if you see something stupid, say something

I'll admit that I occasionally get nostalgic for the British constabulary, insofar as my experiences with them have been more positive than those with the SPD and the NYPD. Certainly, the Metropolitan Police have a calmer and more sensible approach to mass public protest and assorted displays of civil disobedience than their American counterparts. And despite the horrific killing of Jean Charles de Menezes shortly after the 7/7 bombings, my impression had been that British authorities were considerably less prone to paranoid displays of Scary Terrarists! fearmongering. I've never been harassed for taking photos in London, and my friends there who are of desi or Arab background or who "look Muslim" tend to have fewer stories of racial/religious profiling than do those in New York. (Note: I don't take this difference as necessarily representative of an actual UK/US disparity in levels of racism or Islamophobia more generally, but until now have seen it as indicative of a more levelheaded social and institutional response to the threat posed by terrorism.)

But then they gotta go and do stupid shit like this: Met Launches New Counter-Terrorism Campaign. It's an apparent effort to outdo the creepiness of the subway posters proclaiming "Last year, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something", and it succeeds.

Thankfully, derisive snark comes to the rescue (as is often the case in ye deare olde englande)--in the form of fast-multiplying remixes of the posters (via ultrabrown). These two are my favourites: