Can you name one? I suppose the recent bit about "enforcing my will through legislation" is about as close as you're going to come, for all one doesn't feel the need to excuse supporting "2 + 2 =4" as an expression, either.

You can't assert that without denying free will, at which point your cheep materialistic reduction eats itself: in what context can the question of morality even ARISE, if we're all merely bags o' meat?
No, I don't think my excuse-fu even holds a candle to yours, sir.

We can theorize much, but upon what basis?

Which is another way to state my point about the unity of (code . data)
But I think that point is substantially a theoretical one; I write VBA code that generates VBA code all the time. Sure, I may not be able to execute it cleanly in one fell swoop, but you'll notice that MSOffice has orders of magnitude more market penetration than Lisp.

I'm not sure why I should hate targeted ads. I actually see ads for things I'm interested in... instead of random stuff.

Because the more you consume, the less you can save up, and the more dependent you are of maintaining your current job and/or the goodwill of your debtors, thus making you ever more helplessly bound and enslaved. Thus an ad should be considered an attempt to put another chain on you, an attack on your freedom, and a targeted ad a more effective attack.

The tracking, ad infinitum, has always been going on, will always be going on.

So has bubonic plague, but that's no reason to avoid taking antibiotics when you get it.

This project will achieve the first 66% outright, then fanny about ad in-fanny-itum on government subsidies to ivory towers near you, workin' hard, strivin' to get the other 9% nailed down.
Beside the white collar welfare, of course, this will help keep those academics and the stunnedents whose minds they poison voting correctly.
Sweet, sweet descent into oblivion!

I was looking through my HS yearbook from ~1998, the girls seem different from today. Girls now talk as if they were mentally retarded- "OMG," "like totally," etc. It wasn't as bad back in the 90s.

So in your youth the youth spoke proper slang, which is different than the slang of today, therefore the modern youth must be retarded?

Seems like the average female IQ is dropping.

Bonus points for not knowing what IQ means.

Just look at the average girls Facebook feed- nothing but brain dead attention whores.

So... are you a creepy middle-aged cyberstalker of teenagers, or are you pulling stuff out of your ass?

I don't care what you do or don't do with your wabbly bits so long as if anyone else is involved it is consensual, but as far as life and evolution are concerned, you're an irrelevant dead end.

Maybe. Then again, the main thrust of human evolution is arguably cultural nowadays; even if no one carries your genes down the line, they might still carry your thoughts. And this is likely to only become more so in the future, as medicine and genetic engineering advance.

And so what cheap excuses have I offered to God for my sins?

Sweet, sweet Progress!

The problem comes with professional violators of Poe's Law, such as Stephen Colbert's character, "Steven Colbert of the Colbert Report". He's a parody of every right wing nut job talk show host. His schtick is to take a right-wing agenda item and push it beyond its obvious short term benefits to its logical but socially detrimental conclusion, where he continues to defend it even more vigorously using Republican platform talking points, ad hominem attacks, and every other logical fallacy he can throw at it. He does this consistently without ever breaking character. And he has a flock of brilliant writers who are able to help him pull this off night after night.

As a matter of fact, he is so consistent that he was mistaken for an actual right wing comedian, and was invited to speak at the White House Correspondent's Dinner in 2006 where he lampooned George W. Bush to his face for fifteen straight minutes. Very few of the faithful present laughed at the routine. President Bush turned red almost from the get-go, politely grimaced out a smile, sat through the entire speech, and left the stage immediately after Colbert finished. I have no doubt that heads rolled within five minutes. ( My favorite joke from the event went something like, " 'Those naysayers claim that this administration is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' That is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring! If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!" )

NSFW => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4NChe56s9E

It seems that, as with regular expressions, the acme of skill is limiting the problem.

Well, certainly not mine. I'm no less a thug than any other.

Couldn't agree less. The only thing one is born with is an awesome capacity to rationalize.

What if they can't find a job and begin to cope with the benefits of the social security system, continuing playing video games on the sofa?

Well, to put it bluntly: so what? There's a huge surplus of workforce that's only going to get larger as automation continues to advance. Having the ever-increasing masses of unemployed people be content to spend their time quietly playing video games is about the best we can hope for; the alternative is civil unrest, riots, and ultimately a revolution.

Hikikomori is simply a perfectly rational adaptation to having little, if any, hopes for the future.