Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

Our sages would swear by the graves of their long departed loved ones that these are the kind of things causing the successive droughts that have afflicted the country. […] a woman called Quinn Norton from Silicon Valley, California, USA, lived and had a sexual relationship with two men, Danny O’Brien and Jonathan Gilbert in an arrangement they described as polyamory. In fact people who practice this are referred to as the poly community in the USA. […] In that society mothers sleep with their sons and sons-in-law. And what’s more? They are happy and proud to speak about their sexual exploits on television talk shows.

The economic case for forbidding marital dissolution out of concern for the children of the marriage is weakened if the parents love the child, for then the costs to the child of dissolution will be weighed by the parents in deciding whether to divorce, and they will divorce only if the gains to them from the divorce exceed the costs to the child, in which event the divorce will be welfare maximizing. If, as suggested earlier, love is a factor of growing importance in the production of children, this might help to explain why the law is moving toward easier standards for divorce.

Yes, I know some of you are climate skeptics. But if the chance of mainstream science being right is only 20% (and assuredly it is much higher than that), we still have, in expected value terms, a massive tort. We don’t let people play involuntary Russian roulette on others with a probability of 17% (one bullet, six chambers), so we do need to worry about man-made global warming.

[Corporations] live in fear of a nun with a guitar showing up at their annual meeting to protest something,” said Eric Dezenhall, founder of Nichols-Dezenhall Communications Management Group. “But that nun isn’t always innocent.

[I]t must be beneficial to the American power apparatus somehow to demean the individuals who seek to occupy its highest offices. Maybe it’s because while dignified human beings are unpredictable, an old turned-out whore can be counted on to do anything for forty bucks — and these are the kinds of people we need in the White House.

I never really understood the nature-nurture debate. I mean, either way, I get to blame my mother.

romantic”—a curious word meaning all things to all people. From my point of view, it means that in his emotional relationships he should not be too bright—something, perhaps, that I should not state so baldly. But again and again the action of the costume [romance] novel’s plot is carried forward by our hero’s failure to realize that in any man’s life there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of women who will do just as well; that he won’t die if he doesn’t win fair Susan’s dainty hand; and that very probably he will catch a most uninteresting variety of hell if he does win it. Which, come to think of it, is not unrealistic: emotional maturity is one of the rarest qualities in life.