New College has the double whammy of being Florida’s most liberal public college, and also by far its smallest. It didn’t have nearly the cultural insulation to survive DeSantis even as well as The larger schools who have alumni scattered across various levels of business ands government. More’s the pity. New College was something special.

UF for instance slow played everything its imported, uselessly-conservative president Ben Sasse thought he might want to do until he got bored of spending the school’s money on his friends in Washington — as in they literally got jobs with UF but never moved to Gainesville — and finally quit.

Tres comas, indeed.

And plenty MAGA asshole enough to have hired a neo-nazi to set sale pricing.

AKA it’s going to be a big god-damned mess to actually get rid of you, so here’s the lowest-level work we have for your job description. Good luck in your own case and with re-election, asshole.

Honestly, the fact that there were any professional consequences at all is a bit of a relief. Anybody with half a brain and an ounce of empathy could tell he pulled an ego-driven schoolyard-bully move and deserves to be punished, but with nothing “officially official” being done to the girl, it was always going to be hard to turn it into a removal from an elected position.

Also: while I don’t know the selection process for US Navy submarines, my experience with the military is that you can have an opinion about how you want to be posted, but no actual decision-making ability. So I may hope to fly Navy jets, but the Navy can simply say: “fuck you, you’re going to be stationed on a submarine,” and there’s little I could do about it.

You not wrong in general, though with submarines in particular, longstanding policy in the US Navy is that you don’t put people in them who aren’t willing to give it a try, specifically because of those close quarters and limited options in an emergency. I have heard stories of people having a hard time getting other postings once they’re qualified sub-mariners, but having a crew full of resentful balls of anxiety is not worth it to them.

I guess in return, they get a little more money, better food (at least until it runs out), a vague sense of exclusivity, and a more casual culture arising from the close quarters and the actual risk of death being a constant motivator to do your job well.

Something tells me the People’s Liberation Army Navy might take a bit of a firmer approach to postings, but I don’t know for sure.

Pocket squares/boutonnieres are pretty much always on the wearer’s left-hand side, so that’s my guess as well.

Well Labour wanted a leader who could appeal to Tory voters…

“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.

Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.

I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.

Something people forget, and especially people on the right, is that being on the front lines does not make you the final arbiter of good or even morally defensible policy. When your job is to make arrests and get your ass home safely every day, and you’re almost universally called from incident to incident showing people at their worst or in a moment of victimization, you’re going to start to see every interaction as emblematic of societal decay. That can’t help but affect your outlook on the world, and the average person attracted to law enforcement is just that… an otherwise average person. A lot of them are dumb as shit, and even the ones who aren’t have their own confirmation biases (e.g. being attracted to a job imposing order in the first place) and resistance to seeing the forest for the trees.

It would be foolish and cruel not to take Law Enforcement’s preferences and suggestions into account in any policy discussion, but it would be even more foolish and crueler to think they hold some unassailable position of authority in that dialogue. Most American cities, and certainly most American cities that vote Red seem way closer to the latter than the former, and even the Blue ones always struggle with simply deferring to those who “know best” and not wanting to be accused of reluctance to keep people safe via the existing institution that’s (in the public perception at least) set up for that.

Seems like PERF is intended to sort of be that. A more cynical person might imply that their recommendations aren’t really meant to be taken seriously by cops on the ground, but they are at least partially there to say the right things.

While imprisoning an old lady for “corruption” is pretty rich coming from a coup-loving military junta, there’s a pretty good reason that calls for her release have been lower on the priority list.

Play authoritarian games, win authoritarian prizes.

GODDAMMIT! 🤣🤣🤣

Sheriffs are generally elected, but the scope of their responsibility varies widely in different jurisdictions. In some places they are mostly responsible for some combination of courtroom bailiffs and serving legal documents and running the county jail. In others, they’re the primary law enforcement that citizens will deal with on a daily basement basis.

Do you want Gul Dukat to hide the existence of the half-Bajoran love child he intends to murder out of personal ambition?

Because that attitude is exactly how you get Gul Dukat trying to hide the existence of the half-Bajoran love child he intends to murder out of personal ambition.

This story actually sent me down a brief rabbit hole. If there is any science they put into it, it’s psychology. It’s all about treating them as badly as the non-shooting part of the job could ever be (and likely worse), and weeding them out, all while doing the traditional “break down to build up” crash course in traumatic teambuilding. They barely need the average number of graduates to be active SEALs, much less do they need the rest of the applicants to do any remotely similar work. Weeding them out through sheer misery is as good as any other way, though even then the Navy doesn’t want them dying of Rhabdo. No, the Navy will be happier if you die from pneumonia brought on by your steroids and viagra (apparently the blood pressure effects help reduce swimming induced lung edema) helping you push your body until it literally breaks down.

Navy BUD/S in particular is a recruiting tool for the Navy. They dangle a glamorous prize in front of the boys of America, a prize that is quite disconnected from anything else the Navy does, and they therefore sign many of them straight out of civilian life for four-year contracts with only the promise that they’ll be allowed to try out. Well over half of the applicants don’t do any actually useful Navy stuff before going to BUD/S; for them it’s their first “training” after basic recruit training. When 90% or whatever of them drop out, they “serve the needs of the Navy” without even the thin guarantees of an enlistment agreement because by letting them do their insomniac beach torture running for a week, the Navy has officially lived up to their end of the bargain. So you’ve got all these kids, many of whom are already high level athletes and often have higher test scores or even degrees, doing whatever the Navy wants them to. Even the ones who don’t sign up for BUD/S can still get pulled into the recruiting office by the romance associated with Hollywood warriors.

Once they wash out, it (anecdotally) seems like about half of them rotate into something useful (seemingly split between brain-jobs like intelligence translator and kinda-cool jobs like underwater ordinance disposal), and the other half get made “undesignated seamen,” your average sailors who are applying new paint or scraping old paint or heating up bagged chicken tenders that taste like paint, basically all the jobs that the Navy has trouble filling. One amusing reddit poster talked about how they’d be doing all these thigns on the “USS Neverdocks.” It also seems like, regardless of the job they move onto, the general impression is that most of the dropouts will be professionally useless for several months, and only about half ever become truly productive sailors. But nobody knows for sure, because the Navy won’t tell anyone.

The alum who led the training most recently graduated from the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training program, or BUD/S, Collins also said. The program is an intense, monthslong training program for Navy SEAL candidates.

Sounds like former lacrosse-bro either thought his instructors were wimpy CYA babysitters when they told him he should be drinking so much water all day, everyday that he can’t even sleep through the night, or perhaps slightly more forgivably, he internalized the lesson so thoroughly that he didn’t realize current lacrosse-bros would not be hydrated nearly well enough to handle a SEAL workout. In either event, that macho competitive bullshit mindset pushing people to ignore giant flashing biological warning lights and hurt themselves is one of the ways that toxic masculinity is literally toxic. It’s D3 lacrosse, my friends. The fate of the free world does not depend on beating Wesleyan by 9 instead of 7.

I think this is the second time this has happened in recent months. I am wondering if the UK bureaucracy has some sort of training about not violating trademarks generally, or some sort of software filter to avoid trademarked terms. Regardless, it seems like a fairly petty annoyance that affects a tiny number of people and can be worked around.

Or hell, maybe it’s the same clerk and Gareth from Slough is sticking to his guns.

Yes, they do, and 99.99% of parents who fuck around and neglect their kids do indeed lose them forever. So do 99.99% of biological parents who did nothing except sign the papers under duress. It’s just that it’s a statistical non-issue that someone is going to even try to steal your baby back, and the 4-5 years of court cases are there specifically to make sure that all parties are heard. Honestly, the only time I’ve really even seen this recently has to do Native American tribes, who have a very different relationship with this process and some pretty strong reasons to distrust the system.

I can tell you feel strongly about this, and I don’t want to imply there’s no room for nuance or that negligent parents deserve an unlimited number of re-tries, or that adoptive parents don’t love their kids. My adoptive parents are/were broken people in many ways, but I never felt unloved or unwanted. I do feel very strongly that infant stranger adoption has an outsized role in family planning options that pushes it to a darker place than it needs to be, and that in foster situations reunification should be the goal if it’s practical. For both, if all parties are acting in good faith and in the interests of children, then the numbers will land where they land. I just don’t think we’re there right now, through a combination of cultural norms and governmental policy.

1. The genetic details absolutely matter. There’s no one factor that’s determinative, but it’s utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn’t matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.

2. The main thing is the child’s welfare, and what’s best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.