This is the fifty-fifth 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
28 February 2025
***
Other People’s Thoughts I-LV:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LV
The Year of the Snake
… the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.
— Abraham Lincoln, 10 July 1858
America’s ‘Men’sheviks’
Trump won the election by a slim 1.5% margin and got less than 50% of the total vote. About 39% of the electorate didn’t vote, while, rounded off, around 31% voted for Harris or Trump. He got 77 million votes in a country of 347 million people, meaning that less than a quarter of the population voted for him and many voted for him because they were misinformed either by distorted mainstream as well as right-wing media coverage or his false promises and are waking up to the brutal realities. Though many of his and Musk’s threats were clear (to those of us informed by better news media, anyway). His administration is attacking women, BIPOC and LGBTQ residents of this country, federal employees, people with disabilities, medical coverage, farmers, federal workers. If you add up all those constituencies and impacts, you see a presidency chosen by a minority that has launched a war against the majority.
— Rebecca Solnit, Notes on Not Surrendering, Meditations in an Emergency, 18 February 2025
Piss off
America’s first gender neutral bathroom was Rush Limbaugh’s gravesite.
— Mrs Betty Bowers, 18 February 2025
‘We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars’
This Martian mission in turn shares a genealogy with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which the title character is a caricature of Wernher von Braun, the Nazis’ leading rocket scientist, who went on to work on the American ballistic missile program and on NASA’s space missions. According to Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, his unusual first name was inspired by Project Mars, a novel Braun wrote in the immediate postwar years. Braun describes the political system of the colony:
The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”
— Fintan O’Toole, From Comedy to Brutality, New York Review of Books, 13 February 2025
Tick tock, tic toc, TikTok
PRC leaders must be laughing their asses off at the clown show underway. Everything is for sale, and us politicians on both sides of aisle can’t even stomach banning an app. And maybe someone can buy a chunk of tiktok with their billions minted in 36 hours with the $trump shit coin?
— Bill Bishop, Sinocism, 20 January 2025
DEI
Musk is clearly trying to do more with his DOGE-groep than strip our government down to its studs. I believe he is going for nothing short of neo-Apartheid in the US. He’s trying to end the ability of Black Americans to have fair access to employment opportunities, while pushing the false and debunked white supremacist narrative that every white man is preternaturally more qualified for any job than any woman, trans person, or nonwhite man.
— Elie Mystal, Elon Musk’s Vision Is Coming Into Focus—and It Looks a Lot Like Neo-Apartheid, The Nation, 13 February 2025
Mr Burns
‘I’d trade it all for a little more.’
Chinese Lessons
In the fall of 2004, I was living in Lianyungang, China and working as an English teacher when George W. Bush was re-elected president. I was already in a sour mood about this when one day I walked into the faculty lounge and found Cindy, one of my Chinese colleagues, sitting on the sofa.
“How can Americans be so stupid?” she asked me. It was a rhetorical question. “You elected this horrible man as president, and then again? So stupid. Stupid!”
Of course, I didn’t disagree. But the idea that a Chinese person from a dictatorship would lecture an American from a democracy about politics was too much for me to bear.
“Well,” I said. “At least we had a choice!”
Bam! But Cindy only shrugged. I wonder what she thinks now.
— Matt Schiavenza, What China Taught Me About Authoritarianism, 12 February 2025
The Horseshoe
‘Social media amplifies everything. If you’re mildly left wing on Twitter you’re suddenly Trotsky. If you’re mildly conservative you’re Hitler, and if you’re centrist and you look at both arguments, you’re a coward and they both hate you.’
— Ricky Gervais, 14 July 2020
Serena’s Crip Walk
Why must the ways we celebrate our victories be mocked and condemned? Why must our successes accommodate the comfort zone of people who do not value or recognize our humanity? Why must our resilient joy be caged? Ms. Williams answered each of these questions through a Black dance with gorgeous confidence, taking back what should have been her glorious moment 13 years ago.
— Tiana Clark, Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Was Radically Political, if You Knew Where to Look, 14 February 2025
Lit
Earlier this month, netizens were incensed over a viral video that showed firefighters and other uniformed officers breaking into a shop in Datong, Shanxi province late at night in order to turn on the lights—ostensibly, to force the shop owner to comply with a local initiative “suggesting” that businesses in the city’s historic district leave their lights on all night to make the area look more festive for tourists during the Lunar New Year. Local officials eventually issued an apology, citing “improper methods,” “poor communication and misunderstandings,” “impatience for quick results,” and “a lack of service awareness in our work.” The incident resulted in an outpouring of articles, opinion pieces, and online comments highlighting the illegality of the action, the high-handedness of local officials, and the habitual disrespect for private property and private businesses.
The controversy is being described online as “breaking in (literally, ‘prying open the lock’) to turn on the lights” (撬锁点灯, qiàosuǒ diǎndēng; also 撬门开灯, qiàomén kāidēng). Other permutations of the phrase include “breaking in late at night to turn on the lights” (半夜撬门开灯, bànyè qiàomén kāidēng) and “smashing/forcing the door to turn on the lights” (破门亮灯, pòmén liàngdēng). Some have borrowed a more classical phrase (from chapter 77 of Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber) to describe the perennial conflict between imperious authorities and the citizenry: “Only magistrates are allowed to set fires, while ordinary folk aren’t even allowed to light lanterns” (只许州官放火，不许百姓点灯, Zhǐxǔ zhōuguān fànghuǒ, bùxǔ bǎixìng diǎndēng.) The implication, of course, is that those in power can do whatever they please, whereas ordinary people are restricted even in their legitimate daily or business activities.
— Cindy Carter, Words of the Week: “Breaking in to Turn on Lights” (撬锁点灯, qiàosuǒ diǎndēng), China Digital Times, 14 February 2025
Snowfall
Controversy over Beijing municipal government allocating 47 million yuan (nearly $6.5 million U.S.) to fund the training of Eileen Gu, the Chinese-American Olympic freestyle skier, has triggered a wave of cross-platform censorship. A February 25 article on the sports budget by Caixin, a well-regarded business publication, was quickly deleted, and related discussions on Weibo and WeChat were censored.
— Cindy Carter, “Why Are They So Afraid the Taxpayers Will Find Out?”, China Digital Times, 27 February 2025
IDPOL
Judge Esther Toh: “We are Chinese.”
Jimmy Lai: “No, I am a Hongkonger because of ‘One Country, Two Systems’.”
Judge Toh: “Mr. Lai, are you yellow-skinned?”
Lai Chi-ying: “If I am yellow-skinned, does that mean I am Chinese? I am a Hong Konger.”
— X, 27 February 2025
The Inhumane is Being Perpetrated
‘The great independent state of cinema is innately inclusive — immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership or the development of riviera property.
‘The inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch. I’m here to name it without hesitation or doubt in my mind and to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognize the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet-wreckers and war criminals, wherever they come from.’
— Tilda Swinton, speech at the Berlin Film Festival, 13 February 2025
Ordo Amoris
’The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.’
— Pope Francis, indirect riposte to JD Vance, US Vice President
Vigil
During the Vietnam War, a man stood outside the White House every night, for years, holding a candle in solitary protest. One night a reporter finally approached him and asked,
“Sir, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone every night with a candle?”
“Oh,” the man is said to have replied, “I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”
What-about
‘If you can’t stand up against genocide, why should I believe you can stand up for democracy?’
— Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Democratic Party
The Pleasure of Conformity
Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience.
In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.”
Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.
— Anne Applebaum, History will Judge the Complicit, The Atlantic, July/August 2020
Aging Disgracefully
‘Don’t age with grace, age with mischief, audacity, sass and a scintillating tale to tell. Do something outrageous every day and get horizontal as often as possible… Live your life in a way that, if it was turned into a book, Florida would ban it.’
— Kathy Lette
The Larrikin
‘The larrikin may choose to be dignified, but he has to work at it.’
— Clive James, 21 December 2018
We All Belong To It
Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now you know that in cowardice is every evil—especially that cruelty so characteristic of our civilization. But without it mankind would vanish …. I belong to the wretched gang. We all belong to it. We are born initiated, and succeeding generations clutch the inheritance of fear and brutality without a thought, without a doubt, without compunction—in the name of God.
— Joseph Conrad, letter to Cunninghame Graham, January 1898
In a Demon-Haunted World
The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began—in their civilized incarnations—in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Science confers power on anyone who takes the trouble to learn it (although too many have been systematically prevented from doing so). Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty. Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being. If we’re true to its values, it can tell us when we’re being lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes. The more widespread its language, rules, and methods, the better chance we have of preserving what Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had in mind. But democracy can also be subverted more thoroughly through the products of science than any pre-industrial demagogue ever dreamed. Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us—and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.
— Carl Sagan, Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1996, pp.38-39
末代狀元
第一人中最後人，只今四海剩孤身。
— 劉春霖，1872-1942，六十自述詩
Three Years On
Three years ago, it was hardly conceivable that western missiles would be fired at military targets inside Russia with near impunity, that a non-nuclear country would occupy a chunk of Russian territory, that Finland and Sweden would join NATO, and that Moscow’s much-prized special relationship with Germany would be ruined. Yet all of that has come to pass. What’s more, Putin has turned Ukrainians into an aggrieved nation armed to the teeth and looking for ways to settle scores for atrocities committed by those who used to call them “brothers”.
— Alexander Gabuev, There are no shortcuts to manage the Russia challenge, Financial Times, 22 February 2025
After a short break from history …
We live in turbulent times. After a short break from history that some of us enjoyed, it has again caught up with us all.
In times like these, when the world seems out of joint, when the old seems to be dying but the new cannot yet be born, what we need is a return to basics. To questions about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s actually happened, and what’s just a figment of propaganda.
— Radosław Sikorski, Ukraine Is Not A “Project”, speech at UN General Assembly, 25 February 2025
The Art of the Deal
Stephen Feinberg, President Trump’s pick to be deputy secretary of Defense, declined to say during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday whether Russia invaded Ukraine. …
Later in the hearing, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) pressed Feinberg on the issue again.
She read the headline of a Fox News article from three years ago: “Russia invades Ukraine in largest European attack since World War II.” Duckworth noted the article featured Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was a Fox News commentator at the time.
“Can you tell me if Russia invaded Ukraine?” Duckworth asked Feinberg, who let out an audible sigh.
“Mr. Feinberg? I mean, Mr. Hegseth said it,” she continued, referring to the article.
“Yeah, I understand,” Feinberg replied.
“It’s easy. Yes or no: Did they invade Ukraine?”
Feinberg again said he did not want to comment on the issue amid negotiations.
“I don’t feel that I should publicly comment in the middle of a tense negotiation when I’m not privy to the facts to undermine what potentially,” Feinberg responded before Duckworth interrupted to clarify whether he’s saying he’s not privy to the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine and began the war that’s lasted for three years.
“I’m not privy to the details of what’s going on in negotiation between Russia and Ukraine, what the sensitivities are, what the president is trying to accomplish, so I’d be afraid to speak out of turn and undermine that,” Feinberg said.
— Sarah Fortinsky, Stephen Feinberg, Trump’s Pentagon No. 2 pick, avoids Ukraine question, The Hill, 25 February 2025
“In Donald Trump’s America, if you get knocked down, you stay down,” Duckworth said. “By the way, Donald Trump, I didn’t put my life on the line to defend our democracy so you could invite Russia to interfere in it.”
— Tammy Duckworth, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, 28 July 2016
Jeff Bezos Backflip
‘We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.’
— Jeff Bezos, memo to the Washington Post ‘team’, 27 February 2025
Here is a 2018 conversation between Jeff Bezos and German publisher Matthias Döpfner at a Business Insider event. Presumably, he is as crimson as a Washington State cherry today:
Döpfner: Are you upset if the Post journalists are writing critical stories about Amazon?
Bezos: No, I’m not upset at all.
Döpfner: Did or would you ever interfere?
Bezos: Never. I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red. It has nothing to do with … I don’t even get so far… I just don’t want to. It would feel icky; it would feel gross. It would be one of those things when I’m 80 years old I would be so unhappy with myself if I had interfered. Why would I? I want that paper to be independent. We have a fantastic editor in Marty Baron.
— Kara Swisher, @karaswisher.bsky.social, 27 February 2025
This empty little human cunt, his skin made of tracing paper, his mind a desk drawer of obsolete charging cables, just straight-up gutting a fine American newspaper. …
I used to write for the Washington Post every so often. They were diligent, meticulous, curious and open-minded. To see this mewling invertebrate tell it what to cover and how is fucking sickening.
— Ian Dunt, 27 February 2025
F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it coming
They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Autocratic Bedfellows
Their goals may be temporarily in sync but their worldviews could not be more different. Trump retains nostalgic 20th-century visions of what a great president looks like. His proudest photo op was at Buckingham Palace with the Queen. He says he wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker.” He dreams of winning the Nobel Prize. He looks in the mirror and sees his face carved into Mount Rushmore. Musk would happily blow up Mount Rushmore. He probably thinks Nobel laureates are a bunch of “pedos.” His mindset and aspirations are far from America’s historic past or Trump’s delusional future. Instead, he’s building a new world order to rule over from his base camp on Mars.
— Tina Brown, The New Cro-Magnon Era, Fresh Hell, 12 February 2025
A Pair of Jokers
The actual leader of the free world is a comedian by trade. The nominal leader of the free world is a troll by disposition who delights in “jokes” that may or may not be jokes. (And who, in another quirk, is prone to wearing more face make-up than the entire Ringling Bros. roster.)
— Nick Cataggio, Kidding on the Square, The Dispatch, 25 February 2025
AI Gaza
The video might have gone down particularly badly with Trump’s Christian supporters, with several comments referencing the idolatry of the golden statue, and others lamenting a scene showing Trump in a nightclub alone with a woman dressed as a bellydancer as a crowd looks on.
“Only one deserves the glory and the honor, Mr President,” wrote another user. “The statue is a symbol of the antichrist, please humble yourself to God. Jesus is king and only Him.” Other users described the video as “sick” and “filth”.
— Oliver Holmes, Paul Owen, Trump faces Truth Social backlash over AI video of Gaza with topless Netanyahu and bearded bellydancers, The Guardian, 26 February 2025
X marks the spot
What it means to be “autistic” in 2025 — the idpol commodification of the term, its rapid generalisation, its tedious role as both brand and marketing tool (which I’ve cynically exploited when necessary see: a career in the arts) — has generally seen me drift away from a conversation I once found kinda, sorta, interesting.
“Everyone’s a little autistic,” the dipshits like to say, being, as they are, dipshits, and so self-diagnosis is both de rigueur and delicious. We’ve certainly reached a point of mass-psychosis where you may as well staple the DSM to your forehead, just so people know why you cross the street the way you do, or why you’re rude on ZOOM calls, or why you can’t get a Hinge match etc, it’s all content baby, get on board or get cancelled, you ableist dog.
The sad truth is, we’re not allowed to call ourselves “stupid” anymore, despite the fact the majority of us clearly are, and are made to be while existing in what is arguably the “stupidest” (don’t) moment in history.
So it goes that I circle these conversations like an old stray dog eyeing a dead pigeon that’s being run over again and again in traffic. Why risk the nibble, even if your gut insists you’re starving? Better to lay down and die at this rate, perhaps besides the pigeon, for all your gore and splatter is worth.
And yet…one individual keeps pulling me back into that turgid swamp we call “discourse.” A man so venal, dull, perverted, and cringe, that I cannot look away from his Daffy Duck style splutterings without feeling like Elmer Fudd (in want of a HUGE gun.)
That man is Elon Musk — a Nazi, a nonce, and a nincompoop — a “bad” autistic — a ret@rd — who I hope [REDACTED], violently, soon.
— Patrick Marlborough, X, 21 February 2025
***
***
‘The Twitter Guy’
‘Fuckin’ laminated-face cunt.’
‘A billionaire conman with a lot of money.’
— AOC on Musk
‘I can’t believe I’m saying this during Black History Month, but Elon: Go back to Africa!’
— Charlamagne tha God
Praying for the President
‘Let his days be few; and let another take his office.’
— Psalm 109:8