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See, here's the thing. If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent

See, here's the thing. If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone? No, it's going to be investigated and I'll likely get a nice greeting from some men in black soon after. This wasn't some genius, novel clock that kid invented. He put the internals of a clock into a very specific kind of pencil case to bring around school to show people until it was confiscated by a teacher due to the very fact that it looked like a bomb. So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter. It's not the best example for what you want to say about presumption of innocence - which I agree with you on by the way.

BoorishBears 6y ago
> If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone? If you don't make those comments to me, and a news story is making the call that your comments were about shooting up a school, I'll presume you're innocent. That's literally what this is about. You're not an investigator, you're not sitting on the case files for every story you see. No one is expecting you to have the same standards as a court for what guilty is, but you should still internalize some concept of innocent until proven guilty Because the news can, and will, and does paint people as criminals when they did nothing wrong. Now a days literally all it takes is saying "so and so person was arrested for allegedly committing so and so crime". That's it. People don't need any more proof than that, and the fact that this entire conversation is happening when the investigation into the materials was almost 2 months ago by an NYPD Counterterrorism unit and the FBI, yet this guy is still walking around is pretty damn strong evidence that nothing more came of it, should be proof. Tour standard of guilty should be much more than a simple news story. A news story mentioning saltpeter and prepper books is nothing. The kind of people who experiment with saltpeter are exactly the kinds of people to read those books out of interest, not some sort of malicious plan to commit crimes. - Also this is an aside but... > So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter. That's literally the crux of the matter. That's literally all that matters. That no one thought it was an actual bomb, and he didn't act like it was an actual bomb. If both teachers immediately realized it wasn't a bomb, how are you claiming it looked like a bomb? It didn't look like a bomb. It looked like an electronic thing splayed out, they asked what it was, he said alarm clock. The second teacher knew it didn't look like a bomb, what happened is they presumed that he was trying to make it appear like a bomb. No one thought it was a bomb because it didn't look like one.
- salamimonger 6y ago
  I'm not claiming anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident >His English teacher thought the device resembled a bomb, confiscated it, and reported him to the school's principal. The local police were called, and they questioned him for an hour and a half.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    I misremembered the case and forgot it was the police who realized it wasn't a bomb but were trying to prove intent by interrogating him due to Texas's hoax bomb laws... but exactly like I said above that's an aside, and the entire story just shows how little people understand of the appearance of these things if anything. If all it takes to convince laypeople to call police on a child is a splayed out alarm clock, how many electronics hobbyists have more than enough contraptions for someone to go on record as saying "I saw a bunch of really suspicious stuff on his desk" after a fire?
    - salamimonger 6y ago
      I agree, it's pretty bad. But I don't think it's on the laypeople. The English teacher did the right thing. Could they live with themself knowing they could've stopped a real bombing that killed people? The problem isn't that people will call the police based on some suspicions they have in order to protect others in their community or cooperating with law enforcement and telling them what they know and have observed. What else to do?
      - BoorishBears 6y ago
        If the teacher thought it was a real bomb do you think they would have waited until after class and walked it down to the principal's office? The school would have been evacuated before the police got to interrogating him. The teachers said it looked like a bomb, but even they did not think it was a bomb, again the trouble came down to the hoax law, not someone thinking he had an actual bomb

BoorishBears 6y ago

> If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone? If you don't make those comments to me, and a news story is making the call that your comments were about shooting up a school, I'll presume you're innocent. That's literally what this is about. You're not an investigator, you're not sitting on the case files for every story you see. No one is expecting you to have the same standards as a court for what guilty is, but you should still internalize some concept of innocent until proven guilty Because the news can, and will, and does paint people as criminals when they did nothing wrong. Now a days literally all it takes is saying "so and so person was arrested for allegedly committing so and so crime". That's it. People don't need any more proof than that, and the fact that this entire conversation is happening when the investigation into the materials was almost 2 months ago by an NYPD Counterterrorism unit and the FBI, yet this guy is still walking around is pretty damn strong evidence that nothing more came of it, should be proof. Tour standard of guilty should be much more than a simple news story. A news story mentioning saltpeter and prepper books is nothing. The kind of people who experiment with saltpeter are exactly the kinds of people to read those books out of interest, not some sort of malicious plan to commit crimes. - Also this is an aside but... > So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter. That's literally the crux of the matter. That's literally all that matters. That no one thought it was an actual bomb, and he didn't act like it was an actual bomb. If both teachers immediately realized it wasn't a bomb, how are you claiming it looked like a bomb? It didn't look like a bomb. It looked like an electronic thing splayed out, they asked what it was, he said alarm clock. The second teacher knew it didn't look like a bomb, what happened is they presumed that he was trying to make it appear like a bomb. No one thought it was a bomb because it didn't look like one.

salamimonger 6y ago
I'm not claiming anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident >His English teacher thought the device resembled a bomb, confiscated it, and reported him to the school's principal. The local police were called, and they questioned him for an hour and a half.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  I misremembered the case and forgot it was the police who realized it wasn't a bomb but were trying to prove intent by interrogating him due to Texas's hoax bomb laws... but exactly like I said above that's an aside, and the entire story just shows how little people understand of the appearance of these things if anything. If all it takes to convince laypeople to call police on a child is a splayed out alarm clock, how many electronics hobbyists have more than enough contraptions for someone to go on record as saying "I saw a bunch of really suspicious stuff on his desk" after a fire?
  - salamimonger 6y ago
    I agree, it's pretty bad. But I don't think it's on the laypeople. The English teacher did the right thing. Could they live with themself knowing they could've stopped a real bombing that killed people? The problem isn't that people will call the police based on some suspicions they have in order to protect others in their community or cooperating with law enforcement and telling them what they know and have observed. What else to do?
    - BoorishBears 6y ago
      If the teacher thought it was a real bomb do you think they would have waited until after class and walked it down to the principal's office? The school would have been evacuated before the police got to interrogating him. The teachers said it looked like a bomb, but even they did not think it was a bomb, again the trouble came down to the hoax law, not someone thinking he had an actual bomb