RO: This is totally going to kill Bring Your Clock to School Day

No, that’s not it. I… look, I don’t really want to hitch my wagon to this star, but I feel like he’s getting a free pass because it’s an electronic device, which is why I brought up long division earlier. But let’s try another angle, let’s pretend we hear a story about a kid suspended for creating a picture of a something that looked possibly, but not really like a penis and bringing it in to show his art teacher. The story is sold to us as “teenager suspended for art project by prudish administrators.” But then if we see a picture of this art, and it’s clearly a doodle made on a piece of lined notebook paper from a spiral notebook in about 30 seconds… well, wouldn’t you wonder why he wanted to show off this doodle to his art teacher? Is that actually art that he’s proud of, or was he just cheekishly trying to show penises to his teacher and get away with it?

It’s not that I want to tell the kid that his art sucks, it’s just that the suckiness of the art makes me question his motivation.

And yet Obama never responded to, invited the kid or even mentioned this case. Or this case. All these other people and groups offering memberships and stuff to Ahmed Mohammed didn’t think that suspending a kid for chewing a poptart into some shape or arresting a kid for writing a story about shooting a dinosaur is “contrary to the values that Americans claim to uphold”?

“Pablo, the nose is in the wrong place and you’ve got both eyes on one side of the lady’s head! Why are you really showing me this?”

(In response to post 481)

Like a real tech genius.

:rolleyes:

Just because it “sucks” to you doesn’t mean that he wasn’t proud of it or think that it’s cool. As the parent of a 16 year old, I can tell you that my kid showed me stuff all the time that (to me as an adult) wasn’t any great shakes but he obviously thought was cool enough to show his dad.

Naturally, I told him that it was shit so he wouldn’t get any stupid ideas about bringing it to school.

So you linked to a Huffington Post story bemoaning the poptart suspension and a Techdirt story about the dinosaur fiction to show, what liberal hypocrisy?

You might be doing it wrong.

Again, the Pop Tart kid was suspended for disrupting the class after a history of disciplinary problems, not because he “made a gun”. The dinosaur kid was arrested for causing problems while being questioned at school, not because of the “no stories about guns and dinosaurs” law.

I’m usually a pretty law & order, listen to authority kind of guy and look for the “real story” when the headline is “Man arrested for [improbable reason]”. I can’t find a “real story” here beyond an asinine overreaction from the school and police. Maybe based in racism, maybe based in stupidity but certainly not the kid’s fault.

Sure, and when I was 15 my friends and I, who had some musical talent but not enough, decided to audition for the battle of the bands with an avant garde drum septet. This consisted of us (this 100% totally happened, btw) silently walking into the room with the 3 or 4 brave teachers who volunteered to judge the auditions, and banging randomly on whatever drums we had brought into the room for 3 solid minutes. Then we silently left. We did this to be assholes and mock the battle of the bands.

And if anyone had asked us, we would have sworn up and down that we were really into avant garde drum music and we hoped we got into the battle of the bands, and we were just trying to make art and totally not be assholes.

And the fact that our music sucked shit and took almost no effort pretty much revealed us to be liars.

And Obama never commented on this case. Or this one. Or this one. Or the two cases I mentioned before. Could it be because all those kids were white and thus not worthy of Obama’s “political solidarity” as mhendo so eloquently put it?

Look, if a kid’s Ahmed and dangerous, you can’t go inviting him to the White House.
I’ll be here all week, etc. :slight_smile:

Probably not. If you had a trend of him inviting 37 black or brown students to the white house, and zero white kids, than maybe it’d be a trend, but if it’s just one kid, then probably not.

You guys don’t get it. A white kid got in trouble one time so racism doesn’t exist. Open your god damn eyes!

I think if there’s a bunch of cases of overzealous administrators enforcing stupid “zero tolerance” policies, and a handful of cases of overzealous and casually racist administrators enforcing stupid “zero tolerance” policies, it’s easy to understand why the latter might garner more attention and be more worthy of being highlighted by the president. I don’t see a problem with that.

The kid wasn’t being accused of mocking science or electronic engineering with a shitty clock project, he was being accused of bringing a false bomb into the school as a deliberate hoax. The “evidence” outside people are using to still pursue this line of accusation is “Well, I think his project sucks”.

I’m confused. What are we supposed to be outraged about now? What did Ahmed do that was so terrible?

I unknowingly made some craptacular stuff when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure I showed my creations off to a teacher or two. Because it is nice to hear encouraging words, especially during that awkward phase of adolescence when you’re trying to find that thing you’re good at.

No one has praised Ahmed for his clock-making prowess, except for his teacher (whom I’m guessing would have said something kind regardless of what he’d shown her). What the nation has collectively done is encourage his spirit so that he doesn’t just give up and become yet another disenchanted youth of America.

There are a few people here who criticize the creation Ahmed made as nothing more than a sloppy box of parts he pilfered and reassembled. Sort of like criticizing a 5-year-old piano player for playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star instead of the Flight of the Bumblebee.

Well you have to crush their hopeful little spirits young, otherwise someone else will rob you of these precious moments, when their soulful eyes grow dim at the realization of the absolute unfair and uncaring nature of the universe, the inability to escape loneliness, the futility of everything, the inexorability of death or the continued existence of broadway musicals.

Send Jerry Lanier to the boy’s house instead! :smiley:

Gotta give youth practice at getting falsely arrested in a controlled environment so once they are older and out and about on their own they will already know how to behave and not get shot when being falsely arrested.

Folks, when comparing your USA to other first world nations, both your incarceration rate and your death-by-cop rate is off the map. In short, you are not as free as you claim to be. The treatment this lad received is a symptom of your societies’ problem.