Joanna Brooks Watch

[_Bob Loblaw]

Joanna Brooks Watch sounds like one of those obsessive fan sites that post celebrity information and pictures, like these:

https://Twitter.com/BieberWatchUSA

http://www.dreamofgaga.com/

The name alone suggests a whyme-esque creepy obsession with Joanna, as if you're going to fly out to San Diego, hop the fence and start taking pictures of her while she's asleep.

[_sansfoy]

Droopy's Magnum Gabbage.

http://joannabrookwsatch.wordpress.com/ ... -mystique/

tl;dnr

[_Bob Loblaw]

Count the number of periods in this large wad of congealed verbosity:

Joanna Brooks is probably an obscure, if unknown name for most Latter-day Saints, unless one has immersed oneself in what has come to be known as “Internet Mormonism” a favorite playground (and battlefield) for LDS intellectuals seeking dialogue and debate from various sides of the LDS fence; committed and faithful, apostate or “ex-Mormon,” and “cultural Mormon,” which is a kind of apostate that is not an apostate but is, for all intents, an apostate who, however, doesn’t want to be thought of as an apostate and in fact may believe quite strongly that faithful LDS who hold to the totality of the core truth claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are, indeed, the real apostates. There will be much more about this in later posts (especially as we enter the dark, heaving seas of political economy), but for now it is sufficient to point out that the phenomena of cultural Mormonism, while some of its members end as outsiders to the Church in an official sense, through either excommunication or by requesting official severance from the Church, Joanna Brooks presents herself as a “Mormon Girl” (which, technically speaking, she is) as well as, as her own blog mentions, ” a national voice on Mormon life and politics,” which she quite patently is not, and here lies the secret of the cultural Mormon phenomenon, a phenomenon that parallels the “long march through the institutions” of the the cultural Left that began in the seventies and came of age by the mid-eighties.

That's right, there are two. He should rename his blog "Verbal Dysentery Watch."

[_Droopy]

He's not really selling the blog, is he? Besides, why not just post to Joanna's site? Why go through Droopy's obnoxious filter to discuss her writing?

I'll tell you why: because I've tried to post responses and comments at Religion Dispatches a dozen times, and the moderators won't let them through. The stated reason to me in an email from a mod?

I was criticizing Joanna Brooks. That's correct. Personal criticism of Joanna Brooks propositions, claims, arguments, and philosophy are not allowed. In actual practice, of course, this means no criticism of anything she says or asserts is going to get through.

Brooks' website is uninteresting, and is mainly a question-and-answer format in which Joanna, playing a kind of leftist, cultural Mormon Dear Abbey, fields the anguished cries of other leftist Mormons as they attempt to negotiate a Church and culture from which they feel alienated and distant due to their own choice to alienate and distance themselves from it.

I have no real desire to engage her on her own territory among her legion of sycophants (they can come onto my territory to defend her, if they desire). Her job as a religion correspondent for Religion Dispatches is much more meaty, containing a continuing archive of her thoughts on a great deal of religion and culture related subjects, all from her essentially anti-Mormon, academic leftist, woman's studies/critical theory perspective (if anything, I'll critique stuff from her blog, but not on it).

The ghastly intellectual fraud involved in either claiming, or accepting from others, a designation as a "spokesperson" or "a national voice on Mormon life and politics" while that voice is imbued with ideas, concepts, and philosophies dredged from the deepest abyssal planes of the academic Left and its churning cauldron of "studies" departments and pseudo-academic disciplines demands an intellectually substantive, assertive response.

Here's the link.

http://joannabrookwsatch.wordpress.com/

All coherent, substantive, civil, if adverse, feedback, is welcome.

[_Droopy]

I think the tar pits invaded the grammar and gave us "viscous" here.

Thanks Blixa, I really needed a good laugh tonight.

I do sometimes mix up, hurrying through a posts, "vicious" for "viscous." Its a common typo. Since, however, only juvenile snarks and pseudo-intellectual snobs correct simple spelling errors on obscure message boards, such corrections go unnoticed outside of the high school clique atmosphere of this board.

As someone who's never made a single intellectually substantive statement on this board since its horrid birth, Blixa is no one to sneer at what are obviously typos that were not noticed.

I also see no reason to be concerned about minor spelling or punctuation errors (I find them in numerous books I read from major publishers) while engaging in banter and shooting of the bull on this board.

Blixa's mother rides a vacuum cleaner.

[_Droopy]

Also as the tar pits are about 22 feet at their deepest, they hardly serve as a metaphor for depth...

Well above the head of a Woolly Mammoth or Mastodon. The idea is, of course, that leftist beliefs, ideas, and visions of humanity and society are much like the tar within the La Brea pits: dark, viscous, sticky, and deep - deep enough to trap the mind, intellect, and soul and starve them of the sustenance and light necessary for intellectual and moral life, growth, and progression.

Only bones are left behind.

[Guest]

joanna's answer after a slight pause " i have nothing to say to them ; they have lots of things to keep them busy and to worry about" -very surprising answer from a Mormon feminist.

This is exactly the kind of answer I would expect from a Mormon feminist. She's completely outside the Kingdom. Completely alienated (as she is from America and its founding principles and animating ideas).

Precisely what I would expect from any self-conscious leftist who was also a member of the Church. There's nothing to say to the old, white, capitalist, eurocentric males who support the systems of structural oppression that make America the hellish furnace of bigotry and injustice that it is.

What could one of the Anointed possibly say?

[_Droopy]

Droopy - why can't you just ask her out and have done with it?

1. Because I'm married.

2. She looks like R. Emmet Tyrrell Jr.

[_Droopy]

[_Droopy]

Talk about mangled language:

“Internet Mormonism” a favorite playground (and battlefield) for LDS intellectuals seeking dialogue and debate from various sides of the LDS fence; committed and faithful, apostate or “ex-Mormon,” and “cultural Mormon,” which is a kind of apostate that is not an apostate but is, for all intents, an apostate who, however, doesn’t want to be thought of as an apostate and in fact may believe quite strongly that faithful LDS who hold to the totality of the core truth claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are, indeed, the real apostates.

All in one sentence......

Yup.