such terrifying magnitude, such utter desolation
Joined January 2020
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Pinned Tweet
5 Feb 2020
The search to define a Chinese order is raising questions beyond liberal political theory. Jiang Shigong has offered a new vision of the question of political space–pointing towards the reconstruction of world empire. My latest for @palladiummag: palladiummag.com/2020/02/05/…
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Apr 11
"If philosophy is a tragedy, a tragedy is only philosophical if it is not taken too seriously ... If one is a Platonist, one is tempted to say that philosophy only stops being facetious when it dies." (Kojève, Reasoned History of Pagan Philosophy II)
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Apr 11
"Here again Aristotle was no Platonist. We cannot be sure that he realised the comedy of his situation, [but] he would certainly have taken it as a tragedy. ... Aristotelianism is not, like Platonism a deliberately comic tragedy, but a tragic, even hopeless and desperate comedy."
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Apr 10
Guthrie's 1962 History of Greek Philosophy incidentally cites Feng Youlan for the argument that Greek philosophy originated in commercial accounting
Apr 8
“How were the Greeks able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society.”
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The unabridged original of the Kojève blockquote in my review essay - where he says that History is the active process that transforms essence into sense (or, in other words, reality into language). Gives a good sense of his frenetic writing style.
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Vincent Garton retweeted
Vincent Garton/@sysimmolator has written an excellent review for MIH of two new books on Alexandre Kojève by Marco Filoni, (The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève) and Boris Groys, (Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography). Read it here: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
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Mar 27
Perdue rightly says "proper history critiques and subverts conventional wisdom", so it's odd that the essay's engagement with contemporary China just rambles through newspaper clichés into a romantic picture of an eternal freedom-loving South struggling against a despotic North
Mar 26
Historian Peter Perdue on Xi's "great unity thesis," the PRC's new history of China. He finds Marx is all but gone, replaced by Confucius, and a vision of China that would be in many ways pleasing and familiar to Chiang Kai-shek. aeon.co/essays/why-china-ins… via @aeonmag
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Mar 27
by the end I was wondering whether he had actually forgotten where the Yangzi delta is
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23 Oct 2025
Pondering the connections of the novels I happened to have on me when moving.....
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23 Oct 2025
Là-Bas - Neuromancer - Dune is a relatively coherent trilogy I think
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21 Oct 2025
occasionally one really needs to say something about this genre of dullard westerners with pulpits sharing their earth-shattering insights from visiting China for a few days -- in this case not just wrong, but also impressively internally incoherent
Great piece. This is exactly my criticism of China's political development over the last 10 years. It's becoming an insular society. In that process, it also becomes ignorant of the outside world, overconfident, and prideful, in other words, increasingly like the US.
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21 Oct 2025
"they were so wary of foreigners that they were bounding up asking to take photos with me"
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3 Sep 2025
Chapter by me on Han Fei, AI and the concept of the state 👇
2 Sep 2025
MACHINE DECISION IS NOT FINAL is finally here.
A limited number of advance copies are available to order from the Urbanomic webshop. Official release via booksellers worldwide on October 28th.
urbanomic.com/book/machine-d…
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Vincent Garton retweeted
17 Jul 2025
“China isn’t just sort of an analytical problem, it is the political problem…. The development of China is the master key, I think, to understanding modernity…. And without it, you just don’t have a hope of grasping what’s going on.” podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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25 May 2025
New Bloomberg insight:
How do you only have 16k followers but regularly get more likes than me for all the nonsense you say? What do you do that? What’s your demographic?
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13 May 2025
Old school orientalist mystification like this is kinda quaint now, these days realheads use random Chinese words to discuss the latest polls in Iowa. Surely an omen of ziqi for Kamala... the purple qi of the Midwest...
13 May 2025
Internal CCP debate over tifa, which happen in the neibu, can sometimes spill into public channels by affecting the tifa-biaotai call-and-response cycle. These are subtle and time-consuming to identify, but successful tifa analysis can identify major CCP policy shifts.
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12 May 2025
Convalesced from flu last week reading Abulafia's biography of Frederick II (having become very familiar with Kantorowicz's). Fred II fans are really spoiled for choice, both are fantastic reads from totally different perspectives.
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12 May 2025
Abulafia often seems closer to Kantorowicz than he lets on, but he does admit that K.'s supplementary volume is a definitive statement of the available sources so maybe not surprising.
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Vincent Garton retweeted
12 May 2025
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times (2005) is about the Yen being the currency of the End of History
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12 May 2025
Interesting phenomenon since 4/2 where Gao, Pettis, etc., continually claim triumph after triumph while being repeatedly proven wrong in practice. An endlessly capacious worldview that can predict nothing yet purports to explain everything (via Twitter headlines).
12 May 2025
Who made more concessions?
The Chinese text lists 2 from each side, but that’s misleading:
China’s #1 covers both of the US points, while China’s #2—suspending non-tariff measures from April 2—isn’t matched by anything on the US side.
So who caved?
Told you (on Apr 5).
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