KONY 2012: Yes, social media can raise awareness, but does "clicktivism" do more harm than good?

Adrift in a world of YouTube clips of cute kittens and the latest lulz-inducing memes, The Golden Latrine knows a thing or two about sharing links. But now advocacy groups are trying to reconfigure the act of cut-and-pasting a link into something altogether more profound - political activism.

So-called clicktivism is on the rise - although the ease with which the coalition government swatted aside the Drop The Health Bill e-petition shows its limitations. In short: it's easier to ignore Facebook clicks or e-petitions than a protester with a placard outside your constituency office.

The latest and perhaps most noteworthy clicktivist effort yet is KONY 2012, a film made by the Ugandan charity Invisible Children, which has gone viral globally thanks to an astonishingly effective social media campaign. The film asks viewers to help make Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony "famous" in order to bring him to justice at the International Criminal Court (ICC), who put out a warrant for his arrest in 2005.

Now, let's be clear, a 30-minute movie is never going to be able to capture all the complexity of the situation on the ground - and major simplification is probably required to engage the average internet user with an attention span shot to pieces by high-velocity browsing. But while it's slickly-produced and designed to tug at the heartstrings, KONY 2012 left me feeling distinctly queasy.

Forget the portentous opening voiceover about the power of the Facebook generation or the scenes of Invisible Children's Jason Russell "explaining" the conflict to his son, what really troubled me was watching Russell evangelically telling a lecture theatre of students: "Who are you to end a war? I'm here to tell you who are you not to".

In an ideal world, Invisible Children's millions-stong new army of latte-drinking clicktivists could swoop in to arrest the war criminal and liberate the child soldiers. Except Joseph Kony has not been in Uganda for 6 years and, as Joshua Keating put it in Foreign Policy:

the LRA now numbers at most in the hundreds, and while it is still causing immense suffering, it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality.

There are already 100 US Special Forces on the ground advising Ugandan government forces, who have themselves been accused of serious human rights abuses.

With US military forces already enagegd, what, then, are the filmmakers hoping to achieve? KONY 2012 makes the case that without continued public backing, "international support could be removed at any time," which seems a bit of an airy claim to warrant such a lavish advocacy campaign. And why impose an arbitrary deadline (the end of 2012) for rounding up Kony?

The message of KONY 2012 is simple: military intervention is a necessary and good thing. This is, to put it mildly, extremely contentious. Previous attempts by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to get rid of Kony have provoked a brutal backlash from Kony's followers, as this piece in Foreign Affairs last November makes clear:

Operation Lighting Thunder, and other such missions to fight the LRA in the Central African Republic and in southern Sudan, served mostly to kill efforts to keep beleaguered peace talks going. And, far from neutralizing the LRA, they prompted a strategically effective and ferocious response. In January and February 2009, the LRA abducted around 700 people, including an estimated 500 children, and killed almost 1,000

While there's no doubting the good intentions of Invisible Children, KONY 2012 shows a definite refusal to acknowledge the Law of Unintended Consequences. I couldn't help but recall Live Aid: the same infectious feelgood factor, the celebrity advocates (Bono, Rihanna, Jay Z, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg) and political heavyweights (Bill Clinton, Condi Rice, George W. Bush), the same naive belief that action automatically equals a positive outcome.

Live Aid gives the lie to this belief. For all the cosy TV retrospectives reflecting on Saint Bob and how good Queen were, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) estimated that up to 100,000 people may have died inadvertantly as a result of resettlement programme made possible by the aid effort. Yes, Live Aid saved lives, but it cost lives too. As David Rieff put it, writing in The Guardian in 2005:

Isn't it better to do something rather than give in to cynicism and do nothing? This is the question familiar to anyone who has criticised organisations that view themselves as dedicated to doing good in the world. To those UN agencies, relief organisations and development groups working in crisis zones from Afghanistan to Aceh, any "non-constructive" criticism, especially the kind that implies that it might have been better to refrain from acting at all, is so much nihilist piffle.

Edmund Burke's dictum that for evil to triumph, all that is required is "for good men to do nothing" (a favourite quotation of Kofi Annan's) encapsulates this view. Yet an alternative case can be made: in the global altruism business, it is, indeed, sometimes better not to do anything at all

That doesn't mean we should lapse into cynicism though. Invisible Children's undoubtedly do a lot of good work in central Africa, but their enthusiasm for military action might, sadly, undermine all that. Military interventions, after all, tend to esculate. As Joshua Keating wrote:

One of the biggest issues with a simplistic "Stop Kony" message is that discussions of Navy Seals or drone strikes are inevitable when patience runs out with Ugandan-led efforts . But what about the dozens or hundreds of abducted and brainwashed kids? Should we bomb everyone? Will they actually stop fighting after Kony is gone? What if they shoot back?

Before any wannabe clicktivists rush out to buy a wristband or a KONY 2012 'Action Kit', they might want to have a think about that.


Note: For those that want to analyse the film further, there's an extremely amusing deconstruction of the KONY 2012 at Wronging Rights entitled The Definitive ‘Kony 2012′ Drinking Game.

Partying with the English Defence League - a disturbing glimpse into the mind of the EDL rank-and-file

"I'm not racist but..." Can there be another phrase in the English language more likely to make anxious liberal buttocks clench in queasy anticipation? Sometimes The Golden Latrine pines for those Alf Garnett days when racists were at least upfront about their prejudice.

Current doyens of the "I'm not racist but" line are the English Defence League (EDL), who insist they are charming, warm-hearted folk who like flowers and kittens and just happen to be against the creeping "Islamisation" of Britain. Definitely not racist.

The far-right group are planning a national demonstration at the end of the month in Hyde, an economically-depressed market town most famous as the home of mass-murderer Dr. Shipman's surgery (although oddly the local council haven't used that on the town's website).

As is standard procedure with the EDL, they have attached themselves to a local cause, in this case the attack of a 17-year-old white teenager and his friend by a gang of asian youths in Hyde town centre (you can read the Manchester Evening New's report of the attack here).

The Facebook group for the march quickly began to scour the area for similiar cases and muse about how the police would ignore the racial element of the attack (in actuality, the police treated it as a 'hate crime' and charged the alleged perpetrator with a section 18 assault). Perhaps more troubling was the persistent need of one poster to capitalise the first letter of every word ("I'm Unsure, But The Divisions We Are In Will Not Stand By And Watch This Happening In The Streets That He Lives In, Another Reported Case Tonight!"), presumably to ratchet up the drama and make everything he said sound like a headline. Or maybe he's just not that bright.

But endlessly rehashing the EDL's shortcomings is boring, and instead I'd like instead to offer a disturbing glimpse into the mind of the rank-and-file by means of a personal anecdote.

The Golden Latrine casts his mind back to Halloween a couple of years ago. That day there happened to have been a large-scale demonstration by the EDL in Leeds city centre, matched by a counter-demonstration by Unite Against Fascism.

The plan was to nip downstairs to our neighbours' party for a drink or two, before heading to our friend's place. Now, at the neighbours' party there was an EDL member and a Unite Against Fascism member in attendance. Let's call the EDL member Dean (if there are any liberal-minded Deans reading, I do apologise, it just seems like a good solid racist name) and the UAF member Tarquin.

The meeting with Dean did not start auspiciously. After sampling my limp-wristed greeting, his first words to me were: "That's a poofter's handshake". Never one to shirk a challenge, I decided to give him the eyes. Since it was Halloween, I had white facepaint on, with kohl eyes and ruby red lips. I tried explaining to Dean that it was Halloween make-up, but it did not compute. Squinting with the effort, metaphorical steam billowing from his ears, his continued response was: "To me, make-up is gay".

Now, I can honestly say that Dean was one of the least intelligent people I've ever met in my life. If most peoples' brains are Pentium processors, his was a plastic Fisher Price toy computer. But talking to him outside, he seemed far more confused than nasty. He'd clearly been well-schooled in the rhetoric of the Islamisation of Britain, although when I asked him to give me an example of this Islamisation, his only suggestion was that a Muslim on his estate had tried to convert him. I pointed out that a Christian had handed me some reading material earlier that day.

But here's the rub. While Dean was woefully undereducated, UAF's Tarquin was, if anything, much more of an idiot. Despite being university educated, his major complaint about the protest that day was how disappointed he was that the police had put the kibosh on any hope of a running street battle between the two groups. Which was a joke, because he was a skinny wisp of student and the fascists would have ripped him to pieces like a strongman with a phonebook.

At this point in the night, things began to go a little awry. My friend, a maths PhD student with a machine-like brain then pointed out, Spock-like, the flaw in Tarquin's logic. If Tarquin wanted to fight fascists, well, there was one right over the other side of the room. You know, the guy he'd just been chatting to and joking with for twenty minutes. His self-righteousness questionned, Tarquin confronted Dean and launched into a giant tirade about how ashamed Winston Churchill would have been of him.

A giant bust-up ensued in which Dean was, if anything, extremely restrained. As we left, Dean shook my hand and explained to me, with a sad frustrated face, that he was "basically just a very violent person". You had to admire his honesty, and we took that as our our cue to stagger off into the night.



EDIT: The family of Daniel Stringer, the assaulted teenager, have made quite clear that they did not invite the EDL to Hyde.

The Golden Latrine would also like to make clear that he is in no way implying that UAF are comparable to the EDL. This piece simply happens to shine a spotlight on the youthful stupidity of one UAF member.

Does it matter if Britain loses its triple-A credit rating? The opinion of the undemocratic ratings agencies is worthless

The Golden Latrine has sympathy for Greece. Although my overdraft doesn't quite yet run to the hundreds of billions, the pain of unpayable debt is something that is all too familiar to most of us.

News percolated through last night that the credit ratings agency Moody's has warned that Britain may have its AAA status downgraded. In laymen's terms, these agencies grade the security of debt i.e. how likely a lender is to be able to pay the money back, AAA being the most secure. Put simply, a downgrade would mean that in theory it was more expensive for the British government to borrow money. Last month France lost its AAA status and eight other Eurozone countries had their status downgraded in this way.

Britain hasn't been downgraded, or even put on "negative watch" (which implies there is a 50% chance of being downgraded within two years), but rather on "negative outlook" which suggests only about a one in three chance of a downgrade in the next year or two.

Nevertheless, this is news that will have the chancellor's heart (if George Osborne has one) aflutter and raise alarm in the City, but the average person will shrug over and carry on with their day. And you know what, the average person would be right.

These are the ratings agencies, after all, that completely failed to spot the 2008 global economic crash and, more amusingly given their pronouncements from on-high about the creditworthiness of the Eurozone economies, the Greek debt crisis. As the brilliant Aditya Chakrabortty pointed out recently, Moody's report on Greece in December 2009, six months before the country had to be bailed out by their Eurozone partners to the tune of $147bn, was entitled "Investor fears over Greek government liquidity misplaced." In other words: everything fine here, nothing to see.

The stark fact is that global finance has reached the stage where it is simply too complex to be properly comprehended. As screenwriter William Goldman said of Hollywood: "Nobody knows anything.”

And don't just take my rabidly liberal, frothing-at-the-mouth word for it. Watch this clip, for example, from Inside Job, Charles Ferguson's outstanding documentary about the economic crash. Asked why they had given a AAA rating to bundles of extremely risky sub-prime mortgage debt, the heads of the credit rating agencies lined up to tell a Congress inquiry that, in the words of Moody's CEO Raymond McDaniel, their ratings "are just opinions."

Nevertheless, these undemocratic purveyors of "opinion" are being invited into the heart of our public life. Only recently the NHS regulator Monitor floated the plan to scrap the current assessment system that rates NHS providers (hospitals, ambulance services etc.) on clinical quality and instead use the rating agencies to grade their "financial strength" - with those achieving a low grade liable to lose their contract to operate in the NHS.

The mind well and truly boggles. Chancellor Osborne's office is somehow trying to spin the Moody's report as a validation of his austerity measures (you can read BBC Economic's Editor Stephanie Flanders excellent editorial here), since the Moody's report suggests that the downgrade might go ahead if the UK eases up on the cuts.

But should the credit rating agencies, who are accountable to no-one and have shown time and again that there predictions are basically just a stab in the dark, have this level of influence over government policy? We complain about EU law violating British sovereignty, but the credit ratings agencies exert a far greater sway over national governments than Brussels.

Maybe there is hope though. Last summer Standard and Poor downgraded the US's triple-A rating, to which the market's response was largely: So what? It's time for governments and policymakers to stop running scared.

McDonalds is creating 2,500 new jobs in the UK. Is sneering at "McJobs" just plain old snobbery?

The Golden Latrine began to suspect that McDonalds did not have the most rigorous hiring policy after a friend listed "self-harm" on an application form under 'interests'. And still got the job.

The global fast food giant announced yesterday that it was creating 2,500 new jobs in the UK, sparking a debate about the worth of such "McJobs" - a term derived from Douglas Coupland's slacker bestseller Generation X, defined by Coupland as: "A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one."

Newspaper columinists and economists wrung their hands over this being the "wrong type of service job" (basic and low-skilled, rather than the creative, hi-tech jobs we're all supposed to crave in our glass-and-steel utopia), but is working in McDonalds really that bad? Is it the modern day equivalent of the blacking factory that Dickens' David Copperfield is sent to work in? Or is the real problem, as McDonalds themselves put it, "the prejudice that still exists around service sector jobs."

I can't help but think it's the latter. Charlie Brooker wrote a brilliant blog last year about working in a shop (you can read it here). He concluded:

What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn't the occasional snooty customer, or the shop, or the hours, but they way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant – their automatic assumption that I didn't enjoy it. I didn't particularly enjoy my life at the time, but I did enjoy the job. Not every day, not constantly – but I liked it more than I disliked it.

This rang true for me. I worked in a call-centre and for the most part, angry clients and asinine corporate motivational videos aside, quite enjoyed it. Nevertheless I used to occasionally find myself on the receiving end of similarly nuclear levels of condescension - mostly from well-meaning types who felt I should be doing something more commensurate with my genius.

More annoying were the ethical objectors. I recall a trainee paramedic telling me, in complete seriousness, with pitying eyes: "I really admire what you do. I personally have to do a job that means something." To which the only appropriate retort is: try paying your rent in principles when your landlord comes a-knocking.

I worked in a call-centre to raise the money to do my journalism qualifications, so there was always an end-goal in sight. But reading the Guardian's reader debate on McJobs, most of the comments from past employees were reasonably positive. People said the job taught them discipline and in many cases, if it wasn't a glamorous life, well that was an incentive to work hard and do well.

And let's be honest, there are worse things to do for a living than fry chips and serve burgers. As one poster put it:

I worked at Burger King's for a while when a student. I definitely saw it as a step up from my job before uni (working at a kennels). Anyone who thinks fast food provides s**tty jobs should try one where the real thing is provided in large quantities.

What was most shocking was the level of vitriol directed at fast food workers. Several even reported being physically attacked by customers. In part that's likely to be because fast food places tend to stay open late to cater for the lairy throwing-out time crowd. But it's also because there is a general air of contempt that hangs around these jobs, which is fostered by the non-lairy professional class too.

A number of posters on The Guardian's discussion seemed to think that the correct response to "Would you like fries with that?" was "If I wanted fries, I'd have asked for them." Which is to miss the point that the server doesn't actually care if you have fries, they just have a script they have to stick to, and they get in trouble if they deviate from it. Personally I would have stabbed them in the eye with my till fob, no second thoughts.

McDonalds certainly has a diverse racial profile (mainly because a lot of Brits consider such service industry jobs beneath them) and the general consensus was that they promote from the shop floor. So next time you're wrecked and mouthing off in McDonalds/KFC/Greggs, spare a thought for the person behind the counter. This probably isn't their dream job, but it's a job, and right now that's better than nothing.

Have you worked in a McJob? The Golden Latrine invites you to share your experiences of unruly customers/psychopathic managers/terrible corporate videos below.

David Cameron is downright delusional if he still thinks unemployment will fall over this parliament

The Golden Latrine dimly remembers July 2010, one month after the Coalition's election - a time when he was still hiding under the duvet, fingers firmly plugged in his ears, la-la-laing and praying it was all just a feverish dream.

Back then our freshly-minted PM latched on to figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) to confidently predict during Prime Minister's Questions: "Unemployment is going to be falling during this Parliament". Let me just repeat that: Unemployment is going to be falling during this Parliament.

While it was transparently obvious that the deficit reduction plan was going to wipe out large swathes of public sector jobs, Cameron was insistent that the growth in the private sector would more than makes up it.

In fact, as recently as June 2011, Cameron's friends at the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies were claiming that public sector job losses would be offset by a ratio of 3:1 in the year from March 2011.

Those claims now look openly delusional, to put it mildly. Over the last year, new private sector jobs have (just) offset public sector job losses, but I don't imagine that momentum is likely to be maintained.

Cameron, meanwhile, is still claiming that there have been over 500,000 new private sector jobs created since he was elected, a claim which some minimal digging from Channel 4's FactCheck proved to be just plain untrue.

New statistics released on January 18 by the Office for National Statistics show unemploymemt at 2.68m (8.3%), the highest since 1995. David Cameron responded at PMQs by taking "responsibility" for the figures, rather than the blame - a stance nicely lampooned by the Guardian's parliamentary sketch writer Simon Hoggart:

[Cameron said] "The government takes absolute responsibility for everything that happens in our economy, and I take responsibility for that." But not the blame. It might be the government's responsibility, but it isn't their fault.

Except clearly it is. The idea that the private sector could take the slack for the wholesale vandalism of the state (and by extension, public sector jobs) has been shown to be fundamentally flawed. In the three months to November, employment in the private sector rose by 5,000, while employment in the public sector fell by 67,000.

There was also a large increase in part-time work, a classic sign, as Larry Elliott has pointed out, of weak demand in the labour market.

And why does all of this matter, you ask? Because unemployment is the spanner in the economy, creating a vicious circle. When unemployment is high, people have less money to spend: benefits don't stretch far, and companies can get away with offering pitiful wage increases to those clinging to a job, knowing employees will be take whatever they're offered. But that lack of spending hits the economy, which means new jobs aren't created. It's a cruel algebra, and one that looks set to be troubling the UK for some time to come.

Journalists take shelter, Wikipedia is offline

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. The Golden Latrine has taken to his Anderson shelter and advises you all to do the same, for today the apocalypse has hit. Yes, that's right, Wikipedia is down for the day.

This seemingly minor inconvenience will hit the journalistic profession with the force of a meteor strike. Forget all the other issues bedevilling the profession - the Murdochs, phone-hacking, the loss of advertising revenues, dishonest journalists - this is, as political types like to say, a game changer.

Newsrooms across the globe will come to a standstill. Puzzled journalists are, right now, sitting and scratch their heads, starring bereftly at their half-eaten sandwiches, wondering where the hell they are going to find out the GDP of Gambia, that actress's credits or an explanation of a basic scientific concept. It's almost as if they're going to have to start doing genuine research.

But there is a serious point behind Wikipedia's temporary snooze. Their 24-hour blackout has been decided upon by their community to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. Anyone trying to log on will be confronted with this:


There is a reasonably clear explanation of the two bills here on the BBC website. Essentially they are entertainment industry-backed bills designed to crack down on music and film piracy and illegal downloading. And the punishments they are looking to impose are suitable draconian: anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months may face up to five years in jail.

The recent case of Sheffield-based Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old student threatened with extradition to the U.S. for running TV Shack, a site linking to pirated TV shows, proves that simply not being a U.S. citizen isn't going to save you. Those free South Park episodes may soon be a thing of the past.

The two bills also ban advertisers/search engines from linking to file-sharing sites, effectively rendering them invisible. So why are Wikipedia (and other internet giants like Google, Yahoo! and Facebook) so strongly against these bills? Well, you can read Wikipedia's full statement here, but it boils down to the fact that the wording of the bills is so open-ended that if passed it would be, in their words, "devastating to the free and open web". The battle for the internet has well and truly begun.

Is Wikipedia accurate?

When Wikipedia announced the blackout, there was a lot of snarky online comments along the lines of "Quick, we'd better stockpile inaccurate information". Amusing, yes, but research has continually shown that the myth of Wikipedia's inaccuracy is just that, a myth. A 2010 study showed that cancer information on Wikipedia was just as accurate (if less well-written) than on the National Cancer Institute’s peer-reviwed Physician Data Query.

EDIT: For anyone still puzzled, I've just found this nice little animation on the Guardian website which clearly explains SOPA.

How close was Margaret Thatcher to turning Liverpool into a ghost city?

The Golden Latrine once went to Liverpool and found it a charming, cultured city, far removed from media reports painting it as a concrete hellhole full of curly-haired Scousers shouting "calm down, calm down" in comedy accents.

However, as The Guardian reported, new cabinet papers released yesterday by the National Archive show that following the Toxteth riots in 1981, a number of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet were less keen, with a number of them apparently urging a gradual evacuation of the city.

The "concentration of hopelessness" on Merseyside, and perhaps more pertinently the city's record of industrial strife, was enough for the likes of Sir Keith Joseph and then Chancellor Geoffrey Howe to ask if money spent on the city was simply money wasted. To quote Howe:

Isn't this pumping water uphill? Should we go rather for 'managed decline'? This is not a term for use, even privately. It is much too negative, when it must imply a sustained effort to absorb Liverpool manpower elsewhere – for example in nearby towns of which some are developing quite promisingly.

Quite. After all, if the people of Liverpool don't have the decency to vote Tory, or serenely acquiesce to socially-destructive Conservative policy, why should the government do anything to actively help them?

While there's no evidence that Howe's words were ever likely to become official government policy, it still represents an alarming snapshot into the mind of Thatcher's cabinet. In the end Michael Heseltine was left to argue the case for Liverpool's regeneration - asking for £100m-a-year, he instead got pocket change, and even that came with the express proviso that there be no publicity attached. If Liverpool's plight was self-inflicted, the Tory thinking went, why should they be rewarded?

Which is probably why Tory politicians are about as popular in Liverpool as The Sun. More recently Boris Johnson was made to go and grovel after his 2004 Spectator editorial which claimed that the people of Liverpool "cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance about the rest of society".

While the mass majority of the present Coalition cabinet give the impression of only ever having seen a council estate on Shameless, the likes of Work and Pensions Secretary Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith do at least seem prepared to engage with the reality of what life is like in Britain's most impoverished areas.

I was present at a fringe event at this year's Conservative Party Conference, where Duncan Smith blamed successive governments for “ghettoising” large parts of Britain, a situation which he felt played a significant role in the 2011 riots.

Acknowledging that government policy (rather than merely the inherent fecklessness of a city's inhabitants) might have played a role is a step in the right direction. But for all Duncan Smith's good intentions, the fact is that the cuts are hitting Britain's inner cities hard. The Tories may have given up on the idea of evacuating Liverpool's inner city. Check out, for example this and this.