The Apologetic War against Online Criticism
Posted: Thu May 10, 2012 2:02 am
After enduring the latest round of slogging it out with the various characters who conveniently show up here to mislead and confuse the issues in the wake of some apologetic gaffe or "boner" coming to light, I thought it would be useful to pause for a moment and consider the possibility that, like the defenders of Scientology against its critics, LDS apologists have become increasingly sophisticated in the way that they try to suppress any negative, critical, or even candid discussion of the LDS Church and the apologists who defend it. Indeed, I think it not unlikely that they have read up on Scientologists' methods of dealing with the internet and have applied these lessons, even here on lowly MDB.
Consider the following, taken from the wikipedia article on Scientology and the Internet:
This should seem very familiar by now, since for some time we have had our seemingly benign doofus posters like Simon Belmont, stemelbow, and now static, who do their very best to play the dullard (perhaps not with much extra effort in some cases), misread everything, interpret things in misleading ways, and generally muck up every discussion they get involved in. Obviously, these guys have their own schtick, but it is clear to me that the intention is to perform some kind of damage control when an apologist gets caught in his zipper and needs some distraction, etc.
Moving on, the following passage is highly reminiscent of the More Good Foundation's early stated goals:
Most recently, we have witnessed the appearance of Mormon Voices, the stated purpose of which is to:
We saw up close how ridiculous and disproportionate such responses could get in the TIME Lightbox incident, wherein Daniel Peterson, Will Schryver, and some others did their best in the quixotic enterprise of making a photographer who took some pictures of his Utah family look like an anti-Mormon because the photos were not sunny and peppy--much to the chagrin of non-apologist members of the LDS Church who thought these apologists were nuts and making the Church look bad by overreacting.
In any case, it is important to understand who we are dealing with. These are highly motivated people, some who have dedicated their entire lives and staked their entire fortunes, humble though they may be, on fighting a war. They see us, as different from each other as we may be, and they see an enemy in that war, because we dare to talk to each other here on MDB and say things about apologetics or Mormonism that do not tend to flatter the subject. That just will not do, and we must be stopped. The Scientologists have blazed the trail for the apologists, and now the LDS apologists have picked up their playbook of spamming, irrelevancy, legal threats, and the like, and made it their own.
We have all been fairly warned by the things we have watched unfold lately.
Consider the following, taken from the wikipedia article on Scientology and the Internet:
After failing to remove the newsgroup, Scientologists adopted a strategy of newsgroup spam and intimidation.[25] Scientologists hired third parties to regularly flood the newsgroup with pro-scientology messages, vague anti-scientology messages, irrelevant comments, and accusations that other posters are secret Scientologists intent on tracking and punishing posters. This makes the newsgroup virtually unreadable via online readers such as Google Groups, although more specialized newsreading software that can filter out all messages by specific "high noise" posters make the newsgroup more usable.
This should seem very familiar by now, since for some time we have had our seemingly benign doofus posters like Simon Belmont, stemelbow, and now static, who do their very best to play the dullard (perhaps not with much extra effort in some cases), misread everything, interpret things in misleading ways, and generally muck up every discussion they get involved in. Obviously, these guys have their own schtick, but it is clear to me that the intention is to perform some kind of damage control when an apologist gets caught in his zipper and needs some distraction, etc.
Moving on, the following passage is highly reminiscent of the More Good Foundation's early stated goals:
In the early days of the World Wide Web, Scientology attempted a similar strategy to make finding websites critical of the organization more difficult. Scientology employed Web designers to write thousands of Web pages for their site, thus flooding early search engines.[27] This problem was solved by the innovation of clustering responses from the same Web server, showing no more than the top two results from any one site (e.g. Google).
Most recently, we have witnessed the appearance of Mormon Voices, the stated purpose of which is to:
...respond to public discussions and comments from public figures that misrepresent The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
We saw up close how ridiculous and disproportionate such responses could get in the TIME Lightbox incident, wherein Daniel Peterson, Will Schryver, and some others did their best in the quixotic enterprise of making a photographer who took some pictures of his Utah family look like an anti-Mormon because the photos were not sunny and peppy--much to the chagrin of non-apologist members of the LDS Church who thought these apologists were nuts and making the Church look bad by overreacting.
In any case, it is important to understand who we are dealing with. These are highly motivated people, some who have dedicated their entire lives and staked their entire fortunes, humble though they may be, on fighting a war. They see us, as different from each other as we may be, and they see an enemy in that war, because we dare to talk to each other here on MDB and say things about apologetics or Mormonism that do not tend to flatter the subject. That just will not do, and we must be stopped. The Scientologists have blazed the trail for the apologists, and now the LDS apologists have picked up their playbook of spamming, irrelevancy, legal threats, and the like, and made it their own.
We have all been fairly warned by the things we have watched unfold lately.