• Says “here’s the thing” frequently.
• Views gender as a imaginary construct & gets mad when someone calls him by the wrong imaginary construct.
• Becomes a Maoist and then reads Wikipedia to learn about his new political views.
• Strategically leaves volumes of political theory lying around the house so people think he’s reading them.
• Reads things by authors he hates, hoping to find spelling and grammar mistakes.
• Points out obvious things, and when nobody replies, says “can’t anyone see it?”
• Loses an argument and spends the next six years rewriting the argument in his head so that he says all the right things and his opponent looks like an idiot.
• Uses “progressive” and “old fashioned” in lieu of “right” and “wrong.”
• Identifies with social movements to the point where he uses “we” when describing historical events. “We were the ones who ended segregation.” No, you didn’t. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr ended segregation. Your contribution to civil rights is clicking the like button on lots of Facebook posts. Stop taking credit for other people’s accomplishments, fag.
• Creates a remix and puts his name next to the original artist, such as Elvis vs JXL, implying that it’s a meeting of two equally brilliant musicians instead of an legend having his song jacked around by a nobody.
• Becomes emotionally invested in ancient historical feuds conducted by people who decayed into peat moss six centuries ago.
• Reads the list of ingredients out loud while people are eating a meal.

Have you ever read something and felt as if you’ve wandered into someone’s game of Broken Telephone? Have you read opinions or polemics that, though they may have made sense at one point, have been copied and memefied so many times by so many people that they have become distorted parodies?

Atheism on the internet feels like that.

What happens is that two factors start working in confluence:

1. People can’t think for themselves and can only repeat the arguments of other people
2. A “hive mind” that doesn’t tolerate dissent

The Marquis de Sade wrote a story while incarcerated called Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond, an interesting and concise manifesto of atheism framed as conversation between a priest and his dying charge. It’s been downhill since then. These days, you can read things like Why there is no god: Quick responses to some common theist arguments. They are very quick responses. It is recommended that you shout them at religious people out the window of a passing car because then they won’t have enough time to call you stupid.

1. “The Bible God is real.” He doesn’t discuss that at all, he just talks about mistakes and contradictions in the Bible. Clearly if a Jeremy Clarkson biography has logical errors then Clarkson himself vanishes from history. He talks about “selective interpretation”, as though the way we interpret the Bible has anything to do with the existence of God.

2. He argues that Jesus didn’t exist, and to back up his point links to a page that says Jesus existed. Safe to say that you’re not meant to click any of the links in this article. They often don’t back up what he’s saying at all. You’re meant to look at all those blue links and marvel at the author’s intelligence and rigour.

3. “The moment you disagree with a single instruction of the Bible…” No, thanks. There’s lots of ways to interpret the Bible. There are Christians who don’t believe everything in it comes from God, that it was influenced by the earthly politics of its time, or that various things in it have symbolic or metaphoric value.

5. In which we marvel at the shocking revelation that wealthy countries with lots of atheists are more peaceful than impoverished third world shitholes.

10. He uses George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one”…only it’s not presented as a quote. It’s included in the text without attribution or even quotation marks, as if he was the one who thought of it. I think this is generally his thought process. He doesn’t think for himself. Who needs to, when you can repeat memes and quotes and sound-bytes? Not that there’s anything wrong with that…but doesn’t it get depressing spending your whole life regurgitating other peoples’ lines?

11. He could have just said “what does beauty have to do with God?” and left it there. He argues about something completely off the point, and misses an easy and obvious response.

It goes on like that for a while. There’s stuff about Christianity being a responsible for every bad thing in the past million years, and a reminder that the bad things done by atheists are not connected to their beliefs in any way. Heads we win, tails they lose. Everything he writes is…wonky. Unpersuasive. It gives every impression being bolted together from various pieces of intellectual detritus from an atheist forum where nobody ever disagrees with anyone. And it continues.

“Copay [sic] every fact on this page you wrote. Make website. Paste. Then. the sheer amount of fact in one internet place will explode, spreading logic throughout the land.
Genius.” — zinc55

This article was like a breath of fresh water.

“…Reading that felt a little like stepping on a stair that wasn’t there: it was jarring to go from the image of “dinner tables” to the image of “a galaxy”, as though giant balls of flaming hydrogen could give dinner-parties. But that’s what a mixed metaphor does: it combines incongruent or incompatible images in a lingustically gauche way.”

If you like mixed metaphors, President Obama is quite a fruitful goldmine. You could say that he’s one of the backsliders purposely striding towards a future where our embrace of the English language is repellent.

I think Obama needs to count his chickens before they cross the road and come home to roost, and stop pawning words in the discount bin for the highest bidder. He needs to pack up his cowboy hat and stop catering to wealthy one-percenter fatcats who refuse to shed their puppy fat, and who pick the pockets of the remaining 75% with the reckless precision of racketeering wolves, and who aren’t very nice people besides.

“We’ve got more work to do than to just try to dig ourselves out of these self-inflicted wounds.” (source)

“As we consider the road that unfolds before us” (source)

“If we can get that done, that takes a big bite out of the fiscal cliff” (source)

“Jedi mind meld” (source – it seems there is an obscure EU Jedi ability called the “force meld” but I don’t think the POTUS spends much time reading Wookieepedia articles)

“The lines of tribe shall soon dissolve” (source – more an unpleasant double entendre than a mixed metaphor)

“This is the moment when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it.” (source)

“I’m willing to eliminate whatever we can honestly afford to do without. But let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.” (source)

I think there were some mixed metaphors in The Audacity of Hope, but finding them is like shooting haystacks in a barrel with the broad side of a knife.