Other People’s Thoughts

This is the seventieth 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.

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As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this chapter in the series includes videos and illustrative material.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
18 December 2025

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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXIX:

• Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage

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Other People’s Thoughts, LXX

We are hemmed in in a myriad of ways,
eventually we will fade without a trace.
In a room full of books, however, you can
meet people of any era and of every place.

— Lao Shu, 2017

The Art of Not Reading

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. – A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, 16

Content

I can take it no longer. Somebody has to say something. Something has to change.

There is too much content. Too much. It is impossible to choose what to consume at any given moment. We live in a constant state of choice paralysis, and there is only one solution. I am calling for an immediate, indefinite ban on all forms of content. …

My own bookshelf is full, and yet I own less than 0.00046% of books that have been published. According to The Google, there are over 150 million books in existence, and that number is only rising. For the first time in my life, I am starting to suspect I might not manage to read every book ever written before I die. For an SLA, this is a devastating thought.

No more books should be written. If you are currently writing a book, stop. You are too late. We have enough books now.

— SLA (Serious Literary Author), Daniel Pipes, 17 December 2025

FUCK YOU ALL (Deck the Halls)

Fuck you Donny, Fuck your minions! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck the Court, and their opinions! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck you, Elon Musk and Twitter! Fa-la-la-la…
Dragged the country to the shitter! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck to reaching cross the aisle! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck your creepy Christian smile! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck to making nice with losers! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck you, Facebook & Fox Newsers! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck Republican buffoons! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck you, red cap MAGA goons! Fa-la-la-la…
Fuck you, Cuomo, Zohran showed you! Fa-la-la-la…..
Fuck Chuck Shumer, too-da-loo-oo! Fa-la-la-la…

— A Christmas carol recorded at the Rockefeller Center, New York, 10 December 2025

I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves “Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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Julie

Little in today’s monotonous arts landscape could even remotely be classified as great. We are languishing in a period of rote ideology and diminished craftsmanship. However, I would nominate for greatness a stunning music video of the song Julie (2015), written and performed by American musician Rhiannon Giddens, accompanying herself on banjo. It is a magnificent contribution to the epochal folk song tradition that was transplanted from the British Isles to North America.

Inspired by a book about slave narratives, Giddens constructs a charged dialogue between a wealthy plantation mistress and her woman slave, about to be liberated by advancing Yankee troops. The voices are soft and intimate, but the brutal reality of slavery suddenly breaks through. This song is an inspired work of art that repetition cannot dim. See her perform it online on David Holt’s music show. There is no callow postmodernist irony here – just blazing rage and purity of emotion.

— Camille Paglia, A Spectator poll: What is the greatest artwork of the century so far?, The Spectator

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Man of the Year

If, for example, you sensed that your corner of the world was being run by a psychopath and a cabal of goons who enjoy nothing so much as tearing an immigrant mother away from her child, your impressions would be reflected in “Blue Velvet” (1986). If you were stunned by how many prominent citizens were linked to the trafficking and exploitation of teen-age girls, you might see flashes of prophecy in the original broadcast run of “Twin Peaks” (1990-91) and in the feature film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992). If you recoiled at the unleashing of violent and arbitrary forces that destroy people’s lives, livelihoods, and vocations for sport, you could find a black-comic riff on such phenomena in “Mulholland Drive” (2001). And, if you read dystopia between the lines of Trump’s executive order launching the “Genesis Mission” — a “coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery” upon a defenseless public — you might just hear Lynch’s inimitable voice in your ear, that congenial blare of perfectly flat vowels affirming your worst fears: “THERE’D BE A LOT OF SADNESS AND DESPAIR AND HORROR.”

— Jessica Winter, 2025 Was David Lynch

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Youth 芳華

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抗日

作為一個愛國者，剛才欣慰看到央視報道“高市早苗慫了，承認台灣屬於中國”。而我國外交部插著兜硬氣表示：這事兒沒完，不要想蒙混過關。川普通過了不懷好意的《台灣保證實施法》。胡錫進老師指出：抗日是一件長期持久的事業。出於對長久事業的支持，我有一個夢想，對出租海外的大熊貓們進行思想培訓，國家的立場也是我大熊貓的立場，倘若碰上遊客中的反華勢力和分裂分子，政治素養嘩一下子就上來了，啪地竪起中指，“犯我強漢，丟你老母”……

有国家撑腰，讲什么礼貌，乱世先杀圣母。

— 李承鵬，《論抗日》：說起抗日，我從小就血脈賁張，2025年12月4日

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紅鸚鵡 The Red Cockatoo

— 白居易 Bo Juyi, 紅鸚鵡（商山路逢）, ‘The Red Cockatoo’

Life

There are only three ages: young, old or surgical.

— Fran Leibowitz

Living with Oneself

I think there are situations, and there are people who find that the psychic cost of moral compromise is greater than the cost of acting. For them to live in harmony with themselves and with their values, they have to do things that are scary, and they feel like they’re not paying a greater price than they would be if they just sacrificed their values.

— M. Gessen, How to Resist, The New York Times, 9 December 2025

Slop

Garbage abounds in this regime. Trump has always trafficked in tacky/cheap merchandise (from Trump steaks to sneakers to Trump cologne) and scams (e.g., Trump University or $Trump crypto). We got a mere sample of his “wares” in the first term; now the refuse is piling up like old newspapers in a hoarder’s house. Alas, we cannot pull up a dumpster to cart it all away (at least before the next president is sworn in). In the meantime, Trump would be well advised to stop throwing around terms like “garbage” in connection with decent, hard-working, loyal Americans—about whom he knows nothing.

— Jennifer Rubin, Garbage Abounds, Words & Phrases to Throw Out, 9 December 2025

Donald Trump’s Comeback Rally

What you actually saw was a freshly botoxed and be-Spanxed Trump, his greasy umber makeup applied with the subtlety of a 1970s hooker, his shellacked, lemur-pelt wig swooping back from his porcine eyes like an Art Deco-era car’s fenders stalking on stage and leaning on the podium for 90 minutes of madness.

Trump played the greatest hits, a former star now stuck in a regional dinner theater in the Catskills, a man with the same show as ever, but the audience stopped feeling the same heat and passion that once shaped it. Whoever in the White House advance team that picked a casino for a speech about affordability is clearly a Lincoln Project sleeper agent, because the gamble Trump took last night has implications for the rest of his term and the future of the MAGA GOP.

Even among the faithful, he couldn’t convincingly sustain the Big Lie of 2025; standing in front of a lot of people who aren’t OK, insisting that everything is fine and that if your grocery bill hurts, it’s basically a hoax is not an approach from a rational human.

That’s not a reset. That’s a gaslighting goon with a piddle bag strapped to its draggy leg.

— Rick Wilson, Trump’s Hot Mess Rally, 10 December 2025

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DEI hire

Pharrell Williams, you are literally the most expensive diversity, equity, and inclusion hire in the history of European luxury fashion. You are the €250 million, Humanrace-skincare-glazed proof that DEI can be extremely profitable, provided the “D” stands for “don’t scare the shareholders.” …

Virgil dies. Tragic, untimely, seismic. Within minutes, LVMH’s calculators start whirring. Fashion is a business, after all. They don’t need another technical savant; they need someone who can inherit the cultural equity Virgil built without inheriting the parts that made white people clutch their Birkins (read: the politics). Enter Pharrell: same melanin, better smile, zero interest in making anyone uncomfortable about colonialism while selling them a €40,000 monogram trunk. Continuity? Yes. Meritocracy? Girl, be serious.

— Louis Pisano, Pharrell Williams, the Billion-Dollar DEI Hire Who Hates DEI, 18 November 2025

Plot Armor

As a writer focused on AI, people ask me a lot how I feel about losing my hobby to automation. I used to answer that AI writes so bad it will never replace professional writers, or that readers do care about human authors, or that AI lacks the historical or personal context that people can provide, or that having an existing audience protects me from disruption, or that as AI gets better I realize it will never be good enough, or some other cheesy argument about how we are unique and how that makes us irreplaceable and yada yada yada. I have a better answer now: my job has plot armor.

— Alberto Romero, AI Can’t Automate You Out of a Job Because You Have Plot Armor, 12 December 2025

Technoligarchs

This is about an alien invasion by a species of strange human being that doesn’t even want to be human anymore, that doesn’t even want to live on Earth anymore, and that doesn’t believe in God—that thinks it’s God. And this is an existential threat to our country, to our future, to the planet, and we have to fight against that.

— Gil Durán, Silicon Valley’s Fake Christianity Enables Tech Genocide, The Nerd Reich, 12 December 2025

Hyperstition

[I]n the ’90s there was a book called The Secret that even Oprah was pushing, about “if you just—here’s how you manifest the life you want.” And even before that, in like the ’40s or ’30s, Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking—that through positive thinking you can make things happen. And there’s some truth to that: being positive, going after what—being motivated.

But they call it hyperstition. And what they mean by that—the other word for that is basically propaganda. How do you tell a narrative? How do you tell a story that shapes reality? And there’s a lot of words for that. Propaganda is one of those words. Strategic communications is one of those words. Another word they like to use is “memetic warfare.” And memetic warfare is a tactic or strategy of hyperstition.

And we largely see that happening today with a lot of things they’re doing: with the apocalypse, with AI. They just try to have a story that people believe, and that then generates money for them. Venture capital is pretty much based on hyperstition—imagining something and then making that thing happen.

— Gil Durán, op. cit.

範曾的聲明

我與吾妻徐萌女士近期喜得獨子，幸何如哉！茲後我與愛妻、獨子三口共度，現已遷入新居，此後長廂廝守，以慰餘生！

— 范曾聲明節錄

Neologism

Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che told the coldest joke of the night during “Weekend Update,” at the expense of Trump’s alleged health problems.

“This week, President Trump claimed that ‘affordability’ is a new word made up by Democrats to hurt him,” Che said. “But if Democrats really wanted to make up a word specifically to hurt Trump, it would probably be ‘Fatmentia.’”

— Michael Che, SNL Weekend Update, 13 December 2025

Role reversal

The Jewish state has embraced ethno-nationalism, while many of its international critics, including quite a few Jews, claim to fight for the oppressed everywhere. To call all these critics antisemites makes no sense. What about the effort to apply the label to figures such as Mahmoud Khalil? Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student (and a green-card holder), was arrested by ICE officers in March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests on campus and locked up for more than a hundred days. Trump tweeted that he was a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student,” warning of more arrests of those engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”

In fact, Khalil had been negotiating on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that sees Israel’s violence against Palestinians as part of a global system of capitalist, colonialist, racist oppression. “Palestine,” in its view, “is the vanguard for our collective liberation. . . . We support freedom and justice for the Palestinian people, and for all people.”

This may sound simplistic or wrongheaded, but it is not antisemitic. Indeed, it fits squarely within the left-liberal, universalist tradition of Jewish resistance to antisemitism. Khalil himself—a Syrian-born Palestinian married to an American—might even be called a rootless cosmopolitan. That he should have been jailed by an “America First” Administration in defense of a government filled with racists who condone the killing and starving of civilians is damaging to the United States, disastrous for the Palestinians, not good for Israel, and certainly bad for the Jews.

— Ian Buruma, The Uses and Abuses of “Antisemitism”, The New Yorker, 29 September 2025

Remnick on Trump on Reiner

… it is worth asking, do you know anyone quite as malevolent? At your place of work? On your campus? A colleague? A teacher? Much less someone whose impulses and furies in no small measure dictate the direction, fate, and temper of the country? Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump?

— David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, 17 December 2025

To dream perchance …

We are asleep. Our life is a dream, but sometimes we wake up just long enough to realize we are dreaming.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, “Is this true?” “Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?” To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.

— Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971

The current neo-fascist, technofeudalist, billionaire oligarchic simulation has no tolerance for the weird or wonderful. The premise of their escape plans, for their sealed off eco-villages and Mars colonies and eugenic civilizations, is that they can account for everything: the ventilation, the soil matrix, the social codes, the diet, the water treatment. Environmental disaster is the excuse, but the aspirations is the same: America 2.0, hatched ex nihilo, as if from nothing, and—more important—accounting for everything. No surprises. No wiggle room. No magic. No women, for that matter. Just robots and little girls.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Why I’m Getting Weird, 12 December 2025

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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