Churchhoney

I think we know that Josh comes from a long tradition of saying whatever is convenient to say at the time. We weren't victims, but we're being revictimized! We remember exactly what happened! Except we never woke up and don't know anything except what our parents told us! Etc etc etc. No surprise that there are three or four stories being simultaneously told about these events, too.

Either that or they just can't get their minds around it, so they just instinctively look the other way. Cuz hat we know for sure is widespread in Gothard/Quiverfull country is denial, stupidity and fearfulness.

Despite that kind of law being on the books, it works out okay for the men. In America we like to fulminate about how horrible sex as a commodity is. But we hardly ever punish the men who buy it. .... The women who sell it are a bit of a different story, though. We're scared to death of sex without a godly context, we're hypocritical as hell, and we also think that women are lesser beings who are likely the cause of all our troubles. You'd almost think JIm Bob Duggar founded this country.

It does make me laugh to think about how lame a person you have to be to be a sycophant to Jim Bob.

And I guess Michelle doesn't like whistling in the car. Since that's one of the examples. ... Geesh. ... Or maybe it's just joy breaking out in a little music that she doesn't like. And, given other things we've heard, I think Michelle may actually have encouraged Jessa to kick Jana's bunk. You know -- payback for all that kicking rotten Jana did in the womb and all. Oy....Hating these people so much really isn't good for me, even though they completely deserve it. ...

Well, it's really from the half dead lips of old Bill G, not from the Duggs .... so that obviously makes a difference. My impression is that he doesn't cotton to any pop music, country probably included (along with country dances from the 18th century and so on -- and I'm not kidding!). I don't think he approves of anything except some of the less-stirring hymn tunes and some of the very tamest Bach and Mozart. (I can't see him approving of Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations or Don Giovanni, for example.)...... I assume he's scared to death of any music that would encourage him in the least bit to sway his body -- or think a thought that isn't incredibly, 2 million percent confining. (and that's most music). He's the one I'd really like to hear a true detailed account of in childhood, and a psychoanalysis because, wow -- he makes the Duggars look sane to me ... But anyway, beyond all that, I think, as others -- maybe including you! -- have said here, the point of all this is to keep the young from swaying to music or being intrigued by anything that seems to be new and cool. ... So when he started all this, that trend in music was rock. So that's what he went for, trying to hammer the evils of rock home with the promise that hating rock would keep your kids locked up under your control .... Don't bother him with facts about other types of music and musicians. (Although they're almost all bad, too!) I would so love to know the story of ye olde Gothard homestead. Their parents spawned at least two molesters, and all three sons are grifters (at least) and the one is a flat-out blatant ponzi schemer, using BG's "church" group as his source for marks .... And yet old Bill, despite his iniquity, also seems to be the biggest scaredy cat on the face of the earth. WTF are the genetic and environmental components of that kind of mess? (and I wonder what the sisters have been up to....)

Yeah, but that's probably because he sold his soul to the devil.

The book wasn't really written by the the dumb Duggar girls. The book is pure Gothard propaganda -- and fully intended to be -- and the "facts" certainly came from Gothard's henchman David Waller and/or the other ghostwriter Charlie Richards. The girls' "experiences" in the book are just there to back up various Gothard-y points, just like these other "facts."

She's the granddaughter of the company's founder. But Howard Publishing was sold to Simon and Schuster -- I think just after the grandfather died maybe 10 years ago or so -- and moved from Louisiana. It's now an S&S imprint and is called Howard Books. The sale was before the Duggs started publishing books, I think. So they wouldn't have anything to do with the Howard family. By the time they got involved it was just an S&S thing. It's a really big imprint.

Yes, their book is also from Howard. It's standard PR practice for the fake authors of a ghostwritten book to talk about their editor when they discuss the book in public! .... Because that leaves the impression that the faux auteurs actually worked with the editor! Really though, J,J,J, and J, Sue Ann worked mainly with David and Charlie. lol Yes. One assumes he contributed the details of the Gothard philosophy and kept those straight, while Charlie Richards probably did most of the actual planning, writing, interviewing the girls, etc. .... They would have needed a Gothard expert on board, since that's pretty clearly a lot of the purpose of the book, I think. And I think DW is kind of a right-hand man in the Gothard kingdom.

Nope. Not a woman. It's Charlie Richards and David Waller. They're listed on the copyright page using some standard ghostwriter language -- "additional writing contributed by." And no other contributors of any kind are listed except for an editor, Sue Ann Jones. But she got the editor language. Richards and Waller got the ghostwriter language. I think Jones is an Arkansas newspaper editor. .... Instead of being written by the four people who now claim that they're "authors," the book was written by three other people who don't get to say that. It took seven altogether apparently. And yet it says pretty much nothing.

Interesting. On the copyright page of the hardback, they're listed in descending age order, with Jana being first, of course. .... But -- also of course -- she's gotten bumped for Jill! (And on the Amazon page for the Kindle edition, they're listed in a completely strange order (but one that coincides with your Jill only book); Jill, JInger, Jessa, Jana. .... Wonder what the heck that's about. Not age, not alphabetical, not in order of fame.)

Well, Richards is pretty savvy, I think (aside from his longtime professional partnerships). He has a long career writing for mainstream organizations as well as his purely Christian work. So he may have stopped them! He's decades older than Waller and the Curly Sisters, but I expect he was primarily responsible for wresting the language out of Gothard's nursing-home dialect.

The whole book just recites Gothard's stuff, with interspersed "anecdotes" -- many clearly largely or wholly fictionalized, if you ask me -- that are supposedly from these 21st-century "authors'" lives. The whole book is just an attempt to make Gothardism seem young and fresh and pretty because it's supposedly coming from the mouths of the Four Curlytops. (as if they're modern)

Pretty sure David Waller and Charlie Richards (formerly of Focus on the Family and creator of the Life at the Pond series) wrote -- and primarily conceptualized -- most of it. The above -- plus most of what else is in the book -- is a straight-up Bill Gothard talking point. And DW (as a Gothard henchman) and Richards (as a longtime professional writer) were surely hired not just to polish sentences but to make sure that the whole Duggar-favored ATI agenda was laid out clearly and in detail in the book.

Oh my gosh, I haven't seen that cover in a long time. Some of those poses -- like mannequins from the helpmeet floor in the fun-diepartment store. (I'm looking at you, Jill and Jinger) And the curls. Horrifying. Plus, now I know what photograph old Bill G has stuffed under his mattress at home. (Would be better if you could see the flip-flop feet of course....Although they may have given him a full-length photo upon request, I suppose...) Wonder whether the fam figured that with those heads of hair scores of Gothard-y young men would come a-runnin. So much for that plan, I guess. Seems even Gothard-y young men mostly don't want JB and M as parents in-law.

Well, Michelle didn't deliver her, you know.

Point taken. And I get it now. I think you and I are just defining big scandal and big blowout quite differently. Plus, you and I completely disagree about whether logic applies to the Duggars! I don't see them doing anything that's actually surprising at all, given the kind of family they are and the basis on which I think Jim Bob has created that family. They're certainly not people who base their own behavior on logic, but from an observer's perspective it seems to me all their doings play out quite logically, once we have a handle on the kinds of personalities the parents have. And we do have a handle on that. I'm sure Boob's evaded a few taxes and since the visit-a-strip-club (or whatever he supposedly visited) rumor has been out there for years, I'm sure something like that is true, too. I don't think there'll ever be a big tax evasion scandal or the like, though, and I don't think there'll be a revelation that he has some huge perversion like a fondness for giving blow jobs to babies or whatever. That's the level of darkness I thought people were pointing to, given the language that's been used about revelations coming out. And I don't see minor tax-law breakage and some strip-club visits as anything cataclysmic -- except in this alternate universe where we all think that everything the Duggars do is huge huge huge, I guess because of their pretensions to superior virtue and, in my view, the fact that they're TeeVee "stars." I'm sure Boob has cut plenty of corners, but since a minor real-estate speculator and a person who's dabbled in politics is pretty inevitably going to have done those things, I wouldn't see anything minor in those realms as any dark horrible secret. More like par for the course for a grifty mental midget who's played in Arkansas politics, really. Boob's certainly not the pillar of virtue he pretends to be, but then why would we ever expect him to be? His petty greed is on full display pretty much a hundred percent of the time, and that destroys his virtue myth right there. And I have to say that I would never have said Josh was too smart to do the Ashley Madison thing. I've always thought Josh was pretty stupid and eerily arrogant for a person his age; he came across as a creepy and unstable personality to me from the first times I saw him. But, actually, I don't think the Ashley Madison thing is that big a deal anyway. So, yeah, I'm sure Boob's done some shady things and has dallied in a bit of something sexual here and there. But I thought you and others were talking about some really big revelation of criminality or deep perversion or long-running use of prostitutes or something. And I just don't see any of that that. I think he's too busy being a massive micro-manager of as many people as he can get his hands on. That's pretty much a full-time job, too, I expect. Time will tell how it all unwinds, though, obviously.

Plus, they're all current meatheads.

I don't know. I wouldn't bet on there being any big event to come or to be revealed. Maybe there is. But people like Jim Bob can really just go on for many decades manipulating and torturing the people in their immediate vicinity without any major explosions or anything. And even without most people around them -- or in this case watching them on tv -- even noticing how nuts they are. They give birth to a bunch of helpless squirming babies and warp them steadily over the decades and take their pleasure from that. I think that's his only real game. There's lots and lots of scope for daily arrogance, meanness and subsequent triumph in malforming and lording it over the crowd of peons he's created -- now numbering 28 (and counting) including the hapless young in-laws and grandbabies. I think we're giving him too much credit when we imagine that there'll be some big drama or other. He's fundamentally lazy, stupid, cowardly (I would bet -- which kind of limits the size of explosive events you can cause, usually) and, really, not good at anything but two-bit meanness and manipulation of the weak, as far as I can see. And he doesn't seem to have spawned many, if any, who are much stronger, braver or brighter than he is. So it doesn't seem too likely that the younger generation will trigger any big explosions either. I think he just seems bigger than he is -- and bigger than other run-of-the-mill mean control freaks like him -- because TLC has put his mean, controlling ass on television for so long. I don't see him having made any splash whatsoever in the bigger-than-the-TTH real-life ponds he's played in, for example -- Arkansas politics or even the Gothard empire, where JB and M haven't really been influential, seems to me, but only called upon to speak a lot because they've spawned so many baby Gothardites. And if he's got some real scandal going on in his personal or family life, where are the rumors of it? The rumors of pretty much exactly what Josh had done were circulating in Arkansas and all over the internet for years and years. But are there any real rumors about JB, except that maybe he went into a strip club occasionally? I don't recall any, but maybe there are. And if he did have some bigger sick activity going on, I'd think there would be rumors circulating, since there were about Josh. (Heck, even Josiah's got a rumor going now -- with people in LA pretending to be outraged and scandalized because an 18-year-old might have wanted to talk a little dirty with his girlfriend.) Outside of being on tv, Jim Bob's continually been a nobody -- in both positive and negative things -- despite what appear to be fairly frantic efforts to become a somebody, seems to me.

I don't know whether JB and M are conscious of this or not. My guess is not because they're so mentally and emotionally unbalanced. But that "leave and cleave" stuff was always bullshit that they spouted because it was what they'd heard they were supposed to say. .... Those two (or at least JB) are control freaks to a truly insane degree, that's why they've raised the children the way they have, and control freaks would never leave off controlling just because somebody reached a certain age or moved out of the house. To non-control freaks they appeared -- and claimed -- to be training the children to be adults. But JB's greatest need (and maybe M's too) is clearly to be in control of everything. So he wasn't training anybody to be anything. He was just controlling them, and he'll go on trying to totally control anything and anyone that comes near him until the day he dies. That's why the Duggs hate animals, too, I think. You can't control animals the way you can people. People's brains can be warped and shmushed and played with, which makes them all too easy to control. And I think that's what JB's severe personality disorder leads him to do every day of his life. He'll never stop. And he has no interest in anybody being independent of him in any way. It's unfortunate for his kids that the human brain tends to adapt to over-control by internalizing those controls. So even when the controller is out of the room -- and even if you've moved out or the controller has died -- the ways in which that person controlled you and the specific things that person was most controlling about are still wired into your brain so you tend to have robotic responses of some kind to those things forever (even if it's a robotic rebellious and angry response). He's built a ton of triggers into all of them.

Honestly, I don't know if it's that bleak, really. I mean, it's very unfortunate for his kids that he's set up a situation where they're all kind of forcibly channeled into being pretty much the least they can be rather than the best. But it's not like they're worse than millions of other clueless, stunted, kind of nothing people. It's just that we're not used to seeing 19 such people all in the same family, or in a family that has such pretensions to glory and importance or in a family that's on television. I think that if they lived in my neighborhood, I'd just think, Aaa, that's just the shiftless, mediocre Duggars and not really given them much more thought. Josie would kind of worry me because she may have special needs that aren't being addressed. And it is a worry that some of them might be depressed. But most of them seem capable of working basic jobs if they needed to, so they can get along in the world one way or another. All the kinds of people you've described are really pretty commonly seen, I think. It's just that the Duggars are so sure they;'re much more than that. But they're wrong.

Yeah, I can see that. I was trying to just think about the sound! ....

I agree with that being possible in various social situations, and it wouldn't surprise me. I was talking about the webcam. I expect they have their electronics pretty well locked down, since that's centralized and can be easy to do. From what they've said, I think they depend quite a bit on the idea that they control the electronics.

Could be. But I grew up surrounded by similar security. And there's a limit to what magic can do, even when kids are very very motivated, if parents are isolating and determined enough, and I'd be surprised if the Duggars weren't quite determined. Because JB and M -- they're not nearly-normal-but-extremely-overprotective parents. They're insane.... For example, I think there's a very good reason why teenage Josh was looking at porn on workplace computers. Unlike most other teenagers, he probably couldn't get to it otherwise.