Are you serious?

Bean-counter-cum-grumpy-old-man Richard Murphy is a curious cove. He has a blog, but he hasn't quite entered into the spirit of the medium with regard to interacting with his audience. Unless would-be interlocutors are prepared to do the necessary obeisance, they will either never pass the moderation stage or be smothered in a wet blanket of sneering patronisation. Imagine a sadistic child removing the wings from a butterfly and you won't be far off. If you then come back to take further issue, you will likely be blocked. Ritchie must have the last word.

Such inadvertent humour has brought the guy a kind of cult anti-following, and a recent spike in interest occurred when Ritchie seemed to throw down the gauntlet of debate over his 'Economic Plan B' - which one commenter identified as being lifted wholesale from Mitterrand's disastrous first two years in power. However, and here we come to the inspiration for the hilarious image above, what he wrote was:

"Now would anyone (serious) like to debate it?"

The key to understanding the meaning of this sentence is the word in parentheses. It is Ritchie's moderation filter, designed to prevent any such debate taking place. Serious in this twisted context means either holding an opinion that differs from Ritchie by no more than the thickness of a silver Rizla, or, possibly, disagreeing but possessing an intellect of a sufficiently dull nature to be easily dispatched by Ritchie's rhetorical pugilism, such as it is. This being the case, no one's holding their breath for what would most likely be an interesting debate.