[hackerspaces] Irving Texas student suspended for bringing a circuitry-control clock project to school

David Francos me at davidfrancos.net
Thu Sep 17 12:33:51 CEST 2015


2015-09-17 1:50 GMT+02:00 JB Zurn <jbzurn at gmail.com>:

> In the US, there are a lot of people who are afraid of things they don't
> understand. Sometimes that fear even devolves in a sort of pride in
> ignorance; people even attack when they perceive someone to be smarter than
> they are, because they feel threatened by it.
>
> This is an ongoing theme for thousands of years. E.g. Galileo.
>

I think you mean "In the WORLD, there..."
Gallileo was italian, and died in 1642, more than 100 years before the
united states were founded.
And that specific example was due to religious crap, basically christians
thinking in the line of "He thinks therefore he is not".


> This fear/pride in ignorance I feel is a large contributor to the
> difficulty in getting people interested in STEM/STEAM activities. You're
> fighting not just "this is hard", but an undercurrent of cultural backlash.
>
> One reason I stayed in Cocoa Beach, Florida after helping my parents with
> their retirement move to Florida from our small farming community in the
> Northeast. Because of Cocoa Beach's proximity to Kennedy Space Center,
> people weren't intimidated by engineers. It was a great relief that
> people's typical response upon hearing I was working on an advanced degree
> in engineering, was "Oh, that's cool," and then move on with the
> conversation. Instead of something to the extent of "That's so hard, I
> could never do that!" and clamming up. I didn't have to be worried that
> telling people what I did for a living would intimidate them.
>
> Combine the fear of "might be smarter than me" with the terrorist fear in
> the US, and people actually start to take irrational actions.
>

That's kind of a global issue too.
Not that much with terrorist fear but overall racism.

> -Brooks
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 5:18 PM hellekin <hellekin at dyne.org> wrote:
>
>> On 09/16/2015 02:45 PM, Lokkju Brennr wrote:
>> > And, well...  that got a lot of traction fast:
>> > https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656
>> >
>>
>> This thread gave me context to that tweet.  I am appalled that the
>> school establishment is frightened by ingenuity and talent and superior
>> knowledge so much they project their acquired fears of others and
>> terrorism on a child.  I am amazed that the President of the United
>> States of Air intervenes directly to stop the madness.  I'm
>> flabbergasted that the same people will willfully accept cars that can
>> be stopped remotely, "smartphones" that spy on them, televisions that
>> dumb them down, and all kind of aggressive, debilitating, invasive
>> corporate technologies without raising an eyebrow, just because it comes
>> from above in a nicely put package.
>>
>> One has to be entirely brainwashed by TV series and action movies to
>> associate "clock" with "IED" (that's military for Improvised Explosive
>> Device).  Brains wiped clean.
>>
>> ==
>> hk
>>
>> --
>>  _ _     We are free to share code and we code to share freedom
>> (_X_)yne Foundation, Free Culture Foundry * https://www.dyne.org/donate/
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-- 

Gracias,

David Francos Cuartero (davidfrancos.net)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Founder - Dlabs Hackerspace (www.dlabs.co)
Promoter - Zaragoza Python User Group (
https://plus.google.com/communities/103281359456269063508) , Betabeers
Zaragoza (www.betabeers.com)
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