This is the fifty-ninth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
My thanks to Roger Pulvers, early mentor and long-time friend, for allowing me to include his translation of ‘Creation’ by Anna Akhmatova.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
6 June 2025
Eighty-first Anniversary of D-Day
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LVIII:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LIX
6 June 2025
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: “May I remind you tomorrow is June 6, the D-day anniversary when the Americans once ended a war in Europe.”
US President Donald Trump: “That was not a pleasant day for you? This is not a great day.”
Merz: “In the long run, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship … We know what we owe you.”
— meeting in the Oval Office, 5 May 2025
AI avant les letters
Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe… The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
The New York Times that isn’t
Opinion | Harvard’s biggest mistake? Not admitting Barron Trump, despite his low grades.
by Jared Kushner and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
— New York Times Pitchbot, BlueSky, 25 May 2025
I am a staunch free speech supporter. But after ten years of freaking out about woke students deplatforming right-wing speakers, I don’t have the energy to pivot to criticizing a fascist president for launching an all-out attack on free expression at universities.
Opinion | Harvard must completely eliminate DEI so that only the most qualified students gain admission to the university.
by Barron Trump
— New York Times Pitchbot, 29 May 2025
One step forward, two steps…
So he raised the tariffs, paused that raise, paused that pause, then paused that pause of the pause. And no-one knows if it’ll be paused again (and if such a pause will be unpaused) or what happens when (or if) the pause whose pause was paused concludes.
— Justin Wolfers, 26 May 2025
Turbocharging the Algorithm
The PR guru Mark Borkowski, an expert in brand and crisis management, said Cannes and the French film world had for many years offered “a huge amount of support” for another controversial figure, Roman Polanski. “They have a track record,” he said. …
“It feeds into the slow battle Kevin Spacey has fought, which is to get his purpose back. His purpose and whole being is to be an actor and he is, without doubt, one of the most extraordinary acting talents of any generation,” he said. “He is not someone who has disappeared into the ether; he has fought it all the way and he has powerful supporters because ultimately he made a lot of people a lot of money.”
In terms of brand management, Borkowski said the biggest issue was that people had “short-term memory loss and long-term amnesia”. “We move on from things. This [the Spacey award] shows that everyone has a shot of redemption; it shows that the further you get away from the noise of a scandal you can change the emotion of the crowd, right or wrong.”
Big tech was changing the world, he continued. “A publicist’s job nowadays is not to convince an editor, it is to turbocharge the algorithm. “There are a lot of people who want to see Kevin Spacey back. I don’t have an opinion either way but ultimately, whatever he does next it will create clicks, it will create noise … you can’t be mediocre any more.”
— Kevin Spacey to be celebrated at Cannes’ Better World gala, The Guardian, 18 May 2025
The Black Smithsonian
Mr. Trump’s problem with the Black Smithsonian is rooted in an objection, legitimate in itself, to what has come to be called D.E.I. That acronym is too often a euphemism for a performatively institutionalized crusade against something called whiteness. What started as an academic critique grew into a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy that did nothing to improve the lives and opportunities of Black people — and a great deal to irritate and alienate white people.
The proper response to that very real problem, however, is, as President Bill Clinton put it about affirmative action, to “mend it, but don’t end it.”
Mr. Trump’s approach is instead a bleat of tribalist pique, seeking to simply deep-six any discussion of race (or gender or sexuality, or a great many other uncomfortable topics). His executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” is a clapback to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that frames any outreach efforts to Black people as by definition a form of discrimination against white people.
A mature, multiethnic society should resist the complacency of birds-of-a-feather hirings and admissions, instead seeking out talent wherever it might reside and whatever it might look like. To be sure, that mission was sullied by identity politics, the temptations of virtue signaling, the opportunity to follow the funding trail and ultimately a tacit commitment to lowering standards. Mend that. Don’t try to force the country back to an earlier, more willfully oblivious era, when the topic of inequality was everywhere to be witnessed but nowhere to be mentioned. That is a kind of barbarity.
— The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn, The New York Times, 17 May 2025
Eurovision
They gave Israel 2nd place at Eurovision. The highly political contest that serves as soft power for European and other countries rewarded the nation livestreaming a genocide for the past 19 months.
Meanwhile Russia is still banned because Europe believes it’s illegal to commit war crimes unless your victims are brown.
— Elia Ayoub, 19 May 2025
Eichmann in Jerusalem
It was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous, as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it — nothing demonic! There’s simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing, isn’t that true?
— Hannah Arendt
A Feature not a Bug
It isn’t clear that Musk, during his manic and possibly drug-addled months of power in the Trump administration, applied moral reasoning when hacking at the federal government. His erratic behavior and that of his troops in the Department of Government Efficiency seemed driven more by destructive euphoria than by philosophy. But in February, on Joe Rogan’s show, Musk used the loftiest terms to explain why the cries of pain caused by his cuts should be ignored: “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
— George Packer, No One Can Offer Any Hope, The Atlantic, 4 June 2025
The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.
— Bill Gates on Elon Musk
Elon Musk came to Washington with a chain saw and left with a black eye.
— Maureen Dowd, Tech Bro Had to Go, The New York Times, 31 May 2025
O.K., Chief
No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. […] But when our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. Since the great American tradition is Freedom and Democracy, you can bet that our dictator, God help us! will be a great democrat, through whose leadership alone democracy can be realized. And nobody will ever say “Heil” to him or “Ave Caesar”, nor will they call him “Fuehrer” or “Duce.” But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!’
— Dorothy Thompson, 17 February 1937, quoted in Peter Kurth, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, 1990
Empires of AI
The thing that I have come to realize over reporting on OpenAI and AI for the last seven years is that we need to start using new language to really capture the full scope and magnitude of the economic and political power that these companies now have. And what I eventually concluded was the only real word that captures all of that is “empire.”
These are new forms of empire, AI companies. And the reason is in the long history of European colonialism, empires of old several features to them. First was they laid claim to resources that were not their own and they would create rules that suggested that they were in fact their own. They exploited a lot of labor as in they didn’t pay many workers or they paid them very, very well for the labor that would fortify the empire. They competed with one another in this kind of moralistic way where the British Empire say they were better than the French Empire, or the Dutch Empire would say they were better than the British Empire, and all of this competition was ultimately accelerated the extraction, the exploitation, because their empire alone had to be the one at the head of the race leading the world towards modernity and progress.
So the last future of empire is that they all have civilizing missions and they, whether it was rhetoric or whether they truly believed, they would fly this banner of we are plundering the world because this is the price of bringing everyone to the future. And Empires of AI have all of these features. They are also laying claim to resources that are not their own, like the data and the work of artists, writers, creators. And they also design rules to suggest that actually it is their own.
— Brian Merchant and Gail Brussel, Dismantling the Empire of AI with Karen Hao, 21 May 2025
Blue Origin Gals in Space
A perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress.
— Moira Donegan, The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism, The Guardian, 15 April 2025
Creeping Change
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.
But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.
— Milton Mayer, The Thought They Were Free, 1956
Tell ZioNazis to Fuck Off
Drongoloids, we are living in wildly dumb times, overseen by wildly dumb men. In Australia, a country that’s always been run by its most craven and venal suck-ups and fail-sons, the chronic cuckery of of our media/cultural landscape, and the lead-poisoned commentariat that keep it plugging along, is now at terminal levels of cringing subsequence. And it’s all for the favour of a small cadre of lobbyists, hate-mongers, and professional arms dealers, all of whom have been maintaining raging hard-ons for the Holocaust taking part in Gaza for almost two years.
— Patrick Marlborough, Australia’s Arts Industry Needs to Grow Some Balls & Tell ZioNazis to Fuck Off, YeahNah, 26 March 2025
Who Goes Nazi, 1941
Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
— Dorothy Thompson, 1941
Eternal Israel
“Bibi is actually their pawn, not the real player,” explained Avrum Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, referring to the religious-nationalist-settler right in Israel. “You tell them Israel could have peace with Saudi Arabia and they will shrug and tell you that they are waiting for the Messiah. You tell them they could have peace with Syria, and they will tell you the Jewish people already own Syria — it’s part of Greater Israel. You tell them about international law, they will tell you biblical law. You will tell them Hamas, they will tell you Amalek” (a biblical enemy of the Israelites).
— Thomas Friedman, The Flashing Signals That I Just Saw in Israel, The New York Times, 27 May 2025
Gaza
“It is obvious to everyone that there is no purpose that can justify the expansion of these military activities. … The perception in Israel is that this is a personal war or illegitimate war that is being conducted exclusively because of the political interests of the Prime Minister. This is a crime. This is not something that can be defended. And the fact that there are so many victims can’t be defended. It’s as simple as that.”
— Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, 6 June 2025
Darkening Age
There was, however, one group of people who even the great Galen found himself unable to convince. This was a group who did not form their beliefs by basing them on experiments or on observations, but on faith alone—and who, worse still, were actually proud of this fact. These peculiar people were for Galen the epitome of intellectual dogmatism. When he wished to adequately convey the blockheadedness of another group of physicians, Galen used these people as an analogy to express the depths of his irritation. They were the Christians.
— Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, 2017
The Old World
“Do we think that the Western Hemisphere is … meager? Kind of used up? I mean it’s big, but what is it?”
“Yeah, just an assload of Amazon boxes, chugging around ’50s infrastructure.”
“Bunch of cold burritos getting DoorDash-ed to deadbeats.”
Gifts for the Grifter
The South African president jokingly told the American president, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (This might be the line that best sums up the Trump presidency in the history books.)
Trump replied breezily: “I wish you did. I’d take it.”
— A Revealing Joke in the Oval Office, The New York Times, 22 May 2025
The Dark Elf of Cod-philosophes
Yarvin’s oracular pronouncements and bottomless disdain for actually existing politics have inspired a viral post: his face under the words “Your anti-regime actions work well in practice. But do they work in theory?” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has compared Yarvin to “a sullen teenager who insists that everything is pointless.” I came to think of him as a reactionary Goldilocks who would be satisfied with nothing less than the inch-perfect autocracy that he’d constructed in his mind.
… Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. … Intellectual seriousness may not be the point. Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. … It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity—fascism, as some might call it.
— Ava Kofman, Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America, The New Yorker, 2 June 2025
Yarvin on Replacing Pierre Camus
“If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”
— Ava Kofman, Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America, The New Yorker, 2 June 2025
Freedom
I no longer have the right to free speech and I have to show my papers to heavily armed ICE officers every time I cross the street. But I can still own an AR-15 and that is what freedom really means.
— New York Times Pitchbot, 29 May 2025
Outer-borough Mafia Shit
“There’s a point where money is no longer money. It is power—and they’re using that power to screw life up for everybody else.”
— Evan Osnos, Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder, The New Yorker, 2 June 2025
Mars Ahoy!
If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men for Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fear of Reds, or convinced America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorized into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.
— Dorothy Thompson quoted in Origin Story: Mars – The Next Frontier?, 21 May 2025
Man at the Garden
Twice emotional stability
Of sound body and tranquility, I deserve it allLike minds and less enemies
Stock investments, more entities, I deserve it allVVS’, white diamonds, GNX with the seat back, reclinin’
Bitch, I deserve it allPut my homes on the beachfront
Flyin’ private, what you eat for lunch?
I deserve it allThe respect and the accolades
Lampin’ on the island, watchin’ Cast Away,
I deserve it allFor every good nigga that passed away
Sent two-point-five million on an average day
I deserve it allKeep my name by the world leaders
Keep my crowds loud inside Ibiza, I deserve it allMore money, more power, more freedom
Everything Heaven allowed usBitch, I deserve it all
Hmm, I deserve it all
Hmm, I deserve it all
All
All
— Kendrick Lamar
Musk/ Trump
Weird they’re showing Swan Lake on Fox right now
— Aram Shabanian, BlueSky, 5 June 2025
Broooos please noooooo 🫂 We love you both so much
— ye, X, 5 June 2025
“Oh, man. The girls are fighting, aren’t they?”
AOC, 5 June 2025
Who gets Joe Rogan in the divorce?
— online comment, 5 June 2025
One thing I’m proud of as an American is that even during our descent into fascism we have some fun days.
— Noah Garfield, X, 6 June 2025
And Trump said: “You know what? Mars is a shit-hole planet.” And Elon says: “Oh, my god, you’re not the same man I used to Heil.”
— Real Time with Bill Maher, 6 June 2025
The problem with doing the usual “who won, who lost” analysis in this case is that to approach it that way is to normalize it, which feels too much like condoning it. The lesson of Musk vs. Trump (or “Alien vs. Predator,” as some online jokes had it) shouldn’t be whether one man gained or lost influence by attacking the other. The lesson should be that America has become a tremendously embarrassing freak show whose political culture should make any dignified person want to renounce their citizenship.
— Nick Catoggio, The Dispatch, 6 June 2025
Longevity
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.
— Woody Allen
Heaven-Haven
A nun takes the veil
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins