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14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

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Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#441

Post by feedjoelpie »

sp332 wrote: post #100
martincmartin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Stupidity does not adequately explain why they are considering bringing charges of a "hoax bomb", or sent this letter home with the other students: http://www.irvingisd.net/cms/lib010/TX01917973/Centricity/Do... [PDF] Therefore, malice.

Stupidity adequately explains the initial reaction. Bringing charges is merely after-the-fact butt-covering. The whole world knows you're stupid, but if you can get the entire legal system to be just as stupid, it's no longer your fault!

Remember the Aqua Teen Hunger Force "bomb" scare in Boston? The city rigorously pursued legal action to spare their police department the embarrassment of having wasted millions of dollars carefully dismantling DIY Lite-Brites.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#442

Post by unfamiliar »

Something doesn't seem quite right about this story. He made a clock and then chose to store it in a metal briefcase with the numbers on the outside. In other words, he built something that looks exactly like a bomb from a movie: briefcase with red numbers on it. Maybe this appearance was entirely accidental; but I would bet that he originally intended it to look like a bomb, probably for humour.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#443

Post by postitnotecode »

Their twitter page promoted their first "maker space" which I have trouble squaring with this story. Is the message the school wants to send: creation, making, and learning is very very dangerous and only allowed under strict supervision?

https://twitter.com/MacReads/status/643784222394552320/photo...

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#444

Post by joeclark77 »

So... kid with an Arabic name, whose father is a belligerent Islamist known to the townspeople to rail against imagined anti-Muslim racists in the town square, shows up at school with a homemade electronic device with a timer on the front of it. He takes someone's bad advice to conceal it under his clothing, and walks into a classroom where it starts beeping.

I think reasonable people can understand why the police might have been called.

It was of course unreasonable for the police to have actually arrested the boy, once they found out what they were dealing with. Reading between the lines though, maybe the article's use of "arrested" just means they took the kid home to his parents.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#445

Post by edkhalid1 »

fudgy73 wrote: post #419
kmfrk wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, people would rather that part of his heritage weren't brought up, leaving us with Michael Fassbender portraying him on the big screen.

In Arabic, "fass" means fart. That's right, he's a Fart-bender, which I suppose is a type of airbender.

you're already bending fass into faswa. Not cool.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#446

Post by greedo »

cschneid wrote: post #289
dopamean wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always find the "more funding" idea to be somewhat dubious. Don't we already spend a ton of money on education? Perhaps even more per pupil than other developed countries?

At the teacher level, they are underpaid. My girlfriend is a high school teacher w/ 4 years experience, a masters degree in her topic, and works 12+ hours a day (not kidding, seriously all day). She makes $35k / year. If she wasn't lucky enough to have an engineer paycheck behind her life, she simply wouldn't be able to do the job. It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways, but the whole process is inher…

Well, here's anectdata to contradict yours. A new teacher in my fine town starts out at $43K/year plus benefits. 9 month work schedule. Here in the Midwest of the USA, $43K to start with nothing but a degree and teaching credential is a perfectly good salary, above the median for the city and state.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#447

Post by mikeash »

eldude wrote: post #120

> In short, Ahmed was arrested for making while brown. This sort of demagoguery masquerading as journalism has got to stop. Upvoting exploitative personal political propaganda like this contributes to an atmosphere of narrow-mindedness on HN that plays to the bigotry of its readers, with the majority of comments here responding in like. I'm certainly not defending it, but in reality this sort of (over) reaction, is p…

You're right that the reaction is explainable by pervasive CYA and the risk of not reacting and being wrong.

However, you're missing that pervasive and institutional racism is a big part of that risk.

Imagine a kid brings an actual bomb to school, the authorities don't react, and he detonates it. Then what?

The kid's race is going to play a huge role in how that decision is analyzed afterwards. If the kid was white then the discussion is likely to be of the form, "We need better mental health treatment to catch this stuff early!" If the kid was the wrong shade of brown then it's going to be, "He was obviously a terrorist and the administration should be thrown in a hole for not taking appropriate measures."

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#448

Post by nsxwolf »

eldude wrote: post #303
cholantesh wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, given that the police implied heavily that his religious background makes him a candidate for making a bomb...

You mean the non-specific 2nd-hand quote from the officer that makes up the entirety of the justification for the race baiting and exploitative behavior? "Yup. That’s who I thought it was." Like I said, it's an intellectually feeble argument.

That either meant "Yup. The kid that's always building electronics", or "Yup, the Muslim." When in doubt, always assume the worst.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#450

Post by goldenkey »

ashark wrote: post #311
x5n1 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I guess they could logically suspect that he might be doing something more sinister than just bringing around a clock project. So fine get a court order to search his house while keeping him detained at school. Find nothing. Apologize and let him go.

I have a feeling a lot of this behavior from teachers and school middle management is driven by fear of having exactly the same sort of irrational punishment come down on them. Didn't treat the clock like a bomb? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, apologized? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, uhhh... maybe if I get the police involved I can make this no…

It all stems from not having a backbone. Less weasels, more passionate people with some step in their walk. But all the political bullshit that educators have to waft through kills most passion and flare to go against the grain, to do what they feel is right. Unfortunately the nazi-effect is in full swing for most salaried office workers. No one wants to get fired, so everyone just obeys arcane rules and doesn't do anything the least bit outside the box. It's basically raining with grey skies every day.
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