In any case, something is certainly very fishy here, and the right-wing internet will angrily tweet pictures of circuit boards and random people with beards until it’s all sorted out.
I’m always astonished by how quickly most people will discard their oft-stated principles to jump on a partisan bandwagon. The ultra-right would be freaking out in a completely different way if young Mr. Mohamed was Christian.
Edit: the insistence of some on the left that he is a totally brilliant hacker who “solders CPUs” is a similar phenomena. Way to miss the point, knuckleheads.
I’ve been baffled by the number of people who got dragged into the side-discussion of whether the ‘project’ was actually any good or not.
Aside from the fact that the salient issue is the absurdly punitive response because some idiot thinks that exposed circuit boards are a WMD or something, kid is a freshman who at least apparently cared about what his engineering teacher thought. Not necessarily someone you’d expect fantastic work from today; but someone you can be at least cautiously optimistic about as time goes on.
Most people who do eventually do interesting projects seem to have some childhood disassembly stories(as, no doubt, do many people who never went any further than that); but that’s all secondary to the real issue.
It’s entirely possible that for a young, male, muslim and/or too ‘muslim looking’ to pass as anything else in Texas Qatar is going to be a marked improvement, without that meaning that Qatar is a marked improvement in general.
It isn’t exactly the Cosmopolitan Utopian Ideal; but it’s not at all uncommon or implausible for life to be better in a place where freedom on average is lower; but ‘your people’ are on top; than it would be in a place where freedom on average is higher; but you are in one of the less favored bins.
Qatar’s human rights record is pretty tepid; but Mr. Mohammed is going to be far more in-group there than he was in Texas.
Fun History Fact: basically until Eleanor Roosevelt came along and had the nerve to drier herself around the place, here in the U S and A women were strongly discouraged from driving. That puts us maybe 70 years (max) ahead of those Middleeastern places.
I’m citing a News Of The Weird story that’s at least twenty-five years old from memory here so please take the following with an ocean of salt: a rebel group in Qatar would regularly kidnap tourists. The rebel group would treat the tourists with extreme hospitality, driving them around and showing them all the famous sights, providing their own perspective of course. The rebels would then release the tourists in time to catch their flight home.
The government did nothing to prevent this because the tourists were left with such a good feeling about Qatar that the rebels’ actions were actually considered a public service.
This could be, and certainly sounds, completely bogus but I’ve never forgotten it because, true or not, it moved Qatar close to the top of places I’d like to visit.
As much as I hope everything turns out ok for Ahmed… My first thought on reading about this was that they were kind of pulling a “This oppressive regime that treats us poorly is awful! Let’s move to a place where the oppressive regime will treat us well, instead!” - but I fully admit that this comes from a place of very little knowledge, and mostly just a general feeling based on the stories of worker abuse for the World Cup nonsense. On the plus side, it inspired me to try to learn more about Qatar, so I’m not such an ignoramus going forward.
I’d be fooled if he hadn’t said it took him the twenty minutes before school started. Is he a genius? Maybe not. Was I fooled into believing that the school and the cops don’t know how to respond to an unquiet brown person? Absolutely. You done fooled me.
Me too. It was irrelevant. Whether he made it from a kit, cobbled it together from parts, or literally just took an old clock and removed it from the case - it doesn’t matter. We all have to start somewhere.
The point was the complete over reaction from the school on something that NO ONE thought was actually a bomb.
Even that would be uncertain. Ahmed Mohamed and his family are Sufis while the Qatar state religion is Salafism. Relations between the two groups are not good, usually with the Sufis being persecuted.
Sure, but the Israeli public keeps electing his party despite that. Some constituency in Israel think he is a righteous dude. But partially absolving Hitler for the holocaust is just a new level here.
Has anyone here been to Qatar? Or read anything about it? I’ve been five times for work, and as a liberal, atheist, gay man, I was very uncomfortable there. The US has a lot of work to do on human rights, but only the most delusional or naïve would say Qatar is anything like the US. I wish Mohammad and his family all the best, but they have a huge awakening ahead of them.
Yes, primarily, but also that both the school and police immediately doubled down on their cowardly incompetence by repeatedly insisting that their response was appropriate, and that a significant portion of the US public still thinks panicking over brown people with scary wires is a totally reasonable thing to do.
It’s classic derailing. If your argument is no good, trick your opponent into arguing about a different issue, one that you can either win or at least drag out with minutiae until your opponent gets frustrated and gives up.
