This is the sixtieth 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
29 June 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LIX:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LX
I’m not interested in posterity, which is a paltry form of eternity. I want to see the headlines… I’m not interested in an insurance plan for my work.
— from Leonard Cohen Considers the Poetic Mind
The Secular vs. the Sacred
I expect to die in bed. My successor will die in prison. And his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.
Deutsch zusammengesetztes wort sehnsuchtsgefühl
A longing that there be a compound German word for a particular feeling
The Gentle Singularity
May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through superintelligence.
— Sam Altman, 11 June 2025
Everyone is allowed to be different, in exactly the same way
In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style essays in response to broad prompts such as “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?” One group was asked to rely on only their own brains to write the essays. A second was given access to Google Search to look up relevant information. The third was allowed to use ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence large language model (L.L.M.) that can generate full passages or essays in response to user queries. As students from all three groups completed the tasks, they wore a headset embedded with electrodes in order to measure their brain activity. According to Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab and one of the co-authors of a new working paper documenting the experiment, the results from the analysis showed a dramatic discrepancy: subjects who used ChatGPT demonstrated less brain activity than either of the other groups. The analysis of the L.L.M. users showed fewer widespread connections between different parts of their brains; less alpha connectivity, which is associated with creativity; and less theta connectivity, which is associated with working memory. Some of the L.L.M. users felt “no ownership whatsoever” over the essays they’d produced, and during one round of testing eighty per cent could not quote from what they’d putatively written. The M.I.T. study is among the first to scientifically measure what Kosmyna called the “cognitive cost” of relying on A.I. to perform tasks that humans previously accomplished more manually.
— Kyle Chayka, A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts, The New Yorker, 25 June 2025
Artificial Intelligence, Real Hype
We’re told that AI will “democratize” creative activity by allowing anyone to become an artist. We’re told that AI is on the verge of doing science for us, finally providing us with answers to urgent problems from medical breakthroughs (discovering a cure for cancer!) to the climate crisis (discovering a solution for global warming!). And self-driving cars are perpetually just around the corner (watch out: that means they’re about to run into you). …
There are myriad cases in which AI solutions have been posed but fall short of their stated goals.
— Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, On the Very Real Dangers of the Artificial Intelligence Hype Machine
A stochastic parrot
A system “for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning”.
— Emily M. Bender, The emperor has no clothes, Financial Times, 20 June 2025
Giant Plagiarism Machines
A few major well-placed players are poised to accumulate significant wealth by extracting value from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.
— Emily M. Bender
French ChatGPT
“Chat j’ai pété” (cat I farted).
中國沒有歷史
中國沒有歷史，中國史就是暴力鎮壓史輪回，所謂“吃得苦中苦 方為人上人”，脫不了一個規律：出身卑微的負責把天下攪亂，而世家大族負責收盤……只要門閥還在，賤民子弟永不翻身。
而朝代覆滅，不是因為出了反賊，而是朝代一直在製造反賊。…
我是陳勝，站在大石頭上喊“王侯將相，寧有種乎”，被兄弟背刺。我是王匡，砍下王莽頭顱，又被真正的貴族劉秀一刀砍下頭顱。我是瓦崗群雄，只是把鹿從楊家花園趕到李家花園。我是黃巢，殺光門閥世家，卑賤的頭仍被斫於狼虎谷。我是李自成，為農民“均田免糧”卻死在農民鋤下。我是洪秀全，挫骨揚灰……我這賤民轉世兩千年，一直進不了婆羅門。
我不服，我在天上飛啊飛……看到燒殺淫掠的義和團，看到火燒趙家樓的五四青年，看到井崗山“打土豪分田地”的赤衛隊，看到延安的王實味不滿階層歧視，抱怨“衣分三色，食分五等”，被砍死、拋屍枯井。我還看到城樓上喊了一句“中國人民從此站起來了”，覺得自己並沒站起來的遇羅克就寫了《出身論》，被槍斃在北京工人體育場。我看到某個夏天，在廣場高喊“反腐敗，反官倒”的大學生身體被坦克傾軋，看到拎刀衝進警局的楊佳……前些時候，有個小伙討薪800元不成便燒了工廠，說了《哪吒》台詞：“我活不活無所謂，我只想讓你死”……想多了，哪吒是官二代，你個擰鑼絲的不配說這台詞。
我轉世已久，終於明白點什麼：不是你有勇氣和夢想就能階層突破，那扇婆羅門前竪著一道橫亙千年的高牆，等級制度早在設計之初便寫進基因。有個叫費孝通的在《鄉土中國》說“上升通道關閉，社會凝固如石”。有個叫梁啓超的說“中國古今之患，常在貴賤不通”。有個叫錢穆的說中國一直是“血緣化治理”。中國式權力的秘密就是跟等級體系深度綁定，若想在城頭佔據一個位置，得用幾代人的頭顱來換，得妥協、跪舔、詭計多端、身心融合。所以根本沒什麼階層突破，屠龍少年要麼被吃掉，要麼學賤民朱重八，他之所以唯一成功，因為他主動成為那條惡龍。
如今沒有革命、沒有起義，戰場即考場，高考即科舉，青燈夜讀，懸梁刺股，但文憑永遠比不過血緣證書。你看官場，官宦子女比例遠超寒門，上品無寒門，下品無士族，士族有賦稅減免，官員有特供、雙軌制、高幹病房，子女戴天價耳環、讀哈佛大學，這是新的門閥制度。
門閥永不凋謝。你永遠成不了婆羅門。
— 李承鵬，我不是婆羅門，2025年6月11日
Agreeing to Agree
The US & Chinese trade negotiators have negotiated a handshake agreement to seek signoff to agree that a previously-agreed agreement is still their agreed upon agreement. (That agreement is not an agreement but a framework for seeking future agreements.)
— Justin Wolfers, 11 June 2025
湖里的老舍不說話，農場的艾青想回家，廁所的穆旦笑哈哈
看到今年高考全國一卷作文題，我著實吃了一驚。題目給了三段材料，要求根據材料引發的聯想和思考寫一篇文章。第一段材料是：“他想要給孩子們唱上一段，可是心裡直翻騰，開不了口。”出自老舍的小說《鼓書藝人》。一個瞭解老舍的人，未必讀過《鼓書藝人》（中文僅有從英文而來的翻譯本留存），但是一定知道他在“文革”中（1966年8月24日）於北京太平湖投水自盡。“心裡直翻騰，開不了口”，首先聯想到的難道不是這個悲慘的結局嗎？第二段材料是一句詩：“假如我是一隻鳥，我也應該用嘶啞的喉嚨歌唱。”出自艾青的《我愛這土地》。可能的聯想：從上世紀五十年代到七十年代，艾青“失聲”將近二十年；“平反復出”之後，在文學上也沒有建樹。第三段材料也是一句詩，出自穆旦的《贊美》：“我要以帶血的手和你們一一擁抱，因為一個民族已經起來。”高考的日期緊隨“六四”紀念日，出題人是希望青年學子記住那場喚醒了整個民族的民主運動以及它所遭受的血腥鎮壓嗎？“我活著是一種恥辱”——
從包括新華社在內的中國媒體進行的分析和解答看，這個作文題其實是不許聯想，也不讓思考，它有一個標準答案，那就是統一“聯想”到材料的創作時間和背景——抗戰——然後統一“思考”民族苦難與民族復興。日本侵華當然是民族苦難，所幸中國人和全世界反抗法西斯主義的人民一樣，不甘屈辱，奮起抗爭，最終取得勝利。這三位作家在此期間寫下的文字，也是民族抗爭的見證。
— 長平觀察，湖里的老舍不說話，農場的艾青想回家，廁所的穆旦笑哈哈，DW，2025年6月12日
Spaceballs 2
“Thirty-eight years ago, there was only one Star Wars trilogy,” the trailer declares. “But since then there have been… A prequel trilogy. A sequel trilogy. A prequel to the prequel. A prequel to the sequel. Countless TV spinoffs. A movie spinoff of the TV spinoff which is both a prequel and a sequel …The crawl goes on to note that there have also been “2 Dunes,” “7 Jurassic Parks” and “2 Avatars plus 3 upcoming Avatars making 5 Avatars.” And because painfully prolonged jokes were part of the original’s charm, the crawl also includes references to the MCU, the two attempts to launch a DCU and the Alien series, which, come to think of it, does share an important connection with Spaceballs.
— Spaceballs 2 teaser crawl, 12 June 2025
Stephen Miller, the sentient boil on the ass of American democracy
Oh honey, buckle up — we’re about to talk Donald Trump’s Horcruxes, and yes, Stephen Miller is absolutely one of them — the greasy, pasty little fascist fanged familiar slithering behind him like Nagini dipped in Crisco and white nationalism. Let’s be real — if Voldemort and Steve Bannon raw-dogged a Klan robe in a Motel 6 parking lot, @StephenM is what would crawl out nine months later whispering “build the wall” in Parseltongue. He isn’t just a Horcrux — he’s the sentient boil on the ass of American democracy, constantly oozing out policies so xenophobic they make Voldemort look like a UN ambassador.
Trump didn’t accidentally split his soul — he outsourced it. Every time he lied on national TV, insulted a Gold Star family, or rage-tweeted at 3am about toilets not flushing right, a little chunk of that spray-tanned soul flew into another artifact of evil.
Here’s the list, grab your wand and barf bag:
1. The Gold Toilet at Mar-a-Lago – Because nothing screams “dark artifact of corruption” like the throne where he tweets, cheats, and eats double cheeseburgers with Diet Coke chasers.
2. Ivanka’s dead eyes – There’s no empathy behind that thousand-dollar contour. Just a vault of complicit silence, tax fraud, and daddy issues that deserve their own Dateline special.
3. Rudy Giuliani’s leaking scalp – Every time that man opened his mouth, a Horcrux cried. Between the hair dye exorcism and the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle, he’s practically the Dementor of delusion.
4. The Access Hollywood Bus – That rolling confession booth of sexual assault and smug entitlement has more dark energy than the Chamber of Secrets and less ventilation.
5. Eric Trump’s entire existence – Just trust me on this. No one that facially untrustworthy gets through life without being a cursed object.
6. The Bible he held upside down – That wasn’t a photo op. That was a ritual. Like he was trying to summon Reagan’s ghost while simultaneously pissing on the Constitution.
7. Stephen Miller, aka Cursed Draco Malfoy – This albino hobgoblin is the Horcrux with legs. He crawled out of the racist ether with a thesaurus full of eugenics buzzwords and daddy abandonment issues, hellbent on rewriting immigration law with the compassion of a Dementor on bath salts. So kinda the male version of MTG – yet somehow more feminine looking.And let’s not pretend he’s got a redemption arc. This isn’t “tragic backstory” energy. This is “I sniff expired Miracle Whip and call it policy” energy. He’s the guy who’d push a stroller into traffic if it meant deporting a toddler for not speaking English. You know damn well he sleeps upside down in a coffin lined with Homeland Security memos and photos of kids in cages he uses as a weighted blanket. So yeah — Trump split his soul across seven cursed dumpster fires, and Miller? He’s the one that hisses, bites, and somehow always looks like he just came from sacrificing a goat to Breitbart. You want to kill the final Horcrux? Easy. Strip Miller of his VPN, cancel Newsmax, and trap him in a multicultural yoga class with pronouns in the introductions. That little fascist Horcrux would self-destruct in under 10 minutes. Now go find the others and bring me a match.
— William Kory Amyx for Congress, X, 13 June 2025
耶穌被ICE逮捕，即將被驅逐出境
一位生於伯利恆、長於拿撒勒的猶太男子——耶穌，因涉嫌以下罪名被ICE拘捕：
- 非法入境，逾期居留；
- 未經許可公開傳道；
- 自稱“天國之子”，身份存疑；
- 宣揚“愛仇敵、憐憫罪人”，強調“窮人比富人更容易進天國”，主張“凡自高的必降為卑，自卑的必升為高”，提倡“救助病人、接納妓女、關愛囚犯”等，涉嫌煽動底層民眾情緒，挑戰特朗普政府的價值體系，涉嫌擾亂秩序、顛覆國家政權等；
特朗普親自上陣，嚴肅執法，表示：“不管是誰，該遣返就得遣返！”
目前，耶穌正被安排驅逐出境，目的地：耶穌從沒去過的某第三國。
— 牆國荒誕字，2025年6月11日
Mea Minima Culpa
Imagine owning the world’s premier shitposting platform – in fact, having spent $44bn (£32bn) on it, specifically so that your magic mirror would tell you each day that you were the fairest shitposter of all – and then shuffling sheepishly on to your own pixels to mumble something about having gone “too far” with your hurty words. Buck up, sadsack – honestly.
— Marina Hyde, So social media has broken even Elon Musk. I’m forced to ask: U OK hun?, The Guardian, 13 June 2025
墳
我並無噴泉一般的思想，偉大華美的文章，既沒有主義要宣傳，也不想發起一種什麼運動。……我的生命的一部分，就這樣地用去了，也就是做了這樣的工作。然而我至今終於不明白我一向是在做什麼。比方作土工的罷，做著做著，而不明白是在築台呢還在掘坑。
— 魯迅《墳·後記》，1926年11月
False Faith
… the social sciences will always remain subordinate to literature. Reading literary works is infinitely more fun than studying social science! Decades from now, most of the theories, concepts, and paradigms produced by today’s academia will be relegated to the dustbin of history, whereas classics such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber, or works by Yu Hua, Liu Zhenyun, and Mo Yan, will still be read.
When it comes to shaping political perceptions and judgment among the Chinese people, Romance of the Three Kingdoms has far exceeded the influence of Records of the Three Kingdoms, the official historical account. As Honoré de Balzac observed, “A novel is regarded as the secret history of a nation.” And indeed, a nation’s secret history is not found in social science theories, but in its literature.
— Liu Jianjun, The False Faith in Social Sciences, The East is Read, 14 June 2025
No Kings
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
— Denis Diderot
16 June 2015
It was exactly 10 years ago today that the MAGA era officially began, as that greasy clog slid down that golden escalator like a hairball in Ann Coulter’s shower drain.
— Ohh That’s Rich, 16 June 2025
伊朗乎，牆國乎
曾經的世界軍事第五強國伊朗被以色列打的滿地找牙，只有一個原因：凡政教合一，神棍治國，控制輿論，帶來的後果就是，高層失去判斷力，經濟嚴重下降，創新力下降，軍事靠吹，醫療水平擺爛，教育主要是洗腦，民不聊生，怨聲載道，在世界上沒有幾個真正的朋友……而且還不准本國人民說出上述真相，否則就是尋釁滋事。
你說呢，對吧。
— 李承鵬，2025年6月17日
Caveat Lector
In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”
— Joshua Rothman, What’s Happening to Reading?, The New Yorker, 17 June 2025
bam bam bammity barampa
The rise of the internet and the cratering of print advertising combined to doom Portfolio, a Condé business magazine launched in 2007 at a cost estimated between $100 million and $150 million. For its first issue, Portfolio paid Tom Wolfe a rumored $12 a word for an essay about hedge funders. Its first sentence read as follows: “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam, but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam bam bammity barampa.”
The joke around the office was that the nonsense opening “was $200 right there.” The full piece ran 7,400 words, netting Mr. Wolfe roughly twice an average newspaper reporter’s annual salary.
— The Concorde-and-Caviar Era of Condé Nast, The New York Times, 27 June 2025
Social media gave people the tools to crawl out from under this monolithic tyranny and create something really interesting, and instead, we got influencers, intoning vapid proclamations officiously from inflated lips.
— Cat Lady, a reader’s comment in The New York Times
Normal People
I’m extremely suspicious of normal people. I think that they’re devious for the most part because they lie. The only way you could be normal in a society like this is to be complicit with things that are inhuman. Joseph Conrad said, I think, in Heart of Darkness that the devil of our age is not satanic and diabolical; he is just a flabby, mediocre creep. There’s nothing special about him and people are foolish to fall for all his tricks because they’re not very good tricks. I mean, that’s what we live in now: it’s just a morally indifferent and complacent, lazy-minded passive world with hordes of people just waiting for…who knows what?”
— Gary Indiana, Doug Aitken workshop
In every department of human endeavor, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity.
— Simon Leys