From My Informant: Stormy Weather Ahead for Brant Gardner?

[_Droopy]

Now, take the word "ass," combine it with the word "hole," mix it with a little sugar and spice and everything nice ('cause the Candyman can), get yourself a spoonful of sugar (to help the medicine go down), and go back to the land of Trolls from whence you came.

I do have to admit, this was a bit of a guilty pleasure. Nonetheless, this was an extremely rare departure for me, and not what I want to express here.

The best course of action is simply to ignore anonymous cowardly trolls like Darth and say what needs to be said in the most intelligent, civilized, and critically substantive way possible and leave people like Darth to dive for the stogies on the pavement.

[_Shulem]

Now, take the word "ass," combine it with the word "hole," mix it with a little sugar and spice and everything nice ('cause the Candyman can), get yourself a spoonful of sugar (to help the medicine go down), and go back to the land of Trolls from whence you came.

This will be the last time in my mortal existence I bother responding to any of your adolescent provocations, so relish my attention now.

And the gayborhood here in Dallas Salutes Droopy,boy! His ass is sugar and spice.

Paul O

[_bcspace]

Still living in Oak Lawn?

[_Darth J]

Droopy---

I've enjoyed your last several ultimate, final, absolutely last posts that you will ever, ever, ever address to me.

A competent therapist may be able to help you resolve these high school grudges you've been carrying around for 30+ years.

Were the kids who picked on you in high school of a socialist persuasion? Is that part of your origin story?

[_Bond James Bond]

I'm glad to see Droopy has recovered from the full body cast I put him in in the Off-Topic thread. Luckily he was unemployed and thus missed no work.

[_thews]

So in sum, despite the fact that I love my friend Brant and that his new book represents a worthy attempt for which he should be congratulated for approaching the topic with both faith and academic integrity, I find this new book very problematic. I'm not sure yet what forum I will use, but I feel far too passionate about this topic not to point out these issues.

Bokovoy, like Brant, is also a very nice guy. Where I believe they differ is their objectivity, in that Brant's beliefs acknowledge the truth. Brant has no issues with magic rocks placed in a hat... he believes in magic and has many times made the point that Joseph Smith really could see things with his seer stones before the Book of Mormon, and that other "Seers" could see things as well . Bokovoy, like DCP, uses "academic integrity" to paint the illusion that he's using facts and being objective in his conclusions. Bokovoy stated in a thread about the Kinderhook plates that even knowing they were fake, if Joseph Smith had translated them, he would believe the translation. In other words, there is only one logical choice, and if the data shows anything other than positive proof of Joseph Smith's truth claims, it must be wrong. Brant is correct regarding Mesoamerican text, and while the entire theory is based on fabricated data in an attempt to prove the Book of Mormon true without any real data, Brant, unlike Bokovoy, is being objective in stating the obvious.

[_Shulem]

Bokovoy stated in a thread about the Kinderhook plates that even knowing they were fake, if Joseph Smith had translated them, he would believe the translation.

Joseph Smith translated lots of things. Take the Explanations of Facsimile No. 3, for example. Does David believe those translations to be correct? How can he? There is no king's name and the god of Egypt is NOT a slave, etc. For David to defend those Explanations would be academic dishonesty unworthy of any decent University on God's green planet.

A professor who teaches that the Explanations of Facsimile No. 3 are true should be stripped of their academic credentials and put back into grade school, perhaps second grade.

Paul O

[_Buffalo]

How would you describe your relationship with LDS intellectuals within the apologetic movement, Droopy?

Just fine, so long as they're actually LDS apologists and not LDS intellectuals seeking their place in the fashionable intellectual and political sun by genuflecting the Dialogue and Sunstone culture that has toxified the LDS intellectual world to some extent and sent it rhizomes into the apologetic movement itself.

So, in other words, you're only on good terms with Schryver, and all the other apologists get embarrassed when you post, to the point of repeatedly banning you to get you to stop.

[_Buffalo]

Actually it is, you cannot attend the Temple unless you pay up.

1. That's not "enforcement." Its a standard one is free to accept or reject.

2. If I do not pay my taxes, I go to jail. In a collectivist society (socialist/communist, fascist, National Socialist etc.) my existence and its meaning are inextricably connected with the definition of meaning to my existence as determined and enforced by the state ( and relative to a standard of rigorous, ideological purity for which no dissent is tolerated) across the entire society as a collective. If I choose not to accept that meaning and purpose, it is not a matter of not being able to attend the Temple; it is a matter of becoming a non-person and a "class enemy" or "enemy of the people" being, as I would then be, an individual outside the herd by my very existence questioning the relative importance of being within the herd. The herd is united; it is a collective moving, thinking, aspiring, and behaving as one. Each and every individual in a socialistic community is directly and inextricably implicated, by each action he takes, in the lives of every other individual.

And that has consequences, as history so eloquently discloses.

Are you saying going to jail is a more serious punishment than losing your exaltation?

[_Buffalo]

Emancipation, human rights, and other ideas at odds with conservatism.

1. Conservatism, and with certain provisos and caviats, libertarianism, are the only political philosophies now in existence proposing the protection and defense of those concepts.

2. The Left, across all its schools of thought, is a philosophy of slavery (usually by degrees but sometimes in one lurching social upheaval) who's god is power and for whom the gospel of Jesus Christ is a obscene barrier to the idolatry of ideology.

There's really no use pretending anymore that the Left is about "emancipation" from anything but liberty and morality, and without morality, liberty is moot.

Translation: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!