An irony delicious and exquisite.

I followed Francis Porretto’s link at Eternity Road to "physicist Alan Sokal's marvelous ribbing at [our leftist literati’s] expense" and found an intriguing record of scientific foolery and fatuous leftist posturing.

Professor Sokal wrote an article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which was a parody of a scientific paper consisting of 39 pages of patent nonsense -- “a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever.”

This he submitted to a journal called Social Text which published it in 1996 as a serious paper.

Thereafter, the professor wrote an article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword," not a parody, explaining why he wrote the first paper. When he submitted that article to Social Text it was "rejected by them on the grounds that it did not meet their intellectual standards."