Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Finnish Red Cross and UNICEF are probably the most popular charities among people I know. I happen to think the first two choices are no good, at least in their Finnish incarnations.

AI and GP suffer from the same fundamental problem: while their broadly stated objectives are commendable, they are run by people who divert the organisations’ money and (more importantly) mind share towards pet issues that are peripheral or even irrelevant to the really important goals.

Amnesty international

AI was originally formed around the idea of international solidarity towards people who are persecuted for their opinions or beliefs. The idea of a common front in support of all oppressed political oppositions, religions, investigative journalists and conscientious objectors regardless of ideology was and is a powerful idea and, in my opinion, extremely worthy of support. Those groups are as badly in need of help and attention today as they have ever been.

Two things are especially important to effectively fight persecution by mobilising public opinion:

1. Having no ideological bias, so that when you report an abuse, people will believe that your statement is not politically motivated
2. Focusing single-mindedly on this core objective, so that people don’t dismiss you as “just another” activist organisation

I think Amnesty has essentially abandoned both of those critical assets. Between 1986 and 2000 it issued more press releases regarding the United States than any other region, with Israel in second place. Finnish Amnesty’s recent campaigns have dealt with eg. domestic violence and Finnish sex crime legislation (it’s too easy on the rapists, they say). It’s one thing to expand Amnesty’s scope from freedom of opinion, speech, association and religion to “human rights” in general, but quite another to get involved in the details of criminal law in one of the safest and most rights-respecting countries in the world. Amnesty has become yet another organisation for people who are vaguely leftist, want to feel good about themselves and don’t like America.

Greenpeace

Greenpeace doesn’t care about nature so much as “naturalness”. Science, engineering, artificiality and human progress are its enemies. While the last two are debatable (I happen to be for them), science and engineering are precisely the ways humans can be of benefit to nature.

Correspondingly among its most famous campaigns have been opposition to

• DDT (a minor environmental problem, extremely important in fighting malaria [edit: turns out that Greenpeace doesn’t mind DDT when used to fight malaria])
• nuclear power (a safe, practical and abundant energy source)
• genetic engineering (I can only attribute this to latent Gaianism)

I hasten to say that they have had many excellent campaigns as well, and have done more to raise awareness about environmental problems than any other organisation. Still, I wish they were overtaken by a more scientifically minded and realistic organisation – in any case, they’re far too flaky and unpredictable to get my money at the moment.

Richard Feynman on attending an ethics conference:

“I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell
it means.”

So I stopped — at random — and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could
translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes
people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written
in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I
finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.”