This is the sixty-sixth 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.
As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this latest chapter includes a number of short videos and an illustration.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
29 September 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXV:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXVI
‘I think I wasn’t ready to be childish until I knew what the alternative was!’
— Douglas Adams, 1980 BBC interview
Empathy
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matthew 5:44)
And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. (Luke 6:31)
Jesus wept. (John 11:35)
‘I can’t stand empathy. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that — it does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics.’
— Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA CEO, co-founder and Christian nationalist, October 2022
‘Guns save lives.’
— Charlie Kirk was shot to death on 10 September 2025
Saint Charlie
… He normalized violence. He curated it, monetized it, and sicced it on anyone who dared to puncture his movement’s lies. And now, in the wake of his shooting, there’s all this national outpouring of mourning, moments of silence, yellow prayer hands, and tributes painting him as a civil debater. But the truth is that Kirk and his foot soldiers spent years terrorizing educators, trying to silence us with harassment and fear! And now the same violence he unleashed on others has come full circle.
But what I find especially jarring is the dissonance in public mourning for a smug white man whose life work was actively hostile to certain groups. Kirk spent years demonizing LGBTQ people, mocking gun survivors, spewing racism about Black folks, and pushing policies that literally shorten lives.
It is so revolting to watch a bipartisan wave of grief sweep over this hateful racist as if he was a neutral community servant.
— Stacey Patton, 11 September 2025
There is no hate like Christian love.
— a popular saying about evangelicals
Remembering Charlie Kirk
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Vibe Farming
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“This guy is a modern day St Paul. He was a missionary, he’s an evangelist, he’s a hero. He’s one I think that knows what Jesus meant when he said ‘the truth will set you free.'”
— Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Fox & Friends discussing Charlie Kirk
What Cardinal Dolan may not have known is that many of Mr. Kirk’s words were marked by racist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, by violent pro-gun advocacy, and by the promotion of Christian nationalism. These prejudicial words do not reflect the qualities of a saint. To compare Mr. Kirk to St. Paul risks confusing the true witness of the Gospel and giving undue sanction to words and actions that hurt the very people Jesus calls us to love.
— The Sisters of Charity of New York, 24 September 2025
I am sorry, but there’s nowhere in the Bible where we are taught to honor evil, and how you die does not redeem how you lived.
— Rev. Howard-John Wesley, 14 September 2025
Death Cults
Groypers speak in codes and symbols that require a level of nerddom to interpret, a skill born from an asocial, lonely life. These are minds cooked in ways we’re yet to really grapple with, rewritten by an unchecked cannibalistic internet that incentivises attention-grabbing above all else. These methods of getting attention have passed beyond vile jokes and incomprehensible cartoons, through snuff videos and revenge porn, paedophilic hentai and marathon goon sessions, onto that joke whose punchline remains untopped: death. …
This is the natural evolution of a virus that Charlie Kirk himself was a 10th-generation mutation of.
— Patrick Marlborough, Tyler Robinson: Media can’t understand alleged Charlie Kirk killer, Crikey, 19 September 2025
Ecce Trump
Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul — all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been — arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul — it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.
— Oliver Kornetzke, 18 August 2025
Sic Transit
… this will in the end be a very significant speech—precisely because of its stupidity. When American historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the rise of our off-brand fascism. When world historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the passing of technological, and hence economic, and hence political leadership from the U.S. to China, in the span of eight months. The tape of this address will be the easiest way to explain to people how such a mammoth shift happened so fast.
At least he didn’t make them play YMCA.
— Bill McKibbin, The Stupidest Speech in UN History, 23 September 2025
Liberalism
What liberalism are you talking about in the book?
This is not liberalism of the left, and not liberalism of the neoliberal sort associated with a particular set of right-wing views, but instead a commitment to freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law. That’s the holy trinity of the liberal tradition. Freedom is cashed out most importantly in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but it also includes private property. Pluralism is on our currency. It also means respect for people who have diverse ethnicities, diverse religious convictions, and diversity in their sense of what kind of life is good.
— Isaac Chotiner interviews Cass Sunstein, Can Liberalism Be Saved?, The New Yorker, 23 September 2025
Henry dwarfs everything else
In terms of human rights, I’ve always found it a little bit puzzling, given what you write, and given who your wife is, that you two were so close to Henry Kissinger. Of all the pre-Trump political figures in America, he is the one I think of as in some ways the opposite of liberal, given his behavior toward the rest of the world.
I’ll tell you a story. I wrote a book a few years ago on Star Wars. We invited Dr. Kissinger to my Star Wars book party, and he said, “You wrote a book about Star Wars? Why’d you write a book about Star Wars?” He was puzzled and courteous, but really confused. And then he came to the book party, which was quite generous. He was a busy person.
But, despite his busyness, he came to the book party.
Yeah, and then I gave a talk on Star Wars, and he came up to me afterward and he said, “Oh, I see why you wrote a book on Star Wars. There’s a lot there. It’s, like, about families and it’s about governments and freedom.” The amount of curiosity and generosity that he showed was incomparable. I don’t know anyone who showed that level of curiosity and generosity. And we really got into Star Wars. He just wanted to think about it. I know there are strong views about his career, and I’m hardly an expert on his career.
But your wife is one of the great human-rights experts in the world. I asked you about him being anti-liberal, and your response was that he was very nice to you about your book.
About Star Wars.
It is certainly a touching story. But that’s not totally an answer to the question.
Yeah. Well, I don’t know. What he would think of this book I’d love to know.
But no second thoughts about being friends with him or anything?
I feel generally very grateful for friendship, and he was, when I knew him, a person of immense kindness. Those who think of him as someone who was something horrible or worse, I don’t know what to say about that.
But you could have an opinion on it. You have an opinion on all kinds of things, right?
Well, on him and his role in government, that’s not something I’ve particularly studied, so I don’t know. I know some people who think he was a horrible historic figure. They would say, “Would you be friends with Genghis Khan? Would you be friends with Stalin?” And I wouldn’t be friends with Stalin, so I concede that.
Well, the next time someone brings up a terrible anecdote about Cambodia or Vietnam, I will definitely drop the Star Wars story to show that people have two sides.
Yeah. And I get those who think you shouldn’t be friends with someone who did terrible things. I hear that. I can just say that he was, as a very large number of people would say, though many fewer would say it publicly, an extraordinarily generous friend.
Professor, thank you so much for doing this.
Great, thanks. If we go light on the Kissinger part, I wouldn’t complain, because it could dwarf everything else.
A Fascist Encounter
Over the months and years to come, we will have to fight for our values like never before. That means proudly making the case for diversity and openness. It means that we must make that case without embarrassment or apology, without equivocating or whimpering about how we’re metropolitan elitists for doing so. The government is unwilling to do it, so it will be up to us to do it instead – whether we are on the right or left or centre, whether we are naturally activist or rather resigned, regardless of our temperament or inclination. But it will also mean that we stand with those who would be targeted. Thinking practically, speaking openly, ensuring they are safe and protected. It will be an exercise in solidarity. And it is through that solidarity that we will show our values and the failure of racism.
— Ian Dunt, Striking 13, 14 September 2025
The Other Charlie
Charles’s first few years as monarch have been something of a quiet triumph. Seasoned by countless foreign tours, marinated in his constitutional role through years of practice and now magically aligned with so much of modern citizenry’s concerns (his decades-long campaign against pesticides and food dyes, by the way, now sounds like the sane bit of MAHA), Charles may be the last man standing who can exude global gravitas in the dumpster fire of our digitally dominated world.
— Tina Brown, When Trump Visits King Charles III, The New York Times, 17 September 2025
Beijing, 3 September 2025
Xi says: “In the past people rarely lived longer than 70 years, but today they say that at 70 you are still a child.” Putin responds, “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become and even achieve immortality.” Xi then says, “Some predict this century humans may live up to 150 years old.”
— Nikita Mazurov, China Didn’t Want You to See This Video of Xi and Putin. So Reuters Deleted It., The Intercept, 12 September 2025
The China Threat
So I’m still asking, where’s the threat? I don’t like what happens in China. I think it’s rotten. That’s one of the most repressive governments anywhere. But I’m asking another question, we talk uniformly without exception about the Chinese threat, what are we talking about? In fact, just as a rule of thumb, if anything is discussed as if it’s just obvious, we don’t have to talk about it, everyone agrees, but we know it’s complicated. In any such situation, we should be asking, what’s going on? Nothing complicated can have that degree of uniformity about it. So some scam is underway.
— Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s Theory of the Good Life, The Anarchist Library
The Train is Waiting
[Primo] Levi writes about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a Jewish collaborator who ruled the Lodz ghetto. Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” turned the ghetto into a slave labor camp which enriched the Nazis and himself. He deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience and embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming.
“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in “The Drowned and the Saved.” “[H]is fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.”
“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility,” Levi adds. “[Willingly or not], we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.”
— quoted in Chris Hedges, Death of the Holocaust Industry
In place of one killed Charlie Kirk, a million young American patriots must stand up. Charlie Kirk fell so that the turning point would happen. And it must happen. And it will happen.
Internal strife in MAGA must stop immediately. They only benefit the ruthless enemy, and now everyone is a target. In the name of Charlie Kirk, MAGA must be reborn.
Enough of being tolerant. The left always accuses the right of violence. But violence comes only from liberals and the left. The right are victims. Enough of tolerating this. We move to the next phase: total radicalization.
—Alexander Dugin, Who Killed Charlie Kirk?, 11 September 2025
Tech Orgy at the White House
President Trump hosted a big dinner party at the White House last week with attendees, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman. All of them were there. One of them, Tim Cook was there, Sergey Brin, everybody was there.
One notable figure was missing, Elon Musk. Musk says he was invited but couldn’t make it, but other people say he wasn’t invited. I don’t care, I don’t care.
The guests were full of praise for the president. It was pretty grotesque to watch. Bill Gates thanked him for, quote, setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the US.
[Kara Swisher: I think Bill Gates is doing it so he can save USAID. Vaccine research. I’m okay with him.
I’m going to give him the only out. The rest of it was so, they will live to regret what they’re doing here, I think, or maybe they won’t. I mean, this short-term gains, I think this was so grotesque and it reminded me of that story I broke in 2016 when they went up the Trump Tower and did the exact same thing because it was in their interests.
They’re not going to grow a backbone anyone. They’re going to keep up this shtick. It’s good for their business.
It was particularly gross and especially Zuckerberg, who tried to explain himself, looked like a real toady in a room full of toadies. Any thoughts on this?]
I thought they made sex work look dignified. I mean, I think paying some guy 50 bucks to suck my cock is more dignified than what these guys did.
[Swisher: What do you really think, Scott?]
What is the point of aggregating all these skills? These guys work so hard, they’re so talented, they rally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, they build these amazing products, so they can become billionaires, so they can go and fillate an insurrectionist.
What in the fuck?
They all complained about the insurrection.
I understand the notion of staying below the radar. Don’t antagonize him, don’t say anything, just stay out of his way. I get it, I’m having lunch with a chancellor of an iconic public college tomorrow, and they want to talk about a variety of things, including how they respond to Trump. …
[Swisher: They looked so miserable at that dinner. And plus they didn’t get to go on to the new patio, the new rose garden, what looks like such a cheap version of a Marriott. It looks like a Marriott, like a medium level Marriott.]
They’re prostitutes with a half bottle of cheap Jack, of cheap bourbon drink, condoms hanging out of their ass, and the pep has just said, you got another 11 Johns tonight.
[Swisher: Oh my God.]
They look exhausted, abused, tired, and humiliated. They’re like, how did I end up here?
— Scott Galloway, Dept. of War Rebrand, Trump’s Tech Bro Dinner, and Elon’s Pay Package, Pivot, 9 September 2025
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Speak to no one of worldly affairs,
and you become one untouched by the world’s troubles.
逢人不說人間事，
便是人間無事人。
— from To the Monk Zhi《贈質上人》by Du Xunhe (杜荀鶴, c. 846–c. 904)
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洋柿子
西紅柿轉運是在近些年，“番茄”居然上了菜單，由英法大菜館而漸漸侵入中國飯舖，連山東館子也要報一報“番茄蝦銀（仁）兒”！文化的侵略喲，門牙也擋不住呀！可是細一看呢，飯館里的番茄這個與那個，大概都是加上了點番茄汁兒，粉紅怪可看，且不難吃；至於整個的鮮番茄，還沒多少人肯大嘴的啃。肯生吞它的，或者還得算留過洋的人們和他們的兒女，到底他們的洋味地道些。近來西醫宣傳西紅柿里含有維他命A至W，可是必須生吃，這倒有點別扭。不過呢，國人是注意延年益壽，滋陰補腎的東西，或者這點青氣味兒也不難於習慣下來的；假如國醫再給證明一下：番茄加鹿茸可以壯陽種子，我想它的前途正自未可限量咧。
— 老舍，洋柿子，一九三五年七月十四日青島《民報》
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Not Wishing for a Good Outcome
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Apple AirPod 4
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978)
捧殺
Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.
— Terry Prachett, Going Postal
Erika Kirk
‘… and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.’
Homeless?
“Involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them.”
— Brian Kilmeade, Fox News, 13 September 2025
On History
Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured—new institutions, new maps, new rulers, new winners and losers—or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time but somehow speaking the same language?
— Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, 1989
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I am Haunted by Waters
— Robert Redford, d. 16 September 2025
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Appropriation
One kind of intellectual-historical phenomenon that has long fascinated me is how certain intellectuals have their ideas appropriated by people whose politics are the opposite of theirs. Ergo leftwing Hegelians (e.g. Karl Marx), rightwing Leninists (e.g. Steve Bannon), leftwing Schmittians (e.g. Giorgio Agamben), rightwing Gramscians (e.g. Chris Rufo), leftwing Heideggerians (e.g. Herbert Marcuse), or rightwing Alinskyites (e.g. James O’Keefe). In each of these cases, the pupil of course had to drop some features of the master’s work in order to fit it into his own political agenda, but it goes to show that there is no subtle political idea that is not appropriable and weaponizable against the agenda of its originator.
— Nils Gilman, 19 September 2025
Tick Tock TikTok
The likelihood that Donald Trump will connive with China and the new management to turn TikTok into a mouthpiece for his own illiberal agenda isn’t 100 percent, but it sure ain’t zero, either. Instead of a platform where you can’t get the truth about Tiananmen Square, we might end up with one where you can’t get the truth about Tiananmen Square or January 6.
— Nick Cataggio, The Dispatch, 19 September 2025
Chinese Slang
Killer: 绝了 (jué le)
Bangin’: 炸裂 (zhàliè)
Hype: 炒作 (chǎozuò)
Trash: 垃圾 (lājī)
Lame: 没劲 (méijìn)
Wack: 差劲 (chājìn)
Sketchy: 可疑 (kěyí)
Shady: 阴险 (yīnxiǎn)
Bummer: 扫兴 (sǎo xìng)
Homie: 哥们儿 (gēmen’r)
Squad: 兄弟们 (xiōngdìmen)
Chad: 高富帅 (gāo fù shuài)
Ride or die: 铁哥们儿 (tiě gēmen’r)
Ghost: 玩消失 (wán xiāoshī)
Stan: 狂热粉丝 (kuángrè fěnsī)
Tea: 八卦 (bā guà) / 瓜 (guā)
— The Mandarin Flow, 23 September 2025
Self-cancellation
Of course, there is one person who truly made this possible, and that is my chief writer Ava Daniels. I’ve already been asked to fire her from this position. But I won’t do it. I refuse to fire her. And not only because she is my creative partner, but because it’s a slippery slope. A few days ago I agreed to cut a joke I had made to protect Ethan Summers and the studio’s interests. And now I’m being asked to fire someone I love, who hasn’t done anything wrong. So what will they ask me to do next? Where is the line? For me, it’s here, right now. That’s why today’s show will be my last.
— Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart), Hacks, Season 4
To Be or Not to Be an NPC
There are many warring Silicon Valley tribes these days-tech right, abundance, network state, whoever-but they all share the same big three meta-narratives:
Technological advancement is the root driver of historical progress, from economic growth to social liberalism to geopolitical dominance. If a society fails to lead in science/tech, it will decline.
Empowering brilliant, outlier individuals is the key to success. They can be founders, scientists, or operators-and valued for intelligence, agency, or sheer drive-but must be free from bureaucratic or collective control.
Markets are the most effective system ever created-for innovation (e.g. startups), truth-finding (e.g. prediction markets), talent (e.g. immigration), and anything else. They allow the best to rise to the top.
— Jasmine Sun, are you high-agency or an NPC?, 22 September 2025
Chinese Slang Terms Using ‘吃’ (eat)
1 吃貨 (chī huò): Foodie → Grub master
2 吃土 (chī tǔ): Broke, Dirt-poor → Flat broke
3 吃香 (chī xiãng): Popular, In demand → Hot commodity
4 吃醋 (chī cù): Jealousy (in a romantic relationship) → Salty
5 吃相 (chī xiāng): Manner of eating/doing things → The whole deal
6 吃灰 (chī huī): Gather dust, Become obsolete → Dust bunny magnet
7 吃瓜 (chī guā): To watch or listen to gossip or drama → Spill the tea
8 吃虧 (chī kuī): Suffer a loss, Be at a disadvantage → Get played
9 吃白食 (chī báishí): Eat at someone else’s expense → Scrounger
10 吃軟飯 (chī ruǎnfàn): Live off someone → Be a kept man/woman
11 吃狗糧 (chī gǒuliáng): “Be fed dog food” → To be the third wheel
— Mandarin Flow, 26 September 2025
游刃有餘
I don’t agonize about writing. I totally enjoy the act of writing, and I think of myself more like a furniture maker, somebody who sits there sanding the table and staining and waxing it. I kind of have a blank mind as I’m doing it, like the butcher chopping meat in Zhuangzi. And I have a strange way of writing. Most people write a lot and then cut it down. I almost never delete any sentences, though I’m continually changing words. I start out with very little and then just keep adding and adding, to the beginning, middle, and end. It grows organically.
— Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No.4, Paris Review, Fall 2025
Six Records of a Floating Life
Interviewer:
One of the interesting things about your essays is that, despite appearing to be informational, they often take the reader on an emotional journey—wonder, joy, sadness, more sadness … Are there forms of essay that have influenced the structures of feeling in your writing?
Weinberger:
My model for the narrative essays is the Icelandic sagas, because they present incredibly dramatic scenes without being dramatic. Another would be Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life [浮生六記]—which of course has only four records. It’s a memoir, but it’s arranged emotionally, not chronologically. The narrative will skip twenty years from one sentence to the next. But most of my writing comes out of poetry. The poets I’m most attracted to have this enormous encyclopedic mind and curiosity that are also connected to a deep political engagement, people like Paz or Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, even Pound, though naturally I don’t adhere to his politics. People are always asking me about Borges, but he didn’t have that engagement. That blurring of fact and fiction, the faux erudition, was something wonderful to do once, but it doesn’t need to be repeated. His Chinese encyclopedia gets on my nerves. Foucault thought it was real, and everyone who reads Foucault still thinks it’s real. I have an essay that’s a bibliography of real Chinese books that are much stranger than Borges’s fake encyclopedia.
— Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No.4
Defencelessness
On the internet, a campaign of aggression or disinformation costs nothing, while defending against it is almost impossible. As a result, our republics, our large and small liberal democracies, risk being swept away like the tiny Italian republics of the early 16th century. And taking centre stage are characters who seem to have stepped out of Machiavelli’s The Prince to follow his teachings. In a situation of uncertainty, when the legitimacy of power is precarious and can be called into question at any moment, those who fail to act can be certain that changes will occur to their disadvantage.
— Giuliano da Emploi, How tech lords and populists changed the rules of power, Financial Times, 27 September 2025
Da Empoli has peered deep into power. Does he still have political ideals? “If you’d asked me in the past, I would have given you lots of convictions. But what’s left now, to me, is this idea that we try not to kill each other. We’ve been successful in the European Union in not doing so for an extraordinary lapse of time. It looked dull, but I think it’s not dull any more, and not obvious any more. So this European thing is the only strong ideal I have.”
He mentions Robert Menasse, Austrian author of novels on Brussels and, improbably, EU enlargement. “Let’s say that in 100 years somebody still reads books, how will they read his book about Brussels? Will they read it like [we read] the Austro-Hungarian writers, Zweig, Musil and Joseph Roth, with this nostalgia of a world that is gone? Whatever happens, there’s a part of innocence in the European project that is lost forever: this idea we had that the world was going to become like us, about gentle treaties and soft power. This European exceptionalism, which was much stronger than American exceptionalism, is what we’ve lost.”
— Simon Kuiper, Writer Giuliano da Empoli: ‘Putin knows he made a mistake. But one rule of power is to never go back’, Financial Times, 5 January 2024
Curtfishing
Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women.
“I’ve never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?”
“No – have you heard of curtfishing? It’s the new male dating trend. You say in your Bumble profile that you’re a member of the Dissident Right who often attends parties with Curtis Yarvin. Then female journos ask you out in the hopes that you’ll bring them along and they can turn it into an article.”
“What happens when they realize Curtis Yarvin isn’t at the party?”
“Oh, everyone pools their money and hires someone to pretend to be Curtis. You can just do things. Today it’s Ramchandra.” …
You follow his gaze, and there is Ramchandra, hair greased back, wearing a leather jacket, surrounded by a crowd of young women. “When I say I’m against furries,” he’s explaining, staccato, at 120 wpm, “I mean the sort of captured furries you get under the post-Warren-G-Harding liberal order, the ones getting the fat checks from the Armenians at Harvard and the Department of Energy. I love real furries, the kind you would have found in 1920s New Mexico eating crocodile steaks with Baron von Ungern-Sternberg! Some of my best friends are furries, as de Broglie-Bohm and my sainted mother used to say! Just watch out for the Kikuyu, that’s my advice! Hahahahahaha!” Some of the women are taking notes. “But enough about me. When I was seventeen, I spent seven weeks in Bensonhurst – that’s in the Rotten Apple, in case you can’t tell your Nepalis from your Neapolitans. A dear uncle of mine, after whom I was named…”
“Ramchandra is pretty good,” you admit. “Still, if it were me I would have gone with a white guy.”
“It’s fine,” says Chris. “Curtis describes himself as a mischling, and none of the journos know what that means.”
Ramchandra is still talking. “Of course, strawberries have only been strawberries since after the Kronstadt Rebellion. Before that, strawberries were just pears. You had to get them hand-painted red by Gypsies, if you can believe that. Gypsies! So if you hear someone from west of Pennsylvania Avenue mention ‘strawberries’, that’s what we in the business call il significanto.”
“I admit he has talent,“ you say. “But this curtfishing thing – surely at some point your date realizes that you’re not actually a high-status yet problematic bad boy who can further her career just by existing, and then she ghosts you, right?”
“That’s every date in San Francisco. But when you curtfish, sometimes she comps your meal from her expense account. It’s a strict Pareto improvement!”
After some thought, you agree this is a great strategy with no downsides, maybe the biggest innovation in dating since the invention of alcohol. …
Your friend Nishin sits at the table in front of a vodka bottle, slumping and glassy-eyed.
“Hey,” you say. “Are you alright? You look really drunk.”
“Oh yeah?” he asks. “And you’re an insufferable narcissist with main character syndrome. Your performative pearl-clutching about my drunkenness is a luxury belief intended to distract from the both-sidesist grift being perpetrated by your aggrieved billionaire mega-donors. Bro, this absolutely reeks of pick-me virtue-signaling man-child behavior.”
“Nishin, have you been using Twitter again?”
“First of all, it’s called X now. Second – “
“Nishin, you know what Twitter does to people! The journos can use it because they’re all nepo babies who come from long lines of other journos that developed genetic resistance over dozens of generations. Your ancestors were subsistence farmers! The worst discourse they had to deal with was people accusing their rye crop of having ergot! You’ll be eaten alive!”
“I’m making an impact!” Nishin insists, a little too loudly. “I’m influencing the national conversation!”
— Sources Say Bay Area House Party, Astral Codex Ten, 25 September 2025
Other Chinas
Reading her work made me reflect on the growing pool of young Chinese writers who choose to write in English without camouflage or dilution. They tackle contemporary fiction without compromising any cultural nuances. But why English? Is it for freedom, for distance, for reinvention? Li Yiyun once said she wrote in English to claim new personal territory after her Chinese writing had been ruined by education and family history.
— Rachel, 3rd Culture Kids, 26 September 2025
Kirkland USA
The YouTuber was a white nationalist, a fascist and a grifter. Some classic Kirkrrhoea includes “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people“; “the answer is yes, the baby would be delivered” (when asked whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter to pregnancy if she conceived because of rape); and, recently, “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”.
But as extreme as his views were (on gender, sexuality, class, genocide, women in the workplace, public executions — you name it!), they belonged in the continuum of an American ethno-nationalism as old as the country itself.
Kirk was a child of conservative political commentators. As a young teen, he obsessively listened to Rush Limbaugh (who said Kirk was “running the White House” in 2019) and Andrew Breitbart (who paved the way for Kirk), and fit seamlessly into a landscape where such hatreds aren’t only normalised but are also necessary to maintain modern conservatism’s sense of self and self-worth.
Charlie Kirk died by shitpost. The Lord of the Flies hellpit that he, Fuentes and their likes spent the better part of a decade constructing could only ever end in bloodshed. The cultists they bred and attracted are the first generation to be able to suckle at the tit of such hatreds from birth — and the acceptance, or rejection, of them can set one on course to kill it at its source.
What the endpoint of all this is — what it looks like when it arrives on the world stage — will be nothing to lmao about.
— Patrick Marlborough, Tyler Robinson: Media can’t understand alleged Charlie Kirk killer, Crikey, 19 September 2025
睜眼說瞎話
人無完人，並不能要求一個人的每句話都正確。查理·柯克只活了31年，他有成長、成熟的過程。他創立的“美國轉折點”和其他組織，也都有負面的批評。他對俄烏戰爭的立場我就不贊成。但是他思想、著述、和行動的主流在推動美國用對話達到政治的和解，反對暴力，是正確的，對美國是有巨大貢獻的。
— 高瑜，X，2025年9月17日
不應該以自己的不誠實去綁架別人
柯克幾乎是一切自由主義原則——政教分離、種族平等、性別平等、槍支管控……——的反對者，他在年輕人中傳播深遠的主張至少在我看來是完全錯誤、極其有害的。但無論如何，我顯然不會支持政治謀殺，因爲我不相信這能解決任何問題，只會加劇美國社會分裂。作爲言論自由的「原教旨主義者」，我肯定要讓他把話說完，然後心平氣和地逐條反駁他的論點和論據。…
柯克無疑是一個極有能量的人，年紀輕輕就獲得了極大成功，但能力用在一個錯誤的方向上會比平庸更可怕。我不認爲他是任何意義上的英雄，當然也沒有義務加入川粉們的悲情「大合唱」。但我也想順便說說自己對亡者的態度。中國人喜歡把「死者爲大」掛在嘴上，好像人死了就應該表達悲傷，而不應對死者——尤其是不幸的受害者——表示不敬，否則就是不尊重生命甚至「沒有人性」。我認爲，這種習慣性期待只能助長虛僞，因爲它超越了自然人性。我們會對自己的至親摯友離世感到傷心，但是對於一個從未謀面的陌生人？真的嗎？也許偶像例外──我是一個沒有偶像的人，但即便你有，你的偶像也不是我的偶像，你沒有權利在我拒絕作出你期待的表態就訴諸人身攻擊。…
知識人對人的尊重（或「愛」）是用自己的知識去改善社會，譬如減少槍枝犯罪。我認爲這是柯克悲劇的唯一價值所在──用他自己的話說，「證明我錯了」。他的個人悲劇構成了一個證明他錯了的鮮活案例：持槍權很危險！他的錯誤是不幸的——不僅對他自己，而且對每年數以萬計的槍支犯罪受害者。如果我們把他打扮成自由鬥士、國家英雄，那能讓他的遺產繼續在不幸的錯誤之路走得更遠。我不認爲，這恰當表達了對逝者的尊重。
— 張千帆， 柯克错在哪里？ ，FT中文网，2025年9月15日
Whose words will live longer in the viral afterlife of the Charlie Kirk memorial? The whisper of the bereaved young widow with the long blonde Miss Arizona hair who, after looking heavenward, forced out the agonized whisper about her husband’s killer, “That young man, I forgive him,” or the off-script jibe from the tiny, mean mouth of President Genovese, “I hate my opponent. I don’t want the best for him.” …
In this godly throng, no one seemed more out of place on the podium than the halitotic toad Stephen Miller, with his sallow cue ball head, ranting about the “forces of wickedness,” “You are NOTHING! You have NOTHING!…… You have nothing to share but bitterness!“ — the direct opposite of Erika’s declaration that “the answer to hate is not hate.”
— Tina Brown, 23 September 2025
I need a term of my own
I’m not gay, but I’m definitely something. I’m not saying we have to add a new term just for me, but there’s definitely no way I’m the same thing as Joe Rogan. …
Someone once commented on one of my videos: “we need to put a stop to this ‘Straggot’….” Finally, a slur of my own!
— Gianmarco Soresi, Thief of Joy
Bullshit Jobs
Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. “I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams,” she said. Then laughed. “I genuinely don’t know what that means anymore.”
She’s not alone. I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they’d never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don’t need doing.
The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they’ve had time to decompress, they’ll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They’re professional email forwards. They’re human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other. …
It’s like a corporate version of the emperor’s new clothes, everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we’ve all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it.
— Alex McCan, The Death of the Corporate Job., Still Wandering, 30 August 2025
“I make £120k to essentially be in meetings about meetings. My friend who’s a paramedic saves actual lives for £30k.”
— Alex McCan, The Death of the Corporate Job, part 2, 5 September 2025
Tylenol
昔有醫人，自媒能治背駝，曰：如弓者、如蝦者、如環者，若延吾治，可朝治而夕如矢矣。一人信焉，使治曲駝，乃索板二片，以一置地下，臥駝者其上，又以一壓焉，又踐之。駝者隨直，亦隨死。其子欲訴諸官。醫人曰：我業治駝，但管人直，不管人死。嗚呼！今之為官，但管錢糧收，不管百姓死，何異於此醫也哉。
— 江盈科，《庸醫治駝》
***
Days to come stand in front of us
like a row of lighted candles—
golden, warm, and vivid candles.
Days gone by fall behind us,
a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles;
the nearest are smoking still,
cold, melted, and bent.
I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me,
and it saddens me to remember their original light.
I look ahead at my lighted candles.
I don’t want to turn for fear of seeing, terrified,
how quickly that dark line gets longer,
how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate.
— C.P. Cavafy, Candles, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard