Ying Zu > Recent Status Updates

beautiful read so far. Unfortunately reading it on kindle is quite a hassle, as I need to flip back and forth constantly looking for equations referred to by the current page.

quite a pleasant audiobook to listen to on a road trip, although I missed multiple physical explanations/analogies he made while fumbling for directions. I don't think I'll enjoy reading the book as much as listening to it as the writing is really targeted at non-physicists and is thus progressing in a rather slow pace.

Priming is such a simple and powerful scheme, widely used in TV commercials and hate speeches, by dictatorial regimes and free elections, on campaign trails and news screens. Lazy people get primed, while others get informed. The difference between freedom fighters and teen mobs sometime is very blurry.

Despite the extreme contempt shown by the author on Mao, it is very satisfying to piece together, or unveil a more complete version of the Chinese history since the 1930s via correcting/debiasing all the false history education I had back in middle school.

I used to think Mao is an outlier from all the other hundreds of millions of of Chinese, especially the peasants that I vaguely know of, now that with the disdainful anatomy in this book, I changed my mind, he's just one of them, but more ruthless, more power-hungry, without an iota of sympathy for his fellow peasantry.

It is emotionally really hard for me to finish this book. The mystic, exotic, adorable, creative, hardworking, yet brutal, ruthless, belligerent, militaristic multi-faceted Japan never makes any sense to me, until by the time I finished Herbert Pix's book. The answer to all the mysteries surrounding the post-war Japan and its evergrowing ultranationalist attitude toward the war, seem to lie on this diminutive figure.

Now I really begin to wonder, how did the Meijin constitution have this nefarious 'foresight' to so effectively shield the imperial court from the accountabilities of all the war crimes it had inflicted upon other peoples as well as the Japanese. Sigh, Guadalcanal it is now.

excruciating to read. How the China War was planned and executed by the frenzy fascist government led by the all-accountable emperor Hirohito. The sheer amount of disdain of the Chinese people and their will to fight, and the sickening xenophobia of the Japanese, all of those made my brain hurt. Fuck humanity.

the japanese imperial court sits very obscurely inbetween ruling and reigning, but definitely more akin to a pure autocratic power center. The history leading to the 30s' manchuria is really astonishing -- intricate, ridiculous, and extremely saddening.

hey, you can't marry that colorblind girl!

peer school era during the WW I.

Wow, feel like I just open a chest in the treasure trove, oh boy how mysterious this ancient neighbor of ours has been to me for ages! The major difficulty in all my efforts trying to understand Japan is actually very simple --- I just don't know where to begin with --- it's so different from any oriental or western civilization, just like its language, with a blend of both flavors yet so alien and exotic.

The author described a fairly balanced view on the legacies left by both the initial attempt by Min-Chuan Liu and the later colonizing effort of the Japanese to modernize Taiwan. However, I still don't have a good sense of the broad spectrum of the views from the contemporary and current-day literati groups and outside critics, and of course, of the general taiwanese chinese and aborigines. Now enter the Uncle Sam.

Taiwan had been treated as a colony with zero respect across the two hundred years of Qing's rule before ceded to Japan. will find out how much difference they would make.

Koxinga is the real deal.

can't help myself making the comparison between Annette Lu and Long Chai.

The author is clearly pro-independence, but so far his narrative seems to be more or less median, albeit with obvious struggle in containing his green stance when describing some obfuscated political events. Starting with the 3-19 assassination incident. Will find out later, interesting read so far.

try to understand the world, but never try to make sense of the world. Coherence could very possibly just one random storyline coming out of a gazillion of random worldlines.

glad to discover that I'm not a racist.

"oh that makes sense", i constantly utter this to myself while reading this book, without realizing that my comment is simply a reaction to the coherence presented in the book's narrative. How hard was my system 2 at work? I don't know, but according to the book, it is very lazy and it really likes simple answers to easy question and blindly follow authoritative words. I feel like my mind is gonna be devoured soon.

funny that the field is switching to type 1 and 2 just as predicted by astronomers.

What an irony it is to start reading this book on Christmas day....

just started. seems fairly easy to read, maybe I'll be able to finish within a month. it's funny that behavioral and social sciences also name things by this utterly unimaginative terms like "system 1" and "system 2", just like our type one and two...

the most breath-taking, mind-blowing, heart-wrenching, soul-lightening, grandiose piece of 40-mins reading I've had.

so, there is not flat flying sedimentation in China.

ophiolite.

yeah, time to make California!

hotspots! oh my god I should have applied for a phd in geophysics!!!! so cool!