My apologies for the unexpected little break. Between the end of the turn and the American Thanksgiving holiday and family being in town things got a little hectic. Expect things to pick up here soon.
Texas in Africa has a great post about the solipsism of some self-professed advocates as World AIDS Day approaches. When Africanists and others criticize what has appropriately come to be called “badvocacy” it tends to lead to an emotion-driven backlash as if the very act of “working” for and advocating a cause or issue makes one bulletproof. Thus celebrities who decide to engage in a pointless campaign in which they will not use Twitter until they raise a million dollars gets, in their mind, shrouded with a halo. Yet they have not earned the halo. They have instead engaged in a self-indulgent little stunt that does not actually require much of them and won’t be of much use to anyone.
This is the functional equivalent of politicians and others hiding behind the troops to justify any damned fool action, or country singers who bleat our bombastic songs about the US Flag and then criticize the patriotism, as opposed to the good taste and sound aesthetic sense, of critics of those songs. They have relied on cynicism to inure themselves from criticism about their own idiocy. I will give them credit for exploiting the sad fact that lots of people are morons, but it does not win them the case on the merits.
