Churchhoney

I wonder whether part of the problem may also be that Jim Bob himself much prefers "jobs" and "businesses" where you try to profit through speculation, hopefully big returns with little investment, conning-type sales tactics, personality-based sales and so on, rather than jobs and businesses where success actually comes from hard work and excellent planning. I gather that his real-estate investments tend to be of the speculative type and it's also quite possible to go into the used-car business thinking you'll be able to buy cheap, add a little spit and polish, and gladhand your way to selling crap vehicles to unsuspecting suckers. He seems to have encouraged some of the boys to pick up likely half-assed "electrical" and "plumbing" skills so that they can half-ass their way to poorly renovated buildings to sell. It's all the same way he went about his political "career" -- thinking he could succeed just by showing up for high-profile votes on an extremely limited slate of issues and telling his constituents how wonderful he and his family were rather than, you know, addressing constituent concerns. His attempt to leverage that into a lasting career didn't work either. I don't see any evidence that he's actually committed himself to developing businesses or family-member employees with a strong component of know-how, work, attention to what customers might actually want (as opposed to what you can foist off on them because they don't know how shoddy it is) and so on. And unless you're extremely lucky, that kind of speculative approach to work isn't likely to give you real long-term steady returns and success. Especially when you train up all your employees in the same mindset and try to support a whole mob of people on your proceeds, with most of those people not working. Reality tv and "preaching" your personal "ministry" to suckers are some of the few venues in which you actually can grift, speculate,, lie and half-ass your way to bucks. .... Now with those "career fields" dwindling, it's no wonder that he'd have trouble placing his gang in some other profitable enterprise.

Tells you something about these people that everyone within earshot didn't instantly scream "Noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

And in virtually all of the other cases, we can't use the excuse that the kids are tied to the family by the money -- from TLC or otherwise -- since every other family I'm aware of lives modestly or struggles. Seems to me pretty clear evidence that if you want to raise your kids as brainwashed, fearful puppets who'll be perpetually tied to your apron, you have a good chance of succeeding, especially if you start from birth. I know I'm not supposed to articulate the supposedly demeaning idea that these adult kids aren't making the free and informed choice to "believe what their parents believe" but are largely manipulated to stay by what's been done to their little brains throughout their childhood and youth, but I think all these non-launched and non-escaping kids give pretty good evidence that manipulation is often at work. That's what my own experience suggests, although I've been told by many that I grievously insult my relatives by saying they're pretty brainwashed. Seems to me that other families' experience corroborates. It is possible to make an informed choice to stay or go, obviously. But it looks as if it's not as easy as many may think. Else why would so many of these young adults, unlike most other young adults, actually not want their own jobs, friends, educations, love lives, homes, etc.

Everything about this family is the same kind of double-edged sword. I'm relieved when the kids get some protection, not matter where it comes from, because I don't want young children to be hurt. And I can only pin so much blame -- and it's not that much -- on even the oldest of Duggs' generation two (or even their spouses, to some degree, especially Anna) because I know their upbringing has pretty much inevitably made them blind. At the same time, though, I'm absolutely sure that all the kids, from Josh on down through the teenagers and even the school-age ones, truly need to feel and understand some real consequences -- soon -- of the hash that their family's principles and procedures have made of life. If they don't recognize some facts, soon, their chances of waking up and doing something that can change their lifelong fates get slimmer and slimmer. There is such a thing as too late when it comes to getting a sense of reality, and "too late" could come very soon for a lot of the Duggars, I expect.

There's Volume Three. E-books are always better in a series! Speaking of which, I wonder whether an academic field has yet sprung up around the family -- I would think that the highest-profile mega-fundie media family would spark some poster sessions and dissertations somewhere, and even a conference or two. That;s happened pretty quickly for some media phenomena, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 50 Shades of Gray. And the Duggs are certainly just as culturally significant. .... Although maybe it's dicier to do this with real people rather than art?

We should just club together and publish: The Ultimate Duggars: All the Stories, All the Snark, All the Sociological Analysis And then the second volume: The Ultimate Book of Duggar Lists It'd be a mere matter of curation. Could be a series of e-book bestsellers.

Yeah, all true. The disgusted commentators have eyeballs for advertisers to grab, just like the leghumpers.

And this is the guy who's handing out advice about fatherhood. When things like this clearly show his real attitude toward his children, as well as his overall lack of judgment. It's astonishing. I still can't figure out where People is coming from, reprinting his how-to-be-a-father blog post. Was it really a trial balloon by the media group to find out how people view JB as a father? That makes as much sense as anything, yet when you consider the People comment sections on anything Duggar-related this year, it's hard to see how they wouldn't already know that a very large number of people are completely appalled by him and by the family dynamics.

Yes. It was planned as a demonstration, presumably to keep them motivated and well aboard the chugging heading-to-marriage train as well as away from the "let's just do it" train. He wanted to show them the wonderful thing that, as yet, they were not allowed to do. To taunt them with it, in fact. Maybe the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in a video (well, except for closeups of Jim Bob's face)

Amen. While I had a grandfather who only recorded temperatures, I had a great-grandfather who wrote reflections on things, including religion. There's one that I think of when I think of the Duggars' literalism and King Jamesyness and rejection of the metaphorical and the rational and such, here in the 21st century: "I think, after much reflection, that the key to the situation is the theory of the inspiration of the Scriptures that one holds. Starting at the bottom -- or the top as some think -- is the belief that every word in the Book as we have it is as if written by the hand of God. I think I know some good people who believe this. And yet it is utterly absurd to any thinking mind. And by this same standard, as soon as you use the word 'think' you are anathema -- for that is rationalism. Yet the Lord, when he gave us the First and Great Commandment said, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind" -- so recorded in both gospels that give this incident. So, I will use my mind, even if it is considered heretical by some." Never met the guy, but I'm really proud of him for writing this, many years ago.

I'm going to try to hold onto the thought that, maybe, unlike many of their idiotic and increasingly offensive older siblings, some of the younger kids may be looking at the super-Christianity preached by their family and thinking -- "Yeah, right. Sure did a helluva lot for our household. Stuff it, Duggar Jesus." Thoughts like that are the only hope that any of them has.

Boy, that really says it. ... And I suppose some mysteries are just black boxes with nothing inside. The "diary" of one of my grandfathers consisted of nothing but a recording of the high and low temperatures of the day. .... Not sure what that was about either!

I'm very curious about what they feel and what goes through their heads when these verses occur to them. Whether some are really inspired by what they're quoting and some are just going through the motions. .... Why they choose that way to "communicate' with one another, whether they really feel as if they're communicating or whether it's just a way to look like you're communicating while actually keeping yourself shut down. ...

I can see that.

Shhhh!

Can a completely clueless misogynist actually please a woman sexually, especially one who most likely was raised to be fairly sexually unknowing and absolutely sexually repressed right up to the wedding night? The poor woman. It's sickening to think of her being stuck with that situation for the rest of her life, on top of all the other horrors that must constitute marriage to Josh Duggar.

Those Gothard'nitions make me want to scream: "Reprobate: Believing a philosophy of immorality through the motivation of personal impurity." Really. I was going to call it word salad, but then I realized it's word landfill. "A philosophy of immorality" and the "motivation of personal [as opposed to impersonal?] impurity." WTF? I have to say that at least Ben doesn't seem to have adopted those yet. Because they're so crazy, stupid and apparently drug-induced that they make his and Spurgeon's stuff look well-written and sometimes even semi-sane.

True. It's one of the things I actually like about her. That was my kneejerk reaction to House Hunters, which drives me nuts.

"Well, we would have to upgrade to marble countertops. "

This insular cult is apparently so afraid of the outside world that they never think in terms of doing work that involves non-Duggars or at least non-Gothardites for a living. Aside from John David liking planes and Jill having her midwife fantasy, I really wonder whether any of them is actually interesting in anything other than admiring themselves. I know Josh is purported to be interested in politics, but everything I've seen of him makes me think he's only interested in showing how great he is and telling other people what to do. Following his father's tradition of being in politics but actually participating in no votes except the ones on abortion. I really wonder, too, whether Jinger is actually interested in photography or whether that's just a myth based on the fact that she was handed that job -- a necessary one for both big families and for famewhores -- pretty much the same way Jessa was handed the job of family packer. Jinger's actually said that she's not interested in art, design, craft-type stuff, and I don't see how you can be really interested in photography unless you are. I'm particularly skeptical because in some of these other horrible families you have kids who actually do show genuine interest in photography and it's quite different from what I've ever seen from Jinger. For example, in the horrible Pennington family -- the Texans whose one escapee daughter has had to fight her family to get a birth certificate -- one of the younger daughters clearly has a true interest in photography, and she pursues it with a massive passion despite having control-freak parents. Here's her blog, and it shows what deep interest actually is -- http://thebrightnessproject.com/ (Granted, her mother, while insane in many of the same ways as the Duggars, is actually interested in art and design and has certainly encouraged her kids in that.) Anyway, all of this makes me wonder what the Duggar kids are going to actually do with the days of their lives, especially the males, such as Josh, who will certainly have to earn a living sooner or later. They almost all seem to me to lack real motivation to do anything specific, job- or career-wise. But they've also been trained up to think that they're near royalty, so they're certainly going to disdain the kinds of jobs you get with no training, education or motivation. How will Josh present himself as a candidate for the car-wash job? I can't even picture it. And yet I also can't believe that Jim Bob is going to be willing or able to support all these people forever, without others bringing in money from the outside. I'm thinking the Duggar kids' 30s, 40s and 50s could turn out to be very challenging decades.

Yeah, I was kind of inclined to give them an F, too. But then I remembered how little influence we all seem to have in what our kids do with their lives! Didn't want to hold them to a higher standard than I use for myself. : -)

Settling for the teenager definitely set her back. She should have held out for somebody at least her own age, although, as she's intimated, the Duggar-daughter suitors other than Ben and Derick were probably pretty creepy. Her expectation was unreasonable, though, in any case. Josh wasn't making a go of the car lot, the job he got in Washington was a not-even-once-in-a-lifetime fluke, and lightning wasn't going to strike the Duggars twice with something like that. This is another way in which their endless "sheltering" of these kids -- plus the crazy-high material expectations that the TLC show has provided -- does them incalculable harm. She had no real way of knowing that she was expecting something that could never be. And it's cruel to set your kids up like that. (Not that kids necessarily listen to your cautions, of course. Do they ever? lol But at least they will have heard them and you won't have reinforced their delusions.)

Yeah, I get the same impression about Ben. But, as you suggest, they don't have the brains, the personality, the energy, or the right beliefs to make a go of that. Heck, Jill and Derick are closer to the mold of success than these two are, because they're sunnier. And it really looks as if this may be Benessa's only plan. That's why I can really see them getting angry and fed up -- with everything and each other -- in a few years. They're starting out with so much negativity all the time, and then if their dream turns out to be a bust, as it will, it's hard to see how they're not going to be pretty angry, frustrated and scared.

This piece quotes Jim Bob talking about them watching Andy Griffith dvds. http://www.celebitchy.com/188242/the_duggars_dont_let_their_kids_watch_regular_tv_or_have_any_pets/ I'll bet you're right about the "they don't turn to prayer in Mayberry" thing being something that JB heard from someone else. I don't see him being smart or thoughtful enough to come up with that on his own either.

Well, that's scary! And all too plausible. I guess it's always much easier to be a dumb jerk when we have another dumb jerk or two around to reinforce the jerkiness. That's a pity. Especially, as always, for the growing crowd of little children in this messed-up family. I'm still hoping it won't hold in this case, though. Good grief. Won't they just get bored with those same damned bible verses over and over? And I do think the level of reinforcement they get from leghumpers is going to wane -- because they're certainly going to get bored with the perpetual theme. It's already ridiculously repetitive. And I can't see them being smart enough to come up with any new twists. Who knows where that will lead, though. Hard for me not to see Jessa and Ben wanting to rip each other's faces off in a few years, given the negative-nelly life they've set up for themselves -- and the fact that, contrary to their hopes, it's never going to propel them into being media preachers. Hard to see that they won't just get poorer and more desperate -- and when that's set against a backdrop of all their negativity... just looks like a pretty awful life. Maybe if they start hating one another, at least one of them will get a new idea!