This post was essentially written for Monsieur Chambres, our Comrade on the Continent, which is why his name is in the title.

To whom it may amuse,

It may amuse you to peruse the abuse I enjoyed under this post at the world’s most-read climate-change blog.

Starting from here, furrow your brow as my nemeses HotScot and Jeff Alberts post multiple comments disputing, in all seriousness, PRIMERO my familiarity with Anglophone culture and idiom and SEGUNDO my membership in the club broadly identified as climate skeptics, a.k.a. Our Side of the “debate.”

Why prima facie teammates like Hotty, Alberts and the hapless davidmhoffer should develop such a large hadron for me, is a question no particle accelerator yet constructed can convincingly answer. All I can hypothesize is that it all goes back to the surreal exchange that attended an earlier post called ‘100s of Millions of People Will Die.’

Halfway through the thread below said story, I thought I’d reprise my parody of population-bomber argumentation (we need to kill a lot of people right now, or a lot of people will start dying one day). The gag had bombed (no pun intended, or achieved) last time I told it, and the time before that, so I was hoping against hope—or against the definition of sanity, if you prefer—that someone would finally get it if I phrased it transparently enough:

In my experience, people [like the one I’m replying to] minimalize the overpopulation problem because they don’t have kids. Without a genetic investment in the future of the world, who cares, as long as my DINK (double-income-no-kids) lifestyle isn’t impinged on by tax-happy bolshies, right?

Wrong. Wait till your youngest daughter becomes a mother for the fourth time. I defy you to hold your miracle-triplet grandkids in your arms and explain to THEM why you can’t be bothered doing anything about the overcrowded world you’re bequeathing them.

The science is clear, and it’s piling up every day, with peer-reviewed authors in every imaginable field all reaching the same conclusion regardless of what their papers are actually about: that unless we take draconian steps to cut our numbers on this planet, immediately, people are going to die (High Confidence, Moderate/Low Evidence).

My eyes were still sore from winking at the reader when I had to rub them in incredulity at the incredible credulity of the uncritical literalists whose philosophy seemed to be: if a comment doesn’t end in the mythical /sarc tag (not endorsed anywhere in the W3C’s specifications for HTML usage, by the way), then you can hardly expect them to avoid making fools of themselves by taking everything they read at face value and replying in deadly anger. Caveat scriptor! Why should they have to engage their faculties every single time they have to defend the thread against hostile sentences and paragraphs?

Now, I, of all people, am keenly aware that it takes non-zero cognitive work to detect sarcasm from textual clues alone—hey, I’m half-American by nationality. So I feel the pain in your brain. But still, I mean, dude. Come on. Really.

Both posts offer an embarrassment of riches to anyone who studies the embarrassing poverty of pop language.

By the time Atropos bestows her coup de grace, “HotScot” has persuaded himself (at least) that I grew up in Klimanürnberg, Germany, and that a Kant-like life of parochial seclusion has left me clueless about the peculiar humor of English speakers. It’s only to be expected—he graciously explains—that my exertions in such an alien tongue should invariably go “tit’s [sic] up.”

(Thank’s for the tip’s, my Scot’s freund. I know you have a busy greengrocer’s to run, so it was good of you to take the time.)

Before all is said and done, I’ve also advocated the application of German engineering and Swiss design to the problem of too many people on the planet who aren’t Teutonic, and recommended that Teutophobes be “legally compelled” to read “my pro-tolerance blog.”

As Jeff Alberts points out, I’m deadly earnest about all this:

So the [Brad Keyes] persona and the blog and all it represents is real. There’s someone that believes and promotes this filth.

(And that someone is Brad Keyes, is what Jeff is getting at.)

What Mr Alberts has achieved in seeing through my absurdisms to the literal sincerity behind every single statement is admirable enough. But what’s even more impressive is that he has the laser-like focus to ignore all the hints dropped by a handful of denizens who profess, somehow, to know I’m engaged in “Mickeynehmung” or “Entpissung.” Jeff isn’t about to let MCourtney throw him off the scent by calling me a “very naughty boy :-)” and urging me, for pity’s sake, to violate the strict letter of W3C specifications. Nor can Jeff be deterred by the word of a genuine German called Hermann, who chides,

Jeepers some of you are thick. (“Boah seid ihr blöd.”)

Sure. Thick like a fox!

I’m no virgin to what happens When Hadr-ons Collide, so I’m no longer surprised when the natural instinct to ramp up the hint-dropping (or “lay it on with a trowel” as we say Down Under) succeeds only in entrenching the literalists in their literalism, deepening the Americans-vs-people-who-speak-English polarization.*

Still, it never ceases to get a chuckle out of me. And if you can’t laugh at your own [practical] jokes, what’s the point?

That’s how the saying goes, right?

* I suppose this naradox is predicted, after all, by the insight that someone who’s publicly invested in a particular interpretation will avoid admitting ze or ze was wrong at any cost, even if it means zis interpretation gets more and more baroquely wrong as the evidence comes in.