KONY 2012

[Phantasee]

So there's been a huge awakening to the issues of child soldiers and the Lord's Resistance Army among the youth of the developed world, since last night. Twitter, Facebook, every social media outlet, every conversation, whether through face to face or text, has been about Joseph Kony.

The video is just under 30 minutes long; give it a watch and tell me what you think. Will you be getting involved through this organization (Invisible Children)? Will you fill your Twitter timeline and Facebook feed with "KONY 2012"? Will you order an action kit? Will you attend an event on April 20th in your area? Will you do more than that?


http://www.kony2012.com

The video on vimeo.


I also recommend you read this blog postby Mark Kersten on Justice In Conflict, after viewing the above video.

[His Divine Shadow]

I watched about five minutes of that video I think elsewhere online. I googled what this invisible children is about and some cursory inspections seems to have people saying they aren't actually non-partisan nor non-profit. So I'm thinking this is a big campaign to make cash from the child soldier problem and I wouldn't be suprised at all if it just ends up lining the wrong peoples pockets.

So I guess I am gonna watch the fallout and see if it turns out legit or not.

[Dalton]

Obama put boots on the ground there last October, didn't he? This is the guy that Limbaugh mindlessly backed around that time, accusing Obama of going after Christians.

[weemadando]

Yup.

And mang are there some idiots out there mindlessly talking when they should stop and leave it to the adults.

[weemadando]

So, just how idiotic is the group behind the Stop Kony movement? http://bit.ly/xzOQDA Very, it turns out.

[weemadando]

Scream13 on twitter is my hero of the day.

http://bit.ly/Aig0gx

"Stop James Kony! Shoot him in the....WAIT...A NEW IPAD?!?! GRAB THE KEYS HONEY, WE'RE GOING TO APPLE STORE!!!"

[weemadando]

I've had a bunch of FB arguments with folks who don't understand that this current campaign's plan (and history) is funding other genocidal child soldiering militias to do the killing.

Because that's a great fucking plan.

I hate it when campaigns like this come along and people mindlessly support the cause celebre of the day

And I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this campaign, the cornerstone of which is their documentary (which apparently features remarkably few Ugandans, but a lot of,photogenic European kids), is happening just as voting is about to commence for Cannes..

[Panzersharkcat]

Yeah, remember when Darfur was all the rage? What's funny to me about it is that I was bitching about Kony back then, mostly out of trying to mock them about focusing on just that one group of ruthless genocidal assholes. Of course, after everybody forgot about Darfur, I forgot about Kony until today.

[weemadando]

"The conflict is a conceptual mess that eludes simple definition, with many interlocking narrative strands. The New York Times, one of the few American newspapers with extensive foreign coverage, gave Darfur nearly four times the coverage it gave the Congo in 2006, when Congolese were dying of war-related causes at nearly ten times the rate of those in Darfur." - Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

I've finally started reading that book today (seemed like a good time to start) and that quote from the introduction pretty much says it all about African policy in the West.

[Sea Skimmer]

Obama put boots on the ground there last October, didn't he?

Yes but more or less only because the US is trying to convince more and more African powers to go after Somalia, and we don't want to send our people into Somalia on a sustained basis. So help Africans elsewhere, Kenya in particular, and they thus have more people to send against the Somalia militia and terror cells.


Any yeah on Darfur being somehow dominate in coverage, when the Second Congo War and its aftermath violence is in fact not just the worst war in Africa, but the worst war by body count since the Second World War and one being carried out with extensive international involvement from the get go.

[Alkaloid]

I'm actually all for someone intervening and taking apart the LRA and arresting Kony, it would be great. I'm very confused as to why anyone who has paid any attention to the news in the last decade thinks the US military is the group to do it, or teach anyone how to do it.

[The Romulan Republic]

Who do you think would be the best to do it, then? I'm not arguing. I'm honestly curious.

[Alkaloid]

I don't think there is any government sponsored group that is capable, really. There is too much baggage that comes with any government involvement. If you could make something like a militarised version of the Red Cross, with the same ideals and scale that you could keep free from corruption you might pull it off, but you would never be able to build something like that.

[Simon_Jester]

Any yeah on Darfur being somehow dominate in coverage, when the Second Congo War and its aftermath violence is in fact not just the worst war in Africa, but the worst war by body count since the Second World War and one being carried out with extensive international involvement from the get go.

My impression, and I'm probably going to get torn a new one over this...

Darfur is a pretty clear case of Big Bad government beating up on an ethnic minority. That makes for a very simple story, easy to cover, and in theory it should be really easy to stop the conflict- make the government stop killing people.

The Congo is stuck in a huge civil war, and there's no one faction of victims that outsiders can back against a bunch of oppressors. Sending aid there is going to be a drop in the bucket because it won't get rid of the warlords on any side. So figuring out what is to be done, and how to make the war stop, aside from sending about a million soldiers to occupy the countryside... it's a much more complicated problem, and one that's now been going on long enough to have a sort of horrible 'status quo' position in the eyes of outsiders.

[noncredible]

This'll probably die down quicker than Occupy Wall Street. I mean, in the video the senators and celebrities were all for stopping Kony, but I think at least half of them are only doing this to project a good image.

[Sea Skimmer]

My impression, and I'm probably going to get torn a new one over this...

Darfur is a pretty clear case of Big Bad government beating up on an ethnic minority. That makes for a very simple story, easy to cover, and in theory it should be really easy to stop the conflict- make the government stop killing people.

That is the simple story the media would like to portray. The reality is a lot more complicated including the fact that the locals in Darfur at the ones who started the war, even if Sudanese Arab oppression predated it. That's one big thing I long noticed in reporting on Darfur, when did anyone ever say why it started? The rebel side meanwhile was actually multiple factions which fought each other, and in some cases tribes shifted sides during and after the war, including major infighting within the pro government militias who did most of the genocidal stuff. Meanwhile foreign intervention would also have also become embroiled in the separate but adjoining civil war in South Sudan, a war which while much longer running also killed six times more people, and the problems in north eastern Sudan which are a bit smaller scale. Hell now that South Sudan is independent for not even eight months its only had one genocide so far, and civil war in nine of its ten provinces... and people think the aftermath of Libya is going poorly.

It’s also worth considering that the conflict if as so many are, far older then current events. Like four or five hundred years older back into a period in which records become too remote and hazy to say anything, and even the modern phase spans back to the 1960s and the first Sudanese Civil War.

The Congo is stuck in a huge civil war, and there's no one faction of victims that outsiders can back against a bunch of oppressors. Sending aid there is going to be a drop in the bucket because it won't get rid of the warlords on any side. So figuring out what is to be done, and how to make the war stop, aside from sending about a million soldiers to occupy the countryside... it's a much more complicated problem, and one that's now been going on long enough to have a sort of horrible 'status quo' position in the eyes of outsiders.

You can say the same thing about Sudan when you look at the total situation in the early 2000s. The Congo actually has major advantages for foreign intervention because its far more accessible and has some actual basis for a productive economy to support a stable government if ever someone could form one. The Congo also simply already had very large scale foreign intervention, it just wasn’t by western powers. The fact is people just had a very sour taste for the Congo after the first UN intervention, when UN troops committed as many acts of rape and murder as the locals did, if not more and didn't want to try it again on the required scale.

[Alkaloid]

I don't know that comparing this to a campaign to stop a civil war is really the way to go. There's no doubt that areas like the Congo are a clusterfuck, but the difference is that in most civil wars all sides involved have an endgame planned where they take control and provide some sort of stability, even if it is Talibanesque repression. Individuals like Kony don't, because he has made so many enemies on all sides that there is no chance in hell of him running anything unopposed by someone with a bigger stick than him. His only power lies in using the LRA to encourage and exploit total chaos, and he has no interest in anything else.

Arresting Kony and dismantling the LRA should, if nothing else, make it easier to administer aid because most other groups have to at least maintain a pretence of being legit contenders for power. The SPLA, for instance, recently announced it would disband it's own units of child soldiers. I doubt that they have done so entirely, but it at least shows they know they can't try and be the defence force of South Sudan, use child soldiers and be accepted by the world at large.

I think ultimately the goal of the campaign is a good one (I doubt anyone thinks the ICJ getting its hands on Joseph Kony is a bad thing) but I am extremely leery of anything trying to get the US military or UN peacekeepers to this sort of scenario simply because they have tended to often make things worse long term.

[Vehrec]

A little digging on the KONY 2012 group reveals that they've spend about 31% of their money on people in need, and the rest on their own projects-including making slick propaganda videos.

[Atia]

A little digging on the KONY 2012 group reveals that they've spend about 31% of their money on people in need, and the rest on their own projects-including making slick propaganda videos.

Considering part of their mission statement is raising public awareness of the situation and everything. Wouldn't spending money on slick propaganda videos to do just that kinda fall within their mission statement?

[His Divine Shadow]

Figured. It had all the hallmarks of something shady. This seems more like a profitable business that spends a portion of the proceeds on charity so it can call itself that.

http://tumblr.thedailywh.at/post/189097 ... tay-as-far

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

[Aniron]

Figured. It had all the hallmarks of something shady. This seems more like a profitable business that spends a portion of the proceeds on charity so it can call itself that.

http://tumblr.thedailywh.at/post/189097 ... tay-as-far

[

They have a response to the critiques. Its too long to quote.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/www.invisiblech ... iques.html

[Dalton]

Galvatron, if you make one more post in here with nothing but a useless fucking meme, I'm going to make you regret it.

Split to Bottom of the Barrel.

[Dalton]

National media is running with the story now. The creator of the doc will be on Lawrence O'Donnell's show tonight.

[fgalkin]

Are you surprised, Rob? Did you know they've discovered oil in Uganda last year?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Themightytom]

Are you surprised, Rob? Did you know they've discovered oil in Uganda last year?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

You are asserting that Invisible Children intends to secure oil?