The prospect of Bari Weiss in Australia is, frankly, terrifying. She loves reactionary hot takes & Australian media is as reactionary as it gets in anglophone world.
Okay, since a few nimrods are insisting on reading the last tweet in bad faith, I have to go through the "tiresome business of explaining a joke." (To paraphrase Leo Strauss).
Around the time of that tweet, I also re-tweeted tweet below. Guess what: I do not literally believe that that Bari Weiss is being transported to Australia like a penal colonist.
Earlier today I made tweet below. Guess what? I don't actually believe Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Justin Trudeau "We'll 9/11 your ass!"
In like my writing, I like to use the full range of my (admittedly limited) voice, which includes irony, hyperbole, sarcasm, & even invention. I tend to trust my readers can pick up difference between that & my more sincere voice. 99% of the time they can.
With this offending tweet, I made it yesterday and the immediate response (from my normal set of readers) was calm awareness of that it was a jibe that mixed irony & hyperbole.
But suddenly today I'm getting all sorts of readers who are reading it in the most literal possible manner. This is no accident but a direct result of bad faith readers (ahem: @bariweiss & @conor64) retweeting it with that spin added, creating context collapse.
When The Weekly Standard publishes a parody, they alway stick a big fat label reading "SATIRE" on it. I would like to think that it's possible to make jokes on twitter without resorting to use hand-holding. But maybe not.
If I'm reading this tweet right, @conor64 thinks that making a joke at another writer's expense is sneaky & underhanded. Maybe! Maybe the only true nobility is earnestness & I'm a bad person. Mea Culpa.
Anyways, if you want to see a genuinely mean-spirited attack on Weiss & New York Times op ed section, far beyond what I would dare, go to @michelleisawolf, who is much funnier than I am
