At some point, I'm willing to criticize other adults for using a child to further their own political agendas, even as they celebrate the boy. The moral lodestar here is the welfare of the child.
I'm posting to explain my position because I'm seeing the famous know-it-all Richard Dawkins losing his bearings:
In a tweet, the scientist linked to a YouTube video entitled Ahmed Mohammed [sic] Clock is a FRAUD, in which user Thomas Talbot alleges Mohamed’s clock “is in fact not an invention. The ‘clock’ is a commercial bedside alarm clock removed from its casing”.Dawkins seems awfully emotional in his posturing over his love for truth, so let me proclaim a greater love for truth. Here are 2 truths for which Dawkins showed insufficient passion:
In his tweet, Dawkins said: “If this is true, what was his motive? Whether or not he wanted the police to arrest him, they shouldn’t have done so.” His next tweet said of the video: “This man seems to know what he’s talking about.”...
Dawkins eventually retreated.... “Sorry if I go a bit over the top in my passion for truth. Not just over a boy’s alleged ‘invention’ but also media lies about J[eremy] Corbyn.”
1. The question whether the clock was an "invention" should be recognized as a debate about the meaning of a word. It's ridiculous to badger a 14-year-old about a linguistic point.
2. The annoyance at calling the clock an "invention" should be recognized as a dispute with the adults who overplayed their enthusiasm over the child's brilliance and technological prowess. A child whose self-esteem is not perfectly aligned with the level of his accomplishments might have a problem, but, if so, it's nothing for strangers to be sticking their nose into.
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227 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 227 of 227Blogger Jason said...
Kyzernik:
Who actually thought it was a bomb?
Nobody.
Really?
'He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.
“She was like, it looks like a bomb,”'
As this saga moves forward in time and has less and less to do to with the son and more to do with the father, I hope Althouse changes her tag from the child's name to the real party of interest.
Yes, simple, please-like-me Ahmed has already earned more than his lifetime's share of scorn for having performed so well as everyone's pawn. Time for all of his enablers to earn theirs.
Don Surber adds to the party with his "Tweet of the Day."
To my knowledge, no one asked Ahmed either "Cool clock, what did you use, and how did you build it?" or "What other things have you invented? Can you show them to us?" Having built him up, perhaps no one wishes to risk the answers.
Thank you, JAORE. I read Jason's reply and could not believe it. And he still seems unaware as to how he beclowned himself so thoroughly.
Believe it. Nobody thought it was a bomb.
If you thought it was a bomb, what would be the protocol?
Would you confiscate the bomb from the suspect and send him back to class?
Would you carry it, or have someone else carry it, to the principal's office?
Would you have everyone-the principal, the cops, and the suspect - sit in a circle in a closed room looking at a bomb on the table?
Would you then pick up the bomb and put it in the squad car, along with the cop and the suspect, and have everyone trolley to another location?
How about the things they didn't do?
Don't you think a bomb protocol would include moving every student you could find to safety?
Don't you think a bomb protocol would include evacuating the building?
Don't you think a bomb protocol would include alerting a bomb squad?
Don't you think a bomb protocol would involve searching the grounds for suspicious items?
Don't you think a bomb protocol would involve getting a bomb sniffing dog to the school at some point?
Did they do ANY of these basic things that a bomb drill would involve?
No?
Nobody seriously thought it was a bomb, any more than anybody seriously thought the infamous Pop Tart was a gun.
Nobody seriously thought it was a bomb, any more than anybody seriously thought the infamous Pop Tart was a gun.
Quite true. In their haste to build a circus of straw men to torch, people are working overtime to erase the distinction between concern for an actual, people-blowing-up bomb and a hoax, people-alarming-only bombish-looking thingy. Each is a separate thing, in reality, in how school policy deals with each, and in how the law deals with each.
The actual, people-blowing-up bomb possibility was dismissed immediately. Where the ambivalence and plausible deniability came to linger and fester is with the clock that no one can tell time by unless its concealing case is opened.
"A child whose self-esteem is not perfectly aligned with the level of his accomplishments might have a problem, but, if so, it's nothing for strangers to be sticking their nose into."
Usually not, except in this instance the parent of the child in question wants all those strangers in question to acknowledge that the child is "brilliant."
An interesting little gem I found in the Dallas news coverage of the story from an interview that took place at his house: "'Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do,' Ahmed said..."
Considering what he got in trouble for potentially having done and also the non-complexity of what he actually did, that quote sounds either like some kind of creepy threat or a child with over-inflated self-esteem. He's a freshman in high school who took a 1980's era Micronta digital clock apart and then attached the guts to a different outer container in such a way that you might get a little zap if you dared to hit the snooze button. My elementary-aged students of non-brilliant intelligence have to muster more creativity and scientific knowledge than that when they play with their Snap Circuits Junior kits. If the teachers don't know what he can do, it's because of what he chose to show them as an example of his talent.
And while the school and LEOs may have overreacted (whether because of zero tolerance policies or whatever other reason), the remedy for that is certainly not to likewise overreact by showering the child with White House invites, scholarships, and thousands of dollars in freebies from technology companies. President Obama and the other overcompensators look just as foolish as the people they are intending to criticize.
If the kid's name was O'Connor and he waltzed through airport security with this "obviously not-a-bomb" thing, I'm betting he's going to miss his flight; at the very least. In fact, if you polled his fellow passengers...
Jason: I never claimed to be an infantry squad leader. Sorry you don't know the difference between a squad and platoon.
Then that's even worse. A platoon leader that doesn't know the max effective range of the TO weapon his troops carry? Poser.
Now, suppose I answered your silly question. It wouldn't prove anything because anyone can google the answer in 10 seconds. So you're dumb twice over, eh?
Nope. Google won't help you here, that's why I chose the question. And I notice you are still dodging the question...
No, you're gonna have to do better than that. Prove I've lied about my military service, or retract your claim.
I already have. You claim to have been an Infantry Platoon leader but you can't tell us what the max effective range of your platoon's primary weapon is. That's like a "lawyer" going fuzzy when asked what "mens rea" means... so
Strike three. You have dodged the question 3 times, which means you don't know.
Which proves you are a poser. You may have served in the Army, but you never got close to anything related to infantry.
Joe: I'll go with Occam's razor here and guess that he's a lazy ass kid who remembered the project at the last minute and scrambled to put something together.
Except there wasn't a project. This was not an assignment. The kid just randomly ripped the guts out of a clock and wired it into a pencil case. It wasn't homework, it wasn't for a science project. He just randomly did this.
Go ahead, Fen... attach your full name to your accusation if you're so confident.
I'm noticing you don't.
"Why are you concerning yourself with somebody's else's child? He should not be in the limelight at all, but he was thrust there by adults. You should not make an issue of his motivations."
A law professor who dismisses motive. Motive is the central issue, here.
MER is readily Google-able.
https://www.ar15.com/archive/topic.html?b=6&f=2&t=110604
Includes links to field manual.
It says 550/800 yds for point/area targets.
Happy now? Move on?
Speaking of the law professor:
http://www.politico.eu/article/decline-of-french-intellectual-culture-literature-art-philosophy-history/
But the writings of the likes of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard if anything compounded the problem with their deliberate opaqueness, their fetish for trivial word-play and their denial of the possibility of objective meaning (the hollowness of postmodernism is brilliantly satirized in Laurent Binet’s latest novel, “La septième fonction du langage,” a murder mystery framed around the death of the philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980).
Somebody go on Amazon and buy this chick a mirror.
I notice that Althouse seems to have a fear of truth. It might not be nice.
She should try a Japanese hospital.
I think the Father helped his son poke a finger in the eye of the infidel by constructing a suitcase bomb without the C5 explosive. A dry run, so to speak. By the way, what happened to the student submitting a perspective on what his science project would be to his teacher for approval? The enemy within!
See, Fen! That makes Nichevo infantry!
By the way, how's that proof coming along?
Here, I'll help you out: I weigh the same as a duck. Which proves I'm made of wood! Amirite? Lulz.
By the way. Funny you should mention stolen valor and the This Ain't Hell blog, the authors of This Ain't Hell and I have already had a good laugh at your expense.
Cheers, twit!
Little Ahmed suckered a bunch of adults--including Obozo. The only thing he "invented" was how to take the clock out of its case and put it in a pencil box.
He's as fake an inventor as Caityln Jennings is a female.
The kid took a clock from its casing and put it in a pencil box. All the accolades heaped upon him are akin to the practice of handing out trophies for showing up (no doubt at this point, MIT is a little embarrassed by its initial reaction--if it isn't, it should be). Considering who his father is, I most certainly would not rule out a measure of intended provocation on Ahmed's part.
But no matter, Ahmed is now famous. He's going to the White House. He's celebrated by NASA and MIT. He's transferring to a new school. His family will get millions from the lawsuit. Thousands of people will contribute to his education funds (I doubt sincerely, however, that he will be attending MIT). And all because he took a clock from its casing and put it in a pencil box and then goaded the authorities to act stupidly.
1. Put clock parts in a pencil box.
2. ????
3. PROFIT!
And here Jason is, after considerable time, still unable to see his logical error. Do you see why you were wrong yet? And why the ACLU flunky was wrong too?
Willful ignorance is fun.
Still trying to sniff my underwear?
Wrong about what, precisely?
CJinPA:
The fact that you wrote
"It's not a defense for the school's reaction, but it means...something"
means...something, but whether it means something /scrutable/ I have no idea.
Although Ahmed said he wanted to make inventions, I don't believe he claimed the clock/bomb/hoax as his invention.
I will note the facts, as they have been uncovered, leave me even more convinced that what I said above was exactly correct. The boy was treated fairly and was placed in cuffs when the police took him into custody and removed him from school grounds.
Imagine that.
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with what I was saying.
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