Invisible Children, Kony 2012, and criticisms

[essius]

The other day I noticed the Kony 2012 video by Invisible Children that has been receiving a great deal of attention on the Internet as of late (it’s received over 56 million views on YouTube). I watched the video and was immediately curious. Evidently, the video has received multiple lines of serious criticism. No one denies, of course, that Joseph

Comments

[meus_ovatio]

I think criticizing things is an industry in and of itself, with boiler-plate, cookie-cutter, abstract criticisms that apply to any and every subject that comes up. I think hearing the same tropes and phrases over and over again gets a little old. Personally, I knew of the guy years ago when studying terrorism, so I'm just annoyed at watching the internet be one giant Johnny-Come-Lately, and Facebook activism once again proving the rule that Americans are great at talking about things.

[meus_ovatio]

Some instances: "It smacks of White Burden." Well, everything smacks of White Burden when white people are involved. This sort of criticism is entirely rote and rhetorical, and simply fills space.

"It could lead to malinvestment or bad strategies." 1)appeal to consequence 2)everything could lead to malinvestment and/or bad strategies. Just simply saying it also betrays it's inherent emptiness, its lack of substance. More rhetorical space-filling, fill-in-the-blank "criticism".

I'm reminded of science class wherein everyone gets trained to be a "critical thinker" and regurgitates statements about "sample sizes" and "generalizability" ad nauseum in some rote, repetitious, purely rhetorical charade of criticism.

[essius]

What do you make of the charge that IC is working with those who commit the very same kinds of atrocities as the LRA?

[meus_ovatio]

I don't really know to say.

[the_rukh]

I wonder if everyone would be so critical if the LRA were a muslim group.

\trollface

[terminator44]

If they were a Muslim group, then we'd already be bombing them.

[dexeron]

Still processing all the stuff I'm reading. I just came across an article questioning IC's financial dealings (how much they've gotten vs. how much is actually doing anything but going back into more marketing.)

The difficulty in leveling what might be legitimate criticism here is that sometimes people misunderstand that you can agree with conclusions (like Kony, or genocide, or the enslavement and military indoctrination of children are all bad things) while disagreeing with methods. We've all seen situations where something ostensibly helpful is criticized at not being effective at fixing the problem, and defenders will rise up and level accusations of being against solving it in the first place. What surprises me is the amount of intelligent, knowledgeable criticism coming out re: "Kony 2012" that's been able to both express in very strong tones just what's wrong with the LRA, but also what's wrong with THIS approach to dealing with it, mostly without falling victim to that. It's kind of nice for a change.

[essius]

What surprises me is the amount of intelligent, knowledgeable criticism coming out re: "Kony 2012" that's been able to both express in very strong tones just what's wrong with the LRA, but also what's wrong with THIS approach to dealing with it, mostly without falling victim to that. It's kind of nice for a change.

I agree. Oyston, above, has been a particularly good example of that type of balance.

[fornikate]

i think well-meaning but ignorant white people need to stay the fuck out of africa's business 99% of the time

[meus_ovatio]

Except for AIDS and condoms.

[fornikate]

what are you getting at, exactly

[meus_ovatio]

That AIDS and condoms and birth-control are important things.

[underlankers]

Imagine of the Lord's Resistance Army were Islamist instead of Christianist. The GOP would probably be making a big race-loaded stink about how Obama doesn't care about his fellow blacks. Instead when it's Christians being the murdering scum their reaction is a measured silence or in the case of Rush Limbaugh praising this nasty little toad.

[anfalicious]

It is driving me FUCKING BONKERS that no one is saying "Christian Fundamentalist Joseph Kony" or "Christian Terrorist Joseph Kony".

[essius]

To be fair, it is unclear to what extent their belief system more than nominally incorporates Christianity. Yes, they identify as Christian and use terms like "Holy Spirit," but so did many early sects of Christianity that would not have been regarded by the original disciples as orthodox. So it's not merely fundamentalist, which is bad enough, but it's heterodox as well. It's also a syncretism of nominally Christian doctrine with African and Jewish traditions. The Ugandan Catholic Church has apparently disavowed the LRA, and it's more than a little difficult to see how the LRA can claim to be truly Christian. "Christian militia" seems almost like a contradiction in terms. There's no basis in the New Testament or the hermeneutics of the historic Christian church for the moral permissibility of murder, sexual enslavement, rape, child abduction, or coercion of children to participate in warfare. On the contrary, everything in orthodox Christianity (a far cry from American fundamentalism, to be sure) demands the loudest and most

[underlankers]

Blah Blah Blah. All of this equally applies to Islamists but anyone that points this out is accused of sympathizing with it. And frankly Henry Duke of Guise and a number of other heroes of the Faith would disagree that murder in the name of God is perfectly justifiable. Wasn't it a Christian tradition at one point to burn the local Jews whenever the harvest was bad? They, after all, commited the crime of Deicide......

But I expect that the only True Scotsmen are Glaswegians.