An Art Lesson by Jason and Riva.

This Botticelli painting may be familiar to many of you. But to this day, much remains unseen.

Look harder.

On the far left, CHLORIS is ISRAEL.

ZEPHYR, immediately on Israel’s right, is the UNITED STATES.

VENUS is LEBANON.

IRAN is on the far right.

LEBANON, as depicted, is born of strife. Rising from a shell, it knows not who to turn to for support. Is AMERICA protecting LEBANON, or keeping her down? Should she listen to her mother, IRAN, and put on the veil?

Despite her frank sexuality, she holds her thighs together in refusal.

The season is marked by the winds of change.

IRAN looks healthy, but is slowly growing vines. Has it contracted a virus?

AMERICA looks on, calmly. Its nakedness is the weapon.

Is AMERICA holding ISRAEL back? Are they about to bang?

ISRAEL may look feeble, but it has wings.

ISRAEL holds her position on the far left. The artist is juxaposing ISRAEL’s position on the physical left with its leanings towards the political right. So much tension in the mind of the viewer.

As they look on, falling flowers represent the gravity of the situation.

Are those rose petals, or fight birds sent by ISRAEL?

Robot cars are ready for the road. Prototypes like Google’s have driven hundreds of thousands of kilometres without accident, and are probably much safer than human drivers. Within ten years, these will probably be common on roads across north america. This might be one of the most significant new technologies in decades. The last ten years gave us a lot of incremental improvements on information technology: faster computers, faster networks, smartphones, and applications like google and facebook that make the internet more useful in lots of ways. These are all great things, but they’re all incremental improvements, and they’re all just about communication.

It’s been a while, though, since there was a big advance in transportation technology. And as great as light-speed communication is, most of us still have to actually *get places* and the costs from doing so are significant. For most people, the cost of buying a car, maintaining that car, paying for insurance, paying for parking, and spending hours commuting every day is a huge part of their financial reality.  Even if you don’t own a car, you have to deal with traffic congestion, pay for public transport, worry about road accidents, and live in cities that are designed for cars. 

Cars driving themselves doesn’t change all of that. But it does make cars a lot more efficient, and probably also means fewer cars overall. When you think about it, most cars are idle most of the time. They are driven to work in the morning, then are parked for eight hours (occupying valuable land that could be put to other use), are driven home again, and then are parked all night. What a waste! But if your car could drive itself, then instead of doing nothing all day it could be driving someone else. We can easily imagine some sort of car share service, or car rental service that would allow fewer cars to serve the same number of people as are served today. That is very exciting!

Also, if you’re blind, or have any sort of physical disability that prevents you from driving, this might completely change your life. That is a big deal!

And now, some interesting reading on the subject:

Volvo is making a robot car system of their own designed for highway driving:

The recent test featured a Volvo XC60 compact crossover SUV, a Volvo V60 sports wagon, a Volvo S60 compact executive car and a truck all connected wirelessly to a lead truck. Such networked “talking” allowed the cars to mimic the accelerating, braking and turning of the human driver in the truck — all while traveling at 53 mph (85 kilometers per hour) on a public highway in Spain.

“People think that autonomous driving is science fiction, but the fact is that the technology is already here,” said Linda Wahlstrom, project manager for the SARTRE project at Volvo Car Corp. “From the purely conceptual viewpoint, it works fine and road train will be around in one form or another in the future.”

Matt Yglesias points out the barriers to widespread adoption, including double standards of safety and entrenched interests:

A related issue is simply that new things are held to a double-standard and this is particularly true in the realm of the automobile. A lot of the issues around autonomous cars amount to basically “but under some conditions something could go wrong and cars could crash and people die.” Meanwhile, more than 90 Americans die each and every day thanks to automobile mishaps, and 1.2 million are seriously injured every year. There’s a social convention in the United States that we don’t talk about those 90 daily deaths as a serious problem, even though obviously if we had nine people getting killed by terrorists every month there’d be a perpetual state of freaking out. High-speed motorized transportation is a serious business, and conventional automobiles are not held to the same tough safety standards that we apply to most other products, so it’s extremely difficult for something new to compete.

The last thing is that one of the things you’d probably like to do with an autonomously piloted car is build a fleet of them and use them to provide a taxi service. The Uber model plus computer piloted cars would be extremely attractive. This is, however, already an industry that’s subjected to extensive regulation for reasons that have nothing to do with driver safety. The owners of taxi medallions in NYC have made major investments and fully intend to obtain the rents to which they’re due. All across America different regulatory frameworks are in place that involve the interests of human cab drivers and human taxi license holders in different ways and people aren’t going to give those interests up just because futurists like to talk about it.

The NYTimes focuses on the tricky legal issues:

What happens if a police officer wants to pull one of these vehicles over? When it stops at a four-way intersection, would it be too polite to take its turn ahead of aggressive human drivers (or equally polite robots)? What sort of insurance would it need?

These and other implications of what Google calls autonomous vehicles were debated by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars and government regulators last week at a daylong symposium sponsored by the Law Review and High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University.

This article also provides some good examples of the exact overwrought concerns that Yglesias thinks will impede adoption:

There will also be unpredictable technological risks, several participants said. For example, future autonomous vehicles will rely heavily on global positioning satellite data and other systems, which are vulnerable to jamming by malicious computer hackers.

Because that’s way more scary than thousands of people taking to the roads drunk every day? Also, I doubt that the robot cars are relying on GPS for basic pathfinding and object avoidance. They have frikkin’ lasers on their hoods for that.

Jezebel has taken the liberty of following stock images of women through a typical week.

Some highlights…

Monday, 7:00 am. I wake up in my completely white bed. Everything in my house is white, including me.

Friday, 8:05 am. After yoga I head to the office, where my job is being confused near somepapers. 

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I make sure to shrug dramatically at my laptop.

And in case you missed it, don’t forget to check out this piece called Women Laughing Alone With Salad:

Personally, I’ve always been amused by stock images of schools. Can you believe how many young kids are into Einstein these days?

Of course, since chalkboards have similar properties to paper, they leave many women confused…

This is my favourite:

Good afternoon.

How do you feel about this floral series by Cedric Laquieze?

This one would make an awesome centrepiece.

On another note, look at this pencil sculpture by Federico Uribe.

Back to work everyone.

Jezebel published an article last week discouraging women and teenage girls from sharing nude photos of themselves in digital form. The author’s main argument was that there are many creeps out there, digital images are forever, and aforementioned creeps can use those images to hurt you or your career in ways you might not expect. Conclusion: try to avoid sharing nude self-portraits, especially if they include your face.

Photo credit: Jezebel.

I thought the article would be pretty uncontroversial, since Jezebel is designed to be pro-women, and leaked naked images have destroyed careers and caused all kinds of serious problems.

I was wrong.

The article provoked an outcry from self-proclaimed feminists, who argued that the article was an unacceptable instance of slut-shaming and victim blaming. In the article’s comment thread, many called the author a patriarchal jerk, an ignoramus, a part of the problem.

They argued that because in an ideal world, you would never need to warn women about such dangers because no one would illegally share others’ photos, it was wrong to advise women not to put themselves at risk.

They were wrong.

I remember a similar kind of incident happening at McGill, when a student group wanted to run a self-defense workshop for women, and another self-proclaimed women’s advocacy group withdrew from co-running the workshop because they felt the idea of self-defense necessarily meant victim blaming.

I think this approach is common in much of modern feminist discourse, but also terrifically flawed and fundamentally misguided.  While I agree that we should absolutely invest a substantial amount of energy towards perpetrator-shaming and creating a world where nothing terrible happens to innocent people, I don’t think this is a good reason to demonize prevention programs designed to help women who currently exist in the world we live in.

Should existing young women be purposefully left in the dark about dangerous realities and how to protect themselves simply because these realities ideally wouldn’t exist? Would any rational person choose more violence/harm over this ideal? It is unconscionable to me that feminists are arguing that we should not keep women informed about basic ways to protect themselves. Women are people, not instruments in a social game.

Particularly in the case of texting, I think a basic awareness of how images can be used would solve a number of problems.

I also want to stress that encouraging people to protect themselves is not in and of itself victim-blaming.  If anything, you’d think the use of the terms “creep” and “pervert” throughout the article would indicate that they were not siding with the people who distribute these images. Instead, they were offering sound, and necessary advice so they can make more informed decisions about photo use. This is distinct from saying “if you don’t follow this advice, you deserve it.”

And believe me, I understand that slut-shaming and victim blaming are real things, serious problems that need to be addressed. Slut-shaming is problematic when it means legislating on the basis of sexual norms thereby restricting freedom. It is problematic when a person’s preferences are used to in any way justify sexual violence against them. And it is problematic when promiscuity is used to discredit women in unequal and unfair ways.

These are serious, important issues that deserve attention. But that doesn’t mean that any time anyone suggests there is anything that can be done to protect someone from sexual assault or image leaks, that’s slut shaming or victim blaming.

The idea that there are ways, empirically, to slightly reduce your risks of some bad things in some cases does not in any way carry moral weight in blame assessment. That’s a distinct issue, and not a good justification to withhold information from women.

To accuse simple prevention programs for women of perpetrating victim blaming does a disservice to real instances of victim blaming, and to the feminist cause more broadly. It is sickening how often people accuse others who are actively trying to help women of being “patriarchal” in their approach. That is a serious, offensive accusation and not a way to galvanize support for women’s issues.

If you disagree with a fellow feminist, state your arguments, but don’t immediately question someone’s overall attitude towards women and accuse them of complicity in women’s oppression.

So in short: “Slut Shaming” and “Victim Blaming” are Strong Words. Use them right.

Most of you may have heard about this article by now, featuring a Daily Mail columnist who finds life difficult because she’s so beautiful.

Reading it, I never imagined myself coming to this lady’s defense, but I’m just going to say it: As a society, we’re responding wrong.

And again, I’ll keep this brief, because I do worry that if I ramble too long Naomi Wolf will show up and uncomb my hair on the spot, but some of the common responses I have heard just don’t make sense to me.

1. “She’s not even that attractive.”

If you look at any comment thread, forum, or discussion about this article, invariably the agenda is this: First things first, let’s establish that she’s not attractive.

See, for instance, this short clip to illustrate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmXRasjbL40. (They even brought in an attractive lady to certify that the columnist did not quality as pretty.)

Because clearly, the problem with Samantha Brick is not that she’s an unaware, self-absorbed, all-around bad person, but that she’s actually about eight pounds heavier than she thinks she is, and her face is not perfectly symmetrical.

You guys: there are a million ways to critique this article or discredit her argument. To judge the author on her appearance is basically the worst possible response. If her main point is that women judge other women primarily on their appearance, you’re not helping here.

But more importantly, if she were actually attractive, would that make her article any less obnoxious? I’d like to think the issue here is not that she’s insufficiently attractive to actually evoke jealousy in others, but that she’s approached the issue altogether from the wrong perspective.

2. “Samantha Brick is only saying this because the patriarchy told her to, and she is sexist.”

Let’s assume for a minute that Brick really was very attractive, and did experience jealousy from other women. Would that be an unreasonable thing to point out? I think it’s naive to assume that such instances of jealousy never do occur, simply because the phrasing of her argument was unfortunate.

Sometimes, beautiful women experience the effects of jealousy from some other women. To outright refute this claim is naive and misguided. If you watched the Apprentice this week and saw Lisa Lampenelli go off on Miss Universe, you will understand.

But here is what is actually kind of sexist: the implication that this issue is unique to women. Women didn’t invent jealousy, and some acknowledgement of that would be nice. But to dismiss this as an impossible or non-existent phenomenon is unfair.

When there are valuable assets a person can have by lottery of birth that get them ahead in life, there will be people who resent you. In terms of appearance alone, I have heard more than once about  the Short Man Industrial Complex, for instance.

Or consider wealth. Clearly there are people who are hated simply because they inherited lots of money.  You’re still, on the whole, probably a whole lot better off than you would be without that wealth or attractiveness, but that’s beside the point.

Another sexist thing: she never leaves any responsibility with men for putting such a high premium on attractiveness in the first place.

3. “The Daily Mail is a real newspaper, therefore I am offended that it contains a controversial column.”

I will only say this once, America: Just because it’s British, doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be clever. Josh linked me to a great description of the paper today here.

Would we react the same way if an article like Brick’s were published in USA Today?

Also, has anyone seen her other columns? Where was the outrage when she wrote this article titled “My husband says he’ll divorce me if I get fat?” 

People only became offended when she claimed to be prettier than them. Sad.

A life lesson for Samantha Brick:

Sometimes when there are resources that you were given at birth that give you a major advantage in society, people will be jealous of you. But you’re still better off than everyone else, so best to keep quiet about it.

Lord knows it’s hard for attractive young white females in the broadcasting industry, but you’re never going to get any public sympathy for it.

I took some photos of Bob Rae yesterday and thought it might be fun to summarize his speech using only body language.

——

Hey Guys. Pretty psyched you came this far from downtown to see me. I’ll try my best to look like Clinton.

Please sit down.

This budget is very divisive, pitting one generation against the other. In one corner…

Young people.

Fist bump; just kidding.

Against, in the other corner, even smaller young people!

Just kidding. 

Older people.

Yup.

Now ask me several questions about when I’m personally going to invade Syria.

Shin In Geun was born in Camp 14, one of North Korea’s prison work camps. After escaping the camp in 2004, he eventually crossed the border into China in 2005. He is the only known person to have escaped a north korean prison camp. The Guardian has an excerpt from an upcoming book detailing Shin’s life. It’s hard to believe that places like this actually exist:

If Shin’s mother met her daily work quota, she could bring home food. At 4am, she would prepare breakfast and lunch for her son and for herself. Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup. Shin was always hungry and he would eat his lunch as soon as his mother left for work. He also ate her lunch. When she came back from the fields at midday and found nothing to eat, she would beat him with a shovel.

Her name was Jang Hye Gyung. She never talked to him about her past, her family, or why she was in the camp, and he never asked. His existence as her son had been arranged by the guards. They chose her and the man who became Shin’s father as prizes for each other in a “reward” marriage.

Single men and women slept in dormitories segregated by sex. The eighth rule of Camp 14 said, “Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.” A reward marriage was the only safe way around the no-sex rule. Guards announced marriages four times a year. If one partner found his or her chosen mate to be unacceptably old, cruel or ugly, guards would sometimes cancel a marriage. If they did, neither the man nor the woman would be allowed to marry again. Shin’s father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him Jang as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe.

After their marriage, the couple were allowed to sleep together for five consecutive nights. From then on, Shin’s father was permitted to visit Jang a few times a year. Their eldest son, Shin He Geun, was born in 1974. Shin was born eight years later. The brothers barely knew each other. By the time Shin was four, his brother had moved into a dormitory.

The guards taught the children they were prisoners because of the “sins” of their parents but that they could “wash away” their inherent sinfulness by working hard, obeying the guards and informing on their parents.

[…]

One day in June 1989, Shin’s teacher, a guard who wore a uniform and a pistol on his hip, sprang a surprise search of the six-year-olds. When it was over, he held five kernels of corn. They all belonged to a slight girl Shin remembers as exceptionally pretty. The teacher ordered the girl to the front of the class and told her to kneel. Swinging his wooden pointer, he struck her on the head again and again. As Shin and his classmates watched in silence, lumps puffed up on her skull, blood leaked from her nose and she toppled over on to the concrete floor. Shin and his classmates carried her home. Later that night, she died.

[…]

“By the way,” Shin asked, “where is Pyongyang?”

Shin’s question stunned Park. He explained that Pyongyang, located about 50 miles south of Camp 14, was the capital of North Korea, the city where the country’s powerful people lived. Park said he had grown up there, studying in East Germany and the Soviet Union. After returning home, he had become chief of a taekwondo training centre. Park explained what life was like outside Camp 14. He told Shin about money, television, computers and mobile phones. He explained that the world was round.

Much of what Park talked about was difficult for Shin to understand, believe or care about. What delighted him – what he kept begging for – were stories about eating. Park described chicken, pork and beef in China, Hong Kong, Germany, England and the former Soviet Union. Intoxicated, Shin made perhaps the first free decision of his life. He chose not to snitch.

Park’s stories became an addiction but when he burst into song one night, Shin was alarmed, afraid a foreman might hear.

“Stop at once,” Shin told him.

Shin had never sung a song. His only exposure to music had been on the farm, when trucks with loudspeakers played military marching music. To Shin, singing seemed unnatural and insanely risky.

Park asked why he was so afraid of a little song when he was willing to hear seditious stories about how Kim Jong-il was a thief and North Korea was a hellhole.

I don’t know a great deal about Uganda, and probably can’t say anything new or useful about Joseph Kony or the LRA. But these people live there, so maybe we should listen to what they have to say about the methods and goals of the Kony 2012 campaign:

Rosebell Kagumire filmed this video response:

TMS Ruge is appalled:

This IC campaign is a perfect example of how fund-sucking NGO’s survive. “Raising awareness” (as vapid an exercise as it is) on the level that IC does, costs money. Loads and loads of money. Someone has to pay for the executive staff, fancy offices, and well, that 30-minute grand-savior, self-crowning exercise in ego stroking—in HD—wasn’t free. In all this kerfuffle, I am afraid everyone is missing the true aim of IC’s brilliant marketing strategy. They are not selling justice, democracy, or restoration of anyone’s dignity. This is a self-aware machine that must continually find a reason to be relevant. They are, in actuality, selling themselves as the issue, as the subject, as the panacea for everything that ails me as the agency-devoid African. All I have to do is show up in my broken English, look pathetic and wanting. You, my dear social media savvy click-activist, will shed a tear, exhaust Facebook’s like button, mobilize your cadre of equally ill-uninformed netizens to throw money at the problem.

[…]

Catching & stopping him is not a priority of immediate concern. You know what is? Finding a bed net so that millions of kids don’t die every day from malaria. How many of you know that more Ugandans died in road accidents last year (2838) than have died in the past 3 years from LRA attacks in whole of central Africa(2400)? We’ve picked our battles and we chose to simply try to live. And the world should be helping us live on our own terms, by respecting our agency to choose which battles to put capacity towards.

I’ve never heard of Germans running NGOs in [the United States of] America to try and fix the economy or Swedish NGOs in America trying to fix the declining standard of living. Africa is our problem, we hereby respectfully request you let us handle our own matters. We will make mistakes here and there, sure. That is expected. But the trade-off of writing our own destiny far outweighs the self-assigned guilt the world assigned to us. If you really want to help, keep the guilt and charity in your backyard. Bring instead, respect, and the humility to let us determine our destiny.

Musa Okwonga thinks the video radically oversimplifies the conflict:

I understand the anger and resentment at Invisible Children’s approach, which with its paternalism has unpleasant echoes of colonialism.  I will admit to being perturbed by its apparent top-down prescriptiveness, when so much diligent work is already being done at Northern Uganda’s grassroots.  On the other hand, I am very happy – relieved, more than anything – that Invisible Children have raised worldwide awareness of this issue.  Murderers and torturers tend to prefer anonymity, and if not that then respectability: that way, they can go about their work largely unhindered.  For too many years, the subject of this trending topic on Twitter was only something that I heard about in my grandparents’ living room, as relatives and family friends gathered for fruitless and frustrated hours of discussion. Watching the video, though, I was concerned at the simplicity of the approach that Invisible Children seemed to have taken.

The thing is that Joseph Kony has been doing this for a very, very, very long time.  He emerged about a quarter of a century, which is about the same time that Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni came to power.  As a result the fates of these two leaders must, I think, be viewed together.  Yet, though President Museveni must be integral to any solution to this problem, I didn’t hear him mentioned once in the 30-minute video.  I thought that this was a crucial omission. Invisible Children asked viewers to seek the engagement of American policymakers and celebrities, but – and this is a major red flag – it didn’t introduce them to the many Northern Ugandans already doing fantastic work both in their local communities and in the diaspora.  It didn’t ask its viewers to seek diplomatic pressure on President Museveni’s administration.

Maureen Agena grew up in Northern Uganda at a time when children were being abducted from her school:

As the discussion grew on twitter, I realised that the internet has indeed become part of everyday life and has played an increasing role in the delivery of news about issues that concern citizen. Today, a new form of internet journalism –Citizen Journalism has taken root and many ordinary citizens have learnt how to argument, report and fact-check videos like #stopKony.

Just like @RosebellK another Journalist here in Uganda, I have problems with this video because it not only tarnishes Ugandan’s image but also undermines the effort that different Governments and peace keepers like Bishop Odama of Gulu put in, to have peace talks that could bring this war to an end. It totally portrays the hopelessness of Ugandans to help themselves out of this situation and the intervention of some Americans who “cares” so much about the plight of the children in Northern Uganda. I tend to think that it is a one man show video. “Invisible children might be advocating for a good Cause but used a very wrong Approach” like @jssoziput it.

I hardly doubt that the people of Northern, Eastern and West Nile regions in Uganda, that were most affected by this war have any idea that a video talking about their plight has gone viral on the internet. It’s 2012 and the people of Northern and eastern Uganda are in the post conflict era and re-settling. Why doesn’t the video at least give a brief about this rather than threaten the entire globe with out-dated information? Does “Invisible Children” have an idea what impression of Uganda they have portrayed to a world that still believes Idi Amin is still alive and terrorising us? What will happen to our beautiful tourism sector?

Javie Ssozi lists what he thinks we should all take away from the Kony 2012 campaign:

Lessons learnt from #KONY2012: For Western Countries

• People in America, UK and other countries spend more time paying attention to events in their own little bubbles that they know so little about the world. When such people encounter a campaign like #KONY2012 they will think that it’s actually going to change the world in a snap.
• If you are seeking to solve a problem outside your own country involve the people who are being affected/ local people. The magnitude of some problems is much bigger than you would anticipate and some of your approaches will not necessarily work.
• It’s a western syndrome to think about Africans as a bunch of helpless goons. That we are not. And again if you think this way, this is another reason for you to get out of your deadlocked-bubble
• It’s important to think about the consequences of your campaign before you make it go viral

Lesson Learnt from #KONY2012: For Ugandans and Africans at large

• Like the saying goes “if you don’t speak for yourself, someone will speak for you”. This is exactly what Jason Russell is doing – speaking for a bunch of “voiceless Ugandans”. But even as a storyteller I will tell you that there is a multiplicity of stories. And no one can ever tell my story for me!
• Foreign aid and support has greatly contributed to our economies but has also made corruption rampant in our governments because of lack of transparency and accountability. Our economies have now grown to be sustainable and it’s about time we quenched the “begging syndrome”.
• Be careful when you deal with the international media and other international organizations they can take away your dignity in the name of “social good”. From my travels I have had several encounters where people ask me about Idi Amin. Branding Uganda based on Idi Amin’s actions and Kony’s atrocities is unacceptable – this doesn’t make our international image, it makes it worse! Actually there is more to Uganda than that. There is a part of Uganda’s history which is PAST and that doesn’t determine who we are now.

Updated:

Jacob Acaye is the former child soldier featured in the Kony 2012 video. He defends Invisible Children’s advocacy:

But Acaye denied widespread criticism in Uganda and elsewhere that the American-made film calling for Kony’s arrest is out-of-date or irrelevant. “It is not too late, because all this fighting and suffering is still going on elsewhere,” Acaye, now 21, told the Guardian in a telephone interview from Kampala, where he is studying law. “Until now, the war that was going on has been a silent war. People did not really know about it.

“Now what was happening in Gulu is still going on elsewhere in the Central African Republic and in Congo. What about the people who are suffering over there? They are going through what we were going through.”

Angelo Izama:

So why the misleading campaign? Why now? What does it profit to market the infamy of a man already famous for his crimes and whose capture is already on the agenda? Critics of Invisible Children are also likely to be critics of foreign aid and by extension the place of Western charities in the mis-education of western publics about the realities of Africa. The real danger of the game-show type “pornography of violence” that Invisible Children as made so appealing also has a dangerous hold on policy types in Washington DC whose access to information and profiles of issues is as limited.

Recent examples of the impact of evangelizing NGO’s can be seen from the distortions of the Save Darfur Coalition to a recent mining ban in the DRC under the guise of saving hapless Africans. The simplicity of the “good versus evil”, where good is inevitably white/western and bad is black or African, is also reminiscent of some of the worst excesses of the colonial era interventions. These campaigns don’t just lack scholarship or nuance. They are not bothered to seek it.

Updated March 9th:

Anywar Ricky Richard is a former child soldier of the LRA and director of the northern Ugandan organization Friends of Orphans:

Invisible Children are known in Northern Uganda as an organization supporting the education of former abductees, which is much needed in the region. But they are not known as a peace building organization and I do not think they have experience with peace building and conflict resolution methods. I totally disagree with their approach of military action as a means to end this conflict.

Since 1989 the government of Uganda has consistently used military campaigns against Kony including major operations like Operation Iron Fist (2001) and Lightning Thunder (2008 – 2009). Operation Lightning Thunder was highly expected to end the war by either capturing Kony alive in his haven in the Congo or killing him. It was carried out by the armed forces of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan with technical support from the United States government — and still it failed. Instead of ending the war, Lightning Thunder spread the LRA’s atrocities to the Central African Republic as Kony relocated there. The only known result of the military attacks on Kony is the dispersal of his forces into smaller groups, resulting in new atrocities on civilians including the 2004 Baralonyo attack in the Lira district of Uganda, the Kanga Pa-aculu attack in Pader district, and many others. It is also well known that a majority of the LRA’s soldiers are abducted children, and that he uses these abducted children as human a shields. As a result, any attack will be on the abducted children.

(I don’t know much about Uganda, but I have some thoughts about development/conflict studies advocacy, which might be new or useful. Those will be parts 2 and 3. I’ll update this post as I find more perspectives, articles, posts and editorials from Ugandans)