We accept the fundamentalists' view of their religions as being the most accurate, because we want to nail down what religions are, and their versions are black and white, we can understand them, even if we understand them only to disagree, even violently so.

"...idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times."

...recently we have seen how certain movements in the Christian right have embraced counter-cultural forms of style found among skaters, punks, goth, and hard rock for very conservative ends. Where many of these movements are implicitly forms of critique of cultural hypocrisy and capitalist consummerism, these semiotic codes instead get redirected to the most normalizing, conformist, reactionary ends.

I think I'm going to call that last one the 'Rage For the Machine' effect. It might just be the inevitable end station of commodified dissent.

Lost in Translation is on. It looks like it would have been mind-blowing in 1996 at the latest.