Saturday, November 15, 2014

Morality a case of all thumbs and no legs

Morality a case of all thumbs and no legs 

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/morality-a-case-of-all-thumbs-and-no-legs/story-fni0ffxg-1227121056625?nk=d5fe8b6ad69230fbb6aa1d9b91dab054

Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist network leader Abubakar Shekau speaks to the camera. Pictu
Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist network leader Abubakar Shekau speaks to the camera. Picture: AP
WHAT a surprise to see Abubakar Shekau bob up to boast about the hundreds of girls he’d stolen and had raped. 

I mean, hadn’t he read his tweets? Didn’t he know he’d been de-friended?

Sheesh, what else does it take to make some people realise they’ve been bad and must stop?

In this case the leader of Nigeria’s Boko Haram was given the full treatment by millions of slacktivists, including even actor Angelina Jolie and Michelle Obama, wife of the US President.
Shekau had already tested their indulgence by bombing, shooting and beheading thousands of Christians, but in June he crossed the line by kidnapping nearly 300 schoolgirls, forcing them to convert to Islam before giving them to his soldiers.

BLOG WITH ANDREW BOLT

This time the moralists on social media could not be restrained. Millions twiddled thumbs furiously to tweet on the hashtag BringBackOurGirls. Another 235,000 clicked “like” on the BringBackOurGirls Facebook site.

Many — including some of our own politicians — also posted pictures of themselves holding BringBackOurGirls signs, because what’s the point of a moral protest if people can’t see you?
It’s about seeming, right? Not about actually ensuring good be done. In fact, the Greens demanded that all this talk about bringing back the girls had better not result in us doing something practical like sending soldiers to back those tweets with bullets. Just seem. Don’t do.

This is a priority of a generation that believes global warming is fought by turning off the lights for just one Earth Hour a year; that making poverty history is done by dancing at a free concert, and that Aboriginal dysfunction is fixed by changing the Constitution to say Aborigines were here first. This is the age of no-sweat moralising. Forget that old-style slogging of a Catherine Hamlin, building a fistula hospital in the wilds of Ethiopia, far out of TV camera range.

Haven’t you noticed that the Greens — apostles of the new morality — don’t build hospitals, schools or nursing homes?

And so the twitter campaign achieved exactly what you’d expect. Millions of people got good feelings and Shekau got left alone.

In fact, Shekau is now missing the attention, so released a video a fortnight ago to remind us he was still there — and so were the girls.

“If you knew the state your daughters are in today, it might lead some of you ... to die from grief,” he snickered. “The issue of the girls is long forgot because I have long ago married them off.”

Actually, the girls are long forgot because the attention span of the Twitter crowd is about as long as it takes to type 140 characters.

Just ask Joseph Kony.

Two years ago, Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, was the world’s most hated man after the Invisible Children charity made a film of him rampaging through Uganda, raping, murdering and stealing thousands of children.

It was a YouTube sensation, scoring 100 million views and 1.4 million likes. As usual, watch-me celebrities signed up — Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna — and viewers were urged to buy a Kony 2012 action kit and hit the GetKony or Kony2012 hashtags.

The campaign was a huge financial success, raking in $20 million for the charity from social media users only too glad to seem so good for such little effort. But Kony? Oh, he’s still out there in the jungle.

Turns out he wasn’t even in Uganda, wasn’t that big and wasn’t the priority for people truly trying to help Africa.

But did the Kony 2012 carers mind? Hell, no. They couldn’t even be bothered getting off the couch.
When Invisible Children held “Cover the Night” rallies to show exactly how much their supporters cared, just 25 turned up in Sydney and a dozen in Melbourne.

That’s Twitter moralists for you, all thumbs and no legs. It seems the warlords have them figured out even if some politicians haven’t.

Ambassador Samantha Power, the US representative to the United Nations and a member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, joined the BringBackOurGirls hashtag thread in May to protest.
“In abducting >200 girls, #BokoHaram is mimicking one of the #LRA’s most monstrous tactics. Must do more to defeat both,” she huffed.

But again, her Government did only the minimum, sending a few dozen advisers while issuing great gusts of windbaggery about forming an “interdisciplinary team” and “pressing for additional multilateral action”.

Result: Shekau remains as free as Kony, and the girls he caught are still slaves.

No wonder he’s boasting. Shekau knows what Kony discovered: that when millions of internet moralists tweet that you’re bad they think their job is done. Just check their noble frowns on their selfies.


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