Churchhoney

They wouldn't. But her withering, bang-on commentary and exasperation would be very satisfying to watch. As children of mentally sick, incredibly intrusive control freaks, and Gothardites, and, for the final coffin nail, "reality tv stars," the Duggar kids have been taught every day of their lives -- and are still being taught -- to present a fake persona 100 percent of the time, to everyone, and even to themselves. Not only do they not feel safe being themselves with one another, I'd bet big that they wouldn't feel safe being themselves if they were all alone, locked in a room with soundproof walls, 500 miles from anywhere. It's tragic.

When you grow up with parents like JB and M -- and then you add to it indoctrination by an infantilizing cult -- you don't have much choice but to be stunted, I'm afraid. Actually, I seem to recall that being the woman's job all along. Didn't some of the wedding vows or premarriage promises or something include a stipulation by the male that he would be fully on board with having his wife "monitor his computer use"? Plus, all these people have the job of monitoring and snooping on each other. The "accountability partner" thing seems to run very deep into most daily activities, and I'm guessing that, if your snoop buddy screws up, you take some of the blame, don't you think? (Now why this snoop-partner-accountability principle doesn't extend to laying some blame on JB and M for Josh's numerous screwups, I don't know. .... Oh, wait, I do. It's because they're hypocritical, irresponsible jerks.)

Well, not an employee but a founder and board member, at least. One of those in the forefront of crafting their anti-gay message. ..... George Rekers. He got caught taking a European vacation with a rent boy. And I agree about Joshley probably getting more from them than we'd think. They didn't want one whit more publicity from the whole Duggar mess once Josh was out of DC. Reporters were certainly going to snoop around for more evidence of FRC's hypocrisy and so on. And I expect they wanted to ensure that nothing negative or "anti-family" could have been said against them. So to protect Anna and the kidlets -- so that no journalism outlet could point to their potential suffering and say, 'FRC, Where are your family values?!' -- I expect they gave Josh a decent severance. I'd bet through the end of 2015, plus continued solid health insurance for a year or so. They wouldn't benefit at all from AP turning up a story about how they risked having a young mother and her three-plus children suffer because of her husband's jerkiness and their stinginess, leaving her uninsured with an infant, etc.

From my quickie research into auto detailing classes, I gather that it's just cleaning -- but, if you're interested in doing it, really deep cleaning, involving making the engine look spiffy, buffing and even sanding the paint to get a perfect flawless shine, etc. .... With Duggars, it probably means a swipe with a wet rag and maybe a vacuum swoop over the carpeting, though, perhaps.

Yeah. Cause I looked up "car detailing classes" and found that you have to spend about three solid days in class and spend around $1500. That flies in the face of Jim Bob Duggar Principle of Professional Training Numero Uno: Watch somebody do the job for two and a half hours and don't pay them a single dime.

First it'd have to be scientifically tested, though. They'd have to make sure that listening to it as a sleep aid didn't amount to subliminally learning to be like the Duggars. Because while insomnia is bad, being like the Duggars is the fate worse than death.

Giant amen to this!

I think there are three levels of things here that we outside observers tend to confuse. There are fundies, and a lot of people take the Duggars and Bates to just straight up typify them and those beliefs. But they don't. In the Bates' case, you have fundies who are also devoted members of a very messed-up cult, which puts an actual level of truly nutty belief and active dysfunction on top of fundamentalist beliefs. The Bateses are probably typical of the subset of fundamentalists who devote themselves to one of the patriarchal or quiverfull strains -- and while there seem to be a fairly hefty number of such fundie subgroups they don't typify fundies as a whole group. And then in the Duggars' case, you have the cult plus what I'm convinced is real personality disorder and personal dysfunction in JB and M. So they really typify only a very tiny number of families, I expect -- one where the basic beliefs are layered over with both cult beliefs and behaviors and a high degree of personal dysfunction. The idea that they're the ones who apparently become "role models" for leghumpers is awful.

I wonder whether it's possible that some people who become involved with these folks in real life don't actually grasp the day-to-day facts of their lifestyle because it's so far off the norm that they don't even imagine it. Certainly people who watch them on tv generally don't get their minds around most of the facts -- for quite some time, in many cases, and ever, in many more -- and while I have a harder time seeing that with people who contemplate marrying in, I think it does happen. Did with Derick, for example, I guess. So maybe she's another.

Well, I'm anything but a Super Neatnik, but wow. You'd think drinking all the expensive coffee would give you the energy to do something with your day. Guess not.

Well, now, see, he's working his new profession already, and having results. He's got people praying more. The Ministry of Joshley the Redeemed and the Redeeming is already underway! Even Jizm Bob must be pleased. Ditto for the current trend of "reality tv" shows, of course. Heaven forbid we should pay people who would like to write, direct and act well-constructed stories. Or people who would like to report and write interesting facts. Let's just see if people will watch film of brainless boring people doing brainless boring things instead, with much less cash outlay required from us. Yay, they will!

I'm guessing that anybody who would like to have an actual music career -- selling outside of Gothardom -- would know that you can't make new music following the ATI rules and you can't make music that's sellable using those rules. Because everything the Gothard rules-for-music allows has already been done a gazillion times. But I haven't actually heard any of his music except for maybe one song, so I don't know. Lots of popular music is harmonically very simple, so it's way more likely to fit the ATI standard than the "serious" music of our time, really, when it comes to that, at least where the harmony thing is concerned.

Are you sure they even noticed?

No, they do like some Bach, some Mozart and so on. They like the stuff from the Baroque and Classical periods that's relatively simple harmonically and rhythmically. They don't like more edgy or complex or unresolved things from those periods -- so lots of Bach, for example, is too much for them, but lots is okay with them, too. And then beyond that they like a lot of hymns, marches and some more popular songs from many eras that are simple and harmonically and rhythmically well resolved. Except for some simple popular stuff, most 20th and 21st century music of all kinds is out, along with serious music from any era that's harmonically unresolved. Gregorian chants and much other very early Western music almost certainly isn't on their agenda, because it has lots and lots of harmonic tension and is sometimes harmonically unresolved altogether. Non-Western music would also be out for the same reason. They don't like anything with a backbeat or with strong rhythm sections generally either. Too much drive for physical expression in music with strong rhythms. And we know what physical expressions can lead to. They like easily predictable music that has as little tension as possible, basically. Unfortunately, tension is the source of greatness in music, mostly. So they don't like the great, for the most part. They want music that stills the passions and the imagination, not music that inspires those faculties. They like the tame. They're fearful people. So they like everything tame.

But the answer was so obvious. "That's not true! I also discard disposable tableware."

Hardly any resources for investigative reporting exist any more, though. The very very corporate, completely advertiser-driven media generally doesn't support investigative reporting of any kind. So to the extent that it's still done -- either by some standard media outlets or by the newer sources doing it, such as very small outlets and nonprofits -- nobody's going to waste very scarce resources to investigate people who have no actual power and whose nuttiness is therefore of little consequence compared to the issues of a big oil company or a public agency or a significant lawmaker or something. Since the Duggars are in the public eye only as entertainment, what they do isn't consequential enough for anybody to devote time and money to investigating. Jim Bob has fucked over his own family and may give a few airhead tv watchers some bad ideas about how to run a household -- but that doesn't rise to the level of malfeasance by the Pentagon or Monsanto or whatever. And then when it comes to the whole Gothard mania, you run into the fact that they're a conservative Protestant Christian cult. In this long-time Protestant country where a loud and explicit conservative Protestant vote is extremely extremely important to one of the two major political parties, you really aren't going to get much investigation of Christian groups, especially Protestant ones, and especially conservative Protestant ones, no matter what. Everybody's way too afraid of the outrage and backlash that explodes if you say something that someone construes as an attack on Christianity. And, again, the nuttiness of Gothardism just doesn't spread very far. It's always been a relatively small group and is getting smaller. Even though there have been a fair number of investigative stories in the past, pretty much none of them have taken hold or spread beyond one or two media outlets. People just haven't cared about it. Not big and influential enough to be worth having a bunch of people call you anti-Christian and anti-religious freedom.

I seem to recall JB and some of the boys -- the twins, maybe?-- going to Orlando last year to buy some cheap cars -- maybe vans? -- to bring back to Arkansas.

Everything proceeding according to plan.

Joy, Jinger... Some non-adult J-girl or other. Who knows, who cares? TM JB and M

I'm sure it means no music that doesn't have a single quickly identifiable key signature that's used consistently throughout. Maybe two over the course of a piece would be okay -- otherwise they'd have to dump a lot of Bach, for instance -- but the two keys would probably have to each have their own distinct parts of the song and be closely harmonically related.... and the piece probably needs to end in the same signature in which it began. .... It's a funny symbolic wish, to me because it basically means that a listener should be in no doubt -- throughout a whole song -- of what key that song is in and what chord it will end on. Gee, wonder how that relates to Gothardism in general?! lol Doubt and uncertainty of any kind are bad! Bad bad bad bad bad! Talk about a cult for the anxious and fearful. Yeesh.

I'm not convinced that Derick has no desire to run. I don't think he's quite as dumb as most people seem to think or as fearful either. I think he's fearful and dumb enough to have believed the Duggar image as seen on TeeVee for a time. But I still think it's likely that once he got into the middle of it, a bit of intelligence and a slightly-more-independent-than-a-Duggar's spirit may have kicked in a bit and made him look for a way to renew his earlier dream of being an actual missionary. He knew by then, though, that Jill's complete lack of education made that impossible under mission board rules. So when the possibility of just going the heck to another country as a faux missionary -- under whatever dumb auspices -- and both getting out from under JB's heavy thumb a bit and being able to pretend that he could be a missionary as he'd hoped, he grabbed at the straw, sought money by whatever means available (grifting, when you live in a Duggar house), picked up his young family and went. Just seems to me we've seen things in him and in his family that make them lean toward being Duggarish but not collapse into full Duggarishness, and some things that suggest he's not quite as dumb and comatose as the actual Duggars. I don't know that I think he's strong enough to resist eventual full assimilation and collapse of will, though, unfortunately. I do think it's possible, though, being Pollyanna.

It's my contention that the entire basis for the particular "faith" JB's committed this group to is fear and insecurity. And the main way they've inoculated the kids against any desires to slip out of the grasp of JB's "home" and "faith" is by pushing more and more fear, anxiety and insecurity. That's what the whole thing is about, really, so it's no surprise that they're haunted by fears everywhere they go and can't shut up about their fearfulness. That would certainly carry over to Central America. I remain curious about Derick's feelings in all this, though. I do think he has certain kinds of insecurity or he wouldn't have wanted an apparently prescreened wife or have been so attracted to being one of the Jizm Bob Mob. But his Pistol Pete past and his time in Nepal suggest to me that he isn't nearly as fearful and insecure as the Duggars and may actually reach out to the world with a bit of enthusiasm. So I really wonder whether that's true at all and, if so, how such a difference will play out in his relationship to Jill and to the family.

I can't imagine why. He was probably 11 when he plumbed and wired your house.

Note that, on the very first page, it announces its aim of guaranteeing that your entire "life journey" will occur "under parent's authority": "We hope it is only the beginning of a life journey that is centered in God's will, under parent's authority...." That sentence alone was certainly enough to get Jim Bob on board with bells on, I expect! (Note also that, throughout, they have no concept of how to write the plural possessive.) The idea that they expect people to answer these incredibly intrusive questions posed by strangers... and, worse, the fact that, apparently, more than a few people actually do it -- or pretend to, anyway, and that many parents must think these questions are reasonable and appropriate... is absolutely bone chilling, to me. (and also provides evidence that these people are absolutely stone fucking crazy, of course...) I've read the application a couple of times before, but I read the whole thing through again just now....I think because it's like a train wreck -- you just can't look away.

You had it right up above, I'd say. Unless the Holt daughter says someday that it's true, we'll never know. And since I expect she's very unlikely to do that, we'll never know. My money's on its being true, though, I must say. They could have easily been envisioning a long engagement that would distract Josh and thinking about a wedding at age 16 or 17 or so, which wouldn't seem too young to JB and M -- still doesn't seem all that young to them, really, what with the Marjorie courting.