Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

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.