A Meaningful Life

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) announced their 2010 expected delivery machine. With a price tag of $75 there will soon be no reason for the 1st world not to be able to get PC’s in the hands of every 3rd world child.

Photo thanks to OLPC on Flickr.com

We often take the press and activist organisations for granted on issues. This is a very good thing because it helps them with their causes which 95% of the time are spot on.

I mentioned in my previous post I thought the David Hicks issue was a failure point for Amnesty so I thought I should clarify further in this post. David Hicks has it quite good really for someone in his situation, he’s only paid away 5 years of his life for someone willing to kill Australian, UK or US soldiers.

I would have much preferred to spend my donation dollars on freeing a pacifist Tibetan monk in a Chinese prison.

The press only cared about conditions in Guantanamo because of growing public focus on the HR violation issues created by HR organizations (including Amnesty). The press were interested in David because he was an Australian fighting Australians not because of how he was treated in prison. That’s the reality, the press don’t right a story unless there is one there to be written.

HR organisations have made Guantanamo into a huge issue now to the point where we are spending plenty of government dollars on top of the aid dollars. Not to forget using international relation favours to speed things up. Crickey we should have kept those favours for a better day when we really needed them.

On a triage scale where you have ‘x’ dollars and you are trying to save ‘y’ lives then Guantanamo is near the bottom of the pile. Assume there is 20 truly innocent people out of 400 in the prison. These people happened to be caught up in the mess or they hung out with some bad guys or happened to know some.

I’d argue that all the good intentions to (a) free David and (b) bad cop the Guantanamo Prison leaves countries like China saying “See the Americans have a prison like ours so we can keep our prison”. Who did this? The HR organisations creating public following via the press and blogs did it. You can’t argue its the press, do you ever see stories about Chinese prisons with such frequency and rigor?

Again, I’ll be clear that I applaud the good intent of Amnesty on these issues but I feel there was a failure to recognize the impact of doing this. I agree that any torture or execution needs to stop but again I go back to triage. Whats the relative comparison to torture and execution in Chinese prisons?

Triage is all about saving lives with the most likelihood of success. You need to remove emotion and attachment for effective triage (i.e. David is Australian - so what!!! He’s human like everyone in the Chinese prisons that deserves to be saved) The Chinese prison system probably has 10’s of 1,000’s of innocent people. Effectively, Guantanamo saw HR Organisation focus set resources onto 20 people instead of those 1,000’s - poor triage management.

Now there is a new problem that has been created out of this stance by HR organisations. We now have to get rid of Guantanamo to get the “influence power” back with China to do the same. However, this poses a problem - Americans will have military prisons for a long time to come. Guantanamo was just a “military prison” now it’s an excuse for others to have one like it, we all agree. So I don’t think it was a good decision to fight the battle for David, raise public awareness, highlight the bad points of Guantanamo etc at the expense of many more in Chinese prisoners that need freeing. I just hope there may be some internal insight into what Amnesty has actually been creating and backing in this situation.

I was amazed to hear on Triple-J an Amnesty representative suggesting Catholics donating to Amnesty put them in a conflict over abortion. That is, Amnesty has moved further toward right-to-choose away from right-to-life. This is my first conflict as I am definitely right-to-life, humans shouldn’t play god, plain and simple that is not a human right we are born with.

I’m not a Catholic but this shift was the final straw for me. After their concentrated effort for David Hicks I feel like Amnesty’s ability to operate in triage mode is all but lost so I’m diverting funds into other causes now instead. Triage would have you look at David Hicks and ruthlessly say well that isn’t a cause worth supporting.

Further you could be mathematical about it and say that there is a high probability that he’s guilty and thus leave Amnesty resources for causes that have much higher probability of being good causes to save 100% innocent people. It’s not that I don’t believe strongly enough in the right to a quick fair trial for everyone (including David Hicks) it’s just that I strongly believe in triage. A huge amount of resource cost seems to have gone into this one matter by my anecdotal evidence. Harder evidence is available.

Amnesty has 193 pages of info on David and his case in the Australian website as an example. Triage would have you use that resource differently, on a larger number of people in need. I think Amnesty has done some great work over the years and I hope they change their minds on this matter so I can start my direct debit again.

One of their best campaigns was Message in The Bottle by Digital Eskimo.

You could argue Amnesty needs the media profile that the David Hicks case brings to their organisation to help them get donations which then allows them to be a pillar and do good things but I think that is a bit of a sellout on the donators (like me) who give to Amnesty because in the past they were there for the low profile people in desperate need.