The Academic Left is in Denial

Physicist Alan Sokal is mostly known for 1996 Sokal's Hoax, where he mocked non-physicists using physics metaphors. He does indeed expose some nutty academic work, but he is silent about physicists who say things just as nutty.

I thought that he was trying to de-politicize science, but he is not. In a Jan. 22 essay, he argues:

Furthermore, 47 percent of Republicans characterized the storming of the Capitol as “mostly a legitimate protest,” with an equal number calling it “mostly people acting unlawfully.” ...

PBS/Marist also asked: “Do you trust that the results of the 2020 election were accurate, or not?” Fully 72 percent of Republicans thought that the election results were not accurate, compared to 36 percent of Independents and 2 percent of Democrats.

He says that he would agree with the protests, if he were a right-winger and thought that the election were stolen.

He blames postmodernist academics for denying objective truths.

Sorry, but the election was stolen in the sense that Trump only lost because his enemies changed the election rules as never before. If we had a free and fair election, then the votes would have been cast and counted on Election Day, and we could all accept an objective outcome.

Politico, a Trump-hater site, admits that Democrats need more election chicanery:

“If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f---ed,” said Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project.

Even today, the Democrats are holding hearing on the Jan. 6 protests, but refusing to allow Republicans to participate, and refusing to release the 15,000 hours of surveillance video.

I am sure many of my readers hate Trump also. That's fine, you are entitled to your opinions. But those postmodernist academics who deny objective truth are all left-wingers. So are most physicists, and most journalists.

Scott Aaronson has emerged from blog hibernation to tell us that he is grateful that Texas legislators have left the state in order to supportt he democracy. They want to stop Republicans from voting on a requirement to present ID to vote. When pressed for details, it is clear that he is just following the Democrat playbook.

If these academics really wanted to pursue objective truth, they would be urging freer, transparent, and verifiable elections. Europe and Canada are able to run much cleaner elections. The USA ought to be able to do as well.

Another big source of press complaints about people not accepting scientific truths comes from covid and vaccination. No one on Facebook is allowed to say anything contradicting Anthony Fauci, even tho he says wrong stuff all the time. For example, he recently made the widely publicized claim that 99.2% of the covid deaths are in unvaccinated people. This turns out to be a lie, because it is based on data from before vaccines were widely available.

Last year, 100% of the covid deaths were in the unvaccinated, and in Feb. 2021, it was about 99%. The percentage has to be a whole lot less now, but the CDC has not released the necessary data.

Fauci undermines confidence in the system when he lies like this. Here is a Ben Shapiro video explaining how Fauci and CDC officials have been lying to us.