Other People’s Thoughts
This is the seventy-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.
***
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
30 December 2025
***
Other People’s Thoughts I-LXX:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXXI
江湖實在太亂
全是搓火新聞
只好家裡蹲着
沈迷書中乾坤
Things really are crazy out there,
the news is all so inflammatory.
I’m gonna hang out at home and
lose myself in the world of books.
— Lao Shu 老樹, winter 2017, trans. GRB
***
風吹草動
君子之德風，小人之德草，草上之風必偃
—《論語》
“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”
— Hayao Miyazaki 宮崎駿
1:10,000,000
Like Danté, Shakespeare and Joyce, Kafka has kept scholars gainfully employed and well-fed for generations. He has become a department, a bureau unto himself. His work has been examined, excavated and interpreted to the point that the ratio of words written by Kafka to words written about Kafka is now estimated to be about 1:10,000,000. A symbolic punishment for a man who himself claimed to be “made of literature.”
— Kafka Inc., Liberties Journal
See It Say It Sorted
The other day I saw a piece of luggage in the aisle of a train carriage and the words sprung from within my mind, unbidden, as if summoned by my very essence. “See It,” I thought, and then a shudder, a terrible moment of apprehension, as if some part of me was already grappling with the realisation of what I was about to think. “Say it.” As if I am nothing but a drone, a receptacle for whatever tawdry communication strategy the authorities wish to inflict on me, a part of the beehive, a cog in the machine, without an internal life of my own or any functioning resistance against that which would make me conform. God damn me, I thought. God damn me to hell. And then, trembling, fully aware of the vandalism I was inflicting on my soul, knowing the shame I brought to my family name but powerless to stop it, reduced to the tiniest and most inconsequential version of myself: the final indignity. “Sorted.”
What is there to learn here, except that I have found a new reason to hate myself and everyone around me? It is that public messaging can be effective not by being well meaning, or practical, or well designed, or concise, but simply by being very annoying. That you can infuriate people into doing what you want. What a terrible realisation.
— Ian Dunt, Everything I got wrong this year, 19 December 2025
Omertà
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
— Kurt Vonnegut
Worrying About America
What worries some observers most is not China’s rising confidence but what they say is America’s diminishing faith in its own abilities. To Jianying Zha, a writer in New York City who has chronicled Chinese politics for decades, that shift is the real strategic danger.
“America’s greatest enemy is itself — losing faith in its core values and its fighting spirit,” she told me. “That’s exactly what plays into China’s ancient art of war: defeating you without waging war, because you’ll defeat yourself.”
— Li Yuan, China Is Feeling Strong and Senses an American Retreat, The New York Times, 18 December 2025
Fresh Hell
I have come to think America is a country of serial hysteria. The deification of assassinated MAGA podcast host Charlie Kirk is as over the top as the eight years of liberal self-flagellation about toxic masculinity in the wake of MeToo. Now Trump’s war on DEI has given permission for the rise of ball-scratching knuckle-trailers in the corridors of power, cheering on the deportation excesses of a new ICE age. What chance is there that the next pendulum swing is toward the long lost cultivation of sanity?
— Tina Brown, Fresh Hell, 15 December 2025
***
***
Bondi
The cross-cultural, multi-faith vigils and gatherings that have taken place since the shooting are obviously an argument in favour of hope. Almost everything else that has happened, though, has been an argument against it. What happened in India a month ago has happened, on steroids, back home. The Liberal Party, the political wing of the Murdoch media empire, has taken the shooting as an opportunity to wheel out its immigration policies from a quarter of a century ago. (I thought it telling that, prior to his outing as a Syrian Muslim, the hero of Bondi, Ahmed al-Ahmed, was widely reported as being a Maronite Christian.) The pro-Israel lobby, which never saw a horror it didn’t try to either exploit or erase, depending on the faith of the deceased, has doubled down on its absurd claims that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are one and the same thing. (Some of Australia’s most outspoken anti-Zionists, like my friends Antony Loewenstein, Na’ama Carlin, and Claire Wright are Jewish.) Any attempt to inject context into the debate—such as by observing the ideological character of the Hannukah event that was the target of the shooting, as Guy Rundle has done in daring to breath the word “Chabad”—is to be condemned as antisemitic. (If the Muslim Brotherhood were to hold an iftar event at, say, Bronte, people would lose their goddamned minds.)
The Labor Party, always keen to be squarely framed by the Overton window even as its opponents pull the thing ever further to the right, has unfortunately bought into the most transparently fallacious and silly reading of the shooting: that a man and his son were inspired by peaceful marches in Australian cities, and by university students spouting platitudinous slogans, to join the Islamic State and carry out mass murder. As a result, the government has said it will adopt the draconian, entirely pro-Israel recommendations of the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, which would make it a hate crime for me to write and publish a piece like this one. I was deeply troubled by photos from the day after the shooting, which showed mourners at Bondi draped, not in the Australian flag, but the Israeli one. But it would only be a couple of days before the Labor Party was effectively draping its policies in the same. If the first group needs better symbols, then the second needs stronger backbones.
— Matthew Clayfield, 25 December 2025
Warts and All
“It is curious that the internet is shocked that I would not retouch the blemishes. In guess I find it shocking that people would expect that journalistic photos should be retouched. Celebrity photos are celebrity photos. Politicians are not celebrities. Let’s not mix things up.”
— Vanity Fair photographer Christopher Anderson, 17 December 2025
I don’t feel guilty at all
These motherfuckers act like because I did a comedy festival in Saudi Arabia I somehow betrayed my principles… They said, ‘Well, Saudi Arabia killed a journalist’ and rest in peace Jamal Khashoggi. I’m sorry that he got murdered in such a heinous fashion. And also, look bro, Israel’s killed 240 journalists in the last three months so I didn’t know y’all were still counting.
— Dave Chappelle, The Unstoppable
The New Yorker
You’re the most powerful country in the world, with 750 military bases around the planet, 5,177 nuclear weapons and a sophisticated intelligence apparatus capable of killing and deposing anyone, anywhere in the world.
Is this the most refined expression of the mighty US Empire’s projection of soft power and cultural hegemony — a coterie of more or less annoying, middling journalists in New York writing about the hypermodernity of someone called ‘Addison Rae’ and recommending we read lan McEwan’s 200th novel about being sad and middle-class?
It sounds like you need better-quality propaganda.
— Udith Dematogogha, 4 December 2025
No there there
I read Podhoretz’s infamous memoir Making It a few years ago; I remember thinking it was fun, lively, well- and sometimes even brilliantly written, but then I remember getting depressed. I found his “honesty” about the baseness of his own and others’ motivations to be at first cheeky and refreshing, but then bleak and sad. He depicted a world with no transcendence and no real values. It was all just social climbing, slights, and petty grievances. It doesn’t surprise me at all that, unlike many other neocon literati, he liked Trump. As Trump’s favorite song goes, “That’s all there is.’
— John Ganz, Stormin’ Norman Podhoretz, 21 December 2025
Buzz and the Delirious Professions
What is clear now is that media companies are interested in reach, not voice. Whatever moves the needle, baby. That’s where the market is. Of course, to some extent this was always true. Edmund White writes in City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s of the “delirious professions”, “those careers that depend on self-assurance and the opinion of others rather than on certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I’d hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, [and] all of the media”. It was who you know (or “who you blow”, the more sardonic said).
But before the internet, those connections were pliable. You could hit the cocktail scene in New York or the publishing world in London and get to know people. That’s how Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe did it as hungry young things in New York. It’s how Clive James broke through in London after arriving from Australia. The scene was porous. You could bluff your way in, dazzle the right person, get your break. It was human.
But now buzz is quantifiable. It’s the numbers. How many Instagram followers you got? Are you big on X? Got paid subscribers on Substack? In other words: do you already have a name? Then we’ll sign you.
— Mike McCormack, 4 June 2025
Indigestible
In the wake of what quickly came to be known as the “Artforum letter”, some of us were surprised to find that we were being asked to sacrifice something. For years we had been signing petitions for all kinds of social causes, calls for liberation – feminism, queer rights, climate justice, abolition – that were often taken up by the institutions that housed us. Until 2025, nearly every museum had a gay pride celebration. When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, a parade of museums frantically marshalled committees of sacrificial minorities, staged unctuous exhibitions and asserted their commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.
Palestine is different. Even with broad public support, no major museum has taken up the genocide in Gaza. No large institution I know of has put on an exhibition about Palestinian artists or Palestinian lives. Instead, the opposite: in June 2025, the Whitney Museum “suspended” its 57-year-old Independent Study Program after some of its members dared to host a performance critical of Israel. The art world, with all its progressive scaffolding and humanist ornamentation, practically designed to celebrate and aestheticise every rebellion, couldn’t metabolise Palestine. It still can’t.
— David Velasco, How Gaza Broke the Art World, Equator, 22 December 2025
Christmas 2025
閑居少鄰並，草徑入荒園。
鳥宿池邊樹，僧敲月下門。
Living quietly with few neighbors nearby,
a grassy lane leads into the overgrown garden.
Birds roost in the trees beside the pond,
and a monk taps the moonlit gate.
— Jia Dao (賈島, 779-843), ‘Inscription on Li Ning’s Secluded Dwelling‘《題李凝幽居》, trans. Jian Xu
***
Keeper of the Flame (1942)
***
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
— Audre Lorde
Australia
The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, scorn. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair…In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums scrips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopoke bursts out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like monstrous sea calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.
— Marcus Clarke, 1867
Donald Trump: Cunt of the Year
Look, I know it’s unoriginal. It breaks the fundamental journalistic law of lists, which is that it is more important to be controversial than it is to be correct. But the basic ontological reality is that there is only one person who could possibly be cunt of the year and that person is the president of the United States of America.
Over the last decade, we have all had to accommodate Trump’s presence in our mental life. For some he is an unqualified source of inspiration. For others, he is a useful idiot who has driven domestic political reality in their direction. For a third group, who in any other era would have been perfectly amiable liberal types, he is a force you must bend yourself to.
But there is another set of people who take a different view. They think he’s a cunt. I count myself proudly as a member of this group. There is no complexity to this judgement. The first time we saw him, within seconds of him talking, we thought: Oh yeah, it’s a cunt. Nothing that has happened since then has changed our opinion in the slightest. This is not because we are set in our ways. It is because it was obvious that he is a cunt and we were correct to conclude it.
This wasn’t so much a political evaluation as a personal one. He contravenes very basic lessons in what it is to be a decent human being. He is mean, vindictive, egotistical, self-obsessed, ignorant, hateful, spiteful, deeply stupid and vain. He’s a cunt. Obviously. Man’s got cunt written all over him. Now he has broadcast his personality across the globe, forcing us all to live in a world of cunts.
Dick of the Year: Liz Truss
In a year like this, we needed a comedy subplot. The former leader of the Conservative party provided it. In the last couple of weeks alone, she managed to start a podcast and front a private members club. Her every act lightens the psychic toll of the news agenda.
Truss has all the venality and malignancy of the other bastards this year, but none of the influence, success or talent. She is the least competent politician we have ever seen. In terms of presentation, content and record, no-one can quite match her consistent lack of qualities. Her primary social contribution to the life of the nation now comes as a kind of ad-hoc psychological experiment in which we discover what life is like when you have literally no self-awareness whatsoever.
It’s been a dark, dark time. But she really has made it a happier and more satisfying experience than it would otherwise have been. She is like a reminder of a different, better world, in which the lunatics were stuck making podcasts in cupboards rather than running world economies. It’s been so terribly nice to drop in every so often, find out what she’s up to, and enjoy the ruination of an enemy.
— Ian Dunt, The Complete Dunt Awards, 26 December 2025
That Sportsman Time
When you shall see me lined by tool of Time,
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;
When in your being heart concedes to mind,
And judgment, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
And you are irked that they have withered so:
Remembering that with me lies not the blame,
That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same—
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!—
Will you not grant to old affection’s claim
The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?
— Thomas Hardy, She, To Him, I
Susan Sontag’s Last Words
I want to tell you…
— according to David Rieff, her son
***
