DCP's "Humble Apologetics"

[_Daniel Peterson]

our old buddy LifeOnaPlate . . . the Mickey Mouse-ear-wearing amateur apologist and full-time brown-noser . . . "Scotty Dog" Gordon

This sort of thing does make Master Scartch's handwringing about the supposedly negative tone of the FARMS Review seem a little bit like staged melodrama, doesn't it?

Oh well. Gotta go.

Time out, Scartch.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

You know, since this topic has come up, I should say that I am still waiting for you to provide one single example of an openly LDS BoM-historicity article which has been published in a peer-reviewed venue. LoaP threw in the towel some time back, finally admitting that no such articles exist. Are you ready to man up and do the same?

That's odd. I don't remember throwing in any towel. Parenthetically, I thought of an example of Book of Mormon issues being discussed in non-LDS scholarly venues. I'll just toss it out there so you can dismiss it out of hand. John Tvedtnes presented his "Hebrew Names in the Book of Mormon," at the 13th World Congress of Jewish Studies, held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I don't know of it being published in a journal other than FAIR, but can you find any scholars from that meeting laughing about this paper, or decrying it? I can't.

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/insig ... m=9&id=215

[_LifeOnaPlate]

Why not admit defeat, as your brave acolyte LoaP was willing to do? There'd be more dignity in it.

I don't recall "admitting defeat." Can you go grap your files on me and show me the record?

[_LifeOnaPlate]

Daniel C. Peterson, "The Witchcraft Paradigm: On Claims to 'Second Sight' by People Who Say It Doesn't Exist," FARMS Review 18/2 (2006).

Uh. No. But hey... At least someone thinks you're professional enough to employ. *rolling eyes*

I'd bet a million dollars you have not read that article. The whole article. I'd most assuredly bet one million dollars on the spot.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

By the way, I wanted to commend LifeOnaPlate for excellent work on your blog concerning these meetings. I appreciate all the work you did to cover these.

;)

[_Mister Scratch]

FARMS Review is rather unique in terms of its polemics, character assassinations, and ad hominem attacks.

That's BS from both sides: Your caricature of the Review is false, and there's plenty of ad hominem, character-assassinating polemics in the academic world at large.

1) It is not false. As Trevor has pointed out, I am not alone in finding problems with FROB's tone.

2) Just because there is supposedly "plenty of ad hominem elsewhere does not justify its presence in the FARMS Review

The claims made in FARMS publications would not cut the mustard in other academic venues on similar topics (such as meso-American history).

And you speak for the field of Mesoamerican studies?

No, and that's my point: nobody does. There is not a singly frankly Mormon article on Book of Mormon historicity to be found in any reputable Mesoamerican studies publication.

FROB is, in the end, a collection of book reviews, which as you yourself have stated, usually aren't peer reviewed at all. So: one kind of has to wonder why the folks at the Maxwell Institute thought it was necessary to tack on superfluous reviews for texts which usually aren't peer reviewed at all. Common sense would lead one to conclude that this is being done in order to lend gravitas to the whole affair---a kind of bogus "academic" patina that makes everything seem kosher.

Huh? We didn't initiate discussion of the question of whether the Review is peer reviewed or not.

Well, then, who did?

If peer review is so unimportant to you, then why do you employ it for the FARMS Review? If it is so unnecessary, then why not do away with it all together?

Try to grasp the point, Scartch. Peer review isn't "unimportant" to me. That's why we've had peer review at FARMS and even for the FARMS Review, for many years, since long before your creepy network of "anonymous informants" began to feed you information for your creepy "dossiers."

I simply recognize that peer review isn't absolutely necessary for the production of good work, and that it doesn't prevent the publication of bad work. Brilliant things were published before the rise of the modern sytem of peer review. Worthless things continue to be published even though that system is now almost universal in academia. (I say almost because I happen to know that, in some fields, very prestigious and important publications continue to appear without having undergone peer review.)

I understand your point, Professor P. It's just that peer review is held up by TBMs as a sign the the work coming out of FARMS is "legit." Obviously, if peer review is neither here nor there, as you suggest, then it should not be available to TBMs as a "plus" for FARMS.

Peer review is essentially for the benefit of editors, so that, if there are any major flaws in a submitted manuscript, they can increase the chances of those flaws being noticed prior to publication.

Which, of course, brings us back to my basic line of argument/inquiry. *You* are the editor of FROB, which therefore means (according to your reasoning) that the peer reviewers are "essentially for the benefit of" you. So, it is high time to do away with the fallacy that the peer editing at FARMS does anything to help the academic standards therein. It is just as I said before: the peer review at FARMS is more about affirming Church orthodoxy than it is about maintaining high academic standards. Heck, Bill Hamblin himself said that he routinely passes along bogus footnotes and whatnot---items which apparently get sent to the peer reviewers. All of this strongly suggests that this isn't so much an academic organization as it is a sort of locker room yuk-fest, sort of along the lines of l-skinny.

I like such review, and am happy to use it. I simply don't believe that the quality of a published book or article should be determined principally, or even secondarily, by compiling "dossiers" on its peer reviewers.

Of course you don't believe that. As for the rest of us, it is clear that something that the peer reviewers are doing have led to the publication of the many appalling articles in FARMS Review. One cannot help but wonder what sort of individuals would allow stuff like "That Old Black Magic" to go to print.

[_Daniel Peterson]

It is not false. As Trevor has pointed out, I am not alone in finding problems with FROB's tone.

I believe it to be false. There's no disputing about taste, but many people find no problem with the Review's tone. That you claim to -- while favoring such locutions as "the Mickey Mouse-ear-wearing amateur apologist and full-time brown-noser" and "'Scotty Dog' Gordon" -- is psychologically interesting, but hardly definitive.

Just because there is supposedly "plenty of ad hominem elsewhere does not justify its presence in the FARMS Review

You said that the Review is unique because of its allegedly bad tone. I pointed out that it would not be unique even if it really had the bad tone that you allege, since bad tone is far from unknown in academia. But I also denied your allegation.

Huh? We didn't initiate discussion of the question of whether the Review is peer reviewed or not.

Well, then, who did?

You're as good a candidate as anybody. It certainly wasn't us. From our perspective, peer review is just a question of professional methodology, not something to boast about or make into propaganda. It's presumed. Routine. Expected. A procedural matter. Nothing to write home about. It only becomes an issue when you and any others of your tribe attack us on the subject.

It's just that peer review is held up by TBMs as a sign the the work coming out of FARMS is "legit." Obviously, if peer review is neither here nor there, as you suggest, then it should not be available to TBMs as a "plus" for FARMS.

I've never made an issue of it except to deny claims that we don't do it.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen any Latter-day Saint make an issue of it in any other context. It would be helpful if, drawing on your extensive "dossiers," you could provide me with some actual examples of this alleged boasting.

Peer review is essentially for the benefit of editors, so that, if there are any major flaws in a submitted manuscript, they can increase the chances of those flaws being noticed prior to publication.

Which, of course, brings us back to my basic line of argument/inquiry. *You* are the editor of FROB, which therefore means (according to your reasoning) that the peer reviewers are "essentially for the benefit of" you. So, it is high time to do away with the fallacy that the peer editing at FARMS does anything to help the academic standards therein..

What????

What?????????

That's precisely what it's for. It's to help me ensure high standards. It's to help me detect flaws of evidence or argumentation before an article sees print. It's to help me when the essay is on a topic for which I lack expertise. It's designed, exactly, "to help the academic standards therein."

Good grief.

It is just as I said before: the peer review at FARMS is more about affirming Church orthodoxy than it is about maintaining high academic standards. Heck, Bill Hamblin himself said that he routinely passes along bogus footnotes and whatnot---items which apparently get sent to the peer reviewers. All of this strongly suggests that this isn't so much an academic organization as it is a sort of locker room yuk-fest, sort of along the lines of l-skinny.

I'm sorry that I don't share your apparent assumption that scholars, to be legitimate, must always be solemn.

Perhaps, though, we need to introduce more humor along the lines of "the Mickey Mouse-ear-wearing amateur apologist and full-time brown-noser" and "'Scotty Dog' Gordon."

You're it.

[_Mister Scratch]

It is not false. As Trevor has pointed out, I am not alone in finding problems with FROB's tone.

I believe it to be false. There's no disputing about taste, but many people find no problem with the Review's tone. That you claim to -- while favoring such locutions as "the Mickey Mouse-ear-wearing amateur apologist and full-time brown-noser" and "'Scotty Dog' Gordon" -- is psychologically interesting, but hardly definitive.

A nice try. Obviously, I'm not writing for something which purports to be "academic" in nature.

You're as good a candidate as anybody. It certainly wasn't us. From our perspective, peer review is just a question of professional methodology, not something to boast about or make into propaganda. It's presumed. Routine. Expected. A procedural matter. Nothing to write home about. It only becomes an issue when you and any others of your tribe attack us on the subject.

How can this be so? Again: you yourself pointed out that it is *unusual* to send out book reviews to peer reviewers. And yet, here you are saying that it's "presumed" and "routine" and "expected." In other words, you are waffling and backpedaling because you are caught in yet another embarrassing predicament. Probably, you guys were sitting around the FARMS Board table, and once you got through divvying up the payments from your cushy year on the stock market, you guys said, "Hey, the antis will probably criticize us unless we peer review even our book reviews." In other words, the use of peer reviewing for book reviews can be said to be a form of propaganda in and of itself.

It's just that peer review is held up by TBMs as a sign the the work coming out of FARMS is "legit." Obviously, if peer review is neither here nor there, as you suggest, then it should not be available to TBMs as a "plus" for FARMS.

I've never made an issue of it except to deny claims that we don't do it.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen any Latter-day Saint make an issue of it in any other context. It would be helpful if, drawing on your extensive "dossiers," you could provide me with some actual examples of this alleged boasting.

Do you deny that the peer reviewing at FARMS is meant to lend legitimacy to the whole enterprise?

Which, of course, brings us back to my basic line of argument/inquiry. *You* are the editor of FROB, which therefore means (according to your reasoning) that the peer reviewers are "essentially for the benefit of" you. So, it is high time to do away with the fallacy that the peer editing at FARMS does anything to help the academic standards therein..

What????

What?????????

That's precisely what it's for. It's to help me ensure high standards. It's to help me detect flaws of evidence or argumentation before an article sees print. It's to help me when the essay is on a topic for which I lack expertise. It's designed, exactly, "to help the academic standards therein."

Good grief.

Bull. It is about advancing FARMS's polemical agenda, plain and simple. I defy you to demonstrate otherwise.

It is just as I said before: the peer review at FARMS is more about affirming Church orthodoxy than it is about maintaining high academic standards. Heck, Bill Hamblin himself said that he routinely passes along bogus footnotes and whatnot---items which apparently get sent to the peer reviewers. All of this strongly suggests that this isn't so much an academic organization as it is a sort of locker room yuk-fest, sort of along the lines of l-skinny.

I'm sorry that I don't share your apparent assumption that scholars, to be legitimate, must always be solemn.

Wow, you really are struggling today, aren't you? Of course scholars needn't always be "solemn." There is a time and a place, and all of that. Isn't that what l-skinny is for, after all?
But, if these are the sort of antics that pass for "serious scholarship" and "peer review" at FARMS, then I think critics have a real point.

[_Daniel Peterson]

A nice try. Obviously, I'm not writing for something which purports to be "academic" in nature.

But you don't really care all that much, it seems, about maintaining a respectful tone.

How can this be so? Again: you yourself pointed out that it is *unusual* to send out book reviews to peer reviewers. And yet, here you are saying that it's "presumed" and "routine" and "expected."

It's routine internal procedure in academia generally. Do you have a problem with the fact that I wanted to raise the standards of the FARMS Review a bit higher than is common in academic book reviewing, and assimilate them to the broader standard?

It seems that there's only one constant in your posts to me: complaining. You complain if we do X. You complain if we don't do X. And it just goes on and on and on and on.

Have you ever thought of changing hobbies? My wife's grandparents had a friend who collected souvenir spoons. She found it very fulfilling.

In other words, you are waffling and backpedaling because you are caught in yet another embarrassing predicament.

Good golly gosh yes. I'm simply mortified.

[What on earth is this guy talking about?]

Probably, you guys were sitting around the FARMS Board table, and once you got through divvying up the payments from your cushy year on the stock market, you guys said, "Hey, the antis will probably criticize us unless we peer review even our book reviews."

You forgot to mention the Havana cigars, and the scantily-clad blonde bimbo on each knee. Heheheh. Good times.

In other words, the use of peer reviewing for book reviews can be said to be a form of propaganda in and of itself.

Except that, as I've just pointed out -- incidentally, have you ever undergone tests for short-term memory loss? -- we've never made a public issue of peer reviewing, which we regard as purely an internal procedural matter, the academic equivalent of basic quality control on a production line. It only comes up when you and your small ilk claim that we don't do it.

Do you deny that the peer reviewing at FARMS is meant to lend legitimacy to the whole enterprise?

In the sense that we use peer review to try to maintain or improve the quality of our work, not at all.

In the sense that we use peer review to score public propaganda points, I absolutely do deny it. We simply don't.

If you think otherwise, feel free to draw upon your extensive network of creepy "anonymous informants" and to search through your creepy "dossiers" in order to find evidence to support your view.

Bull. It is about advancing FARMS's polemical agenda, plain and simple. I defy you to demonstrate otherwise.

You're the one making the wacked out accusation.

You're it.

[_Trevor]

I'm aware of that, and I regret it. It seems to have hardened into a kind of orthodoxy in certain quarters, such that some folks won't even look at what we publish -- a textbook instance, by the way, of the ad hominem fallacy of distraction.

I am sure there are those who do fall into the trap of blind prejudice against FARMS and the Review. I don't doubt it. But there are also those who have formed their negative opinions based on actual reading experience. Just because some take their dislike of FARMS as an untested article of faith does not mean that all who share a similar view have not tested it.

Many people -- and perhaps an unusually high proportion of Latter-day Saints -- simply don't like even the slightest degree of rough and tumble debate or confrontation. They find it offensive or off-putting. I happen to have grown up outside of Mormondom, reading things like National Review, The American Spectator, and so forth, and I like wit and a polemical edge. I think that BYU Studies, for example, is solid but a bit bland. De gustibus non est disputandum.

I would agree on both accounts (confrontation-averse LDS and bland BYU Studies).

Much of the image of FARMS as harshly polemical is undeserved. First of all, most of what FARMS has published isn't polemical at all. Most, even, of the FARMS Review isn't polemical. So it's unfair to generalize from a few examples in the Review to the entire Review, and even more unfair to generalize from those items to FARMS as a whole.

Speaking as a Classicist, I would say that the Review has a saucier tone than I am accustomed to. I would also say that at times the quality dips lower than I am used to.

1) One or two people have complained to me that our reviews of Grant Palmer's book were nothing but strings of personal insults. Now, I think that this is altogether unjust even with regard to Louis Midgley and Davis Bitton's essays. But it's patently absurd when it's said about the responses by Mark Ashurst-McGee, Steven Harper, and James Allen.

"Nothing but a string of personal insults" would be hyperbole. "Not infrequently insulting" might be fair. The Ashurst-McGee review I reread recently. I thought that it was a good review. Elsewhere the focus on the word "Insider" was overplayed and, to be blunt, silly.

3) A very gentle prominent retired Mormon academic, who has been a friend for roughly twenty years, actually took me out to lunch once, to continue trying to persuade me to take the Review in a gentler direction. Finally, though, he wrote a review for me of a rather controversial book. It was negative, but kindly in tone. Since then, he's been ripped into by a number of Church critics for his supposed viciousness. I think it's been a real eye-opener for him.

I imagine it was. And, of course, you can't please everyone. Still, I have had the experience, on more than one occasion, of reading a book, going to the Review to see reactions there, and asking myself, "what book was that person reading? Did (s)he have a different edition than the one I read?" Then I ask around to see what others (not antis and exMos) thought of the book and of the review in the FR. More than a few times they voiced similar reactions. While not a scientific study, I have not been inclined to dismiss this anecdotal evidence as utterly worthless.

In my field, it is now considered impolite if not unacceptable to act like a jerk when interacting with others' work. Naturally, this does not prevent all jerkish behavior from occurring, but I have been surprised at how politic and diplomatic people tend to be in reviews and conferences. Recently, I was taken to task a little by an eminent Hellenist for a piece of theory I was using, and yet she did it with such good humor that I was not bothered in the least, and I took something valuable from the criticism. By contrast I was once asked a bunch of empty questions by a graduate student who was looking to appear tough. Not only was this annoying, but it was a complete waste of my time.

This jerkish behavior of which I speak also includes what some people who write for the Review seem to categorize as "all in good fun." Now, I don't consider myself to be a completely humorless prig, although many may disagree, and yet I do think that a professional and collegial tone, even used in reference to arguments with which we vehemently disagree, is not only preferable, but also more effective. But, as you say, de gustibus non est disputandum. Still, I hope, for the sake of the cause you hold dear, that all of these high spirits don't cut the spirits of others off at the knees too frequently. Given the seriousness of your mission and responsibility, it would be more than a shame.

I am not suggesting that you have not considered these things. I simply respectfully disagree with where you have tended to draw the line. All the same, peace be with you.