Armageddon

If you close this window in your browser, the world will soon end in a fiery cataclysm.

Not "the world might end," but the world will end. And it will do so as a consequence of your closing this window in your browser.

We're talking cause and effect. If … then. If X, then Y. You close the browser window and thereupon Armageddon, apocalypse, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, The End.

I am warning you. Do not close this window of your browser. If you close this window, the United States will cease to be a free country. It will thereupon become a socialist, totalitarian state in which socialist totalitarian thugs will come to euthanize your grandmother — your very own sweet, gentle grandmother. And then the water of the great river Euphrates will be dried up to prepare the way for the kings of the East and they shall gather together in the valley of Megiddo and the seventh angel will pour out the seventh bowl of wrath and taxes shall increase.

I am telling you that this is what will happen. You have been warned.

You may decide this warning seems insane and is therefore safe to ignore. You may be thinking, "But wait, X doesn't cause Y — there's no way this could lead to that and there's no reason for any reasonable person to ever imagine or believe that it could."

But you may also be thinking, however overwrought and seemingly arbitrary my warning may seem, that it's best not to take any chances. Why risk Armageddon and the death of Grandma if you don't have to?

Sure, common sense might scream that my warning is ridiculous, but if on the one hand I tell you that closing this browser window will kill Grandma and destroy the world, while on the other hand common sense is telling you the opposite, then the truth will probably turn out to be somewhere in between, right? And that would still be pretty bad. So why risk it?

Eventually, though, whether you think my warning is insane or not, you're going to close this browser window. Explorer will crash or Firefox will restart to incorporate its latest daily update and the window will close.

And thereupon all the calamities that I have warned you of will happen. All the consequences I have predicted and insisted must and will occur will come to pass exactly as I said. I will be proven right and all of my doubters will be proven wrong.

Or, I suppose, it could turn out the other way around.

It might turn out that when you close this window none of the calamities I've warned you about will come to pass. It might turn out that all of my warnings were just lies — goofy, implausible, impossible lies.

Either way. Doesn't matter.

This is America, after all, and the great thing about living here in America is that there are no consequences for telling goofy, impossible lies or for offering dire predictions that are quickly proved untrue. I could spend the next year screaming "socialism" and "totalitarianism" and "death panels" and "Armageddon" and staking my entire reputation on outlandish claims that would quickly turn out to be demonstrably false. I could be proven wrong — proven exuberantly, deliberately, destructively wrong — and it wouldn't matter. I wouldn't have to apologize or explain or correct myself or change in any way. This is America.  There are no consequences for being exuberantly wrong.

So go ahead and close this window. Or don't. The world will come to a fiery end and Grandma will be killed by totalitarian thugs. Or not.

Whichever. This is America. You can't hold me responsible for what I tell you.