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.”
I’m with you but have you considered joining just to fuck things up by being obstructive from the inside?
This is a bad idea for a ton of reasons, but the most important, I think, is that you are not immune to propaganda.
Look, if you join a fascist organization (of any sort - I’m not specifying any particular government or non-government organization here), by the time you finish your probationary period and have enough authority to take independent action, you’re going to have spent months doing horrible things to innocent people. You’re going to be surrounded by other fascists telling you those horrible things are right and just. You’re going to be reading fascist propaganda everyday. You’re going to have to repeat that propaganda and pretend you agree with it. And you’ll probably be isolated from your friends and family who would tell you otherwise because, you know, you joined a fascist organization - except for the friends and family who support fascism and will be telling you what a great thing you’re doing.
And so, instead of acting against the organization, you rationalize to yourself why it’s not time to act yet. Or it’s not bad enough to act. Or you have to keep your powder dry to do more damage later. Or you can’t afford to act because your rent is due and you have a family to support. And meanwhile a steady diet of fascist propaganda moves you closer and closer to genuinely becoming a fascist.
Fighting from within is for people who are already stuck in an organization that changed around them - or people drafted into the organization who have no other choice. Pretending to be a fascist, as 4chan and gamergate showed us, is a very effective way to become one.
Yes, actually, but don’t believe I’d be able to do much good. I could be “incompetent” and maybe achieve slower arrests and cost them money unnecessarily, but outside of just “accidentally” burning a precinct to the ground or something else that could be done by anyone, i feel joining would just make me another incompetent fascist slowly fumbling the agenda forward.