This is some cold-ass shit. As President, Biden has to say something. But he can say it in a way that says nothing and everything.

I want to shake the hand of the staffer that wrote this because this is absolutely fucking superb.

Biden (and/or the staffer who composed this) is using a technique called "damning with faint praise," which is the rhetorical equivalent of "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Nothing he says is untrue, he just ... doesn't say much.

"I'll never forget the first time I met Dr. Kissinger..." A statement like this would normally be followed by a personal anecdote of some kind. But here it just stands alone.

"Throughout our careers, we often disagreed....." One would expect a but to follow this part, some way of softening such a statement by complimenting Kissinger. There isn't one.

"...his fierce intellect and profound strategic focus..." These are the nicest things the statement says about Kissinger, and the second one is a bit backhanded - "strategic focus" could be restated as "ruthlessness" or "knack for scheming" if they were willing to be rude.

"...he continued to offer his views..." This could be restated more positively if Biden meant it to be positive - "contribute his insights" or "share his wisdom." By using the very neutral "offer his views," the statement implies that's neutral is the best they could do.

"...and all those who loved him." This final sentence is brief and direct, and again, the absolute minimum Biden could say to be polite. It also delicately implies that the Bidens are not among those who loved him.

me: 

Disney: “We’re going to take all our movies off of streaming sites INCLUDING THE ONE WE ALREADY OWN (Hulu) so we can put them on a separate one and milk even more money out of you.”

Me:

You can have your torrent activity go through a proxy (while the rest of your traffic isn’t shuttled through there) using services like BTGuard. All the torrent activity is run through the proxy:

If your ISP has bandwidth caps, you’ll still run into those. But they won’t know what you’re transferring.

John Smith 

John Smith was born in Manhattan in 1917, the second son of a prosperous Wall Street Banker.  In many ways, John’s early life looked picture perfect.  Any hint of superiority, however, was tempered by his father, who instilled a deep sense of civic duty and propriety in his sons.  The boys were four years apart in age.  John looked up to older brother Chris, a star athlete and an A-student, following in suit.  In 1927, when John was 11, Chris collapsed and was soon wheelchair bound.  In March, 1929, The Wall Street Crash struck, and overnight American banking institutions folded.  John’s father was financially ruined and promptly took his own life.  And so, at 13 years old, John Smith swore to himself that he would never allow himself to break.  Even when his beloved brother passed away, two years later, John Smith pressed on.  Despite witnessing a New York City that had become decrepit and corrupt, and a failing America that had been gutted once more by the 1933 assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, John was still determined and still a patriot.  He earned a degree at Princeton, he joined the New York Mayor’s office, implementing programs to get America back to work, and, when war loomed, he signed up for officer training at West Point. where he proved a natural solder and tactician.  Graduating to a post within the US Signal Corps.  By 1942. John Smith was a 1st Lieutenant.  In 1943, he was promoted to Captain and re-deployed to the Pentagon to advise all branches of the military on intelligence gathering.  During this time, he met and married Helen McCrae, the beautiful, accomplished daughter of two Harvard academics.  Helen became pregnant with their first child in July, 1945.  Just a few months later, the American government fell to the New Reich.  Smith saw surrender as the right thing to do.  America had lost.  Nothing in the US arsenal could compete with Nazi nuclear power.  So, John Smith assimilated into the interim government, in sincere hope he could lessen the brutality of Nazi retaliation against rebel uprisings.  He could save American lives.  He could keep those he loved safe.  Nazism is survival.

At Cambridge University, they were sick of checking the coffee pot level, so Quentin Stafford-Frasier wrote client software for a greyscale 128x128 camera hooked up to an acorn archemedes computer.  Paul Jardetzky wrote the server program.

“One of my wife’s distant friends has attempted to invite herself to stay with us, again,” writes the exasperated owner of a prime 2 bedroom apartment in New York City in this Ask MetaFilter question. “She did this last March, and we used the excuse of me starting a new job and needing to do x, y, and z as well as the “out of town” excuse for any remaining dates. This got us off scot-free, but we both knew the time would come again… and it’s here. We need a final solution.”

He goes on to list two different possibilities he can think of for getting this woman to stop asking for free room and board. The first is a little white lie, something about their keys being hard to duplicate. The other is to be vague, to say something like “Sorry, that isn’t going to work for us” and hope she doesn’t ask why.

The first few answers give this poster very direct advice: Just say no. No need to give an explanation, it’s her who’s being rude by asking. Others give him advice that was probably more like what he was expecting: other ways to be vague like claiming that it’s “One of those random `Life in NYC things.’”

Another thread of discussion popped up around whether or not the woman asking for a place to stay was being rude. Some posters couldn’t understand how simply asking to stay in someone’s apartment was rude, while another went as far to say that putting someone in the position “having to be rude and say no” was rude in and of itself.

It is into this context that user tangerine contributes this answer:

This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person — and you obviously are — then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

Obviously she’s an Ask and you’re a Guess. (I’m a Guess too. Let me tell you, it’s great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.)

Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people — ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you’ll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you’ll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the Cluelessness of Everyone.

As you read through the responses to this question, you can easily see who the Guess and the Ask commenters are. It’s an interesting exercise. (#)

“One of my wife’s distant friends has attempted to invite herself to stay with us, again,” writes the exasperated owner of a prime 2 bedroom apartment in New York City in this Ask MetaFilter question. “She did this last March, and we used the excuse of me starting a new job and needing to do x, y, and z as well as the “out of town” excuse for any remaining dates. This got us off scot-free, but we both knew the time would come again… and it’s here. We need a final solution.”

He goes on to list two different possibilities he can think of for getting this woman to stop asking for free room and board. The first is a little white lie, something about their keys being hard to duplicate. The other is to be vague, to say something like “Sorry, that isn’t going to work for us” and hope she doesn’t ask why.

The first few answers give this poster very direct advice: Just say no. No need to give an explanation, it’s her who’s being rude by asking. Others give him advice that was probably more like what he was expecting: other ways to be vague like claiming that it’s “One of those random `Life in NYC things.’”

Another thread of discussion popped up around whether or not the woman asking for a place to stay was being rude. Some posters couldn’t understand how simply asking to stay in someone’s apartment was rude, while another went as far to say that putting someone in the position “having to be rude and say no” was rude in and of itself.

It is into this context that user tangerine contributes this answer:

This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person — and you obviously are — then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

Obviously she’s an Ask and you’re a Guess. (I’m a Guess too. Let me tell you, it’s great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.)

Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people — ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you’ll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you’ll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the Cluelessness of Everyone.

As you read through the responses to this question, you can easily see who the Guess and the Ask commenters are. It’s an interesting exercise. (#)

I’ve spent the past… five? Let’s say five - the past five years analyzing the structure of Disney Musicals as part of the process to write my own/a parody of them, and the thing is that all the modern ones have roughly the same number of songs - except Mulan.

Mulan has about half, because after AGWFF ends with that unresolved final phrase, there are no more songs until the end credits, which isn’t even sung in-universe.

Mulan wasn’t even the REALM of fucking around - when they arrive at that village, when the true horrors of war are brought into the story, not only does it interrupt THAT song, it breaks the entire fucking mold - the movie’s damn genre changes; it is no longer a musical.

And the Huns represent this from the start - Jafar and Hades are notable for not having proper villain songs, but Jafar does get his Prince Ali refrain and Hades and his plan get sung ABOUT by the muses. No scene with the Huns has any singing, they are mentioned once in song (the second line of Man, natch), and they of all Disney Villains are probably the most serious - no jokes, no witty asides, no sassy delivery of dry humor. The Huns are an invading army who plan to straight up kill a fuckton of people, including children, and AGWFF’s sudden end is the moment when our happy go lucky MUSICAL protagonists finally come in contact with them and their work directly - and it breaks them. Because shit like the Huns cannot exist in happy go lucky musical world. They just exist in our world. The real world. And you can’t sing your problems away here.

have emotions

think thoughts

is likely introverted or extroverted

has at least a few friends