Sokal affair

The Sokal affair was an eleborate piece of IRL trolling and notable hoax of the mid 90s. It is interesting as it provides one of the earliest known examples of trolling feminists, marxists and other pinko scum who's repercussions lasted for many years after the fact. Even today, bringing up the Sokal affair or the name Alan Sokal with intellectual postmodernists will result in BAWWWing of epic porportions.

The trolling techniques imployed in the Sokal affair may not have directly inspired future acts of OTI Trolling, but the techniques have certainly been employed.

Sokal affair 101

Alan Sokal was a humble physics professor at New York University, teaching young minds about the wonderful world of science. But he had always been troubled by a particular breed of faggotry infecting his beloved science: Postmodernism. In the world of postmodernism everything is a social construct, everything is a product of human perception and everything is offensive to somebody.

This did not sit well with the Professor, who believed in order and the absolute laws which constitute science. This threat had to be stopped, so he decided to do something about it.

Under a fake name, Sokal submitted a "research article" to a prominent Postmodernist publication, that proposed Quantum gravity was a social construct. His paper had delibrately been filled with complete bullshit and stuff he had made up, instead opting to reaffirm the publishers already existing biases. Low and behold, with absolutely no consultion from promenant physicists or peer review, just careful flattery of the people reading it, the journal published Sokal's madeup bullshit as fact.

...the penny drops

Sokal's plan to humiliate his enemies did not stop with simply tricking them into publishing nonsense, he then proceeded to brag about it, detailing his plan to them and generally rubbing it in. The publication Social text was left with its credibility and reputation mortally wounded, as it was now blindingly obvious they had done absolutely no fact checking on the piece what so ever.

It should be noted that Sokal didn't simply leak the details of his plan, the big reveal came in the form of a scientific experiment published for an actually credible journal, in which he detailed in painstaking detail how easy it was to manipulate suggestable leftists. Further rubbing it in, as it implyed that Social text was merely a prop in a long winded experiment.

Aftermath and legacy

The Postmodern community was quite upset about the incident, with many rebuttal papers being published on the incident. Most of these centred around how Sokal had behaved "unethically by deceiving them". Sadly the irony was lost on them, none of them noting how their lazy editorial practises had led to them lying to their readers.

Sokal was a man with vision, a true pioneer in the field of IRL Trolling. His techniques of targetting publications with limited to no fact checking, that will publish anything that goes along with their existing biases have been used in other trolling incidents such as #SANDYLOOTCREW and #Cut4Bieber. Sokal also achieved this feat without the aid of the Internet and aged over 40. Who knows what great acts of trolling this man could have achieved if he was born in the computer age.