Wed Nov 05 2003 15:55 (Brendan) Inside the Crummy Studio: First in a Series:
The signal-to-noise ration of sarcasm in print is unworkably awful. The genius of the lie justification footnote is that it solves a this major interwebbian problem in a single stroke: the last given footnote in any footnote chain reliably contains the truth. In this, it's superior to both "</sarcasm>" tags, which are smarmy and nonspecific, and unmarked but obvious sarcasm, which (especially in hypertext) serves only to accelerate the tar pit descent.
I'd make some kind of exaggeration about the usefulness of the LJF and then clarify it here, but that would be unacceptably meta.