Friday Ephemera (831)

From Albania to Yale (over 4,500 miles):

Charlie Munger: “I always liked the story of P.J. O’Rourke, who said, ‘The last Communist dictator of Albania was a pure Communist.

He threw out the Russian embassy because they’d lost the pure faith. Then he kicked out the Chinese Communists because they’d lost the pure faith.

Finally, he was only comfortable with two places in the world. One was the Communist dictator of North Korea and the other was the English department at Yale.’ “

“There is a lot of extreme craziness in some of the liberal arts — and they select people who share their craziness.”

(Caltech || 2008)

From Yale to madness:

Many years ago, when my marriage first started to disintegrate, I got a therapist for the first time. He was much older, with decades of experience with Yale professors. I spoke with him about my disintegrating marriage. But I was curious why others had therapists, so I asked. He responded, “many professors spend their time with me complaining about why their work doesn’t get more attention.”

from the comments:

I’d believe this except that [Jason] Stanley is such a relentless liar that I’m assuming he thought that would be a funny things to have heard and then convinced himself he heard it.

Anyone who bills himself as “antifascist” can safely be assumed to be a relentless liar (and other things). But on the other hand the anecdote does sound plausible, at least with regards to certain segments of academia.