Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is 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.

We start the year 2024 with this, the forty-first chapter in Other People’s Thoughts.

— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
28 January 2024

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More Other People’s Thoughts:

• Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage 

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Other People’s Thoughts, XLI

 

Forty Years Ago

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.

— Apple Macintosh advertisement, Super Bowl, 1984

Wetware, Software, Malware

The threat is that we shrink ourselves to the scale of our machines’ limited capabilities; the threat is the sanding down of human thought and life to fit into ever more standardized data sets.

A.I. cannot innovate. All it can produce are prompt-driven approximations and reconstitutions of preexisting materials. If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then there should be nothing to fear, except that — what do you know? — a lot of humans have not been imagining anything more substantial. When a TikTok user in April posted an A.I.-generated song in the style (and voices) of Drake and the Weeknd, critics and copyright lawyers bayed that nothing less than our species’s self-definition was under threat, and a simpler sort of listener was left to wonder: Was this a “real” song? (A soulless engine that strings together a bunch of random formulas can pass as Drake — hard to believe, I know….)

An apter question is: Why is the music of these two cocksure Canadians so algorithmic to begin with? And another: What can we learn about human art, human music, human writing, now that the good-enough approximations of A.I. have put their bareness and thinness on full display? …

I remain profoundly relaxed about machines passing themselves off as humans; they are terrible at it. Humans acting like machines — that is a much likelier peril, and one that culture, as the supposed guardian of (human?) virtues and values, has failed to combat these last few years.

— Jason Farago, A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?, The New York Times, 28 December 2023

Eleven Years of Winning
十一年偉大的成就

催生了一個荒唐的美夢；畫就了一個飄香的大餅；修改了形同虛設的憲法；坐牢了永不變色的江山；重用了俯首帖耳的奴才；撤換了心存疑慮的異己；指引了五百次的方向；開出了三百張的藥方；發佈了一萬條的金句；印制了二百卷的著作；濫發了貌似敦厚的畫像；誕生了空前絕後的思想；打破了一百條原有的規矩；培植了一桿子習姓的家軍；竪起了亦尊亦神的雕像；爛尾了一帶一路的宏圖；整出了一個世界思想的首都；建成了一個副京雄安的空城；膨脹了一個大國的領袖；縮小了一個世界的舞台；搞垮了香港的一國兩制；傷害了台灣的兩岸三通；得罪了左鄰右舍；弄掰了舊朋老友；為丐幫拋撒了無數的金幣；和流氓結交了可恥的友誼；打了數不清的老虎；關了幾十萬的貪官；嚇跑了百家外資；整垮了萬家私企；吹爆了脫貧的中國；割光了苦逼的韭菜；捅了三年的嗓子；封了百城的家園。

— 2023年11月9日

Red Suede Shoes

One for the money two for the show, CCP go go go … Little pink, little pink, you stink stink stink!

— Dr K (Brendan Kavanagh), 27 January 2024

Doublespeak

Plagiarism, aka fraud, by any other name; ‘duplicative language without appropriate attribution’; ‘academic sloppiness’; ‘technical attribution issues’; ‘careless cutting and pasting’; ‘repeating banal phrases’; ‘inadvertent missteps’; ‘omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used’

— various online sources

Bill Ackman

Bill + Wife = Plagiarism = Gay + Harvard

‘It’s called KARMA, and its pronounced haha fuck you’

— https://x.com/rffrommass/status/1743509472264212861?s=46&t=Ui_QrHprvgDYWq8yYN6VWA

What’s Not to Hate?

People hate Jews because they are communists, capitalists, foreigners, residents, immigrants, elitists, have strange ways, are unassimilated, too assimilated, bankroll the left (like George Soros) or bankroll the right (like Sheldon Adelson). People hate Jews because they are weak and stateless, or because they are Zionists and defend Israel.

— Rabbi David J. Wolpe, On the Hatred of Jews, The Harvard Crimson, 29 December 2023

國安詢問胡舒立（純屬胡編）

問：外國媒體說，你的許多發言都是王岐山的意思，你與王岐山有聯繫嗎？
胡：以前有過，但不是電話聯繫，黨和國家領導人的電話是打不通的。
問：什麼方式聯繫。
胡：鴿子，鴿子傳書。他退休後養貓，鴿子被他家貓給吃了，我們就失聯了。
問：你所說的都是事實？
答：如果是開個玩笑，會犯法嗎？
對方：請嚴肅點，你的每句話我們都要記錄。
又問：西方國家給你非常多的榮譽，是支持你在中國發表不同的政治觀點，符合他們需要嗎？
胡：我辦媒體是為中國讀者，中國讀者是衣食父母。外國人怎樣想的，你去問他們。

— https://x.com/wuzuolai/status/1740897268851699715?s=46&t=Ui_QrHprvgDYWq8yYN6VWA

Who Will We Be?

And it’s not that our situation was wonderful on October 6. Already then, fascist-racist movements had achieved a foothold in the Israeli political system. Already then we had experienced 15 years of unbridled exacerbation of incitement against anyone voicing criticism of our treatment of the Palestinians and the government policy regarding the conflict with them. …

Long before the accursed Shabbat [7 October 2023] we were at the height of a culture war that the government declared against anything that radiates humanist and universal values, while enforcing an ultranationalist and religious agenda. After October 7 it seemed for a moment that these battles were suspended, because after all, only “Together We Will Win,” right? Well, no. The spread of these festering wounds has only been accelerated under the sponsorship of the disaster and the war.

— Michael Sfaad, Who Will We Be After the War in Gaza Is Over?, Haaretz, 26 December 2023

隨緣

任何關係，走到最後，不過是相識一場，有心者，必有所累，無心者，亦無所謂。情出自願，不談虧欠，一念起，天涯咫尺；一念滅，咫尺天涯。前世緣，今生遇，來世回眸。緣起緣滅緣自在，情深情淺不由人。相遇，銘記一生，不負遇見，不談虧欠。無永世之相伴，有一世之掛念。情分耗盡，緣分盡頭。歸咎己過，禮貌退場，還己還人，花歸花，樹歸樹。自此，山水一程，再不相逢，願來生，不見，不欠，不念。

— 弘一法師

高擎旗幟

新年伊始，我們7、8個七老八十的老編、老記定在4號中午聚餐，想見個面，聊聊天，高興高興。因為微信被封，謝韜之女謝小玲就用電話提前通知李慎之之女李爾柔，電話裡多聊了兩句，告訴她誰誰要來。

沒想到3號一早北京四城的國保就緊急出動，找人的找人，上崗的上崗，阻止我們的新年聚餐。

我們的父輩有的被打成“胡風分子”，有的被打成“右派”，文革一律成為“臭老九”。《公安六條》早就廢除了，今天你們把我們一個個都作為“敏感人物”加以管控，限制行動自由，實際上就是仍舊用《公安六條》 把我們當作“地富反壞右”，當作“臭老九”對待，就是明目張膽地踐踏憲法，踐踏人權。

憲法條文就在那裡擺著，你們應該對照看一看，看看你們踐踏了多少條。連續兩天黨媒都在宣傳“高擎習近平文化思想旗幟凝聚團結奮進力量”，你們作為“刀把子”，因為我們老年人要吃一頓飯，就給站兩天崗，你們究竟是高擎旗幟？還是給旗幟上抹黑？

— 高瑜。@gaoyu200812

What Price Ignorance?

It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.

— Upton Sinclair

Santa Fe Institute Operating Principles

Scientific work at SPI is always pushing creativity to its practical limits. We always court a high risk of failure. Above all we have more fun than should be legal.

We are absolutely relentless at hammering down the boundaries created by academic disciplines and by institutional boundaries.

If you know more than anybody else about a subject we want to talk to you. We don’t care what the subject is.

We are beyond relentless in seeking out the best people in every discipline. We will get you here. No matter what. And we will give you the space and the resources that you need.

We don’t care how young you are.

We have in general avoided becoming involved in matters of policy.

But if you are working on a program that involves sustainability or the environment or human welfare and you think we might have something you can use pick up the phone.

The educational opportunities that we offer — especially for young people — are simply not available elsewhere. Period.

Occasionally we find that an invited guest is insane. This generally cheers us all up. We know we’re on the right track.

— Cormac McCarthy

Franz Kafka on Being Jewish

What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.

十要十不要

朋友的群發郵件，說北京現在盛傳「十要十不要」：

要說人話； 要接地氣； 要乾實事； 要知禮義廉恥； 要講良心誠信； 要對得起工農大眾； 要對得起衣食父母；要對得起列祖列宗； 要對得起數百萬先烈； 要對得起前任，前前任，前前前任，前前前前任……

不要好高鶩遠； 不要白日做夢； 不要不懂裝懂；不要說一套做一套； 不要貪天功為己有； 不要掛羊頭賣狗肉； 不要日日上電視； 不要每期都發署（掛）名文章； 不要一心只想當酋（球）長；不要等人家操你祖宗八代了，你還一臉朦逼，無自知之明。

— https://x.com/dyw1968316/status/1744805940073762972?s=46&t=Ui_QrHprvgDYWq8yYN6VWA

The God Delusion

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

— Richard Dawkins

— 吳祚來，2024年1月11日

Larry David

‘A person who hates people yet had to be amongst them.’

— Larry David

Living with the way you think

“We’re always selecting what we say and what we don’t,” says the narrator of “The Land of Green Plums,” the Romanian author Herta Müller’s exacting 1994 novel about dissident students tormented by both the Securitate and their own anxieties. “Why do we say one thing and not the other? And we do this instinctively, too, because no matter what we’re talking about, there’s more that doesn’t get said than does.”

That kind of state control may be over, even in illiberal Hungary. East Berlin has become the art world’s Shenzhen, a low-paid back office for a global cultural industry. Pace Edward Snowden, there is no comparison between the surveillance of the Eastern bloc and today’s ambient digital monitoring. But the selective silence of artists, writers, intellectuals: that feels all too familiar. These artists were asking, like Müller’s narrator, a question that is not at all historical: “How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?”

— Jason Farago, Daring to Create Art Freely Behind the Iron Curtain, The New York Times, 11 January 2024

A Thousand and One Voices

We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom — and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist — is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage — and to profit by.

What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways.

To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.

— Salman Rushdie, If Peace Were a Prize

2024

剛剛結束了北京的短暫行程，去看望了老師，也看看京城的小夥伴！2024可能也是創業艱難的一年……做生意，不是比誰賺得多，而是比誰活得長……一步一步穩穩當當的堅持長期主義，是我對今年的規劃……兢兢業業並且乾乾淨淨，做個有風度、有風骨，並且很風趣的小人物……

— 陳秋實

Nostalgia

‘In the afterlife, we’ll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.’

— Samuel Beckett

《六悔銘》

官行私曲，失時悔。富不儉用，貧時悔。
藝不少學，過時悔。見事不學，用時悔。
醉發狂言，醒時悔。安不將息，病時悔。

— 寇準 (北宋)

Habermas Does For Gaza

If Habermas has not an iota of space in his moral imagination for people such as Palestinians, do we have any reason to consider his entire philosophical project as being in any way related to the rest of humanity — beyond his immediate tribal European audiences?

— Hamid Dabashi, Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt, Middle East Eye, 18 January 2024

Ethnic Cleansing

‘The special military operation has united our society like never before and contributed to the cleansing of people who do not feel they belong to Russian history and culture.’

— Sergei Lavrov, 18 January 2024

I’ve never seen it so broken

A lot of people have been asking me lately like — I tend to be a positive person. I try to be solution oriented — how does this end? And I just tell everybody, I have no idea. I have no idea how this ends. I’ve never seen it so broken.

Ezra, it was like we were putting 1,000 piece puzzle together, and somebody came and overturned the table, poured coffee on them. And the dog is now chewing on half of them. And someone’s saying, well, go put that puzzle back together again.

— Thomas Friedman in conversation with Ezra Klein, The New York Times, 19 January 2024

A Poor Thing

‘It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.’

— Manohla Dargis

Decline and Fall

The best part of this experience came after the fact — my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork. Here are just some of the ways I benefit:

• I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day.
• I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective.
• The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not.
• I find out how little I know.
• I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things.
• I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world

— Iggy Pop

Song Meiling on Song Qingling, her sister

二姐生性好強，一生每逢大事必糊塗，最終於國未盡忠，於民不稱仁，於父母未盡孝，於夫妻未盡節，於親朋未盡義，於大義未盡思，於天地無一敬，於暴君 未盡諫，於凶民未盡撫。可不悲哉！……終至於眾叛親離，孤苦無依，上辱父母先祖，下愧多災黎民。

Last Lines of the Last Poem

The times are such that there is no standing up
Or lying, or sitting down, screaming, or cursing.
You wake up in the night because your bed
Is sinking, and you are sinking with it

— Lev Rubenstein, quoted in Masha Gessen, Lev Rubinstein, a Devoted and Defiant Lover of Language, The New Yorker

Empires über Alles

The world of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It is a world order that is based on empires. China, is not a nation, it’s a civilisation. India is not a nation. The US is also an empire, more than a nation. And then finally the Russian Federation. The world of tomorrow is a world of empires in which we Europeans, and you British, can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together, in a European framework and in the European Union.

— Guy Verhofstadt, The Spectator, 15 September 2019

A Known Quantity

What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them’…

A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about…

A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

— John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump

茅于軾耄耋之年

我見經很者了；活不了多久，將來的世界是年輕人的。你們將面對什麼樣的社會，應該比我急。社會要進步，這是每一個人的責任。若社會倒退，也是我們每一個人造成的。by @茅於軾

独立之精神
自由之思想

— Mao Yushi 茅于軾，13 January 2024, Vancouver

Conscientious Objection

‘I refuse to believe that more violence will bring security, I refuse to take part in a war of revenge. I grew up in a home where life is sacred, where discussion is valued, where discourse and understanding always come before taking violent measures. In the world full of corrupt interests in which we live, violence and war are another way to increase support for the government and silence criticism.’

— Tal Mitnick, 26 December 2023

The Slap

“I call it the ‘holy slap’ now,” purred Jada Pinkett Smith of her husband’s decision to lamp Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars two years ago, “because so many positive things came after it.” God love ’em and everything, but aren’t celebrities incredible? There really is nothing – no incident too blatantly ghastly and embarrassing – that cannot be folded into some kind of aspirational narrative of personal growth. Just as Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling” offered an opportunity for Her Vajesty to get gorgeously divorced in a way normies could never, so Jada would have you believe that public assault lies on the other side of the glass against which the likes of us can only press our envious snotty noses.

— Marina Hyde, Hooray for Barbie and Oppenheimer, The Guardian, 23 January 2024

Max Headroom

“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” one person told me. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”

— from https://danwang.co/2023-letter/

ScoMo

He achieved nothing. He gave us nothing. He left our nation the poorer for his stain upon it. A charlatan and a pitiless, second-rate actor, he will not be mourned. Nobody will mourn him. There is just a darkness in our country where he once used to be.

— RonniSalt, Requiem for a lost country, The Shot, 27 May 2022

Tout le monde

The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! for everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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