Are we now arguing about WHY the kid made something? He made something because he felt like it! Is this not the country where kids used to make ham radios and soapbox racers?
So the debate centers on: why did this dumb dark-skinned kid from the Other get so much attention foisted on him, while the Lame-stream Media ignores creative White Christian kids when they’re slapped down by a school/government bureaucracy (probably operating under faulty political correctness, corruption and even malice)?
I do condemn extreme right-wingers who need to twist Every.Single.Incident to fit their narrative (consider themselves lucky not to be named)
Emperor Obama Of-The-Drones is in league with Marxists, Saudis, Ayatollah, the Devil and the Illuminati
He wants to vaccinate your Grandmother and make you pay for it
It would be relevant to examine the bomb and guess whether it was intended as a bomb prank/hoax. Slacker(?) is arguing for that; maybe he’s right. What do others think? What display (e.g. up or down) did the clock have? Have good photos been posted?
You mean “clock”?
I have to say, if this were going to be a fair comparison, someone would’ve had to go overboard and get this kid a lifetime NRA membership or something.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe liberals do overreact.
What, no Obama invite to the White House? Guess there is no “political solidarity” there. Let’s see the calculus here. Looks-like-a-bomb-scary-thing plus Muslim kid - “political solidarity”. Looks-like-a-gun-scary-thing plus white Kid - no “political solidarity”. Gotcha.
:rolleyes: You are so dumb, it’s not even funny.
This is almost certainly what the silica powder was. Now, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t look to me like an explosive.
Yup.
It was just a disassembled digital clock re-packaged into a little suitcase-style pencil holder. It was so suspicious, because it told time. Apparently, in Texas (and for certain posters here), that is akin to magic.
As has been stated over and over - nobody who examined it ever thought it was a bomb. Was it a hoax bomb? If you can define what one is, maybe we can come to some consensus. It seems that, like pornography, it can’t be defined, but the folks there (and here) know one when they see one.
This just in:
8th Grader Suzy MacIntyre did not, as she has presumably claimed, construct an actual volcano from paper maché, vinegar and baking soda.
We consulted with several experts in the field of looking at pictures of things and telling things by the pixels, and we have uncovered the shocking truth that actual volcanoes are actually really big and have lava and stuff, and her obviously shit project is only 14 inches tall and has foam with red food coloring in it.
The only conclusion we can make is that she did it because she wants everyone to get an abortion.
Coming up next: Did Ralph Wiggum actually invent Wookies as we assume he claims?
I’m certainly feeling less outnumbered in this thread than I was a couple days ago. Which raises a meta-question: does the scorn that was heaped on me apply to the skeptics who have subsequently arrived? If so, why am I not seeing it? This is the Pit, after all. (No, it’s not all bonhomie, but the barbs have been signifcantly more muted.)
For that matter, I haven’t detected quite the same level of vitriol aimed my way of late, either. Is that because my/our antagonists are, deep down, sheepishly starting to realize they were snookered, or at least do not feel on as firm ground as they once did? (It might be interesting to go back and count up how many formerly full-throated Ahmed defenders have quietly slunk away and have stopped posting ITT altogether.)
Or maybe it’s about “in” vs. “out” groups. I don’t really know the lay of the land in terms of the membership of whatever Doper cliques may exist–except that I’m not in any of them. So it was safe to “other” me (ironic, that); but perhaps now some of the people taking a skeptical view have more social cachet around here, making it awkward to lay into members of the “in” group the same way? (If that’s the explanation, I may be getting off more lightly because it would be too obvious to excoriate me individually for saying the same things as others are given a pass on.) I honestly couldn’t say, but it seems a reasonable hypothesis given what I know about social group dynamics in general.
This is precisely what Chris Matthews was lamenting. It’s all about in-group solidarity vs. “othering”. If they’re agin’ it, I’m for it. This goes foursquare against the ethos of the SDMB, if you ask me. We should be for digging into the truth of things, not just lining up in our partisan ranks. I have no love for the Palins, but like “stopped clocks” (heh), they are not always wrong about everything. More precisely, they can often be wrong in the extremeness of their views, or the motivations for their views, without the truth being 180 degrees away from their narrative. Nuance, people, c’mon.
I think the kid’s father’s background provides plenty of circumstantial evidence. Not enough to “convict”, but enough to give us reason to be a little more skeptical and not just blindly circle the wagons around him.
I would love to see some reporting on these very questions (although “attempting to hide the device” is not what he would do if he were trying to provoke a reaction). But as Dopers we should all be well aware that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And it’s either naive or disingenuous to think that we are in an environment in which these things would have a good chance of being uncovered if they were true, as you seem to suggest. Who’s going to assign a reporter to do that digging? I can’t picture it being anyone but a right wing publication, and if it comes from that sort of source it will be immediately (and understandably) dismissed by the left and center, and in fact will spur the left to just double down all the more. Which goes back to the chilling effect of political correctness I was complaining about: I want legitimate media outlets like the NYT or WaPo to feel free to investigate questions of this sort, because I’m not ready to trust an investigation by NewsMax or FOX News either.
I think it’s very constructive to note how the pro-Ahmed crowd has slowly but surely retrenched (and dragged the goal posts along with them). When I entered this thread, saying something like “it’s not a fabulously cool idea” and “it was poorly executed” was a hanging offense. Now that’s just a given. Where will those goalposts end up? Maybe they’re done moving, but I could also see them before long evolving into “Okay, maybe he and his dad cooked up this test of the school’s Islamophobia, but good for them: they did us all a service by uncovering it”. (And I suspect this may already be what some of you are thinking, deep down.)
When I entered the thread, the most recent page or two of posts (I’ll confess to not going back to the beginning) included comments like these, which were not being challenged:
When I kind of verbally rolled my eyes at all this and said the clock was no impressive feat of engineering (which, as I noted above, has slowly become a given even by Ahmed’s defenders), I was challenged as to what I had done at age 14 that could compare with his technical wizardry. And then we were off to the races.
This illustrates perfectly what I keep saying: so many people are treating this story as though Ahmed is *much *younger, or has something like Down syndrome. He’s 14, people.
And the fact that the kid’s room is full of bits and bobs from Radio Shack provides plenty of, yanno, actual, non-circumstantial evidence. Confirmation bias is a bitch, don’t become its sucker.
Your hypothesis that this incident was some sort of politically-motivated hoax is not based in fact. when you have chosen your viewpoint and then seek out aspects of the narrative to justify it, that’s being confirmation bias’ sucker. Don’t be a sucker.
Terr is a complete fucking idiot, who makes claims that he knows are false in order to try make some sort of ideological point. He cannot support his claims because they are not based in reality. He knows this, which is why he will not respond to my requests to support his bullshit. Don’t be like Terr. Please.
.
I agree with you that those people should have let your comment go.
And they should have let it go for precisely the reason i suggested in my earlier post: because focusing on whether or not the clock was an “impressive feat of engineering” is completely fucking asinine in the context of this particular issue.
It’s irrelevant, and people focusing on it are drooling morons who apparently don’t understand the actual ideals and principles involved in this case. If you did make something more sophisticated than a clock at age 14, your arguments in this thread are demonstrating the you’ve regressed since then.
Also irrelevant.
I cannot possibly imagine why you think we’d be interested in this level of your analysis of how people are responding to you. Well, no, that’s not true; I imagine you think it because you’re something of a narcissistic douchebag.
Be assured that nobody else cares.
But only after the “hoax bomb” gambit fell flat. Ahmed’s age or ingenuity was never the point of this story, but you have tried your best to steer it that way.
Yes. Well said.
Yes. Some are.
Scorn is heaped on you because you are a paranoid lunatic. Oh, and Dawkins made it clear on twitter that he wasn’t trashing the kid, but merely media credulity as well as his own. So don’t draw him into your team of one.
I do meet the clinical definition of narcissm, but like homosexuality a half century ago, I think it’s bogus to pathologize robust self regard.
Seems to me there are 2 issues here:
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Did the kid bring something to school that could reasonable be considered to be against the rule they have about bringing a fake bomb to school.
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If yes to #1, did the administration and police over-react?
Extra credit: Would it have made a difference it his name was Jimmy White, and he was a Christian.
(Just joking around issue, since this is the Pit and all: A clocK? You’re kidding me!!)
Frankly, I say “yes” to number 1. And I think the kid was, at best, naive to not know that. Now, lots of kids are naive at 14, so maybe that’s just par for the course. But… the school does have such a rule, and the contraption could reasonably be suspicious as being a bomb or a fake bomb.
As for #2, I agree there was an over-reaction. Once the determination was made that it was NOT a bomb, then the kid is not a physical threat. His parents should have been called immediately, and this should have been a matter handled by the school, not the cops.
I’m not convinced the kid was profiled because of his religion. Schools have zero tolerance rules these days, and if you bring what may be a dangerous object, or even a facsimile of a dangerous, to school, it’s not uncommon for the kid to get pounced on. I blame the “zero tolerance rules” more than anything else. And we only have ourselves to blame because we all get hysterical when tragedy strikes, and someone, somewhere wants to sue.
Would this mean that a student should never bring any exposed electronics project to school? Are there not high school classes that teach electronics? How should those students complete their projects?
Incorrect.
As near as I can tell, Dawkins position is pretty well precisely the same as mine, except that maybe I have not as assiduously tried to emphasize that I don’t bear any ill will against the boy.
How can you get #1 == true when the science/engineering teacher didnt confiscate it?
And why are you calling it a “fake bomb” - the kid didn’t take a “fake bomb” to school.
Let me hijack the thread to Pit the Internet Powers that Be. I cannot access that image: (Does artvoice.com needs some cookies from me?) “403. You don’t have permission to access /techvoice/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/header.jpg on this server.”
NM – I’ll Google if I get desperate to see a photo; I just wanted to Pit links that don’t work, sites that deny permission, etc.