>Sokal
>bullshit was already lame in the 90's.
He's still working from the same script though, updating it only occasionally it looks like:
http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2009/05/alan_sokal_on_the_nature_and_u.php
[...]
Sokal spent an hour and a half on stage. It was an enjoyable talk, though he was reading from the apparently unaltered manuscript of a lecture he gave in London a year ago. I found this a little disappointing -- the guy was hunched over his paper and at some points had to halt, look up and apologise for some reference that was topical in the UK in early 2008 but not so today in Sweden.
[...]
The reason that we should care about what science is, Sokal said, is basically that if we forget how to engage scientifically with the world, then it will punch us in the face. He identified four groups hostile to science, in ascending order of weight and dangerousness.
Post-modern relativists. These are largely a thing of the past since the Bush administration taught the academic Left where a hostile attitude to reason leads. Even Bruno Latour has apparently backed down.
Purveyors of pseudoscience. Homeopathy is rampant in the UK.
Advocates of religion. No matter how theologians spin it, all religion boils down to believing the dogma in the holy book because one of these dogma is "thou shalt believe in what the holy book says". Circular reasoning.
Propagandists, PR firms, spin doctors and the politicians and companies that employ them. Their business isn't about muddled thinking, it isn't about sloppiness, it's about defrauding the public. Sokal explicitly pointed out George W. Bush and Tony Blair as fraudsters in the case of the rationalisation of the second Iraq war