From: Menno Rubingh <rubingh@delftnet.nl>
> ...I think it makes a person smarter and more efficient to simply
>excise useless memes and activities like "Cultural Studies" out of his life.
Considering how "journalists" fill up magazines and newspapers with "Cultural Studies" tripe, your advice seems eminently worthwhile. Who knows, perhaps someday "Cultural Studies" will morph into something useful, as alchemy became chemistry, and astrology became astronomy. But I wouldn't count on it. It may become something like another Marxist world view. We ought to study "Cultural Studies" to see how much damage it inflicts on otherwise healthy young minds.
>It is highly useful to know WHAT kind of memes to be on
>your guard against.
Yes, that precisely states my intent in posting the Sokal piece. IMO, we need to guard against memes which carry an agenda of political control and cognitive coercion, memes founded on reactionary systems of consensus ideology, memes which derive from a power base locked in ancient connections to privilege and inherited status, memes which emerge as a consequence of tribal identities as opposed to empirically ascertained information, in short, memes which oppose extropy. --J. R.