Tag: Dystopia

NSA’s Speech-to-Text capabilities

The Intercept has a lengthy article on what we know on the NSA’s speech recognition capabilities. Putting aside the actual capabilities, just the fact that anything you say will be recorded, stored and may be accessed at any point in the future only protected by “policy” sends shivers down my spine.

“People still aren’t realizing quite the magnitude that the problem could get to,” Raj said. “And it’s not just surveillance,” he said. “People are using voice services all the time. And where does the voice go? It’s sitting somewhere. It’s going somewhere. You’re living on trust.” He added: “Right now I don’t think you can trust anybody.”

Also when all the voice data gets automatically transcribed, made keyword-searchable, flagged and presented to agents as “potentially interesting” there’s basically no way of producing any sort of indication for suspicion other than pointing at a black box and mumbling something vaguely resembling “correlation.”

“When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP [Natural Language Processing] methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting’; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.'”

Dracula Untold, For A Good Reason

I like good stories and came across Dracula Untold. I didn’t like it very much. Maybe it’s because of my heightened sensitivity for anti-islamic racism. Or maybe it’s because the main theme of the movie seems to be that: it’s OK to join the forces of evil as long as your intention is to protect your family and your country … if that makes sense to you, it doesn’t to me.

They try to accomplish this by twisting the historic context both with regards to the time and place, the persons involved and in the loyalties they had. Also they try to convey that Evil is not something despicable in itself, but a tool to be used by the powers in charge.

I assume you’ve seen the movies and can relate tho following facts to the plot and the characters.

My first pain point are the movie’s extremely distorted “Vlad” and “Mehmet” figures. They are created from greatly mixing Vlad II …

… and Vlad III.

  • was called the “Prince of Wallachia”
  • who was later called the “Impaler”
  • grew up as a political captive under the Ottomans (together with his brother Radu)
  • Radu had a friendship with Mehmet II, not Vlad
  • had a personal hatred for Radu and Mehmet
  • known for The Night Attack
  • he is often characterized as a tyrant who took sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing his enemies

And by greatly mixing Murad II …

  • actually ruling in 1442
  • tried to establish Ottoman-friendly rulers in Wallachia

… and Mehmet II.

My second and more general pain point are the movie’s morals which are kind of strange to say the least. :/ Among those seem to be:

  • pacting with the devil is OK, as long as it’s against Muslims
  • choosing to become a monster is alright, as long as you can protect your family and your country
  • you can do whatever you like to your enemies (especially using torture or excessively cruel ways of killing), as long as you’re good-looking
  • you can both be a pious Christian and a henchman of the Devil
  • being “the son of the devil” is a source of pride
  • revenge is good
  • prominent characters in western literature must be made to fight Muslims
  • Muslims must be defeated, even if you have rewrite history

I find this extremely troubling. o_O

Was man von Pegida halten soll

Ich glaube Herr Theisen trifft es ganz gut. 😀

Der Fraktionschef der CDU in Pulheim erklärt Pegida
Der Fraktionschef der CDU in Pulheim erklärt Pegida

Trotzdem ist “ganze Ding” sehr eigenartig. :/

Der französische Redner auf der Bühne kann sich nicht vorstellen “dass unter uns Rassisten sind”, während ein Chorleiter aus Würzburg alle Muslime erschießen will. Solche Widersprüche fallen bei Pegida nicht auf. Da weht die Fahne der rechtsextremen “German Defense League” friedlich unweit der israelischen im Dresdner Abendwind. Da ist quer durch den Wutbürgerkatalog für jeden etwas dabei zum “Jawoll”-Schreien – auch das Gegenteil. Hauptsache, irgendwas ist schlecht und jemand anderes hat Schuld.
— Telepolis

Aber eins ist klar, Deutschland hat ein massives Rassismussproblem!

Und für alle, denen das alles zu viel Text ist, gibt es istdasabendlandschonislamisiert.de. 😀