re: #628 Jimmah

Probably the classic academic punking of postmodernism - from physicist Alain Sokals “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (which was accepted and published in a leading postmodernist journal)

I adored this so much that I went out and bought Sokal’s book about the whole scandal, which came out a few years afterward. He gives a lot of the background, and reveals a lot of his motivations.

Despite the fact that pretty much all the people calling for more rigor in higher education fall on the right, and see all this post-modernist, deconstructionist, nonsense as highly political, and designed to strengthen the left - Sokal is in fact a man of the extreme left, who considers Naom Chomsky to be a reasonable guy. He thinks that this nonsense is distracting people from the truth, and if people were only more logical and scientific they would be good leftists. Or something.

He has a lot of strange bedfellows, imho…