Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

I’ll tell you what makes me uncomfortable: When I forget the words to the song I’m trying to sing and someone else [in the audience] is singing along to it and they’re getting it right. That definitely makes me feel bad.

i thought the staff actedlike douches towards me b/c i have shampooed hair, looser jeans than my girlfriend, and lacked a tongue ring, but it looks like they treat everyone like their doing a favor by serving us a slice of pizza…hey guys it’s not our fault you’re 3o somthing year old pot heads stuck in a dead end job, so serve the slice and leave the attitude for mom and dad when you call to ask for more cash to pay the rent

In the immortal words of Dr. Johnson, “Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent: deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtlety, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another, upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.”[^15]

[^15]: I might, however, “conclude by chance” and then invent the “just reasons,” for instance, by giving greater weight to the attributes on which the chosen option is clearly superior. This can have undesirable consequences. Suppose I have the choice between going to law school and going to frestry school. Being unable to make a reason-based choice, I go to law school more or less by chance and justify the decision retrospectively by giving more weight ot the income dimension of the two careers. With these newly induced preferences, I might go on to make other decisions that differ from those I would have made on the basis of my pre-choice preferences.

Don’t eat at McDonalds or Burger King – if you were going to do that you might as well have stayed in Peoria. If you have children who want to eat at such places, I believe that spanking is still legal in the UK as long as you do it in private. Child abandonment, unfortunately, is not.

I once got to the end of a date in New York, pulled out my credit card to pay and the girl solemnly remarked: “A green American Express card? I didn’t know they still made them in that colour.

Everybody hates Wired’s Chris Anderson except for James Truman and Si Newhouse.

This reminds me of something I’ve wondered about for years: the fact that in America there seems to be little or no middle ground between nice-nice and acrimony. Is it something about the American propensity for violence? I started wondering about this in the 90s, when I spent about a month every year in Europe. I don’t know about you Brits and how you do things, but in Belgium and France I got used to going to dinner parties where people would very seriously rake each other over the coals, destroy one another’s ideas, call each other stacks of names—but no bottles got broken, and it was understood that everyone was friends. (Likewise, you can propose to your fellow motorists detailed outlines of their sexual peculiarities, and get the same back, without fear that anybody will be pulling out any artillery.) I’m not suggesting that I yearn to get on anybody’s case, but I wonder if there isn’t a kind of unspoken and maybe unconscious gag order infecting the entire educated middle class in America.

Flea market vendors pay up to 100 euros for a skull with white teeth. A rib cage with all the ribs in place could bring up to 300 euros. … Skulls with blackened teeth are worth 50 euros. There’s not much of a market for them; potential buyers are not repulsed by the idea of death, apparently, but by tooth enamel that eventually starts to decay.

In honest fact, using the phrase “Neo-Darwinian Sociology” is actually an act of extreme politeness on my part, because the more concise phrase would be “Social Darwinism”, the age-old and known horrible theory without a shit-eating, disingenuous and self-consciously pious denunciation of which, no pop EP book is complete. (Matt Ridley, I’m looking at you. Daniel Dennet, you can wipe that smile off your face too). It’s kind of like the paramilitary wing of evolutionary psychology; the default position of a serious ethologist when confronted with the possibility of earning a quick two hundred quid for 400 words on some current issue in the Sunday papers (Richard Dawkins, I’m looking at you, and pointing at you). Basically, in so far as these pieces have any message which doesn’t consist of laughing at people more intelligent than the author for believing in God, the message boils down to […]