Other People’s Thoughts
This is the fifty fourth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
The dramatic events in the United States during January and February 2025 weigh heavily on this installment of Other People’s Thoughts. For more on the Trump era, in particular T2, see Contra Trump, a miniseries in Spectres & Souls.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
8 February 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LI:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LIV
Why, what’s the matter,
That you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
T2
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
— Lin Yutang
Chi-Merica
A [destructive] kalpa destiny is now at work, which is called forth by the crimes committed by the tyrannical rulers, and also by the karmic activities of the people developed from immeasurable cycles of transmigration. When I take a look at China, I know that a great disaster is at hand.
— Tan Sitong, 1897
Ressentiment
Ressentiment, Nietzsche taught us, is a deep feeling – a determinant fact of our being in the world. We all look around hungrily for someone to blame, someone to wreak vengeance on – for everything we were denied back then, at the beginning. We know we’ll never find the culprit, really; we know we’re making things up; we’re bewildered by our feelings, half ashamed of baying for the scapegoat’s blood – but boy! it feels good.
To have made ressentiment the main form of politics, to have made himself the very image of it, to have it written it into every shaking of the jowls and ‘It-wasn’t-me-Sir’ stare – that’s Trump’s achievement. Here I am: rich, bankrupt, fraudulent, criminal, surrounded by toadies, destroyer of politics, president … And I still haven’t been given my due!
— T.J. Clark, A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle, London Review of Books, vol.47, no.1
President Trump: The Inauguration
4pm, BBC One/ STV
After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories — among the most common is the “What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War” setting — but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present. The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today’s feature length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors.
— Scottish Herald TV Guide, 19 January 2025
Trump’s ‘irredeemables’
They’ve embraced the most un-American idea since the Civil War: that one man should wield near-absolute power, imposing his will simply because they believe he will win a culture war against people unlike themselves. He is the avatar of their rage, the king who will finally scratch the itch of their discontent.
— Rick Wilson, The Last Sunday, 20 January 2025
Part mafia, part circus, part cult, part scam
At the center is Trump himself, a lifelong con artist and recently convicted criminal who plainly feels more kinship with foreign strongmen than with the framers of the American experiment. Around him is a motley coterie of tech oligarchs, boorish yes-men, authoritarian ideologues, and preposterous grifters, all jockeying to assert themselves. Beyond that lies a ring of servile Republican mandarins who dislike him and his politics but are too cowardly to do anything but kowtow. And beyond that extends the great mass of MAGA fanatics, ever eager to validate any impulse he might have.
— Nick Catoggio, American Grotesque, The Dispatch, 20 January 2025
Inauguration 47
What’s everyone up to? Michelle O and I are watching Wicked at mine.
— Randy Rainbow, 20 January 2025
CO2
One search on ChatGPT uses 10x the amount of energy as a Google search. Training one AI model produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 300 round trip flights between New York and San Francisco and five times the lifetime emissions of a car.
— Matt Bernstein
Tick-tock TikTok
‘Goodbye to my Chinese spy’
— online meme, January 2025
Grumpy Cat Wang Yi: 好自為之/ 耗子尾汁
Reuters: “I hope you would conduct yourself well”.
Bloomberg: “behave yourself”.
Xinhua: “I hope you will act accordingly and… make the right decisions”.
But Newsweek’s translation is so warm — “I hope you will take good care of yourself.”
— X, 25 January 2025
Yeah, nah
A linguistics professor was lecturing his class. “In English, a double negative is a positive. In some languages, like Russian, a double negative is still a negative. But, there is no language wherein a double positive can be a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”
— Sidney Morgenbesser
First Farce, Then Tragedy
We have to know what we’re dealing with. These people are bullies. And you fight back, you push back … I hope Marx was right that first comes the tragedy and then comes the farce. I worry it’ll be the other way around, that we’ll look back at Trump’s first term as farcical and this is going to be very bad and tragic for a lot of people.
— Alex Soros, ‘These people are bullies. And you fight back’, Financial Times, 22 January 2025
Just get over it
I think there is too much focus on past guilt (in Germany), and we need to move beyond that. Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents — their great grandparents even.
— Elon Musk to an AfD rally in Germany, 25 January 2025
Reichest Man in the World
People with eyes: “Elon Musk make a Nazi salute.”
Historians who have studied the rise of fascism: “Elon Musk made a Nazi salute.”
Mainstream Media: “Elon Musk made a heartfelt gesture that was misconstrued as a Nazi salute.”
— Mrs. Betty Bowers, 20 January 2025
TeSSla
Come on, Elon Musk is not a Nazi. The Nazi’s made nice cars.
— Michael Che, SNL Weekend Update, 25 January 2025
The Trump-Musk Duumvirate
My job is to make sure we don’t have any kings or queens in this country, but it seems like you all have decided it’s going to be Mr. King and his queen. And y’all can pick which one is which.
— Jasmine Crockett, 5 February 2025
Deep Suck-up
Anyway, are you particularly familiar with Sam Altman? I think he’s becoming almost my worst one. Elon Musk remains the edgelord overlord to beat, of course, but honestly, it’s getting extremely difficult to avoid appreciating just how much of a super-irritant the OpenAI boss has become. Physically, he resembles the kind of actor who shows up to an audition thinking he’s a perfect leading man, but who gets cast as the puppy-eyed loner who just happens to take a trophy from each one of his victims. Which, in a funny kind of way, I guess he is. Sam’s got every living creative down there in his basement well. “It feeds my machine its script, or it gets the hose … ” I think I have to say here that he and OpenAI deny all this. The unauthorised scraping of human creativity, I mean – I’m not sure if anyone’s asked him about the basement well, so do consider that one unsolved.
But where were we? Ah yes: the Altman journey. “To anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s,” declared Sam back in 2016, “it’s chilling to watch Trump in action.” Well, now. Purely going on Sam’s own rather crass analogy, he now seems to have turned into one of those German industrialists who gladly popped into the chancellery for a slice of cake. And, indeed, for a slice of the cake. …
Alas, like the rest of the Silicon Valley horror-moguls, Sam is now a fact of all our lives, and – along with the Trump administration he is thoroughly cosied up to – is telling everyone how to think about DeepSeek. This is really a key dynamic of the next few years: being told we should be very worried about what the authoritarian Chinese are doing by Silicon Valley authoritarians we should also be extremely worried about. For us little people, the choice seems to be between being data-jacked and screwed over by the undemocratic Chinese, or being data-jacked and screwed over by the post-democratic tech bros. Once again, it’s the old syphilis or Ebola menu choice.
— Marina Hyde, Oh, I’m sorry, tech bros – did DeepSeek copy your work? I can hardly imagine your distress, The Guardian, 31 January 2025
Star Trek vs. Star Wars
The pivotal cultural moment came in 2021, when William Shatner went to space. More than anyone, he represented that older, more idealistic view of technology. Star Trek, among other things, was a manifesto for the view that technology, reason, empathy and diversity are all intimately connected. It presumed, wrongly but not unusually, that only rational people could develop this kind of space-faring technology and that such figures would not fall victim to racist obscurantism.
Shatner spent a few minutes in suborbit on Bezos’ Blue Origin capsule. He had a life-changing experience. He saw the lifeless vacuum of space on one side and the vulnerable life-giving basket of Earth on the other. “It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered,” he said later.
Down on Earth, he attempted to explain this to Bezos. The Amazon owner looked at him with a face robbed of any notable features, without genuine interest or indeed any meaningful capacity for human connection. He just needed the Star Trek guy for marketing purposes. All this wanky existential shit was beside the point.
Behind him, people were opening champagne and cheering, like they were at a sorority party. Soon enough his dog-sized brain was distracted. He kept looking over his shoulder and smiling. Then he just ignored Shatner and turned away. “Give me a champagne bottle,” he said to someone, with the grace you’d expect from someone so wealthy. “Come here. I want one.” Then he shook it, sprayed it everywhere, and everyone laughed. Everyone but Shatner, who finally realised that he was not in Star Trek. He was in Idiocracy. And the rest of us are too.
— Ian Dunt, Striking 13, 25 January 2025
Reds Under the Bed
We’ll teach you how to spot ’em
In the cities or the sticks,
For even Jasper Junction is just full of Bolsheviks
The CIA’s subversive, and so’s the FCC
There’s no one left but we and thee
And we’re not sure of thee.
— The Chad Mitchell Trio, The John Birch Society, 1962
TrumpSpeak Primer
‘Did you know?’ (I just found this out.)
‘People are saying’ (I’m making this up.)
‘We’ll see what happens’ (I have no idea what’s happening.)
‘Fake news’ (This information makes me look bad.)
‘Believe me’ (I’m lying.)
Antipodean Advice
Americans, don’t, like, 2/3 of you own guns? Can’t you just shoot these cunts? Pretend they’re schoolchildren, if it helps. Just hop to it but, christ!
— Patrick Marlborough, 1 February 2025
Endgame
To hold government accountable, political media need a public with an appetite for accountability and a pipeline to deliver pertinent information to that public. Lacking one is a crisis; lacking both means endgame for liberalism.
— Nick Catoggio, Media Matters, The Dispatch, 30 January 2025
Journalism
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, “saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it’s asking three different sources with a vested interest in the matter whether Lord Jones is in fact dead, and posting their contradictory answers in real-time as you receive them.
— M.F. Robbins, Denial of Service, 4 February 2025
In the internet age, a lie doesn’t travel halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. It travels all the way around, 20 times over, and is relaxing with a cocktail before the truth so much as stirs.
— Nick Catoggio, The DOGE Hoax, The Dispatch, 6 January 2025
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
The Russian people for the most part are divided into two uneven groups. One part is the descendants of serfs, people with a slavish consciousness. There are many of them and their leader is V.V. Putin. The other (smaller) part is born free, proud and independent. It does not have a leader but needs one.
— Boris Nemtsov, 2007
暫時做穩了奴隸的時代
中國人就是三種身份，奴隸、奴才、奴隸主。 在這種體制下，奴隸變成奴才就非常高興，奴才則以為自己也算得上奴隸主，奴隸主和奴才都是欺壓奴隸的嘛。奴隸主也欺壓奴才，但還是有無數的人想從奴隸變成奴才。這就是中國精英政治的基本動力機制。
— 吳國光，《走向共產黨之後的中國》，2023年11月
Springtime in China
迎春團拜喜洋洋，笑語歡聲韻滿堂。
領袖容光真煥發，神州國運正榮昌。
聆聽教誨心頭暖，矢志追隨腳步鏘。
自信龍騰難阻擋，堯天舜地萬年長。
— 李殿仁，出席二零二五年中央春節團拜會感言，中紅網，2025年2月2日
Riding a Rail
The conformism, the xenophobia, the sheer hatred of anything Western during the Mao era was so extreme that my grandfather felt compelled to disguise even his nostalgia about the French language. That was why he was reading a French translation of Mao’s writing, and why in a companion notebook he carefully wrote out, in very neat handwriting, study notes in Chinese, as if to prove he was really interested in nothing but Chairman Mao’s ideas. I have kept those bilingual pamphlets and study notes in a drawer. Every time I look at them and recall the sight of my white-haired, shriveled grandfather bent over a desk, reading French surreptitiously, I am swamped by sadness.
— Jianying Zha, Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival, ChinaFile
夠了
夠了，這發霉的造神運動，淺薄的領袖崇拜；夠了，這無恥的歌舞昇平，骯髒的鮮廉寡恥；夠了，這驍驍漫天謊言，無邊無盡的苦難；夠了，這嗜血的紅朝政治，貪得無厭的黨國體制；夠了，這七年的荒唐錯亂，一步步的倒行逆施；夠了，這七十年的屍山血海，亙古罕見的紅色暴政。
— 許章潤：《世界文明大洋上的中國孤舟》，2020年5月
天論
雩而雨，何也。曰：無何也，猶不雩而雨也。日月食而救之，天旱而雩，卜筮然後決大事，非以為得求也，以文之也。故君子以為文，而百姓以為神。以為文則吉，以為神則凶也。
— 荀子
De Senectute
This word anti-aging has to be struck. I am pro-aging. I want to age with intelligence, and grace, and dignity, and verve, and energy. I don’t want to hide from it.
— Jamie Lee Curtis, March 2022
Riviera of the Middle East
“We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal, and I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East—this could be something that could be so—this could be so magnificent,” Trump said. (The Riviera: “A sunny place for shady people,” as W. Somerset Maugham put it.) “We’ll make sure that it’s done world-class,” Trump went on, building on the real-estate pitch. As he’d noted earlier in the day, “It doesn’t have to be one area, but you take certain areas and you build really good-quality housing, like a beautiful town, like someplace where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying.”
— David Remnick, The Madness of Donald Trump, 6 February 2025
Sitting there listening to him, I saw a dystopian tableau vivant in my mind’s eye of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos betting billions on baccarat at the new Trump Gaza City Hotel and Casino while suicide bombs detonate sporadically outside. Of all the “inject bleach” moments we’ve endured since 2015, this may well have been the bleach-iest.
… Pushing the Palestinian population out of Gaza to create a beachfront playground for international jet-setters frankly sounds like an over-the-top progressive satire of “settler-colonialist” rapaciousness.
… openly aspiring to annex another people’s territory gives the United States no leg to stand on in criticizing China for eyeing Taiwan or Russia for eyeing Ukraine. In fact, Trump’s intentions are arguably more depraved than theirs are. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin could talk our ears off about the strategic imperatives of controlling their respective near-abroads and the historical kinship between their countries and those they’re aiming to “reunite” with. All Trump can say to justify depopulating Gaza is that it might make a hell of a resort.
— Nick Catoggio, The Trump Gaza City Hotel and Casino, 5 February 2025
Into my heart an air that kills
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
— A.E. Houseman
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