[palmotea]

> And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.

If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.

I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.

[rhcom2]

Also known as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

[_yb2s]

> there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically

And Summers himself is one of them- he spent most of his career making things analogous to that essay actually happen

[mwcremer]

Sorry, did you mean "Summers unironically wrote" or "capitalist economist types unironically believe" ?

[quuxplusone]

Or, for that matter, "I unironically believe"? ;)

From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."

The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.

> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."