Finding Nemo (again)

 

From my blog post We all live in a retro submarine from April 2010

I just had a reminder of this photo, which I took in Brighton over a decade ago. A few things have changed since then. My son, who was just about the right size to captain this hobbit-scale sub is now as tall as me (give or take; it's hard to tell when his default posture's the stereotypical teenage slouch). 

But I'm still coming across subs out there which look like takes on Jules Verne's fictional Nautilus. A more or less unrelated search recently came back with this:

Image Credit: H I Sutton's Covert Shores blog

Although it dates from the around  same era when I took my picture, this is no cartoonishly cute sculpture, or theme park attraction, but an attempt at an actual working submarine (well, a semi-submersible, anyway), designed and built with deadly purpose by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers, in the closing days of the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Like the sculpture, this is on a far smaller scale than Nemo's Nautilus (it's a midget semi-sub, probably only around a 10th of the length of the fictional 70 metre Nautilus). Interestingly, Hutton also compares it to a Nineteenth Century submersible, but a real one. That's because, like the Confederate Civil War-era sub the Huntley, the Tamil Tigers' vessel looks as if it was designed to attack ships by ramming them with a spar torpedo attached to the pole sticking out of its bow.

This isn't the only interesting oddity to be found in the Covert Shores blog, which features a compelling selection of unusual naval tech, both current & vintage. Highlights include Russia's huge, terrifying nuclear powered/armed torpedo, named "Posiedon" (Посейдон), after citizens were given a vote on the name of Russia's latest weapon of mass destruction (can't help feeling disappointed that they didn't end up with a doomsday weapon called Nukey McNukeface). Then there's quite a bit of stuff on (mainly Latin Ameican) narco subs, the use of marine mammals for naval operations, the mysterious death of Lieutenant-Commander "Buster" Crabb, a prohibition-era moonshine-smuggling sub and the James Bond-ish hardware of Swimmer Delivery Vehicles underwater "chariot" attack craft and various stealthy/low-profile vessels.

Another treat from Covert Shores is Hutton's own interpretatation of Verne's Nautilus, which is closer to a visualisation of what was described in the novel than the Harper Goff's looser, but nonetheless wonderful, visualisation. 

It wasn't a search for this iconic proto-steampunk design which originally led me to Hutton's blog, though. I was initially looking for information on another a piece of retro futurism from a later era, namely this sleek deco-looking experimental helicopter design from the 1930s:

Like the Tamil Tigers' mini-Nautilus, the  Dorand G20 Gyroplane looks like something that's sprung out of the pages of vintage Science Fiction into real life. In this case, if you ever had a mental picture of the ubiquitous helicopters which flitted around the art deco skyscrapers in Huxley's Brave New World, carrying the Alphas and Betas to and from their places of work, consumption or leisure, it probably looked like something like this.

Like the Tamil mini sub, though, this helicopter was orignally built with more aggressive intentions - there was an idea that the Dorand would replace the spotter plane which was kept on board France's massive inter-war Surcouf cruiser submarine (that's the link which originally brought me to the Covert Shores blog).

The Dorand Gyroplane isn't quite as insanely art deco as the never-flown Bugatti racing plane from the same era, but it comes pretty damn close.

Definitely at the more elegant end of the very wide spectrum of French aircraft designs from the 1930s. As somone once said:

When one looks at French aircraft of the period immediately before and during World War Two, it is evident that there were two schools of thought when it came to aircraft design! One school was to design elegant, graceful and beautiful aircraft. The other was to see just how ugly they could make the airplane and it still fly and perform the duties it was designed for.

Mon Dieu, quel bordel!

 Now there's a design that wouldn't ever make it it into fiction. Oh, hang on...

The Canadian Air Force (according to South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut).

Low-maintenance voters

With all the desperate flag-waving and public displays of jingoism, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Boris Johnson's UK is a tribute act to the Thatcher years. But it occurs to me that one thing has changed fundamentally; aspiration. 

Right through the Thatcher years and beyond, the Conservatives and New Labour, made a very conscious electoral pitch to "aspirational" voters. Way into the noughties, pundits were referencing the upwardly-mobile "Mondeo Man" and his ilk as the demographic groups that were key to gaining and maintaining power.

The canny shift the modern Conservative Party and its media enablers have made seems to be to mobilise an entirely different* set of voters. After a decade of austerity and stagnant wages, like Trump, they've identified a new group of voters to woo. People who don't believe in aspiration any more, because they don't see it in action, but are furious and want to punish somebody for what their lives have become. 

Angry people, made too cynical to believe that either own lives, or the lives of their kids will ever get better, but who'll vote for anybody who can turn their anger on an external enemy; migrants, minorities, the "woke."

It makes sense in its own warped terms. In a post-austerity, post-Brexit, post-Covid world, it's going to be tough to appeal to aspiration. If you feed aspirations you will eventually be expected to actually fulfil aspirations. If you mobilise voters with no aspirations beyond seeing somebody else worse off, then you literally don't have to do anything except make the designated hate groups' lives shittier. Which is way easier to achieve than actually making people's lives better.

You have to hand it to the UK's post-Trump Trumpists - by finding angry people with low expectations and keeping them angry they've built themselves the ultimate low-maintenance political base. People so cynical that they no longer expect their lives to get better, but will vote for anybody who'll take their pain out on somebody else.

By weaponising spite, they've brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "the tyranny of low expectations" and come pretty damn close to actual political genius.

 Efficient sadopopulism. Mondeo Man didn't see that one coming.

 

 

* I say "entirely different, but it's quite possible that many of todays angry and disillusioned voters may be formerly aspirational Mondeo Men or Worcester Women for whom the idea of upward mobility has become a sick joke.

 

Update

 Synchronicity:

The Ford Mondeo has reached the end of the road, the company announced today.

The saloon car that became a byword for ‘Mondeo Man’ – the middle-ground voter that could swing elections – has been killed off by the rise in popularity of sports utility vehicles and the push towards electrification, the manufacturer has confirmed today.

More here.

 

Banging your head against a brick wall, AKA Twitter moderation

 

I've just been taught a slightly annoying, but worryingly instructive, lesson.

Contrary to my New Year's resolution, I'm probably still spending more time on Twitter than I ought. Then I got this message:

Hi Andrew King Your account, *******, has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm.

Oh boy. What terrible message had I posted? Well, here's my offending tweet, in all its gory glory:

I guess deciding to *stop* repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall doesn't actually count as a policy. 

But it would sure feel better than continuing to repeatedly bang your head against a brick wall.

OK. Well, you could argue this was a facetious reply (judge for yourself: screenshot in the context of the tweet I was replying to at the bottom of this post).* And, sure, it's a clichéd metaphor, so I should definitely hand myself in to the style police.

But "encouraging suicide or self-harm?" Seriously? Even if you were totally unfamiliar with the idiom and took those two sentences literally, the literal sense is that banging your head against a brick wall is a bad thing and stopping this activity would definitely feel better.

Anyway, I was given the options of deleting the offending tweet or appealing against the suspension, so I appealed. After all, I figured, some key words had probably been picked up by an algorithm, so if I appealed, presumably an actual human would look at the tweet and realise that it had been flagged in error?

 Wrong, apparently:

 Hello,    

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account, *******, regarding the following:

Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.
 
You will not be able to access Twitter through your account due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules around:

Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm

In order to restore account functionality, you can resolve the violations by logging into your account and completing the on-screen instructions.
 
Thanks,

Further violations will lead to suspension of your account.  

Twitter

So I ended up deleting the tweet to get back on the platform. Annoying and slighly worrying, in the sense that another innocent metaphor could see me banned from the platform, which would be irritating, given that I've done nothing wrong, but I'll live.

But what makes me slightly more than irritated and more like angry and concerned, is the context. Moderation, after all, is there for a reason. There are genuinely anti-social, threatening, harrassing, violent messages, hate speech and, yes, actual messages which really do promote or encourage suicide or self-harm.

I know that because, like almost everyone else on Twitter, I've seen some pretty unpleasant stuff.  For example, one of this individual's tweets popped up in my timeline the other week:

 Yep, a real life, out and proud white supremacist Nazi, praising George Lincoln Rockewell, an actual, if clownishly ineffective, Nazi. I had a look it this account's feed and reported a few genuinely dodgy tweets. With, as far as I can tell, no result at all. 

Twitter may be cool hosting white supremacists and Nazis, but props to Linktree, a social media landing page which, old fogey that I am, I hadn't heard of before, but which at least has the gumption to kick creeps like this off its platform. Here he is whining about it:

Sadly, Blogger and YouTube, like Twitter, apparently still seem to think that this sort of content is OK (Odysee, like Linktree, is a thing I'd not even heard of but, as for Gab, we all know that like Parler it's just a sewer of conspiracy theories and far-right wingnuttery).

 So there we are. Use a perfectly normal English idiom on Twitter and risk having you account permanently deleted. Be an actual Nazi-supporting white supremacist with an account that exists to direct hate against minorities and your political opponents and Jack Dorsey's minions apparently see no problem at all (ditto the people at Google who run YouTube and Blogger). Something is very much not OK here.

What's going on? Is it that, for all their "community guidelines", social media platforms have a vested interest in keeping extremist clickbaity accounts alive, because controversy drives engagement and grows the platform? That would explain why it took so long for multple breaches of community guidelines by individuals like Katie Hopkins to build up to a Twitter ban, much engagement and hate having already been generated before any action was taken.

Apparently, all it takes is provocation-driven engagement and the brass neck to deny what you quite obviously are to keep the Twitter police off your back:

Anyone with eyes, and/or ears and a functioning brain?

Hmmm...

*Context of my tweet: