The Vainglory of the Self-Appointed Humanists

From the same school of thought that’s tried to “Free Tibet” with little stickers, advocating regime change in China, and notably NOT in Iraq: Amnesty International, an organization loved by many a naïve college student which has never once freed anyone thinks that “there’s an app for that”.

Is Amnesty being serious? Someone who wanted to mock the weird combination of laziness and narcissism that seems to motor many Amnesty campaigns could have made the exact same ad, as a way of saying: "Amnesty is so out of touch it seriously thinks you can change the world with an iPhone." Such clicktivism, where morally upstanding Westerners are invited to free downtrodden Third Worlders in the spare three seconds they get between tweeting about their new trainers and saying "LOL!!!" on Facebook, makes the old Amnesty modus operandi of writing and posting tear-drenched letters to evil foreign dictators seem like hard labour in comparison.

What Brendan O’Niell is describing is persistent the hobgoglin of the small mind – and it thinks a rubber wristband or a “Free Tibet” sticker will actually “Free Tibet.”