This is the seventy-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.
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As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this chapter in the series includes videos and illustrative material.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
1 April 2026
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A friend told me that
it’s important to wait.
‘Wait for what, exactly?’
‘I know what you know.’
— Lao Shu, trans. GRB
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXXIV:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXXV
Diskworld
Sir Terry died before Brexit; he died before the election of Trump; he died before a flawed world tipped over into the absurdity of whatever we want to call our current odious stew. One can only imagine what he would have thought of the antics of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, of the ascendancy of tech billionaires and their pretensions to world domination, of America’s doubling-down on Trump 2.0. That we lack his humour and rage and his capacity to imagine for us an alternative world is a profound loss. I don’t begrudge him his rest, but I weep for a world without his wisdom.
— Christopher Lockett, The Magical Humanism of Terry Pratchett, 12 March 2025
Bait-and-switch
‘We were hoping to get a Delcy Rodriguez in Iran, but what we got is a young Kim Jong Un.’
— David Petraeus, former head of the CIA
‘Trump: the world’s only elephant who walks around with his own china store.’
— Claude Malhuret, French politician
‘The Dildo of Consequences Rarely Arrives Lubed’ is a catchphrase and internet proverb similar in meaning to proverbs such as ‘you reap what you sow’.
The Trumpageddon Express
The IEA just confirmed this is the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The largest. Ever. Gulf production has been cut by 10 million barrels a day. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. A fifth of all the world’s oil used to flow through there. Used to.
And here’s what $200 oil means for you personally.
97% of everything you touch, eat, wear, and use involves crude oil. Your food. Your medicine. Your plastic. Your fertiliser. Your transport. Your heating. Even your tomatoes from the farmers market. Grown with petroleum fertiliser. Picked by blokes who drove there in trucks made from crude oil. Delivered on diesel. Wrapped in petroleum packaging. That little sticker on the tomato? Petroleum.
When oil doubles, everything doubles. When it triples, civilisation starts to wobble. This isn’t a recession. This is a fucking seizure.
— Here Comes The Trumpageddon Express To Destination Epic Clusterfuck., 19 March 2026
Predicable Disassemblage
At the on-camera Cabinet meeting on Thursday, Trump’s free-associative drivel, in the midst of a world crisis, ranged from the new White House ballroom: “The military wanted it more than anyone,” to the Kennedy Center: “It’s going to be beautiful when you add the name Trump,” to his favored Sharpie pens: “They do treat me well, Sharpie.” My historian friend Sir Simon Schama sent me a despairing text. “It was like a bit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What was the 25th Amendment for, if not for this? The stroke-struck Woodrow Wilson was a combo of Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR, compared to this oozing hulk of cognitive rot. HELP US, Obi-Wan, HELP US.”
— Tina Brown, 31 March 2026
China Maxxing in West Oakland
His “neocolonialism” solution for the historically Black neighborhood entails allowing the Chinese government to impose an authoritarian surveillance regime:
“So we basically cede West Oakland and it becomes extraterritorial under Chinese law. And then Chinese like police, you know how in Beijing they have the police officers with like the white gloves… and so, basically, like, if there’s any sort of — you know—it’s under Chinese law, enforced by Chinese security forces—so if there’s any bad bad behavior and then, you know, the guys in white gloves are like they blow the [whistle] and they’re like right you know like jaywalking right. I mean first of all anything involving both Asians and African-Americans is inherently amusing, number one fact, and it’s just how it is I don’t make the rules…”
West Oakland where he could use an app to summon a drone armed with a megaphone to yell at people considered bothersome (here, he appeared to do a racist imitation of a Chinese voice).
“And that’s the first step, and if there’s no compliance with these orders in Chinese—which maybe the guy doesn’t understand—I think he’ll learn to understand them,” Yarvin said, calling the situation a “win win” and a model for future governance.
— Gil Durán, Curtis Yarvin Compares Africans to Cattle, Cuddles A Soros, The Nerd Reich, 15 March 2026
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家醜
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Epic
“It’s better to name this war Epicure instead of Epic Fury.”
— Iranian spokesman, 17 March 2026
跑皇城根撒泡野尿，也覺得自己跟皇室體液交融
胡編呼籲“要與國家立場保持一致”，我理解的，他其實要跟退休金保持一致。我也理解縫紉機樂隊，為了減刑可勁在牢里踩響正能量樂章。我只是不理解那些吃著簡裝泡面、擔心電瓶車被繳、焦慮“花唄”咋還、從出生就鼻涕一樣被甩出體制紅利池的屌絲們代入感為什麼這麼強，跑皇城根撒泡野尿，也覺得自己跟皇室體液交融……
— 李承鹏，X，2026年3月17日
藉助外力
In a system where domestic politics cannot be an object of genuine academic inquiry — where the question “how does the Chinese political system actually work?” is either already answered by doctrine or too sensitive to investigate freely — the study of the international becomes the permissible outlet for political curiosity. IR is, in a sense, the one space where Chinese undergraduates are officially encouraged to think about power, strategy, and conflict, so long as the object of analysis lies safely beyond the border.
— Yaqi Li, How I Started as an IR Student in China, New China Literacy, 19 March 2026
The Resistible Rise of Pauline Hanson
Australia decades from now will be ruled by a multi-racial, lesbian, part-cyborg president, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has written.
The post-apocalyptic sci-fi prediction in the outspoken politician’s book The Truth claims in 2050, the country of “Australasia” will be run by president Poona Li Hung.
Written in 1997, the extract was revived in the Federal Court to highlight the One Nation leader’s alleged tendency to be racist as she tries to overturn a racial vilification finding.
“Ms Hung, a lesbian, is of multiracial descent, of Indian and Chinese background and was felt by the World Government to be a most suitable president,” Senator Hanson wrote in her book.
“She is also part machine — the first cyborg president.”
— Miklos Bolza, Pauline Hanson’s post-apocalyptic prediction resurfaces, The Nightly, 18 November 2025
Empathy
“Empathetic is just ‘pathetic’ with a prefix.”
— Audacity, tv series
Sarcasm
… the protest of those who are weak.
— John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959)
Dubiety
Rachel Duzan, an expatriate from Pakistan who runs an events company, had wanted a Dior beach hat, but was told that it wasn’t available because shipments into the country were halted. She decided to buy a Jacquemus bag instead.
“I know I shouldn’t be shopping,” said Ms. Duzan, 36. “But I can’t help it.”
— In Dubai, the World’s Luxury Brands Face a Wartime Crisis, The New York Times, 19 March 2026
Nothing Sacred
What I argued is that Judaism was meant less as a religion with sacred things to worship than the process by which we get over religion. God evolves from idols to big scary monster to angry daddy to ethereal presence to “which way did he go?” God recedes, leaving people to find the sacred in one another. Not in place, not a name, and certainly not in some nation state. …
Taking a transcendental mythical narrative like Torah and using it as a real estate deed, kills the whole project. Once you take the text literally, or as a historical record of events that actually happened in the past, you lose access to the timeless, multidimensional experience it describes. If it has to say this one thing, you lose the ability to argue about what it means. To the extent that Torah is true or valid, it’s not because it happened at some moment in history, but because it’s happening all the time, in every moment.
— Douglas Rushkoff, The Holy War Delusion, 19 March 2026
Conscious Uncoupling
At last, the culture has thrown up a split more nauseatingly up itself than Gwyneth Paltrow’s from Chris Martin. It is Nigel Farage’s attempt to consciously uncouple from Donald Trump, a man up whose backside he’s spent the past decade most firmly lodged. Nigel’s made such a massive, self-satisfied show of his real estate in the presidential large intestine for 10 years now that I actually don’t think non-surgical extraction is possible at this stage. He doesn’t just get to walk away whistling. The only way out is a full Faragectomy. I’ll give the president a piece of drone fuselage to bite down on.
— Marina Hyde, The greatest challenge Farage has ever faced – convincing the world he was never besties with Donald Trump, The Guardian, 20 March 2026
A Job Application
Dear Sir:
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.
I have just returned and I still like words.
May I have a few with you?
— Robert Pirosh, MGM screenwriter, 1934
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The Three Ages of Man
Tad (he always went by Tad) was an irrepressibly energetic man with excellent hair, bright, curious eyes, and a shy, slivery smile—and yet, when friends and strangers remarked on how young he looked, he deflected, citing what he called “the three ages of man”: Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great.
— David Remnick, Remembering Calvin Tomkins, a Master of the Profile, The New Yorker, 30 March 2026
Normal Kindness
‘That’s a crock of shit. Nice people don’t do nice things. And when the Nazis come, they’re going to turn around and fucking massacre everybody, the nice people.’
Self is enraged by the literary world. JK Rowling is a “dreadful fucking writer” who courts controversy in her “Harry Potter castle of money”, afraid of “a straw man with a giant cock who’s going to fuck up everybody’s arguments and moral reasoning”.
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
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憲政
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AI;DR
There’s a new hot term making the rounds that perfectly captures the spirit of the age: AI;DR, which stands for “AI; didn’t read,” a mutation of the venerable internet shorthand TL;DR (”too long; didn’t read”). The semicolon, which in the original separated cause from effect—the more you write, the less I read—now separates the machine’s output from your refusal to dignify it with your attention; quite an appropriate change given that we don’t have any left.
— Alberto Romero, The Algorithmic Bridge, 27 March 2026
尖斌卡引
尖字能大能小明世態，
斌字能文能武乃英才，
卡字能上能下淡名利，
引字能屈能伸福自來。
Renewables
No one ever bombed a factory full of sunshine, No one’s ever gone to war over the wind.
— Avi Lewis, Canadian politician
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No Kings Day, 28 March 2026
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Not Just War
Hegseth imagines himself heroically defending “the West” while discarding its noble contributions to that just-war tradition.
These ideals generally include prohibitions on needless wars; on excessive cruelty; and on unnecessarily wanton and unrestrained killing, especially of civilians and combatants who surrender, among other things. Hegseth has violated all of them: The rationale for his war is based on lies. He casts his maximally brutal killing as an inherent good. His war has killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including many children. He lionizes the killing of enemies who surrender.
But Hegseth answers to a higher authority. Utterly incapable of genuine humility, Hegseth knows with unshakable certainty that those simply cannot be transgressions. No: They’re all in God’s plan.
— Greg Sargent, Pete Hegseth Just Revealed the Real Roots of His Sadism and Rage, The New Republic, 30 March 2026
Historical Nihilism
To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The Joy of Life
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
— George Bernard Shaw
When It’s Cold
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