Carve seals, write calligraphy, read books, translating classical works of China often left aside. Hungarian.
Joined April 2021
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Reading the letters again in Zhou Lianggong's collection《尺牍新钞》. Would any of you be interested in collected phrases from these that are sometimes profound, often funny, sometimes sad? I'll start the thread with a few from today and let me know if you want more. Maybe a 🧵
Rest in peace, Sir Patrick Stewart. I was so young I could barely register the world, but I knew Cpt Picard even in kindergarten. One of the most foundational characters and actors in my childhood and even in adulthood. Boldly go where no man has gone before!
So today there was a 2 hour long lecture on Kant's concept of human dignity at our department + a 1 hour long discussion. You know what I did? As opposed to yesterday, I kept silent. Simple as.
Could've said tons, like why is Kant talking about human dignity when he thought that Black people were naturally suited to servitude or that no civilized nation had ever existed whose people were not white, but they would've just accused me of whataboutism and dishonesty.
So, my new policy is, what, a daoist or buddhist one? I keep quiet. I know what I know and I keep learning. That is more than enough for me. I am not even sure that if my book ever gets published, I will even hold a launch event or whatever. In these conditions? Why?
It is incredibly frustrating because these are not unintelligent people, they are not dumb, they are not illiterate, they are just conditioned so far and so heavily, they don't realize that they are. So, when you suggest something outside that conditioning, guardrails come up.
I am so extremely tired of cynicism and how people almost generally in the west cannot for their miserable fucking lives have any sort of different relation to the world other than cynicism. These people cannot imagine that there is ANYthing outside their little Euro-bubble.
So I kept quiet after and allowed them to do their "the first thing we can and should do is to think these issues through" circles. For the hundred millionth time and still arrive at not a single fucking thing to do. Neither them, nor their vaunted horizontal free associations.
As much as they bitch and moan about "oh noes power and propaganda shutting down avenues of free thinking", the first and foremost thing shutting the avenues of free thought the fuck down is cynicism based on a long unwarranted western superiority. Nothing else.
Gonna be a long rant. am extremely fed up with being a China researcher in the so-called "western world" and its academia. This started years ago when I was still writing my PhD, but I am at a tipping point. I just hope I can go to Nanjing next year to carve seals in small stand.
I was stupid enough to suggest that one might take a look at how the Chinese state influences its economic actors and see if one can learn from this. I wasn't stupid because this isn't a legitimate suggestion, but because I expected something else than what followed.
The issue of western political bodies, state or horizontal ones, not being able to influence economic actors to uphold environmental initiatives came up. After a while another good colleague who lead the discussion panel asked if I had anything to add.
There was a long discussion after it and I kept quiet although there were tons of things I could've said, I made like five pages of notes in my notebook. I kept quiet because I knew what would happen if I said anything even remotely referencing China in this context.
I went to a colleague's book launch earlier today, it was his PhD book about "political theories in a post-capitalist world". Like, I didn't want to be *that* guy, but framing is already off because it proposes universal political theories, yet only cites western theories.