A lot of cities, NYC for example, have had laws like this on the books for years. The idea was to crack down on mob actions like KKK rallies where people would wear hoods or masks. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly novel or controversial law unless it outlaws wearing a hood that isn’t covering one’s face.
So much for the Spok hoodie: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/f11a/?srp=9
The Captain America hoodie: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/htgo/?srp=11
The Sriracha hoodie: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1e4a/?srp=17
The STFU hoodie: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/79e3/?srp=61 (Which, I’m guessing, is up there in popularity with Whatsamatta U because it’s out of stock. Darn!)
You get my point…
One cold January, when I was a bank teller, a woman came into the bank wearing a ski mask. Fortunately, my branch manager saw me ready to hit the panic button and waved me off - he recognized her and took her aside for a talk about how we don’t wear ski masks into a bank; just not a good idea.
How do people decide what part of your body your “identity” is? Why is it always the front of the head?
What if my identity is my genitals? How should I explain this to them? This is my face - ie the part of my person that intersects with others.
The system? You thought there was only one?
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Because when THEY did it, they were pinkos who hated freedom… WE do it in the name of security… totes different!
Seriously, I think it’s about providing legal cover for the police - if someone disguise themselves in the commission of a crime with a hoodie, and they shoot a guy 10 blocks away, also wearing a hoodie, but it’s not the same guy… well now they have a law that gives them more latitude if they shoot the wrong guy.
He was a catholic at a time when catholics were heavily persecuted in England (and in Ireland by the English).
Catesby was the ringleader, not Fawkes. And the end was to stick a Catholic puppet on the throne instead.
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I’m pretty sure most Brits wouldn’t disagree with you, since we’ve been burning effigies of Fawkes for 400 years.
I think the plot itself was political as much as religious. It was part of a long running power struggle, and there’s no way the Catholics would have been any more even-handed if they were in charge.
But as to whether Fawkes is a dubious choice at best for a symbol of resistance to an oppressive government/power structure, I’m not going to disagree with you. 
But here’s Alan Moore’s thoughts.
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Does it matter what it’s called?
Again, does it matter how they are labeled?
Who is this “we”?
You seem to get hung up on labels. Anything can be a symbol for freedom, depending upon the person and the circumstances. Especially considering how nebulously freedom, oppression, religion, and terrorism can be defined.
Should I assume that you are referring to “V for Vendetta”? If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the character V was not Fawkes. I don’t even know if that goofy mask really resembles Fawkes or not. I don’t know that it should cause too much cognitive dissonance to be inspired by somebody who was themselves in turn inspired by somebody dubious. What if I am fighting with some brilliant person who lives and breathes Sun Tzu - despite me having gone to university with Sun Tzu and knew that he was really a bit of a prat? Need this change anything?
It’s probably no more bizarre than the commodification of the image of Che Guevara, mostly for marketing to people who have neither read nor know anything about Guevara. Or voting based only upon what you see on television news.
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You may want to look outside of US borders for the actual metaphor. Because it’s not always about the US.
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Well, since the original was a criticism of Thatcher, it was set in London and the villain was explicitly British…
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In 1600, in western Europe, the two were one and the same, no?
Bloody Mary, right (poor, phantomly pregnant, full of daddy issues, Mary)? And the Spanish were attempting to thwart English aspirations at every turn… but then there was the colonization of Ireland to consider… began (again) under the Tudors, and then, eventually onto Cromwell, who kind of completed the job.
But it didn’t. What happened was very much of its time. I think it’s anachronistic to call it “fascist”, nor do I think it was necessarily “religious extremism”, given the religious wars that had rage all the previous century. But Fascism is especially a modern phenomenon.
The movie might have been stupid, but Alan Moore certainly ain’t…
It was there…
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Both those headlines still describe something reprehensible though.
The one it was set in?
(ETA: @daneel beat me to it. I’ll not post any more Blair pics though. No one needs that…)
Of course he can. But of course only white people get sunburn…
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You’re anti-semantic!
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Oh, glad it wasn’t just me that had an issue… this happened to me in another topic yesterday! Just generally glitchiness.
I’d argue that fascism itself is a modern political construct - though clearly, Mussolini meant to invoke the roman empire and the nazis meant to invoke some mythical aryan past. But, they are built on modern systems of power. The use of media for example - the nazis, as David Bowie once famously said, “staged a nation”, and they couldn’t not have done so without mass media available to them, as mobilization of the masses was key. Goebbles was key to the rise of the nazis and the architech of their success because of his use of the mass media. Modern ideas about race and nation (based on a bastardization of Darwin’s theory of evolution as applied to society/people) play an constitutive role, as did the industrial, still privatized economy.
What was happening in england in 1600 at the end of the Tudor era, moving into the Stewart era was nowhere near as totalizing. It was essentially a struggle between elites (the monarch, parliamentarians, the spanish).
I think it matters how we use words like fascist because they have a specific, historically grounded definition. Using them anachronistically simply taints our understanding of events in the past.
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