4 Works of Propaganda That Prove Dictators Suck at Photoshop
Dictators have nearly limitless power. They're living out everyone's childhood fantasy of getting to do whatever you want all of the time because they've brutally murdered their parents, leaving nobody to check their random outbursts of craziness.
Yet when it comes time to illustrate their propaganda, every single one of these dictators seems wholly unable to find people with any Photoshop experience, or indeed anyone who has ever seen Photoshop before in their entire life.
For example, Iran recently released an image of a snazzy new radar-dodging jet soaring high above the country's tallest mountain peak:
"No matter how hard we jangled the watch, the damn thing wouldn't smile."
However, according to a hilarious list of visually apparent design flaws compiled by aviation experts, the jet cannot possibly fly. Additionally, the picture is clearly Photoshopped, because the sun typically doesn't shine like a spotlight on the backs of supersonic aircraft as they carve through the skies like knives made of science, and if you know anything about perspective, that plane is either 15 feet from the cameraman or fucking huge.
"Magnetic lasso is the only tool, right?"
Not too long ago, Iran added more missiles to a photo of a test launch with all the skill of a 13-year-old copy/pasting real boobs onto pictures of Lara Croft in Microsoft Paint, before retracting the image later the same day without any explanation. In November 2012, they flat-out stole a four-year-old image of a drone aircraft made by Japanese college students and claimed it was one the Iranian government had just developed (this was a few months after announcing that they had used UFO technology to capture a U.S. drone, which is one instance in which a terrible Photoshop would've actually been less stupid).
Not to be left out, North Korea doctored a picture of Kim Jong Il's funeral procession to remove a news crew and add a giant flag, for reasons that are still not entirely clear.
We would've added elephants or something.
Meanwhile, Syrian president and all around psycho Bashar Assad couldn't be bothered to be in the same room as a governor he had to swear in, so the two men were Photoshopped into a picture together, somehow standing at different elevations while staring past each other on opposite sides of a table made for giants.
None of these three things have ever actually been in this room.
Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak tweaked this Reservoir Dogs shot of him tagging along for some Middle East peace talks at the White House ...
Netanyahu is Mr. Pink.
... to put himself at the front of the group, despite the fact that it makes no logical sense that he would be leading the way to a room in someone else's house.
That smirk was not digitally added.
In all of the countries mentioned up there, the Internet is heavily monitored and regulated (or, in the case of North Korea, doesn't even exist for regular citizens). They are strict anti-technology cultures because technology fosters the spread of information, the control of which is vital for dictators to retain that unchecked power we mentioned earlier. The end result is a bunch of state officials who couldn't convincingly Photoshop Nazi paraphernalia into a picture of Mel Gibson's living room lording over nations they have engineered to be devoid of anyone they could hire to do it for them. The Onion has better Photoshop artists, and they manage to trick more people with their fake news than any of these assholes do.
