> "It's okay to be white" campaign.
Are you saying this is reasonable?
EDIT: Here come the downvotes. You can't prove I meant X... oh the irony.
I have a browser extension [1] that lets me set custom tags on HN users. I'm not unconflicted about using it, since I have some ideological hangups that tell me to let people's words speak for themselves and to not let someone's history muddy the waters of a discussion in the present. That being said, HN isn't anonymous and it's a comparatively small community and I decided I might as well try keeping track (to some extent) of who's saying what here because it's practicable and there are other places I can experience death-of-the-author just fine. Besides, it reminds me that jacquesm sorted two metric tons of lego using legos and machine learning that one time, so now that always makes me smile when I see him comment.
So here I am, looking at your comment and trying to figure out what it tells me about you as a commenter - what I would want to remember about you if I saw you again. It needs to be fairly terse, to fit.
The first idea that arrives is "It's not reasonable to be white." I dismiss this immediately, because it's the most cynical and least-founded take on your comment (though darkly funny to me).
The second idea is "The 'It's ok to be white' campaign is not reasonable." I turn this over in my mind a few times and even start typing it out. But while I'm typing, I re-read your edit and pause. Then I realize - I'm doing exactly what that blogpost described. "What did 0xff00ffee mean here?"
What if all you meant to do is ask is the literal question "Are you saying that the 'It's ok to be white' campaign is reasonable?" And it's hard for me to even come up with a way of phrasing this in such a way that it sufficiently emphasises the literal, un-euphemistic, un-implicating character that I'm trying describe.
Then I pause again and realize that I've fallen down a semantic rabbithole and there's a snowball's chance in hell that you meant your comment in the third way. And by this time I've read your next comment [2] and am aware that you're aware of the ambiguous, scissor statement nature of your original comment and the amount of context that must be conveyed in order to disambiguate it. This humanises you. Instead of a snarky internet signaller, you become a real person, with parents whose views you care about and who's already expended effort trying to convey the that large context to people without setting off the self-generating minefield that you know exists. The snappy comment wasn't because you haven't stopped caring about changing people's minds; you're just tired of arguing with apparently superficial people who aren't prepared to take context into account (and you were responding to someone who may be a particularly strong example of such).
So I guess you're "a real human bean".
0: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication