All kinds of clever and subtle things become possible in human communication when you stop insisting on overt signposts to interpretation and instead rely on your wit, experience, and judgment to resolve (or accept) possible ambiguities.

The chatbots on HN and Reddit are pretty smart, but yeah, you can find them when they complain about having to have human emotion and intuition to interpret a comment.

There is nothing in his post to assume humor either way, "overt signpost" or not. This is written text, where you don't have the signposts that vocal communication allows, such as sarcasm. I don't insist on "overt signposts" but I'm not going to pretend that there was anything in the post to make the author's point clear. So here I am relying on my wit, experience, and judgement and I have no way to resolve either way. So I'm going to assume the author is trying to make a serious comment.

This is interesting because I would never consider this comment serious whatsoever until I looked at the comments. I agree with cobralibre that you need to rely on your wit, experience, and judgement. Language is very nuanced and can't be taken literal.

This is also under the assumption that the person in question isn't a sociopath.

Oh, come on.

> Voter registration is unfortunately a front for other malicious activities - such as jury duty, a state-mandated intrusion into my most private information and thoughts

How can you get to that point and not immediately understand that it's obviously satire?

> How can you get to that point and not immediately understand that it's obviously satire?

By having encountered people who express exactly that sentiment and are deadly serious about it.

And you should treat those people as satire, too. The insistence on taking everyone seriously all the time only creates friction. It is not your job to take someone seriously, it is their job to make you take them seriously.

> jury duty, a state-mandated intrusion into my most private information and thoughts

Which aspect of that statement do you find satirical?

Jury-duty forces someone to have an opinion on record about some contentious topic. By most accounts that is an intrusion into one's private information and thoughts.

You won't and can't be forced. You can state your objections, and your refusal to make a public judgement, in which case you will not be selected to be on the jury. Even if some unreasonable judge still put you on the jury, you can refuse to vote guilty or not guilty, in which case there would be a hung jury. No court wants someone with such an attitude on a jury, so it won't ever get to this.

I'd hate to have seen your high school essays on Swift's A Modest Proposal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

Unrelated... Would 'they' have really been more awkward than '(s)he'?