Internet/Planned Parenthood - 1 / Susan G Komen Foundation - 0
48 hours and the Susan G Komen Foundation is backpedaling hard. It's also interesting that last year Planned Parenthood received $680,000 from SGKF, whereas in the last two days they received $250,000 from the Fikes Foundation, $250,000 from New York's Mayor Bloomberg, and another $650,000 from other sources. By my math, that's $1.15M in two days. $1.15M is a bigger number than $680k.
The thing here, though, is that the Susan G Komen Foundation is going to lose in the long run. The only people who supported them in this were the, "Planned Parenthood iz abortionz! Oh, noez!" types. They, um, they don't take well to reversing course and will now undoubtedly abandon the foundation in droves. The people who got pissed off in the first place and started this backlash, meanwhile, won't be returning. The Susan G Komen Foundation's withdrawal of support for stem cell research, tendency to spend a shitload of money suing anyone who used the color pink or "for the cure," rank hypocrisy, and rather transparent attempts to play with right wing politics/politicians have gotten a lot of press. Also, I think there's a barely contained hatred of cause marketing and "awareness" as an end-goal running through the public consciousness. Since Susan G Komen for the Cure's pinkwashing is the most obvious and ubiquitous example of that very thing, it doesn't surprise me that the backlash to this came so fast and hard.
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I paid a great deal of attention a couple years ago when Anonymous launched its worldwide protest of Scientology. Really, I paid way more attention than that particular issue deserved. At the time they were seen as a bunch of short attention span script kiddies with an overinflated sense of self-importance going after a joke of an organization. That is, they were seen that way by the few people who bothered to pay attention. That particular interpretation was correct for the time.
I grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke. He is, of course, best known for HAL 9000 and big-time space opera stuff. One of the things he constantly hit on in his work, though, was the effect computers and computerized networking would have on humanity. He was basically writing about a human internet-based hive minds when most people were still dialing in to Prodigy on 14.4 baud dial-up modems.
To me, the interesting thing about Anonymous attempting to take down Scientology wasn't the act itself, it was the way they went about doing it. They organized a rolling, worldwide protest and a series of DDoS attacks against Scientology's web servers in a matter of a couple weeks and managed to pull everything off with surprising precision. I read the transcripts of some of the chat logs after the fact and at the time I described it as the first example of an internet hive mind. It was, in its own way, truly impressive. And it accomplished next to nothing.
Then Anonymous teamed up with WikiLeaks. And then they took down HBGary just to prove they could. Even that was still rather limited, even if it made a much bigger splash.
The raw power of the internet has spread beyond the borders of 4chan and /b/, however.
Ten years ago the Arab Spring would not have happened. Hell, it probably wouldn't have happened five years ago. I'm not saying someone wouldn't have tried. It's just that the protests would have maybe been footnotes in the newspapers or a quick item on the evening news between a cat fashion show and the big house fire down on Fifth. Thanks to the internet and the ubiquity of social networking the entire world had a real-time feed of the earliest stages of the protests in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt and [various other places that currently slip my mind] and the powers that be couldn't simply make them go away and pretend like it never happened.
Then in the last month we had the SOPA/PIPA blackout (which, honestly, I'd accept arguments to the effect that the blackout did nothing or that it totally killed the bills. But they weren't really going anywhere very fast in the first place) and the backlash against Susan G Komen for the Cure. I guess my point is: we're increasingly living in Arthur C. Clarke's world. I, for one, am looking forward to the quantum black holes that allow us to see through time and the device that creates a field that can instantly detonate all explosives inside its reach. I'm less sold on the whole "everybody's gonna be bisexual now!" thing, though. So, y'know, some positives, some negatives.
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It was also kind of fun getting to play a tiny role in expanding and amplifying the signal. Slacktivist linked to my Wednesday and Thursday posts on the subject and spread Scalzi's offer. So that was totally awesome.
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In the comments on that post I made an off-hand comment about how I ought to write a book about growing up conservative and Evangelical in Wheaton, IL, then becoming a liberal atheist, also in Wheaton, IL. It occurs to me that personal memoirs of 30-something-former-Evangelicals are kind of big right now, so...y'know. I might. Nothing like getting in at the tail-end of a glutted market!
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I had this stuck in my head all morning. Now you do, too. ENJOY!
Also, is it just me, or is it REALLY, REALLY HARD to actually believe Freddie Mercury when he's singing about women? I'm not thinking they made his particular rockin' world go 'round...
EDIT: On further consideration, SGKF might not really have backed down. I'm seeing a lot of commentary to the effect that all they're doing is saying, "Yeah, we'll honor our existing agreements, then allow PP to re-apply in the future." That's not exactly a ringing...much of anything, really...
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