Written by I’m half kidding with the title. I genuinely want to move on to other topics, but this entire week has been soaked in the blood of unborn, I’m an enthusiastically pro-life atheist libertarian, that’s quite a controversial thing, and this is an open phones show. I won’t allow myself to be accused of dodging debate on the subject, so we all know where the topic is going to go, at some point, whether I want it to go there or not.
Speaking of open phones shows, I made my triumphant return to Free Talk Live last Sunday, much to the chagrin of the PC hysterics.
Aside from that, I took some advice from Internet Aristocrat, to go read about the “Science Wars”. He described it as a phenomenon where social justice warriors were writing articles about chemistry being racist, and gravity being sexist, which just sounded superbly insane and might have been worth a laugh.
What I stumbled upon was a rabbit hole of lunacy, the magnitude of which my considerable command of the English language seems to lack verbiage to describe. More importantly, however, I found some amazing bright spots of reason and brilliance in the murky depths of social justice anti-reality madness.
Alan Sokal, a professor at NYU, penned an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which got published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, an academic journal of some reputation at the time. In it, he derided the scientific method and the concept of reality itself. The piece was utterly nonsensical, talking about time travel and all manner of absolutely absurd things, but the political overtones noted in the piece persuaded the editors of Social Text to publish it anyway.
But Sokal, though a leftist, was not quite the lunatic a rational person reading the paper would have thought him to be. It was hoax. As he put it, the piece was a “mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever” to make the point that the “displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is — second only to American political campaigns — the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time”.
Not only have I gotten some excellent laughs out of this, but it led me to reading an excellent book titled Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Which I’m now working on. Not sure I’ll have it finished before the show tomorrow, but we’ll talk about it a bit.
In other news, is Donald Trump conspiring to hand Hillary Clinton the Presidency of the United States? Is Greece heading toward a return to the drachma, as I predicted? How did unelected New York bureaucrats impose an industry specific minimum wage?
And if you think that stuff is crazy, just wait until you hear from the listeners. Give us a call at 218-936-0815 or Radical Agenda on Skype if you would like to be on the program.
Join us, this and every Friday from 5-7pm Eastern time for another exciting episode of the Radical Agenda. It’s a show about common sense extremism, where we talk about radical, crazy, off the wall things, like maintaining the integrity of physics.