Oh yes, it's magnificent. It has a certain heroic pathos to it that calls to mind an image like this:
"Remember the FARMS, brother Boyd, the FARMS."
If so, it would be a pointed and typical example of their delusional status-seeking. Everything always has a kernel of the real, but then they water it with their delusions until out of some small truth has sprouted an exaggerated lie. It's characteristic of everything that group has produced from Nibley on, but it's of a piece with how they describe their relationships with the Church hierarchy.
And, by the way, the videos of Church leaders discussing world events a few years back did not leave me with the impression that the relevant member of the 15 would have even known what a podcast is. The Greg Smith piece would have been unintelligible to him.
"Brother Gong," asked Elder Packer with all the elegance of a sneezing camel, "do we sell copies of the Facebook at Deseret Book?"
I always had the impression that each of these guys have their own little pet projects and concerns where they have some limited autonomy to dilate. In that view of things, Oaks, a former professional intellectual who had been associated with Dialogue in its early years, was probably much more interested in the sort of stuff to do with Sunstone and its direction in the 80s and early 90s than the others, just as Packer, the CES commissar, had a deep interest in all things to do with that department of the Church. One could think of other examples. The mural on the crumbling wall of Midgley's mind is probably not all that far off in its general shapes: Maxwell probably really did care a lot about FARMS and the eponymous institute that grew out of it and probably went to bat for it/them, and maybe he expressed that to Packer in some fashion, though the death-bed scene is as ridiculous as it sounds. In my speculation, though, they were on borrowed time once they lost their patron. Packer was no intellectual like Maxwell, and I really doubt that he had much interest in what the FARMS people did. He was more like McConkie, who openly denigrated the study of ancient languages and antiquities for the purpose of scriptural investigation: we have the "standard works," so what do you need the learning of men for? Packer was with McConkie on the committee that produced the LDS edition of the Bible, which isn't exactly notable for its scholarly apparatus. And while there probably is some rule or other to the effect that Midgley outlines, it just seems unlikely that such a rule would have anything to do with personnel decisions, which is what the MI shakeup was. It's not like Peterson was an apostate being fired from BYU or anything that drastic or high profile.Kishkumen wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 1:21 amI agree with you on the removal of DCP from the Review. But the hit piece is something I am prepared to believe more GAs knew about. If Oaks bothered to call out Sunstone to millions of members who had no clue up to that point what that was, surely they were all peeing their pants about a popular podcast with many more thousands of downloads than Sunstone subscriptions.
