The hipster ethos, as promulgated in Vice Magazine, is indistinguishable from Ayn Rand's Objectivism

yes, i was about to say.

Whereas Vice is a mag that came to New York from Canada and made Americans wish they were Canadian.

it's a handy soundbite, but i don't think vice made anyone wish they were canadian. seriously.

The fact is that Vice on the screen would clearly be Harmony Korine, not Sofia Coppola. In other words, it would be a lot closer to a Fassbinder film than an Air album.

Blount has never been more OTM than about Vice/LiT.

ya'll fucking poop-dick canadians gotta get fucked somehow, eh? CANADA IS A BURNT BITCH

here's Vice editor Chris Nieratko, by the by, doin' a li'l "racial, not racist" humor in the website's "About Us" section:

http://viceland.com/issues/v10n6/htdocs/staff/iheartnj.jpg

Did you like that bit, J0hn? Did it sound like a whore wrote it, or the editor of Vice pretending to be a whore? Is it usual to read about Dworkin and MacKinnon in free mags? Do you think this article demeans women?

It was all right, I guess. When I lived in Portland most of my friends were prostitutes - guys, mainly, working near the Justice Building around 13th & Taylor. My own experience of their attitudes - toward life, their line of work, the people they met up with, and so on - does not closely mirror that of the article's author. Contempt for the tricks seemed limited to guys who'd entered the trade out of actual empty-stomach hunger; my closest friends were guys who whored because it was hard for them to find work elsewhere: the market for waiters being flooded, and my friends not having any professional training (my best friend, Brad, being dyslexic and unable to complete classes without severe kill-me-now level frustration), and job interviews being somewhat embarassing when your manner of speech outs you before you've finished saying "hello." Maybe all these are/were just excuses, I dunno. But the seven or eight working guys I was pals with and the three or four working girls who liked to hang around with them weren't real "In your face! This is what bein' a WHORE is like, yeeeah!" about it. The girls I knew talked more about going to community college and getting a CNA than about, say, the sort of thing covered in the "youth" section of Vice's A-to-Z.

Not to call into question somebody else's experience, of course - just wondering if the article mightn't have been better written as a "how it was for me" than as a "what it's like" sort of thing. Not un-entertaining, though. 6 outta 10.

yay vice! being a crackhead and whore is really really cool!

You know, when I first saw this pic I felt like my cozy liberal preconceptions were being challenged. Then a few seconds later I realized I was just feeling a little gassy. It happens.

I got a headache and had to go to bed for a while, sorry. I liked your answer, anyway, it seemed honest.

this has all been talked to death and i'm saying nothing new, but i thought i'd take another look at the online vice (my 2nd since the last mammoth thread). john d's right - it's the comments that seem important here. no matter what article you're reading, scroll down a bit and the "nigger"s "jew"s and "french"ies inevitably appear. i get the feeling that, if anything, the vice environment is one that completely does away with the need for critical thinking. it doesn't quite matter anymore who means what or to what degree - going by the comments, it seems that now more than ever we can don blackface without thinking too hard about it. as much as like i'd like to buy that (THAT being "we're beyond good and evil and we're working towards a better future so let's keep language moving towards avantopia you fags"), i don't really. i'm not pretending language doesn't and isn't changing, but i am pretending that it serves us well to think about which bits and how. maybe (hopefully, i'd say), we can find a kind of change that isn't just changing AGAINST political correctness (which sounds like a very simple and easy thing to hate when you write it out as a two word phrase or speak it as a soundbite but.. i suspect it ain't). sure, maybe vice's a historical inevitability (if ya still believe in history) - an intrinsically awkward, sometimes funny, sometimes horrible side effect of REAL ACTUAL CHANGE FOR GOOD, but that's a little too forgiving for me.

http://www.viceland.com/issues/v11n3/htdocs/ungrateful.php

Some are intelligent, some dismissive, some crude, some appreciative, some funny...

But while you can judge a board by its 'comments' (that's all a board is), you can't judge a magazine by them. It's written by professionals, curated, edited, it has a style and a mission. In Vice's case, a rather eccentric one which, while it plays all the positional games of 'hipper and harder than thou', is also a very personal vision of the world coming from Gavin and Jesse. It's not tied into product cycles like other mags. It really is a much more serious and ambitious magazine than most style press titles. It makes people think because of its unreliable narrator stance, its feisty contentiousness, its devil's advocacy, and the way it works with themes, not just doing a little theme section but turning over the whole magazine to consideration of a single topic, sometimes all the way through the reviews.

I said this before when defending Vice, but I'll say it again. I think I'm quite a good writer, but when Jesse solicits ideas for articles from me I often think my own responses are wishy washy, just below par. Sometimes I self-censor. For instance, I had nothing to contribute to the Jobs issue, mainly because I've never had one. Other times Jesse passes tactfully over the idea, and when I see the issue I accept that other people had much more lively or interesting ideas. That happened with the travel issue. Although I travel a lot, I didn't really know what to say about it.

From time to time, though, I find a pitch that just fits the Vice style, and Jesse recognises that it's good and works, and it runs. I'd say that happens with about one in five pitches. With all the other magazines I write for, my success rate is more like one in one. They tend to take whatever I propose, even when it's rather lame. So I must say I've developed some respect for Vice's editorial vision and process. They know what they are doing.