@CyanoticWasp You say you try to tailor your communication to your audience, yet you refuse to explain the comment you made?
I really strongly feel that for moral, etiquette, and practical reasons you ought to be willing and able to explain yourself, and I encourage you to do so in the future. While this exact situation may not rise again, I suspect another like it may, so, having read Candide (and enjoyed it, thank you), I want to provide you with an example of what I think you should have done in this thread:
CyanoticWasp > There is no racial injustice in the world today. We live in the best of all possible worlds. So any perceived “inequality” (and we should include gender, status, sexual orientation, medical condition and whatever other differentiators you can think of) must be “just.”
nicobanks: What do you mean?
CyanoticWasp: Oh, I was making a joke. I don’t know if you’ve read Candide by Volatire, but it’s the story of a man who’s been educated in the religious theory of “optimism”: that is, that this is the best of all possible worlds and that all is well. In the story, Candide is buffeted from one place to another, epic-style, meeting strange new people, learning strange new customs, and having tragedy after tragedy befall him and his acquaintances as he struggles to re-unite with his beloved. Every instance in the story pushes up against this theory of optimism, serving to ridicule and discredit it. So, I was just making a joke in reference to that.
See how easy that can be?