A UK Minister Photoshopped the ex-PM from a rocket mission | Hacker News Reader

A UK Minister Photoshopped the ex-PM from a rocket mission

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66 pointsfeurio42 comments

And now Shapps is claiming he wasn't aware it was edited.

It really is remarkable how bad politicians' memories are. Every time they get caught out they miraculously forget everything.

Even if it's true that he was unaware, that just shows how bad the people he employs are. It's farcical, you are your team, if his team are crap it's because of him.

Shapps (or his pseudonym) once had a side gig selling $497 eBooks that promised to earn you $20k in weeks and scraping software for SEO spammers, so he definitely is tech-savvy and cynical enough to at least ask someone else to Photoshop Boris out...

He forgot about using a pseudonym and having a side business when asked too.

> Every time they get caught out they miraculously forget everything.

There's no cost to this, because tomorrow the media and your supporters will forget everything as well. Unless the media really want to use it against you.

Not to defend him[0], but humans in general have fairly flawed memories and can often end up with false memories after seeing fake photos of themselves.

[0] course he should've known, the photo is framed in a way that only works with the missing PM, and is a bad enough photoshop job that I can still see BJ's elbow.

Norway isn't European I guess.

Bloody Tories!

Oh my god. That's straight out of Stalin's playbook. Erasing Boris Johnson the way Stalin did to Trotsky.

Stalin erased Trotsky a bit more violently than we are contemplating here.

There are some who would like that but I don't think many in government. Although if you include the civil service...

It wasn't Trotsky, it was Yezhov, the man in charge of NKVD during the worst of the purge. Fun fact: of all occupations/organizations NKVD officers were at the highest risk of a speedy trial and execution.

I think there have been several people who have been erased from photos. I recall one photo that had been updated several times to remove more and more people until only 2 were left.

You must be thinking about this one. https://izbrannoe.com/upload/sotbit.htmleditoraddition/bed/b...

Trotsky was indeed deleted from a couple of pics, but they are much more obscure.

That's another example, but not the one I was thinking of. I clearly remember the photo, and yet it seems impossible to find on the internet. Closest thing I could find is this one, but it's Mao instead of Stalin: https://11points.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/maofuneral.j...

(From https://11points.com/11-famous-doctored-photos-dictators/)

Perhaps I'm misremembering after all and it was always Mao instead of Stalin.

Comparing every single thing to the evils of nazism and communism is a bit too trite. I know that most people default to last century's events because they are the only ones fresh enough to have a grasp on, but deleting people from inscriptions, annals, murals, paintings, coins, etc. has been a common practice throughout history.

Saying "this is just like what emperor Flavius did!" causes a lot less outrage than saying "this is just like what Stalin did!", even though they are both true. This is why, unless a phenomenon was exclusive to a certain ideology, I feel like constantly mentioning nazis and commies is just a rethorical tool

And has recently taken off in a big way - removing statues, replacing names and generally purging history.

Statues and names of military bases for example, celebrate people. As far as I am aware history is mostly doing just fine in history books and places like Wikipedia. No need to conflate these things, is there?

How do you know it has taken off? When a new roman emperor took place he mobilized an incredible amount of people to replace as much stuff as possible from the previous ruler at a scale hardly comparable to what's happening today

Do you have specific examples you're thinking of, specifically regarding "purging history"? My university degree is in history and I have never used statutes or building names to study, but it's hard to have a discussion when the meat of the argument is only obliquely hinted at.

Should never have pulled down that big statue of Saddam Hussein.

True, but on the other hand, the people that did it are well aware of that, too. And they still do it. Although this is not Stalin's playbook, of course. Just a minor part of it.

It's not like someone is building a highway and I'm saying "just like Hitler!". This is erasing recently disgraced people from photos in order to misrepresent facts.

Although I suppose we could also say "just like Vogue!" (or whichever fashion magazine is most guilty of photoshopping people).

>This is erasing recently disgraced people from photos in order to misrepresent facts.

Which has been done since forever. People in the past didn't erase others only after they were long gone. Someone could quickly fall out of favor and have many of his depiction and documents already altered in a single year.

I don't think it's something that has always been universally common. Erasing people like that is something that mostly the Soviet Union was known for. And possibly China or other dictatorships, but it's something you mostly see in propaganda from dictatorships. It's quite unusual to see it from the UK.

My problem is with people using nazis and communists for cheap rethoric effect towards people who don't know history and eat it all up. If you knew that people have been erased since the time of the babylonians you wouldn't immediately compared what's happened to nazi Germany.

It's bad that he got deleted from the photo, but that's not indicative of any particular 20th century dictatorship

Are you telling me you did not immediately think of how people kept disappearing from Soviet photos? I think that's easily the most well-known modern example of this. It's blatantly similar.

And if your argument that dictatorships outside the 20th century did it too, that still doesn't mean it's not something associated primarily with dictatorships. Can you name a modern democracy where people were erased like that?

I stand corrected. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4984364/How-Hitler-... includes one example where Churchill's cigar was removed, and one where British King George VI was removed from a photo with the Canadian PM.

Still, the majority of examples, and the most famous ones, are Stalin, followed by various other dictatorships. But this example is apparently not a first for the UK.

> This is erasing recently disgraced people from photos in order to misrepresent facts.

Hitler did do that, but it's not the most notable thing that he did.

I mean the tories are bastards but I don’t think Sunak is going hard with an ice pick any time soon.

Despite my 24/7 prayers.

My country is an international embarassment.

Someone make it stop.

Please.

Is it not more likely that this bojo character has photoshopped himself into the photo?

He probably photoshopped the rocket into a photo of himself, and now we have gone full circle and removed him from it.

So the only thing real in the picture is the sky? I like that!

They photoshopped out the sky and put it in a pretty fake looking hangar.

Ah, a pitty... I liked the idea of a photo shopped picture in which only the sky was unaltered, when sky replacement seems to be one of the first thing a lot of people do in Photoshop.

Nope, look at both pictures and you can see the one posted by the MP is altered. There are clear editing artefacts

The edge of BoJo's right elbow is still there!

I suspect that this was a playful take on the notoriously dishonest character of the ex-Prime Minister :-)

His elbow remains in the photo

Yes I think it's likely as well

(People are missing the subtle humour of this post.)

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