The Mormon Apologist's Modus Operandi

[_Doctor Scratch]

The Review can be whatever you want it to be. But let's not pretend that it's not bellicose, and that it's not using a stunningly rigged peer review system.

I don't have to "pretend."

It's not "bellicose," though it can be combative. (The two words have very different connotations.)

Right. Uh huh. "They started it!" Sure. Early Mormonism and the Magical World View was a direct attack on FARMS, as was the FHE game. Are you really trying to claim that these authors are the ones who "picked the fight"?

Remember, I'm the one who runs the confidential peer review system for the FARMS Review. You're the one who knows nothing about it, and makes stuff up. So, if we're not going to pretend, let's not pretend any more that you have any real idea what you're talking about.

I'm satisfied with your admission that the process is meant to produce more effectively "combative" articles.

One wonders why a review-based "journal" would need peer reviewers at all. Most scholarly book reviews, after all, don't receive peer review.

That's correct. I've made that point to you a great number of times. It seems that you've finally begun to internalize it.

Here's the reason we use peer review: It helps us with quality control. We don't need it, but we do it anyway. For which, predictably, you damn us.

[...]

If we had ever made a big deal about our peer review, you might have had a point. But we never even mentioned it -- for years -- until a few critics such as yourself began to criticize us for supposedly having none.

Your story just keeps getting more and more convoluted and strange. At first, you used a "secret" peer review, and just never told anybody. It was only *after* critics started to say something that you unveiled the fact that, uncharacteristically, you guys *do* in fact use a peer review! This is just....weird. Most scholarly journals announce from the outset that they use peer reviewers who are selected on the basis of their expertist. With FARMS Review, though, peer review was not mentioned for years, and then, POOF! once critics start saying something, all of the sudden, there is a peer review system in place---or, at least, the apologists "unveil" the fact that they have a peer review system---a peer review system, which, by the editor's own admission, is "unneeded." Now: this blows me away. Can you imagine Science, or any other reputable journal admitting that peer review is "unneeded"? Stunning.

This is really a new twist in the whole FARMS Peer Review Saga. In fact, I daresay that this is a watershed moment.

You criticize us no matter what we do.

I only criticize the stuff that needs criticizing. Do you see me hammering on Terryl Givens or Richard Bushman or David Bokovoy? Do you see me criticizing the FARMS works that are more scholarly in nature?

The issue was not whether "people whose opinions [you] value" like the Review. The issue is whether "fair minded" people, following the links you endlessly post, would "like" it, or would approve of the "ironic, satirical bent." The total number of "fair minded people" you've so far named is: Zero.

What would be gained by naming them?

It would make your point seem halfway vaild.

If you think I'm lying now,

I don't think you're "lying," per se. I think you're giving an answer to a question I didn't ask.

[_Daniel Peterson]

It's not "bellicose," though it can be combative. (The two words have very different connotations.)

Right. Uh huh. "They started it!" Sure. Early Mormonism and the Magical World View was a direct attack on FARMS, as was the FHE game. Are you really trying to claim that these authors are the ones who "picked the fight"?

What on earth are you talking about?

Do you yourself have even the faintest idea?

I'm satisfied with your admission that the process is meant to produce more effectively "combative" articles.

Anybody who reads through the posts above will readily see that I "admitted" no such thing.

This is your typical method. You make things up.

Your story just keeps getting more and more convoluted and strange.

It doesn't, of course.

At first, you used a "secret" peer review, and just never told anybody. It was only *after* critics started to say something that you unveiled the fact that, uncharacteristically, you guys *do* in fact use a peer review! This is just....weird.

It was never "secret," and I never said anything to that effect. (You just make this stuff up.)

We made no fuss about peer review because, for most of academia, peer review is nothing more than a routine procedural matter. It doesn't get a fanfare from John Williams or a twenty-one-gun salute. Why announce something, and make a big deal of something, that, for most academic things, is presumed and self-evident to most people? Making a big announcement about peer review -- a process that exists primarily to help the editor make good decisions and to improve quality, not for PR purposes -- never even occurred to us. No more than standing up at an academic conference and announcing that one has a doctorate would ever occur to any normal person. Such things are so ordinary as to require no special notice.

Do I need to point out, explicitly, to you, that my cars have tires, that my shoes have soles, that my kids breathe oxygen, that I was born, or that there is a sky above Utah?

a peer review system, which, by the editor's own admission, is "unneeded." Now: this blows me away. Can you imagine Science, or any other reputable journal admitting that peer review is "unneeded"? Stunning.

Do you have short-term memory problems? You yourself acknowledged, just above in this very thread, that academic book reviews are seldom if ever themselves peer-reviewed. (The ones I've written never have been, so far as I can tell.) Since the FARMS Review is, by design, essentially a collection of book reviews -- perhaps you've seen a copy of Science? It's not simply a collection of book reviews -- we could dispense with peer review and still be complying with normal academic practice. For which you would undoubtedly attack us. But we don't dispense with it. We use peer review. For which you attack us.

This is really a new twist in the whole FARMS Peer Review Saga. In fact, I daresay that this is a watershed moment.

A WATERSHED MOMENT(c)!

LOL. Right.

I have, in fact, said precisely the same thing several times before. While you were sleeping, it appears.

I only criticize the stuff that needs criticizing.

In your warped opinion.

Do you see me criticizing the FARMS works that are more scholarly in nature?

I don't know that you've even read anything else. It was pretty clear, a year or two ago, that you were unfamiliar with a lot that had been published in the FARMS Review itself. You've never shown much interest, if any, in anything substantial.

[_Doctor Scratch]

]Right. Uh huh. "They started it!" Sure. Early Mormonism and the Magical World View was a direct attack on FARMS, as was the FHE game. Are you really trying to claim that these authors are the ones who "picked the fight"?

What on earth are you talking about?

Do you yourself have even the faintest idea?

Sure. "Bellicose" suggests aggression and a propensity to pick fights---that's why I used the word. You substituted "combative," presumably because you see yourself and your fellow FARMSboys purely as defenders. Right? Well, if that's the case, you're going to have an extremely hard time explaining how the authors I mentioned are attacking FARMS, let alone the Church.

At first, you used a "secret" peer review, and just never told anybody. It was only *after* critics started to say something that you unveiled the fact that, uncharacteristically, you guys *do* in fact use a peer review! This is just....weird.

It was never "secret," and I never said anything to that effect. (You just make this stuff up.)

We made no fuss about peer review because, for most of academia, peer review is nothing more than a routine procedural matter. It doesn't get a fanfare from John Williams or a twenty-one-gun salute. Why announce something, and make a big deal of something, that, for most academic things, is presumed and self-evident to most people?

It's not "self-evident" for book reviews.

Making a big announcement about peer review -- a process that exists primarily to help the editor make good decisions and to improve quality, not for PR purposes -- never even occurred to us. No more than standing up at an academic conference and announcing that one has a doctorate would ever occur to any normal person. Such things are so ordinary as to require no special notice.

Who said anything about a "big announcement"? In the Submission Guidelines for the typical academic journal, the peer review process at least gets a token mention. Ah, but we need to recall that, for many years, FARMS Review's submission guidelines were essentially kept under lock and key. I.e., they weren't available for perusal online. The reason for this is that you guys didn't want submissions in the usual sense; virtually all of your articles were solicited.

Do I need to point out, explicitly, to you, that my cars have tires, that my shoes have soles, that my kids breathe oxygen, that I was born, or that there is a sky above Utah?

Gee, I dunno. If your car was actually a boat, you might. If your shoes were actually Kleenex boxes, you might. If your kids were amphibious, you might. If Utah was located on Mars....uh, well, don't answer that.

That's kind of the point: the FARMS Review is unlike a typical academic journal at virtually every juncture, despite your vigorous attempts to defend it as being "typically academic" and "typically scholarly." It has a lot of the outward, superficial signs of being "academic" and "scholarly," but as we've learned, it differs in a lot of significant ways, including the issue of peer review.

I don't know why this is so hard for you to concede or admit to, but, then again, your three decade career of attacking critics, coupled with your irrational and white-hot hatred for me, probably has something to do with it.

a peer review system, which, by the editor's own admission, is "unneeded." Now: this blows me away. Can you imagine Science, or any other reputable journal admitting that peer review is "unneeded"? Stunning.

Do you have short-term memory problems? You yourself acknowledged, just above in this very thread, that academic book reviews are seldom if ever themselves peer-reviewed. (The ones I've written never have been, so far as I can tell.) Since the FARMS Review is, by design, essentially a collection of book reviews -- perhaps you've seen a copy of Science? It's not simply a collection of book reviews -- we could dispense with peer review and still be complying with normal academic practice. For which you would undoubtedly attack us. But we don't dispense with it. We use peer review. For which you attack us.

Well, yes. I do. I don't think that you guys are using peer review in the same sense that most of us understand it. I think you're using it primarily to lend credence to apologetics. And, I think that you have been fundamentally misrepresenting what peer review is supposed to be about. The TBMs hear you say, "We use typical peer review at FARMS," and they think that all is well. What they aren't told is:

---It's not "typical" for book reviews to be peer reviewed.
---It's not "typical" for peer reviewers to be selected on the basis of ideological bias, rather than expertise (and yes: I do realize that we could argue whether there is any real distinction between these things)
---It's not "typical" for the editor to regard his own peer review as "unneeded" for the given journal's scholarship

Look: I know you hate me and think that I'm just "insane," but I think this is an important, serious, and substantive point. Peer review at FARMS is *not* the same as it is in normal, scholarly journals, and to claim that it is is a gross mischaracterization. I think that you have been conflating terms and engaging in a lot of sophistry on this issue. I understand why you're doing it: you love the Church, you love apologetics, and you want people to believe in FARMS, and to treat it as a credible and respectable institution. But the way you have been twisting what peer review is all about.... *That* I disagree with. And yes: I do realize that your response has been to the critics, and that you would have kept the FARMS peer review a tightly guarded secret if no one had brought it up. Then again, I doubt that critics would have brought it up if you and other FARMSboys hadn't insisted that FARMS Review is a "typically" scholarly/academic journal.

I only criticize the stuff that needs criticizing.

In your warped opinion.

I'm not the only one who's offered up this sort of criticism. I guess there are a lot of us "warped" folks out there, eh?

Do you see me criticizing the FARMS works that are more scholarly in nature?

I don't know that you've even read anything else. It was pretty clear, a year or two ago, that you were unfamiliar with a lot that had been published in the FARMS Review itself. You've never shown much interest, if any, in anything substantial.

"Substantial" according to whom? You? You think that Ed Decker and Loftes Tryk are "substantial" enough to merit peer-reviewed, multi-page articles....

Frankly, I think that the integrity of FARMS's "peer review" process, and the question of whether it's okay to claim that FARMS's peer review is comparable to typical academic peer review is quite substantive and important. And you apparently do, too---hence your participation on the thread.

[_Daniel Peterson]

"Bellicose" suggests aggression and a propensity to pick fights---that's why I used the word.

I know. That's why I rejected it.

you're going to have an extremely hard time explaining how the authors I mentioned are attacking FARMS, let alone the Church.

I think -- and I'm far from alone in this -- that elements of Mike Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View constituted a challenge, in some ways, to important elements of Mormonism as I and others understand, believe, and practice it. And, with others, I think that challenge unwarranted. The reviews that we published agreed, said so, and argued for their positions.

I said that the Review "can be combative," not that it always is. So your demand that I explain how an FHE book constituted an attack on the Church is, as you know, ridiculous.

Ah, but we need to recall that, for many years, FARMS Review's submission guidelines were essentially kept under lock and key. I.e., they weren't available for perusal online.

They weren't "kept under lock and key."

You just make this stuff up.

Anybody who wanted to submit a manuscript or was asked to submit a manuscript got them. There's nothing mysterious about them. They mention some citation rules, announce that we follow the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, etc. Pretty much one sheet, on one side. Nothing very dramatic.

The reason for this is that you guys didn't want submissions in the usual sense; virtually all of your articles were solicited.

With one or maybe two exceptions, all of my academic book reviews have been solicited.

There's nothing really unusual or scandalous about this.

That's kind of the point: the FARMS Review is unlike a typical academic journal at virtually every juncture, despite your vigorous attempts to defend it as being "typically academic" and "typically scholarly."

I've defended it as academic and scholarly, and as following most major conventions in the publication of academic journals. But it was designed to fill a niche, and I'm not at all ashamed or uncomfortable about that.

It has a lot of the outward, superficial signs of being "academic" and "scholarly," but as we've learned, it differs in a lot of significant ways, including the issue of peer review.

Yes. It has more rigorous peer review than academic book reviews typically receive.

I don't know why this is so hard for you to concede or admit to, but, then again, your three decade career of attacking critics, coupled with your irrational and white-hot hatred for me, probably has something to do with it.

I don't hate you, Scratch. I just think you're an obsessive nutjob.

Well, yes. I do. I don't think that you guys are using peer review in the same sense that most of us understand it. I think you're using it primarily to lend credence to apologetics.

If we publicized our peer review, and boasted about it, you might have a point. But we don't.

Peer review is a method that we routinely use to try to maintain quality standards for what we publish. It's not a public relations tool, and we don't make a big deal about using it.

And, I think that you have been fundamentally misrepresenting what peer review is supposed to be about. The TBMs hear you say, "We use typical peer review at FARMS," and they think that all is well.

We scarcely even mention FARMS peer review publicly. See above.

What they aren't told is:

---It's not "typical" for book reviews to be peer reviewed.

That's right. In this regard, we exceed the "industry standard," if you will. You seem to believe that that discredits us, somehow. Why on earth you should imagine such a thing, I really can't begin to fathom.

---It's not "typical" for peer reviewers to be selected on the basis of ideological bias, rather than expertise (and yes: I do realize that we could argue whether there is any real distinction between these things)

When I choose a peer reviewer, I go for relevant expertise. When we publish on the DNA issue, for example, we get geneticists to do our peer review. When we publish something on Book of Mormon onomastics, we get Semitic philologists to do our peer review.

If you actually knew anything about the process, you would have known this. As it is, you simply make things up.

---It's not "typical" for the editor to regard his own peer review as "unneeded" for the given journal's scholarship

Surely you don't believe your own lies. I never said anything of the sort. I said that, by the standards of academic book reviewing, we didn't need peer review because the FARMS Review is essentially a collection of book reviews. (As you yourself said, just above, "It's not 'typical' for book reviews to be peer reviewed.") Yet we do it. And we do it, as I said several times above, because we want to ensure quality. So we go beyond what the normal standards are.

You seem to regard this as a liability and a negative. Why you do so eludes me completely.

Look: I know you hate me and think that I'm just "insane,"

I think you're insane, but I don't hate you. Why would I hate somebody just because he or she has a mental illness? It would be like hating someone because she had a broken arm, or because she was blind.

Peer review at FARMS is *not* the same as it is in normal, scholarly journals, and to claim that it is is a gross mischaracterization.

It's true that our peer review exceeds normal standards. But I don't see this as a negative thing, and I certainly don't intend to boast about it.

I'm not the only one who's offered up this sort of criticism. I guess there are a lot of us "warped" folks out there, eh?

Others have criticized the FARMS Review, in whole or in part. But nobody is within light years of being as extreme or as one-track obsessive on the matter as you have been for at least the past three years.

[_Paul Osborne]

I don't hate you, Scratch. I just think you're an obsessive nutjob.

Then let me hear you say, "I love you Scratch". I want to hear it. If you say it I will believe you.

Paul O

[_Daniel Peterson]

I don't hate you, Scratch. I just think you're an obsessive nutjob,

Then let me hear you say, "I love you Scratch". I want to hear it. If you say it I will believe you.

I'm not going to pretend that I have any great affection for Scratch. He's been maligning me with single-minded determination, from behind a protective curtain of anonymity, almost every day for the past three years.

But I don't hate him. And, in the sense that we're supposed to love everybody, I suppose it could be said that I love even him.

I actually don't hold grudges very well -- I would like to, sometimes, but I'm just not very good at it -- and I wouldn't find it difficult to be polite with Scratch, and so on, if he were to let up for even a few minutes on his relentless crusade to discredit me.

[_Paul Osborne]

Remember to love your enemies. It's not easy, I know. I believe you when you say that you don't hate him and I suppose you are working on learning to love him. That's good. I have great respect for that.

Hang in there.

Paul O

[_Gadianton]

It looks like I've missed out on quite a thread as once again professor Cam has given us some wise words to ponder.

I've had a chuckle this afternoon over the apologists' sugeestions that all academic journals are equally corrupt and this justifies an admitted rigged peer-review system at FARMS.

By way of analogy, let's say you have two countries, country A and country B. Let's say country A is expansionist and constantly attacking other countries, plundering and ravaging as they go. Country B sort of works on its economy and protects itself as necessary, tries to help out its neighbors and so on. It would be true to say that both countries are biased in a similar way, country A elects leaders that suits its stated objective to dominate the world and reduce all other civilizations to ashes, and country B elects leaders that more or less want things to be fair for people and keep GDP going. Country B is just as dogmatically devoted to it's own vision of peaceful coexistence with the world and thus is just as agenda driven, subjective, and biased in its own operation as country A.

Now, one thing interesting about this situation is that when citizens of country A question the doings of their leaders, the powers that be respond with propoganda aimed to show that they've merely done what's necessary, and that country B is just as bad, just as narrow and ideologically driven in their own agendas. Country B on the other hand, would never in a million years try and justify any wrongs they've done by comparing themselves to country A.

I think this analogy ferrets out the truth of the situation rather nicely.

[_Gadianton]

A note to EA here. I saw that episode of Little House on the Prairie when I was a wee tot. I have a pretty bad memory overall, but somehow the episode you referenced has always stuck with me. I can still see the scene in my mind where Michael Landon clears house and exposes the fraud by grabbing the crutches from the pretended cripple and jerks them in the face of the pretended blind person. It's funny, when I was on my mission, there really were travelling shows like that. I remember one poor couple telling me how they'd been to a travelling ministry that was healing people. The wife suffered terribly from arthritis and when the preachers were calling down people to heal, this woman gave everything she had raising her hands in the air and screaming for a chance to go up but lost out. She wanted us to try and explain why God wouldn't have given her the chance. She continued to explain how amazing it was to watch these ministers work. How one guy called up had a leg shorter than the other, and right there on a table he laid down and the ministers made it grow. I was dying inside because I remembered this trick from getting a magic merrit badge (or skill award) in scouts. I actually couldn't bring myself to tell her it was a sham for some reason.

[_KimberlyAnn]

A note to EA here. I saw that episode of Little House on the Prairie when I was a wee tot. I have a pretty bad memory overall, but somehow the episode you referenced has always stuck with me. I can still see the scene in my mind where Michael Landon clears house and exposes the fraud by grabbing the crutches from the pretended cripple and jerks them in the face of the pretended blind person. It's funny, when I was on my mission, there really were travelling shows like that. I remember one poor couple telling me how they'd been to a travelling ministry that was healing people. The wife suffered terribly from arthritis and when the preachers were calling down people to heal, this woman gave everything she had raising her hands in the air and screaming for a chance to go up but lost out. She wanted us to try and explain why God wouldn't have given her the chance. She continued to explain how amazing it was to watch these ministers work. How one guy called up had a leg shorter than the other, and right there on a table he laid down and the ministers made it grow. I was dying inside because I remembered this trick from getting a magic merrit badge (or skill award) in scouts. I actually couldn't bring myself to tell her it was a sham for some reason.

I loved the Little House series when I was a young girl! I read all the books several times and dedicatedly watched the television show.

I, too, remember that episode. Here's a clip of it just for kicks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1dUIhOvWmk

KA