Anyways, the essay is intriguing because he gives somewhat derogatory names to all of the posters he attacks, labeling them things like "Alvin" or "Beaver" or "Doogie", etc. There is also a good deal of quite petty nitpicking of prose which was obviously not meant to be formal, or strictly "academic":
Daniel Peterson wrote:For reasons best known to himself, Alvin also doesn't number the first paragraph of his purported FARMS Review formula. Thereafter, though, he lays it out in organized outline form, befitting its scientific and scholarly status.
[...]
References and footnotes, it seems, are very undesirable in academic publishing as Alvin envisions it. Of course, he might possibly concede that they are a necessary evil but insist that the fewer of them we can get by with, the better. And best of all would be to make assertions without providing any supporting evidence whatever. (Perhaps by subtle design, Alvin's post offers an excellent example of the kind of writing he evidently favors.)
Caught up now in the sheer passion of his prose, however, Alvin forgets the numbering system that he began late and carried through all the way up to four. From now on, his writing takes on an almost Joycean stream-of-consciousness flavor as it surges from outrage to outrage:
Or this (in which he continues to mock "Alvin"---also, I cannot help but wonder why he didn't simply name the people he was talking about):
Big words are bad. Small words are good. Short words that plain folks use are best. No long words. Long words make it seem that Ol' Smart Head Big Brain wants to trick plain folks. This is wrong. It is bad. It is a bad thing in books. It makes FARMS look bad. It makes life hard for Dick and Jane and their dog Spot. Bad FARMS!
The essay also contains this delicious nugget:
Alas, though, FARMS' reputation for personal attacks is grossly exaggerated by the standards of academia. Consider, for example, a little item about a scientific conference in Boulder, Colorado, that came to my notice (thanks to Greg Taggart) as I was writing this very paragraph:
Colorado State University's William Gray, one of the nation's preeminent hurricane forecasters, called noted Boulder climate researcher Kevin Trenberth an opportunist and a Svengali who "sold his soul to the devil to get (global warming) research funding."
Trenberth countered that Gray is not a credible scientist.
"Not any more. He was at one time, but he's not any more," Trenberth said of Gray, one of a handful of prominent U.S. scientists who question whether humans play a significant role in warming the planet by burning fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gases.
"He's one of the contrarians, some of whom get money to spread lies about global warming," Trenberth said during a break following his presentation at the 31st annual Climate Diagnostics & Prediction Workshop.12
Alvin will be hard pressed to come up with anything in the long history of the FARMS Review that even approaches that level of scholarly/scientific discourse.
This I find laughable. Am I mistaken, or did DCP not print Pahoran's "The Anti-Mormon Attackers"? Where did they print the "outing" of J.P. Holding, which goes well beyond mere name-calling and into the realm of actually threatening somebody's life? Was this not in FARMS Review? "Hard pressed" indeed. One need only to pick up the most recent issue.
Perhaps the most classic thing in this essay is this contradiction, which Prof. Peterson apparently overlooked. First he makes this claim:
(emphasis added)DCP wrote:Critics of FARMS and FAIR commonly make several claims. Among them is the notion that writers for each organization offer neither evidence nor analysis in support of Mormon beliefs, but simply bear their testimonies. Honest readers of the FARMS Review or articles on the various FAIR Web sites will know how seriously to take that allegation.
And then, later in the essay, he says:
(emphasis added)Daniel Peterson wrote:We who write such things engage in apologetics because we believe that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, that the two of them appeared to Joseph Smith in a grove of trees near Palmyra, New York, in the spring of 1820, that the Book of Mormon is the record of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, and that the Church and gospel of Jesus Christ have been restored. And, what is more, we believe that defending these and related claims against attack, misunderstanding, and distortion--very often from writers who offer a great deal more in the way of evidence and reasoned analysis (it would be difficult to offer less) than anything Alvin, Beaver, Caleb, Doogie, and Eeyore have provided thus far--is a worthwhile thing to do, and something that we're obligated to do.
LOL!!!!
Wow, his stuff is really just devolving into these pretty painful attacks, dripping with smugness. I notice that he still has not addressed the issue of properly citing the messageboards he's quoting from. If he really wanted to be scholarly and intellectually honest, he would have listed RfM in his footnotes. He also would have credited Bachman, McCue, and others that he freely cites. In one footnote he offers this lame explanation:
In what follows, the names, "handles," or pseudonyms of the posters have been changed in order to protect the guilty. I have, however, reproduced the posts in their entirety, unaltered (e.g., with their original spelling and grammar).
In other words, he is not going to give them proper credit, but he has no problem mocking their spelling and grammar errors. Elsewhere, he tell us:
There is no point in providing URLs for the posts I quote in this essay. By the time my comments here are made public, the materials I've cited will have vanished. Wisely, I think, the message board that is my chief quarry does not maintain an archive.
A couple of thoughts. One: if he provided the URL, it would be easy for a person reading the essay to track down the authors of the quotes DCP is citing. (Bob McCue, for instance, maintains a website of his own, I believe.) His attempt to absolve himself of proper citation standards is, once again, underwhelming. He goes on to post dates for each of the quotes he has listed, and to what end? Further, this provides even more evidence of the Good Professor's intense obsession with RfM. (Some of these posts go back two years, evidently.) I am extremely curious about this "archive" which DCP purports to maintain, and suspect that he keeps it well-guarded because it would reveal the extent of his obsession (as if articles such as "Apologetics by the Numbers" don't already do that....._