Student Arrested for Clock 'Bomb'

[GDS_Starfury]

#contextlifematters

[mirth]

#argylelivesmatter

[Swatter]

Rumors! I'm sure we are on the right track now.

"Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers
In everybody's pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry"

[Nefaro]

Rumors! I'm sure we are on the right track now.

Read that from a fellow wargamer & vet I've known for years who lives there & says he personally knows the two officers involved in the arrest (where that info came from).

So take it as you will.  I called it rumor, since it's already passed one set of ears, but have little reason to personally doubt it.

[LongBlade]

Hey, once someone digs in their heels their opinion almost never changes on the internet.

I've started to write a rebuttal several times but it simply isn't worth the time because of the above statement.

[Swatter]

Personally, I am always looking for information to improve my opinion.

Nefaro, It's hard to weigh the information you provide. There are 50,000 ways in which the info relayed to you could be incorrect in some aspect. I have no way to verify, so I simply cannot put much weight behind it. If the officers have something important to say, let them come forward. Otherwise, it is simply rumor. During the Ferguson BS, here in St. Louis, local talk radio interviewed seemingly credible sources about Darren Wilson's side of the story, people who supposedly knew him. 80% of stuff like that I heard was wrong. People were simply mistaken, lying, or both.

Whenever I rub my two brain cells together with enough vigor, I try and evaluate arguments in a similar way to what I learned in my logic and philosophy classes. From that perspective, you have to evaluate evidence that you have in hand. Value known fact above circumstantial speculation. While I do see smoke, I don't see the fire.

[GDS_Starfury]

[LongBlade]

Personally, I am always looking for information to improve my opinion.

Nefaro, It's hard to weigh the information you provide. There are 50,000 ways in which the info relayed to you could be incorrect in some aspect. I have no way to verify, so I simply cannot put much weight behind it. If the officers have something important to say, let them come forward. Otherwise, it is simply rumor. During the Ferguson BS, here in St. Louis, local talk radio interviewed seemingly credible sources about Darren Wilson's side of the story, people who supposedly knew him. 80% of stuff like that I heard was wrong. People were simply mistaken, lying, or both.

Whenever I rub my two brain cells together with enough vigor, I try and evaluate arguments in a similar way to what I learned in my logic and philosophy classes. From that perspective, you have to evaluate evidence that you have in hand. Value known fact above circumstantial speculation. While I do see smoke, I don't see the fire.

That's well reasoned enough.

Several of us have put forward a series of facts which provide a context for the boy's actions and make a strong case that both his father and the muslim community have fomented tensions with the local officials. It is also clear that the kid didn't really invent anything and the item he assembled bore no resemblance to a clock.

Within that context the theory that the kid was part of a hoax seems quite believable.

That said I'd be interested to entertain the facts as you see them. What have we missed?

[Swatter]

The good thing is that we all agree on the facts (minus the rumors).

Let me present the three scenarios I think are important:

1) The kid was an inventor who built a clock and brought it to school to show off to his teachers. A teacher is disturbed by the clock because the student is Muslim, thinking Muslim equals bomb. The teachers and staff over react because of his religion and skin color and call the police. The police then puts the kid in cuffs and interrogates him like he was a terrorist (or at minimum a hoaxer). This incident is just another example of the institutional racism.

Analysis: I think this story gets all the facts correctly (perhaps overdoing the "inventor" part). The problem with this story is that the media wants it to be another story (Michael Brown), so it fills the gaps in knowledge with a victim narrative.

2) The kid liked to build things and installed an alarm clock into a different case, thinking it was cool. He brought it to school to show his science teacher. Another teacher is suspicious that it could be a bomb or some sort of hoax. The kid is pulled out and questioned about it and is not very cooperative. The police are called and they cuff and question him without a parent present. The father, a known provocateur, immediately senses an opportunity to push his own less than fair narrative to the media. This narrative is gobbled up without question. While the dad injects some questionable perspective into the story, the kids was ultimately handled somewhat harshly (not anything new) and was not shown to be a hoaxer.

Analysis: You will notice the above story is much the same as the first, except a few facts are added and the victim narrative is ignored. This above story covers much of the known facts without assuming facts not in evidence or assuming he is a victim of racial discrimination. This is the story I like, because there is no need to insert rumors or read too much into an single fact.

3) This kid was either in on a hoax or was duped by his father into bringing the device to school to trigger a hoax. The clock was put into a case deliberately to look like a bomb. Some ever say the clock was counting down. The staff picked up on the obvious hoax and the police were called. The kid's father wanted his son to be arrested and interrogated by police to make a political statement and that's what he got. The father orchestrated the entire thing for his own skewed politics. The kid now reaps the ill gotten gains of his father's scheming.

Analysis: You will notice that all of the facts associated with the story are construed in the worst possible light. Gaps in knowledge are filled with the worst possible motivations. For me, its even less convincing than the victim narrative in #1. The way it tries to make the kid and father into villains based on spinning all known facts in one direction, its just lazy thinking. It builds a house without a foundation. It looks like a house until a storm blows in and it collapses. Its craving for something, some sort of payback because the kid really didn't deserve the praise he got and because his father is a dick.

Now, if someone can bring some hard facts to bear, that's a different story. As it stands, the narrative that says it was a hoax simply inserts speculation in between facts. That's not a very reliable way to conduct a witch hunt.

[bayonetbrant]

[mirth]

Analysis: You will notice that all of the facts associated with the story are construed in the worst possible light. Gaps in knowledge are filled with the worst possible motivations. For me, its even less convincing than the victim narrative in #1. The way it tries to make the kid and father into villains based on spinning all known facts in one direction, its just lazy thinking. It builds a house without a foundation. It looks like a house until a storm blows in and it collapses. Its craving for something, some sort of payback because the kid really didn't deserve the praise he got and because his father is a dick.

That works both ways though. The mainstream media wants to portray the kid as the innocent victim of a racist, Islamophobic school and police department. I'm not sure how what you spell out in #1 automatically fits that narrative. There are plenty of gaps in knowledge around #1 that have been filled in to make the kid look like an innocent "inventor" who just built a clock. But he didn't invent anything. He took the parts of a commercial clock and put them into a case to make something that looked an awful lot like a hoax bomb. Then he was not forthcoming about his motives for doing so when questioned about it. Those facts are not in dispute and are not being interpreted in the worst possible light.

It's also not in dispute that his father has a history as an attention gathering provocateur.

The kid got praise not as an inventor, but because of a societal reaction to perceived persecution that was fed by the media's narrow reporting of the "facts".

[mirth]

I really hate agreeing with Bill Maher

[OJsDad]

Swatter, if the school/police are in the wrong, then why are they wanting to release their records on this issue, but being prevented because the family refuses to allow them.  That one fact points more to this being a hoax that the family is trying to get all they can out of it. 

I would think that if this is a real potential racial issue, then the DOJ is conducting an investigation.  So we should find out in a few months if there was any wrong doing by the school/police or not. 

[Swatter]

I think the zero tolerance policy is wrong, not the fact the kid was pulled out of class and questioned.

[OJsDad]

There were 7 bomb threat made to different schools in Ohio on Friday and at least two in Florida.  If they catch the person that did this, what would be the appropriate punishment.  Why should there be much tolerance for this kind of crap.