This is the sixty-first 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.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
10 July 2025
***
Other People’s Thoughts I-LX:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXI
Damnatio memoriae
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity… Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it… Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?
— Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, 1658
Collective Guilt
‘If Palestine were a crime scene, then it has all our fingerprints on it’.
— Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Zohran Mamdani
An inexperienced nepo baby cannot be allowed to run New York City. — by A. G. Sulzberger
— New York Times Pitchbot, 9 July 2025
Pacific Difference
someone Australian summed it up nicely – “fuck I’m glad we got the convicts and they got the Puritans”
— Threads, 20 June 2025
Reading
One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of “Bleak House,” by Charles Dickens, that “they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” And these were English majors.
— Hua Hsu, What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?, The New Yorker, 30 June 2025
In Chancery
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
— the opening paragraphs of the first chapter of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?
— Hua Hsu
Although I’ve empathized with my students’ various mini-dramas, I rarely project myself into their lives. I notice them noticing one another, and I let the mysteries of their lives go. Their pressures are so different from the ones I felt as a student. Although I envy their metabolisms, I would not wish for their sense of horizons.
— Hua Hsu
TikTok
They have the watches, but we have the time.
— a saying attributed to the Taliban during the US occupation of Afghanistan
Jordan Peterson
The trajectory of Peterson’s career may have been an inevitability of an ego that couldn’t say “that’s enough,” or it may be the fault of those who expected him to be more than he was. Either way, the failure of Jordan Peterson is a failure of culture, a failure of public intellectualism, a failure of a new media system that seemed to promise a positive replacement to the legacy media and instead produced siloed professional talkers who tour podcasts becoming steadily more unhinged and self-reinforcing.
— Matt Whiteley, Reflections on the Jordan Peterson Generation, 1 July 2025
Jimmy’s Hoes
“The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”
— Jimmy Swaggart, Passionate Televangelist Ousted by Scandal, Dies at 90, The New York Times, 1 July 2025
Venice, June 2025
Now that the 55-year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn’t changed since the first Venetian Republic.
— Tina Brown, 26 June 2025
Bias
Paramount has joined Disney in paying bribes to Donald Trump, the Washington Post killed its Harris endorsement, Fox News functions as Republican state media, and the X algorithm amplifies fascist content. Here’s why the media has a liberal bias problem.
— New York Times Pitchbot, 2 July 2025
Bo Xilai’s Birthday
Happy birthday to the finest father — whose grace in triumph, indefatigable strength in adversity, and quiet courage to rise above the fray continue to guide me everyday!
— Guangyi (Guagua) Bo, 3 July 2025
The Reviewer
Martin Amis said of Richard Tull, “He was very good at book reviewing. When he reviewed a book, it stayed reviewed.”
蔡瀾之死
台灣作家柏楊說過一句話，中國人的追求到了榮華富貴這個層面，就再也上不去了。國人到一起，基本上不會談哲學，談歷史，談時事，不是談男女性事，就是吹大牛，比房子，比穿著，比收入，假如時間再長一點，那就喝大酒，吃大席，搓麻將，像猶太人那樣用讀書度過閒暇時光的極少極少，想探討一下哲學，歷史，思想那根本沒門。從人生追求上，更接近於亞里士多德說的動物性追求，這就是蔡瀾為什麼廣受歡迎，因為他那些美食節目抓住了中國人的靈魂，國人在這以上再也沒有什麼追求了。這就是為什麼蔡瀾死了，有這麼多的自媒體紀念他的原因，絕大多數自媒體人與蔡瀾非親非故，蔡瀾對他們也沒有什麼貢獻，蔡瀾無非就是像一個成功的動物一樣過了一生，吃的好些，交配的多一些，而這正好是大多數國人能想象到的人生全部意義。
— 易中天推薦的網絡評論
AI & Self-reliance
… students ought to spend a substantial part of each day in an electronics-free environment reading books and interacting directly with teachers and fellow students (“the Cloister”) and then, at other times, avail themselves of everything that AI and the Internet have to offer (“the Starship”).
It seems to me that this general plan would work if it could be implemented. But why would it work? What’s the essential skill that students need to be learning, such that when they get out of school they are more capable humans than when they went in?
… I think that the answer … isn’t simply a body of knowledge to be memorized or a set of skills to be mastered. It’s a stance. A stance from which to address the world and all its challenges. A stance built on self-confidence and resilience: the conviction that one has a fighting chance to overcome or circumvent whatever obstacles the world throws in one’s path. The way you acquire it is by trying, and sometimes failing, to do difficult things. It can be discouraging, but if you have good mentors, and if you’re collaborating with friends who are in the same boat, you can find ways to succeed, and develop a knack for it. That’s true self-reliance.
From that standpoint, the most insidious thing about AI is that it solves problems for the user and never places them in a situation where they have to overcome failure. Problems might get solved in the end, which sounds good, but the “prompt engineers” who cajoled the AIs into solving them don’t understand how those solutions were produced, since it all happened inside a black box, and didn’t acquire the kind of self-reliance that matters.
All of that is a natural outcome of an AI industry that demonstrates its usefulness, and raises funds, by showing that it can solve problems. There’s no reason in principle why AI couldn’t be turned to a different problem: making students more self-reliant. The paradox is that you learn self-reliance through failure, and AI tools construe failure as a malfunction. AI’s purpose, as currently configured, is to make things easy for humans. And humans who’ve had it easy from birth don’t have the grit to deal with challenges.
— Neal Stephenson, Emerson, Al, and The Force—Notes from the Laude Institute Summit, Graphomane, 3 July 2025
中國經濟
中國經濟最大的問題是，是想讓虧本的企業繼續擴大投資，想讓裁員的企業擴大就業，想讓賺不到錢的老百姓去擴大消費，想讓單身的年輕人快點生孩子，這些問題環環相扣，解決起來確實不太容易。
—匿名網友, CDT, 2025年7月2日
Now, it is too late.
I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc.
There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them — the ozone layer — and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockström says we have five years to get out of the danger zone.
If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven!
And, if you look at those boundaries, like the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions.
We’re on our way to more than a three-degree temperature rise by the end of this century, and scientists agree we shouldn’t rise above one and half degrees.
—Davis Legree, ‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost, iPolitics, 2 July 2025
More Golden Girls than SATC
“Sex and the City” worked, in part, because of these women’s conflicting attitudes toward men, marriage and sex; their brunches could be the site of juicy gossip but also ideological combat. Now they are a monolith: insecure, maladjusted to contemporary mores and, fortunately for them, extravagantly wealthy. Their debates have been pruned back; instead, the show wants to teach them lessons, and it matches them with equally stylish and well-heeled women of color to help them along. The characters are bizarrely estranged from their origins — they register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.
This season, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why did I still find all of this entertaining, even pleasurable? The show’s writing is meek, its pacing haphazard, its story lines bizarre. Yet it digs in its stilettos until you can no longer resist, remaining compulsively watchable by virtue of sentimentality or schadenfreude or maybe some narcotic combination of them both.
— Jake Nevins, The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt, The New York Times, 9 July 2025
Spot Off
Christopher Hitchens had the misfortune of doing all his best work before he became famous and then, just as his work and public persona became stale, boorish, and tiresome, becoming about as famous as a writer can be.
— Henry Begler, Get It Right or Die, 8 July 2025
I propose that [Isaiah] Berlin was somewhat haunted, all of his life, by the need to please and conciliate others; a need which in some people is base but which also happened to engage his most attractive and ebullient talents. I further propose that he sometimes felt or saw the need to be courageous, but usually – oh dear – at just the same moment that he remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere.
— Christopher Hitchens, Moderation or Death, London Review of Books, vol.20 n.23, 1998
Stephen’s Schadenfreude
Last year, in another podcast interview with Mr. Travis and Mr. Sexton, Mr. Miller told the two hosts what to expect if Mr. Trump returned to the White House. “You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” he said. “That’s how excited you’ll be. That’s how wonderful this will be.”
— Jason Zengerle, The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller, The New York Times, 7 July 2025
In The Zettabyte Zone
The third stage of culture in the zettabyte age, after the hipster and the nerd, is the zombie. If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.
— Sam Kriss, In my Zombie era, Numb in the Lodge, 2 July 2025
Ashes to Ashes
“If you gave him an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox.”
— Christopher Hitchens to Sean Hannity on the death of Jerry Falwell, televangelist, 2007
“The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called ‘reverend’.”
— Christopher Hitchens on the day after Falwell’s death
Eyelash mites
During the panel discussion that followed I don’t think I contributed anything earth-shaking. One remark that seemed to get people’s attention was a little digression into the topic of eyelash mites. You might not be aware of it, but you have little mites living at the base of your eyelashes. They live off of dead skin cells. As such they generally don’t inflict any damage, and might have slightly beneficial effects. Most people don’t even know that they exist—which is part of the point I was trying to make. The mites, for their part, don’t know that humans exist. They just “know” that food, in the form of dead skin, just magically shows up in their environment all the time. All they have to do is eat it and continue living their best lives as eyelash mites. Presumably all of this came about as the end result of millions of years’ natural selection. The ancestors of these eyelash mites must have been independent organisms at some point in the distant past. Now the mites and the humans have found a modus vivendi that works so well for both of them that neither is even aware of the other’s existence. If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.
— Neal Stephenson, Remarks on AI from New Zealand, Graphomane, 16 May 2025
游本昌鮐背之年
你说他爱党吧，他92岁前信佛你说他信佛吧，他92岁居然入党你说他爱国吧，他儿子孙子全在美国
— 易中天
這好解釋：
耳順之年演濟公活佛，走火入魔，自己走進佛門，兩度剃度；鲐背之年，再演《繁花》，爺叔叫好，黨請入甕，感激涕零；黨國不分，愛黨即愛國。兒女之事，上行下效，不容見外。
— 高瑜，X，2025年7月9日
游本昌雖已年逾九十，但他模糊不清的價值觀難免被人詬病其虛度光陰，以出演濟公聞名全國並結緣佛教、兩次在寺廟正式剃度出家的他竟然又信奉了共產主義，不知道他對「信仰」二字是否有何誤解，在中國名利雙收的他把兒子送去美國定居、美籍華人的孫女為入黨的他高歌「唱支山歌給黨聽」，這一家子混亂的認知是表象，內核其實還是精緻的利己主義，不但要「名利」，還要「大名、大利」，心意、立場甚至信仰都可以與時俱進、因地制宜、因人而異，既不捨民間廟宇煙火供奉，又追求死後棺裹黨旗入葬八寶山，既要風燭殘已享受體制內養老醫療臨終待遇，又要把子孫後代送去西方享受民主自由福利，你這是中山裝（國黨皮）掛黨徽（共黨心）、子孫西渡（美籍）把佛名（自稱活濟公）背，屬實牛逼克拉斯，建議游老先生讀讀《順心經》，開門那句「門前流水自潺潺，急也向前，緩也向前」，多麼的禪意盎然、悠然自在，說的就是做人做事無需改來改去、忽後忽前，更推薦另一句「鄰家阿婆贈花苗，謝也含笑，枯也含笑」，多有深意，莫說你一個凡夫俗子，就算古來聖賢誰又逃得過九泉含笑，廟堂鮐背老，不入人得死，入了你又能活幾長？
—火哥，易中天轉貼
Clockwork Orange Agonistes
Chat, am I washed? Chat, be fr, am I washed? I think I might be washed. I think they might have washed me. But chat, who washed me? Chat, who dried me? Chat, who tucked me up in bed?
Every day I spawn in. Emerge wriggling out my skibidi bolus of slime. Whence and where? Lol. Idk. Vibes here be mad shady fr. Shit is not aesthetic. Shit is not bussin. Shit is burned-out cars piled in barricades across the street. Shit is THE END IS NIGH scrawled across bridges. Shit is roofs caved in, windows boarded, thin trees already rising out the wreckage, with roots that slip through gaps in the brickwork to return the brief work of man to the senseless rubble that came before. This sus ahh Ohio ahh realm is my crib. Damn, bitch, I live like this. …
I twitch. Muscular spasms, hands taloned at ungodly angles. I stream. Vomiting bile or pissing where I stand. I doomscroll. I have doomscrolled over this entire island, over gentle green hills and through the grey wreck of cities, down to the infinite sea, and none of it has held my attention for even a moment, because I have no attention to hold. I am brainrotted. Molten black sludge in my cranium. I am locked in on the emptiness behind all phenomenal things. Frfr. Bet.
— Sam Kriss, In my Zombie era, Numb in the Lodge, 2 July 2025
BBB — a 1000-page suicide note?
The MAGA rank-and-file’s jubilant acquiescence to the passage of the BBB — a policy apparatus whose immanent effect will be the physical liquidation of thousands of Trumpniks and the destruction of so many of its petit-bourgeois businesses — signals the deterritorialization of desire into a new totalitarian machinic assemblage. This new MAGA desiring-machine above all produces death as jouissance: Thanatos as ecstatic political form.
We are no longer dealing with the classic fascist economy of signs and spectacles; rather, we confront a necropolitical orgy of self-annihilation, enthusiastically embraced by a populace whose libidinal economy has been wholly subsumed into a simulacrum of sovereignty. What we witness here is not false consciousness but an inverted will to power: the ecstatic embrace of one’s own immiseration as the final proof of authenticity.
For the plutocratic class that sat behind Trump at his inauguration this proliferation of suicidal intensities may still seem like effective instrument for disciplining the democratic impulse. But capital may soon discover that a body without organs animated by death-desire is ungovernable — even unprofitable. Thanatos, after all, produces no dividends.
And yet, Trump himself, ever the perverse entrepreneur of symbolic excess, retains his singular potency before the MAGA masses precisely in his spineless positionality: his ideological fluidity represents the cunning of the shopkeeper-become-sovereign, a plasticity that seduces the technocapitalists into thinking they can puppeteer what is, in fact, a metastasizing sovereign void. Ask Musk: he thought he was buying a toy; instead, he inherited a black hole.
The biggest question tis whether capital will awaken to the suicidal vector of its alliance with this death-machine before it is too late — before the libidinal infrastructure of the entire order collapses into the abyss it has summoned?
— Nils Gilman, 7 July 2025
Bragging Rights
The Epstein List marks the first time in history that Trump didn’t want his name on something.
— Andy Borowitz, 9 July 2025
Noblesse
Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination from Netanyahu is like a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson.
— The Daily Show, 9 July 2025
Each thing melts in mere oppugnancy
O, when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar justice resides—
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
— William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
Always on the Edge
The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think the most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right.
— C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring, Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, 1944
Moving on
Maybe the future is just participation, not belonging. Maybe we’re done putting down roots and we’ll just keep moving.
— The World’s Best and Brightest Are Moving, but Not to America, The New York Times, 9 July 2025
守寂寞
寂寂竟何待，朝朝空自歸。
欲尋芳草去，惜與故人違。
當路誰相假，知音世所稀。
只應守寂寞，還掩故園扉。
In stillness I linger—what is there left to wait for?
Day by day, I return alone, to no purpose.
I long to seek the spring grasses again,
Yet I grieve to part from an old friend.
Who in power would lend a helping hand?
A true soulmate is rare in this world.
Perhaps I shall keep to my solitude,
And once again shut the gate of my old garden.
— Meng Haoran (孟浩然, 689-740), from ‘Parting Gift to Attendant Gentleman Wang’《留别王侍御维》, translation adapted from Witter Bynner and Burton Watson