Sokal must be either laughing or crying

Remember the Sokal affair? When Sokal made his hoax, he was not mainly interested in making the point that "postmodern" critical theory was full of pseudoscientific nonsense. His central aim was to serve as wake-up call for the academic political Left, telling them that endorsement of "relativism" about science was against all the best interests of the Left and robbed critics of the status quo of the weapons offered by fact-based knowledge.

Now, a decade later, sociologist of science Bruno Latour (who was one of the main targets of Sokal) is finally coming to his senses. Too bad it has required years of abuse and misrepresentation of science from the Bush administration to make him realize that:

And yet entire Ph.D programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.

Sokal, and all the scientists that were on his side, can now say all with one voice: "I told you so!!!!"