so-treu:

white girl says “i am not Trayvon Martin……and neither are you, fellow white people.”

THIS is how you collect your folks.

I think this is a very important message. I own a lot of Amnesty shirts, but never the I am Troy Davis one. It was and is an amazing campaign strategy, but I’m not either of them and I’m not at risk to be. Myself, most of my followers, and most of the people I see on a regular basis are far closer to George Zimmerman. Scary, isn’t it? This girl articulates so well that feeling. Spend three minutes with it.

(via politicalpartygirl)

This time tomorrow I will be in Denver, Colorado for Amnesty’s AGM this year! I am very, very excited!

visiblechildren:

For those asking what you can do to help, please link to visiblechildren.tumblr.com wherever you see KONY 2012 posts. And tweet a link to this page to famous people on Twitter who are talking about KONY 2012!

I do not doubt for a second that those involved in KONY 2012 have great intentions, nor do I doubt for a second that Joseph Kony is a very evil man. But despite this, I’m strongly opposed to the KONY 2012 campaign.

KONY 2012 is the product of a group called Invisible Children, a controversial activist group and not-for-profit. They’ve released 11 films, most with an accompanying bracelet colour (KONY 2012 is fittingly red), all of which focus on Joseph Kony. When we buy merch from them, when we link to their video, when we put up posters linking to their website, we support the organization. I don’t think that’s a good thing, and I’m not alone.

Invisible Children has been condemned time and time again. As a registered not-for-profit, its finances are public. Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production. This is far from ideal for an issue which arguably needs action and aid, not awareness, and Charity Navigator rates their accountability 2/4 stars because they lack an external audit committee. But it goes way deeper than that.

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Still, the bulk of Invisible Children’s spending isn’t on supporting African militias, but on awareness and filmmaking. Which can be great, except that Foreign Affairs has claimed that Invisible Children (among others) “manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” He’s certainly evil, but exaggeration and manipulation to capture the public eye is unproductive, unprofessional and dishonest.

As Chris Blattman, a political scientist at Yale, writes on the topic of IC’s programming, “There’s also something inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous, about the idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa. […] It hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably shapes programming. Usually misconceived programming.”

Still, Kony’s a bad guy, and he’s been around a while. Which is why the US has been involved in stopping him for years. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has sent multiple missions to capture or kill Kony over the years. And they’ve failed time and time again, each provoking a ferocious response and increased retaliative slaughter. The issue with taking out a man who uses a child army is that his bodyguards are children. Any effort to capture or kill him will almost certainly result in many children’s deaths, an impact that needs to be minimized as much as possible. Each attempt brings more retaliation. And yet Invisible Children supports military intervention. Kony has been involved in peace talks in the past, which have fallen through. But Invisible Children is now focusing on military intervention.

Military intervention may or may not be the right idea, but people supporting KONY 2012 probably don’t realize they’re supporting the Ugandan military who are themselves raping and looting away. If people know this and still support Invisible Children because they feel it’s the best solution based on their knowledge and research, I have no issue with that. But I don’t think most people are in that position, and that’s a problem.

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 supporting 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.

If you want to write to your Member of Parliament or your Senator or the President or the Prime Minister, by all means, go ahead. If you want to post about Joseph Kony’s crimes on Facebook, go ahead. But let’s keep it about Joseph Kony, not KONY 2012.

~ Grant Oyston, visiblechildren@grantoyston.com

Grant Oyston is a sociology and political science student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. You can help spread the word about this by linking to his blog at visiblechildren.tumblr.com anywhere you see posts about KONY 2012.

TONIGHT! Come out!

FYI This is happening next week. Monday, February 6. If you are a FGCU student or anyone around the area, come by!

John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4’x5’ plywood board — and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches — spontaneous, and always surprising — go further than classroom lectures can.

Watch this TED talk. It elaborates my previous short StoryCorps post. This idea is so inspiring.

(Source: cagedbirdsproject)

deadladyofclowntown:

“Medvedev and Putin’s party is pushing an outrageous law to a vote this week. The idea? To make it illegal to publish an article or even speak in public about being gay or transgender. We only have 2 days to tell key leaders around the world push Russia to drop the bill.” - allout.org

Please sign this and reblog! The new law in progress in St. Petersburg categorizes homosexuality as “social perversion” and would introduce fines for those seen as “enemies of family values”. Please be part of the fight against this monstrosity, which will legally sanction the rabid homophobia, biphobia and transphobia already present in Russia.

undermyumbrella11:

I love watching TED videos, they are informative and inspirational. This speech given by Natalie Warne is beautiful. I am so happy that I am apart of this generation. And there are movements like Invisible Children fighting for human rights. I could watch this a million times, and I encourage you to do the same. #amazing

“What fuels a movement are the Anonymous Extraordinaires behind it”

“But whatever you want chase after it with everything you have. Not because of the fame or the fortune but solely because that’s what you believe in. Because that’s what makes your heart sing. That’s what your dance is. That’s what is going to define our generation, when we start chasing and fighting after the things we love and that we want to fight for.”

“Find that thing that inspires you that you love and just chase after it, you know fight for that because that is what is going to change this world and that is what defines us”

“It is the acts that make us extraordinary, not the Oprah moments.”

P.s. Invisible Children makes my heart sing, and just telling people and blogging about this issue makes a difference. I am so blessed in my life, so doing that feels like the least I can do.

You should watch this.

You should probably watch every TED talk, they are all amazing. This girl is incredible, inspirational, and we should all become informed on the issues of child soldiers. For FGCU students, keep a look out because in the Spring our campus’ chapter of Amnesty International will be bringing Invisible Children to campus again.