I guess i have been overly defensive against you, but i saw your first semantic argument as being obtuse when to me, saying it was probably a joke does not evaluate to: ‘musk is blameless and im siding with him’.

Defining a joke to me, seemed a little combative compared to asking me a clarifying question so i felt like you were trying to discredit me instead of trying to understand, which seemed like punishing a commenter for not aligning with the sentiment of the chain. In hindsight i think your comments were fair…

Forgive the abstract response: The top comment on this chain mentioned it was a joke, and the reply was that it was not a joke. I guess they could have meant that from the perspective of a semantic definition of the word joke. I interpreted it as them saying musk did not intend it as a joke.

When someone says “i was just joking”, it does not always mean they delivered a joke by your definition provided above, in fact its usually the case that it doesnt because they are having to tell their audience its not a joke. If i were interpreting “i was just joking” with the intention to accurately understand that person, i would assume they meant: “i wasnt serious”, “i thought it was funny to say that”, or “whoops that wasnt recieved like i thought it would be”.

All that to say: to me, musk genuinely seemed to miscalculate the poor taste of his comments. In my opinion, Musk didnt seem to try to incite violence, which is the basis for the outrage. He is just short-sighted and the consequences are far reaching compared to a normal person saying something which would otherwise just be “a bad joke”.