E. Lily Yu @elilyyu@mastodon.social

The simplest way of thinking through this is to use Goethe's three questions:

- What are you trying to do? i. e. What is your intended meaning?

- How well are you doing it? i. e. Is this intended meaning sufficiently clear?

- Was it worth doing? i. e. Is the conclusion you want your reader to arrive at worth the journey you're taking them on?

And... that's gonna be my conclusion. Thank you so much for reading, and please share your thoughts and criticisms with me!

Compare this to how Nick Mullen's joke operates: men who believe rape is funny, and men who believe it's a good thing to do are everywhere, and the view is widely perpetuated by our culture.

Irony is frequently used by fascists to create a third group: people who recognise the ironic meaning of the joke, and also realise that this ironic meaning is used to mask the statement's actual sincerity.

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.

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.

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"

In this restaurant, they have a caesar salad that has kale as the primary green instead of romaine, and they missed their opportunity of naming the salad "Kale, Caesar!" 🏛️

Fluffy Cat Illustrations by Malaysian Artist Kamwei Fong

@RecursiveRabbit Well, when you grow up and are educated in a society as bigoted as ours, it happens.

I think what happens a lot is that white people expect everyone else to be patient while they learn how to be decent people as the world changes.

And that's not really an option as the learned inhumanity of whiteness is still causing so much harm.

Until white folks find a way to reduce that harm, it's just going to be a hard road.

Here's a list of things that matter more than your ability to hold a job:

- your mental health
- your physical health
- your heart
- your kindness
- your willingness to listen to others and empathize with them
- your sense of humor (lol)
- your family, blood or chosen
- your creativity
- your morals
- you, as you are

In a world full of metered internet bandwidth and widespread wealth inequality and poverty, auto-play video is a form of gentrification.