Churchhoney

That's about the size of it. I doubt she had time to become and then stop being a junkie, though. My guess is that she smoked a fair bunch of weed for a brief period. David Waller was a lost soul at 3, Jinger Duggar at, what, 7 or 8? .... Doesn't take much in this community to view yourself as utterly depraved, apparently. Except, of course, for those whose behavior actually is depraved. Such as Josh's serial child molestation and its unspeakable coverup and papering over by JIm Bob and Michelle. That stuff doesn't make you depraved at all. It's all upside down and backwards, so I'm betting Sierra's is a bit that way, too.

Wonder whether he sees the hip dude (haha) persona as a possibility for boosting his career as a Calvinist teevee preacherman who'll appeal to millennials because he's just so ... cool. (haha). That was sort of the Mark Driscoll/Mars Hill approach, wasn't it? Before MD showed his true colors as massive grifter and overall mean guy.

Well, I expect it's both what you were saying and what I was saying. Because why have one stupid reason when you can have two?!

I assume that part of the not speaking thing is to avoid having mutual defrauding take place. I mean, if women are out working then they're clearly sluts. So they might defraud JB. And, of course, he's so extremely attractive that he's likely to totally defraud any woman he goes near. So he shouldn't talk to them either, for their sake. After all, they're sluts but they have the misfortune of working for a living rather than being wholly under some guy's umbrella. So they have enough problems without being defrauded by Jim Bob. The refusal to talk is a safety measure really. (ETA: DId I forget tho turn on the sarcasm beacon for this last line?)

I kind of expect that they actually talk like that. I mean, in their minds their lives are part of this major apocalyptic drama that's going on with God and the devil. And they, the super-godly Duggars, are walking through the world at the right hand of the Biggest Guy There Is. Everything's a crusade and an Armageddon to them. Or a Season of Life. That's why they actually think it's some big "mission" to hang around on Central American beaches and talk to people about the Bible. Or post Bible verses over and over on instagram like Jessa and Ben. And why every idiot thing they have or do is Precious and Special. God's breathing on them all the time while they do their crap and their stupid piddly actions are part of the great battle for the ultimate fate of the universe.... They really think in those King Jamesy poetry terms when it comes to their own lives, I think. That both feeds their arrogance and results from their arrogance, I expect.

Probably near the start. In Boob's case, though, it's not that he's against taking things from people. He's just against taking things that you're supposed to give back or pay for. It's not so much a No Debt way of life as a No Pay way of life. ha Control freaks don't generally seem to be people who've been controlled themselves. Not in my experience anyway. (Maybe they've never allowed it.) And they're definitely not logical. Control freaks live for the pleasure of pushing people around. And children are easy to push. Plus, if you play your cards right with the children, you'll get the even greater pleasure of pushing them around as adults, too. Boob has played his cards right.

I'm about a 100 percent sure that this question doesn't even occur to him because the kids aren't real people to him. In his mind, he's the only real person. He only registers them insofar as they act in accordance with his wishes, or don't. So if they left or acted rebellious because they don't like each other much, he'd freak. But he still wouldn't look for explanations in their feelings. It'd be -- Robots not doing as programmed! -- plain and simple. Having no empathy at all means that you don't see other beings as real. Boob has zero empathy, I expect. Some people with no empathy become serial killers. Boob became a killer of children's souls and autonomy. In either case, no ruth about what they do.

I'm not so sure. Admittedly, I'm about a decade older than JB and M but quite a few people I went to high school with married soon after graduation. And that included quite a few who were not with child! And both people who intended to go to college and those who didn't. I think it varies a lot from family to family and even community to community. I can easily see the "family is moving" thing used as a reason, too. The kid would demand to remain behind, and the parents find it preferable to have him/her remain behind as a married member of another family, with in-laws who would help look after the couple, rather than having the kid remain behind unmarried and, thus, probably fooling around in the unmarried state and ripe to be abandoned or to abandon if pregnancy happened. If your kid doesn't intend to go to college -- and it seems as if Michelle didn't? -- then what's your real leverage once that kid gets out of high school? And if she remained in Arkansaas, she could conceivably become part of a then-moving-onto-its-4th-generation real-estate business -- which she did -- instead of going to her own family's new home without a plan or any set occupation and being incredibly pissy and maybe running off. I can see many families doing it the way you suggest, but I can see it happening this way, too. And i certainly know of both kinds of situations.

Ah, but it's probably all their own fault. Just ask the Botkins: So, we make our wish lists and pray that we get Missionary Martyr Malibu Ken for Christmas. But what will we have to offer him? How are we preparing to be what he might need in a wife? How long are our lists of standards and requirements for ourselves? Our aspirations to be married to fine husbands are good; but then, that’s an aspiration that the Cinderellas and the ugly stepsisters of the world have always had in common. We need to step outside of our imaginary roles as the heroines of our own personal fairy tales, and ask ourselves: Which one am I? Why would the prince choose me? On a day when women all over the world will be thinking about what they want to get from a man, let’s think instead about we’re preparing to give to one. The bad news is, none of us are naturally likeable, desirable, or eligible. Because of sin, we all start out as ugly stepsisters, and we don’t automatically become Cinderella upon reaching marriageable age. The good news is, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” (1 Pet. 2:24) And the rest of the good news is, if you find yourself Valentine-less this Valentine’s Day, that means the Lord is giving you more time to die to sin and live to righteousness, more time to make yourself ready, more time to become a better gift. Ladies, let’s decide to do our (future) husbands good on this day (Prov. 31:12), instead of moping about the good they’re not here to do for us. On a day when women all over the world will be thinking about what they want to get from a man, let’s think instead about we’re preparing to give to one. http://botkinsisters.com/article/all-i-want-for-valentines-day So...uh, I guess two young women who've basically given their entire lives to one man -- their father -- think they're somehow unworthy of...something...because they're...uh...insufficiently willing to sacrifice themselves to men? Or what?

Under the heading of "things I'm surprised people haven't deleted by now" is this blog entry I stumbled on the other day -- about, essentially, "the wonderful life of young marrieds Josh and Anna Duggar and how I pray that everything they and their parents have done forms a pattern for my own kids' lives." Oh, dear. http://raisingservantsofchrist.com/2013/06/07/647/ Typical sample: "After their honeymoon, Anna came home to a house that the Duggar’s let Josh and Anna live in, a car business that Josh had already established, and her new husband told her that she could pick any car that she wanted off his lot :-). She did not have to worry about where they would live or how they would make money. Through Josh’s diligence, he made sure that all of that was taken care of before he proposed to Anna. Some would call this old-fashioned, but as a woman who started her young marriage off struggling, I think it was such a blessing to the beginning of this couple’s life. "

Because you are all ego and a mile wide! And you're also stupid enough to feel your ego boosted simply by having tons of your genetic offspring running about so you can browbeat them into internalizing all your monumentally stupid ideas.

Giving me yet another in my large pile of reasons to particularly despise Michelle and Jim Bob. Just goes to show that they care for nothing except their pr and the money that comes from it. If he's truly your favorite son before his actions are known to others (but are known to you), there's no reason he would not continue to be your favorite son once word got out. You'd just be expressing your care and love for him in a different way, not dropping him like a hot potato. This is one more tale revealing the truth that, some appearances and much leghumper fawning to the contrary, they care for their children -- including Josh -- not at all.

And sometimes there are experiential reasons for people being the control freak or the person drawn to the control freak, and sometimes people are just born that way. In my family, the head control freak is the only one out of a large group of siblings with this nature and, from family stories, had it from childhood, allowing it to be honed and perfected in the family of origin, who were as gobsmacked by it as successive generations -- and as incapable of successfully countering it. Meanwhile, the person who married the head control freak and ended up largely aiding and abetting the brainwashing, controlling evil as an accessory was completely suckered by the control freak from the beginning of the relationship, continued to be suckered forever, and suffered physical and psychological damage from the relationship that would have prompted most reasonable people to run for the hills. (and this person was otherwise reasonable) However, according to anything we have been able to uncover, the person in thrall never had any prior experience of being in thrall to such a person, had no massive crazy control freaks in the family of origin and never experienced any damage in early life that might have accounted for the strong attraction. Now, of course, there may be some hidden thing that nobody's uncovered that was the triggering awful pre-control-freak event. But there's been a lot of digging done and nothing has ever been uncovered. Some people just have outlier natures. And unfortunately all too often pairs of these people find each other, I think. When you have a really really strong outlier trait, I think that a radar for the people who will fit to that trait in a sick way is often part of the package.

Notice that she says her parents were authoritarian crazy control freaks before Gothard/Pearl. They picked that stuff because it gave them extra ammunition and an excuse to behave exactly the way their sick psychologies prompted them to behave toward their children. That's right on the money, for me. The "beliefs" and the "faith" in the case of the households where it all goes bad are merely rationalizations that give sick people cover for their neurotic control needs. I think this is something that most people fail to understand, since most of us simply aren't drawn to utterly control, shape and viciously manipulate other people in the ways some sick fucks such as Jim Bob and his ilk are. It's not an impulse at all with most people, I expect. I know it's never occurred to me, and I grew up being manipulated and controlled in that way so you'd think I would do it because that's the model I have. I've actually been surprised that I didn't feel the urge to control. And if I'd never seen it done, I expect I wouldn't understand it at all. That's one way I think the Duggars and others pull the wool over people's eyes. They have controlling tendencies of a degree that make them completely foreign to most people's internal experience, so people don't even see what they're doing because they can't even imagine the possibility of it. ... That's something that makes it hard for escapees, too, since people you talk to about your experience generally can't even conceive of it. They hear what you're saying but they mostly don't understand it at all. It's not within their conceptual framework.

Well, I don't know about the Bates, but my theory has always been that the Duggars' are, plain and simple, a household run by a paranoid control freak, in Boob. And in my experience of such a household, no actual conversation is ever allowed. Conversation can open the doors to things. So all their talk is just going to be pro forma anyway. People who have approved things to brag about, such as money or babies or some kind of church accomplishment, brag. And other than that, everybody just exchanges and re-exchanges the (short) approved list of cliched comments (and in this case, we've heard all those comments on tv). Some of the Duggar kids probably have an obscure, frustrating hunger for conversation. People do. But even those don't know what they're hungering for because they don't know what conversation is, particularly since they haven't even read any books or watched movies or tv.

Must have. I don't remember this either, but I do remember something about Boob's mom buying one of the Duggar houses -- maybe the mold house -- from Michelle's dad somewhere in the latter stages of the molestations unfolding and people speculating that the price was too high or too low or something and that the purchase may have been made to have a place to put Josh or something like that? Anyway, I do remember (well, sort of remember) something like that being discussed. Have no idea how or when Michelle's dad got that house.... but I was thinking that maybe he moved back there after MIchelle's mom died or something? (And thus concludes my remarkably unhelpful post!)

Boy, talk about boring. The longest single stretch of Duggar I've ever watched is under 20 minutes (with commercials in there, but I don't know how much time they took off the 19-20 mins), and it not only featured some of the most boring dialogue I've ever heard either in media or in real life but repetition of some of that boring dialogue! They have over two dozen people available! And they can't fill 20 minutes (minus commercials) with passable dialogue without repeating some of it! They have to be among the most boring people ever born. A meal with them? Aaaaarrrrrgggghhh.

Gotta remember that they don't believe in cultivating imagination.

Happens more than you think. If somebody bends all their effort to psychologically manipulating you, they can do a very good job. I'm still programmed. Often shock myself with things I do -- and, especially, don't do -- and only later realize why. And I'm a runner. Who ran four decades ago. And who shares my family's life view not at all.

The Duggs apparently belong to the school of thought that deems a nice thing unsaid unless it's been said on publicly accessible social media. ....And likely also to the school of thought that deems nice personal things not worth saying unless they're said showily to the general public on social media. (Ben'll probably get most, if not all, of his compliments via social media for the rest of his life, I expect ... Of course, if Jessa's follower numbers dwindle past a certain point, he probably won't get any compliments there either.)

Plus the eternal unspoken assumption that no other men are nice to their wives and babies. That drives me nuts. You don't know any other men, Jessa. I do, and not only are many of them very very nice to wives and babies but they wouldn't name an innocent child "Spurgeon." And they'd get a job to support the kid. (I must admit, though, that I think there's historical evidence suggesting that Ben is a pretty warm-hearted creature. At some point, though, he's likely to find that he's the only such adult in his household.)

If they bring the show back, they should call it "Arrested Development." There's never been a group of people who were better described by that phrase.

They could also have had pecan. Because they are nuts.

I'd call this a definitive statement of the case.

That's because they have the former, but they don't have the latter. Ever spent time with an extremely dysfunctional family headed by sick mean people? That warmth and heart-touching stuff? Not in evidence. And when you've been in one of those long enough -- and Michelle and Jim Bob have been in one at least since they were teenagers (since they're the source of the sickness and meanness) and the children have been in one from birth -- you don't have any idea that anything is missing. You may know that you don't like holidays and may actually hate them because they often involve even more hours than usual of having nothing to do but hang around with a bunch of people who don't get along and are not really comfortable with each other. But you don't envision any warm-hearted, fun alternatives, because you haven't seen them. It's just another dead space to be filled with way too many pies. That's the look of Jana in this video, I think.