That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.
If you project the other things you know about this guy to color everything he did, sure. Reading it made the tone obvious, well before I got to his defense in the wiki article. The memo on its own is painfully obviously a joke but I'm really not surprised that the audience of HN has difficulty interpreting tone.
The consistent mistake people did last years, including those on HN was to pretend to themselves that odious people are "just joking" and "totally not serious". Again and again. Starting with 4chan and 8chan that were just a trolls and no one was ever nazi, until nazi became normalized, the top government and leadership of a major party.
No one was sexist ever, they were just joking and all feminists were stupid not understanding that, until their quite sexist messages got released by inside a pack of messages to known abuser. This is literally the case of Larry Summers.
And you want to play that game again, with literally the same person. Of course no one believes it, it is not being sophisticated, you are asking people to pretend they are stupid. Nothing in Summers career suggests he would sarcastic out of care for Africa or environment. That is not what his work was, at all.
We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
Yes, he was “joking”- he is what the Internet calls a “Schrödinger's dbag,” it was only a joke if people don’t agree, but if they do it’s what he really believes- a cowardly way of communicating. In the context of his career, his actual beliefs are along the lines of the essay.
