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Competence, the ability to perform organizational core tasks, is an underrated quality. In its presence, we take it for granted. We miss it only in its absence. It is an especially overlooked quality by people who value other things, like ideological goals, or people who believe that existing institutions are fundamentally corrupt, or people who have never actually run things.
And when you put those people in charge of our institutions, the price of incompetence suddenly looms large.
We are witnessing this right now with the gross mismanagement of New College in Florida, a public higher education that Ron DeSantis turned into a pet project. The idea was to turn this institution into a conservative bulwark, akin to Hillsdale College in Michigan. Instead, it has become a testament to populist incompetence, to the vast breadth between breezy platitudes about transforming higher education, and the reality of running a real institution, with real students.
As the new semester starts, New College is an administrative disaster. One third of faculty have gone. Students cannot find classes. Students with housing contracts are being relocated to an airport hotel.
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Yeah, my go-to example of this is still the US Postal Service. I’m still waiting for DeJoy to get one of these…
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I mean, seriously, the idea was never to run a college, it was to turn a college into an indoctrination center. Pure and simple. Amazingly, that’s not actually an easy thing to pull off.
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Are they accredited?
If so, can accreditation be pulled?
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They were, before all this, and I have no idea if anything can be done before the next cycle rolls around. It is not the same college it was, though.
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Such a critical story that it pushed the embassy bombings off the front cover. Priorities I guess
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apparently they gave the housing returning students had expected to the new athletes they recruited. how many athletes?
The incoming freshman class, which is the largest in New College’s history, will include at least 341 students; 155, or just under half, are athletes, according to [the] university spokesperson… the baseball team had 70 players as of July, compared to 37 on the University of Florida’s Division I team.
so a quarter of all new students are on the baseball team. excellent. i sure hope they have a baseball field
( via Chaos reigns at New College of Florida as fall semester nears )
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Umm, WTAF? What the hell are they turning this “school” in to?
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Spoiler alert: they don’t.
(But I know you know that already!)
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They’re turning it from a school to a ‘school’.
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why buy when you can lease to own?
i am curious how much money florida is shoveling in. leased facilities, students in long stay hotels, a new private bus company, and the inflated salaries of de santis’s picks.
a libertarian paradise, so probably public money flowing upward, but not entirely sure
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The United States respectfully submits this omnibus Sentencing Memorandum for defendants Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. This Sentencing Memorandum addresses those factors that are common to all defendants, a hearing on which is set for August 29, 2023. Additional support for the government’s sentencing recommendations for each defendant are discussed in Attachment A (Tarrio), Attachment B (Nordean), Attachment C (Biggs), Attachment D (Rehl), and Attachment E (Pezzola).
The interesting bit is that the five defendants all have a Criminal History Category of VI, and so
| Defendent | Guidelines | Government Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Tario | 360–life | 33 years |
| Biggs | 360–life | 33 years |
| Noread | 324–405 | 27 years |
| Rehle | 360–life | 30 years |
| Pezolla | 210–263 | 20 years |
From the appendix of Tario’s conduct
False contrition would be entirely consistent with Tarrio’s broader pattern of duplicity and double-dealing. Examples abound: Tarrio told the House Select Committee under oath that “with almost 100 percent certainty… if I would’ve been on the ground on January 6th, there would be absolutely zero Proud Boys that got arrested,” Tarrio Ex. 7 at 173, but he told the Proud Boys Presidents Chat that, if he had been present, “We would still be there,” Ex. 514-59. When Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, raised concern that a member was generating controversy by wearing a t-shirt emblazoned “6MWE” (a grotesque reference to the Holocaust, standing for “six million wasn’t enough”), Tarrio proposed to falsely claim it meant “6 man weapon and equipment.” Tarrio Ex. 8 at 1.7 Tarrio publicly accused a media outlet of intentionally publishing a “false” and “EXTREMELY dangerous” report that Proud Boys were wearing orange hats, Tarrio Ex. 9, but numerous photos and videos from the event prominently show the orange hats worn by members of the marching group from the Arizona chapter, e.g., Tarrio Ex. 10. On an episode of his “War Boys” podcast, he told his audience that they should attend the inauguration “in Biden gear” and “turn [it] into a fucking circus, a sign of resistance, a sign of revolution.,” Tarrio Ex. 11; then, responding to media coverage that quoted the statement verbatim, Tarrio took to Parler to deny ever having said it, Ex. 604-14. All this flows from Tarrio’s apparent worldview, in which “all politics revolves around half-truths and some lies,” Ex. 490K at ~8:32, and in which “Goebbels” is flip shorthand for the use of “misinformation” to deceive the public and “cultivate fear,” Ex. 514-47.
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A direct connection to the insurrection on that day and the Trump conspirators.
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CNN recreated Chesebro’s movements using deleted video clips from the conservative social media site Parler, photos from Twitter, footage from Infowars and video from Jones’ own bodyguard’s body camera – previously published by Infowars
hosted by their own petard
( apologies to shakespeare and the english language generally )
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The symbolism is muddled and the execution shows the results of removing the arts and humanities from junior high school.
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I’ve done better penis graffiti with a marker and 30 seconds of freedom.
As far as I can tell, the cognitive dissonance (this is fine, a drag show no?) doesn’t make their heads pop, as there’s lots of extra space for contrasting things to exist freely.
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