Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

Berlin is a city consisting of two principal ethnic groups: Turks and hipsters. Now I know we aren’t supposed to talk about hipsters anymore; I’ve been upbraided for it, and told I was relying on “a crutch for uninspired alt-weekly hacks.” But what can I do? They’re here. I didn’t invent them. As Durkheim would have said, they constitute a social fact.

The hipsters congregate in bars without names, whence radiates music that signals either (i) how much better they know America than even Americans know America; or (ii) what a beautiful and respect-worthy place is the third world; or (iii) that we are indeed entering the age of the Man-Machine, as Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, and others anticipated long ago, but it’s not so bad because if you’re young and good-looking you can still get laid.

Thomas’s embrace of victimhood is extraordinary for a man of his achievement, and especially for someone who has often spoken publicly against self-pity.

“Fine,” Hitchens said. “Now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you’ve told me all I need to know. I’m not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I’m telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There’s nothing you wouldn’t make an excuse for.”

“That’s wrong!” they said.

“You know what? I wouldn’t want you on my side.” His tone was businesslike; the laughing protests died away. “I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say, ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards, and you say, ‘What standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq war.’ Fuck. Off. You’re MoveOn.org. ‘Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush, he can say what he likes.’ Fuck off. You think a doctor can lie in front of an audience of women on a major question, and claim to have suppressed evidence on rape and incest and then to have said he made it up?”

I am just an undergrad from India. I badly needed a topic for my
research work. One of my professors suggested “Semantic Web”. Initially, I felt the topic very abstract and vague. But your paper was the turning point. It changed the way I went about the topic. The confidence and the knowledge that I got after reading your paper is inexplicable. My madness reached to such a height that I spent days together understanding this topic and even the prerequisites of it (XML, etc).

A household is a business given over to caring for small, temporarily insane people, a business subject to cash-flow problems, endless legal harassments, run by people who expect to have sex with each other, who occupy the same space, and who go nuts when either party has sex with anyone else. Once in marriage, a lot of people try to get out as fast as religious tradition, poverty, or devotion to children permits.

Nothing is more offensive to a first-class intellect than to have to listen to third-raters converse about an intrinsically fascinating and complicated topic.