God's Own Crunk

Regarding that Kony business that is currently ruining your Facebook:

And this is whom Invisible Children wants the US government to train? Are they also proud that for the past two years, the Obama Administration has waived almost every penalty against foreign governments using child soldiers to give them more of our tax money in military aid?US military training often goes awry. Six years ago we trained Guatemalan soldiers to fight against the LRA. Kony’s group, according to David Axe at Wired, “wiped out the entire eight-man commando force and beheaded their commander.” We also trained Osama bin Laden to fight against the Soviet Union, which was then deemed the greater of two evils.

via Invisible Children – Takis Magazine.

Occasionally I’ll get emotionally sucked into causes, but the attempts to shed light on internecine power struggles and human rights violations of various African banana republics tend to produce as much ignorance as not. The average American attempting to understand who Kony is, why he is a particularly reprehensible human being, what child soldiers are, and the methods they use is pretty much impossible.

This is not a new story.

I’m not even an amateur Wiki-expert on Kony, but the child soldiers business has been going on for years – the battles over blood diamonds in Sierra Leone produced a heartbreaking generation of brainswashed, psychopathic children, and lest we forget the janjaweed and all those good times in Sudan.

George W. Bush probably had as close to a moral outlook regarding humanitarianism and foreign policy as a POTUS in this country can – he pumped gazillions of dollars into African, er, AIDS awareness, community-building and so forth, money that was – I’d add – completely wasted, if not well-intended.

What this sudden movement, spurred part and parcel by Invisible Children, wants is anyone’s guess. Intervention? What does that mean, exactly? Military? Multi-laterla? Unilateral? UNilateral? The only thing more dangerous than “well-intentioned” progressives pushing their ill-conceived domestic agendas on Americans is those progressives who look abroad for arcane, complex, Quixotic causes to embrace.

It’s a cruel world, and the existence of people like Kony are just a sliver of proof for that. I would wager that most Americans posting about Kony on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere don’t know the first thing about the conditions that produced such a man, the collusion with local and national governments that has kept him alive all these years, or what – for that matter – it is that Invisible Children is actually trying accomplish.

/rant

A perfect storm of ‘Kookery. I cringe to think of a few of my more, er, intoxicating comments from back in z’day – hopefully, those of us who got rid of our accounts won’t be swept up in the dragnet:

The Internet’s most popular — and powerful — search engine will soon expand its search index to include user comments on Facebook as part of Google’s traditional search results.

via Google To Index Facebook Comments As Search Results « CBS Los Angeles.

I’m not sure when I snapped, but I think it was the third, over-sized image imploring people to not be homophobic that finalized my decision to discontinue my presence on Facekook.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t normally have issues navigating and customizing the latest versions of Facekook, but the company’s latest overhaul is … different. I still haven’t gotten a handle on it, and judging by the Chinese Firedrill taking place among my Friends, they don’t either – most of them are still convinced that z’Kook is now charging for Gold Accounts et al, a clever joke that has flown around 4Chan for years. Anyway, Lifehacker has a handy guide on how to keep your ‘Kook activity there alone, while disabling the company’s prying eyes from everything else you do – if you go to the link below, you can block much of the site is doing without your knowledge:

Whether or not Facebook is tracking your browsing even when you’re logged out, if you don’t want third-party sites to send data to Facebook, you have some options. You could scrub your system clean of all Facebook.com cookies every time you use Facebook, but a number of developers have already stepped up with browser extensions to block Facebook services on third-party sites.

via Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here’s How to Stop It.

Sean Parker, on the new Facekook redesign. What I find instructive about this rant is that, unless you’re really, really, really into site design, most of it makes about as much sense as the ingredients listed on the side of a bottle of soda pop:

What I do think will become clear with time is that while Facebook was doing a piss poor job of making these decisions on our behalf, most users never paid it much heed until they were given a taste of the alternative in the form of a simple toolset to do the job for themselves.

[J]ust to be absolutely clear, lest anyone misinterpret my ranting, I’m incredibly happy with where the product is headed and this is a proud moment to be an owner and friend of the company. Regardless of whether you’re exhilarated or aggravated by the recent changes, there’s a lot more good things coming down the pipe.

via The New Facebook Lists Are “Too Painful to Use”.