I guess he felt that Kony just wasn’t getting enough attention.
I can’t think of a more meteoric fall from grace than this. Absolutely fucking hilarious.
Yikes. That’s definitely not going to help fundraising.
On the contrary, now he’ll get the comedy support, where before it was just the bleeding heart maudlin bandwagon crowd.
The Red Cross’s raison d’etre is not the use of force to arrest the enemies of the Iranian government. The situation is not comparable.
Interesting perspective from a Ugandan-American teenager shedding light on the misleading claims: Kony 2012 Video is Misleading - YouTube
Yeah. It was bizzare to read the story in The New York Times this morning. According to the short article, “Police Detain Maker of Uganda Video”, he was “found in the street in his underwear, screaming and inferfering with traffic..” Apparently, getting the word out about the YouTube video. :dubious: I expect a good explanation or apology from Mr. Russell.
Seeing and reading the story sure woke me up, anyway. Props to the reporters for use of ellipsis for hilarious effect, i.e. “screaming and interfering with traffic..” 
I don’t know why, though, the editor wrote “Police Detain Maker of Uganda Video” as the headline and not “Police Detain Maker of Kony Video”.
Have you seen the money porn makes despite illegal downloads. Man this guy will have money for his videos of him in solo action by the truckloads.
By my solo video and donate, maybe he was donating to a sperm bank and got confused:eek:
More people recognize Uganda than they do Kony.
Because nobody knows more about a country than a diaspora teenager. :rolleyes: I’m going to guess that she does not actually represent all of Uganda, and that her parents most likely have some politics of their own that she is picking up.
She claims that Kony died five years ago, which is just not true. The LRA is and continues to be a major source of instability in Central African Republic. Thousands of people have been killed and more uprooted…and this is a country that has enough problems without foreign armed rebel militias running rampant at the borders. Because of how violent and unpredictable the LRA is, they are really having a huge effect on health, economic prosperity, education and everything else across a huge region. How are you going to plant your crops, send your kids to school, and start businesses when you are under the constant threat of being uprooted from your homes?
I hate that this video has not inspired people to learn more about the situation, but rather to take random stances on something they know next to nothing about.
Right now, the biggest threats along those lines in Uganda come from the Museveni regime, the anti-gay death squads, and people accusing each other of being witches. The LRA is not in Uganda and has not been since the Seahawks were in the Super Bowl. This is not a practical question of stopping the LRA. They have already been neutralized as a military force. When it turns into a criminal case of bringing Kony to justice for his crimes, one can no longer justify teaming up with nearly or equally as bad forces on the grounds of stopping an immediate threat.
I think the people of southwestern CAR might tell you that the LRA is far from “neutralized.” At least, you’d hear that from those who haven’t been killed by them or the effects that the LRA has on social services. Being left to run rampage on a part of the world that doesn’t happen to have much strategic value to anyone with money is not the same as being disarmed. Again, they are killing, and more importantly they are keeping thousands from growing crops, accessing healthcare, running businesses and doing the things that can potentially help CAR move forward- which is a big problem.
CAR is one of the least developed places on the planet, and it’s been a haven and training ground for terrorists, rebels, organized criminals, poachers, and international trouble makers and murderers of all stripes. CAR’s security is essentially for the security of all of Africa- and even further.
I’m absolutely not an expert on Uganda, but when drafting foreign policy, either you work with local governments, you isolate them, or you start a war with them. There is no realistic way to be active in a region without engaging the local government in some way.
So when someone from the region disputes the claims of the hipster-youtube consensus she is an ignorant “diaspora teenager” being manipulated by her obviously pro-war crimes parents, but when someone from the region supports a military alliance with the Ugandan dictato rship we need to put great stock in what they say. Quite a change of heart you have had over the span of two posts.
By the way, Kony isn’t in Uganda and hasn’t been for six years. Since all the arguments for arming Museveni seem to depend on blithely handwaving that fact with some pablum about how we just have to work with the “kill the gays, burn the witches” people since they are the government of the place where Kony is, I thought I’d repeat it again.
I think that my point is that developing your viewpoints based on random individuals on YouTube is not an effective way to get a grasp on a situation.
Lucky they invented these things called reputable news outlets, who helpfully provide actual news an analysis by professional journalists, so we don’t need to rely on teenagers who have been to Uganda “several times” to tell us what it is like there. BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera have all been covering the LRA for years. None of them report bullshit like “Kony is dead” or “the LRA has been neutralized.” All of them agree that the LRA are a bunch of baddies that are causing a lot of problems in a remote place.
Uganda has it’s own motivations for being uncomfortable with this spotlight. For one, it’s generally considered a dick move to shove your rebels and criminals into the next country over and declare the problem solved.
But more importantly, there are all kinds of political intricacies involved- stuff that goes far beyond Uganda. The entire region has been involved in a complex series of international wars that is nowhere near being resolved, and the LRA has been a part of getting our troops into that business for god-knows-what reason as well. Oil, international war, “the war on terror”, China, mining, the still resonating aftereffects of the Rwandan genocide- it’s all there, tangled up and complex exceptionally poorly suited for simplistic “for” or “against” analysis.
Everyone in this story has their own agenda- including, incidentally, the type of Ugandan who is able to emigrate and travel back frequently- which is almost certainly a well-off, politically connected person with plenty to lose or gain from how this plays out. There is no easy way to pick sides here. I’m writing a thesis on security in the Central Africa Republic right now, and I am pretty lost as to what is really going on. I’m certainly not advocating any course of action- I know shit all about this except in practical terms if you want to work in an area, that means you have to work with that area’s governments. A few YouTube videos isn’t going to give anyone a better understanding.
FWIW, here is a
for a course on political security in Northern Uganda. Might be a good place to start.
Oh, if you guys are concerned about witch-hunts, consider donating to Stepping Stones Nigeria. As far as I’m aware, they’re not advocating US military intervention since Shell are already in the zone creating worse ecological disasters than Deepwater.
This has been making the rounds, and I’ve mulled it over a bit.
I’ve decided I think it’s basically bullshit. I don’t look at the Indian guy who runs my company and say “What the hell does he think he’s doing here? Does he think white people don’t know how to run a company? And what’s with dressing in the white-man drag- who does he think he’s fooling with that polo shirt? Why does he have to romanticize white culture? Why doesn’t he stay in India and do things Indians want? Why does he think we want what he’s doing? Us white people don’t need those sanctimonious Indian managers who think they are going to save us.”
The “foreigners have no place in Africa” argument is essentially based on the idea that western culture is so great and amazing that anyone who would choose to work elsewhere must be crazy or somehow evil. As if nobody in their right mind would find any value in a developing country, or enjoy something different than the supposably universal suburban dream. But, just like the Indian manager might value something about US culture (or might not- he might be in it for the money) I think it’s totally reasonable that people from Western countries might see where their skills, experiences, desires and preferences are best met in some other country. We live in a globalized society. If the US needs engineers, India has no problem sending them to us. If Tanzania needs public health experts- well, we have a hell of a lot more public health schools than Tanzania, and until Tanzania has a higher education system that can fill those jobs, these guys are going to come from countries where those skills are more common.
That’s not to say there aren’t power dynamics in the development industry that need to be thought about in a critical way. Of course there are. But not going to or working in developing countries doesn’t erase those power dynamics. All citizens of Western countries are a part of this dynamic- we all eat the child-slavery chocolate, we all buy the exotic hardwood tables, we all want to be protected against terrorism, we all buy the diamonds and gold and minerals, and we all want the good that keep getting hijacked by Somali pirates to reach us. Each one of our comfortable lives is a part of this dynamic. It’s doesn’t make global inequality worse by being a direct contact with it. Yeah, it’s not fair when the development workers lives in the beautiful gated compound with the Landcruiser surrounded by slums. But it’s also not fair when some American suburban guy lives in a beautiful gated community with a Landcruiser and the slums 4,000 miles away.