman.
The two Uwes committed suicide last November, right after robbing their 14th bank in 12 years and only moments before police were about to apprehend them. And Beate turned herself over to police custody after firebombing the house she and the boys lived in, in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the evidence that ultimately linked the trio to the Kebab Killings—evidence that included the murder weapon and a DVD containing footage of the crew in which they claim responsibility for nine of the murders. In an attempt to understand how such misguided pieces of human garbage come to be (and why they made a board game), we reached out to three American game experts—Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman, and Jesse Fuchs—to see whether their analysis of Pogromly could tell us anything about the notorious terror-cell trio.
VICE: Hi, Frank. What can you tell us about the terror cell from looking at Pogromly?
Frank Lantz: They are idiots. Re-skinning Monopoly is the most unimaginative way to make a game. There’s Simpsons Monopoly and Baseball Monopoly. It’s been done a million times.
Well, at least they put their own political spin on it.
Politics in games is nothing new. Monopoly itself is based on a game that was a political work made by a radical leftist to show the injustices of land ownership. However, this game’s only value is its interesting, shocking, and perverse cultural kitsch.
Eric, what do you think they were trying to accomplish?
Eric Zimmerman: The fact that they made the game demonstrates their fantasy about having their ideas at play in the culture at large. They hope one might walk into a toy store and see their version of Monopoly on the shelf. It is not necessarily an earnest attempt to make a fun or playable game, or even have some kind of viable economic idea disseminated. Just the act of making the game helps them live out their fantasy.
Do you think it’d be fun to play Pogromly?
Jesse Fuchs: It’s almost like the game is for people who find Monopoly too confusing. It’s hard to even tell what the utilities are—oh, they seem to be Jews working… The weirdest thing is that Monopoly is a game about bankrupting each other. Was this supposed to represent Nazi infighting? I doubt it was well thought-through. Even if I were a Martian game designer who had no instinctive revulsion to this game, I still doubt I would get anything from it.
STEPHEN HARPER LOVES PUSSY
BY BEN AMERICO
PHOTO BY COLE WAGNER
Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, is a bona fide feline-hoarding kitty lady in disguise, which is why, after the prisons he loves to build, his second-favorite housing facility is “Cat Parliament.” In the mid-80s some volunteers literally constructed a cat-scale parliament behind the real one, fit with heaters, litters, and feeding troughs (supplied by fucking Purina cat chow, by the way). Since the 1960s, hundreds of stray cats gathered around the industrial heaters behind the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa to escape the winter cold. Turns out, the cute little bastards were all the descendants of brave cats employed back in the 19th century by the original parliamentary staff to rid the buildings of rodents. Chemicals replaced them by the 50s, and out of work with no purpose in life, the cats hit the streets. That is, until they were saved, given a home, and rechristened the “Parliamentary Cats” like some shitty Disney movie (but really, the maintenance staff was just sick of pulling cat corpses out of heating shafts). Stephen Harper and his wife, Laureen, have been uncharacteristically empathetic to the plight of the cats, frequently championing the good work of Cat Parliament volunteers. Meanwhile Ottawa’s homeless population, a large chunk of which are Inuit, has the worst crack epidemic in the country and valuable drug-rehabilitation programs are set to be cut by the Conservative government’s new tough-on-crime legislation.
