WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?

author=kentona
yes you can. this story is exactly a warning on that.

There's also the warning of disinformation and racial prejudice that will once again be completely ignored!


e: My takeaway is that we should subject children to spiders so people quit freaking out over them

e2: pictures and videos and whatnot, not live specimens. Spiders don't deserve the hell of being subjected to children

I completely agree that there is actually too much focus on safety in the playground.

The playground in my hometown recently replaced the gravel with foam. I just about shit myself to see it. And I think it's harmful to kids.
Places like playgrounds should be inherently slightly unsafe. Because compared to anywhere else, they are already insanely safe. You have the best supervision available, people ready at a moments notice to respond to any accident.

Kids need to make mistakes in a place like that. When you're young, you need to get hurt. That's how you learn. You make small mistakes, even get minor injuries, all the way up to breaking bones. You do this in a safe environment, when you are young. And they when you grow up, you know your bounds because you have tested them. You are better adjusted to the world because you learned these lessons in a place where failure was not as severe.

Man, I remember when our playground swapped out dirt for soft bark. Soft bark is great! We made amulets out of pieces of it by taking a stick and wearing a hole through them, then making string from the more stringy pieces (or appropriating it from arts and crafts areas) and wearing them. Fun times.

Next they'll replace sand in sandpits with... uh... something that isn't sand. Clay? Mud? Synthetic sands (wouldn't surprise me if they already had).

Part of hurting yourself on the playground is learning not to be a complete idiot and realising that hey, dumbass, if you run you're going to trip and get a skinned knee so don't fucking run, moron! Take that away and you remove an integral learning tool. I mean, there's always going to be dumbass kids who do stupid shit regardless of how safe you make something - like that one kid in Primary school who put his head through the slats of the cool wooden fort we had at school that time (and the spaces between those slats was pretty slim. No idea how he managed to get his head through there at all. he must have had lubrication or something... maybe too much hair gel?) and consequently got the coolest play structure replaced with some boring-ass plastic thing that wasn't half as cool or fun.



Also, if I'd seen the clock my first thought would have been something they made for electronics class or science. Not a fucking bomb. Hell, that was my first thought on seeing it. Like... seriously. I've made shit like that just messing around in electronics that didn't do shit. If he actually made it tick and work, kudos to him. He should be getting pats on the back for his ingenuity, not being fucking arrested. Seriously, this is only going to feed the stereotypes that everyone was raging on about in that other thread about stupid-ass Americans (sorry, I know most of you aren't fucking retards but a hell of a lot of ya being shown on the news and in anecdotal stories are.)

Oh no. The police knew it wasn't a bomb. He was specifically arrested for perpetrating a hoax. Bomb disposal was never brought in and never was there an actual bomb charge.

He was also formally placed under arrest, not read his rights, denied a phone call, and denied representation.

author=SnowOwl
You could say the same about Christianity, sure, but not to the same degree.
All religions are silly, some are silly in a way that kills people. You could argue that all religions kill people, but most did the majority of their killings in the past. Islam is still going strong with its ass-backwards views and killings. Islam is worse than most other religions. It's also a very big religion, which makes it even worse.

You should totally watch Reel Bad Arabs. You know, the video I linked earlier?

author=Mirak
If that's a picture of his "clock" then i would have thought it was a bomb, disregarding the kid's nationality. Mainly because i know nothing about electronics or how to recognize one thing from the other if it doesn't have certain easy-to-recognize features a clock is supposed to have.

Nothing in there appears to be capable of igniting a spark or carrying an explosive force capable of causing anyone any harm. It seriously looks like the beginnings of a home-made computer. But ignorance is scary, son.

author=alterego
I'd say that "stereotyping" is not that bad a thing, though. Stereotyping, or even racial profiling, can be very useful tools. The problem, as with most everything, is how far is taken... And nothing bad happened in this case so I don't get what the commotion is about.

Let's stop every black kid walking down the street because he could be a gangster with a gun and a baggie full of coke just waiting to cause mischief. You mean nothing was on him? Well, let him go. No harm, no foul, black kid. Oh, good morning, Davey. *waves happily at the white kid*

DAMN, I missed something else....
OK, fess up. Who was it that called that kid a dirty bomb making Arab???

You know who you are, time to post an apology !!

After reading 3-4 pages of posts, I did not read where anyone called that kid any names. Nor did I see anyone claim all Muslims are terrorists of even killers.

After all these years of looking at electronic devises, I've never seen a clock, homemade or otherwise that looked like the one that young man made. So I'd say, if a English or History teacher heard a ticking noise coming from a case like that and then seeing the item, it could be mistaken for a bomb OR ANYTHING ELSE.

Let's see, do pressure cookers look like bombs????
Guess what was used to kill and maim several people out for a nice day at a marathon??? Then tell me how innocent that clock looks.

Mistakes can be made by anyone. By the teacher to called the police or by a boy who brought a great little clock he made to school not thinking what it MIGHT look like to someone who works at a school just like any other school with many young children they want to protect from danger.
We all know how tension can cause us to see one and mistake it for another.
At least I hope we all understand that no one should be called a racist for trying to protect children under their care.

How well did you look at the picture? It's the size of a wallet.

Linkis
At least I hope we all understand that no one should be called a racist for trying to protect children under their care.

So, if there's a bomb threat, do you think that at least an evacuation was in order? Do you think bomb disposal might have been called to make damned sure? We ARE talking about a bomb at a school, right?

RIGHT???

It's basic logic, Linkis. If even basic safety measures were not taken, then it logically follows that protecting the children under their care was not at issue. Ever since we're little kids, Linkis, it's drilled into our heads to flee a building at the sound of alarm. Did you not have fire drills? Did you not have deal with the monthly disruptions to class ever since kindergarten? Honestly? Tell me! I don't if they were having them 65 years ago. "Flee" is a panic reaction we conditioned for whenever a threat to a building is in evidence. If panic and tension were anywhere in this case, the teacher and principal's first knee-jerk reaction would have been to evacuate the building. When I was in highschool for my senior year, we had a spat of prank calls calling in bomb threats. Each time the building was evacuated and we were sent home early. That shit was going on for a month.

Teacher asks child what a device is.
Child says it's a clock he made.
Teacher says it looks like a bomb.
Teacher calls the principal.
Principal says it looks like a bomb.
Teacher does not evacuate the building.
Principal does not evacuate the building.
Principal calls the police.
Police say it looks like a bomb.
Police do not evacuate the building.
Police do not call bomb disposal.
Police arrest child under terrorist laws.
Police charge child with...wait for it...a hoax.
Teacher has not sought an expert opinion on the nature of the device.
Principal has not sought an expert opinion on the nature of the device.
Police have not sought an expert opinion on the nature of the device.
All three enablers in this scenario clearly know there is no bomb.
Throughout this whole scenario, nobody has EVER believed this device was a bomb.
At no point is policy activated which is designed to react to a bomb.
Child was arrested for a hoax and suspended for misconduct. Suspended, not expelled.

At no time was the safety of the children in that school at question. At no time did anyone ever remotely feel threatened. Logic irrefutably proves it. It cannot be denied. As an authority in a situation like this, you either panic and sound the alarm, or you keep calm and sound the alarm, just in case. In the first case, you're reacting. In the second case, you're following policy. Bomb and fire reactions are among those rare scenarios in which the panic reaction is proper and supported by official policy. There is no policy in any office across the world that does not evacuate a building for a bomb threat. Buildings with bombs evacuate.

So, we firmly establish that protecting children from a bomb was not a concern in this case. Authority reactions simply do not support that premise. So, Linkis; any other theories?


@SnowOwl I'll admit I've gotten a bit facetious with you, but I don't think I've really gotten nasty with you, so please let's keep being nice.

SnowOwl
Good job ignoring everything I write except small parts that you can repeat over and over instead of actually discussing the topic. It's a law made by the government, but it wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for religion. It's in no way a logical fallacy, and I'm not sure why you don't think that killing people for having the "wrong" religion isn't problematic. You didn't even stop to consider it wrong in your posts. It's very problematic.

Look at the bold sentence. I'm going to have a problem with you saying something like this. It sounds a little bit like you're accusing me of supporting state sponsored murder. It's a dodge that you could only possibly be using to establish your superiority, and it's a dick move. This is where I think the conversation moves into people being nasty to each other because such an accusation is frankly inappropriate and uncalled for.

At no point have I said to support or approve of these governments. Unfortunately, you seem to miss the point that a government's purpose is to control its populace. The more authoritarian the government, the more violent its methods. In order to maintain its rapport with the population, it must be able to justify its more violent actions using means the public can relate to, otherwise, they risk a revolution. So a government and a society establishes it's rule of law based upon the dominant religion of the region, and unlike the majority of Muslims, who are actually decent people, the government, such as the Taliban, has no qualms about using religious doctrines demanding death of unbelievers to support its murder.

You have chosen to be hostile to an entire group in general. You've already demonstrated that you have no problem lumping all Muslims into one category, I see no reason to think you wouldn't do the same to all Arabs. This makes me incredibly uncomfortable even talking to you, as clearly you're already trying to vilify me.

Actually Islam is sort of like Christian cults, except on a much larger scale.
The followers are brainwashed to be hostile to non-believers and told not to talk to anyone outside of the circle, and critical thinking when it comes to the religion is also met with hostility. They also hold beliefs which people outside the circle would consider extreme or dangerous and are told that it's okay to lie to non-believers to get what they want (all as told my Muhammed).

This is the basic structure of a warrior religion. At its foundation, its survival is threatened by the outside and so institutes measures to protect itself. The most common form being the condemnation of unbelievers. As the religion establishes its permanence, this structure is no longer needed and ignored by the people in general, but there will always remain a fundamental extremist core.

It's also interesting how you selectively ignore how muslims view women in a very negative way, basically as slaves to do with as they please.

You know, at a company picnic, one of my mother's coworkers got sunburnt and wrapped a towel around his head to keep the sun off of it. A family passed by with two little children, and he jumped on a picnic table and shouted, "How much for the little girl? Two goats and a camel!" My mother chewed him up one side and down the other.

You know, there was a time in the Middle East when Muslim women went to college, could get degrees in finance, engineering. They didn't have to wear traditional clothing, or even cover their faces. Some Muslim countries even today have women elected as president and prime minister.

But of course, it's more important to mark words about about how I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with Arabs. Let me clarify that for you then: Arabs are friendly, hardworking and honest, except the Muslims.
Yep, I just made another sweeping generalization. Sue me.

But of course, it's more important to you that we condemn an entire culture based on the actions of a few, like the average bigot. Yep, I said it. Sue me.

Linkis
Your right pianotm, you were there and SnowOwl and I were not.
OK, time to close another thread since people can't have a nice discussion on the news without flying off the handle and accusing others of being stupid or racist.

Translation: "I can't think of a way to counter your argument so I'm going to challenge your right to even have an opinion and start crying 'foul'."

Edit: I'm just going to leave this here. White kid makes working nuclear reactor and Homeland Security helps him get a scholarship; Arab kid makes a clock and gets arrested for making a bomb. Nope, don't see a racial issue here.