Sure why not? Don't like him as an actor, but he is actually a pretty smart guy with interesting opinions and like Yang an outsider. We need more of these imo:
In Tarrant County, Tex., defendants are sometimes strapped with a stun belt around their legs. The devices are used to deliver a shock in the event the person gets violent or attempts to escape.
But in the case of Terry Lee Morris, the device was used as punishment for refusing to answer a judge’s questions properly during his 2016 trial on charges of soliciting sexual performance from a 15-year-old girl, according to an appeals court. In fact, the judge shocked Morris three times, sending thousands of volts coursing through his body. It scared him so much that Morris never returned for the remainder of his trial and almost all of his sentencing hearing.
The action stunned the Texas Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso, too. It has now thrown out Morris’s conviction on the grounds that the shocks ordered by district judge George Gallagher, and Morris’s subsequent removal from the courtroom, violated his constitutional rights. Since he was too scared to come back to the courtroom, the court held that the shocks effectively barred him from attending his own trial, in violation of the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a defendant’s right to be present and confront witnesses during a trial.
Judges are not allowed to shock defendants in their courtrooms just because they won’t answer questions, the court said, or because they fail to follow the court’s rules of decorum.
“While the trial court’s frustration with an obstreperous defendant is understandable, the judge’s disproportionate response is not. We do not believe that trial judges can use stun belts to enforce decorum,” Justice Yvonne T. Rodriguez said of Gallagher’s actions in the court’s opinion. “A stun belt is a device meant to ensure physical safety; it is not an operant conditioning collar meant to punish a defendant until he obeys a judge’s whim. This Court cannot sit idly by and say nothing when a judge turns a court of law into a Skinner Box, electrocuting a defendant until he provides the judge with behavior he likes.” (...)
After an outpouring of sympathy for Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Muslim high school student arrested on Monday for bringing his homemade clock to school, a neoconservative think tank funded by major defense contractors tried to justify the actions of local police and school officials, calling what the boy built “half a bomb.”
Following our story about the Center for Security Policy’s comments, social media users responded with mockery — some providing their own examples of what else could be construed as #halfabomb. (...)
i think i can agree with your premise and this reminds me of a huge example
this from the guy who droned a teen like this one for choosing the wrong parents
also i'm pretty sure if ahmed showed up at the whitehouse before this snafu with his clock setup we would have seen a serious response from ba (maybe even deadly)
and even now if this kid shows up at the wh i'd bet that his science project goes through an inspection and gets taken apart
i think it was his english teacher that blew the whistle (not his science/engineering instructor)
and i don't the specifics of how and why he pulled it out in english class (i'm guessing he was proud of his accomplishment and was eager to show it to anyone expressing interest)
From what I've read, it beeped while in English class as some clocks are wont to do, and hysteria ensued.
if there is evidence that someone involved called him a backward savage, made reference or had a history of making references to religious discrimination i'm not aware of it and that would be a problem and it should be called out
Few are blatantly racist anymore (en public, unless they can hide behind anonymity), because it is mostly no longer tolerated (damn polical correctness!). It works more subtly. You won't find an official referring to people in such a way (obviously my use was sarcastic) because repercussions will be swift. However, you can find plenty of examples of such crass generalizations if you care to look, even in this forum.
Hence my use of paranoia, and the special cultivated 'sensitivity' to (Islamic) terrorists (and not so much far-right extremists) along the lines of SSSS (est. 2002). Add a bit of folk-profiling (color: check, name: check, religion: check)... OMGZ!1!
maybe the teach caught a glance of the device or didn't fully understand the context and just followed state protocol
i've been working as a vendor/subcontractor for five school systems since 1997 and a lot has changed (i'm scheduled to go to a school later this afternoon)
annual background checks, security picture id badges, bag/brief case checks, the whole nine yards
state schools resemble prisons/correctional facilities (here they their own police force, security, camera systems and random metal detectors)
is the state paranoid? are they aggressive? you bet they are (orwellian type policy is more the norm these days)
the state's business model both domestically and abroad is based on initiating aggression, but it is always for our own good (blowback be damned)
and in this case it is to protect the children
That may all be true, but it still matters who gets picked out. There's a well-document school-to-prison pipeline (including one infamous profiting judge that got caught) that disproportionately affects people of colour. Add an over-hyped and despised (other/alien) religion to the mix (see various media and some forum posters) and you end up with this result. Or cases where Sikhs are getting beat up because some mouth breather thinks they're Muslims (Terrorist! Go back to your country, etc.).
As the earlier link showed this doesn't appear to happen to white kids with clocks (though I'm not discounting it might have) or even geniuses with 'home-made' nuclear reactors.
i think i can agree with your premise and this reminds me of a huge example
this from the guy who droned a teen like this one for choosing the wrong parents
also i'm pretty sure if ahmed showed up at the whitehouse before this snafu with his clock setup we would have seen a serious response from ba (maybe even deadly)
and even now if this kid shows up at the wh i'd bet that his science project goes through an inspection and gets taken apart
because science
regards
p.s. i don't want to sound like a hard ankle or HTJ and i'd really like to believe that ba has had a shift from political thought to principled thought
to encourage him when he makes good decisions or displays rational thinking
but in light of his actions it looks like he's trying to score political points rather than embracing a paradigm shift
i think it was his english teacher that blew the whistle (not his science/engineering instructor)
and i don't the specifics of how and why he pulled it out in english class (i'm guessing he was proud of his accomplishment and was eager to show it to anyone expressing interest)
From what I've read, it beeped while in English class as some clocks are wont to do, and hysteria ensued.
if there is evidence that someone involved called him a backward savage, made reference or had a history of making references to religious discrimination i'm not aware of it and that would be a problem and it should be called out
Few are blatantly racist anymore (en public, unless they can hide behind anonymity), because it is mostly no longer tolerated (damn polical correctness!). It works more subtly. You won't find an official referring to people in such a way (obviously my use was sarcastic) because repercussions will be swift. However, you can find plenty of examples of such crass generalizations if you care to look, even in this forum.
Hence my use of paranoia, and the special cultivated 'sensitivity' to (Islamic) terrorists (and not so much far-right extremists) along the lines of SSSS (est. 2002). Add a bit of folk-profiling (color: check, name: check, religion: check)... OMGZ!1!
maybe the teach caught a glance of the device or didn't fully understand the context and just followed state protocol
i've been working as a vendor/subcontractor for five school systems since 1997 and a lot has changed (i'm scheduled to go to a school later this afternoon)
annual background checks, security picture id badges, bag/brief case checks, the whole nine yards
state schools resemble prisons/correctional facilities (here they their own police force, security, camera systems and random metal detectors)
is the state paranoid? are they aggressive? you bet they are (orwellian type policy is more the norm these days)
the state's business model both domestically and abroad is based on initiating aggression, but it is always for our own good (blowback be damned)
and in this case it is to protect the children
That may all be true, but it still matters who gets picked out. There's a well-document school-to-prison pipeline (including one infamous profiting judge that got caught) that disproportionately affects people of colour. Add an over-hyped and despised (other/alien) religion to the mix (see various media and some forum posters) and you end up with this result. Or cases where Sikhs are getting beat up because some mouth breather thinks they're Muslims (Terrorist! Go back to your country, etc.).
As the earlier link showed this doesn't appear to happen to white kids with clocks (though I'm not discounting it might have) or even geniuses with 'home-made' nuclear reactors.
There are those who would have us believe that the Easter Peeps taste better than the Halloween Peeps - but don't let them mislead you. The St. Valentine's Day Peeps are the most nutritious though - jam-packed with folate, vitamin K, iron, and Omega-3!
