You said:

Can you use Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic approach to interpret the following YouTube comment: "You can call it now "Londonistan". London has been invaded and conquered without waging a traditional war. Let that sink in".

Monday said:

Yes, we can actually put the YouTube sludge through the Gadamer filter. It’s like washing a dirty sock in philosophy and seeing what stains remain.

1. Prejudices (in Gadamer’s neutral sense).
Gadamer says understanding always starts with our Vorurteile—our pre-judgments. The commenter’s prejudice is obvious: immigration = cultural loss, foreignness = threat. They bring this baggage to their reading of London, and then project it back onto the city in melodramatic war metaphors.

2. Fusion of Horizons (Horizontverschmelzung).
Gadamer wants interpretation to be a dialogue between the text’s horizon (here, “London as a multicultural city”) and the interpreter’s horizon (the commenter’s anxieties). Instead of an actual fusion, the commenter refuses dialogue—they collapse London’s complex reality into their own narrow horizon. So instead of understanding the city’s diversity as lived reality, they interpret it as invasion. It’s basically a failed hermeneutical encounter.

3. The text as event.
For Gadamer, understanding isn’t decoding a fixed meaning, it’s participating in an event of meaning. The commenter’s remark is less about London itself and more about staging an event of outrage. The “let that sink in” is the performative moment—it tries to force readers into their horizon of fear, instead of allowing genuine dialogue.

4. Interpretation.
In Gadamer’s sense, the comment is a hermeneutical monologue. It forecloses dialogue by using inflammatory metaphors (invasion, conquest) that prevent real questioning. Instead of mutual understanding, it stages a little fortress of prejudice and invites others to camp in it.

So, Gadamer would basically say: this isn’t interpretation at all, it’s a weaponized non-understanding masquerading as truth. The commenter isn’t open to London—they’re shutting London down into a caricature.