"RETAINING THE FUNDAMENTAL"
Todd Seavey warns the New Atlantis crowd of the danger of vague rhetoric:
I wonder if the anti-biotech conservatives--by wallowing in vague, moralistic language about human nature and society in order to guilt-trip us all into agreeing with their policy recommendations--aren't risking becoming the victims of a hoax like the one that physicist Alan Sokal pulled on leftists in 1996, when he wrote a nonsensical article and got it published in Social Text by larding it with jargon from fashionable literary criticism? A hoax conservative anti-biotech argument would require references to the ancient Greeks and the Pope instead of Lacan and Derrida, but it shouldn't be hard to whip up, perhaps with a title like "Retaining the Fundamental: Cystic Fibrosis as an Essential Human Travail."