Category: Weighty Matters

Death Race 2021: Science Fiction Prediction

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Moto GP rider Marco Simoncelli’s father is comforted by an official after his son’s death during the Malaysian Grand Prix. Many news agencies ran a video of the incident as it happened. Image: Reuters.

As a teenager, I always found science-fiction novels to be a touch depressing. Whether we’re talking Orwell’s predictions of strictly controlled information flow or Philip K. Dick’s chilling dystopian landscapes where individuals starved of affection find comfort in technology, the future through these guys’ eyes was never quite the hedonistic bundle of fun I was envisaging adulthood to be.

The rate at which their damn depressing prophecies are coming true hasn’t helped my interest in the genre, either.

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Reflections: Colonel Muammar Gaddafi

Posted on by Kelly Welles

We reserve the right to make judgements on people based on their actions. And not too many of us would dispute that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was a dictator who imposed and presided over a brutal regime, was responsible for thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands living in fear and suffering.

So we’re entitled to feel anger towards him, right?

But our actions are a reflection of us, too. What are we when we watch him being dragged from a drain pipe, beaten and then shot to death? What about when his body is paraded through the streets of Sirte and then put on display in a meat locker so locals can take souvenir photos on their mobile phones and we can look at them over our cornflakes? Should we feel ok about that because he was very bad man?

It would’ve been nice to show the world why Gaddafi was so wrong in his actions. Not mimic them.

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Occupy: Entirely The Wrong Position

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Naomi Wolf is an author, journalist and political activist. In light of this information, the NYPD would probably acknowledge that arresting her for asserting protesters rights on a New York pavement during Occupy Wall Street was probably a mistake.

Image: Mike Shane/Animal New York via thecutline.

Dale Farm: Offended By Eviction Or Expletive?

Posted on by Kelly Welles

It took numerous hearings, several false starts and enough spewing vitriol to bathe the whole of middle England for a month, but police and bailiffs have moved into the travellers site at Dale Farm, Essex, this morning, to evict those who have refused to abide by the court order.

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Error 3200: The World Is Not Responding

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Technology is supposed to remove the human margin of error from life. It’s about certainty, and reliability; two things that we, as humans, have experienced rarely in our evolutionary journey.

It minimises the element of surprise and the necessity for terms like ‘coincidence’ –  which is essentially just a very human way of dealing with a situation that appears darn convenient and impossible to explain.

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Fox Hunting: Such A Civilised Way To Spend A Saturday Morning

Posted on by Kelly Welles

The Hunting Act became law in February 2005. It made hunting with dogs illegal in England and Wales. As far as I am aware, despite vociferous campaigning by the Countryside Alliance, it has not been repealed.

Which made my alarm call this morning – howling beagles, gruff shouting and backfiring quad bikes skidding around the field next to my house – even more surprising. How could this be?

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Amanda Knox: The Point. Has Anyone Seen It?

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Do you know who these people are? Most of the media don’t appear to. Image: AP Photo.

UPDATE: Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have been cleared of the murder of Meredith Kercher on appeal and freed. The morning after the verdict was given, Channel 5’s morning magazine show ‘The Wright Stuff’, ran a discussion segment prompted by the case called ‘Foxy Knoxy – Would Ya?’. The introduction, by presenter Matthew Wright, went like this.

‘She’s entirely innocent of the murder of Meredith  Kercher and foxy as hell, so what I want to know this morning is: If you met Amanda Knox in a bar  and she invited you back to her room – would ya?’

It’s actually worse than I thought.

ORIGINAL POST: Regardless of whether Amanda Knox’s conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher is overturned on appeal later today, it’s unlikely that anyone apart from Knox, her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede will ever know the truth of what happened that night in Perugia.

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Saudi Arabia: Driving For Change

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Shaima Jastaina has been sentenced to ten lashes after being caught breaking Saudi Arabia’s prohibition on female drivers.

Before launching into our collective repertoire of women driver jokes, (a myth that is perpetuated by women who refuse to believe that the absence of a Y chromosome equates to an inability to parallel park, incidentally), let’s remember that like many others before her in history, Jastaina is part of a movement defying law in the hope of changing it.

While her punishment is quite clearly egregious, brutal and ludicrously innappropriate, I, for one, can only admire what women in these countries are prepared to do to effect change.

It’s more than I think I could manage.

Troy Davis: Whoops. Can We Retract That?

Posted on by Kelly Welles

Despite a conviction for murder based on witness statements that have now been withdrawn, a refusal by officials to allow a lie detector test and a promise by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles that he would not be executed unless there was ‘no doubt’ of his guilt, Troy Davis was put to death last night.

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Dale Farm: Are We Missing The Point Here?

Posted on by Kelly Welles

The issue of the travellers camp at Dale Farm in Essex has been poked, prodded, manipulated and wrung dry of pathos by the media. But as we continue to wade through confusing stories of helpless cancer stricken pensioners being hurled out onto the street and non-resident protester types infiltrating the site in order to wage battle against the authorities, have we lost sight of the point?

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