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I'm afraid sarcasm is often lost on our more zealous comrades.

• gliese1337 11y ago
  sarcasm is often lost on our more zealous comrades. While this is often true, in this particular case I don't think you can blame "our comrades", regardless of zealousness, for that. This is simply not an effective deployment of sarcasm. The effectiveness of sarcasm depends on the audience's ability to discern that what you say is obviously ridiculous or otherwise at odds with what you really think. When it is not reasonable to expect that your audience can make that deduction, you have failed at using sarcasm. This is much easier to accomplish in person, where body language and vocal inflection add to your meaning, and thus sarcasm must be used more sparingly and skillfully in written media. It is also much easier when you have a well-known reputation, especially concerning the topics you wish to satirize. A relatively anonymous text-based forum such as HN is thus one of the most difficult places to effectively deploy sarcasm. In this case, the poster did not establish his true feelings ahead of time, nor engage in sufficient hyperbole to make the statement clearly ridiculous, nor even employ quotes to distance the words from his own opinion. No, he simply made a statement that is completely plausible to interpret as his genuine opinion, given how common such statements actually are. This does nothing to demonstrate the "intellectual bankruptcy" of such a statement. It's just sloppy rhetoric. If you know before you post that you're going to have to explain how you didn't really mean that, and we're supposed to take it as sarcasm, then maybe try a different rhetorical tactic, because you have already admitted failure at this one.