Churchhoney

Plus, it has the nostalgia feel.....the old sepia-toned stuff....Makes everybody think we're in the good old days -- when we believe, contrary to all reason, that things were wonderful. 😁

Logic. That's not a strong point with any of them either. Of course, God has commanded us to never ever ever ever trust logic.......so I guess they're being especially godly there....

Except that, Josh being Josh, woudln't he be dripping sarcasm, not talking seriously? Sarcasm seems to be a pretty constant mode with him. And he also seems to think he's hilarious....

Pretty much. I think it is possible that he really didn't seek out anything to read about the case, though. I'm sure JB and M did their utmost to steer everyone away from reading anything. And he and his father were IBLP. And the Duggs were IBLP royalty. [Just noticed that I originally typed IMDB. 😁 That's what the Duggs wish, not quite what the truth is...] They might just have taken his prospective/new in-laws' word for what happened. And Joy was little when it all happened....Her parents might have pretty successfully convinced her that it was all the way they said it was. i.e., no big deal. So....next topic! Maybe Joy told Austin she didn't want to talk about it any more and they should just move on. Not saying it did happen that way. But I do think it could have JB and M have had a helluva lot of influence in their bubble. And teenage/20-something guys don't tend to be that interested in the details of people's doings -- they've got other interests.....

To be fair, he seems to have a hard time turning the "smarmy" off. It must be a built-in.

Jed! and misguided Katey were on the float with JB and M over the weekend, so I'd say he's definitely a defense witness or they wouldn't have let him on.

As usual, he's a really weird combination of knowledgeable and a complete ignoramus/idiot at the exact same time.

If this were my kid, though, and I truly believed that that was a true or a strong possibility, I'd want to see the stuff in that case, too. I'd want to know, viscerally, how terrible a thing it was that my child might be falsely convicted of. I'd want to know exactly how big an outrage it was..... Either way, I think it's chickenshit, ... Either way, there's something very bad here that, one way or another, closely affects their son and the rest of their family. Yet these people -- who are planning to join Jesus soon to literally battle all the demons of hell to win the universe for their Heavenly Father -- are afraid to even look at this one small stack of serious human evils. Even though these evils are a very large thing in the life of their favorite son. All I can conclude is that Jesus is assembling a Chickenshit Coward Army ☹️

Absolutely crucial. Criminal that JB and M don't have the balls to watch something this critical to their really understanding what's gone on with their son and what's at stake for their whole family in this. They're supposed to be the fabulously wise elders, according to all the gushing Gothard shit. Not hardly.

You know, that may well be true. But, given the nature of these particular images, if she weren't changed to some degree by seeing them -- while knowing that they so excite her husband sexually that he risked prison to have them -- I don't believe she'd deserve to be called a human being any more........Either she was born as lacking in empathy and other human capacities as he apparently is, or she just froze those to death with super-Jesusness somewhere along the way. Especially because I believe she's just thinking now, "Oh, it's porn, like Playboy, only with younger girls." I don't believe she has any idea at all of what the images are. So if she has any humanity left in her, then the shock and surprise alone should wake her up at least a bit. So while I fear you may be right, I sure hope it isn't true that she wouldn't be moved at all. Because she has seven young kids to raise in what will be an increasingly difficult situation. To have those needy kids raised by a person with absolutely zero empathy and zero capacity to register true atrocities is horrifying. What kind of emotional or moral upbringing can she possibly give them if she's that dead and indifferent inside. Awful.

Ever since this started, I've craved seeing Anna and Meeechelle forced into the Clockwork Orange eyes wide open scene for the courtroom display of images Josh likes to pleasure himself to. Knew it wouldn't happen, but maybe I can dream about it some time. They're craven, hypocritical cowards who love posting little piccies online about how much they cherish their own sweet grandbaby girls. Wouldn't surprise me, though, if neither of them has enough empathy and sense to be much disturbed at all by seeing vicious abuse perpetrated on a person who isn't one of their own. Churchhoney, despising the Duggars since 2002. All this loathing has probably eaten half my own innards away by now, I suppose. Don't care.

I hsven't really had a feeling one way or another about whether JB and M made a PR blunder -- or did a perfectly fine thing -- when they published happy family-Thanksgiving pictures last week. I can see that one both ways. But I do think that riding down the street in a Thanksgiving-Christmas parade at basically the exact moment when this hideous mess was about to bust wide open was a dumb and tone-deaf -- and possibly literally crazy -- move indeed. Gathering your family at home for a warm Thanksgiving dinner and photographing your loved ones? That's one thing. .... Grinning and waving at strangers on the street from a float when your son is about to be tried for hideous vicious sexual crimes and his earlier ugly sex offenses against several of your daughters will likely be part of the public conversation? ....Stay home and stop waving. (also, don't bring a little girl with you on the float)

Absolutely! But as far as I know, the Duggs are far more successful in holding a ton of kids hostage like this than most people are. I think a lot of that's just their good luck in getting the tv show.......I'm pretty sure the money they have and the fame they've been able to offer traps the Duggarlings more than a lot of people are trapped when their parents main or only tool is a stick and a set of religious beliefs......JB and M have have had the assistance of both sticks and plentiful carrots that other people -- especially people with a ton of children -- have never had access to! And I think no matter what might happen to make kids think about possibly fatally disagreeing with JB, the continued existence of desirable carrots will be a bar to their breaking with their parents that just the religion alone wouldn't necessarily provide.

That would be JB's crowd -- definitely. I wondered as I read about that absurd hissy fit, whether he was deliberately trying to force them to avoid any further testimony from him. ...Bad enough to talk then. Worse to potentially face even more questions he didn't want to answer during the actual trial. .And if that was part of his motivation, it apparently worked.

I expect fear of losing and zeal to hold onto the good-life stuff they have, like free or nearly free houses, airplanes to fly, the hope they hold of sitting on a special golden throne in heaven and so on. would be their reasons for toeing Daddy's line. JB's managed to put all his kids in a position where they are probably insecure about being able to make a living if Daddy stopped supplying much or all of that living and even possibly insecure about finding suitable love partners without Daddy's network. None of them seem to have any friends, either, except for their siblings and people from Daddy's network. A helluva lot of them live in houses that, one way or another, belong to Daddy. They've been "sheltered" from education, training, social or other community experience with anybody beyond their very small bubble, etc........They've had the evils and dangers of working for anybody else, marrying anybody who isn''t part of their parents' circle, recreating with non-IBLP people on a baseball team or in a class or a choir, etc., drummed into them to an extreme degree. And they've reaped benefits from staying in that bubble -- they're famous and they get fancy hunting and skiing trips and they hardly have to work.... We're certainly looking at situations that may make some of them want to break ranks. But I'm sure they're all also haunted by what they might have to lose.

Yep, his paranoia is clearly of Mt. Everest proportions, although I'm not sure that his hasn't ramped up in the past few years just as the persecution feelings of a lot of other white evangelical men seem to have ramped up as they suspect society is getting away from them more and more. .... A degree of low cunning was what I always thought he had, too.....But this year, especially, is making me think that we were overestimating him even by giving him credit for that......... He must have a bit of low cunning that operates in grifting and "business" situations, though, or he wouldn't have these millions of dollars to throw around. But it seems that it doesn't go even a millimeter beyond such situations.

The likelihood of this is why I thought JB was fairly likely to be behind the scenes all this time nudging Josh toward taking a plea.......And when he didn't, I thought the same thing @Zella mentioned -- that it was probably Josh's vicious attitude toward everybody-especially-his-family thing coming out, likely in some defiance of JB.......After Monday, though, it seems that JB doesn't even mind a lot of new crap coming out either as he puts hiimself at risk in court (at the same time as he refuses to talk about selected portions of the old crap, that were already public knowledge.) Wonder if or when they'll look back at this period and regret their super stubbornness and idiotic risk-taking here.

On the slightly brighter side, sometimes a crackdown like this by a power player backfires on them and causes others in the family to re-evaluate whether all their loyalty should go to that power player or whether it's finally time to speak up on behalf of someone else. There's a range of consequences that could come out of this, I think. You know, in most families there's no such thing as the ability to absolutely forbid adults to have contact with someone......Up to now, JB' and M have been in a very small group of parents who've enjoyed such a powerful hold over every one of their children. But it's possible -- only remotely possible, I suppose -- that this could be the final straw for somebody. For Jill there was no obviously satisfying answer to what she should do. There's just an ugly paradox she faces and serious pain, no matter what. Over the course of a lifetime, it seems most people regret more the things they held back from and are gladder about the brave risks they took. And she's taking the risk. I hope this ultimately works out for the better for her. Other people that JB and M know seem to hold onto their religion (and even their cult) while being civil to and even sort of friendly with their kids that have done things that fly in the face of Mom's and Dad's ideas. The Kellers, the Vuolos, the Seewalds.......It'll be an ugly measure of the Dugg parents' extreme arrogance and thoughtless tyranny if they refuse to learn anything from parents like that, in the face of this whole mess......Unfortunately, JB seems unlikely to surprise us with any new thinking. All along, I've figured that Josh and Anna are living in major delusion about this case and that Meeechelle may be so emotionally wrought by it that she's in a half demented state. But I wondered whether JB might be partly non-delusional and potentially a source of some smidge of reason when it came to talking to Josh about facts and about what he should do.......Monday -- along with some of his paranoid pronouncements lately -- seem to put JB entirely in the delusional category right along with his son, though, more's the pity.

By the end of yesterday the prosecution and the defense had agreed on who'll be on the jury. A fairly large group of people -- 50 or so? -- came to the courtroom. They were asked some questions to try to eliminate anybody who would be too biased one way or another, and the prosecuting attorneys and defense attorneys got to make some choices about who could stay. They chose 12 people for the jury. Plus alternates....I haven't seen a number, but maybe 4 or 6. The alternates will also be in the courtroom the whole time, and if a currently seated juror can't continue for some reason (they get sick, they sleep in court, whatever...), the alternate with the lowest jury number will join the official jurors. Today the judge will say some preliminary things, and then the prosecution will begin making its case.

Well, Joshua and Caleb Williams probably both have known at least some Duggars for a long time. They're the grandsons of IBLP star Pastor S. N. Davis, who was a frequent IBLP speaker and also created some IBLP-loved materials alleged to teach parents how to keep their kids under control, especially when it came to sex and other wild-teenager-type stuff. (Obviously didn't work too well in his own family, but hey....). In addition to that, though, it's been said that Caleb Williams is a friend of Josh's, in particular. That's how his connection to the Duggars was explained, back when people were speculating that he was hanging around the family because he was courting Jana. ... He's also been said to have lived at the TTH for a time. So as Josh's friend, he might just have some knowledge of Josh's comings and goings and other behavior, I guess...Or he might be another one the defense hoped to pin the crimes on because he and Josh allegedly have hung out?

I expect the prosecutors would like to avoid that, too, if they could. That's probably why they dug up Bobye Holt to testify. If her testimony is allowed in, that might spare Jill, if she wants to be spared. It'd be possible to find something positive in testifying, for some people, I think.

I think "Needyforattention" is Amy's actual middle name. Like a few years ago when she was apparently billing herself to the media as "the rebel Duggar," clearly implying that she was the next thing to an actual JB and M child...and yet was extraordinary in being the only one who'd "rebelled." Meanwhile, the truth seems to be that she wasn't really ever treated like a member of the JB and M household. And she definitely never lived under JB-and-M-type rules, so there was no way she'd ever "rebelled" against them. But she wanted the attention, and it kind of worked. That's her only criterion for things she says, as far as I can tell.

He got Jinger while she was tending the laundry room, I think. So....at least two were wide awake. Part of the escalation of his behaviors. He clearly became bolder with time.

I really wanted Josh to plead guilty, to force himself to scrounge up whatever microscopic smidgens of common sense and humanity he might have still hidden inside himself somewhere....and, especially, to spare everybody else in the family this daily media blitz, save the jury and the other people in court from having to see those horrible pictures, and save some bucks I'm sure the Duggarlings may all (including Josh) really need down the line. But now that it's led to JB really really really making a super-hate-worthy ass of himself in federal court with the world's media watching and reporting several times a day......Well, I'd just like to say, "Thanks for not pleading guilty, Josh. I like the result so far for your disgusting father."

That was Jana's job. After all, she was 10. Had about three years' practice as a sister mom under her belt. Forget this snitching stuff. Take care of your own issues, sprouts.