Purely out of curiosity...

Fri Dec 11 08:02:26 CST 2015

Is there any evidence that the kid "only" took apart a store bought clock
and put it back together, beyond people online pointing out that doing so
is a thing that people can do? Beyond that, if the child acted as
maliciously as Richard Dawkins and others would like to believe, this means
his whole plan hinged on the knowledge that his teachers and police would
confuse a circuit board and some wires with something that can explode. If
our teachers and police are this stupid (which seems to be the case, here),
then we are lucky in getting off with a $15 million dollar fine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150923171620/http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150922-craze-over-teen-clockmaker-from-irving-shifts-from-celebrity-to-conspiracy.ece

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 7:27 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Check out  these "Retro Report" videos for some thoughtful revisits to
> media feeding frenzies -- many with political/ideological components --
> through the TV and Internet years: crack babies, Ruby Ridge, health hazards
> of power lines, McDonald's too-hot coffee, etc.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/video/retro-report
>
> I'm in sympathy with both the Thibodeau and Bailey PoVs here: yes, for
> those pre-sensitized to GWOT and "profiling" excesses, the original story
> was a perfect storm of outrage... *and* yes, for those pre-sensitized to
> @$#% ambulance-chasing lawyers, the lawsuit sounds over the top.
>
> Circa 1980, Love Canal was in the news: the neighborhood near Niagara
> Falls where seepage from an old Hooker Chemical waste dump had (maybe) been
> damaging the health of residents. It was the "poster child" story for
> environmental activism, and contributed greatly to the passage of the
> Superfund cleanup law. I did a column for Discover magazine exploring some
> complications: that the 1940s waste dump had been well-built even by 1980
> standards... that the town (wanting land for a new school) had threatened
> Hooker with eminent domain to acquire it despite Hooker's repeated
> warnings... and then sold off part of the parcel *without* warnings to
> residential developers who scraped off the clay cap, ran utility cuts
> through the waste trenches, etc.
>
> There was no ideological argument at all in the column, just documented
> fact -- but it drew more mail than everything else I published in 15+ years
> of science writing, 95% to the effect that I must be a paid shill for Big
> Chem, that I had no heart for the poor poisoned babies, that Gaia-rapers
> like me would be first against the wall, and so forth. Given that my own
> inclinations are pretty deep green, it was an education in What Must Not Be
> Said.
>
> There is a Pynchon angle here, y'know: his constant, pervasive, profoundly
> ironic awareness of how experience is mythologized, simplified,
> broad-brushed into historical narratives. Not just in the explicitly
> "historical" V and GR and M&D and AtD, but in the more or less real time of
> CoL49 or BE. You can feel 1965 Manhattan Beach turning into "the Sixties"
> as it happened, weigh the self-serving twenty-years-after perspectives in
> Vineland, check out the story-fication of 9/11 under way within weeks
> (narrative time) of the event. Scarsdale Vibe's speech to LAHDIDA is both a
> distillation of real robber-baron entitlement *and* a parodic exaggeration
> of an indignant Knights of Labor version of a robber baron. For every
> unreliable narrator there's a _hypocrite lecteur_ in the mirror.
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 5:57 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As someone who works in the media I'd suggest you don't trust the
>> reporting on this story too much. Compare: that big recent shaming of
>> the "world's worst aunt" who sued her pre-teen nephew for $127,000
>> after he hugged her and she fell over and broke her wrist. The real
>> story there was about US healthcare and the fact that she couldn't
>> receive any support unless she sued him, which she didn't want to do
>> (apparently, allegedly, etcly).
>>
>> IMHO you don't go for $15 million damages because you've suffered $15
>> million worth of damage. You go for it because of complicated and
>> arcane legal counsel that is WAY too boring for journalists to dig
>> into when they could just go for the easy clickbait instead.
>> Seriously, which story are you going to read?
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 9:38 PM, Jemmy Bloocher <jbloocher at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > I certainly don't anymore. Even if he had been grievously maligned, $15
>> > million is a pretty obscene expectation.
>> >
>> > On 11 Dec 2015 10:29, "Mark Kohut" <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> He doesn't deserve fiteen million dollars and won't get it. I' m glad
>> he
>> >> is moving happily enough.
>> >>
>> >> Sent from my iPad
>> >>
>> >> > On Dec 11, 2015, at 5:12 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
>> >> > wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> > ...does anybody on the P-List still think Ahmed the Clock Boy is a
>> >> > totally innocent victim of brutally racist teachers who deserves 15
>> million
>> >> > dollars for the torture of being kept from his mommy and daddy for 85
>> >> > minutes?
>> >> >
>> >> > Just curious if any of my fellow Pynchon fans are as disturbed by the
>> >> > cult-like, knee-jerk, quasi-Pavlovian, ignore-all-contrary-evidence,
>> Social
>> >> > Justice Warrior conga line that has emerged on this topic.
>> >> >
>> >> > Seems to me a lot of my leftier-than-thou friends are acting like Fox
>> >> > News conservatives, only in the ideological equivalent of
>> photo-negative...
>> >> > I mean, I count myself as a proud liberal, but I have to draw the
>> line at
>> >> > fucking lying to myself.
>> >> >
>> >> > Mark T.
>> >> -
>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>

-- 
Are you hip to Easter Island?
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