Skeptic Project

As of yet I don't have plans to make a blog on it. I've been traveling for most of the last few days, and these are the days on which the Kony story has been most prominent. Though I'm not totally unfamiliar with it, I haven't really investigated it in-depth. My gut impression is that it's a hoax trumped up by a fake charity for one reason or another, and that seems to be supported by what evidence I'm aware of--but again, I haven't done much investigation.

Africa is a hell hole full of brutal warlords, thugs, bullies, mercs, scammers, terrorists and drug dealers. To single out one, especially one who (from what I understand) isn't even in power anymore, seems to be simply taking advantage of Westerners' woeful ignorance of what's really happening in Africa. The problem with this sort of thing is that it becomes an exercise in line-drawing and lifeboat logic. If Dictator X is killing 40,000 people, yes, of course that's bad, but if Dictator Y right next door is killing 70,000, and the only difference between them is that Dictator X made it into Twitter and nobody's ever heard of Dictator Y, the case for intervention (whether military, humanitarian, or economic) in one case versus another becomes difficult to make. It's all arbitrary. For example, did you know that the bloodiest war on Earth since 1945 was fought in Africa between 1997 and 2003? This war involved a dozen or so nations and killed millions, yet it's so low-key it doesn't even have a name that historians or the general public can agree on. No one's ever heard of it. Yet everyone has heard of Darfur. Africa is like this. On the one hand, it's easy to denounce the Kony thing as fraudulent or misleading; on the other hand, you can't really blame whoever's behind it from trying to draw attention to some pretty horrible shit by anybody's definition.