mynextmistake

Sure, but they’re looking for things that impact current hireability, not stuff that happened when the candidate was four. And if they are looking for things that far back just to snark on a candidate in an interview, they need to get lives.

I would be extremely surprised to find out there was a hiring manager out there who had the time or inclination to google a candidate, find a twenty-year-old video of the candidate’s mother talking about the candidate needing early intervention for special learning needs in preschool, and then bring it up in the interview. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to be critical of Joy for putting details of Gideon’s life on You Tube, but I don’t think concern about his future employability is one of them.

Oh good. I’m thrilled to learn that the tax dollars I pay from my salary that I earn at a job are going to support Jill and David’s fat and lazy asses. People like them are the reason benefit recipients are vilified by the public at large. I have no objection whatsoever to the kids receiving aid, because they can’t help that their parents are malignant leeches, but I don’t see any evidence that they’re actually getting any food.

There’s also a work requirement for able-bodied adults in Ohio. Jill would be exempt until her youngest child turned 6, but David would be expected to work at least 30 hours a week at a job paying at least the state minimum wage, or to participate in a work training program. I suppose it’s possible he’s earning that much printing tracts to pester people with, but I doubt it.

I remember that several months ago someone posted one of Jill’s Insta stories and it included a photo of her Aldi shopping cart. It did not look like she was shopping to cook meals for a large family. Most of the items in the cart were packaged convenience foods in quantities that would serve maybe 4-6 people with light appetites. They looked like snacks, not meal ingredients. If Jill is getting food stamps, she could feed her family quite well if she planned ahead. Three-bean chili with cornbread and a veggie, beans and rice, pasta dishes with a salad, beef or chicken stew with lots of veggies, breakfast for dinner, etc. could all be easily made for a large family out of ingredients that don’t cost much. But Jill’s clearly not cooking like that, because she and David are overweight/obese while every single child is emaciated and sickly looking.* It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she and David had sit-down steak dinners every night while the kids are left to pick at a few plates of microwaved snacks. *She claims the kids are naturally thin. As a nurse I’ve seen plenty of naturally thin kids. They look healthy and athletic. The Rod kids look skeletal and pallid, with thin hair and dark circles under their eyes. These kids aren’t naturally thin, they’re malnourished.

Carlin pulling her mask down for a few minutes while alone with her husband in an ultrasound room is not particularly dangerous behavior. The risk of getting COVID through fomites rather than direct transmission is very low. When you factor in the fact that the medical facility is presumably cleaning the room between patients, that risk becomes negligible.

Oh please, like David and Jill would ever allocate two peanuts apiece to any of their kids. The Kid of the Month (tm) probably got one peanut and the rest of the kids all had to split a peanut. David didn’t get that girlish figure by letting other people eat. I had a feeling that for a while Jill was hoping to hook Tim up with the Dingus daughter. Free beef for life! But the Dingus friendship seems to have fizzled out. Maybe the Dingii weren’t fundie enough for Jill.

No wonder he has so many tickets.

I think this assumes all colleges are intellectually rigorous to some degree, though, which hasn’t been my experience with the university system in the United States. I certainly think any of the Duggar children would have been hard-pressed to succeed at an academically challenging college or university, but I think there are colleges that virtually any of them could have made it through. They might even have done better than we would expect. I once did some grading for a freshman comp class at a large state university with a decent reputation, and I was shocked by the poor quality of the work that was awarded passing grades. Going solely by their social media posts, many of the adult Duggars write quite a bit better than those students did, and most of them ended up passing the class.

Nah, if it was his idea, the baby would be on the ground and the dump truck would be covering him in pecans.

I have to admit that the thought of Anna trying to portray Carlin Bates, who is possibly the only human being alive who is even dumber than Anna herself, as some kind of criminal mastermind makes me giggle. Anna: Carlin snuck into Josh’s office and programmed his router to download child pornography while simultaneously using his cell phone to text me minutiae about his day to make him look guilty! Austin: Carlin? Carlin… Bates? Anna: Yes, Carlin Bates! Austin: … Anna, it once took Carlin half an hour to figure out how to use our KitchenAid stand mixer. I don’t think she could prog… wait, did you just use the word “minutiae?” Anna: Yes, I came across it while hate-reading In Touch at the dentist. But that’s not the point! The point is this is all Carlin’s fault! Austin: Why would Carlin frame Josh for a sex crime? Anna: She’s jealous because at least I have a husband! Austin: So does sh… oh, never mind. (Wanders off to move a mound of gravel from one place to another.)

Why don’t they just buy each kid a refillable water bottle and make them use it? I know the Duggars don’t care about the environment, but you’d think the cost of hundreds of pallets of bottled water would give JB pause.

It’s never too early for those!

Thank you. One of the things that bothers me about fundie women like Michelle and Anna is that they act like being a stay-at-home homeschooling mom is a some kind of God-given right, and it’s not. If you want to be a SAHM who homeschools, and you can make it work for your family, great. But if you can’t make it work, you’d better be prepared to get out there and hustle to put food on the table, because nobody has an obligation to support your kids except you. I’m also not sure I understand the argument that it would somehow be harmful to the M kids for Anna to have to get a job instead of relying on JB. Yes, Anna is poorly educated and has no marketable skills, but she’s perfectly capable of getting a retail job, and the Target in my town is currently paying $18+/hour. As other people have noted, she would probably also qualify for a plethora of public assistance like rental assistance, WIC, food stamps, daycare subsidies, Medicaid, and possibly even cash aid. The kids wouldn’t have the life they are used to, but nobody would freeze or starve. Sure, Anna would have to give up homeschooling, but millions of kids in this country attend public schools and they get by just fine.

Things I learned from this post: 1. Nurie has a NEW phone. 2. In low light, Jill R. looks like a day-shift stripper on her smoke break. 3. Nurie has a NEW phone! 4. Nehemiah has begun to realize his grandma is SEVERELY crazy, and he finds it SEVERELY alarming. 5. Did I mention Nurie has a NEW phone?!?

It’s like grand central station for messy bitches! 😂

I think that people who claim all of Derick and Jill’s changes are just surface changes to make them more palatable to social media perhaps underestimate the degree to which those changes reflect a repudiation of Jill’s upbringing and the Duggars’ fundamental belief system. Homeschooling, eschewing birth control, long hair and long skirts for women, not watching TV or listening to secular music, running your own business and attending only home churches aren’t just cosmetic aspects of Gothardism, they’re fundamental tenets. Gothard, like most cult leaders, seems to have realized that impoverished and poorly-educated people make the best disciples. Homeschooling your kids, marrying them off young, and insisting they have as many children as possible while forbidding them from working for anyone except themselves is a recipe for keeping them in the fold. Sure, they might have doubts eventually, but when they’re already in their thirties with a (functionally) sixth-grade education and eight kids to support, their only work history is helping out at their dad’s lawn-care business or car lot, and their only connections are either family members or five other families who go to church in the same garage as they do, what are they going to do? Where are they going to go? They’re stuck. And, IME, there’s nothing like being stuck in a shitty situation to help you convince yourself your situation isn’t really that shitty. People don’t want to be failures. They don’t want to be trapped. So they convince themselves they’re doing it all for Jesus, and raise their kids exactly the same way, so you get a nice, self-sustaining population of fundies. Derick and Jill have taken virtually all these tenets and turned them on their heads. They go to a large, mainstream SB church! They have friends! Jill wears pants and cuts her hair! They send their kids to public school! They use birth control! Derick has gotten an education and trained (yes, the bar was unfortunate, but he can take it again) for a career! Are they still conservative Christians? Yep. Have they made HUGE strides from where JB and Michelle wanted them to end up? Also yep. The changes they’ve made may seem “cosmetic” to some of us, but I think they’re very, very significant when you consider what they mean.

I guess I don’t understand what you don’t get? A police officer felt like Jana’s conduct fell within the conduct prohibited by a criminal statute so she was charged with violating that statute. The fact that someone from Teen Mom might not have been charged for similar conduct is irrelevant. A lot of people who break the law never get charged, but that doesn’t mean we can’t charge anyone.

I don’t disagree that Jana is a true believer, but I don’t know if we can conclude anything from the property or LLCs. All of the other adult daughters were married very young — Jill was the oldest at 23, and Joy was only 19. JB and Michelle might have concluded they were too young to manage companies or property while they were still single. Plus, most of them started courting as soon as they reached a marriageable age, so JB and Michelle probably figured their husbands would provide for them. I think a lot of fan support for Jana stems from the belief that she sacrificed herself by staying single to protect her younger sisters from Josh. I’ve seen a number of people mention that both here and on Reddit. It’s possible that the theory is correct, but I don’t think we have any evidence to judge that one way or the other. It seems just as likely to me that Jana has other reasons for not wanting to marry — being gay or asexual, not wanting to have to run her own household, not wanting to have eleventy billion kids.

While I certainly DO NOT agree with the Grahams’ stand on social issues, Samitarian’s Purse is a legit charity. They have a perfect rating with Charity Navigator and have a number of worldwide projects, like disaster relief and Operation Christmas Child. The help they provide undoubtedly comes with a big heaping dose of evangelism, but at least they provide tangible assistance to people who need it instead of hijacking bottled water and pulling guns on civilians.

Well, sure. No caregiver is perfect and shenanigans happen. But there are degrees of shenanigans. My kid once drew on our yellow lab with black sharpie while my back was turned. But she never got out of my house and into the street long enough to be picked up by a police officer without me even noticing she was gone. I understand Jana was tired and has to watch way too many kids that aren’t even hers to begin with, but it’s really not that hard to lock a door if you realize there’s a chance you can’t devote your full attention to watching the kids. I don’t think Jana is generally crazy or irresponsible, but in this case it seems like she did behave irresponsibly.

I don’t think anyone is saying that though? She was cited for what did happen, not what could have happened. Some people seem to be arguing she shouldn’t face any consequences because “all parents have moments like this” (not true) and “the child was fine” (great, but irrelevant to the charge). If she fell asleep and a young kid got close to a busy road for long enough for a motorist to call 911 and police to get there, pick the kid up, and take them home, that’s reckless. I don’t see anyone calling for her head on a platter, just saying that it’s reasonable for her to face the charge she is facing if the facts are as reported.

Unintentional acts can still be crimes. The definition of third-degree child endangerment in AR is reckless conduct putting a child at risk of injury, not intentional conduct. Jana probably didn’t fall asleep on purpose while watching young kids, but if you’re responsible for young children, you need to stay awake. If you’re too tired to do that, you need to make sure you find an appropriate alternate caregiver or, at the very least, that you lock the damn doors so toddlers can’t wander into the road. Failure to do so is reckless. I have sympathy for Jana because I do think Anna takes advantage and should be watching her own damn kids, but if Jana agreed to watch them she assumed the duty to keep them safe.

I’m really glad Jill has support from her husband, friends, and church community. She has been through a lot and deserves a chance to heal. ❤️

True, but I’ve had some involvement with CPS cases in a previous job, and I have a very hard time believing that a judge would not have granted a court order to interview the minor children of a man who was accused of possession of CSAM and who had a documented history of sexually abusing minor children. We aren’t talking about CPS trying to get a court order to assume custody of the Ms, which I agree would have not been legally warranted with the facts they had at the time. We’re just talking about a court order for an interview, which is a pretty low-stakes intervention. I don’t see a judge turning that down. So if the kids weren’t interviewed, it would have to be either because CPS didn’t apply for a warrant or because they didn’t file for enforcement of one they had obtained. Those would be discretionary decisions on the part of the agency. *If* those decisions were made, I do think they showed an unfair amount of deference to the Duggar family. If you take JB’s money and connections out of the equation, Anna is a poorly-educated, low-income mother of 7 with a husband who is accused of sex crimes. In my experience, in cases like that CPS wouldn’t have to think about this for thirty seconds — they’d get that court order and compel interviews of the children.