On regarding the pain of others

The title of this post is stolen from Susan Sontag’s book of the same name, which some might recognize as the “sequel” to the seminal On Photography. However, the topic is quite different.

The conventional wisdom is that when a person has become a source of pain in
another person’s life, that they ought to “cut themselves off,” go incommunicado, let the bereaved one mourn in private, since that is what is necessary to do.
This belief is almost axiomatic, there is hardly a person I know that doesn’t subscribe to this belief at least in part.

I want to argue the other side, if only to get things straight and perhaps resolve the debate, at least in my own mind.

Begin with the premise that there is the possibility that remaining in that person’s life can do them some good. When the bereaved feels that everything that has happened undercuts their very sense of self-worth and esteem, might there not be some wisdom in staying the course with that person? Surely, you don’t have to be involved. A Swiss emotional neutrality might be a viable option. Words of encouragement, or just acknowledgment are signs of empathy that might do that person some good. There are moments and periods where we flounder and flail, looking almost indiscriminately for something to anchor ourselves. Source of spiritual succor seem in short supply*, there is the kindly advice of others to do this or that, and that’s fine. That advice will be implemented, in its time. But first thing’s first–that sense of isolation and abandonment has to be whittled down to size first, because friendship, empathy, and concern give you the belief that you are not going it alone. It’s a crutch, if you like, but there are many people with broken legs that would imagine going without one.

As always, the devil is in the details. This is difficult balancing act, especially for the one locked outside the pain of the other–because we are told that making them quit cold turkey is the best for them in the long run, forcing them to more quickly accept the new reality–reality sans you. However, even a move as seemingly simple as this could come at the wrong time, and end up doing more damage than good. This is because the person under duress is going to conflate losing you with a general state of all-pervasive loss. The important thing, of course, is to find some way of hacking this erroneous way of thinking–that is, convince the person or restore them, rather, to some equilibrium where the acknowledgment of loss so inherent in human life can somehow be reconciled with everyday life.

Everyday life, of course, has its share of victories, but these are temporal victories. There is no victory over death. To borrow from Ernest Becker, culture is nothing but a succession of hero-systems, and we are all, insofar as we buy into these beliefs, somehow complicit in the “denial of death.” We strive, and we strive, and we strive in this life. To do things. Because things have to be done. A self-evident truth, or not? How many pathologies are covered up by this directive? How much happiness is compromised in this way. There is nothing wrong with doing things, nothing innately wrong with the vita activa–but it has become the heartbreaking default position for most us, and this, I fear, is to our detriment as both individuals and collectively.

I mention this because there is a constant war in the mind, a gulf between what we do everyday–our business deals, emotional transactions, the natural give and take between humans in even the most transitory of social interaction–there is a war between that and the fact of death. For most people, both facts are valid–we need to conduct our business deals, and we also must die–but there is no neurotic conflict between them, one accepts that business must be done so that there is money, so that there is food, so that there is enough of the material and spiritual sustenance we need for this engine to keep on keeping on until that one day where it starts puttering and eventually gives out.

In situations of duress, whatever fig leaf was covering these contradictions is dropped. You are naked, in the desert, wandering under the relentless sun. even as you go about your routine, outwardly normal, inside, at every moment, you are in this desert. There are mountains or the sea far off. So you have a rough compass, something to shoot for. But they are far and you don’t know if you can make it–at least not alone. You feel like an empty husk of a body carrying an
intestate soul that does very little other than occasionally cry out for this or that. And so, beholden to it, your lurch forward, in this direction or that. Your sense of time is distorted. Your clock is forever locked on the GST of this suffering of your own making.

Back to the topic.

There are ways, I think, for a person to somehow play this double role–as the person who both caused the pain and as a friend that can somehow alleviate it. Then the ball gets thrown back to the sufferer–because if you give them too much, they will start dreaming impossible things again. You have to perform some Orpheus like role of leading the person back from the underworld. Your hand is on theirs, leading them back. But you don’t want to look back. You don’t want to speak. I mean that figuratively, of course. However, it is important that you do this, and not others. Because you are intimately involved in the production of that pain. There is a certain responsibility in that that cannot and ought not be shirked.

Meaning must be reconfigured. Most of the work lies with the sufferer, who will learn, however circuitously, that this can be done. But they need reassurances with each step. There are things that you will say to them when this all blows over, things that you can feel safe saying after recovery. But sometimes its better to say some of it–”leak” it, if you will–before the recovery is complete. As a way of “jump starting” that recovery. As a way of letting the sufferer know that their suffering has not been ignored. That their suffering is as real as the sun and the shiver when you step outside in the late autumn without a jacket. Because the world cannot see it, and the world can therefore ignore it, and they must not allowed to think that the world is indifferent to it. The howl has to be heard. You–all of you–raise your head when it breaks the silence. If only, just only to acknowledge it. Let it course through your neurons. Afterwards it will be no more, but for that moment, at least, it is real, like the rain.

More on social unrest in China, 2008.

I was just reading an article about the social unrest that has plagued China in 2008, and it says, in the title that the problem lies with the government competing with the people’s interests, that is, the government has, if only through inaction, sided more with capital than labor, the companies more than regular people.

The latest incident to happen is the Long’an 11.17 incident in Gansu province. The article talks about the other mass incidents–the taxi cab strikes in Sanya, Hainan as well as in Chongqing, and then the Wen’an incident in Guizhou, where the proximate cause of the riots was the death of a teenage girl and what was perceived as a failure of the government to fully investigate the cause of her death and mete out justice, were that to be necessary, but which I have read and heard was merely just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, like many other places in China, there were plenty of grievances that added fuel to the fire. The article quotes the Lianhe Zaobao as to the reasons why this is happening:

这些群体性事件一经媒体披露，迅速在网上引起广泛讨论。“地方政府与民夺利”被中国网民认为是“罪魁祸首”。“部分地方政府片面维护企业与自身利益，漠视农民的权利要求与利益诉求，将损害群众利益当做增加企业与政府利益的前提。”中国一位资深评论员魏文彪说。《联合早报》评论说，一些地方政府片面强调经济发展，忽略了应有的服务职能。比如在公共事业范围内，修路要过路费，建校要集资费，拆迁要劳务费，对治下百姓敲膏吸髓，刮地三尺，所作所为有的甚至比黑帮有过之而无不及。

The government has been to involved in economic growth and creating capitalist wealth and forgotten its other mission, which is to serve the people and protect the little guy’s interest. They have done the former at the expense of the latter, squeezing the peasants and migrants and fueling the kind of resentment that results in mass dissatisfaction and unrest.

The last paragraph is also interesting

2008年究竟发生了多少群体性事件，官方尚未公布最新的数据。不过三年前的一组数据已经说明问题的严重性。根据2005年的《社会蓝皮书》披露，从1993年到2003年间，中国群体性事件数量已由1万起增加到6万起，参与人数也由约73万增加到约307万。“群体性事件发生的根本性原因在于个人无法找到协商机制和利益维护机制”，中国人民大学毛寿龙教授这样说道。

Here they talk about the rise of mass unrest in China…according to a 2005 blue book, the number of incidents rose from 10,000 to about 60,000 (assuming this means per year? or does that seem too high an estimate even by Chinese standards?) and and the number of people involved in such incidents rose from 730,000 to about 3.07 million. The explanation given in that blue book for the steep rise in such incidents is the lack of a systemic mechanism for dealing with social and political conflict.

The original article linked to quotes an expert as saying that despite 2008 being a banner year for protesters, that the government’s attitude towards such incidents has shown signs of improvements—there is, overall, more lenience, tolerance, and transparency. I think on the whole, that such a description is true. But prognosis for the future—well i don’t know, but if the global downturn is going to last a few more years, and if the stimulus packages don’t work that well to revivify demands for Chinese exports, then perhaps the party will have to either start working on that mechanism or see how much money they can dole out and see how much time and patience that buys them.

China, unemployment, unrest

The effects of the economic downturn are being felt in CHina. The Times of India reports that with export markets doing poorly, labor demand is down ad unemployment has spiked which leads to renewed fears, on the part of the Chinese government, of unrest and mass incidents (CNN). Unemployment threatens social stability, and the problem is that its hard to get a handle on how many people are unemployed in china since so many of them are migrant workers.

Now the Chinese government actually wants to subsidize enterprises that employ unemployed workers–for each unemployed person they give a job to, the enterprise will be given 10,000 rmb. The policy should be in effect for the next couple of years, which is how long some economists are saying this financial downturn is going to last.

The point, according to the government is to share the burden with the enterprises. (曹思源：“(政府)鼓励雇用失业工人，企业出一点，国家出一点。因为工人要是没有工作就会面临很大困难，人心就不稳。”)

And the government is making sure that enterprises aren’t just shedding as many workers as they want. Shandong and Hubei are not allowing companies to lay off more than 40 people. And in Qingdao (locate in Shandong province), you are not allowed to lay off more than 20 people or more than 10% of your workforce.

Guizhou: throwback to Cultural Revolution days

贵州桐梓举行公捕公判大会_网易新闻中心 via kwout

贵州桐梓举行公捕公判大会_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Throwback? Maybe they never quite got out of the Cultural Revolution. Some commentators support such measures, but I think that the distinction has to be made between fighting crime (which is naturally a good thing to do, unless that crime involves marijuana, in which case it is a waste of taxpayer money) and holding these public “trials”. These public trials are there to show the good people that the cops are on the job, and show the baddies that this is what happens to you, but of course the main point is that we should not have public “trials” of this sort in this day and age.

An addendum:

One of the comments on the first page of that post:

向各位记者提供社会新闻线索：贵州省丹寨县正在修一条通过长青乡龙塘村翻瓮村我不知名的公路，当地的苗族农民不知道什么叫赔偿，只知道土地等一切都是国家的，他们只有也只能跪在田埂上为这一季已抽穗的稻谷而嚎啕大哭。各位记者：苗族农民不是为土地被占而哭（因为他们只知道土地是国家的，国家怎么做就得认命），而是为抽穗的稻谷而哭（象已养大的孩子一样心疼）。在广东打工的我，不能为家乡父母出力和出气，我真的想撞墙。求求为社会主持或反映社会正义的记者深入到：贵州省丹寨县长青乡龙塘村翻瓮村采访。

The commenter says that in the place where he/she is from, in Guizhou province, there is a new road being built that runs through former agricultural land. That the land must be requisitioned and claimed by the government is not the issue, he/she says: the peasants understand that the land belongs to the government, and the commies that giveth can taketh away. The tragedy is that they don’t understand the concept of compensation — not for the land, but for their wheat and rice crops. The commenter says that his peasant families are not sad about the land per se, but about the rice that they grew, which must now be destroyed. The commenter hopes that the journalists reading this will head over there and do some reporting. Fat chance. But perhaps someone like me could…slip in there incognito?

china, guizhou, cultural revolution, chinese, society, trial, laws, public, justice, crime, mafia

Chinese MBA marriage meetups

MBA相亲会数百人参加 女性怨男性“素质低”(图)_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Hmmm it seems that kwout is having problems with Chinese character encodings…oh well. The link is to an article about a marriage, dating meetup that paired some highly-educated lasses with some not so tall men. Some men complained that they were afraid of women who were too well-educated, saying that they were picky and were too lofty in their goals for life and love. The women said that barely any men were over the height of 1.75. There is hope for me yet.

marriage, MBA, single, sex, china, chinese, guangzhou, society

Books I’m Reading: The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

paradoxofchoice book cover by Barry Schwartz

I’ve been meaning to get this book for ages and I finally managed it. It’s an interesting book, almost too much so in my case, since it really gets to the heart of many of the issues I face in my life.

The main thesis in the book is that we have too many choices in our modern, affluent societies. So right off the bat we are talking about the middle-classes of the developed countries, not all of humanity. Schwartz contends that we have too many choices, and that this overabundance of choice, contrary to all those free market nostrums about the freedom to choose, the more choices the more competition the better for the consumer, that there is a downside – a serious price, both individually and collectively — to the kind of society that we have created.

Schwartz develops a theory about two different types of behavior: maximizing and satisficing. The former is the person that is obsessed about making the right choice. They spend loads of time researching the various pros and cons, opportunity costs involved in every decision. Their more neurotic tendencies mean that before the decision is made, they will anticipate regret and afterwards, will, even if their choice wasn’t too bad and worked out for them, will still harbor some regrets – for they know too well all the things that they missed out on.

In contrast, the satisficer constrains the amount of informational input that goes into every decision: they are not going to compare prices from 100 stores and read 20 consumer reports or reviews…they have decided what the minimum standards are for what they need, and most anything that falls into that range is good enough. After making their decision, they do the psychological work of justifying their decisions, meaning that they convince themselves that this was a good decision.

Schwartz’s contention is that everyone falls somewhere in the spectrum between the maximizer and the satisficer, or more precisely, are one or the other depending on the type of decision and the area of our lives.

I have found that when it comes to things like cheap laptops, I am a satisficer: I tell myself my budget limit, and as long as I can get a cheap but functional PC that fits that bill, it doesn’t matter what features it has, or what brand it is. I don’t agonize forever about the specs, and whether or not it will be the best choice for the various tasks that I will use the computer for. I don’t care if it looks good.

However, there are many things in which I am a maximizer, and, if Schwartz is correct, maximizing carries within it an inherent danger. The way he puts it, there is no way to distinguish cause and effect between maximizing the behavior and the psychological/emotional substrate in which exists. That is, I don’t know if I was already neurotic to begin with and maximizing made it worse or whether or not the society in which we exist — where the glut of choices and the endless array of maximizing enablers (I’m talking about you, Pricegrabber.com and Ebay.com)— creates this mentality. Schwartz doesn’t have the answer to this, and he suspects that it’s a two-way street, and I concur, adding only that it differs so much for each individual. The etiology, if you can call it that, is very individual and does not admit of easy generalization.

There are three areas of life in which I was or still am a hopeless maximizer, and I can safely say that for the most part, this has been, as Schwartz says, a prescription for misery.

1. Deciding a major in University
I switched from philosophy to sociology, then to applied math, and then almost to film, and then to pure mathematics. I was always looking for the right fit. I had considered a bunch of different majors, including physics and Russian literature. I loved philosophy but started hating the other students, who I didn’t think were on my level, intellectually. They seemed like poseurs, people who thought they were deep just by hanging out in philosophy classes. None of them seemed to have any real intellectual firepower; they were fairly ignorant when it came to the other realms of knowledge. I remember one philosophy student whose knowledge of physics was little more than that planetary, Bohr model of the atom. Of course, the real philosophers, the professionals – know much more, many of those who are philosophers of physics know as much physics as your average PhD in physics. But I hated the students. Same with sociology. It was too easy, the other students were a bore.

I wish I had done physics, and I would have if I weren’t so lousy at experiments and doing those nitty gritty problems. I suppose I was always more of a math person anyway, but in any case I finally chose math because you didn’t really have to talk much, and no one else liked to talk either. It was all nerds, and so no one spouted anything stupid. You just couldn’t, I mean if some mathematical assertion you make is off base, people will know sooner or later. There was nothing being debated that couldn’t be settled, objectively and definitively, with a few lines of calculation or reference to some book.

It took me a long time, and it was a tortuous route. I had to have the perfect mix — something intellectually challenging, not full of bullshit, not full of stupid classmates, and perhaps even employable after college.

2. Careers.

Torn between doing something that pays and something artistic. In the realm of the arts: should I be a writer, a journalist, a filmmaker, a photographer, or a musician? Which one would pay the best, and be the most stable? Which one has a better chance of making it in Shanghai? What about New York? Or should I just go back to doing a PhD in something mildly scientific and mathematical, like public health or bioinformatics? Schwartz mentions the issue of non-reversibility, which is to say, the more you treat something as reversible, the less committed you are, psychologically, to making it work, to making it something you enjoy. There is a refund policy on everything, there is an exit strategy and escape clause in the back of your mind, which means that you give yourself the license to think about all those other options – precisely because they still ARE options.

Hence, I keep thinking about going back to math-related fields, even though my age and lack of training have really made the proposition a fairly impractical thing.

There’s another point Schwartz makes that is worth mentioning here: expectations and control. If the learned helplessness theory of depression has any merit, than depression is caused by a lack of control, and obviously I don’t mean just once, but when it happens enough that people, for whatever reason, begin to think that this is an inherent feature in their lives. They give cosmic explanations for their failures, meaning they blame society or the Fates or the short-sightedness of other people (these people can’t understand or help or appreciate me) for whatever happens to them. And they tend to also locate the faults in themselves, in some kind of unchanging, immutable flaw that they can never change. Optimistic people tend to just see these things as one-time unfortunate circumstances (that HR person was in a bad mood, which is why I didn’t get hired).

I think that I had too high expectations of myself. My parents, my teachers and my peers always thought I was smart, that I had something going for me. I was placed in the gifted and talented classes. I excelled at a range of subjects. I was (am) well-read, knowledgeable. I can write better than most people. I can compose songs on guitar. I can do calculus in my head (well not anymore). I know what Hilbert spaces are, and I know what Augustine’s life in Carthage was like. I They said I was a Renaissance man, some say I’m a polymath. It doesn’t matter. I felt like I was groomed for success, and right now, I don’t feel successful. I feel underused, and under-appreciated. I most definitely feel underpaid. I feel like I am wasting my talent. Talent for what, I don’t know. I feel like I spend most of my time trying to find some skill I can sell for a pittance, whether its editing or copywriting. Most of the time I have to hide who I am and what I am. I cannot be too intellectual. I cannot use too many big, polysyllabic and obscure words. I cannot fully celebrate the pleasures that the life of the mind affords — at least not with others. I never thought that I would be the President of the US, but I did think that I would amount to more than this. I thought I would have a PhD and some kind of respectable job and status in life. And I thought I could control it, because I always had. I studied hard and worked hard and got A’s. I impressed teachers. I was in the driver’s seat.

I don’t think that way anymore. Nowadays, I seem to have less initiative. I don’t really believe that anything will come out of my life. I think that if I worked harder and tried harder and marketed myself or whored myself out a bit more things would go more smoothly. But I don’t think that I will be graced with great success, artistically or financially. I think I am doomed to be something or someone middling. One day, perhaps in a few years or decades, I will exclaim, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: I coulda been a contender! Don’t get me wrong, I think I will be ok in the long run. I won’t starve. But I won’t be the wildly successful person I thought I would be. Of course I still think that time is on my side. I’m 31, there is hope yet. But I have to find the right thing, and I have to put it all into that one thing. And there I go, back into that labyrinth, back into that endless arbitraging of skills and intellectual assets, trying to find the loophole that will allow me to come out ahead, in anything, anything at all. To be good at something and therefore remembered is all that matters.

Now I am too worn out, mentally, to write about romantic relationships, another area where I do a neurotically unhealthy amount of maximizing. But I will save that for some other time. My McDonald’s breakfast just arrived, and with it (or anything with cheese on it), a slight respite.

If I’m not doing it for you, please feel your own breasts

Spurred by the possibility of some hot pictures, I clicked on the link to a Chinese article about the pleasures of sex without penetration.* The article talks about we often place too much emphasis on genitals and penetration, oblivious of the body’s other erogenous zones, ignorant of the polymorphous pleasures that we’d unlearned in the process of accepting certain social definitions of sex and sexuality.

The People’s University has a famous sexologist—Pan Ruiming—who conducted a survey on the sex lives of the Chinese, and the article reproduces (pun kinda intended) the following results: men felt that oral stimulation from women could raise their pleasure 35%, while using their mouths to pleasure a woman could raise pleasure 45%–though it’s not clear who is on the receiving end of that raise. I think it’s the men. For the gals, kissing can raise their pleasure 43%, while receiving genital area stimulation could raise their pleasure 64%. What surprised me most was what came next (pun kinda intended): touching their own breasts and nipples could raise pleasure by 74%, but if they do it “fully”, they can raise their pleasure 212%.

This is no doubt of great succor to the all the men in the world that are lousy in bed. 212 percent, and all you have to do is to remind her to do some of the work herself. Who said there’s no such thing as a free munch in this world?
Here’s the passage in Chinese:

中国人民大学性社会学教授潘绥铭2000年完成的中国人性生活调查发现，男性主要通过采取各种新鲜的性交方式来增加快感，被调查男性认为妻子用口刺激自己可以提高35%的快感，自己口刺激妻子可以提高45%的快感。女性需要的则更多是各种爱抚，在性生活中接吻可提高43%，丈夫抚摸自己的外阴可提高64%，抚摸自己的乳头提高74%，爱抚很充分的话可以提高212%。由此可见，有时单纯的皮肤摩擦都能擦出炽热的火花。

*don’t worry people, I’m fine. And healthy.

Illegal Chinese net bars and net addicts: a match made in heaven

OK, so internet addiction is old hat but I am continually amazed by the stuff that people will do just to get their fix. There are other, perhaps extenuating circumstances: broken homes, parental neglect, problems at school—but some young people in China are really falling through the cracks. Read an article about how an 18 yr old boy lived in an internet cafe for three years; he basically played games until he was too tired to go on and then would sleep. He developed some kind of pelvis infection and things finally caught up to him recently when he tried to get up to go the loo and could not move. They rushed him to the hospital and that’s how his story got picked up by the media. Internet addiction makes people do strange things. A third-year student at a Kunming university spent so much time on the net that he neglected to shower for three days.

A more in-depth story about the “black” net bars that cater to underage consumers with little cash is a bit more shocking. Xiao Xing, a middle school student, became so addicted to the internet that his parents were forced to get rid of the computer. With nowhere to get his fix the boy turned to the illegal net bars that are ensconced within regular apartments. There is obviously no signage: people who know, know where to go. Adults are not allowed in. There are often more than 10 computers stuffed into these apartments. Kids can surf the internet for 2 rmb/hour sans ID card.

When Mr. Chen, Xiao Xing’s father, went looking for his son, he went into one of the first net bars and a saw several computers, but no kids. Then he went to a second one, and again saw a bunch of computers, but no people. He noticed that the monitor lights and mouse lights were blinking. He sensed that these computers had recently been used. He heard a sound and opened a curtain to find several boys hunched and hidden behind it, staring out at him in fear. Xiao Xing wasn’t there. He told them “go home, your parents are going to get worried.”

The reporter managed to interview a kid (it might have been Xiao Xing, on the way home) and discovered that this was standard protocol at the illegal net bars: whenever someone knocks or comes in, the kids have to hide, behind curtains, in the bathroom, on the balcony, etc. People know about the existence of these places, but the strong arm of the law hasn’t done much to clamp down on this phenomenon: at most they took away some of the computers and restricted the number of computers able to access the internet from that apartment—but never were these people arrested or ordered to stop, which is, in my mind, what ought to happen.

One time when asked who all these kids surfing the internet were, the boss lady replied “these are all my relatives…oh and that boy is a friend of theirs.” Shameless. Just shameless.

These places mushrooms, you stamp them out in one place and they pop up somewhere else. All the parents that are trying to curb the excessive net addictions of their kids had best beware. If the heat is on one of the places, the kids can just go to another one nearby.
I really think they ought to just not let the owners of those apartments ever get online again, ever—or limit their connection to one computer.

Movies I’m Watching: Edward Yang’s Terrorizers (恐怖分子）

《恐怖分子》影评：杨德昌的手术刀-搜狐娱乐 via kwout

Edward Yang is, by any measure, a master of the cinema. Like his other films from this era (late 1980s and early 1990s), Terrorizers is a merciless dissection of the lives of the Taiwanese urban middle-class. I’ve been reading a Chinese review/essay on the film, and I think it brings out some interesting concepts. For
one, it mentions that one of the major themes of the film is the middle-age crisis, especially as it revolves around the Li Lizhong and his wife Zhou Yufen. He’s a doctor obsessed with trying to get a promotion by hook or crook, and Zhou is a writer who seems to have lost her creative spark. What at first seem like minor speed bumps, over the course of the film,
get magnified into something else–a crisis of meaning. Their marriage is on the rocks, there is adultery, both real and imagined, and soon Zhou wins a literary award and moves out just to shack up with her old/new lover.

Of course, things go pear-shaped for Li and he goes on a murderous rampage–or at least we think he does. It turns out this is just a dream. It’s a strange thing: a dream sequence in the film that for the most part remains staunchly on the outside of the characters, observing them from afar. However, when we get back to reality, we find that
instead of killing others, Li has blown his own brains out. The Chinese reviewer’s point is that the emotional cruelty inflicted upon us by “modern society” , so that it is impossible to just take Li Lizhong’s self-destruction as individual tragedy–the lives of all the characters, not just Li’s, are comments on or representations of what Yang thinks of life
in the present society. The reviewer also claims that the two younger characters–Xiao Qiang, the scion of a rich family who slums it as a photographer, and Shu An, the girl involved in the criminal underworld–are rebelling against the strictures of society; they do what they do because they are, each in their own way, rebelling against their lot in life, running away from the clutches of middle-aged meaningless that would no doubt overtake them otherwise.

This whole theory seems a bit too pat for me, but I think that the overall gist is right, if only because the overall gist of Yang movies is really hard to miss. I don’t know if it really amounts to some broadside against modern society per se–I think that like anyone, Yang sees both the good and bad things about the times we live in–but I think, like a trust artist
Yang has made it his mission to take an unflinching look at the darker side of things: the anomie, the desperation, the specter of meaningless that lurks inside and around even the most normal of lives. Anyhow, I think this essay is also quite interesting for the way that it discusses not only the movie but Yang himself: Yang, he says, takes a surgical knife
to modern society, peeling away its layers, exposing what lies inside and beneath. He/she claims that the title of the film refers not only to Shu An, the most regularly “violent” of the characters, but to all those characters who stand in opposition –or perhaps find themselves, unwillingly perhaps, thrown into a situation where they must go against grain. They are the “terrorizers” because they terrorize us into seeing what is normally repressed. In some sense, the darkness that exists beneath the calm veneer of the middle-class ego and middle-age stability and position is even darker than naked violence between say rival gangs or mafia families. That kind of violence is open, and in some ways, transparent–people know the rules, there is a ample cause and effect, but the kind of violence that erupts from the relatively staid and normal people in Yang’s films is altogether something different. It’s inchoate, and unpredictable. The victims aren’t even aware of
the fact that they are targets.

One last digression. The author of the review says that the first ten minutes of The Terrorizers reminds him of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, but says that the contrast between the two directors lies in the fact that MA explores the philosophical nature of things and existence, whereas EY takes his surgical knife and exposes the core of Taiwanese society for what it is .

影片的前10分钟让我想起了安东尼奥尼的《放大》，同样行尸走肉一般的社会环境，同样带有悬念的故事，还有同样以照相机记录事件的人物。两部影片为了达到纪实的效果自始至终都没有配乐，但安东尼奥尼的主题是想探讨事物存在与真实的哲学命题，展示社会情境只是他加入其中的附属品；而杨德昌的镜头就像一把外科医生的手术刀，抽丝剥茧层层递进地揭示出台湾社会的内核。

Interesting food for thought.

Unfortunately, scrolling up and down, I can’t seem to find a name attached to it. You can see the original link here.

Controversial Chinese housing ad: “those worth less than 500,000 need not apply”

售房广告称"50万以下身价者恕不接待"引争议(图)_网易新闻中心 via kwout

This ad for some posh Chinese apts featuring pictures of some poncey-ass Chinamen like you’ve never seen raised some hackles because of its main slogan: those that are worth less than 500,000 RMB need not apply. This got some people pissed off because they might not be worth that much at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t find some way of financing the house. The company when contacted, stated that they weren’t trying to be offensive, but just wanted to make it clear that this was a posh place full of poncey-ass wankers. I think they made the point quite clearly. Give that copywriter a fuckin raise!