Churchhoney

The thing is, though, she grew up in a situation where clinginess is both a principle people are supposed to follow on moral grounds -- hanging out constantly with your spouse, always having an accountability partner at the supermarket and the like -- and a constant practice unconsciously spurred by the particular warped psychology of these parents, who are such massive fearful nasty control freaks that they can't let anyone out of their sight. And it appears as if it's probably something congenial to her own particular nature, too. That's a combination of factors that's going to take both awareness -- hard to come by for brainwashed, not-that-bright Jilly Muffin -- and serious effort to overcome, if she ever does overcome it. It wouldn't be a quick fix. Add to that, of course, the fact that she's now in a foreign country where she doesn't speak the language, and unaccompanied by any of the people she's used to, except for Derick. Really, anybody is a bit insecure in that situation. So we can add that as an extra spur to be clingy. .... She's going to be clinging for a long time.

This is one of the many reasons that I say JB and M are driven by their sick, mean psychologies, not any kind of religious or even cultic "rules" or whatever. Not stating the "rules," tricking people into violating rules because they haven't been articulated, pretending that ad hoc prohibitions on certain behaviors are actually "rules" when they're really just whimsical ways to sneak up on people and thwart their wills -- All of those things are the stock in trade of malignant narcissistic, manipulative, mean-spirited rotten parents (or other people in charge). They're extreme mental cruelties practiced by mean-spirited jerks because they get their kicks from such meanness. It drives me absolutely crazy to see such parental behaviors -- which I've experienced firsthand my whole life -- be portrayed as "faith" or "conservatism" or the like. (And I'm a liberal atheist!) These actions represent no philosophy or set of religious principles or any other such thing. They are the behaviors of sick, mean personalities. Period.

Yes.

This pretty much sums up the whole psychology and lifestyle of not just the Maxwells but the Duggars are well, seems to me.

Makes me think that Gothard must have had a superstrong compulsion to diddle (or masturbate on the feet of or something) young girls and so concluded that females were all Satan's tools to lead him straight to hell. .... And so he came up with this killer idea for "training" other young men to embrace this revelation. Imagine the crapload of warpedness that must emerge from that experience.

Here's a bit about some of the allegations that have been made regarding ALERT, in an article noting that an HSLDA-sponsored mag is sort of touting ALERT at the moment: http://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2016/02/14/hslda-sponsored-magazine-promotes-bill-gothards-alert-academy/ "The TOS article is featured prominently on the magazine’s front cover with the line, “ALERT Academy: Cultivating Integrity in Your Son!” The author, John Boulden, describes the history of ALERT while making no mention of its relationship with Bill Gothard, IBLP, and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI, Gothard’s homeschool program)." 'A homeschool alumnus who attended ALERT Academy, which is still an IBLP program, described it as “really nothing more than a glorified boy scout troop; often referred to by some as ‘Gothard’s boy scouts’.” ALERT stands for Air Land Emergency Resource Team. The academy engages in highly controversial training techniques, much like Teen Mania’s suspended Emotionally Stretching Opportunity of a Lifetime (ESOAL) program. Also like ESOAL, ALERT has faced a plethora of abuse allegations. Jeri Lofland details, among other charges, the program’s alleged “refusal to contact parents regarding medical emergencies” and practice of forcing “under-dressed teen boys to stand outdoors in sub-freezing temperatures at night” to elicit confessions.'

Absolutely. I'm sure that he idealized the family, especially in light of his sadness about his dad's death and so on. And then to find out about the Josh thing (not to mention all the other dysfunction) -- it really had to shape him. ... And he did have dreams. I hadn't heard about the accountancy-to-a-big-company thing. And we know that he also flirted with ideas about the FBI and certainly being a full-fledged missionary. And now here he is -- fleeing abroad to escape Jim Bob but in fact dependent on Jim Bob. A lot of what he hoped for has been shattered, I think.

I can certainly see that as a possibility. But I envision both Derick and Bin imagining that they were getting the best of all possible wives, in marrying into the Duggar fantasy land of amazing wifehood. And now they know that they got brilliant-homemaker helpmeets who don't even cook and, much worse, women with Michelle and Jim Bob ineradicably implanted as governors in their brains, and who somehow managed to implant JB and M as governors in the guys' brains as well. Plus, in Jill, Derick got a terminal clinger, and in Jessa, Bin got a pretty major clinger who is also a bitch. Not sure how many dumb young guys rushing into marriage with famous tv stars would expect that really -- or see it as a good thing when it happened. I also kind of expect that Derick envisioned himself and his Duggar life partner preparing themselves right now to be full-fledged Southern Baptist missionaries, under the auspices of the mission board. But of course Jill's complete lack of education would have killed that dream in a heartbeat. Meanwhile, I kind of think that Bin saw himself as inheriting some of the Duggar's tv magic and being on his way to having a big-time Calvinist-tv-ministry-for-the-millennials by now, climbing on the giant Duggar tv shoulders. And I expect he's now learned that that ain't likely to happen -- so why was he in such a rush to get into this family?

I haven't thought Bin looked so great lately either. My completely unsupported guess is that they're two half-bright, kinda naive but sort of idealistic young-for-their-ages guys who thought that marrying into the Duggar clan would be a dream come true. And now they're finding that it has some qualities of a nightmare.

I'd suggest Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But the Duggs seem to have been zombified already.

Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility would work. Patient, low-expectations women snag nice-guy pastors as husbands in both of those. Not Persuasion, though. Seeing late-20-something Anne decide that years earlier she shouldn't have allowed her elders to dissuade her from marrying young Wentworth might give certain people ideas. (Someone should sneak that one to Jana wrapped in an Gothard-seminar cover.)

Do you think she has any idea that she's benefited from strangers' generosity, though? JB and M certainly don't seem to. They seem to believe that everything they've ever received was because the Lord directed stuff their way because they're so great. I've never heard them utter a word about being grateful for the "love offerings" of food on their porch before they got the tv show, for example. They seem to think that they're doing God's work by having a million uber-Christian children and anything they get is simply in recognition and support of that all-important contribution they're making to the heavenly kingdom. And Jill not being anything like an independent thinker probably has swallowed that hook, line and sinker. She apparently deeply admires and respects parents who preach the idea that they're helping poor people by dropping off bags of Dumdums and applying cheap nail polish to children. The only hope for her is to get enough exposure to the rest of the world to realize that that's nonsense. And, to me, as long as she's not in the Duggar house, there's at least a slim hope that a penny may one day drop. I wouldn't call it more than a slim hope, since grifting seems to run in families -- and of course continuing to believe that Christ supports your grifting is the easiest way to be -- but still. And it's not just Jill, I expect. I imagine that most of the Duggar kids think they're more than repaying whatever they've received when they accost strangers in shopping malls and tell them "the good news" or when Jessa posts a quote on instagram calling people's attention to the fact that they're all hellbound sinners.

A couple of high hurdles for anybody who wants to complain: "Public benefit" is simply as opposed to "private benefit." So if your ministry offers some kind of religious rites or other activities that are open to the public and not confined to "group members only," then you can -- under the way the laws are currently interpreted -- pass a "public benefit" test quite easily. These two clearly wander around the area "offering" their religious rites and conversations to everybody and anybody. And that's how "public benefit" has generally been construed. Second, it's quite common for board directors of small nonprofits to also be paid employees of those nonprofits. And that's clearly what the Dullards are doing here. They're directors of the nonprofit but also missionaries of the nonprofit. As long as there are other board members as well and as long as salaries are relatively modest -- say under $100,000 a year or so -- that's generally considered completely permissible. If they consulted a lawyer at all, then they know that they can't be the only board members, so I think it's safe to assume that they probably have more board directors now, listed on some document somewhere. If they do, then there's no problem with Jill and Derick being both board members and paid employees -- in this case, "missionaries." On the salary question, somebody could certainly look at whatever salary Derick is taking, for example, and argue that it's too high. However, you can't argue that based on the fact that the salaried person is wealthy or has other money coming from somewhere. If a Rockefeller is getting a nonprofit salary of $250,000 per annum, he or she is perfectly within rights to do so if that's in line with what other nonprofits with similar sizes and missions are paying, no matter how much money he/she has otherwise. All you can base the judgment on is whether the salary is within the reasonable range for other people doing similar "work." So if Derick is pulling a salary from the Dill Fam Mission that's in the ballpark of what Mike Schadt of S.O.S. is making, for example, it would probably be impossible for anybody to make the case that he shouldn't be getting that money. This becomes especially difficult when it comes to charities operating as religious entities, because the "work" they do is so intangible that the IRS has very little ability to actually judge what that work is "worth" in monetary terms. And so the religious groups almost always get the benefit of the doubt as long as they aren't paying people amounts that would be outsized for any charity. There certainly are people in the nonprofit regulatory system -- and in the public as well -- who try to push for extending nonprofit tax-free status only to organizations that do work that everybody would consider "charity" -- i.e., the well digging and so on. But this movement has so far gotten very little momentum -- and it's especially stymied when it comes to faith-based nonprofits such as missionary groups. The argument for doing intangible things based on faith -- and the fear that surrounds the idea of criticizing faith-based groups because their "public benefits" are intangible -- is just too strong in the United States for such critics to have made any headway so far. All of that -- plus the fact that this is a tiny tiny two-bit nonprofit, and the IRS is already way underfunded and therefore unable to keep up even with huge potentially scamming and cheating nonprofits -- means that, while it might be a fun idea to think someone could get them to go after the Dullards, it's way way unlikely.

Seems to me that they said they'd go to Central America and act as the kind of missionaries who talk to people about the importance of adopting the right kind of Christian faith and that the money given would support -- i.e., pay the salaries and expenses of -- the missionaries doing this. And they're the missionaries. They also said they'd assist visiting missioncationers in spreading the same Gospel, and they've done that too. Doesn't seem to me they lied or made unkept promises at all. Anybody who gave money thinking that the Dills would dig wells or support orphans or build community centers or the like simply wasn't paying attention. If the IRS accepts straight-up religious "work" as an acceptable nonprofit enterprise -- and this is Amurca, so they do -- then I don't see that there's any grounds at all for calling the Dills' activities a scam. To call it a scam, they'd have to call many other now tax-exempt religious enterprises scams. Lots of plain old stateside churches, for example, don't do much of anything except preach their preferred theology, maintain their expensive buildings and run social events for their own congregations -- who in some cases are downright wealthy -- and they get that tax-free status too. I don't see that changing any time soon. I would guess that most of the religious activities that involve tax-free donations are not what we might consider "charitable work" unless you define preaching and sharing a specific theology as such work. Everybody here hates the Dillards, but if they're doing a scam, so are a lot of other people.

At last! Something good about missioncationing!

Interesting thought. Her mother, Teri, has had a lot of depression and they've written about it -- in the context of the jail they live in and in the context of the family being widely considered homeschooling gurus. Wonder how that background does affect the marriage market.

Plus, it's a "compared to what" situation. Jill has been the Duggar kid who said she wanted to be a nurse, who believed she was studying Spanish and who read through quite a bit of material preparing for her sorta-kinda-midwife tests. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, compared to other Duggars, she's read a lot. And given her lifestyle, other Duggars are really the only thing she has to compare herself too. The fact that she reads hardly at all compared to people who actually read isn't really something she'd be aware of.

Don't worry. I'm sure they'll be revealed in the upcoming season of 28 Dependents and Counting (29 If You Count Michelle): The New Show We Were Counting on Is Here! Once again, Duggar-affiliated young people learn to treat their whole lives as teasers for a tv show.

I expect all the Duggar kids are pretty hard to be married to. In my family, it's absolutely been the case that spouses find out too late that they're actually married to the family dictators as much as they're married to their partners. And it's very tough to deal with because the influences that bug the marriers-in are largely unconscious ones and mainly consist of internal controls that beat people up from the inside if they veer from their childhood indoctrination. This kind of thing is very very hard to wean a partner away from, first because people don't even realize that they have such processes going on inside and second because the attitudes and behaviors were ground into them so young that they're nearly hard-wired and extremely difficult to eradicate, even assuming you can get someone to realize that they're there. Marrying a Duggar will always be marrying a mean little Jim Bob and Michelle buried deep in your beloved's brain, directing his or her behavior and attitudes with a power you'll never attain (or driving him or her nuts and causing him/her to act out against the little internal JB and M -- this might be Joshley's state, mainly). In either case, JB and M are directing a lot of your partner's behavior, and your influence doesn't stand much of a chance, quite often. She's tried. But so far she's only managed to bleach six of them.

Steve M and David R sort of enlisted on their own into their specific cult-types post-puberty, didn't they? While Chad P and Zach B were either born into the particular groups of which they're now members or were brought in by their parents as young kids, right? If that's the case, then I'd say that's certainly a pattern you see a lot and a pattern that accounts for the drop-off in membership of most of the cults as they approach the third and fourth generations. The people who enlisted on their own after attaining the age of reason are often going to be much more avid. For one thing, they're defending their own choices by their avidity. If the actual choice was your parents', not yours, you don't feel the same compulsion to embrace it madly to justiify yourself, I expect. (You might even run, or at least ease your way out of it over time.)

Maybe he's trying to find some way to mask the post-surgical crookedness of his face. I can see why you might think that a full beard and a lot of hair could help. In person, maybe it does actually help. I don't see dirt, either. His skin looks clean enough. He has dark hair but that's, uh, hair, not dirt.

I think that a lot of people can't emotionally handle that much uncertainty about big things. As T.S. Eliot says, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

Seems to me it's yet another symptom of what's at the heart of the family troubles. JB and M have lethal combinations of stupidity, ignorance, disordered personality and flawed character -- with arrogance and a complete divorce from reality as their hallmarks. It's all masquerading as "faith" and "family values," yet literally nothing has any real meaning to them. And that's the horrifying meaningless echo chamber those poor kids live in pretty much every minute of their lives -- and at least through middle age, apparently, in many cases. How terrible that such deranged idiots have gotten their hands on so many children.

The Duggar Camp thinks they're interesting enough to have a long-running (perhaps perpetual) tv show. Their judgment of entertainment value seems suspect.

You raise an interesting point. He's a dinosaur who interacts with humans. That fits the creationist timeline.