Stand and Deliver!

Having jumped on the bandwagon the night the Kony 2012 video went viral, I somehow had the good sense to back-pedal pretty quickly, amending my original post with the 'arguments against' that sprang up almost immediately.

It didn't take long for all the negative aspects of Invisible Children to be brought forward, but about a week and a half later, Charlie Brooker's excellent explanation of the Kony 2012 clip also started to go viral:

And then, according to rt.com, the guy behind the Kony 2012 campaign - Jason Russell - was arrested for lewd behaviour and vandalising vehicles after getting all tired and emotional.

So far we don't know how the cute 5-year-old toddler in the Kony 2012 clip feels about that - perhaps, eventually, that he was invisible - but for now, maybe it's time to stop the Kony 2012 Phenomenon as well as Kony.

There's a bastard in Africa called Joseph Kony, one of the world's 'ten most wanted', who leads the Lord's Resistance Army.

Of course he's a religious crackpot, seeking to establish a government based on the Ten Commandments. But to help do so, he's abducted some 60,000-odd children over the last 30 years that he has turned into sex slaves and murderers. (Yeah, for Commandment 6, 'Thou Shall Not Kill', read, 'Thou Shall Not Kill When I've Got These Boy Kids To Do It'; and for Commandment 7, 'Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery', there's the addendum 'But Childery's Fine, That's Why I Also Abducted These Girl Kids'.) Kony's been at it for years. Kony 2012 is the campaign to rid the world of him once and for all. This is the year.

There's a short film about it doing the rounds:

As one of my favourite political comics, Scott Abbot, suggested: "Bob Carr, this is your first mission as Foreign Minister…". Heck, it's the one that'll get him UN Secretary General, if not PM. If he handles it the right way and gets to the bottom of it.

If you feel you should do more, you can donate and buy stuff but don't do so blindly: be informed.

Even efore you attach this clip to all your social media stuff, be informed: a lot of the groundswell that has sprung up literally overnight targets Uganda as the centre of Kony's operations; he hasn't been there for some 6 years, and there is a peace process underway there. Furthermore, the LRA much smaller than it once was.

So this campaign, seeking to send US 'Military Advisers' into Africa, has the right inentions. But I can think of past conflicts in other parts of the world to which the United States provided soldiers 'Military Advisers'. Heaps of them. It didn't end so good, for those parts of the world, the locals, or a heap of the soldiers 'Military Advisers' (Psst: it was in Vietnam.) It's worth having a bit more information when contributing to viral memes, is all I'm saying. Cos there's always another side to the story, as the 'Visible Children' Tumblr points out.

I'll get back to the entertainment stories and interviews shortly.