Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,” a former Facebook employee explains. “You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.

The perfect illustration of competition writ large is war. Everyone just kills everyone. There are always rationalizations for war. Often it’s been romanticized, though perhaps not so much anymore. But it makes sense: if life really is war, you should spend all your time either getting ready for it or doing it. That’s the Harvard mindset.

PayPal also had a hard time hiring women. An outsider might think that the PayPal guys bought into the stereotype that women don’t do CS. But that’s not true at all. The truth is that PayPal had trouble hiring women because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?

Peter Thiel: I won’t come out as pro- or anti- Y Combinator. They do some things well and maybe some other things less well. But I will something anti-not-Y Combinator. If you go to incubator that’s not Y Combinator, that is perceived as negative credential. It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past.

Reading Mr. Cowen is like pushing a shopping cart through Whole Foods with Rush Limbaugh. The patter is nonstop and bracing. Mr. Cowen delivers observations that, should Alice Waters ever be detained in Gitmo, her captors will play over loudspeakers to break her spirit.

These observations include: “There’s nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer”; “buying green products seems to encourage individuals to be less moral”; and — a contender for Orwellian sentence of the year — “technology and business are a big part of what makes the world gentle and fun.”

As Eli M. Noam reported in his 1991 book, Broadcasting in Europe, UK newspaper publishers encouraged the development of the “public” BBC so that no new commercial enterprise could take root, as happened in the United States, and attack their advertising base. UK regulators suppressed commercial TV and radio for decades and protected the BBC from the onslaught of cable TV. Parliament even regulated the VCR.

Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school.

You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That we’ve become inured to the very practice is a harm.)

I would no more have kept up with Father Sullivan than with cholera.

In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” Nemeth says. “It wakes us right up.