It was only after Miles Pickering arrived at Scotland Yard following his arrest that the police realised they had got things embarrassingly wrong.
The T-shirt worn by the Brighton engineer did not express support for a proscribed terrorist group, instead the words on it read “Plasticine Action” and inside the letter “o” was an image of the stop-motion character Morph giving two thumbs up.
Speaking to the Guardian, Pickering admitted it was designed to be an easy mistake to make, appearing to look like the logo of Palestine Action, the protest group banned under terrorism legislation last month, but text underneath the logo reads: “We oppose AI-generated animation.”
In hindsight, when George W. Bush realized he could reuse the “terrorist” label to infringe on country’s and people’s rights, that’s when the whole descent into fascism started.
That gave the fascists a potent tool that they would use to great effect, but the seeds were planted way back with Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
I keep seeing this conversation happen. The eternal contest of “who can connect the dots back the furthest without sounding ridiculous” must have occurred in nearly every conversation among learned people who have had the occasion to bemoan present circumstances, which has been almost continually - presumably even in the public baths of Mohenjo-Daro.
On the strength of that observation, I have a new hypothesis to put forward: history has some degree of self-similarity. Sort of like Nietzsche’s eternal return, but in a more fractal sense rather than a repetitive sense. Things don’t merely repeat, events have a self-similarity and causal intercourse can be apprehended at many levels simultaneously. People have often said “history rhymes”. But I find history less like a song and more like some kind of a fractal crime scene, and the culprits are always legion.
At least this way we might have these discussions (repetitively, I note) without having to feel churlish every time we connect another dot, nor aggrieved by having been one-upped. Time is not a flat circle, it’s a Mandelbrot set.
Poetry. You have a way with words.
Arr it drives me nuts
No the seeds of fascism were planted when the first Cro-Magnon bashed another’s skull in with a thigh bone.
Then threw it up into the air and it turned into a spaceship. Loved that movie,
9/11 was the beginning of the end of the West.
Bin Laden would be so proud. Converting the west into an authoriatarian dream and in the case of the USA, even with a strong religious taste.
The judicial coup that brought Dubya to power was the beginning. 9/11 was just a convenient pretext but the surveillance state and the undermining of civil rights was always going to happen.
Brooks Brothers riot… No we can’t count the presidential election votes because there’s dudes in suits jumping around yelling outside
It started when we designed economic and political systems that pools power in fewer and fewer peoples hands. Bush Jr and his actions are just a symptom of the problem.
In hindsight, the Dominionism Cult was started in the 70s to take over America. The fascists have been the same this whole time. Checkout “Totalitarianism in America” by Chris Hedges. My mom was in this cult in the 90s, and I have disgusting memories of going to secret meetings where they taught ppl how to brainwash ppl and become their “friend” so they could use them. Now it’s rich ppl and republicans, same MOs though.
Two, three decades ago, it was just another snake cult. Now, everywhere.
Nucular
Ironically enough that was also the exact moment when the terrorists won the War on Terror.
Which ones? The Muslim or the Xian flavor?