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.”
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,