View Larger The campaign to “do something” about Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and a hunted war criminal, has been completely and utterly blowing up social media for the past twenty four hours. If you don’t know this, you’ve probably been living under a rock without internet access, and you should introduce yourself to the subject with this video.
Of course, whenever activism reaches a critical social media tipping point, there’s a backlash, and within hours individuals and news agencies started striking back, both against the social media campaign’s goals and Invisible Children, the NGO masterfully running this campaign.
At the moment it seems like the situation is still developing - the video is being viewed thousands more times as you read this, but the backlash is also growing. I figured I would put together a partial list of some of the different takes on Kony, Uganda, and Invisible Children.
- WIRED’s Danger Room has a good overall summary of who Kony is, some of the criticisms leveled at Invisible Children, and the current situation in Uganda.
- Foreign Policy Magazine’s Passport blog blasts KONY2012 for a blatant disregard of the facts: Kony and the LRA are no longer in Uganda and haven’t been for six years, and Ugandan and US military actions have left the group in hiding with less than a few hundred troops. They also raise the key question: what’s the point of all this? Invisible Children’s plans don’t seem to go beyond “raising awareness” and selling $30 action kits. Their plan is to get the US to help the Ugandan military find Kony, which it already is doing, and Invisible Children funnels some of their money directly into the Ugandan military, which is accused of numerous human rights violations, and the government, which is run by a dictator who has been in power for more than two decades.
- The Daily What (somewhat worryingly part of the Cheezburger network), has a surprisingly strong article about the attacks on Invisible Children. IC has been attacked by the Better Business Bureau, has only a two-star accountability rating from Charity Navigator, and by its own admission spends almost 70% of its expenses on things not related to actually helping Ugandans.
- The Northwestern Chronicle accuses Invisible Children of stirring up a whole lot of meaningless sound and fury, pointing out that a similar situation happened where they mobilized tens of thousands of college students in 2006, with no effect. “It is a movement for the sake of a movement.”
- Invisible Children itself has responded to the accusations leveled at them. They essentially deny any charges of financial misconduct, acknowledge that they may have been misleading about the situation on the ground today, but reiterate the need to catch him, and list off some of their charity projects in Uganda.
- Finally, if you’re feeling dispirited because the perfect international cause may have turned out not to be, a fellow Northwestern student has a great action list of what we can do that really will have an impact, against Kony, in Uganda, and beyond.
Andrew Sullivan takes on the recent flareup over contraception. He sees Obama specifically directing the issue away from more contentious cultural questions like abortion or gay rights to what should be (and what has been for decades) an obvious right - contraception. The fact that the right is now actively challenging that, right now in the fight over religious health plans offering contraception, but also overall (Santorum, at the moment tied with Romney to be the face of half of America, is strongly opposed to the use of contraception) is frankly incredible. Sullivan credits Obama with baiting the evangelicals and the far right into coming out vocally against contraception, which is (hopefully should be) political suicide in this day and age. Can we just be done with the culture wars?
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areasofmyexpertise:
ALAN MOORE on the use of the Guy Fawkes mask on Occupied Wall Street and various protest movements around the world.
“In terms of a wildly uninformed guess at our political future, it feels something like V for validation.”
Everything I know about anarchy as a political theory I know from comics, of course. But it’s arguable that a picture of a Guy Fawkes mask at Occupy Wall Street is not only the best, but really only adaptation of V FOR VENDETTA possible.
While OWS was and is equal parts inspiring, troublesome, invigorating, and embarrassing, the disorganization and lack of a single, authoritative agenda that its critics attempted to use to discredit it was in fact its elusive and maddening strength.
What I took from it, at least, was pure anarchy: at the heart of a financial system that seemed unaccountable even to elected government, humans came and said: your control is limited.
You don’t control us. You don’t fully control even this PRIVATE public park. And except by virtue of our consent—or your sheer force—you never did.
OWS denied their consent to governance, and they were met with sheer force. This was always, logically what would and perhaps even SHOULD occur. But the point was proved.
And you still see that mask around.
That is all.
An interesting take on the Guy Fawkes mask and the meaning of OWS
View Larger It’s easy to get into academic discussions about whether or not religious organizations or teachers should be forced to interact with the gay community, or whether hate speech laws unnecessarily muzzle free speech, but it’s also easy to forget that there are people behind it all who are suffering.
The story of one Minnesota town’s institutionalized discrimination against gay teens, and the suicide epidemic that it caused. Welcome to Michelle Bachmann’s America.
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Whatever reservations one might still have about its overall quality, I don’t believe there’s much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.
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-William Cronon, president of the American Historical Association
The academic community might finally be warming up to wikipedia. The president of the AHA cites it as an example of the wider trend of the internet weakening the walls guarding scholarship in the academic world.
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View Larger An interesting profile on a man who does IT for gangs and crime syndicates from Gawker, which usually doesn’t do long pieces. He does everything from the relatively harmless - reputation management for clubs and the rich - to the very dangerous - providing wiretap-proof cell phone services to drug runners.
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View Larger Wired writes the best profiles. Cooking is one of the last crafts that is still artisanal, mostly untouched by science and technology. Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft and literally a mad scientist, wants to change that and is writing the Principia of sous vide and scientific cooking. This is from last year, but still a great profile.
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The longer I keep this blog and the more links I post, the more difficult it will be for me to name anything the best article I’ve posted yet. At the moment though, this is unarguably the best article I’ve linked to yet. Read it.
America locks up more people than any other country in the world, we’re told over and over, until we lose sight of the fact of how horrifyingly broken our justice system really is. So many numbers are tossed around - 6 million in prison, 70,000 prison rapes, 7x the imprisonment rate of other first-world countries, nearly 1 in 2 black men - that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We lose sight of the fact that we’ve created a a country where “mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today - perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” The New Yorker explores the crime wave and the evolution of the prison state in this great, heartbreaking article.
Article via Give Me Something to Read (5700 words)
View Larger The debate over the future of music is raging. Streaming services are growing like crazy, kickstarted in America by Spotify, and some artists are striking back and complaining that they are cannibalizing shrinking album sales for even-less-profitable streaming. The streaming services strike back and point out that the average American consumer spends $17, and that anything you can do to bring in money is a positive. Of course the underlying question under all of this is whether record labels are even relevant in an age where a band can market themselves and distribute music digitally.
(The Verge) Link
A cool visualization on the decline of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires over the 19th and 20th centuries. Skip ahead to about 2 minutes in if you want to see things get really active (post WWI).
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All this article about dark matter and dark energy and the nature of space and time tells me is that we hardly know anything yet. And that there’s a whole universe full of amazing left to discover.
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NPR (1100 words)
View Larger The Atlantic delves into the myths of the Civil War, and why so many black people feel so alienated from one of the most important moments in African-American history. We’ve agreed on a communal narrative that the Civil War was a war between two sides that were equally culpable, that the war was about the breakdown of compromise, that slavery was really just a bug in the system. It’s an insidious sort of attitude - no one is attempting to save for a moment slavery wasn’t horrible - and it comes from good intentions, namely rejecting the overly simplistic view that the North was entirely good and the South was entirely bad. However, bending over backwards to minimize the evils of slavery, or to obscure the fact that the Civil War was anything other than a war between one nation that was free and one nation whose very existence was based on owning human beings is misrepresenting and revising history.
“We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative.”
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“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”
-Chris Dodd, MPAA CEO to Congress
I’m not universally condemning of the influence of money in politics - hyperbole aside, I still don’t think our government has degenerated to an auction - but god, I’m going to let this one speak for itself.
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(update: oh no! sorry guys, just realized I linked to the wrong article here. if you’re still reading this, try again)
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International Women’s Day 2012: Women’s Representation in Politics
There are currently 17 countries with women as head of government, head of state or both, which according to Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women has more than doubled since 2005.
[However] The report marks slow advances in the political landscape - the number of lower houses hosting more than 30% women rose slightly from 25 to 30 in 2011 - and although the results show progress IPU Secretary General, Anders B. Johnsson says:
“Less than one-in-five parliamentarians in the world today are women. It is a worrying statistic at this point of human development and impossible to justify. The political will to change this is simply lacking in most cases.”
(via)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0lhisINd51qb2cg0o1_500.png)
