Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One
wanted writes "If you look at Microsoft's Poland business solutions Web site, you will probably not notice anything odd about the main picture. However, when you compare it with the original English version, you can see that someone decided that showing black people in Poland is probably not going to be convincing to business. They just Photoshopped the head of a white guy in for the black one, in an amateurish way, leaving his hand unchanged. (Here's a mirror in case something should happen to the original.)" We noted a few months back that the city of Toronto had done something similar.
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/
They left the Asian guy, but you do have a point. When Clinton addressed the Serbian people back in the 90's they made him a little extra pasty for the audience.
I grew up in Poland (81-93). And yes there was very little diversity in our population especially coming out of the communist era, where Russian mandate purged Poland of almost all non-Natives. Which considering what they did to countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Georgia I consider generous! I would say given my experience it's not that Polish people are racist, it's more that racism is a very new concept. Having had grown up in a totally homogeneous society, I could not even conceptualize any other kind of a society. I did not consider attacking anyone just because they were different. The few people I did see that were Asian or African only invoked extreme curiosity in me.
Then as communism fell the wave after wave of immigrants started to hit Poland. They could be seen begging for money on streets of all of our major cities. Not even sure where all of them were coming from, only thing that was apparent was there somewhat darker hue. These immigrants stoked all kinds of nationalistic feelings amongst my people, and often were met with violence. To understand such a strong response you must consider that prior to the fall of communism for many years (since the end of WW2) the word Pole was synonymous with Slavic and Catholic. There was no variation. So in essence it was as if the collective being of our society was under attack. Xenophobia was a very natural response (in a Human sense), and I believe it prevails to this day.
Around 20 years ago someone arranged a 'living flag' ceremony on Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Invitations went out to any and all military people stationed in the area, an enormous number of potential attendees. People showed up, the event was held, photographers took pictures. After, the phone company wanted to use some of the photos for the covers of the phone book. Upon examination it turned out that very few non-white persons had attended. The phone company couldn't see their way clear to use pictures of reality, so they held a bogus living flag event with a mix of non-whites of much greater proportion that in real life, and even in the military. (I suppose that of real life makes you then it may do the same for the basic, well devised lie, so the best way to prevent this uncomfortable feeling is to lie real big.) Those pictures got used. People who attended the event found out and publicized the fact, but after the initial splash the matter remained known but non-newsworthy. Also after, I was told but can't confirm that some of the photos were altered to increase the female presence and to make some of the people more attractive.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Mod parent up. People that regard this as racist have probably never been to Poland or any other Eastern European country. For historical reasons, you will very rarely see black or Asian people in any of those countries. Having an ad with a black person is just not believable. Personally if I saw a local add like that in my home country it would immediately say "ah, this is obviously a US add, so the product is probably very US centric", simply because the ad shows a black person. This is not racist, it is just a fact. Americans probably don't notice it, but for "political correctness" reasons many American publications always made sure that every group of people they showed always had a mix of races/types of people. If you ever watched a cheap teen movie that has a story about some group of kids, the group would always have some white kids, one of them being fat, at least one Asian guy and at least one black guy. Not having this combination of races/types of people in the movie would be considered politically incorrect in the US. Seeing a group of people of mixed races is an everyday and normal thing. Seeing a group of people of mixed races in Eastern Europe is a rare occurrence, so a picture with a black person will immediately tell you that the picture was most probably made outside of the country. Imagine an ad showing a couple driving to work in a car - a Volga Coupe. Would this ad be believable to you if it was shown in the US? No, because you would never see that car driving down an American freeway. What the ad does show is that Microsoft is cheap. Instead of taking a new photo, adopted to the local market, they just photoshoped an existing one - badly.
Because some Polish folks have Asia based blood in them, thank you, Genghis Khan you insufferable bastard!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_from_Poland_during_and_after_World_War_II
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
They wouldn't be able to use the Apple logo anyway. You can't put someone else's trademark in your own promotional materials!
The penalty for protecting a Jew was the death of the entire family. Couple that with all the Volksdeutches - ie ethnic Germans who only spoke Polish in western parts of Poland who happily collaborated with the Germans I would say you are full of BS. Poland invited most of the Jews in the middle ages and had some of the most progressive anti-discrimination laws - the fact that it was so full of Jews proves that - they enjoyed living there.
Please learn your history and stop calling everyone anti-semitic, because you're anti-Polish and Jews are not more special than anyone else. 'Anti-semitic my-behind', you anti-Polish bigot.
Poland has an unfortunate history both during and directly after the war, extending into the 60s. The embarassing reaction to the relatively recent release of Jan T Gross's book (hereby incorporated by reference) in which the former Kaczynski, the former Primitive Polish Prime minister even tried to prosecute the author.
It's important to remember that during the war the Poles had much harder situations for rescuing Jews than in most other countries (you risked your entire family going to a concentration camp; elsewhere you risk only yourself and only prison) and many still did. It's also worth remembering that the reason Jews were in Poland was because they were historically treated better there than elsewhere. Poland is much further along coming to terms with and apologizing (though with reservations) for it's former anti-semitism (even Kaczynski has made efforts to return passports to the victims of the 60s) than a number of surrounding countries.
Essentially anyone who tells you that Poles are all good is a Holocaust revisionist. As is anyone who tells you that they are all bad.
In all cases where I referenced Wikipedia, all references in the page references are incorporated by reference as material to read. There; is that enough citations for you?
Everyone keeps saying they "photoshopped" it. This is Microsoft. Adobe makes Photoshop. Clearly from that quality editing, they used a Microsoft photo editor like Picture It. Actually that's exactly what you'd get if you used Picture It lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Note: This is my opinion, but it is based off a substantial amount of real life experiences and knowledge.
This is not the case at all.
Having lived in Poland for over 12 years (I am a foreigner), I can tell you that Polish people tend to be quite prejudiced against anyone who is not Polish. They believe non-Polish people are stealing their jobs, their way of life and as such do everything in their power to discriminate against such people. I lived in Szczecin which is a major Polish border city to the German side, not too far away from Berlin.
In Berlin, you could see about 25-45% of people on the street were black, in Poland, over the course of 12 years, I only saw one and Berlin was only two hours away. I heard quite a few stories about people complaining to companies that employed foreigners and even boycotted them for that reason. I've also been the subject of much discrimination in the country (unlike any of the other countries I've lived in).
Poland it self is quite forward with technologies, mobile phone networks have the latest 3g technologies first, the Internet infrastructure has always been quite quickly deployed in Poland. Being one of the first countries to support nationwide dial up to having the first nation wide DSL systems in place.
To put it simply, Poland is not ready for foreigners outside of their tourist cities (Warszawa, Krakow) and likely won't be for a while. Many people fear foreigners as some kind of evil, people of a different skin make it even worse for people who haven't ever seen a person with different skin colour before. They are not technologically backwards nor do they have a lack of access to resources beyond money (although the economy problems don't seem to have hit Poland much like the rest of the world).
Don't get me wrong, Poland is integrating with the rest of Europe and learning to accept, but it is still very backwards in this regard (despite having had a "constitution" of their own before the USA acknowledging the rights of all individuals by law, no matter the race, gender, skin colour - not that it matters).
The people are just prejudiced and it will take some changes before a black person is considered socially acceptable by most.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Bill Clinton isn't black?
I'm pretty sure I saw the clip you were talking about. There were 2 guys with guns at the rally, one white, one black. During the newscast something got messed up, the reporter was talking about the white guy while pre-recorded footage of the black guy was playing. The reporter pointed this out while this happened, admitting to the screw up. I don't think anything intentionally disingenuous was going on, just a garden variety fuckup.
Photos.
[citationneeded]. We agree on Stalin, but all the others did not use damnatio memoriæ. In particular, Che Guevara was never head of any country, so he could not have done it even if he had wanted it. Counterexamples welcome.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Erm the clip is in that link and is exactly as the GP describes and not even one iota as you describe.
There's no fuck up there and may I say after seeing it *holy shit* that's not even mere "bias", that's even beyond Fox news style "editing".
It's carefully edited to appear fully as though it's a white man carrying the gun, very cynically too I might add as it sticks out like a sore thumb and even though I was pre-warned my first thought was that it *was* the white guy whose face was cut to immediately after the loooong close up of the armed individual (so close you couldn't see any skin). Until I saw the edited out extra footage where the camera zooms out on the armed individual and you can see it's some big black dude. MSNBC cut away to the white guys face just before it zoomed out and at the same time the pundits are ranting about the evil white men turning up at these "town hall" meetings armed becasue there's a black president and in your mind the association is made, it's the white guy that has the gun.
It's sick! How can you people stand for that from your media??
Oh and how dishonest can YOU be by the way? Nice attempt at a whitewash, keep muddying those waters of truth...and keep telling yourself that you're better than the "right" and that those sorts of tactics (that I'm sure you used to rail against when Bush did it) are ok because your sides cause is "just".
You're a shill.
I'll retract Che, as I couldn't find an example, but for the rest:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/
I don't want to google more, but I remember seeing many more examples over the years.
You don't need to be a head of state to have photos edited, btw. It just need some devoted followers in the press or something like that.
just to clarify that they aren't kidding
Well, not very surprising given what Germans did to Polish people during the war. Not that the expulsion was a nice thing to do, but killing several millions of Polish citizens wasn't nice either: between 14% and 17% of 1939 population of Poland died during the war, 600,000 people were left disabled. Polish capital, Warsaw was destroyed in 80%, 800 000 Warsaw citizens died (out of 1.3 mln in 1939). Add to this a total destruction of economy (70% of industry, 22% of farming, 30% of forests) and what happened to Germans after the war shouldn't be too surprising. Compare it to how US (over)reacts through its recent history.
they fixed it... http://www.microsoft.com/poland/businessproductivity/default.mspx lol
http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/WATCHBLOG/60115
Is a story about the white guy with the gun in question.
Where the mirror of polish original? Looks like it got lost. :)
hany
He started out fucking up his argument from the minute he opened his mouth. He compared Rodney King - who was severely beaten by COPS to Gladney who was beaten by a couple of random union shitheads. The first was a severe abuse of authority, the second was a couple of assholes assaulting a guy. And while it sucks shit to get assaulted, to be assaulted by the police is a crime against all citizens.
Plus, as another person posted links to information about - there really was a white racist with a big gun strapped to his hip at that rally. The editors were just sloppy, probably didn't have footage of the white guy so they improvised. Stupid and sloppy, but not some vast left-wing conspiracy.
Personally, I don't see a big deal about the gun stories at all. More people ought to bring their guns because rights are meaningless unless you exercise them. Plus, it isn't like they are anywhere near the president - wherever he goes is automatically federal land and neither concealed nor open-carry is permitted there.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's what she said.
Though I don't consider it racism, because the hatred isn't towards race or ethnicity - it is towards a specific culture
The Romani Gypsies prevalent in eastern Europe are an ethnic group, not a cultural one, so yes it is racism. Irish and "New age" travelers are a separate group and not properly referred to as Gypsies.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Conspiracy theory, what the hell are you talking about?
There's extended *MSNBC* video footage of a black guy holding a semi automatic assault rifle at an anti-"Obama Care" rally.
The pundits on MSNBC were talking about the crazy racist WHITE people turning up at these events armed when there was a BLACK GUY ON SCREEN ARMED TO THE TEETH. The on site reporter even interviewed him! All of which they conveniently cut when they wanted to rant about the crazy white rednecks.
Watch the goddamned video you ignorant shill, then pull your head out of your knee jerk reactionary arse and realise that "your guys" media outlets are behaving just as badly as the media outlet of guys that just got kicked out.
I *really* hated the dishonesty, lies and absolute bullshit that the right pushed onto the world for 8 years and hoped (stupidly it would seem) that the left would be a little better. Boy was I wrong, dishonest AND hypocrites.
Fuck sake...
Umm no.
Did you even watch the video?? Apparently not.
The "gun in question" is an AR-15 assault rifle held by a black guy that was interviewed by the onsite MSNBC reporter at an anti-"obamacare" town hall meeting. The fact that he was black and the interview was conveniently cut by MSNBC when they were showing footage of his gun and ranting on about the evil racist white rednecks that want to kill the black president.
The link you have (bizarrely) supplied is a completely separate event in another part of the country weeks ago.
Why the fuck are you modded up your post doesn't even make sense! It's not *that hard* to watch 5 minutes of video.
Intellectual dishonesty is a far worse crime than uneducated ignorance.
You missed the point of the show -- Archie was a buffoon. The point of the show was that views like his, although still widely held, were no longer acceptable. (that is, they were the sort of opinions only suitable for grumpy old men who were out of touch with the times... which is why it was funny.) We weren't laughing with Archie, we were laughing at him.)
It's possible (though I think unlikely) that that myth is the origin of Polish stereotypes. But it is definitely a myth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_cavalry#Cavalry_charges_and_propaganda
The Polish army did have a sizeable cavalry contingent, and it did fight in the invasion, charging at least sixteen times. But most of the charges were successful, and they didn't have lances but modern armament - the only thing antiquated about them was their sabres and their horses.
By propagating this myth you are spreading a Nazi lie.