Hier und dar oder sonst wo

@dangerliesbeforeyou

From Politifact, here's what Biden actually said:

He said this in 1977, specifically about busing to integrate public schools.

Busing was a practice briefly used mainly in the northern states, where housing segregation and economic segregation had led to de facto school segregation. Busing meant merging school districts or re-drawing boundary lines, and transporting students to further-away schools in order to have a racially mixed student body.

Sometimes it was unidirectional, with Black students being bused in to (usually better funded) schools in predominantly white areas, and other times students were bused in both directions. Different schools used different methods of deciding who was going to be bused and where, but it usually didn't involve personal choice of the students and families.

It was wildly unpopular. In addition to the race aspect--which we'll get to in a second--it created a number of logistical and practical problems. First and most obviously, students being bused had to get up earlier in order to travel the longer distance to their newly-assigned school. Also, students were split up from their friends and classmates, and the new school might have different course offerings and extracurricular activities than the old.

These are all things that kids naturally resent. And of course it was very obvious, in any given school, who were the "bused" kids--the ones whom (as a child or teenager would understand it) your friends had been sent away to make space for. And they didn't even seem grateful to be here!

Or, on the side of the bused kids, your life had been disrupted to send you to this new school, and now everybody (except for the other bussed kids) was acting like it was your fault you were here! (Maybe there were some more interesting classes or extracurriculars, if you ended up at a better-resourced school, but somehow, all the spots seemed to be taken up with, you know. The kind of kids who had always gone to that school.) Per the Politifact article, some Black kids bused in to formerly-white schools were greeted by mobs throwing rocks and bricks at the buses.

The bused-in kids at any given school tended to stick together (as most kids would, if sent to any new school with a random selection of previous classmates, even if not greeted with violence when they arrived) and each group projected their resentments about the situation onto the other group of kids (who were right there) instead of onto the adults who had crafted this policy with no consideration of child and adolescent psychology.

Add on the fact that a lot of the kids were coming from families/households with at least implicitly racist attitudes and beliefs, and you can see how the practice ended up inflaming racial tensions rather than easing them.

So what Biden was saying--again, in 1977--was that busing is clearly not working; it's making things worse instead of better. Focusing the integration process on schools puts all the burden on kids, and busing does nothing about the root causes of de facto segregation: economic inequality and discrimination in housing and employment.

All of which was (and is) true: busing has faded into history, and we still have employment patterns that lead to segregated housing, and housing patterns that lead to segregated schools.

But he did slip up pretty badly by using the word "jungle." That sounds bad, and I'm honestly a little surprised he didn't realize at the time that that specific word choice could be cherry-picked to make him sound racist.

Edit: Here's an NPR article interviewing a guy who is an actual expert on this subject, about Biden's take on it, from the last time this quote circualted, in 2019.

in the japanese suburbs, every street is lined with rain gutters, so even during heavy rain, the streets are perfectly navigable, even on foot. in the american suburbs, there's like one drain every couple of streets, so whenever it storms, the streets turn into rivers

the american driver craves the sensation of hydroplaning

the american

driver craves the sensation

of hydroplaning

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

splishy the puddles

I don’t really Go Here but u can always rely on this man to read a right wing politician’s outfit for filth

I mean. Just devastating 😭

This man has LETHAL comebacks. Idiots keep trying to get one over on him and he has never missed

Actually no I'm double reblogging this I found the one where he *calls a guy's tailor* to confirm his suit isn't actually bespoke

You cannot win in his arena. This isn't "if you come at the king you better not miss" this is "don't fight a shark in the water"

You're telling me a gar* licked this bread?

*a North American freshwater fish of the family Lepisosteidae

A helpful visual:

Official gar post

One of my previous bosses, the Archivist for the State of -redacted for privacy-, had one of these (or very very similar prototype format) that he kept in his briefcase.

Whenever someone in a meeting would say something along the lines of “we don’t need to worry about that/budget money for that/do that, everything is digital now!” He would pull this bad boy out of his briefcase and say “this has digital files on it, please access them. Oh, you can’t? Well what about this? or these?” And pull out a selection floppy discs and CD types.

And that is how he fought the good fight for a budget for the archives because digital preservation is expensive and difficult and there are a million different hardware and software types and technological obsolescence is a nightmare.

obsessed with what's happening on twitter rn

Yea, he belongs here

For context, @neil-gaiman has NOTHING to do with the new LOTR series

It’s been hilarious watching this unfold...  :)

I've never enjoyed being yelled at more.

Bringing this back from 2022. Unlike Neil Gaiman, who won't be bringing back LotR The Rings of Power.

Darn, those Harry Potter movies of his were such abominations, too. Don't even get me started about his novel Persuasion, nothing like Pride and Prejudice, I was terribly disappointed.

In retrospect perhaps Elon Musk should have come to me for advice on how to fail to buy Twitter. I would have told him to try harder.

Recently, while staring far too long at a potato chip, it occurred to me that the ridges could possibly be used to create a lenticular effect. So I got out some chip dip (and the smallest paint brush I have) to test it out. I started with a simple 2-frame illustration of a football and a basketball, then I painted a little sour cream and onion dip bird. 🥔🕊️ - via my new @brockdavisart instagram

Item: Crest of Tuning; simply tap one of the metal bars and the resonant frequencies create a minute-long ten-foot-wide sphere of protection against Bardic magic.

my cat somehow took hundreds of selfies on my phone when i was sleeping

my personal favorites

Good morning to doomed people only

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room / Bill Hader, on IT: Chapter Two