He revisits the affair in which Sokal published a hoax essay in Social Text, attempting to show that postmodern leftist academic writing was, in short, lazy and harmful to the left

It's a purely formal point, but that is indeed Faris in the blog Ted links to. I understood your comment to point to something Ted had said.

Secondly, I read that, not as Bérubé "attempting to show...", but Sokal. While you read:

Upstate NY:

"attempting" refers back to Berube. Berube is not obviously attempting that.

Purely formal, as I say, but it doesn't help discussion.

To your main point: I'm reading Bérubé with the pleasure that always gives me, and will attempt to report back.

Post Hoax, Ergo Propter Hoax » American Scientist

But I [Bérubé] am convinced that theories of social justice are qualitatively different things than, say, neutrinos or Neptune. I'm therefore inclined to accept John Searle's distinction between the worlds of "brute fact" and "social fact," and to insist that in the world of social fact, things like "theories of social justice" are indeed socially constructed.

This position puts me at odds with people such as Sam Harris, whom Sokal discusses at length in his chapter on religion. Harris writes, in The End of Faith,

In philosophical terms, pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism. For the realist, our statements about the world will be "true" or "false" not merely in virtue of how they function amid the welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any culture-bound criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of our thoughts. Realists believe that there are truths about the world that may exceed our capacity to know them; there are facts of the matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view. To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered--and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them.

"Postmodern" pragmatists such as Rorty and myself [Bérubé] think this is a truly unfortunate way of thinking about truths in human affairs.

My own view is close to Bérubé's - who goes on honestly to point out loopy postmodern behaviour (and this is the "pimping for ID"):

Post Hoax, Ergo Propter Hoax » American Scientist

Case in point on the opposite side: Unwittingly bolstering Sokal's argument, one prominent science-studies scholar has recently weighed in on the side of people who believe in angels: Not long after enthusiastically blurbing Meera Nanda's book, saying "this first detailed examination of postmodernism's politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists," sociologist of science Steve Fuller arrived in Dover, Pennsylvania, to testify in favor of the teaching of "intelligent design" in that school district's seventh-grade science curriculum. And he did so, tellingly, by deliberately confusing the context of discovery with the context of justification, arguing that intelligent design is worth pursuing partly because great scientists of the past--such as Newton--believed in God.

So we have a science-studies scholar criticizing postmodernism and stumping for creationism, religious fundamentalists calling on God to smite the infidels, and "ethical realists" arguing for a moral absolutism. Sokal is appropriately alarmed by the first two of these phenomena, but, unfortunately, his book's closing argument--which, again, echoes that of Harris--is that all human beliefs should be judged by the degree to which they are supported by verifiable empirical evidence. That rationalist dog just won't hunt;

This leaves me a touch mystified by your reference to Harris and ID (a Google search for some other place where Bérubé discussed this has your comment above in first place among the search results..!).

Overall, here and in the longer and more recent The Science Wars Redux, (which is dated Winter 2011 and is perhaps the recent revisit you mentioned), I find Bérubé's attitude towards Sokal balanced, even conciliatory:

Michael Bérubé for Democracy Journal: The Science Wars Redux

But what of Sokal's chief post-hoax claim that the academic left's critiques of science were potentially damaging to the left? That one, alas, has held up very well, for it turns out that the critique of scientific "objectivity" and the insistence on the inevitable "partiality" of knowledge can serve the purposes of climate-change deniers and young-Earth creationists quite nicely. That's not because there was something fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical anti-foundationalism (whose leading American exponent, Richard Rorty, remained a progressive Democrat all his life), but it might very well have had something to do with the cloistered nature of the academic left.

What he's interested in, it seems to me, is getting out of a sterile face-off between a "hard-science" left and a "social-relativist" left (my approximate terms) and into something more positive, like making the world a better place, that science twinned with socio-cultural understanding may address. And:

Michael Bérubé for Democracy Journal: The Science Wars Redux

the world really is divvied up into "brute fact" and "social fact," just as philosopher John Searle says it is, but the distinction between brute fact and social fact is itself a social fact, not a brute fact, which is why the history of science is so interesting.