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Kony

Primus said:
I fail to see where the straw man was. I was quoting the guy who wrote the Visible Children blog.

Is awareness good? Yes. But these problems are highly complex, not one-dimensional and, frankly, aren’t of the nature that can be solved by postering, film-making and changing your Facebook profile picture, as hard as that is to swallow. Giving your money and public support to Invisible Children so they can spend it on funding ill-advised violent intervention and movie #12 isn’t helping. Do I have a better answer? No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that you should support KONY 2012 just because it’s something. Something isn’t always better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse.
I saw the quote, it resonated with my opinion, hence me quoting it (albeit badly) and then when questioned I expanded on why I agreed with it.

Fine if you don't agree but don't be so quick to shout strawman at people.
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Yes, so you're repeating that guy's straw man, and that makes it not a straw man because?

Look, I don't think people reposting the video is going to help a great deal, but Invisible Children isn't just making a damn video. I see a lot of other poor arguments being thrown around too. 'US soldiers are already hunting him.' Yeah, well there are many who would end that effort for political reasons without continuing support.

Your opinion that the video repost isn't a 'great thing' and isn't helping is irrelevant to my point. Have all the opinions you want. My disagreeing with your opinion is irrelevant. The fact that the argument you presented is a straw man makes it poor support.
 
aggle-rithm said:
Interestingly, that's also the first step towards mob mentality.
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Mob mentality doesn't have to be a bad thing when it comes to helping people.

I'm seriously not getting it. To solve problems, surely the first step is public awareness? Or should we silence everyone trying to do something, and hope things work themselves out?

I know there are several organizations that work with saving child soldiers and rehabilitate them, and they've had some success with that. That's an extraordinary good thing. Campaigns like these, even though it surely is slacktivism, can't hurt these organizations and might bring them better funding.
 
Zelenius said:
This is just a fad. Most of these people will move on to something else after they get bored, or Kony is killed or captured. I highly doubt they will become interested in stopping another barbaric African rebel leader; very soon, that will be sooo "yesterday".
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Getting bored (quickly) and moving on is the most likely outcome.

OTOH if this campaign were to result in the killing or capture of Kony (success beyond their wildest dreams!) then we could be seeing the genesis of a role for the internet in warfare. If mouse-clicks can kill then there are potentially billions of volunteers out there.
 
varwoche said:
Many millions of people are being made aware of Kony due to this project, and no doubt some of them will donate to the cause as a result.
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Ok. So what is that cause? Donating to a cause isn't automatically good. If millions of people decided that iran needed more energy to fund economic growth, and decided to help by donating to the cause of their nuclear program, that wouldn't automatically be good. Similarly if millions of people donate to catch this guy and the result is a bloody mess of a war where most of the casualties are child soldiers, that isn't automatically good even if it does catch the guy.
 
Zelenius said:
I agree with you 100%. This is just a fad. Most of these people will move on to something else after they get bored, or Kony is killed or captured. I highly doubt they will become interested in stopping another barbaric African rebel leader; very soon, that will be sooo "yesterday".
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I read the book "The Dressing Station" a few years ago, written by a doctor that goes around to war-torn parts of the world providing medical care. At one point he was affiliated with a group that wanted to do a film about the children dying in Africa. He was to go in with the cameras and they would film him helping the sick and injured. However, the producers wouldn't allow it. Dying children wasn't trendy enough; what the public really wanted to see was people helping save the elephants.

So, the film was changed to be about elephants. The doctor still went in, though, and helped some people.
 
So what does Kony have to say about all this?

I would like to hear his side of the story. This will aid in my becoming aware of the fuller picture, and awareness, I have been told, is a good thing. Otherwise, it just seems like a kind of psychic vampirism -- feeding off tragedy and ogling an accident as I drive by.
 
Fishstick said:
So, its good that people are donating to IC because they feel bad about Kony, but it doesn't matter where IC spends the money or how little of it actually goes torelief. These are different issues in your mind?
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Try to follow the conversation please.
 
varwoche said:
I suppose the same could be said of any altrusitic effort. What, you thnk sending $10 to Haiti will actually solve poverty?

And who is saying this effort will put a stop to child soldiers in Africa? Other than cynics creating straw men that is.

Why not?
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$10 to the Red Cross? Gladly. They're a reputable charity.

It's not a straw man. The vid targets Kony. The purpose of the vid is to have a manhunt.
 
marplots said:
These are the kids who killed their own parents, right? Might not be welcome back at home.
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Not a problem. At this point home is goverment run concentration camps. Oh officialy they are refugee camps but trying to leave them ends badly.
 
Captain Obvious said:
Whatever the merits or demerits of this, I'm glad at least someone's starting to think of the children.
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So when should we try and arrest Yoweri Museveni? I mean that should be far more staightforward. We know where he is and there is the side benifit that his recent attempts to subvert democracy have been a little too obvious.
 
What, you thnk sending $10 to Haiti will actually solve poverty?
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As long as the $10 are spent responsibly, absolutely it might. It won't stop poverty by itself, of course, but then again, "raising awareness", by its very nature, accomplishes nothing, so the comparison isn't really there
 
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I've been hearing drips and drabs about this whole "Kony2012" meme over the last few days, and the fact that so many people were Tweeting and Facebooking it so feverishly made me cast a wary eye on the whole thing. I had the feeling that it was almost like how people want to uncritically forward chain emails...

Well, it seems there may have been good reason for my cautious skepticism:

Why You Should Feel Awkward About the ‘Kony2012′ Video
Most Americans began this week not knowing who Joseph Kony was. That’s not surprising: most Americans begin every week not knowing a lot of things, especially about a part of the world as obscured from their vision as Uganda, the country where Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commenced a brutal insurgency in the 1980s that lingers to this day.

A viral video that took social media by storm over the past two days has seemingly changed all that. Produced by Invisible Children, a San Diego-based NGO, “Kony2012″ is a half-hour plea for Americans and global netizens to pay attention to Kony’s crimes — which include abducting over 60,000 children over two decades of conflict, brutalizing them and transforming many into child soldiers — and to pressure the Obama Administration to find and capture him. Within hours of the slick production surfacing on social media, it led to #StopKony trending on Twitter, populated Facebook timelines, was publicized by Hollywood celebrities and has been viewed some 10 million times on YouTube. Suddenly, a man on virtually no Westerner’s radar became the international bogeyman of the moment. …

… Yet for the video’s demonstrable zeal and passion, there are some obvious problems. Others more expert in this arena have already done a bit of fact-checking: the LRA is no longer thought to be actually operating in northern Uganda, which “Kony2012″ seems to portray still as a war-ravaged flashpoint — instead, its presence has been felt mostly in disparate attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation with its own terrible history of rogue militias committing monstrous atrocities. Moreover, analysts agree that after concerted campaigns against the LRA, its numbers at this point have diminished, perhaps amounting to 250 to 300 fighters at most. Kony, shadowy and illusive, is a faded warlord on the run, with no allies or foreign friends (save perhaps, in one embarrassing moment of blustering sophistry, for American radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh.) The U.S. military’s African command (AFRICOM) has deployed its assets against Kony since at least 2008— a fact that goes conveniently unmentioned in Invisible Children’s video. …

… Not once in the half-hour film do we hear the name of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, whose quasi-authoritarian rule has lasted over 25 years. Arab Spring-inspired protests last year were ruthlessly suppressed and the country’s opposition complains bitterly about the entrenched corruption of the Museveni state. The U.S. State Department voiced its concern over Uganda’s rights record last November. Speaking to the Washington Post, Jedediah Jenkins, a member of Invisible Children, shrugs off charges that the NGO is too much in bed with the status quo in Kampala:

“There is a huge problem with political corruption in Africa. If we had the purity to say we will not partner with anyone corrupt, we couldn’t partner with anyone.”
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marplots said:
So what does Kony have to say about all this?

I would like to hear his side of the story. This will aid in my becoming aware of the fuller picture, and awareness, I have been told, is a good thing. Otherwise, it just seems like a kind of psychic vampirism -- feeding off tragedy and ogling an accident as I drive by.
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I'm sure he'd say something along the lines of, "It completely misrepresents me and my work. I'm being a father figure to these poor lost orphans and I've given them a purpose. Teaching them a useful trade, how to be responsible and respect authority." Or at least something darn close to it.
 
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I have a hard time believing anyone with a name as silly as "Kony" can be anything other than an overweight politician from Jersey.
 
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