If, as he claims, he plugged it into a wall socket, during class, after his other teacher advised him not to show it to anyone else, because, you know, it might seem suspicious, then he is either an idiot, or very clever. Or just a regular idiot 14 year old kid with no respect for school.
Since it resulted in fame and profit, it doesn’t even matter as far as the result.
Thank christ Fuxsie has brought his patented brand of scienzs! to this issue too. Get ready for 2,000 posts of him selecting the juciest cherries.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Family retains lawyers to get the piece of shit clock back.
Yes, I’m sure he’s severely traumatized by becoming an overnight celebrity who got to meet the President and gets all kinds of free shit given to him.
My take (since everyone’s been clamoring so loudly for it): I don’t know whether the whole thing was planned by the family from the start. My guess is it wasn’t that organized. But no kid as supposedly bright as this one would be completely oblivious to the resemblance of this “invention” to an explosive device. I think he knew it looked like a bomb, and thought it would be funny to show it off.
Whether it was planned out by the family or not, they’re definitely milking the moment for every goddamned drop. Everyone involved in this fucking fiasco is an asshole.
Including Obama. And Zuckerberg.
If everyone else involved in a situation looks like an asshole, it’s not everyone else who’s the problem.
It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.
He’s not traumatized by being an overnight celebrity etc. He was traumatized by being a 14-year-old treated like a fucking terrorist suspect, with an arrest and handcuffs. The fame doesn’t necessarily obviate that experience, and that’s what they’re suing for.
Geeze, I mean, Elizabeth Smart became an overnight celebrity with a book deal and talk shows and TV movies and everything. Does that mean she wasn’t traumatized by the kidnapping?
No, I’m not equating the level of trauma between the two. I’m just saying that the after-effects have nothing to do with the original incident. And I wonder if the parents might have been mollified, rather than going the litigation route, if the asshole admins in the high school showed one ounce of “oops we were wrong” remorse instead of sending out a letter patting themselves on the back for protecting the innocent children from this nasty violent Muslim.
We should never ever even give the slightest indication we are concerned over Muslim’s killing and terrorizing us. Much better to err on the side of caution, and rather than upset anyone, just ignore any possible threats.
Otherwise, the terrorist have won.
Because, y’know, there’s no excluded middle between ignore any possible threats and interrogate a 14 year old without his parents present.
The terrorists have already won if we see everyone as terrorists and we live our life in constant terror.
I agree, but its funny that people aren’t willing to see that this fallback position is dramatically different from the CW at the beginning of this thread. Saying that no one covered themselves in glory here is a lot different from giving all these huzzahs (and expensive tech goodies) to Ahmed and feting him at the White House.
Right, they were so genuinely worried about this clock that, as has tiringly been stated over and over again, the teacher just held onto the clock for a while, not doing anything or calling the cops until later that afternoon.
BTW, who’s this guy named “Muslim” who’s killing and terrorizing us? Sounds like a scary dude!
(Apostrophe goes after the “s” in plurals, buddy.)
You are the one being mendacious. The kid took the clock to his teacher and showed him it was a clock. Any suggestion that the kid was trying to make anyone think it was a bomb is a lie.
Yeah, don’t make us call the grammar police. They’ll take you down to juvie and book you unless you write a confession right now.
Fine. I’ll give examples. I’m not saying most of these are 100% disproven; it’s more that they notably take a different tone or tack than has subsequently become the case once more details have come out, and Ahmed increasingly looks less and less like a poor innocent persecuted tech prodigy. Emphases mine:
Even a post trying to throw some cold water on the story gave Ahmed too much credit, ironically:
(You know he doesn’t actually *want *to bring that clock.)
Which is when I jumped in, and responded to the above with:
The frenzied pushback to this included:
(There were also plenty of posts intimating that my program that simulated a modem accessing a school grades server was pretty lame compared to what Ahmed “made”, which…LOL)
You don’t seem to be making an actual point.
The point was one I made earlier. It was then challenged by **andros **with the “Like what?” to which I responded with many examples.
Your examples are examples of hyperbole, exaggeration, sarcasm, and casual speech. They don’t add up to anything tangible.
You seem to be working very hard to say something disparaging about this kid, as if finding some kind of flaw in his character proves something.
He’s a kid. Kids have a laot of character flaws. None of that justifies the school’s or the cops’ treatment of him.
At the same time you seem desperate to construct a contradictory characterization of nefarious mastermind for him or his father, as if he’s the Joker and this is a Batman movie, in which the most complex and implausible schemes can be pulled off without a hitch.
I’ll repeat (and someone upthread even agreed with me on this, while still hastening to point out that they disliked me nonetheless): it didn’t have to be planned out to some exacting detail. “Bring a clock to school but make it look kind of like a movie bomb, but maintain deniability that this was your intent, and let’s see if these racist crackers freak out and get you in trouble, at which point we’ll make hay out of it”. It’s actually not “complex and implausible” at all–it’s simple and “hitch-proof”, since there’s little investment of time or money if they don’t take the bait.
ETA:
It shouldn’t require endless reiteration, but I agree with this 100%, and I have said so over and over. This is, as someone else first noted, the fallacy of the excluded middle. Although I think the general tenor of the thread is edging more and more toward that middle, which was my point in quoting all the early Ahmed rah-rahing that made me roll my eyes.
I’m still waiting to see a photo which is clear enough and shows scale to decide if it was a plausible hoax bomb. It’s described as being in a “pencil case.” Pencil cases are not large enough to hold significant explosives and hence do not make plausible hoax bombs.