• Here’s another oddity of the way we use words like “sacred” or “holy.” Like many news stories involving the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, this article refers to the site as the “third holiest” shrine in Islam. Our impulse to rank — and quantify — seems to clash there with whatever it is that word “holy” is meant to suggest. And with that superlative suffix. What can “third holiest” possibly mean? That the site is considered holy, but not quite as wholly holy as the second-holiest site?
• The “Jade Helm” U.S. military training exercise concludes today and, as Ed Brayton notes, “Texas hasn’t been taken over, the Walmarts of the Southwest have not been turned into FEMA concentration camps, Blue Bell ice cream trucks are not being used to transport the bodies of all the victims of the ‘invasion.'”
The uneventful conclusion of this event may seem to some to be conclusive proof that all the right-wing hysteria about this exercise as a ruse for the diabolical black president’s invasion of the homeland was baseless foolishness. But that’s not how they see it. In their telling of this story, all of those dire consequences — the American invasion of America, etc. — were forestalled only because of their panicked shouting and “vigilance.”
Or, in other words, the fact that absolutely nothing like what they said would happen by today has happened will be seen, by them, as vindication of all those fears and proof that they were right all along.
This is true not just for the far-right fringe where this nonsense first percolated, but also in the mainstream of the Republican Party, where “Jade Helm” has been enshrined in the litany of Bad Things That Prove Liberals Are Bad Even Though They Never Happened — “IRS scandal,” Benghazi, Whitewater, selling baby parts, ebola, Hillary’s email, welfare fraud, voter fraud, etc. — that they continue to recite long after each was, in turn, definitively debunked and disproven.
• A new billboard in Rowan County, Kentucky:
• Neil Carter confesses to being a professional wrestling truther.
• “How did bioethics come to be known as a field for glib and woolly moralizing?” Sally Satel asks in a Pacific Standard essay on “The Bioethics Dilemma.” It’s a fun, pot-stirring rant, suggesting that bioethics may be too important to entrust to the sort of people who want to be known as bioethicists.
• “So, if you’re having trouble following along, this is what happened: A Gamergater, intent on ‘proving’ that moderate Muslims are secretly jihadists, invented a fake Muslim character who fit that profile and his fake radical Muslim ended up plotting with another fake radical Muslim who was an FBI agent. Welcome to the 21st century. It’s like an O. Henry story, but with computers.”
• Den of Geek: “Is This the Worst Movie Break-In of All Time?”
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