Kony 2012. Spread the word!

[sallyandsnowx]

I found this on facebook today, it left me heartbroken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc

It is pretty long, about 30 minutes. So watch it when you have time. It is absolutely sickening that children and families in Africa have been put through this for 26 years and no one has tried to stop the man committing these horrible acts until now.

Help spread the word about this and send your hopes & prayers to these children. May God bless them.

[Karen]

Before you spread this any further, please read this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments...gn_is_a_fraud/

Of the $8.9 million in donations they spent in 2011, this is the breakdown: $1.7 million in US employee salaries $357,000 in Film costs $850,000 in Production costs $751,000 in Computer equipment $244,000 in "professional services" (DC lobbyists) $1.07 million in travel expenses $400,000 in yearly office rent in downtown San Diego $16,000 in Entertainment etc... Only 2.8 million (31%) made it to their charity program (which is further whittled down by local Ugandan government officials) - what do the children actually get?

[smokey the elder]

It seems the bigger the charity gets the less good it does in a lot of cases.

[kitten645]

Thanks Karen. Seems with the increasing speed of information, there is very little vetting of the info. We seem to have traded speed for accuracy.

[Miss Z]

I believe we should be spreading the word about Joseph Kony, but not about the Kony 2012 campaign.

I am absolutely for the arrest and trial of war criminals and believe piling on the international pressure on Western governments via a hard-hitting campaign video is a genius idea. But I am not a fan of Invisible Children or the crux of their campaign.

Firstly I have a HUGE problem with 'charities' that pump out 'free' merchandise, such as the bracelets, posters and leaflets Invisible Children send to those who donate to them. So I donate the money that should be aiding the focus of charity, such as supporting ex-recruits of the LRA, and then receive all my cool stuff... and who has payed for that, other than muggins here? It seems the big charities that get their brand name everywhere are less about the thoughtfulness of giving, and more about, 'everybody's doing it, and are proud of it, so why the heck aren't you?' Furthermore, the video campaign has been very successful for them, and I will remember Kony's name for a good while now. Hence I don't need posters plastered all over my city to keep reminding me who he is and why he's in the same picture as Adolf Hitler.

Secondly, having been to Uganda, and having had (somewhat!) first hand experience of the Ugandan police/armed forces, they are nearly as corrupt as it comes. Whilst they may be relatively stable in terms of a Central African force (I believe they have been/still are part of the peace-keeping forces in Sudan), they are by no means ethically equipped to deal with war criminals in a way that the West would be comfortable with. If they do get hold of Kony, I would wager we shall see a similar sticky end to him as Muammar Gaddaffi. The Ugandan government needs some help and reshuffling before this could be corrected, I believe.

Also, on a side note, Joseph Kony's name was never once mentioned in Uganda whilst I was there. Not to say he's not a big deal. But he most certainly is not breathing down everyone's necks as the campaign video would have you believe. Uganda on the whole is a country finding its feet in a rapidly evolving world, not a nation plagued by death and destruction and violence.

The problem with the twitter/facebook fly-away campaigns is that everyone finds their bandwagon and jumps on it, either by watching the video and being all for it, or then reading one anti-campaign blog or report and being totally against it. Everyone is entitled to their belief and knows where their heart lies, however problems such as this are never very black and white and I don't believe we'll ever be satisfied from the outcome of the Kony 2012 campaign, whether we catch him or not.

[Catty1]

The story has been removed. I went to the link and all that was there were the comments.

[Catty1]

I found this: http://thedailywh.at/2012/03/07/on-kony-2012-2/

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:
Stop sending me that video.
The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.
Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.
By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.
And as far as what they do with that money:

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.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.
The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”
Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.
Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.
Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.
The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.
There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

[RICHARD]

I don't social anything, So I came across this story peripherally and have not seen the video.

I did read some press about it and saw the guys that made the film.

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The first thing that I noticed was one of the film makers with a t-shirt on that said "Kony 2012" and thought to myself that this is nothing but a moneymaking op for these dudes.

As the week went on?

I saw some kind of bracelet/tag on a string that was shown with the K/2012 shirt, so, I did a google for the stuff on line and saw that this is big business for the people 'sponsoring' this info/news.

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Children being used as pawns for warlords in Africa is nothing new.

This has been going on for years and to think that these guys are bringing it to the masses makes me laugh, not in the haha funny way, but in the cynical, you have to be friggin kidding me way.

I saw a documentary and some other stories years ago about the very same situations on the African continent.

Some of the "child armies" are a sad product of the economics and way-of-life in the areas where the WLs operate.

The WLs can put together these armies because the children they 'recruit' are so poor that the promise of food and clothing makes it one, if not, the only opportunity to get a meal into their stomachs.

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Here's another little factoid about why these 'armies' are so successful.

The Kalishnikov styled assault rifles they carry.

If I remember correctly, the AK-47 rifles have only 3-4 moving parts and can be taken apart and cleaned in a matter of minutes-perfect for a child or teen to understand.

The AK is also on of the most copied firearm on the planet, so copied and simple that you can take parts from firearms maufactured in different countries and put them together to make a useful rifle.

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This Kony moron isn't the first and won't be the only idiot to take advantage of small children - He's more known because of some opportunists who are using the internet to make money on a sad story that has been going on for years.....

[dab_20]

Just curious, I know 4/20/12 was supposed to be the day everyone put posters up around the city. Did anyone see anything in their city the next morning? I sure didn't.

I think this whole campaign was a huge buzz for a week and then quickly died out. A horrible, horrible thing it's true. But it sickens me all the money these people are making out of it when it should go to the children of these tragedies.

[Miss Z]

Just curious, I know 4/20/12 was supposed to be the day everyone put posters up around the city. Did anyone see anything in their city the next morning? I sure didn't.

I was at home on the 20th, and I saw one rather lonely poster on a railing. Now that I'm back in London, I haven't seen ANY at all, and there was supposed to be a large event happening here last time I heard, although it has been my examinations week and I haven't really been paying much attention.

[phesina]

The big thing I heard about happening on April 20 was, people all over the country (the whole world?) taking stands (in various ways) for the legalization of marijuana!

[cassiesmom]

Just curious, I know 4/20/12 was supposed to be the day everyone put posters up around the city. Did anyone see anything in their city the next morning? I sure didn't.

I think this whole campaign was a huge buzz for a week and then quickly died out. A horrible, horrible thing it's true. But it sickens me all the money these people are making out of it when it should go to the children of these tragedies.

I saw one sign (spray painted on a boarded-up building) on my way to work. There are "Kony 2012" stickers on most of the traffic light and street light poles on the streets around my building, but with the NATO summit coming in a few weeks I'm sure the city will have crews out to remove those pretty quickly.

[Alysser]

I swore I read somewhere long before this "KONY" movement that Kony was killed three years ago. I can't remember the source or if someone told me.

[Lady's Human]

He wasn't killed, he was driven out of Uganda about 3 years ago.