You are paranoid and it is affecting your judgment. The media is celebrating a kid with an interest in engineering who was put in handcuffs for his efforts. I have Ahmed’s back. That doesn’t mean I think he’s a genius: I don’t.
ETA: Ok, ok, I’ll concede cm’s decent wordsmithing. Heh: invented time.
Not if it is a “meta” hoax bomb, with the intent all along having been to troll the school into taking it away, at which point the plan was to cry foul and insist it was just a clock. That plan would have been DOA if fake explosives were in there (although there was a packet of silica powder that was likely intended as a deniable facsimile of same).
OK, I’ll bite: why is that “likely”?
Do not bite the silica powder.
That’s, like, just my opinion, man.
That plan suggests that Ahmed is actually Lex Luthor in disguise. Or maybe Rube Goldberg.
I can get behind that.
It’s really not all that elaborate when you are dealing with predictable people in a Texas school. It’s just “make something that will freak out these crackers and make them think it looks like a bomb, but which allows you to plead that ‘it’s just a clock’”. That’s it. The entire scam can be described in one straightforward sentence, which hardly takes it into Rube Goldberg or Frank Underwood territory. (The hidden camera scam on Planned Parenthood was far more involved, but it wasn’t just a “only in the movies” deal.)
The kid’s clever, I’ll give him that. but he’s a clever hoaxer not a budding Edison. Still, good luck to him, if only for showing us how dumb politicians and the media are.
So if Oxford scientist and award-winning British intellectual Richard Dawkins came to the same conclusion I did–but only, unlike me, after sharing the mainstream belief about this story for the first day or two–does that make him more of an idiot than I am, or less? Help a cretin out with the math here (or “maths”, as Dawkins might say).
…I’d accuse you of appealing to authority, but Dawkins is not an authority here, just another guy on the internet with an opinion. And you seem to be unaware of how many dumb things Dawkins has said on twitter recently. It really doesn’t surprise me that you share the same opinion with a guy who thinks that “mild paedophilia” exists.
Yet he keeps being named as one of the world’s premier public intellectuals. Not bad company if you ask me.
…in the last few years Dawkins has cultured a reputation of being an absolute dick outside of issues directly related to what his career has been built on, especially in social issues. Do you think you are a dick? Then you are indeed in fine company.
As for being named one of the world’s premier public intellectuals: you googled that right? Found out he was number 19 on some internet list somewhere? Do you consider yourself one of the world’s premier public intellectuals? Disappointed not to make the top 20?
Even the smartest people hold dumb opinions. You can be intelligent yet unwise. Sharing an opinion with someone else on the internet means absolutely bugger all.
I think that the answer to this question is in the eye of the beholder. And a beholder who is beholden to a very PC view of the world will absolutely consider me a dick, and I am fine with that.
PC itself is also in the eye of the beholder, which means any statement like this must needs be qualified, to avoid being lumped in with some extremely odious people. For instance, Donald Trump styles himself as being non-PC, when he is really just outrageously racist and misogynistic. I am anti-PC in the spirit of Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Jonathan Chait. All of whom are progressive in outlook, but look aghast at how a large segment of the modern left has gone mad with political correctness.
Yeah, because social media is all about not waiting for facts or investigations, who needs that crap? Lets rush to judgement and then act on our hurry up judgement, because that always has worked so well for mankind.
Wow, you’re right. Obama should have acted with due deliberation, careful not to rush to judgment or to accuse someone of wrongdoing before he had evidence. Perhaps he could take lessons from a certain principal and police department in Irvine, Texas.
Both of the above “responses” actually say nothing at all about the issue.
Haven’t waded through this entire thread, so this point may have been touched on already, but:
AFAICT, pretty much any clock can be turned into a gizmo that tells a time bomb when to go Boom.
The key missing piece is the actual, you know, explosive material. And usually some sort of detonator, I’d guess.
So if there wasn’t any explosive material or even a detonator, which apparently there wasn’t, then all Ahmed had was a clock. What else did Obama need to know before he sent out that tweet?
I bring this up not just in response to you, but to all those wingnuts who are now saying, “Ahmed had** half a bomb**.” Well, only to the extent that our homes are filled with half-bombs.
Hey, look, there’s a half-bomb on the wall of my kid’s classroom, it says 9:04 a.m.! Let’s check some of the other classrooms: yep, every damn one has a half-bomb! There’s even one in the cafeteria! OMG!!!
In society there is a maxim of “what if everybody did it?”, in this case, what if every teenager brought a case with electronics in it, and it alarmed during class, and there was no clear and good reason for a jumble of wires and circuit boards to be in a case in your back pack.
I mean it. How stupid are you to have an alarm set to go off at that time? Is the kid a dumb ass? Or a really smart kid? Did he act alone and innocently? Or is there more to the picture, than meets the eye?
What if he didn’t actually make it? And it’s just a manufactured clock he put in a case? And he deliberately set the alarm to go off during a class?
What if the report is correct, and the handcuffs picture really was staged? What was his intent?
These are things not quickly answered, nor should the first thing put out as a press release, or tweeted, be considered above fact checking.
Here is a picture of the clock. I gotta say, it looks very bomb-like.
I would also guess that the digital readout was turned away from the camera to make it look MORE bomb-like.
