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March 10, 2012 10:00 pm GMT

Save Helpless Faraway Africans From The Comfort Of Your Armchair!

congo-volcanoWow. I never dreamed that I'd have a legitimate excuse to write a TechCrunch post about Joseph Kony, the crazed Ugandan warlord whose Lord's Resistance Army has been a pet obsession of mine for some years now. The first draft of my thriller set mostly in Uganda and the Congo had a villain loosely based on Kony, but I had to edit him out, basically because he's far too batshit crazy to be even remotely believable. The world is surprisingly full of things so implausible they would never fly in fiction, and the LRA is one of them.Now, stretching credulity even further, a 30-minute-long LRA-awareness video from the quasi-NGO Invisible Children has gone viral around the world. Celebrities and A-listers everywhere are retweeting it. Of course! Because if we just increase worldwide public awareness of the LRA's horrific depredations, why, then......and that's where they lose me. What exactly are Invisible Children hoping to accomplish with this? They claim credit for persuading Obama to send 100 US troops in October to help the Ugandan army find the LRA; but for what it's worth, I happen to know that the US Army was interested in tracking down Kony well before that. (How? Last June, while roaming around East Africa, I went diving in Djibouti with some Special Forces dudes--as you do--and Kony came up in conversation.)Raise your hands: who here seriously thinks the Special Forces will be any more effective because Taylor Swift, Diddy, Rihanna, and Zooey Deschanel are tweeting their moral support?

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/SBaPp_8dtJ4/

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