And its a picture of a guy with a bandit mask and an AK-47. I don't know about you guys, but all my Tor activities are performed in my Halloween costume!
I honestly can't believe something this tacky would end up in a presentation. Is this supposed to be propaganda?
It's a powerpoint, doubtless put together by a middle-manager who thought some clipart would spice things up. Internal presentations at pretty much every company I've worked for have been just as tacky.
What stuff? Realistically illustrating terrorists in Powerpoint? Nobody is paying for MS Office prowess, and frankly at this point laughing at the NSA strikes me as hubristic at best.
and a beard... like terrorists can be stereotyped like that. This is more than just propaganda, this is the mentality of the type of people who put these presentations together. That fact that whoever wrote this presentation has profiled people like this. I would wager that 99% of online "terrorists" are sitting around in jeans and t-shirts, on safe soil, have probably never handled a gun, let alone an AK-47 (or whatever that is on his back), probably don't have a beard. The ones financing them probably spend their life wearing a suit and tie and are either driving a top of the line vehicle or are driven everywhere in a top of the line vehicle.
If you look at the world around us and review the history of terrorism, most of it's been funded behind the scenes by one of the major superpowers, and you can't overlook the fact that a large portion of this has been by backed by the US. It's funny how when the US wants a government toppled, the terrorists are "friendly" and funded and armed by the US government, but when they're counter to US interests, they're suddenly part of the axis of evil and must be destroyed...
Perhaps if they stopped funding this ignorant behaviour and stopped supplying munitions to these terrorist interests, the problem would eventually go away... spend more on education and tolerance towards all points of view, enlightenment, the world would become a more peaceful place.
When will "democratic" governments eventually realize that money and greed is not the best approach to the furthering the human experience on this planet.
Sorry, didn't mean to get off on a rant there, but that one picture triggered a bit of annoyance.
And banks don't actually keep money in big cloth bags with dollar signs on them. It's just clip art, and to say that it speaks to the mindset of a type of people you probably don't really know much about. I would hasten to say that your stereotypes are probably no more grounded in reality than those of the straw men your attacking.
>"If you look at the world around us and review the history of terrorism, most of it's been funded behind the scenes by one of the major superpowers, and you can't overlook the fact that a large portion of this has been by backed by the US."
While this assertion is not completely baseless, it's simply not correct, but is the kind of empty-headed moral equivalence that gets tossed around to unanimous approval among a certain class who consider a shibboleth of sophistication.
To wit, in the history of terrorism, we see the Irish Republican Army, The Tamil Tigers, the Red Brigade, the Weather Underground, FALN, Baader Meinhof group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the current Chechen groups, the Hindu and Muslim groups prior to the formation of Pakistan, and frankly many more -- all without super power support. While some national actors have stepped up to support terror groups, superpower, or even great power support has been the exception rather than the rule.
During the cold war, the USSR, the US and China fought a number of proxy wars, and supported opposition groups in various national civil wars, mostly in Asia, Africa and Central America. Additionally, the CIA engaged in specific assassinations of political leaders largely in Latin America but not really what anyone would consider terrorism by the current definition. You're statement that a large portion of terrorism has been backed by the United States would require expansive definitions of 'large portion', 'terrorism' or 'backed' to be true.
It's clearly intended as a joke. It's a slideshow shown to people with technological backgrounds. Most people in computer-based work have seen poorly selected stock photos like these to depict hackers/terrorists/whatever.
In all fairness, most countries do. Watching South American leaders lately shows the exact same behavior. Find a foreign devil for everyone to rally against to hide domestic issues.
Soviets were not some bogeyman. They were real, their spies were real, and the international communist movement they sponsored was real.
Rosenbergs and others did spy for the Soviets. They did successfully transfer secrets related to the atomic bomb. And they were ideologically motivated.
Communist would have been a better word to use than Soviet. Soviet was relatively specific, but broad swaths of the world got labelled communist. While it's true that the Soviets were more than boogeymen, I think that the broader point stands that Americans (and everyone else really) tend to have some convenient, reductionist label to apply to "others" that is broadly taken as a synonym for "evildoer". "Terrorist" is the fashionable label today.
I may be reading you incorrectly, but I get the sense you consider what the US/West does somehow isn't ideologically motivated or that having any such motivations is inherently sinister? Of course they were, just like the US is ideologically motivated. Defending and furthering capitalist goals is no less ideologically motivated than defending and furthering communist goals.
> Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.
These people's job is to fight (their government's definition of) terrorists. It's not automatically in the job description to develop a nuanced view of terrorism, of various categories of hackers, etc. -- except to whatever degree it helps them to understand their enemy and thereby stop them.
People often do this even in jobs where the stakes are lower -- if you're running a struggling grocery store competing with a SuperWalMart, WalMart are the bad guys, even if the people who work at WalMart are perfectly nice people just trying to earn some money to raise a family.
Having said that, yes -- it's obviously particularly dangerous to go around branding anyone you have a problem with a terrorist.
I'm not sure. You can imagine that presentation in some run-of-the-mill crappy company meeting full of 9-5ers, but it's hard to imagine intelligent people with good educations presenting information to each other like that. I know there are all sorts of contractors, but would they really be discussing such weighty issues?
I thought it was more of a Zorro mask. It's very suspicious that the entire presentation seems to undermine the supposed severity of the issue with very silly names and pictures...
And its a picture of a guy with a bandit mask and an AK-47. I don't know about you guys, but all my Tor activities are performed in my Halloween costume!
I honestly can't believe something this tacky would end up in a presentation. Is this supposed to be propaganda?