Mads "Legend" Viande @byttyrs@radical.town

car that wrecks itself without moving

cant get a hair cut so i am a permanent hat wearer now

please do not comment on someone’s non-sexual post with some kind of sexual remark (even if it’s a joke) unless you are close enough where this is an established part of your relationship. i see this happening more and more lately and it’s rather creepy and upsetting

not to beat this subject to death but please be mindful when replying to anyone in general... it’s one thing to make crude jokes with people whose boundaries you know very well and quite another to put a stranger in the very uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge your sexuality. this kind of behavior drives people out of communities

found the Tumblr of someone who describes themself as a "second-gen SCAdian," giving me a dizzying alternate-universe vision of myself where Dad fucking committed and raised his children to LARP

@byttyrs @garfiald look mads Garf and I are both very huge IQ and greatly enjoy huge IQ reading. I don't even need to look the book up to know they picked the one that reflects that huge bond we share ok? nobody was 'pwned' we are just two big time intellectuals on online

@byttyrs dont repeat this but it is one of my favourite novels

@selfsame [Caveril Lavine voice] he hunt. she gather. more obvious... how?

Hi everyone, today I'd like to write a short (lol) thread about a topic that comes up again and again in both leftist circles and discourse at large surrounding media. I don't have a definitive argument to put forward, but I hope to encourage discussion and to invite all of you to think critically and make steps towards a clearer understanding of what is often a rather hazy concept. I'll use CWs but be advised I'll be discussing upsetting things throughout.

So, without further ado: irony.

"Irony", when it's not used in the Alanis Morissette way, has two meanings. It is either

1) A local figure of speech, consisting of saying one thing to mean its opposite

2) A generalised attitude characterised by the playful espousal of gestures and ideas without ever fully committing to any of them

While I'll mostly be using "irony" to mean the first definition, the second definition is useful to keep in mind and will come into play over the course of the argument.

What I'm interested in here is irony when it is used in jokes. The first two views I would like to disagree with are the idea that it's always OK, and the idea that it's never OK.

The idea that irony is always OK is usually put forward with the idea that you can say anything as long as it's a joke. This is ridiculous. It implicitly lets the person making the statement decide if what they said is a joke, which implies that anyone can say anything as long as they follow it up with "just joking"

People should be held morally responsible for what they say, which means they can't be given a get-out-of-jail-free card by claiming it's a joke. When you make a joke about something, you're still saying something about that thing. Most of the time what you're saying is utterly inconsequential, but sometimes it isn't. In any case, nothing is ever "just a joke" because every joke is a also a statement.

Then there's the idea that irony is always bad, an idea that I have seen leftists occasionally throw around. This is also ridiculous. In Western culture, the first great ironist was Socrates, who over the course of the Socratic Dialogues, playfully espouses different ideas before dismissing them. Ironic thinking is essential to our continued becoming as people. You can renounce irony but you can't ever be rid of it (how ironic).

So, how can we tell when we're using irony right and when we're using it wrong? This is where it gets complicated, and in order to being to answer this question, we need to start looking into how irony actually functions.

If irony is saying something to mean something else, all ironic statements contain within themselves the possibility that someone might take them literally, miss out on the ironic tone and/or context.

Irony is always exclusionary, because it divides its audience into two groups: those that get it, and those that don't. Even if every human being in the world takes an ironic statement the same way, in order to realise that it's ironic they must first glean the statement's ironic meaning. Before you become the person who gets it, you are always first the person who doesn't get it. Irony always creates a grey area.

This doesn't, however, mean that one can never be ironic when discussing heavy and difficult topics. One of the best and most skilful uses of irony in literary history is Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The speaker of A Modest Proposal argues that in order to alleviate their living conditions, poor families in Ireland ought to sell off their babies to be eaten by wealthy families. Let's spend a moment thinking about how this works.

If irony creates two groups, those that get it and those that don't, here are the groups of readers of A Modest Proposal:

- Those that realise Swift doesn't think poor Irish children should die

- Those who think he means it, and disagree

- Those who think he means it, and agree

The reason A Modest Proposal is so well thought out, is that the third group doesn't exist. It's simply too horrifying.