On speaking to journalists - a thread 🧵🧵🧵

“Everyone is so pushy”
“I wish journalists would treat us as experts in our own lived experiences.”

- Myanmar friends speaking about recent interactions with journalists. 1/ This thread is inspired by stories from friends who have had some negative experiences lately.

I want to stress, first off, that I have great respect for the profession of journalism. Good storytelling is honorable work.
2/

“We have made the global apparel brands huge profits with our bare hands over the years. ...their silence thus far is appalling.”

A great report by @sjmichaels on the brands that benefit from doing business with the military, and what MM activists want.
motherjones.com/politics/2021/…

https://twitter.com/sjmichaels/status/1382402292112973824

This is from @adidas website:
"Workers must have access to effective communication channels with their employers and managers... as a means of exercising their social and economic rights"

#adidas #speakupforMyanmar #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar

adidas-group.com/en/sustainabil… But 73 days into the #myanmarmilitarycoup, and @adidas has made no concerted effort to assure the public or their workers as to whether they are actually committed to making sure their workers are guaranteed this access they tout on their corporate website.

"I urge you to support the public and the worker's movement against the military dictatorship in Myanmar."
- Moe Sandar Myint

@adidas @Chevron @adidasWomen: Get in formation! Take a stand to support these people, or else risk their blood on your hands. Your silence is violent.

https://twitter.com/AndrewTSaks/status/1380719425276370951

friends, please sign these petitions! This one is asking @adidas, and @Beyonce as their affiliate, to take concrete action for their 20,000 workers in Myanmar:

actionnetwork.org/petitions/beyo…

🌍 Friends of Myanmar, here is an important thing you can do to help the democracy movement:

Sign this petition asking the US to sanction Myanmar's gas and oil industries 👇

actionnetwork.org/petitions/pres… @meemalee @Milktea_Myanmar @MYmilkteh @AutumnThet @badiucao

I'm tired of reading perspectives implying that #Myanmar people don't know what they are risking. It doesn't matter how politically/economically savvy the take:

It's rubbish if it isn't centered on a high regard for the agency, self-determination, and wisdom of Myanmar ppl, especially ethnic minorities.

They know they are fighting a lion--they know this better than we do.

Some reflections on #myanmar op-eds by Myanmar outsiders these days. A thread:

I understand why Myanmar folks, some of whom are in exile, might write op-eds that sound resigned in regard to the viability of the #myanmar protest movement. They have their reasons. But I really wish non-Myanmar outsiders would stop writing this sort of stuff. Pieces that say “protest movements alone never succeed” sound neo-colonial, for one thing.

But for another, these pieces are players in the movement in a real way, and in a detrimental way.

Easy steps to performing your first healing:

1) go to a place where you don't speak the language.
2) make sure that the only people who come to you for healing have an invisible disability.
3) make sure you have a translator who has prepped the community for your visit.

https://twitter.com/wartwatch/status/1227976067249573889

Here's the thing: trying to confirm something like this is rather complicated.
And if it were confirmed and subsequently broadcasted as true, it would only serves to encourage more people to do phony faith healing activities.

So, Francis Chan is planning to move to Hong Kong in order to carry out ministry in Myanmar, and he introduced these plans by saying, “There’s no one fishing over there.”

That’s a very white person thing to say.

crazylove.org/updates Years ago, my husband was talking to a friend about western church leaders and their habits of going to places where they don’t know people, working through translators, conducting serial baptisms, and marketing their “grand work” back to the West.