Alan Sokal knows a thing or two about bullshit. He single-handedly made a mockery of Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. His 1996 article,
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was published in the journal’s spring/summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
The reemergence of post-modernism, now in the form of Woke culture concerns Sokal in a big way, as he writes in ARC:
What postmodernist relativism has wrought is, rather, something more insidious: by devaluing the concept of objective truth, it has undermined our own ability to combat objective untruths—to develop herd immunity to a pandemic of viral disinformation, as one writer eloquently put it. Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I honestly don’t know how to put it back in.
Sokal’s piece in ARC is troublesome. He opens with a hypothetical stolen 2020 election in which the evil forces of the extreme right conspire to undertake, successfully, to steal the 2020 election. He goes from there to note that the left would be at least somewhat sympathetic to a group such as Antifa invading the Supreme Court. This gives him the chance to compare two situations and conclude that Republican members of Congress of acting in bad faith.
There was no need to create a hypothetical for there to be a comparison, but the hypothetical did allow for his conclusion. There was an analogous situation only four years earlier, in 2016, when half the country – just as in 2020 – believed the election results were wrong. That half of the country proceeded to weaponize government, commit perjury, leak confidential information, commit at least one egregious Brady violation, in a continuous effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election. There was a four-year rolling bloodless coup, culminating in mostly peaceful arson, looting and murder. And an impeachment to remove from office someone who no longer held it.
I clicked a related link on the page, and read an article by Nicholas Grossman, Senior Editor at ARC Digital, F*** You, Ted Cruz, You unAmerican, anti-Democracy, lying sack of Sh*t. In this dispassionate piece, Grossman repeats a number of false statements and elides over the fact that Democrats in Congress declined to certify the electoral vote in 2001, 2005 and 2017. Grossman attempts to inoculate Democrats by stating that Democrats’ actions following the 2016 election are in no way similar to Republicans’ actions following 2020. I concur; four straight years of lies and non-stop sedition are not the equivalent of a mostly-peaceful protest. Grossman claims Cruz was lying about a requested ten-day audit; perhaps he was, I don’t have any mind-reading pills. I asked for a review of both elections to determine where and how fraud could enter the election processes because in both cases half the country believed that the elections were invalid.
I’m not one of those. I accept that Trump won in 2016 and Biden won in 2020. I’ve never voted for either. I won’t attempt to defend the unruly invasion of the Capitol by a mob, some threatening violence. I also won’t respond in-kind to tribalism. A libertarian, I don’t have a dog in this fight except wanting the US electorate to believe that our elections are legitimate.