Funny

Here is the logician Peter Smith using his blog to point out the idiocy that passes as intellectual "brilliance":

Bullshit of the day

Some years ago, I used to have an occasional slot in my first year logic lectures where -- as light relief from getting straight about the material conditional or quantifier trees -- we'd pause for Bullshit of the Day, with an engaging quote or two from some laughable post-modernist pseud. I recall Simon Critchley as being an excellent source of amusement. But when Sokal and Bricmont published their Intellectual Impostures, I gave up my trifling dabbles, and instead recommended everyone to soak it up and learn from their wonderful indictment of intellectual bollocks.

But it's just so tempting to restore the slot when there's guff like this about:

In the first Part of this essay, I trace the emergence of the unliturgical world, the lineaments of whose struggle to quell the agonies of obsolescence and desire can be seen in the lateral consolations of universalized strongholds, cities whose citizens are regulated either visibly via military force or written contract, or invisibly, via the dissemination of unquestioned assumptions regarding the nature of reality and the human subject. In such immanentist cities, the ideal course involves the eradication of the unknown, the choreography of "spontaneity," and the anticipation of all eventualities via a textual calculus of the "real". These unholy cities which claim clarity and knowledge as their secure foundations, conceal a nihilistic aspect which is the inevitable outcome of a separation of ontology from theology.

The perfectly cloth-eared mangling of the English language, the wild exaggeration, the unconstrained arm-waving rambling: don't you just love it? Though sad to say, this travesty is from a Reader in Philosophy and Theology in my own university. Sigh.