It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

The following is an excerpt from a wonderful book which I am reading entitled Wittgenstein's Poker.

"In the year 2000, a Chinese academic, Liu Junning, was evicted from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences after delivering a lecture on The Open Society.*"

This is the type of occurrence which I am always tempted to call "ironic," but which I think is more accurately described as "tragicomic."



* The Open Society was a philosophical work by the Jewish-Austrian thinker Karl Popper, written during WWII. He had left Austria for a teaching post in New Zealand shortly before the Nazis took power, narrowly escaping the persecution which befell the rest of his family. He considered The Open Society his contribution to the war effort. It is a lengthy polemic against fascism, but is a relevant critique against totalitarian governments of all kinds. As such, it remains an influential work to this day. It is considered to be a particularly devastating argument against Soviet and Chinese communism because of its arguments for the necessity of political freedom and freedom of expression.