Written in 2004, but still a good read and still very much the world in which we live.
The potentially alarming statement itself, “this machine kills fascists,” demonstrates a passion, a commitment, to speak loudly against the technologies of oppression and conformity that fascists use to maintain power, even without pointing guns at everyone. Eyes can be more effective constraints than weapons. I am sorry. I am not worthy of Woody Guthrie’s legacy. I wonder how many of us are.
CNN:
Though three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, only half deem it important, and most can’t talk coherently about their beliefs, the study found.
Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good — what…
Look, I think this is a problem, but I don’t think the author has it right in saying that the problem is that teens need to be exposed to more “real acts of faith.” Unquestionably, this is true, but I think that’s only part of the problem, and sort of an easy answer, because that’s approximately three billion times easier to say than it is to do.
I think the bigger problem is that teenagers have finely honed bullshit detectors. They can tell when they’re being lied to, and they can tell when what most people call “church” is really just a big shell game involving guilt trips for non-attendance and political posturing and an absolute refusal to discuss real problems that real people have. This is why teenagers are becoming “fake” Christians. Not because they’re not being taught the right Bible lessons, but because the people who are teaching these lessons, on the whole, tend not to give a shit about doing what they’re teaching.
Until that gets straightened out, there are going to be a lot more “fake” Christians, because it’s a lot easier to just get baptized at the appropriate age (which is twelve) and go to church camp when everybody else does and wait it out than it is to ask a grown up why they never seem to implement the things they’re teaching in their actual lives.
Not that I would know.
All that is to say this: it’s a learned behavior. The real reason teenagers are fake Christians is because their parents are fake Christians—and if their parents aren’t, then a lot of other people who are responsible for their youth program probably are.
In case you want to feel more guilty about how much time you’ve given Facebook and Twitter (and Tumblr, really) that you can’t ever, ever have back:
I’m not arguing that pressing the stream’s pause button is an easy thing to do. The internet twitch is a powerful force. But it’s worth taking a hard look at our behavior now because the omnipresence of the realtime web will only increase. We should probably try to figure out how to best manage that reality now because there are plenty of cliffs up ahead.
Sonic Youth - “Schizophrenia” (Live, 1987)
This. However much you may love the new Arcade Fire record, this is better.
The edited-for-TV version of the “money quote” from Snakes on a Plane.
From In Which This Is What Happens When You Find A Stranger In The Alps, over at This Recording. A list of the best TV dubs of all time.
The hacker spirit at its most indomitable:
The best part of the easy, web-based jailbreak exploit for iOS devices was that pranksters have been hacking iPhones inside Apple Stores. They have been walking into stores, visiting Jailbreakme.com in mobile Safari and boom, Apple’s own demo devices are hacked. It’s that easy.
Of course, Apple didn’t like this, especially as restoring a single phone to its defaults and re-loading its media library can take an hour or more. So Apple did what any parent would do if the kids were causing trouble: it blocked Jailbreakme.com from the in-store Wi-Fi. A simple, effective fix, right? Actually, no. One ne’erdowell, who goes by the name IT Geek, worked around it by using the mobile hotspot feature on his Nexus One to get an in-store iPad connected to the big wide internet. Here’s the video.
