Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
dailymaverick.co.za
Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#2Yes, raising awareness is easy compared to finding a solution. But African politics has failed to solve a pretty awful issue for 25 years. Placing this issue in the global spotlight might force something to happen before another generation of villages is raped or abducted into slavery.
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#3Pretty misleading title, if you ask me.
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#4Yes, raising awareness is easy compared to finding a solution. But African politics has failed to solve a pretty awful issue for 25 years. Placing this issue in the global spotlight might force something to happen before another generation of villages is raped or abducted into slavery.
The question the article poses is, what good could come out of (more) foreign intervention? The US already has 100 soldiers in Uganda, and is apparently trying to actively capture Kony already.
Anyway, it's nice to get an African perspective on this issue. Interesting read!
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#5Yes, raising awareness is easy compared to finding a solution. But African politics has failed to solve a pretty awful issue for 25 years. Placing this issue in the global spotlight might force something to happen before another generation of villages is raped or abducted into slavery.
FTA:
> Here’s the thing. The LRA is an incredibly complex issue. By simplifying down to a case of “Goodies versus Baddies” the Invisible Children campaign risks undermining the very real progress that is being made against the LRA. Also released on Tuesday, in a report completely ignored by social media, a spokesman for the UN High Commission for Refugees said that a recent spate of LRA attacks were “the last gasp of a dying organisation that's still trying to make a statement,” adding that there were only about 200 LRA fighters left. Progress is being made. There’s even a chance that Kony will be caught or killed by the end of 2012 – but this will have nothing to do with a YouTube video, however slick it is.
I don't think that the statement "African politics has failed to solve a pretty awful issue for 25 years" is really accurate or fair. And that's one of the problems with this video -- it propagates this idea that Africans need Western powers to solve their problems for them.
And I guess I'd ask this: How does the attention of people in North America and Europe "force something to happen"? Force what to happen? Force Western military intervention? Give Ugandans more motivation to take out the LRA?
And, of course "Africa" isn't really the right word, anyways. It's an entire continent, after all, and the people in Uganda or South Sudan aren't the same as the people in, say, South Africa, or Botswana, or Somalia, etc., nor are the political/economic/social contexts necessarily the same.
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#6[deleted]
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#7Yes, raising awareness is easy compared to finding a solution. But African politics has failed to solve a pretty awful issue for 25 years. Placing this issue in the global spotlight might force something to happen before another generation of villages is raped or abducted into slavery.
that statement is a bit insulting.
furthermore, the issue is being resolved. What remains of the LRA has been hidding in the deep jungle for a few years now.
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#8I think (and hope) this is the first step in creating real connections between people in disparate regions.
In building a movement, the first thing that is necessary is a good story. And KONY2012 will provide the story if he is caught anytime this year or the next.
I'm not saying that KONY2012 needs to be the reason he is caught - there just needs to be a perception that it was the reason.
There are a lot of lonely people in the US with a smartphone who badly need a human connection and in the developing nations there are tons of people who would be happy to share their lives. I think technology can bridge that gap leading to some real social progress on both sides.
This has always been my "dream app" but of course it requires better infrastructure in the developing nations coupled with really cheap computing and video equipment. But I think it should be possible soon.
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#9"[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really." -James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA
Re: Is the #kony2012 campaign a scam, or just misleading?
#10One of my big concerns about the US military getting involved in "removing" some crazed warlord from power is that our track record of doing that around the world indicates we do a piss-poor job of finding better replacements.