Churchhoney

Nope. I didn't mean to imply that you should stop writing about it! That's for me, only. I completely agree about trying to push the world in the direction of awareness, but I think we just have quite different ways of trying to do that. One of my teaching gurus, Alfred North Whitehead, said something that has rung true with my experience. It runs pretty much like this: You have to go where people are if you're to have any hope of taking them someplace else. ... That idea underlies my philosophy of talking about changes I'd like to see made in the world. I'm even more devoted to this principle when I'm actually talking to people I'd like to convince and not just discussing them behind their backs! (Some of my friends say that it's because I'm a weenie. And who knows? They could be right!)

Yeah, me too! Thanks for sharing the stories. Awful. And I'm very glad that you took your out! I do judge Anna. But what I can't do is feel any security in my judgments! Plus -- I can judge people who do mean things or selfish things. But I find it a lot harder to judge people who do weak things (and I'd put Anna in this category) -- because I never can tell when somebody's looking weak because they're lazy or whether they're looking weak because they're weak by nature and from circumstance, which may be beyond their control! In this case, the weakness clearly affects the children's futures, so in a way that makes it seems as if she's definitely to be judged. But then I don't think she would be able to understand what we do about what the kids are learning from all this, since unlike most -- or all -- of us here I think she truly continues to believe in their dumb cult. Plus, I truly don't think she's actually seen any harm to her children from living with Josh and with the Duggars and in fact I think we've had some evidence in the past that Josh may actually have been a fairly good dad in at least some ways, no matter what he was as a husband. So is she being mostly weak and greedy, and obviously acting to the kids' detriment? Or does she think she's learned things from experience that actually tell her that the kids are better off staying in Duggardome? I find those questions impossible to answer as a complete outsider who knows -- really -- nothing about her situation. So I don't feel competent to judge her one way or the other even though I'd like to be able to call it one way or another!

I've recently had some long-term experience with people who I'd say are insecure, belong to groups of the insecure and paranoid, and isolate themselves in a bubble in which everybody is just the same -- people that I think are like the Seewalds and their milieu. And what I saw suggests that people who are "diff'r'nt" (as they say), and other, and alien, and scary and lesser to you are always on your mind when you're like that. No matter where I turned and no matter what I tried talk about -- like, Wow, this rain should be really good for the flowers! -- somebody would, apropos of nothing, suddenly make some dumb, irrelevant, nothing, mildly or seriously negative remark about African-American or immigrants or teh gays or whatever. Day in and day out, with what looked to me to be no provocation, there'd just be these stupid remarks all the time. Some like JS's stupid hair remark and some blaming people for crime rates or whatever. Just anything and everything. Drove me nuts. All I could figure is that among a lot of white Protestant 'murcans today there must be just extreme supersensitivity to the very existence of a whole bunch of "other" people that they fear will take over or something. Looked to me that this anxiety is never out of some people's minds -- although I expect they don't realize it -- and it causes these odd, stupid semi- or full putdowns to erupt from their mouths. This being the case, I expect that JS and most people around her erupt with stupid remarks like this constantly.

I'm responding over in the Josh and Anna thread. And then I'm shutting up about this. I promise!

Okay, I'm responding to Fun in Fundieland's post over in Lonely Js again. Quote: "Indoctrination, even brainwashing, can't be blamed entirely for failure to at least TRY a different life strategy. Her brother has offered her a ticket to ride, which is more than many women get in such dire circumstances." Well, here's my take. You won't be surprised! (And I didn't say that indoctrination was the whole answer -- As I said, there's indoctrination of people who are hard to indoctrinate, and indoctrination of people who, by nature, are easier to indoctrinate, obviously! My guess is that Anna's among the easy to indoctrinate. I sympathize with that, because I believe that I am, too, in a lot of ways. Others aren't -- but I chalk the ability to resist up to one's biology, although that may be special pleading on the part of somebody who, like Anna, is just lazier than others!) Anyway, on Anna -- I'd say she's been conditioned to be very afraid, and she's probably a fearful person by nature. So it's not "indoctrination," period. But indoctrination of someone with some character traits that make it easy (that was my point with the dogs.) In addition, though, what, exactly, has Anna ever seen that tells her she could actually protect and care for and support those four kids? Seems to me she's seen nothing. She's never done things on her own, even gone to school each day or on her own to Girl Scout meetings or whatever. She's never earned a dime in her life or done anything at all on her own, let alone lived alone with four kids. Hell, even when she had Josh around, she also had quite frequent visits from the extra nannies, Jana and Jinger. And at that point she only had three kids and plenty of money coming in. All of those things were powerful teachers schooling her in an unconscious conviction that she's better off under some umbrella of protection, even one provided by a possible devil that she knows. It's not just that she was told these things about life. She was shown them -- and shown no alternatives, really, every day for years and years. It's in the constant demonstration of it that I think the brainwashing comes in -- not the telling. And while her brother has provided an option, maybe it's not the great option that it may seem to us. After all, what do we know about her brother? How well is he doing? Does he always keep his promises? Can he support five additional people? He may be a great bet, but we certainly don't know that. I especially doubt whether she sees "at least try" as one of her options. I'm sure she's been told -- truthfully or not -- that if she walks and goes off with the brother, then there's no "try" about it. If she's gone, she's gone. She can't come back and pretend she didn't do that. She'll be held to have abandoned her husband and her religion, most likely. I doubt that the Duggs would hold to that in the end, but I don't doubt at all that this is what they'd tell her. They're not people who lose easily or who give up their control easily. They'd say anything. And, sure, there are absolutely people who would walk away anyway, for exactly the reasons you say. And that's the best thing to happen, obviously. But to say that you can't imagine any woman falling for all of this and not leaving -- that just seems to me a big failure of the imagination! Seems to me that when you say that you're failing to imagine about half the women on earth, really. Look at all the women, including women with independent money, who stay for years and even decades with men who not only cheat on them but beat them, even with men who beat and molest their children. That's no small number of women. .... All I'm saying is that it's just not that easy to leave, for many people. And -- as someone who has many many weaknesses of my own, and who doesn't have the strength that you're so justly proud of in yourself -- it's hard for me to be too hard on those people. I agree that it's possible Anna's just being a jerk, or lazy or staying out of greed or something. But I think it's just as possible that she -- or anybody else who does this -- is staying because of fears that she might like to get past but can't.

The mini adult clothes have been a big thing for a few years now (at least) among people who want to see kids dressed for looks rather than convenience and comfort. I expect that Jessa's status as a media star puts her in this category (especially during photo time)?

A spray can? Not sure about using one on the face. But the Duggars do love their cans ...

So much yes to this. It's a systemic racism that's so dangerous because when it's not overt or consciously held everybody can just deny that it exists but act on it just the same. .... It's all that stuff that's unconsciously part of our neural architecture that causes the most trouble of all, I think. I'd love to see more kids like JS get out of their traditional milieus and meet more people of many different kinds, because I really believe that some of them would change their views and behaviors over time if that happened. Who knows what the likelihood is in any individual case, of course?

True. I completely agree! I tend to define "sheltered" a bit differently, though. I think of people as "sheltered" not just if they don't know about things outside their own personal experience but if they're enclosed in a milieu that routinely views things outside their own personal experience as categorically bad, lesser, laughable, etc. I'm pretty sure the Seewalds are and are in a milieu like that. So I see a lot of racists -- especially very young ones who haven't lived on their own as adults yet -- as being "sheltered." I guess I believe that a lot of people -- not all, obviously -- would move on from racism (and other bigotries) if they really and routinely encountered the laughable or scary -- but always unreal-to-me -- "others" in a day-to-day context for a prolonged period. I think JS is too young for me to know whether she's an other-hater by her own nature and choice or whether she's just a "sheltered" young know-nothing who goes along with what I expect is her family's and her milieu's uppity attitude toward other groups. Guess I should find another word for this besides "sheltered," but is there one that works and has no other easily confusable meaning? Dunno.

I think Jessica's the one who wrote the horrifying Central America "mission trip" journal that Calvinist Pop had to pull offline eventually, wasn't she? So I guess we shouldn't be surprised. She's an extremely sheltered young girl with no apparent empathy who's lived her whole life with and been raised by people who seem to be suspicious and fearful of everyone who isn't exactly like them and kinda convinced that all those people are not only wrong about everything but are in imminent danger of spending eternity being consumed-but-not-consumed by lakes of flame.

Yeah, but some individuals are much better brainwashers than others (it's psychology, I think, and not the nature of the beliefs so much) and some people are much more susceptible to brainwashing than others. (just like some dogs are very very trainable and some barely trainable at all, and some people are dog whisperers and others take two years to housebreak the world's most trainable puppy). .... Wide range of variation in these things, for people as well as for puppies and puppy owners, I think. Also -- I'd like to see a tv show based on your two potential trajectories! Throwing Tupperware parties, indeed.

Ya'd think. But surprisingly, it doesn't really break down that way. For one thing, all our states have pretty lax standards for home schooling. And the breakdown doesn't seem to be regional, as one would expect. Tennessee's kind of in the middle of the pack, actually, requiring families to notify the government each year they homeschool (some states require no notification, ever!) and maintaining vaccination requirements for homeschooled children, for example. As best as I can figure, the state-to-state differences mainly trace to how active the home schooling associations are in each state. If a state has had enough activist homeschoolers to get heavily involved with HSLDA and bring them in to lobby, then they've been able to push the state governments -- in basically every case I know of -- to repeatedly roll back the rules and make it easier to homeschool as you wish. And if not, then not. Here's a state by state summary of some big homeschooling rules: https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/homeschool I think Jill's family's interest in Tennessee remains a mystery.

Yeah, I can't help judging her a little either! Same as you, in fact!

I assume your brother's a high earner! Tennessee has no income tax but it has extremely high sales taxes, including on groceries. .... Hard to see how that would work well for anybody in the Rodriguez clan. Wonder what laws they are thinking of.

Yeah, I sure do.

Brought over from Lonely Js' thread -- reply to Fun in Fundieland about Anna. All I can say is that -- Everybody's a little different, clearly! .... So while I don't know that I exactly understand what Anna's doing, I think what allows people to do things and what hinders them is kind of inscrutable... I questioned things and consciously my beliefs now are completely different from my indoctrination. But I still have essentially zero self confidence or self belief and whenever some opportunity presents itself that requires self-belief to undertake, I'm viciously bombarded from inside my own brain with all the negative things that were implanted in me as a child. I've lived away for many decades now, live a completely different life than the one I was expected to live, gone through psychological probings for years and have -- by superficial appearances -- moved on completely. But the convictions about myself that were implanted when I was a kid have crippled me -- beyond repair, I now think -- when it comes to actually living up to my own potential and ambitions professionally, creatively, and, perhaps even more so, when it comes to friendships and other relationships. I fully believe in not selling yourself short and have counseled -- successfully in some cases -- many others not to do so! When it comes to myself, though, there are hurdles that I just can't seem to get over. I have gotten over one that Anna isn't getting over of course, the one about leaving the situation and going out on your own -- but I did that as a childless 18-year-old. I like to think that I would have done it also as a 20- or 30-something with kids, saving them as well as me. But I can't say for sure that I would have, because I was never in that exact situation. .... What I can say for sure is that I now believe that just because something's doable for one person doesn't mean it's doable for everybody. .... I know it's possible that Anna's just being lazy or otherwise holding herself back when she really could do it. But I also don't think it's impossible that it's just too damned hard for her, given all her circumstances. I'd love to believe that we can do anything at all if we put our minds to it -- as all the self-help books say -- but I know that many of my own conditioned responses are so far below and beyond thought that I feel, after long trying, that I just can't conquer them. So I think that's probably true of others, too.

And I just noticed we're way off topic here. Blast you, Duggar photographers, for putting people with different threads in the same picture. ... I'll reply over on Josh and Anna (not that I have anything very significant to say!)

His sister, I believe. ... He has a sister named Jessica, at any rate.

Well, if you receive the message often enough, through enough channels, and beginning in babyhood that your wants are nothing, that you don't have worth as a separate individual but only as part of a couple or a group, that you don't have a right to act without consulting certain authorities and so on, you really do internalize those ideas. And you do it even if -- eventually -- you consciously and rationally don't believe that those things are true. Anna's been fed all that stuff from birth, through many channels, and from everybody she's considered an authority. And I think that she probably believes in the system, such as it is, on her own, and probably hasn't questioned it rationally very much either. I can attest that -- even as somebody whose rational principles have shifted to something quite different -- when you've been conditioned in that way, your fallback position is that your wants are nothing, you don't have worth, etc. All that is down at the bottom of my mind, despite my conscious disbelief in it, and when the idea of acting in a way contrary to those "principles" the conditioning still pushes me hard in the old direction -- and it does so especially strongly when I'm stressed or tired or anxious or the like. And I'm sure that Anna's darned stressed, tired, anxious -- emotionally depleted in many ways -- at this point. You really do tend to act in accordance with your brainwashing, even decades after the fact if the brainwashing was intense enough and started early enough, in my opinion. And in her case, she's lived entirely in the midst of people who are going to push and push her in the conditioned direction and play on all her potential fears of going a different way. To be spurred even to seriously try to shift the underlying principles she's imbibed, I expect that she'd have to actually be physically separated from these people, somehow get possession of serious thinking skills, live closely with a bunch of people who behave quite differently, see some specific bad consequences of sticking with the patriarchal views (not just have them be theoretical, which the very real harms you mention to the kids are to her, I'm sure) and have a bunch of time pass with all these conditions in place. And even then, she'd still have the dark voice in her brain yelling that she's a terrible unredeemable person whenever she contemplated acting in accordance with different ideas. (Well, this is what happens to me, at any rate!) I wish she'd take a different tack, too. But -- so so so much easier said than done, in my opinion anyway.

I think that, officially, women can't live on their own as heads of households, even temporarily. I mean -- Who's her headship? I believe that the concept of a woman having "a home of her own" (hell, even "a room of her own") is a non-concept in the Christian patriarchal universe. .... As I write this, it sounds like a joke. But I think it's probably a deadly serious principle with these lunatics.

I'd bet that most people listen to them because they feel really really sorry for those poor children. Anybody who's seen a photo is going to want to give the poor things a good dinner. So if the price for helping the kids is listening to the cacophony ... well.... I swear that has to be the only way they get their gigs. Hey, the RV functions as both! And, like a lot of the other Christian patriarchists, maybe they're insecure, terribly fearful, randomly aggressive -- and not even close to rational?

Who adorns the stove area, no matter what holiday, with paper decorations? Oh, that's right. Brainless people or people who don't cook. (and, in this case, obviously both ...)

Wow, thanks. Love my crown.

Maybe they picked up "Papi" from the Dullards. Not an uncommon word in Central America, I believe.

Hear ye, ye young men. Ignore the devilish stirrings of thy crotch vegetable. For, lo, it is fickle. It moveth without meaning or direction. Lo, how bitterly it led thy brother astray. Be ye not so deceived. Look ye instead unto the cucumber. Green, cold, non-tumescent, yet full to a fullness with plentiful seed, it moveth not, it leadeth not astray. Plant ye therefore the cucumber. And, lo, it shall be a blessing unto you. Heed the cucumber. Award it care. Abnegate thyself and thy devilish stirrings. Water the cucumber. Weed ye it instead. Lo, though the summer be long and seem fruitless. And after all thy labor, lo, the cucumber will rise up to bless thee and give thee pickles. Even in the months of the bitterest cold and darkness. Pickles unto the last generation.