Snort. You see Mr. Mayhem, that’s all you have. Opinion. Weird accusations, wholly unsubstantiated. I count like 1 decent wisecrack in the verbiage.
There’s been 13 pages of argument. Your position was and remains unconvincing.
After a number of years around here you learn that for some (most?) people there is no correlation between them holding an unconvincing position, and them abandoning that position.
I sense a “no you” coming my way…
Hate to break it to you Einstein but message boards exist solely to provide an outlet for ones opinion.
Hell, you’re posting on the flame section of this board and complaining about people expressing opinions? :smack:
Do you practice being a crybaby or does it come naturally?
Of course it does.
Like I said before, that kid could write a book on murdering homosexual infidels and your side would be too busy arguing semantics.
Let a Christian woman refuse a gay couple a marriage license and “MURDER DEATH KILL THAT WHORE”!!!
Speaking of crybabies, this is crybaby excuse #4 on the all time hit parade. What Einstein would I suspect have understood, but which you clearly don’t, is that MfM didn’t say you couldn’t have an opinion, but only that your problem is that’s all you have. Some of us make reference not just to opinions but to actual facts and logic. Around here we consider opinions backed up by facts and logic to be better than just having an opinion. You may come from a different planet, but we like ours. Einstein liked ours better than yours also, I suspect.
And this is crybaby excuse #7. You should ask your friend Einstein what the expression “arguing semantics” means.
Here, look, I’ll help; saying something is just “arguing semantics” is appropriate when someone is merely arguing about what particular words mean.
Saying someone is just “arguing semantics” is dumber than dogshit when in fact someone is pointing out substantive difficulties with your stated position.
This doesn’t stop peabrains from whining about it all just being “semantics” when they are losing badly.
You should make that your sig.
March 2015 join date? How has a dumbfuck like you lasted this long on the SDMB?
Never mind—I see that you posted a bunch of stupid shit on the day you joined, then disappeared for six months. Carry on.
It’s true, and that was legitimately a good burn.
But here’s where you guys lose credibility (and, again, I don’t know if this applies to you personally: I’m speaking to the thread collectively): you say canned mayhem is a dumbfuck, an embarrassment, etc. And that’s absolutely justified. But you also say it about me, which suggests you say it just to express vehement disagreement, without making important distinctions between debate opponents (using that term loosely in **mayhem’s **case). Which then undermines any notion that you have a foundation of objectivity or dispassionate intellectual curiosity undergirding your position.
There’s no debate. Your justification for your position has literally been: 1) when I was 14, I was a douchebag with mad BASIC skillz; 2) I’m wicked good at predicting shit, just trust me; 3) I have a 15 year old.
When all your evidence is about you, there’s no debate about your position. You’ve given no evidence worth considering to support your point. The fact that you felt your position was bolstered by the appearance of trolls and Terr just made everything worse.
Yes, you’re a dumbfuck, but for profoundly more troubling reasons than a random shit-slinging troll is a dumbfuck.
Case. In. Point.
OK Slacker, let me have a go at why I find your position untenable. (I could say the same for cannedmayhem, but you at least seem to have a certain level of smarts, which remains unproven for him).
For the position you seem to be taking (or at least inferring, or ‘just asking questions’ about), the Father would have to come up with this wonderful plan, talk his son into it, then make sure that the Science teacher and English teacher do exactly what they did, arrange an alarm to go off at exactly the right time, make sure that the principal and the police would act exactly as they did, all the while having a 14-year old kid not give it away in front of cameras and national TV coverage.
Or, a reasonably smart teenage kid does something neat and well within his skill set (and yes, it wasn’t great science or tech, but it was neat) to show to his teacher and then does something dumb (the alarm), which is also well within the skill set of a 14-year old, and people react…like people do, which is sometimes dumb.
I wear a small beard, but I shave my face with Ockham’s Razor. And unless you can come up with a LOT more than inferences and vieled hints, I cannot find your tale credible.
IMHO as always. YMMV.
This is neither a contradiction nor a conundrum.
canned mayhem is a dumbfuck posting dumb shit because that’s all it’s capable of doing.
You are a smartass posting dumb shit because of [biases / cognitive dissonance / projection / congenital obstinacy / distraction caused by tentacle porn addiction / too much caffeine / whothefuckknowswhy].
This makes you effectively a dumbfuck on this subject (and perusing your recent additions to the board oeuvre, possibly many others).
Oh no: I’m a cretinous idiot, a total moron, imbecile, etc. (hitting for the cycle in classic medical terminology regarding intellectual disabilities). Just ask anyone upthread. 
(But I do appreciate your giving me a little more credit, even if you think my theory of the case is bonkers.)
Okay, first of all: as I believe I said upthread (unless it was on Facebook rather than here), if this were a trial and I were a juror, based on the evidence I’ve seen thus far I’d have to vote to acquit the kid. But I’m like 60% sure I smell a rat, and as noted upthread I have a good track record of sussing things out in news events before most people do.
Secondly, you’ve done a good job (as have some others in this thread) of laying out the scenario in a way that makes it sound like a real Rube Goldbergian triple-bankshot type deal. And if this were a plan in a movie that had to go just precisely right, or all would be lost, maybe I’d agree. But can’t it be a lot simpler than that? How about if the dad says something like the following:
“Hey, what if we take this case and this clock and rig it up to look sort of like a movie bomb? Then you take it to school, and watch these stupid crackers freak out at what the Ay-rab brought to school! If they bite, and you get in trouble for it, I’ll call up that reporter who interviewed me earlier this year and you’ll be famous.”
[A little later] “Awesome, that looks perfect! You can show it to your engineering teacher, but it might seem weird to just randomly show it off in other classes. I know, set the alarm to go off during class and then if the teacher asks what the sound is, bring it up to show her.”
This will be dismissed as insanely complicated, because a father having a simple conversation with his son is just too much to believe, I guess. :rolleyes:
And here’s the thing: all is not lost if the plan doesn’t work. If it gets shrugged off by the teachers? So what, all that you’ve lost is the 20 minutes it took to take an old clock and stick it in a cheap case. Big whoop.
I also don’t think he was counting on the handcuffs or even the police. Certainly not the president, Mark Zuckerberg, et al. Just hoping for some kind of disciplinary action from the school, which he could then leverage into a complaint to take to the local media (again, a local TV station had already come out and done a profile on him a few months earlier) and use in the service of social media activism. But then it blew up way beyond anything he could have imagined, as things sometimes do.
ETA a response to this late-breaking post:
So you think Trump, Carson, and Fiorina *are *highly qualified for the presidency? 
Wow, okay then. Noted.
I don’t care about the father, for me - an outsider - it’s about the teacher, the school, the police and the saddest indictment of what the US has become.
I hate phrases like ‘bin Laden won’ but ffs, people do need to get a grip because if you’re frightened of school science projects you are pretty fucked.
I don’t think we need to say that Ahmed’s father would have had to talk him into it; Ahmed certainly could have come up with a prank on his own, knowing that his dad would have his back if anything got serious. I also don’t know what you’re suggesting by his teachers having to do exactly what they did; hypothetically he could have just been looking for any reaction at all, either to get attention (teenagers do stupid stuff for attention) or to make a broader point.
I get it, this is all conjecture and there’s no evidence to support a prank theory. In my defense, I’ll point out that this is the pit, and if Bricker were here everyone would be falling over themselves to point out that the courtroom rules of evidence don’t apply. Dopers are big fans of evidence, usually, but a certainly amount of speculation is almost always tolerated.
The problem with all of these RO stories, which I used my expert predictive powers to point out earlier this year, is that the parents always get to set the tone of the story because the authorities are often bound by procedure or law to remain silent. When we accept at face value the story of a parent who says that his kid was suspended for using a magic ring, we all have a bit of egg on our face when it comes out later that the school officials aren’t actually morons and the kid was being disruptive.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been burned by this over and over again; frankly it’s one of the few things that conservative mouth breathers get right when they complain about the “mainstream media.” There’s a rush to get copy out to the public and the first ones out the door get to set the narrative. I think everyone would agree that it’s best not to rush to judgement until all the facts are in, but then we do it over and over again because it’s there and it’s easy.
I think this clock thing is following the same pattern. We’re fed a narrative about a smart kid who fixes go-karts and builds radios who’s arrested by troglodytes who can’t understand his homemade clock. I don’t know about you all, but I was picturing something with a microcontroller and a four 7-segment displays mounted on a bread board; you know, the sort of thing that a hobbyist might actually make. I used that mental image to fill in the narrative we were being fed, and I was as recreationally outraged as the rest of you.
But when the actual clock picture came out, and I realized that a) even though it’s in a small pencil case, there’s definitely more than a hint of movie-bomb there, and b) it’s certainly not a little electronics hobby project (watch this trite but humorous video of the “cool clock” being recreated in about 20 seconds), I started to get that familiar feeling of having been burned by the media and the story we were fed by the parent. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true. I get that. But I’m instantly a bit more skeptical of everything. I’m not sure why that’s an unreasonable position to take at this point.
Indeed, the Irving mayor, who may very well be an islamophobe and a racist, has pointed out (right-wing site, you’ve been warned) that they’re unable to release their side of the story because Ahmed is a minor. Which may just an attempt at deflection; I’m not sure what could be in the report that would justify handcuffs. But I think she’s got a point in that we all seem very comfortable saying that maybe a dozen grown, professional adults all made a horrible, racist mistake just to avoid the mere suggestion that maybe a 14 year old was playing a prank.
Her point, of course, is that Obama rushed to Ahmed’s defense without so much as a phone call to the city to get their side of the story.
Might she have a point? Do you think Obama would still tweet out “cool clock kid” if he’d seen the actual clock in question? I don’t.
See? Dumbfuck.
I haven’t paid attention to your political posts. Maybe because I skim over low content posts that agree with an opinion I already hold, maybe because they’re in the Elections forum which I don’t frequent. I don’t know because I haven’t done a search on your username, and don’t intend to. I’m going purely on other threads that caught my interest.
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What would a phone call to the mayor from Obama have done? She’s asserted that she can’t release information in the case - she doesn’t get to then cry foul at not having the opportunity to release information (even if it is to the president).
I’m sympathetic, generally, to the possibility that parents can make up bullshit stories and the school cannot respond.
In this case, though, what the school and the police have released accord with Ahmed’s story, and don’t really allow for any mitigating details. There was nothing in their release or their statements about his behavior suggesting a hoax. The cops provided nothing remotely contradicting the story or justifying their draconian response. I’m just not seeing a reasonable alternative story in what they’ve shared, and no reason to doubt Ahmed.
Awww…I saw those nice things you said about me before you understandably thought better of what they would do to your SDMB reputation. Aren’t you sweet! 
The cops are Texas cops, which we’ve seen repeatedly in recent months is just not a sign of anything to recommend them (though to paraphrase The Donald, “some, I assume, are good people”). That they most likely acted like racist assholes I have very little doubt.
It’s the school I wonder about. If Ahmed has said things in the past to make them think he would absolutely pull a stunt like this, would the school be able to say anything? I tend to think they wouldn’t, which is **steronz’s **point.
And that video: wow. I’m sure the guy who made it is some right wing asshole, but still: even I am shocked by how very little electronics work was involved to create what Ahmed called his “invention” that he “made” (that in itself casts great doubt on his honesty).
So the father’s master plan was to have his son risk suspension, expulsion and/or arrest and imprisonment so he could talk to a reporter?
Well, that certainly sounds more reasonable than “kid brings project to school 'cause he thinks it’s neat”. Unless you’re the type to assume that Muslims are all martyring their kids or something in which case I suppose “Here, son, you go get arrested so we can embarrass America!” makes sense. Beats blowing himself up, I suppose.