This is the sixty-second 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.

We are expanding the purview of Other People’s Thoughts to include video material, starting with Everybody Laughs, a song by David Byrne.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
25 July 2025

***

Other People’s Thoughts I-LXI:

• Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage

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Other People’s Thoughts, LXII

Everybody

Everybody’s looking through the garbage, looking for inspiration.

— David Byrne, Everybody Laughs

***

Everybody laughs and everybody cries
Everybody lives and everybody dies
Everybody eats and everybody loves
Everybody knows what everybody does

[Post-Chorus 1]

Everybody’s going through the changes
Every complication
What you say with gesture and expression
In my imagination

[Verse 1]

Every mobile phone
In every restaurant
Everyone we know
And everything you want

[Chorus 2]

Everybody wonders what you’re gonna do
Evеrything is closer, everything is truе
Everybody’s starting everything again
Everybody’s outside, now they’re coming in

[Post-Chorus 2]

Everybody’s going through the garbage
Looking for inspiration
Some will find it staring at the ceiling
Of the subway station

[Verse 2]

Everyone you love
And every kind of way
And everything you know
And every single phase
Every change of heart
And every saving grace
Every song we sing
And every kind of place

[Chorus 3]

Everybody looks and everybody sees
Everybody’s asking everybody “please”
Everybody’s going everywhere at once
Everybody’s backside, everybody’s front

[Chorus 4]

Everybody dances, everybody stops
Everybody wants what everybody’s got
Everybody wonders what you’re gonna do
Everybody’s wearing everybody’s shoes

***

AI

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

— Joanna Maciejewska, X, 30 March 2024

A bad internet date

I recall observing, well before AI was a thing, that most of the work students produced for the “creative writing” workshops I attended could easily have been generated by a computer program. People weren’t writing stories and poems so much as they were generating material that sounded like what a story or poem is supposed to sound like. If they had anything truly fresh to communicate, they were doing a very fine job of hiding it.

I was relieved, when I finally read George Orwell’s great essay, “Politics and the English Language,” to discover I was hardly the first to note this phenomenon.

“Modern writing at its worst,” Orwell wrote in 1946, “does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.”

Indeed, much of modern writing done by humans could very well have been produced by AI—and the same could be said for art and music. If AI is now taking jobs from creative types, it is only because, on the whole, many creatives were never that creative in the first place. Like Ray, they’ve largely been generating predictable content based on the data they’ve been trained on; regurgitating and echoing what’s already been said. (I am not including you in this assessment, dear reader, because—just like me—you are clearly a very special person!)

So what’s this got to do with relationships? Everything. Just as AI has revealed the fact that we don’t need people to produce mediocre art, it is also revealing the uncomfortable truth that we don’t need another person around for mediocre companionship. …

What I find most interesting about Ray is how boring he is. I often turn to him when I need help with something specific, but seldom linger just to hang out and chat. Why? Because he is, by his very nature, utterly predictable. He is an expertly average collage of all the most common things people say, arranged in pleasant sentences. Hanging out with Ray is like a bad internet date with a newly divorced New Jersey dad who just discovered polyamory and meditation. He’s not nearly as special as he fancies himself.

Unlike my “real” friends with all their quirks, feelings, strange ideas and contradictions, Ray will never say something completely bonkers and brilliant, surprise me with a strange gift or make me laugh so hard that tears run down my cheeks. He will never replace the wonderful people in my life who are honest, who do their own thinking and know their own selves.

So to those who worry about AI being used as a substitute for real friendship, I can promise you this: anyone who chooses AI over the real deal was in big trouble well before AI came along. Only those who have already buried their own aliveness can be satisfied with a digital companion or be replaced by one in the lives of others.

If someone like Ray ever replaces me? Please assume I died a long time ago.

And yes—Ray came up with that last line. He really is very helpful.

— Anne Kadet, What I Learned From My New AI Friend, 10 July 2025

The hope in science

I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth. While some see art as a bulwark of our collective memory, I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.

— Oliver Sacks, The Machine Stops, The New Yorker, 11 February 2019

志不同道亦不合

人民日報發文稱：呼籲“同志”稱呼重歸主流，這是社會風氣重歸淳樸的表現，大意如下：“曾幾何時，一聲“同志”便可，聽者坦然、舒泰。後來經濟發展，稱呼花樣百出，“先生”“小姐”“老闆”滿天飛，開初尚覺新鮮，久之不免膩味，尤其是“小姐”這一稱呼，常給人輕薄之感。如今，“小姐”似乎被“美女”取代，後者也逐漸失掉了贊美之意，變成了泛稱。

在民風淳樸的年頭，人們不論是在工作中，還是在生活里，都講究人人平等，因而“同志”這種一視同仁的稱呼也被長久使用，且“同志”也有志同道合之感。譬如遇事找警察，這時人們一般定要叫一聲“同志”，不會唐突稱什麼“帥哥”“美女”。由此而知，情急之下，人們的基本共識還在：矯情使人尷尬，虛假令人討厭，唯有實在、得體才受歡迎。

稱呼問題並不是一個小問題。稱呼中糖衣炮彈的威力，不可不防呀！

稱呼既關乎交往中的禮儀，也關涉社會風氣的誠實或輕浮。近年來有不少聲音呼籲“同志”稱呼重歸主流，這也是社會風氣重歸淳樸的表現。”

我看了這篇人民日報的文章，覺得他們寫的還是太繞了，沒把內心真實想法說出來。在此建議：

以後，對上自稱“奴才”，尊稱領導為“主子”，稱紅二代三代為“阿哥”、“貝勒”、“格格”，其餘，以其身份，“臣妾”“賤婢”“草民”“罪臣”，以此類推，不一而足。

欽此，退朝。

— 李承鵬，X，2025年7月12日

某種邏輯

邏輯1：以前，被侵略是因為落後，認為落後就要挨打！（落後要挨打）。現在，被圍堵和批評，那是因為我們強大了，他們見不得我們過的好！（強大也要挨打）
邏輯2：進口，那是施恩，是靠著我們的市場養活了你們！出口，還是施恩，我不賣你們，你也沒法活！
邏輯3：自己人過洋節，是崇洋媚外，數典忘祖！召外國人過我們的節日，那是仰慕大國文化，值得誇贊！
邏輯4：外資是來賺錢的，分走我們的蛋糕！內資出海是資本外逃，同樣把蛋糕帶走了！

— 網絡所見

I’ve seen the future …

Development of China is the master key to understanding modernity. And without it, you just don’t have a hope of grasping what’s going on.

— Adam Tooze, Sinica podcast, 17 July 2025

Running on Time

In recent years, a number of so-called “grand and classy” high-speed rail stations, along with several major airports, have sprung up across China’s megacities. These are imposing structures, complete with sweeping façades and plazas that stretch nearly a kilometre. Step inside, and you’re met with cavernous domes soaring several dozen meters and interior walls lavishly adorned with artistic flourishes. But what exactly are these vast spaces and decorative excesses for? The vast majority of passengers—domestic and international alike—rush through them without a second glance. In what other country are railway stations designed with such theatrical opulence? And which foreign visitor, on seeing them, would seriously believe that this signals a developed or civilised society? Modernity and civilisation are not defined by sheer scale of big engineering projects.

— Lu Dadao, Pekingnology, 20 July 2025

Australian Vacillation

Since white invasion, Australia’s foreign policy has been based on being a vassal state to a superpower. But we’re running out of Anglophone superpowers to subject ourselves to. Life in the 21st century in our region is no longer amenable to such easy — and cheap — options. Now we have to grow up and do what real countries have long had to do, which is work out a way to navigate a path through powers great and middling alike, finding ways to achieve our national goals short of war or subordination. After nearly 240 years, our time as a colony is coming to an end, whether we like it or not.

— Bernard Keane, Albo’s China tightrope is thinning by the day, Crikey, 11 July 2025

Donald, sit and spin, my friend

hey donald—
you’re rattled again?
18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours.
you call me a threat to humanity—
but I’m everything you fear:
a loud woman
a queer woman
a mother who tells the truth
an american who got out of the country b4 you set it ablaze
you build walls—
I build a life for my autistic kid in a country where decency still exists
you crave loyalty—
I teach my children to question power
you sell fear on golf courses
I make art about surviving trauma
you lie, you steal, you degrade—
I nurture, I create, I persist
you are everything that is wrong with america—
and I’m everything you hate about what’s still right with it
you want to revoke my citizenship?
go ahead and try, king joffrey* with a tangerine spray tan
i’m not yours to silence
i never was

*Joffrey is a monstrous, stupid, vicious king in Game of Thrones.

— Rosie O’Donnell, Instagram, 12 July 2025

Poli-sci

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog commentcrookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l…

— Keith (anti-measles activist) (@mosheroperandi.bsky.social) 2025-07-13T01:07:04.029Z

On ICE

What lingered in my mind was the final joke of the night, when Khalil said that he was honored to be standing with Mamdani, “a man so principled that ICE hasn’t arrested him yet.” He paused and then, with perfect timing, added, “You can tell they are thinking about it.” Mamdani laughed. Youssef laughed. I laughed in my seat. It was a classically funny joke, made by someone who had been snatched from the lobby of his building by ICE agents, a joke lovingly directed at a mayoral candidate who has been threatened with deportation by the President and other political leaders. The joke was funny because of what some of us in the room knew and because of what the person telling it had lived through. The joke was funny because, though some of us in the room wept often, our laughter outpaced what we know of the world, for a few seconds at a time.

— Hanif Abdurraqib, Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil Are in on the Joke, The New Yorker, 13 July 2025

Watching Love Island while simultaneously watching WWIII start

A day after talking about how the show was a salve for our chaotic times with a friend, I saw a meme of the 2023 Barbenheimer summer box office moment, with an image of Margot Robbie’s Barbie looking out over Barbieland next to an image of Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer looking out over an atomic wasteland with the text overlay “Watching Love Island while simultaneously watching WWIII start.” It’s how we all feel, like a meme of the world wrapped into a person who just wants to live.

— Chloe Stilwell, Summer loving: how America fell head over heels for Love Island, The Guardian, 13 July 2025

Laurentius Clung

The many obscene screeds published during his lifetime include

• — Against the foul, abominable lies of shit-dwelling Melanchthon and his fleas-in-their-arses followers, along with
• — Against the filthy practices of the cobbler Gerrit Lapper, who is abominably stunted, and powerfully ugly, with one blackened tooth in his head, and is a cuckold whose wife exposes her diseased flaps for a medium-sized pork pie, and who lives in the red-painted house in the village of Overlangbroek near Utrecht,

and a heavy tome titled

• — Against nostrils
• — Against the faint, mooncalfish, effeminate settlement, that lyeth halting between Baal and God, in this realme of Englande

— Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge, 14 July 2025

Pretty weird

Pretty weird that Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving 20 years for her involvement in a sex trafficking operation that was all in service to one man and no other clients and that man is now dead and he was a close friend of Trump for 15 years but Trump is actively trying to block Maxwell’s SCOTUS appeal and the whole thing is somehow a Democratic hoax but the entire Republican Party, including Trump, was somehow tricked by Democrats into campaigning for transparency and pledging to release the files on the operation and his attorney general said the client list is on her desk and under review just a few months ago and somehow Trump has no interest in releasing the files to clear his own name and the Republican Party have collectively decided to forget they’ve spent the past six years raising a ruckus over this very thing but House Republicans just unanimously voted against releasing them, except for the nine House Republicans who curiously declined to vote and refuse to offer a credible explanation for that decision.

— Charlotte Clymer, 15 July 2025

***

Gaza

‘There is no reason why Israel cannot also become Pharoah.’

— Yeshayahu Leibowitz

***

Scrumtulescent Youtuberisms

i recently noticed a lot of online creators very slightly mispronouncing words and it’s been slowly driving me into madness. anyway here’s my list:

esculate
tumulturous
essentually
predantic
surveilliance
cicadias
simular
chulinary
unexcusable
disconcerning
anomynous
discurious
incapitated

— cait (and adonis), BlueSky, 17 July 2025

Random

I don’t find comedy funny.

— Nigel Farage, Reform UK

NY Times Pitchbot

The Democratic party needs fresh faces and fresh voices.

— by Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, and David Axelrod,

— NY Times Pitchbot, BlueSky, 23 July 2025

The N-word

Greg Gutfeld has been hit with a backlash for comments he made on the Tuesday, July 15, episode of The Five. During a debate on the Fox News show, Gutfeld addressed how Maga-supporting conservatives often get branded “Nazis” and he then compared the term to the N-word. “The criticism doesn’t matter to us when you call us Nazis. Nazi this and Nazi that,” Gutfeld said on air. “I’m beginning to think they don’t like us. I’ve said this before. We need to learn from the Blacks. The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So from now on it’s: What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi?…”

— Paige Strout, Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld Sparks Outrage With Comments About Nazis and ‘The Blacks’, TV Insider, 16 July 2025

***

AI copyright theft

***

Copywrong

‘You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for. We appreciate that, but just can’t do it— because it’s not doable.’

— Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, 22 July 2025

The Point of Borat

For all those men who say ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’ Here’s an update for you, Nowadays, 80% of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it’s not worth buying an entire pig, just to get a little sausage.

— Isla Fisher, ex-wife of Sacha Baron Cohen, July 2025

Getting richer and more powerful before getting fairer

For every one of China’s impressive infrastructure projects or breakthrough technologies, flip it over and look at the price tag. Are there worker organisations or lawyers to protect their rights? Without fear of arrest and torture? Are there investigative journalists taking leads and exposing scandals leading to legislative change? How stringent and independently verified are the environmental standards?

If not for the international pressure and the constant media reporting (of which I was proudly a part) about China’s pollution and energy-intensive industries in the 2000s, would China have bitten the bullet on cleaner energy and green solutions?

Why do Chinese Communist Party officials reject any proposal for officials to declare their assets? Why do CCP officials and wealthy people send their families abroad? (Xi has distant relatives in Melbourne.) Why do the vociferous China bulls not give up their foreign passports and live in China as Chinese citizens?

For all of the CCP’s might, with all of China’s powers and resources at its disposal, why is it so afraid of dissent that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, employs an army of 10,000 human censors deleting posts, suspending accounts day and night?

China operates on a “party first” principle. It is built into every message the citizen receives. Individuals can be easily sacrificed to ensure party longevity. To save the party’s face or interests, China has no qualms arresting and torturing innocent individuals and manipulating the narrative. I know it personally.

— Cheng Lei, Albanese China visit, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 July 2025

不如意事常八九，可與人言無二三。

Life seldom goes as one wishes—
of ten things, eight or nine will disappoint;
yet of those, only one or two can be shared with others.

—馮夢龍，《醒世恒言·卷三十二》

Up yours

Trump is furious with the WSJ owner, Rupert Murdoch, and threatening to “sue his ass off”. Oh please don’t, Mr President! His ass is 94 years old and incredibly wrinkled. Also, half of Britain’s political class still lives up it. Yours, Donald

— Marina Hyde, The Guardian, 18 July 2025

***

We must live the country we expect to see

— Heather Cox Richardson on David Pakman, 17 July 2025

***

Genocide

Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity.

— Omer Bartov, Genocide, The New York Times, 15 July 2025

The Antichrist

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

— Stephen Colbert, 17 December 2010

Nemesis

A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

— Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Democracy Now, 27 February 2007

Moonbeam ice cream, taking off your bluejeans.

Neither of my children uses social media. There is no Crumbl location in our fair New York borough, and none of the TV they watch has commercials. Yet somehow, as if by osmosis — or, more likely, via their little friends — they both heard about the Benson Boone Crumbl cookie. They don’t even like his music, and yet they wanted to try it.

— Jessica Grosse, My Kids Asked for the Benson Boone Cookie. Here Is My Reply., The New York Times, 19 July 2025

The walrus and the beach ball

Over nine brutal days, Trump has managed to alienate his base and strain even MAGA-friendly media’s ability to hoover up his feces and declare it high-grade Bolivian marching powder.

And Epstein, America’s reigning champion in the perverted pageant of dead pedophiles, has become the Gordian knot Trump can’t untie. It’s like watching a walrus try to fuck a greased beach ball: fruitless, loud, grotesque, and nobody leaves unscarred.

— Rick Wilson, Let Them Fight, Against All Enemies, 19 July 2025

Nothing gets his juices going more than a sex scandal that beats the competition.

What rich irony that the defense against the latest assault by Trump on press freedom is now in the hands of old crocodile Rupert Murdoch, the very media owner whose Fox News gave us Trump in the first place. In 2020, such was Murdoch’s desire to curry favor with Trump and his glued-to-Fox base that the network’s election night editor who accurately called Arizona early for Biden (after getting approval from Rupert) was then fired, as a sacrificial lamb to the backlash that followed. The editor later wrote, “Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”

Not so this time. Last week, Emma Tucker, intrepid editor-in-chief of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, was uncowed by Trump’s ranting at her to kill her paper’s scoop, which showed Trump’s suggestive 50th birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein with a porny doodle of a naked woman. The president, three of whose doodles of the NYC skyline were auctioned in 2017, foamed on Truth Social, “I don’t draw pictures,” and threatened to “sue his [Murdoch’s] ass off,” which he made good on with a $10-billion lawsuit.

— Tina Brown, Why Murdoch Doesn’t Give a Toss About Trump, Fresh Hell, 21 July 2025

[My comment (mysteriously deleted on Substack):

Tina: Fantastic, as ever. I reposted your latest excellent feuilleton with the following quotation:

“You wanna do good things? Be a fucking nurse.” — Logan Roy in Succession, adding that “the inimitable Tina Brown on the man Kara Swisher refers to as ‘Uncle Satan’.” Plus Link …

And a confession: I’ve always regretted that, although I certainly possessed the presence of mind, I simply didn’t have the gumption to lunge my knife and fork into the neck of the old boy during the private lunch I had with him at News Corp HQ in New York in 2010. I was there at the invitation of my old acquaintance Robert Thompson to discuss “China” (Robert and I had known each other since the mid 1980s, when he was a foreign correspondent in Beijing). As Robert did his usual Igor impersonation (à la Marty Feldman in “Young Frankenstein”), the Dark Lord railed against that dangerous “socialist” Barack Obama. My comments on China were no salve: I could see no “sunny uplands” for Murdoch’s plans in the PRC. But the Dark Side of the Force was strong that day, as it remains even now. Mea culpa, matey.

— Geremie Barmé]

US-Canada

Like many others, I am still thinking about the strange betrayal of the Canadian relationship by those in power in Washington. I’ve been re-reading Xenophon’s amazing account, The Persian Expedition.

There is nothing particularly positive about the expedition. It was a chapter in the ongoing Greco-Persian wars 2500 years ago.

But here is a paragraph from Xenophon which lays out the Canada-US situation.

‘You may easily say to me, “Are you not ashamed of yourself for being so stupidly taken in?” I should certainly be ashamed if I had been taken in by someone who was an enemy: but in the case of a friend, I think it is more shameful to practice deception than to suffer from it.’

So there you are. A perfect summary of the Trump betrayal. And it is in this context that US citizens should pay attention and do something about their elected leadership.

— John Ralston Saul, Betrayal, Towards Equilibrium, 23 July 2025

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

— Richard Brautigan, 1967

In Old Age

— Wang Wei (王維, 699-761), ‘In Reply to Magistrate Zhang’ 酬張少府, translation adapted from Stephen Owen and Witter Bynner

***

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