GMail Status Log

I have developed a habit of assigning snootily highbrow statements as my gmail status.  Since google doesn't fully retain them for me, I felt inclined to log them here for posterity's sake.  It's kind of like a personal twitter feed, only without the flimsy pretense that anyone gives a crap, and there's no ridiculous character limit compelling grammatical incorrectness.

• While I consider myself staunchly anti-racist, I am an unrepentant culteralist. I abhor the Japanese culture’s stance on whaling, for example; American exceptionalism and manifest destiny turns my stomach (I am proud to call many Americans my friends, but it’s pretty much impossible to look at that country’s political and religious cultures without concluding that vast swathes of the USA are batshit crazy)...
  - Peter Watts, Author

• "I've found the best way to get anyone to listen to me is to keep my messages insanely concise and saturate them with poop jokes and farm animals."
  - Matthew Inman (theoatmeal.com)

• What if our goal in life wasn’t to make as much money as possible?

• "Much to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet works, these two Acts (SOPA,PIPA) will have absolutely no effect on digital piracy, but they will create an environment where freedom of speech could be severely curtailed, large companies can execute competitors, and scientific data can be hidden from the public."
  - Michael Ham, LANL researcher

• "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."
  - John Carmack

• A republic is not based on the consent of the governed if the citizens do not know what their government is doing.
• "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.  That sucks."
  - Jeff Hammerbacher, former 'Research Scientist' at Facebook
• "I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil."
  - Arnold Toynbee