So anyway, I’ve been following the news stories about the murder of Meredith Kercher for the past few weeks, I suppose because it’s quite the mystery, what the hell did happen, what was the motive, what really happened.
Anyway, one interesting aspect of this story is that one of the three suspects, Amanda Knox, is a white American girl from Seattle, who’s so far lead an exemplary life; a good student, well-behaved, etc, etc.
What thought process made her decide to take away someone else’s life is the question I ponder.
Because of her image of innocence, there’s a lot of people that has been defending her. Her parents and friends, of course (that’s just a default mode to take isn’t it?). A “news” reportage interviewed them recently and they testified to her good nature, kindness, how warm her hugs were, and so on and so forth.
Of course the TV channel probably filtered the message, and people who could testify to her evil side (if there were any witnesses) weren’t even asked for an interview.
I remember watching a TV ad where the actor says “I am really healthy! Well except for that bit of back-ache. And the bit of … [some other things]“.
“Wow, that’s true!”, I thought. I’ve always thought that I am a healthy person, since I rarely get sick. But in reality I sit in front of the computer all day, rarely exercise, and sometimes when I go to lie down in bed at night (or, in the morning) that I notice, ouch, my back hurts. But through the power of delusion I ignore and forget the little things and think, “Oh, I am fine.”
I am sure Ms. Knox has had a temper tantrum once in her life, or has done something wrong that upset her friends and family. Of course those sort of things don’t look good when you’re being asked to describe the character of your murder-suspect friend/daughter, so you don’t mention them.
In the same note, you can always find somebody to say “Yeah he was always a bit strange” when asked about a criminal who’s been caught of some non-petty crime.
So you lie about the bad things to other people, or if you are a GWB-”conservative” American, you lie about them to yourself.
Ms. Knox not only has her friends and family who defend her, she has plenty of fellow Seattleite and Americans doing so. And for some reasons this has turned into a US vs EU cultural war.
Now I live in the EU, so I guess you can call me biased for the EU. And some Americans have displayed so much ignorance, stupidity and arrogance lately (best represented by the monkey that they even chose to be their president) that I don’t expect much difference from them.
For one thing there’s probably a thought unwritten in blog articles and comments that the Italian justice system is useless, perhaps filled with idiots and people not knowing what they are doing. I think in the minds of their authors there’s a representation of USA’s superiority in criminal forensics in the form of CSI episodes.
I admit, at first I also thought “I hope those Italians do the investigation correctly.”, as if they are a bunch of incompetents. But the truth is, I don’t know how well, or how bad their expertise in the field is. But it is wrong to dismiss them as inferior based on the evidence of “Well, they’re Italians, not Americans.”.
Because I am really annoyed at USA at the moment, who says they always knows best in what they are doing anyway? Look at FEMA, to name one example.
And because the USA has been greatly humiliated through their major fuck-ups in the past 7 or so years (Long shall the GWB presidency live in the history of the world), I feel the proud Americans are even more eager to show that they are still superior to the world.
The aforementioned cultural war is perhaps a bit one-sided though, with Americans fuming about how their girl is being portrayed in the British and Italian media (well, I guess it’s not exactly the whole EU in this war), while the British media (well, I can’t read Italian) so far has been “la-la-la”-ing and going about its business.
Some of the American “news” articles are accusing that the Brits are portraying Ms. Knox as a sex-crazed drug-addict party girl. Too bad the Brits that are doing can not be exactly said to represent their media though, the Daily Mail being a tabloid that shock and sensationalize stories to wow their readers.
One defender of Ms. Knox is Candace Dempsey, an Italian-American writer based in Seattle. What does she write about? Food. She also has a blog hosted on the site of the newspaper Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Perhaps that is why her articles show up in Google News, and through GNews is how I found her blog.
Her blog is presumably about food, being called “Italian Woman at the Table”. But lately she has also been writing about the case of Meredith Kercher. This has gathered the attention of a lot of the followers of the case, both defenders and accusers of Ms. Knox, who’s been leaving her with abundant comments, some praising her voice, some accusing her of being blind to the facts.
I suppose Ms. Dempsey is new to the blogosphere (TM!), that she’s only discovered what “trolling” is after a blog post she wrote about the case, having to look it up in Wikipedia and feeling the need to explain to her readers what it is, inventing the terms “trollarazzi” and “trollerazzi”. She had been “trolled” by commenters being rude in reply to a blog post.
In her blog, she’s been defending the innocence of Ms. Knox in the murder. Or to be more accurate, the chance that Ms. Knox may be innocent, based upon her good character and the to her sheer improbability of such a sweet, innocent, girl to be a murderer.
Her outlandish theories of how Ms. Knox can be innocent are amusing. For example, she believes it is the prosecutor’s job to explain, why, if the cause of the murder was Ms. Kercher catching Ms. Knox stealing money ouy of her bag to buy drugs off another suspect – Rudy Guede – could Ms. Knox not have gone to the bank instead?
To respond to that: So what? Some people get killed over a parking spot. I don’t think anybody ever asked “Gee, how do you explain that the man chose fatal violence over looking for another parking spot?”.
In her latest blog post, she interviews another author and journalist, this time an author with expertise in crime, Doug Preston.
It angers me though that Mr. Preston was also very biased towards Amanda Knox, saying
Amanda had absolutely nothing to do with the murder. The outpouring of abuse toward her is extremely disturbing. I am convinced she is innocent, and I cannot understand why there has been such a bloodthirsty rush to judgment.
and, “the evidence is overwhelming that she had nothing to do with it. Absolutely not.”.
Of course before the interview a small disclaimer says his comments “speculation, but informed speculation”. But it sure reads like he was very certain of what he was saying…
I was just going to post a small comment in response to the post, asking what their opinion might be about a piece of evidence that goes against Mr. Preston’s absolute certainty that Ms. Knox was no where near the scene of the crime. Unfortunately after scrolling through the comments supporting the 2 authors, I saw that she’s closed commenting for the post, claiming
Readers,
I’m closing down for the night, right on the cusp of a troll invasion! See you in the morning.
it got me a bit annoyed…
Now, she wrote this comment at 1:37 am local Seattle time, which is 10:37 am in Central Europe and 9:37 am in the UK, all times Saturday morning. It smacks me as a bit of censorship, which has the purpose of denying European readers and commenters a fair discussion on the blog post and interview. What is the cusp of troll invasion that she talks about? Does she perhaps mean the European readers, who at 1:37 am Seattle time were just waking up and getting online?
Of course, I can understand not wanting to read and respond to the comments who were about to rip apart her post and its bias, especially not on the eve of a Saturday and a weekend. But I am not the one who’s been blogging trying to convince everyone of the case one way or the other. I find her cutting off the dialog before “the other side” has a chance to respond displays her fear of dialog.
Now, why is it does she fear dialog? I am only speculating, but I feel it is probably because she’s created a whole delusion that Amanda Knox is innocent, and she doesn’t want to face the facts again and again in the comments, which would either cause her to doubt her conviction, if she’s smart, or upset and lead her into more denial, if she’s the kind of person who functions like a GWB-believer.
Kudos to her that she actually read and responded to the hundreds of blog comments people have left.
To return to the original small comment that I wanted to leave that got me to writing this monstrosity, I wanted to ask Mr. Preston, “If you are so certain of Amanda Knox’ innocence, what do you say to the report [assuming it is true] that, when the police found Knox and her boyfriend at the murder scene, they were in the process of washing Meredith’s bloodied clothes in the washing machine?”.
As to Ms. Dempsey, I guess I am to her just another “trollarazzi” attacking her arguments, and by proxy, the sweet and innocent Amanda Knox. Reading the comments on her blog posts, there are already hundreds others like me, posting level headed rebuttals to her biased writing. They don’t seem to have had any effect on what she believes, so I’m not keeping my hopes up.
