Notes

Qiu, Yuwei. Your Near Is My Far. Shandong Publishing House of Literature and Art, 2025 (translations mine):

Mainstream psychologies have reduced the issue of trauma from a social problem to an individual or bodily one. This shift has exacerbated adversarial dynamics between generations (mother–daughter), genders (male–female), and urban–rural divides, leading to such stereotypes as “East Asian mothers are control freaks,” “East Asian women aren’t relaxed enough,” or “rural women are ‘brothers’ subordinates.’” The intent here is not to deny the existence of certain social phenomena, but to point out that we often mistake consequences for causes, treating them as mere matters of personal choice while neglecting the historical and social conditions behind these behaviors.

Many Western psychologists in recent years have also begun to critique this concept of self, arguing that it alienates people and breeds isolation. It leaves individuals feeling lonely, anxious, and narcissistic. In my clinical work with older generations of women, I have come to see that their seemingly “ineffective” behaviors are not merely expressions of narcissistic traits but responses shaped by their own needs and the historical context they lived through.

Gradually, I realized that as a therapist, I must not only study mainstream psychological frameworks but also maintain a critical awareness of their underlying ideology, pursuing localized explorations of my own. To interpret trauma, one cannot stop at the dichotomy between individual and collective; one must place it within larger social contexts and complex power relations.

The process from “Why can’t she understand me?” to “This is something she simply cannot give me” is a journey of recognition.

I came to see that empathy rests on two pillars: psychological energy and the understanding capacity. The former depends on inner maturity, the latter on our ability to revisit the past with the client and re-experience their feelings of that time. Both are indispensable. For a long while, I thought understanding mattered most, but later I saw that without sufficient psychological energy, it is nearly impossible to transcend one’s own perspective and truly understand another, especially someone who has hurt you. A colleague once remarked: “When my psychological energy is low, my imagination traps me in deep unease.” Empathy cannot be forced. An emotional flow beyond the self, it arises naturally after one has worked through a great deal of grief and developed the internal strength to hold it.

When a mother’s sense of self-worth relies entirely on the social identities bestowed upon her, the completion of each such identity — wife, mother, grandmother — leaves her emptier. She may then seek to fill the void by creating new identities, such as “being a boss,” to meet inner needs.

Letting go of expectations is a kind of farewell, a farewell to the imagined mother or daughter. Earlier I wrote mainly of daughters dismantling their idealized image of the mother, but mothers too must relinquish their ideal image of the daughter. This is a shared responsibility. One side’s willingness to face it can be supported by the other, but never wholly replaced. The process requires working through grief: denial, guilt, ambivalence, anger, unease, anxiety, depression. Only when these emotions are acknowledged and released can one accept the other’s real, imperfect self and different choices. Otherwise, unrealistic expectations persist.

Do not wait for your parents to recognize you before becoming an independent person. Take responsibility for yourself first before attempting to communicate.

We habitually begin questions with “why.” But research shows that “why” questions often make others feel accused or challenged, especially when they already harbor negative emotions.

I’ve observed that most of parents don’t consciously intend to hurt their children; rather, they themselves are helpless and can only resort to ineffective ways of coping with their emotions, such as provocation, suppression, avoidance, or outbursts. When emotional trauma remains unhealed, people use dogma and austerity to suppress inner anger, viewing emotions as an “obstacle” to solving problems, pitting emotions against problem-solving.

When describing emotions, use affirmative rather than negative language. We often say, “Don’t worry,” “Don’t cry,” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Though meant to comfort, such words invalidate the other’s lived feelings and may have the opposite effect.

Empathy requires the willingness to feel one’s own vulnerability. A person who cannot accept their own emotions cannot truly accept another’s.

When parents complain that nothing tastes right or works well, it is often an expression of insecurity.

If I had to define the “self” in one sentence, it would be: “The self is an independent being composed of diverse needs.”

When mothers act domineering, there is usually a need beneath it: to be acknowledged, to be obeyed, to see certain outcomes in their children. Especially for mothers who sacrificed their careers for their children, the child becomes the vessel of all their time and energy. Their expectations intensify. This is not only a domestic tragedy but a social one.

There are two types of controlling behavior: overt “claws-out” dominance, easily visible, and a “roundabout” stubbornness that twists and turns but always circles back to her viewpoint, quietly unyielding.

If you are currently in a fragile state, financially or emotionally, keep a healthy distance from your parents. Create a space of autonomy, avoid sharing vulnerable feelings that may be easily triggered. When your energy strengthens, state your feelings and boundaries matter-of-factly. The other party may react defensively by suppressing, denying, or playing the victim to evade responsibility. Such reactions are common, since challenging long-held values provokes aggression. There is no need to justify or explain yourself; simply restate your boundary, calmly and repeatedly.

A father may suddenly be triggered by something, lash out in anger, and not understand what caused it or how to express dissatisfaction constructively.

Children often express strong emotions because they lack the tools to express themselves otherwise, using intensity as a way to be noticed.

For example, your grandfather may not actually be refuting you; he may simply be offering a different perspective. Yet you feel instantly contradicted, because years of his nagging have filled you with anger. His differing view reactivates that old scene, triggering rebellion. A more effective approach is to revisit the past and truly feel the anger that accumulated in childhood and to release it. This is not to change the past, but to clear the blockage so reconciliation becomes possible.

The key to breaking reactive patterns is not to “fight back,” but to notice your emotional state in the moment, use relaxation techniques, and release the physiological stress — racing heart, dizziness, tension in limbs — to free yourself from reactivity.

Parents are autonomous individuals with their own issues to work through. We cannot expect them to change before we can adjust our emotions. The more effective approach is to recognize what is happening and refuse to absorb their emotional debris. When you sense “he’s slipping into it again,” gently interrupt. I now stop my father mid-sentence and mirror back his anxious speech to him.

Over the years, I have accepted that I can’t expect to change my father or to have him understand or approve my choices. But I retain the right to tell him what I think.

Between anger and appeasement, I have found a third way: to give him direct feedback about my feelings. Whatever his reaction, I calmly and firmly communicate my discomfort or joy and my choices without justifying them. When he erupts in impotent rage, I tell him directly: “That’s your emotion. If you want comfort and support, I can offer that. But if you attack, I won’t accept it.”

For a long time, my image of my father was split, both fragile and violent. I later realized these were two sides of the same coin: narcissism and trauma intertwined, trapping him in his pain. I could label him an “East Asian parent,” yet I know his suffering is also part of mine. To reject him is to reject part of myself.

When I was young, I swore not to become my mother. Yet I’ve internalized her disappointment in me: I can’t “forgive” myself unless I excel. Otherwise, I feel unworthy and punish myself. I dread what she’d feel if she saw how much she hurt me, because she’s trapped in the same pattern. What I can do is to learn about her past, to know that being caught in this cycle isn’t my fault, and to free myself from guilt and anger.

In response to this emotional void, mainstream culture prescribes “be yourself” and “live your truth,” resulting in a false sense of agency through consumption, as if using a certain brand, following a celebrity, or listening to a podcast makes you unique, attracting like souls so you can receive love and attention. But this pursuit centers on having, not on feeling or understanding; it dulls awareness of others and of reality. The more we chase “selfhood,” the lonelier we become, living enclosed within our own worlds, fragile and anxious when we reach outward.

“Apple’s Liquid Glass Design Prioritizes Content Over Tools”:

Yes, many people are largely passive consumers of content, whether we’re talking about Web pages, podcasts, or streaming videos. For those people, there is little beyond content, and Liquid Glass’s deprecation of controls may allow them to continue their consumption with less distraction. But that’s not a lifestyle to aspire to, reminiscent as it is of the humans in WALL-E—perpetually reclined in floating chairs, mindlessly consuming entertainment.

For the most part, Apple has done a good job of making them highly usable and efficient, but at the same time, the company’s designers seem to want to pare away ever more of the physical instantiation. Bezels get smaller, keyboards get thinner, and ports disappear, all in the service of giving way to the content on the screen. But tools aren’t necessarily better for being smaller—function must dictate form, not the other way around.

Wikipedia editors on Signs of AI Writing:

When talking about biology (e.g., when asked to discuss a given animal or plant species), LLMs tend to put too much emphasis on the species' conservation status and the efforts to protect it, even if the status is unknown and no serious efforts exist, and may strain to derive symbolism from things like taxonomy.

While many of these words are strong AI tells on their own, an even stronger tell is when the subjects of these verbs are facts, events, or other inanimate things. A person, for example, can highlight or emphasize something, but a fact or event cannot. The "highlighting" or "underscoring" is not something that is actually happening; it is a claim by a disembodied narrator about what something means.

While human editors and writers often use em dashes (—), LLM output tends to use them more often than nonprofessional human-written text of the same genre, and uses them in places where humans are more likely to use commas, parentheses, colons, or (misused) hyphens (-). LLMs especially tend to use em dashes in a formulaic, pat way, often mimicking "punched up" sales-like writing by over-emphasizing clauses or parallelisms. LLMs overuse em dashes because they were trained (sometimes illegally) on novels, and novelists have always used em dashes more often than laypeople do.

Chris Arnade in “Walking Hong Kong (Kowloon, really)”:

The only way to cross that eight-lane fenced-in road, the one with monstrous semis pulling shipping containers, or buses whose center of gravity seems too high for the speed it takes the curves, is to go into the Hoi Tat Estate’s mall, up to the second floor, next to the Fairwoods diner (more on those later), then across the long bridge to the adjacent mall, where you can weave your way three floors down through a series of zigzagging escalators to the food court, where the four-block-long underground passageway to where you want to go is, assuming you take the passageway branching off at three o’clock on the compass face, not eleven, six, or nine.

Being a pedestrian in a city shouldn’t be the equivalent of a mouse in a maze, or a Super Mario Bros-style series of levels to complete, but in Hong Kong it is, which coupled with the density, heat, noise, and general sense of barely contained clamorous mayhem, makes it a punishing city to be in, one that’s aggressive, intense, and exhausting, one you feel you’re constantly battling2.

So while I stand by my opening statement that Hong Kong is not walkable, that doesn’t mean it’s not a singular and fascinating city, a humid gem in an ocean of global uniformity, and one that is ultimately rewarding as a pedestrian.

在华强北看到 Gaga 心想开在这是要给谁吃。

最后吃了 Gaga。

“Intimacy” (fiction):

I could not help feeling bored by the accounts whenever I encountered them—how granular they were, how tedious. How often they repeated the same material facts: the little clammy hands, the sleeplessness, the lack of time, the mess and splintered focus, the wonder of new speech and its ingenious formations. The problem, I thought, was that these descriptions never reached beyond themselves, beyond the concrete reality of the situation. But what was the purpose of their repetition? Was it just that we yearned to be heard? Was there a genuine need within this yearning, as basic as nourishment?

[T]he writer started talking about a book he had read in his youth which he had recently come across by chance. At one time, he had included this book among the titles that made up his formative reading, but now he could remember nothing about it. Rereading it, he found it confusing. In fact, he had no idea what it was about.

“What I can’t figure out,” the author said, “is whether I was smarter back then or just pretending to understand what I read. That wouldn’t be unusual, you know. One is in such a hurry to get an education, to have read it all.”

Ayşegül Savaş, the author, discussing the story:

We meet the narrator at a moment when her identity is in flux. She is holding on to an idea of what a writer should be, even though this model no longer seems authentic to her. At the same time, she is not very comfortable in her identity as a mother, or, rather, how this identity has merged with her life as a writer—that is to say, with her imagination. It’s easier for her to keep these two parts of herself separate, but it also means that her identity as a writer is not true to who she really is.

What is striking to the narrator about Marian is that she is so comfortable with who she is—she does not compartmentalize her different selves. The narrator does begrudge the fact that Marian has made her husband’s writing life very smooth, but, ultimately, I think that she is resentful about the various dead ends in her own life, the experiences that she tries to keep contained, without allowing them to merge or interact.

The narrator plays at being intimate with the author and his wife, following some rules she has set for herself, and then one day discovers, almost to her surprise, that she cares deeply for Marian. It’s as if she is trying to correct her faulty compass [for intimacy] by overstating the closeness.

ChatGPT:

The final paragraph is a quiet self-indictment. After trying—and failing—to prove closeness to Marian through a secondhand anecdote, the narrator wonders if she “didn’t relate the story very well,” or “missed some details,” or “hadn’t listened carefully enough.” She recognizes her unreliable memory and borrowed intimacy: the story didn’t belong to her, and her need to “belong” bent it out of shape. As an ending note, it leaves her with regret and acceptance of limits—of her art, her memory, and her right to narrate others—closing the story on self-awareness rather than consolation.

nothing constitutes an offense in a party where the music may stop at anytime

Kindle 中国拾遗

而在这块萎缩的领地里，各家出版社的电子出版业务，已经从几年前被寄予厚望的“全村的希望”，迅速沦落为食之无味、弃之可惜的“路边一条”。朋友半开玩笑地告诉我，现在社里的共识是，对于那些有点畅销潜质的爆款书，电子版“能不上就不上，能晚上就晚上”。

在 Kindle 业务的最后几年，一个显著的变化是电子书的价格越来越贵。一本实体书定价 60 块，它的 Kindle 版就敢卖到 50 块，甚至更高。当时不少读者对此怨声载道，认为亚马逊吃相难看。但正是这种被读者诟病的“高价策略”，催生了一个短暂却极具想象空间的“黄金时代”。

Kindle 之后，国内再也没有一个电子书平台，有能力或者有意愿，去复制这样的高价单本销售模式。以微信读书为代表的“优等生”们，选择了另一条道路：低价包月。

与此同时，另一个“巨兽”的崛起，则彻底断了出版社对电子书的念想。那就是抖音直播卖书。

在 Kindle 退出中国的时间点，任何公司都已经错过了统辖电子出版市场的历史机遇——你再也没有机会像早年的亚马逊（中国）一样，用镶着金边的大外企名片，带着一款没人见过的设备，敲开每一家出版社领导的门。

One dies twice, I see it clearly:
To cease to love and to be lovable,
It’s an unbearable death:
To cease to live is nothing.

Chris Arnade:

I began, somewhere in my forth year of grad school, when I was finally exposed to the current cutting edge of physics, to believe that the whole construct of modern physics, while great at advancing technology, maybe wasn’t so great at answering those fundamental questions.

Physics, during the early 1900s, had gone from using math to construct toy models of the known physical world, to forcing reality to agree to the math. From letting reality drive the math, to letting math drive reality.

I wanted to understand the universe at a level that when I try to explain it to someone at a McDonald’s, I’m not laughed at. Or not reported to the cops as an escaped inmate. Not because I think normies have a lock on what’s true, but that I think the truth shouldn’t be so odd that it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Or, to put it another way, the truth is a very human thing, and it shouldn’t be instinctively off putting to other humans.

I also began to think a little differently about religion that last year of grad school, not as a route to the truth, but as a low bar that science hadn’t managed to clear, provoking my physicist friends over beers by telling them that the Big Bang was only Genesis dressed up in fancy Math. Something I more firmly believe now.

There was a sense in the air that we were approaching a nirvana on earth, the payoff for centuries of scientific and rational thought. We had found the correct mixture of free markets, good governance, and smart technology, all available because of a dedication to a lucid intellectualism unchained to emotion. The 90s was a combination coming out victory dance for the technocratic class, and we were cocky, including me.

I want to emphasize what might seem obvious — which is how deeply money matters to many financial people. Yet it’s deeper than bankers craving money, it’s their entire identity. It’s how they see themselves in the world, and how they understand their worth as a person. It becomes their morality — a very explicit metric by which they measure how good they are. A free-market libertarian telos, adjudicated down to the single dollar.

Sorries Seem to Have the Harder Words:

People use longer words when apologizing and interpret apologies with longer words as more apologetic.

Iconicity in language is the non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning.

The type of iconicity that is investigated in this paper, however, is context-dependent and will be referred to as dynamic iconicity. It is not between a word's form and its meaning but between a word's form and the meaning or attitude that the speaker would like to express in that context, not necessarily via the semantics of the word.

Dynamic iconicity, in contrast, examines whether the form of words that are semantically unrelated to effort (e.g. genuinely) can signal effort, and are even produced in order to signal effort, in certain contexts.

While prior studies focused on the cost that accompanied the message, it is possible that making the message itself costlier, that is, requiring more effort to produce, can also increase its perceived sincerity.

Prior work in pragmatics lends support to the claim that the effort one puts into communicating a message influences message interpretation. A general assumption is that both speakers and listeners aim to minimize their effort. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) further proposes that speakers produce messages that they believe are relevant, that is, that the cognitive effects that they would bring about in the listener are worth the cognitive effort of processing them. Similarly, Gricean Maxims (Grice, 1975) assume that communication is cooperative, and that, among others, speakers adhere to the maxim of manner, namely, to be clear. Deviations from the clearest formulation should thus give rise to a conversational implicature.

Ann Goldstein on Translating Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet”:

I feel that’s the way I get closer to the writer is just by staying close to the text; by not trying too hard; not inserting myself. If you’re a copy editor or an editor, I think that’s part of your job in a way, right? We used to talk about this at the New Yorker, sometimes: the goal is to make a writer sound as much like him or herself as possible. Not like you. I feel like that’s a good standard, at least for me, for translation.

You shouldn’t feel like you’re reading something in English, but you also shouldn’t feel like you’re struggling over the grammar or over the structure. You should be able to read. So there’s something in-between, something like that.

Then starting with the third book, actually I didn’t even read it. I just translated it. I read it when I was working on it, but I have never read the four novels altogether.

When the TV show came out, they did speak in dialect, but it was subtitled in Italian as well as in English, so that’s the level.

One other thing I think is big is that Italian has the ability to add suffixes to words that give them a nuance that English doesn’t have. One of the obvious ones that everybody would know would be like Fortissimo: if you say Forte is “strong,” and Fortissimo is very strong.

A lot of Italians write run-on sentences; I think I heard somebody say once it was a paratactic language, which I think is true—that the clauses just lie there beside each other, and you have to sometimes put the relationship in.

apparently it’s just beyond the capacity of my brain to manage more than two phones

“Queer Unintelligibility in China”:

Homosexuality in China was never technically criminalised or pathologised in the same way. Rather than targeting homosexuals for persecution, the Chinese State—from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) through the Republican era (1911–49) and into the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–present)—has largely rendered them invisible through systemic denial of their existence.

Pointing out that in the Qing archives there is not ‘a single case of consensual sodomy being punished in the absence of other, more serious crimes’, Sommer (2000: 116) argues that what bothered Qing lawmakers was not the sexual orientation of the partners but homosexual rape.

one of the most striking cases occurred in 1991, when a man named Lin Jiabao in Anhui filed an official complaint against his daughter and her same-sex partner, accusing them of crimes of ‘tongxinglian’ and demanding their arrest. Unsure how to respond, the local authorities forwarded the case to the Public Security Department, which eventually issued a statement that became the first instance of a juridical interpretation of tongxinglian in Chinese law. According to the statement, tongxinglian had no legal definition in Chinese law and therefore the reported incident had no merit. In his analysis of the proceedings, Chinese legal scholar Zhou Dan (2009) argues that the significance of the Lin case lies less in what it reveals about the treatment of homosexuals than in what it demonstrates about law as a continual process of rhetorical suturing and articulation.

生成式 AI 最不擅长的可能是生成:

前者 [ 评估 ] 追求的是对数据分布的深刻理解，希望达到全局上的客观综摄。后者 [ 输出 ] 追求的则是在这个分布里试图获得一个不平凡的结果，换句话说，是对这个分布的一个抵抗而非服从。

也就是说，评估需要的是理解分布，而创造追求的是打破分布，或者说，是在另一个自己内心的理想分布中做采样。

“The History of the New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department”:

I’ve never encountered a complete description of what the magazine wants its checkers to check. A managing editor took a stab in 1936: “Points which in the judgment of the head checker need verification.” New checkers, upon receiving their first assignment, are instructed to print out the galleys of the piece and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word.

The joke in the department was that my foreign language was sports.

A disputatious source is actually more helpful than the opposite. The checking system, like the justice system, requires something to push against.

Checkers don’t read out quotes or seek approval. Sources can’t make changes. They can flag errors, provide context and evidence. The checker then discusses the points of contention with the writer and the editor. It’s an intentionally adversarial process, like a court proceeding. You want to see every side’s best case. The editor makes the final call. In a sense, the checker is re-reporting a piece, probing for weak spots, reaching a hand across the gulf of misunderstanding.

Peter Canby’s philosophy was that it’s better for a subject to scream before a piece is published than after—a controlled explosion. Screamers still provide useful information. They’re better than ignorers or trolls.

Most writers appreciate having been checked but resent being checked. Checking makes evident how badly you’ve misinterpreted the world. It upsets your confidence in your own eyes and ears. Checking is invasive.

“This kind of fact checking wasn’t nitpicking and wasn’t just a bureaucratic thing. It was an artistic advance of the twentieth century. It just clicked with modernism.” He went on, “Modernism is goodbye to self-expression, hello to what’s right in front of you,” and that means you better get the thing right. The hedge is an acceptance that the world is impossible to know accurately. It imparts to the writing a humbleness, an understatedness, and, perhaps, a smug fussiness: in other words, what people think of as The New Yorker’s voice.

Large Language Muddle:

So, inconstancy, fallibility, forgetfulness, suffering, failure — these, apparently, are the unautomatable gifts of our species. Well, sure. To err is human. But does the AI skeptic have nothing else to fall back on than an enumeration of mankind’s shortcomings? Are our worst qualities the best we can do? It’s hard not to read the emphasis on failure as an ambivalent invitation for the machines to succeed.

The way out of AI hell is not to regroup around our treasured flaws and beautiful frailties, but to launch a frontal assault. AI, not the human mind, is the weak, narrow, crude machine.

For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear.

Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI’s further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don’t publish AI bullshit. Don’t even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit.

“Inside Uniqlo’s Quest for Global Dominance”:

“Uniqlo is kind of like Everlane without the moral superiority and H&M without the ickiness.”

An inadvertent moment of unibare—a Japanese word for the moment when someone realizes you’re wearing Uniqlo and not a more expensive brand.

Uniqlo is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any life style or aesthetic.

What was clear is that Uniqlo conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values, replete with mantras and koans, as much as a clothing company.

[The LifeWear messaging for Uniqlo] was deliberately enigmatic, saying that he wanted customers to “stop a moment and engage with language.”

Yanai has likened Uniqlo to K-pop, an industry that is oriented toward “what will be popular worldwide, rather than focussing on uniquely Korean characteristics.”

Under normal circumstances, the Uniqlo shopper should walk into a store and feel a sense of overwhelming abundance. Such is the logic behind Uniqlo’s power walls of thousands of sweaters on shelves that reach so high you fear that they might bust right through the ceiling, like Willy Wonka’s elevator. The display is arranged according to a precise formula, with sizes increasing from floor to ceiling, and colors darkening from left to right, as well as from the entrance to the back of the store.

Each pile is assessed for tidiness multiple times a day, using a five-rank grading system. A “B” grade might mean that a green blouse has found its way into a blue stack, while “D” is reserved for serious cases like a completely empty stack, or items that have fallen on the ground. Like IKEA, which intentionally musses and jumbles its displays, Uniqlo believes that volume is the catalyst of consumer desire. Conway explained, “We want everything to appear fully stocked all the time.”

Apparently, one of Yanai’s inspirations for this hands-off style of service was a visit that he made to a university co-op during a trip to the U.S.; Uniqlo now trains employees to sell clothes like they are selling books, letting customers browse freely.

This strategy gives customers “a chance to say, ‘I don’t need a basket, but I need help with a sweater.’ It’s an indirect way to initiate communication—low pressure, because you’re offered something specific versus asking, ‘Can I help you?’ ”

Uniqlo finishes every zipper track with a small piece of fabric known as a “garage.” It keeps gunk out of the device and protects against abrasion. Other fixes are invisible.

But much of what Fast Retailing says about its deep commitment to creating timeless clothes is undercut by the fact that it also owns GU, a lower-priced sister brand. Pronounced “jee-you,” GU offers “trend-driven styles” and “rapid turnaround times from design to retail”—with, presumably, rapid turnaround times from retail to landfill as well. And the scale of Uniqlo’s operations, not to mention its quest for endless expansion, makes real sustainability an impossibility.

“Small Acts of Good, US as Third World Country, and How Culture Changes”:

For humans, it is another reminder we don’t help animals for them, but for us – to try and give our own pointless lives a little more meaning.

While we do help animals primarily to make us feel good, we do that because it is a reminder that there is a point to life, which isn’t grounded in the rational, but in the spiritual. Those daily acts of small “irrationality” are attempts to maintain our soul in an overly rational dehumanizing world.

These little acts of good, towards frogs, but especially towards other humans, is a part of us that speaks towards high purpose. Yes, I will use saving a tiny frog to imply the sacred dimension of existence.

天下体系：在可能与未来之间:

天下的性质不是世界主义（cosmopolitan）的政治正确秩序，而是为文明建立一种宇宙论式（cosmological）的生态系统秩序，考虑的重点是文明的生态安全，试图把世界变成每种生活方式和每种文化之间互相安全的系统，重点在“关系”的生态而不在“个人”的身份。最简略地说，天下体系是对亨廷顿的文明冲突问题的一个可能解。天下并不许诺类似神话的乌托邦（utopia），而是可实现的共托邦（contopia）。

从前人类有过多种“世界性”的努力，比如世界性的帝国、普世宗教、普世价值观、世界语之类，都失败了，其失败自有多种历史原因，但本质原因在于那些传统的世界性努力都属于单边主义的推广，只是单边之“化”而不是“互化”，即使一时成功也最终失败。孔子以为“名正言顺”就能够“事成”，现代政治学也以为“证成”的观念（justified，类似“名正言顺”的意思）就能够推广，这些传统理论都忽视了主体间性的根本难题是“他人不同意”，而“不同意”不需要也不服从名正言顺的理由。这是“他心”问题的极端形式。假如跨主体性能够成为一种解决方式，就需要发现能够形成“跨越”效果的方法，但似乎还没有发现充分有效的方法，因为“他心”有着难以进入的超越性。

就像个 bug

Sappho. How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality. Edited and translated by Sarah Nooter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

In the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer “can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”

Eros is above all a feeling so powerful that it is understood as divine, an affective force that draws people away from what is demanded of them by institutions and establishments, and toward an experience of fervent vitality.

A delicate fire
runs under my skin, my eyes
see nothing, my ears
roar,
cold sweat pours down me, and trembling
seizes me all over, and I am greener than grass.
A boy and a horse have a similar mind. For a horse
does not weep when his rider lies in the dust,
but just carries another man, once glutted on fodder.
For whoever labors for the love of a boy must, in essence,
put his hand over a quickly burning flame.
Blessed is he who, in love with a boy, does not know the sea,
and for whom night coming over the ocean is not a care.
For the vision of the mind begins to look sharp only when that of the eyes starts to abate from its peak.

“What About Whataboutism?”:

The virus of whataboutism produces at least two symptoms. On the one hand, it fosters apathy: if any form of criticism is just seen as hypocrisy, then what is the point of having endless discussions? When does one become qualified to criticise? On the other hand, it blinds by obscuring basic similarities, muddying the water and making it difficult to identify actual commonalities that extend beyond national borders and are inherent to the organisation of the global economy in our current stage of late capitalism.

The pervasiveness of the whataboutist virus also produces a powerful hyperactive immune response in the China debate that manifests itself as the very opposite of whataboutism—i.e. a complete dismissal of any attempt to find similarities between dynamics in China and elsewhere. This is a form of argumentation that can be defined as ‘essentialism’, in that it tends to emphasise the set of attributes specific to a certain context as its defining elements, a line of reasoning eerily reminiscent of the debates over China’s ‘national character’ (国民性) that raged in China and the West a century ago.

Essentialism also produces a myopic outlook, and often manifests as self-righteous outrage at any suggestion that there might be more to the picture than what immediately meets the eye. From this perspective, there can be no linkages, seepages, or parallels between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes. China must be analysed in isolation, and any analysis must identify the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the only constant underpinning all problems.

As easy as it is to lay the blame for all this on China—and undeniable as it is that the Chinese government is playing an important role in all this—these trends are not emanating solely from one country. Rather, what is happening in China is just one dramatic manifestation of global phenomena—phenomena that are, in turn, shaped by broader forces. For this reason, we need to go beyond essentialist and whataboutist approaches and carefully document (and denounce) what is happening in China, while also highlighting the ways in which Chinese developments link up with events elsewhere.

哈哈哈哈哈哈 https://chinamediaproject.org/2025/09/19/chinas-liberal-press-and-its-feminism-gap/

https://archive.ph/H4EMk