
Wow. 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?
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/SBaPp_8dtJ4/
On Semiconductor Nvidia Nuance Communications Novellus Systems Novell Network Appliance