611–620 of 994 posts
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This - I know teachers with 25 years experience making close to six figures, which seems fairly insane.
Why shouldn't a teacher with 25 years experience not make six figures, or close to it?
Somehow they still claim that Ahmed made a "hoax bomb".
If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events: - A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1] - A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article…
Nobody mistook it for a real bomb and nobody had any trouble with it, except for when it was set up in the middle of class to annoy the teacher :)
A later improvement was the addition of "detorator circuit" based on the flash electronics for a disposable camera, and you could hook up something like a resistor to it which would then be fried by who knows how many volts...
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> Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story. Allow it to go where there is little to no public over sight, no public school board or checks and balances, under performing scores, teachers paid $20,000 less with no pension, and CEOs making millions. Charter Schools are a part of the problem with American education. Sure some Charter Schools are g…
Then why don't the Obama kids go to public school? Citing security would be silly. A school is a school. Even the President doesn't believe in public schools. If he does, he sure isn't eating his dog food.
They can afford to send their kids to private school, they believe that school to be superior to the public schools their kids would otherwise attend, so they pay the private tuition. As a parent, I agree with this. I, however, do not have a $400k income with a $169k expense account and a sweet pension plan, like he does.
In short, his kids don't attend public school because he can afford for them to go somewhere better. I am not willing to penalize any child for the sake of their parents' political views (or offices), nor am I willing to restrict people from spending their own money just because they might buy something I don't like.
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Bigotry, maybe. There's a chance (which I'd estimate at smaller than 1%) that there was no racial motivation here. But I don't see how you can say there's no grounds to make accusations of ignorance and cowardice. Being unaware of what a bomb looks like is clearly ignorance, and being so terrified that you get an innocent kid arrested for it is clearly cowardice.
Handcuffs went too far. But that's a protocol issue for US lawmakers etc. We've all seen protocol out of control in the States for a host of different incidents. No need to react so much in the other direction either, making this kid an ambassador of "freedom to pack electronics in a case and bring it to school" or whatever. He made an error of judgement going against his teacher's advice, and a ton of bricks came do…
Why should we not make this kid an ambassador of "freedom to pack electronics in a case and bring it to school"? That sounds like a pretty good freedom, and one worth fighting for. Kids should feel free to bring their (non-dangerous, no need to bring in guns or actual bombs or whatever) interests to school to share them. You might even broaden the horizons of some fellow students (and who knows, maybe even a teacher or two).
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I'm not ignoring institutional racism, merely not assuming it, which is consistent with the American justice system tenet of never presuming guilt, even when you really want to and everyone around says you should. You're making a lot of wild assertions that really are tangential and not intellectually consistent with my original point that there are no facts specific to this case to support the author's narrative, me…
I love it when "guilty until proven innocent" gets brought up in internet conversations, as if it were somehow the right way to have a conversation. This isn't a court of law. Skepticism is, of course, always warranted, but equating it with high principles of justice is ridiculous. We're not putting someone in prison here. And institutional racism against certain categories of brown people is far beyond a mere assump…
It's a rhetorical appeal to authority, so implicitly, in addition to anyone who shares my respect for and identifies with the values of the American legal heritage, I agree with it. Therefore, even though it has no direct application, as you unnecessarily point out, it is a rhetorical convenience for delineating our very different views of right and wrong.
You misunderstand / mischaracterize me in that despite the existence of institutional racism, I think it is morally wrong and intellectually dishonest to presume or even assert that the specific police are racist, without personally specific supporting evidence.
And institutional racism against certain categories of brown people is far beyond a mere assumption at this point.
I'm not interested in engaging the rest of your arguments. It's not related to my original point, there's too much material to cover, and we clearly have wildly divergent views of right, wrong and what constitutes appropriate treatment of the individual police officers in this situation.
I will say, to avoid being mischaracterized, that we are in agreement that the student was mistreated. We merely draw different conclusions as to why. Mine upon the specific facts; yours upon generic presumptions, assumptions, assertions and other views that are not specific to this situation. As a personal admission, I don't see any avenue for myself for effective communication with someone that communicates as you have chosen here.
A story. So, this thirteen year old kid with a Syrian father once got flagged up by Hewlett Packard because he was ordering electronic components. I'm sure you can imagine what happened next... Yeah, Bill Hewlett offered him a summer job, he got hooked on making stuff, wound up founding a company out of his garage with his buddy Steve Wozniak, and created the biggest electronics company in the world. Thank goodness h…
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.
because it's completely irrelevant to what Jobs accomplished. It always seems to be the people implying that other are people racist who bring up his heritage.