Other People’s Thoughts
This is the sixty-ninth 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.
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As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this latest, extended chapter in the series includes videos and illustrative material.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
1 December 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXVIII:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXIX
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晚年唯好靜，萬事不關心。
自顧無長策，空知返舊林。
— 王維，《酬張少府》
Every day, computers are making people easier to use.
— credo of Information Magazine
We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?
— Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Art of Poetry No. 80’, The Paris Review
A person of good intelligence and sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality — and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing — it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.
— George Carlin
漢奸
希望年輕人要明白，喜歡外國的任何東西，喜歡他們的文化、藝術、音樂、電影、服裝、食物、景點、制度、人 … 你都不是漢奸。什麼才是漢奸呢？
1、愚弄國人認知的；
2、扭曲國人三觀的；
3、給國人進行反智教育的；
4、把國人當成韭菜進行收割的 … 這類人才是真正的漢奸。
— 李玲，北大教授
Emiraticore culture
For the rest of the world, modernisation no longer means Westernisation. No one wants to be like the West, pompously dysfunctional liberal democracies where you need to spend a hundred million on planning documents before you can put in a catflap. Even the West doesn’t want to be like the West any more. The great global attractor is the UAE. Development is Dubaification: more sensuous, more childlike, more sinister. Life as a series of toys and gimmicks, the Emiraticore culture that’s now ascendant everywhere, matcha labubu sober rave Kaws Mr Beast Benson Boone. A new and unsettling class of commodities, that no longer try to obscure the social relations that undergird them. You enjoy the labubu precisely because it’s annoying: this is one small way of guaranteeing that somewhere in the production process, someone has suffered. The Sultan drowning his concubines for fun. Everyone gets to worship Satan. That’s part of the deal too, baked in to the whole project. Vathek abjures the Prophet; Tamburlaine desecrates the Qur’an; the Orientalist fantasy always involves making war against Heaven. You get the sense that the emirs would rather have as little as possible to do with Islam. Hoping that if they build enough malls their population will quietly stop believing in God. Replace Him with Japanese food and Italian cars and Ukrainian girls. No more holy wars. No desperate flights across the desert. Your only reward is in this dunya, but the dunya can be a very nice place.
— Sam Kriss, The world’s first matcha labubu genocide, Numb at the Lodge, 18 November 2025
Peace isn’t built by turning Asian symbols of joy into the global face of “every genocide.” Matcha Labubu is not that symbol; it is your wake-up call. For such a smart guy you have made a fatal category error: appropriating a Chinese soft-power emblem of childhood delight as the mascot for Abrahamic religious enmity and its genocidal fruits is not clever, it’s scapegoating. The real suffering in the Sahel (or Gaza) deserves better than having its horror laundered through someone else’s innocence.
The Wicked Erivo-Grande Promotional Tour
I hereby express my doubts about this focus-grouped, Astroturfed theoretical gay pairing; apologies to the X users with anime avatars who are currently photoshopping images of the two of them scissoring on the Yellow Brick Road. I do not in fact detect any particular homoeroticism between them. Maybe, behind the scenes, there’s some real passion going on, I don’t know. But a press tour is a press tour and if you read any actual human emotion into it, you are a mark. Are they fucking? That’s my question. Are they fucking? That would be, you know, something. That would be actually gay. I would not necessarily call it homoerotic, because fucking is not necessarily erotic — these days fucking usually isn’t — but it would be gay. But the kinds of people who go wild for this shit are not so keen on gay sex, right, only on “gay” as a kind of vague aether that permeates the universe like the fucking Force from Star Wars. It’s amazing, the number of people out there who love everything about queer life except for queer sex, who would prefer that sex and sexual orientation live in entirely different zip codes, that they exist as non-overlapping magisteria; it’s so much safer that way. Who wants gay sex polluting their enjoyment of the abstraction that is Being Gay? …
That is what gay love is, now, in the collective imagination of American commerce: a set of identity relations projected onto bored and indifferent celebrities who will half-heartedly play along with the idea because doing so moves units and, anyway, what does it cost them? The more that sexual orientation slouches to the point of pure abstraction, the less effort it takes. Anyone and anything can be gay, now, because gay is just a set of pompous liberal cultural signifiers that have no earthly material relation to homosexuals.
— Freddie deBoer, 24 November 2025
One Day
One Day is passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read, if only for the reminder that history always comes down to one simple question: “When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?”
— from a review of Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
I’m 62 today
How in the hell did that happen?
Taking stock of a life, particularly one’s own, is always a tricky business. Memory is a rigged casino. It pays out the jackpots you like and quietly burns the receipts for the dumb bets. Most remember the wins, the losses, the near misses, and the moments you should have seen coming but didn’t. You remember the people who loved you into becoming someone better, and the people who, through cruelty or betrayal, taught you to stop handing out keys to your own house and heart.
Time is usually a great editor of past suffering and pain, and a burnisher of triumphs.
— Rick Wilson, 21 November 2025
Ezra Pound in hair extensions
Nuzzi’s only hope for redemption was to come roaring back with a witty mea culpa memoir that would also defenestrate her “insatiable in all ways” former crush (she even loved his brain worm, for God’s sake), who now, in the hugely influential role of secretary of health and human services, is wielding reckless power over the life and death of 342 million Americans. But no. Nuzzi has, alas, blown it with the absurdly pretentious American Canto. The memoir’s opaque, staccato paragraphs, the recurring gusts of Didion-derivative Santa Ana winds, the clunking literary aperçus from the likes of Carl Jung thrown around — WTF, Olivia? American Canto is Ezra Pound in hair extensions. Except, instead of Pound’s crystalline imagery, the prose feels muffled in the smog of the LA fires (a laboriously overworked metaphor for her own reputational incineration) and the bloated sense that an ambitious 32-year-old magazine snark-artist who lusted for the conferred charisma of a Kennedy fling is a doomed femme fatale of the silver screen. “He desired. He desired desiring,” she warbles. “He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.”
— Tina Brown, Fresh Hell, 25 November 2025
A ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees
Something I have done, though by my profession a divine, yet turbine raptus ingenii, as he said, out of a running wit, an unconstant, unsettled mind, I had a great desire (not able to attain to a superficial skill in any) to have some smattering in all, to be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis, which Plato commends, out of him Lipsius approves and furthers, as fit to be imprinted in all curious wits, not to be a slave of one science, or dwell altogether in one subject, as most do, but to rove abroad, centum puer artium, to have an oar in every man’s boat, to taste of every dish, and sip of every cup, which, saith Montaigne, was well performed by Aristotle, and his learned countryman Adrian Turnebus; this roving humour (though not with like success) I have ever had, and like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly, qui ubique est, nusquam est, which Gesner did in modesty, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.
— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
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1984 + Brave New World — China according to Jianying Zha
The idea that China should forever be condemned to dictatorship simply because it serves economic purposes—that argument we don’t buy.
— Odd Arne Westad, ‘China’s Long 1970s’, The Monitor, 25 November 2025
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The Thucydides Convergence
Far from beating back China, America under Trump may come to resemble it. The country is on its way: obsessed with regime stability and willing to use almost any means to keep its people under control; jealously guarding its near periphery while remaining largely uninterested in leading the world; and building a cult of personality around its autocratic leader in an atmosphere of ethnonationalist triumphalism. …
As its primacy fades, the United States now faces a choice: meet rising nations as respected partners in building a new, more equitable multipolar world or seek the costly, brittle power that comes from domination. Trump has chosen the latter; China, it seems, seeks the former. History tells us which path leads to peace and prosperity, and which is the road to ruin.
— Lydia Polgreen, America Is Setting a Trap for Itself, The New York Times, 21 November 2025
A Human Chum Bucket
Yesterday, like every damn day in this deranged funhouse America we are staggering through, but yesterday especially, was a Category Five political psychodrama. One of Donald Trump’s most rabid foot soldiers, Marjorie Taylor Greene, announced she was resigning and went full scorched earth on her way out, detonating her own party like she had stumbled across a self destruct switch while searching for the light. And immediately before that detonation, as if the universe were running a slapstick double feature, we got the absolutely unhinged spectacle of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani sharing the same oxygen.
Not because the mayor elect of New York City called Trump a fascist to his face while Trump nodded like a man being praised for remembering deodorant. Not because the memes mutated so fast epidemiologists should have been involved. Not even because Mamdani stood there youthful and articulate and incandescent while Trump sat, because he cannot stand for more than a commercial break, body sagging flaccid like the depressed tongue of a mud covered boot, all collapsed will and wounded pride in a single pathetic heap.
It was the revelation inside the spectacle. The reminder. The thing about Donald Trump most people forget until he is seated beside someone with actual presence.
He talks tough. He bellows. He snarls. He hurls “communist” and “monster” the way toddlers hurl spaghetti. But the second he encounters someone with spine, someone with moral clarity, someone unmoved by bluster, he folds. He wilts. He sits there like a dog brought instantly to heel, panting for approval from the very man he swore he would obliterate.
There is no introspection, no subterranean machinery, no inner voice whispering “Are you sure you do not look pathetic?” He does not reflect. He does not evolve. He is a stimulus response organism in lifts. A political amoeba pulsing toward flattery and recoiling from strength, which is why Mamdani reduced him to something spiritually boneless on live camera. …
So when the two of them were captured in the same Oval Office frame, the contrast was not visual. It was existential.
Mamdani, upright and slim and alert and vibrant, the human equivalent of a city wide exhale.
Trump, a human chum bucket, putrid and slumped and sagging inward like a cellophane sack of half congealed bacon fat.
— JoJoFromJerz, The Siren, 23 November 2025
President Piggy
I wish we lived in a land where if journalists heard the president call one of their colleges “piggy” or suggest another of their colleagues, who was butchered for what he wrote, in some way had it coming, they would close their laptops, leave as soon as possible, and ask to be reassigned.
— Mrs Betty Bowers, 19 November 2025
… a walking case study in what happens when you feed resentment, ego, and fried food into the same human being for fifty years and then give him nuclear codes. … No man who lives on a diet of corruption, cruelty, Big Macs, Filet O’Fish, KFC, and burnt steaks and spite gets to call anyone “Piggy” ever.
— Rick Wilson, 19 November 2025
Not All Greek
As when one has spent the happy years of childhood on the green banks, and amid the woody cliffs of some beautiful river, and has followed up many of its tributary torrents, through far-winding glens to the foaming cascade, or the clear moss-grown well where they have their source—as this native of some fair Wharfe or Tweed, loves not only the spot where he was born, and the dark-brown swirling pool where he caught his first trout, but the whole course of the stream; and will trace with delight its whole progress through dreary sands and muddy Deltas, till it loses itself in the sea; so the student of any favourite language will not feed only on a few chosen authors, but follow out the whole stream of the national existence which it exhibits, and chronicle every point of its mazy wanderings with the pious faithfulness of an old monk. A feeling of this kind, I should think, will, with ingenuous youth, prove sufficient to excite an inquiring sympathy after the literary fate of those who still use the language of Demosthenes; but for brains of sterner stuff, I may remark, in the second place, that the living Greek language, though modern in name and organism, is, beyond all question, ancient in the greater part of its materials—more ancient, unquestionably, than that Attic form of the Hellenic tongue, which gives its colour to by far the more important part of the ancient Greek literature which we possess.
— John Stuart Blackie, On The Living Language of the Greeks, 1852, reprinted in Antigone, November 2025
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Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble
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Three Years on
Three years ago, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released. It’s been one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history, and gotten more press than God. But I think a fair case can be made that it is not what it has often been cracked up to be, and probably never will be.
… [l]et me make four of my core beliefs, often misrepresented, absolutely clear:
- I believe that artificial general intelligence(AGI) is achievable.
- I believe that there is at least a chance that artificial general intelligence will be of large net benefit to society.
- I just don’t happen to think large language models like ChatGPT will get us there. (I do think they have their uses, but I worry about their costs to society, around bias, cybersecurity, misinformation,
nonconsensual deepfake porn, copyright theft, energy and water usage, the gradual enshittification of the internet, the severe hit to college education, and so on.) - I think that the recurring core technical problems that we have seen (as discussed below) with LLMs aren’t going way; instead they inherent to the technology.
In short, I am at least modestly bullish on AGI, but don’t think that large language models like ChatGPT are the droids we are looking for. And I certainly don’t think that ChatGPT has lived up to expectations. Increasingly, it appears that others are recognizing this as well. …
If things do go belly-up, and the whole economy falls into recession, the single biggest culprit in my mind, will be ChatGPT’s human avatar, its bullshit-spewing CEO Sam Altman, who hyped GPT-5 endlessly for years, pretending he knew that AGI was coming when in hindsight he was bluffing. In his January blog, for example, he wrote that “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.” Earlier he joked that AGI had been “achieved internally,” likely stoking FOMO on the part of potential investors.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, might be culpable too, as he been increasingly drawn to overstatements and flawed arguments of his own …
— Gary Marcus, Three years on, ChatGPT still isn’t what it was cracked up to be – and it probably never will be, 29 November 2025
When faith in government and Wall Street disappeared during the financial crisis, technology was the last industry standing — its leaders’ idealism mirrored the public’s confidence in it. But over time, as they grew more dominant, they put corporate self-interest ahead of customers, and they made their products worse. Tech now looks a lot like finance: power without accountability, and profit without purpose.
— Aaron Zamost, From Apple to Meta: How Silicon Valley Lost Its Spine, The New York Times, 12 November 2025
徐渭
眼空千古，獨立—時。肺胃達官貴人、騷土墨客，文長皆叱而奴之，恥不與交。
— 袁宏道
Reporting the Truth
And if we think we’re doing it tough trying to cut through the shroud of institutional secrecy; or trying to call out those who would polarise our communities for grubby political ends; or resisting attempts by government or corporate machines, cynical or otherwise to dictate our stories for us; or you’re struggling in a regional or rural community that’s been seriously stripped of its news outlets and the most basic resources, remind yourself of those journalists in Gaza or Ukraine, or Russia or China, or Myanmar or Afghanistan who’ve been shut down or gone to prison, or gone to their graves for an ideal – for seeking to report the truth.
Fini
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short.
— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
His response to a letter from Harold Pinter canvassing support for a proposal to have the Comedy Theatre in London rechristened the Pinter Theatre, “Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?”
NORAD Ready to Track and Terminate Santa’s Illegal Flight, November 29, 2025
MAR-A-LAGO COMMAND POST, Fla. — NORAD will not be “tracking” Santa Claus this year, but intercepting him. According to Mike Johnson, Santa and his filthy reindeer are expected to enter U.S. airspace illegally around December 24, smuggling “mystery substances” packed in candy canes. “We will locate, identify, and execute the sleigh,”promises President Trump, “Border security includes the North Pole. It’s for the kids. I love kids 🧒”
— Tokyo Paladin with Jake Adelstein
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