One, I was wrong about Harris. I meant the other guy, Fuller is the ID pimp.

But Berube uses Fuller as an example of empiricist craziness, not Postmodern craziness. That's why he brought him up in the first place.

This is what he says:

So we have a science-studies scholar criticizing postmodernism and pimping for creationism ... and ethical realists calling for moral absolutism.

Read your longer quote again. Berube is saying that Fuller (the loopy one) believes postmodernism's politically reactionary consequences should concern leftists. In other words, he critiques postmodernity. Berube characterizes him as an ethical realist, a group he situates within the realms of scientific empiricism. The passage is a bit confusing because he writes that Fuller unwittingly bolsters Sokal's argument. Unwittingly why? Well, in the first place, he's a science-studies scholar who--according to Berube--gets it wrong. But Berube continues and wonders why scientists such as Sokal are not dismissive of ethical realists such as Fuller. It's only reserved for poststructuralists.

As for the last bit, I'll emphasize again that he is referring to the REACTION to the hoax, and not the essence of the hoax. I seriously doubt his critique of the essence of the hoax has changed. It couldn't have since Sokal misrepresented the people he was reading in the same manner that he argued science-studies people were misreading science. It was the blind talking to the blind. The reaction to the hoax is interesting. I can't say it isn't. But Berube is saying that not only has science-studies been co-opted, butt hat so has Sokal. He has. I mentioned David Horowitz. People trot out Sokal all the time.

We live in an insipid media-dominated culture in which anyone with anything complex to say is drowned out instantly. I would say that it all becomes reducible, science-studies and science itself. If you read the American Right's "rigorous" rationale's for almost any position--whether we should be shooting immigrants like pigs, or whether rape is a young girl's fault, or whatever flavor of the week they are bloviating against--well clearly this is a problem of something other than insular academia. The levels of philosophical discussion in this debate do have an impact on the culture, but not an immediate one and certainly one that can be extrapolated and distorted. But to say it can be is not to say that it should be. My Hitler and Nietzsche analogy was meant to convey this idea.

Now I'll be forced to go into Zizek in depth here, but maybe not until later on.