Notes to myself

The Cowshed, a memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin, a Chinese academic, suggests 1966 precedents for present-day situations:

The role of “privilege” (from the Introduction):

If he and many other Chinese intellectuals have been guilty of persecuting one another, it was largely because the intellectuals as a class had been compelled to feel

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

“Four.”

“And if the Party says that it is not four but five – then how many?”

“Four.”

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle … More ...

Someone sent me a story about the Pennsylvania senate race, and a Republican candidate whose firm handled — not very successfully — some of the investments for the state teachers’ pension fund. An opponent, the famous Dr. Oz, is raising it as an issue.

Apparently the fees were high, the results mediocre, and the firm … More ...

People who lived through communism tell me that a big difference between the political lunacy then and now is that people today actually believe what they’re told. That seems true. There doesn’t seem to be an inner circle running things that recognizes the difference between prolefeed and what’s actually going on. For all I know … More ...

John Derbyshire notes that today Nazis are everywhere. Everybody our rulers find objectionable, including both sides in the Ukraine war, are Nazis. He says it’s “because they are mentally lazy and view the world in terms of simplified narratives.”

To my mind it’s less laziness than an extremely limited understanding of what’s real. As they … More ...