02 Oct 23 Monday Briefing

What a start to October, friends.

Apart from celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival with lots of mooncake and tea, we had a nonagenarian biting the dust (to no one’s surprise), Taiwan releasing a narwhal (to mark its western neighbour’s Golden Week Holiday?), McCarthy buying 45 days with his balls, and writers getting their way after all in a I-can-use-AI-but-AI-cannot-use-me deal.

No House Teaching

A famous, oft-used, but extremely nuclear slur used in Chinese culture is 沒有家教, transliterated “no house teaching”, but it is really a missile that seeks the heat of every Chinese parent – that of face. To accuse someone of having no house teaching is to accuse his parents of poor parenting to the extent that a stranger has to step in to point that out. It is a slur most Chinese parents work hard to avoid and a slur many are happy to bandy about for maximum effect.

Reading about the role of SBF’s parents in the sordid FTX saga made me wonder how much they too should be held accountable, if not legally, then certainly, morally. The Chinese have long moved past punishing seven generations of a criminal’s family, but one wonders how much that kept rowdy young men out of trouble… or dragged down their entire families with them.

Something’s Gonna Get Ya Sooner or Later

I figure there’s little we can do about constantly mutating viruses except churn out vaccine after vaccine, so maybe we should pay more attention to bacteria, but no, guess I now have to add fungi to the list of existential worries. A lot more makes sense when you accept that humans are a blip on this planet and there are things that preceded us that will survive far beyond our impending… extinction?

Wishy Whooshy

Tooze calls blaming China for the production woes of the Global North the mood music of our era, specifically as it relates to the EU and its EV protectionism. Looking for fig leaves and scapegoats will always provide more political ROI than, I don’t know, something revolutionary like getting shit together. Not that I actually think China gets that much more shit done, just that they’re quite good at making it seem like they are. Take Whoosh in Indonesia, for example. I’d be more than happy if it just does what it says on the tin.

To Read or Not To Read

Help, please? I don’t know if Yanis Varoufakis’s new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is worth the drachmae or the time to read. He had his heyday in 2015, put forth a few interesting ideas, and sort of… faded (?) into the beige ranks of the EU intelligentsia. I don’t disagree that Big Tech is a far bigger force in our lives than we’d like to admit, but I’d rather a SparkNotes at this point given my limited time resources.

P. S. What to read – Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation, featuring Singapore in its idyllic pre-war days. So far, very good.