Apocalypse Not

Maybe I'm tempting fate by starting this post with 5 minutes until midnight, but if the predicted (but only by wingnuts) Great Iranian Apocalypse of 8/22/06 is going to happen, it had better hurry up and be quick about it. Not that I'm trying to encourage that sort of thing, mind you.

A few Iran-related links to share:

• Stop War on Iran blog
  
• An 8/22 story at ThinkProgress
  
• Another story, at Uruknet. I'm not a big fan of Uruknet, but this story's on the mark.
  
• The cheeky Brits over at El Reg chime in as well.
  
• Another fun 8/22 piece at NewsHounds
  

A couple of additional observations here. First, it fascinates me how the apocalypse crowd can blab on and on about Ahmadinejad fixin' to blow up the world, and the question of how he might pull off that stunt never comes up. It's just sort of assumed that anyone who makes mean faces at us a.) wants to blow up the world, and b.) therefore can blow up the world. Bernard Lewis and his adoring fans suggest that the end is near solely because of a date they find significant, and completely ignore the issue of whether there's any credible mechanism for doing so. That's not science. That's not even political science. That's nothing but numerology, and it deserves the same respect we normally reserve for numerologists' predictions. Lewis can have a booth at the state fair, between the palm reader and the bearded lady, if he likes. But an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal? What did he do to earn that sort of honor?

And second, I'm amazed by the near-infinite capacity to forget, as shown by the media and certain segments of the general public. Somehow, the war nuts have managed to keep crying wolf again and again, year after year, and people still shriek "Eek, a wolf!", even though the wolf never shows up. They swear up and down that Saddam has zillions of WMDs, and it turns out he doesn't, and then they swear up and down, with a straight face, that Ahmadinejad has zillions of WMDs, and nobody bats an eye. Somehow, they can keep predicting Armageddon all the time and the public never tires of it, and no credibility is lost when the world resolutely fails to end, again and again. I don't know how they manage this trick, but in terms of gullibility the true believers compare unfavorably even with weird outfits like the old Church Universal and Triumphant, a New Agey doomsday group that holed up in Montana back in the 80's, to await the imminent nuclear war that never happened. Membership dwindled after that, which seems only logical. It doesn't seem to work that way with fundies, though. Every failed apocalypse just whets their appetite for the next prediction, and they remain in a constant end-of-days tizzy, day after day, year after year, and this seems perfectly reasonable to them. That will never cease to astonish me.