As I hope some of you have noticed, lately I've ramped up the proportion of my posts that are sarcastic. This has brought to my notice how often, and apparently how easily, we fail to pick up these days on the fact that a post by any one of us is intended to be understood as sarcasm.
I have my own thoughts about why that seems to me to happen so much more often today than it did years ago. I'm thinking maybe our age is one in which so much absurdity is thrown at us as Gospel truth, we are all of us to one extent or another begun to take everything, from any source, as an attempt to make us swallow nonsense.
So that raises to my mind the question of what, if anything, I should do to increase the odds that my sarcastic posts are understood to be sarcasm, rather than just one more tedious attempt by this or that person to fob off crap as truth.
I'm not sure how I will answer that question going forward after having substantially more time to learn and think about it, but if anyone is interested in what to expect from me for the foreseeable future, then here it is: I am for now going to continue on as I have been doing, which is to try to signal when a post of mine is meant to be taken as sarcasm, mostly by putting forward as 'the truth' the most outlandish, improbable, and genuinely absurd ideas I can think of in hope that their ridiculousness will be a flag that is easily recognizable as sarcasm.
Having said that, please let me make this clear. I feel no actual obligation or duty to anyone but myself for what I do here. The only exceptions to that might be extraordinary ones, along the lines of yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater with a very high bar set for what that might mean in practice.
Now, anyone who finds my position on this intolerable has a ready recourse open to them. Stop reading my posts. Beyond that, if someone is in denial of my right to set my own standards here, then so far as I am concerned, they have removed themselves altogether from the conversation because they aren't even reading the same book as me, let alone us both being on the same page. i.e. I'm most likely to simply ignore them, just as I would encourage them to ignore me.
I wish I felt I had no need to spell things out. I've never felt such a need in the past. But I guess we're living in a different age for now.
Last, there's nothing in all that I have said I believe is worth my time debating. Were I to politely tell you otherwise, I would be lying to myself to say it.
Thanks for your attention.
I have my own thoughts about why that seems to me to happen so much more often today than it did years ago. I'm thinking maybe our age is one in which so much absurdity is thrown at us as Gospel truth, we are all of us to one extent or another begun to take everything, from any source, as an attempt to make us swallow nonsense.
So that raises to my mind the question of what, if anything, I should do to increase the odds that my sarcastic posts are understood to be sarcasm, rather than just one more tedious attempt by this or that person to fob off crap as truth.
I'm not sure how I will answer that question going forward after having substantially more time to learn and think about it, but if anyone is interested in what to expect from me for the foreseeable future, then here it is: I am for now going to continue on as I have been doing, which is to try to signal when a post of mine is meant to be taken as sarcasm, mostly by putting forward as 'the truth' the most outlandish, improbable, and genuinely absurd ideas I can think of in hope that their ridiculousness will be a flag that is easily recognizable as sarcasm.
Having said that, please let me make this clear. I feel no actual obligation or duty to anyone but myself for what I do here. The only exceptions to that might be extraordinary ones, along the lines of yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater with a very high bar set for what that might mean in practice.
Now, anyone who finds my position on this intolerable has a ready recourse open to them. Stop reading my posts. Beyond that, if someone is in denial of my right to set my own standards here, then so far as I am concerned, they have removed themselves altogether from the conversation because they aren't even reading the same book as me, let alone us both being on the same page. i.e. I'm most likely to simply ignore them, just as I would encourage them to ignore me.
I wish I felt I had no need to spell things out. I've never felt such a need in the past. But I guess we're living in a different age for now.
Last, there's nothing in all that I have said I believe is worth my time debating. Were I to politely tell you otherwise, I would be lying to myself to say it.
Thanks for your attention.