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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.

You absolutely can, if you are actually dealing with people listening, because sarcasm is signalled with (among other things) tone (the other things include the listeners contextual knowledge of the speaker.)

You can't do it online, in text, where the audience is mostly strangers who would have to actively dig into your history to get any contextual sense of you as a speaker, because text doesn't carry tone, and the other cues are missing, too.

And by “you can’t”, I mean “you absolutely can, but you have to be aware of the limitations of the medium and take care to use the available tools to substitute for the missing signalling channels”.

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It's a matter of degree. You're right, of course, but there was a time not so long ago when such things were ubiquitous - even on the internet. Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek. Then it slowly dawned on everyone that there were a bunch of people there who weren't kidding, and things kind of went to pot.

In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex times. I miss them.

It’s not even really a problem of the Internet necessarily; it’s rather a symptom of the growing political divide in Western society. Things are “simple” now because we’ve reached the point where nuanced discussion is pointless. In Europe you can be jailed for going against the Accepted Opinions™, and we’re seeing a rise in politically motivated attacks. There is no logical solution to emotionally backed rhetoric like we’ve seen with the Turtle Island terrorists; you can’t debate ethics with someone who wants you dead.

Who are the Turtle Island terrorists? I only know of four people accused of attempting to build a bomb, but not actually having done so.

Surely you aren't taking a government at its word on a politically charged case? Need we trudge out the Chicago 7 again?

By their own words they were going to commit terrorism. That, logically, makes them terrorists. They were found, on film, to be making and experimenting with illegal explosives, and they were found to own even more materials. If you have trustworthy evidence that this is all fabrication—evidence that doesn’t exist in your mind—then I’d be more than happy to see it.

And if you’re saying all of this because you agree with them and their actions, at least have the courage to state you support terrorism directly.

> Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek.

I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke, until true believers started showing up and thinking we believed too. Not a joke anymore...

> I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke

4chan was created in 2003. Trump's first bid for the Presidency was an attempt at the Reform Party nomination dropped early in the primary season—in 2000, the one cycle when that party had access to federal matching funds but wasn't effectively a vehicle for H. Ross Perot. Another Trump bid was a recurring topic of discussion in serious, if speculative, contexts ever since (and, for that matter, the idea of a Trump presidential run had been even before the first bid, back to the 1980s, as I recall.) It certainly is not an idea that first emerged as a 4chan joke.

Trump running wasn't a 4chan joke, but support of him was.

Also, thank you for encouraging me to read the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Reform_Party_presidential....

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