Churchhoney

I kind of think that the Duggars do know that people can easily find, and probably interpret, their flight information. There's been a long and ongoing battle between rich individual and business owners of private planes and the government about just what should be required before the FAA suppresses information about a flight plan. They want to do it only in cases where there's a clear security threat to the plane's passengers and, of course, people who own private planes would like the "security threat" thing to be interpreted as loosely as possible so they can keep many flights off the public record. That seems to me like the kind of thing that Jim Boob, dim as he is, would know about.

Not only did John David get to vent a few things on Joshie boy, but Jim Bob probably paid less in landing fees that way.

Having come from a highly repressive environment myself, I've never really believed that the Duggar repression has the least bit to do with anybody thinking about how to lead children to be moral people. In my repressive household, the repression was clearly the product of an over-developed craving for power and a lot of narcissism, and while religion and moral behavior were mentioned, they obviously functioned only as tools of somebody's ego trip. Correctly or incorrectly, I've always seen Jim Bob and Michelle as looking, sounding, behaving just like my own family members. So I don't think a craving to foster children's morality and right religious belief has anything to do with it. It's all about their desire to control and repress somebody. And how wonderful to have 19 people to repress. An egotistical, power-mad narcissist's dream. ..... That's why they won't change their parenting style, I think. It's not about beliefs or ideas or theologies. It's about their very neurotic needs and cravings.

Well, it's possible that it isn't. But I think it's also possible that somebody in the state government has ties to these people and will look the other way while they get bucks forwarded to them for food even when the request is questionable and skirts the rules. I think Gothard, for example, has had some possible sweetheart deals with the Illinois government in the past, hasn't he? ...... I'm not saying this is the case. But if it were the case, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that somebody knew somebody in government who got them a better deal than they would have gotten had the rules been followed closely. (A better deal in this case being that somebody can come to their program and pay them for food, even though that somebody might be only borderline eligible for the food stamps or not have fulfilled a residency requirement, or whatever.) To the mid-PA countryside to talk to some nice conservative Pennsylvanians about family values?

No. That's just some more for-shit non-reporting "reporting" by another of these 24-7 repeat-the-rumor-without-checking-or-even-understanding-it media outlets. This whole meme about how Cross Church is the Duggars' church -- and it's not; it's Southern Baptist, and JB is not -- started because Jill wrote that Cross Church was "our home church," meaning it's hers and her new headship's. Derick has gone there.Derick and Jill have gone there (and were married there), but the whole nonsense about its being the Duggar family's church is bull based on somebody's misunderstanding of what Jill meant and everybody else's parroting of that somebody, whoever that first somebody was.

It is the Duggar-Gothard philosophy of life, however. ... Well, except for the "do work" part.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure Jessa's not the only idiot out there. After all, she's a big-time media role model. And she could only be a role model to idiots.

I kind of think he was. I also think that's probably the most likely reason why he pointed people to the Cross Church sermon as well. He couldn't know exactly what would be in that sermon, but I'm sure he figured it would be heavy on -- Don't commit sexual sins. And it was. Said there was no excuse for having sex outside of marriage, no matter what you thought your good excuse was. And I'm sure Derick would have figured it would say that, no matter what else it included, and it's hard to see that not as a message about Josh. Just as it's hard to see this not as a message about Josh. Derick, did, after all, take his family out of the country soon after he (possibly...probably?) learned that Josh had molested his wife when she was a child. That seemed to suggest he wasn't too thrilled with that situation. And then to have it followed up with this stuff. I think we have at least as much reason to think Derick is angry and disapproving toward Josh as we do that he's in cahoots with JB and company to blame the whole thing on Anna.

Dear Disingenuous, Lying People Hacks, As if you haven't known 100 percent of this for years, just like everyone else with a third of a brain. How dare you claim you're "reporting" anything, when all you're doing is finally mentioning all the shit you knew was true but that you suppressed because you were slyly functioning as JimBob Evil Jackass's PR agency? Nice work spending years enticing innocent idiots to believe that the "Duggar way" is something to emulate instead of to shun with every fiber of your being. Don't know how you can sleep at night.

Kinda ironic that their supposed big problem with getting him real state-provided counseling for the molestation was that they didn't want him to be around other bad people who'd done the same stuff...... But now that the bad people belong to nutso Christian cults like theirs, apparently that's fine and dandy.

Wow, he really is going to redo another Hobby Lobby.

It opened for me. Google Reformers Unanimous. (I assume this is meant to be a play on words? Argh.)

Absolutely. And many refuse to do unprotected. But this woman kind of makes it sound as if she wasn't really doing sex work regularly but went along with the idea of an encounter with a fan because he promised a fairly big payment, doesn't she? The whole thing sounds odd to me.

I wish I didn't think that the answer is "absolutely not, not for half a second"... and that I didn't think that, even now, they're figuring out how they can make the rest of the kids' lives even more abnormal. They are not bright, not flexible thinkers, not learners and not willing to imagine that their stupid ideology could ever ever ever be wrong. Plus, they're massive control freaks.

Josh is able to toss around an adult "like a rag doll"? .... If that's so, it's the first thing in the whole mess that really truly surprises me. He looks like all flab to me. Especially his brain. Also -- Way to spend your salary right before you get fired, stupid irresponsible father of four.

I hope it's a sign from the Lord that the Duggars have Dug themselves into an inescapable Pickle. (or two, or three)

I'll bet Jim Bob never anticipated porn actresses joining Sierra and the others trying to ride the Duggar coattails to fame. ... This whole thing makes me sick, but that kinda makes me laugh. I think I disbelieve her about 200 percent.

So far, I've only skimmed the headlines on these other people. Did they have credit-card info revealed as well? That's why Josh came clean, it seems. Too much financial information that tied back to him and would have been hard for somebody else to fake. If somebody's leak doesn't include that, then they're going to have a far easier time claiming that it's a false accusation, whether it is or not. If somebody denies it when there was substantial financial info revealed, then they're exceptionally brazen and gutsy, I guess.

Wow. Wonder if anyone caused an awkward moment or whether everybody just pretended that nothing at all had happened. That, I suppose. Wow.

And people think internet forums deal in irresponsible rumor. We're like a panel of New Yorker factcheckers compared to a lot of the media.

Ain't it the truth. That's the definition of child abuse, as far as I'm concerned.

Libby Anne (from a homeschool background with some similarity to the Duggars, now out of that culture) at Patheos has a couple of more good pieces on Josh. One on how she and he suffered from some similar pressures that come with Duggar-type homeschooling: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/08/josh-duggar-and-the-pressure-of-perfection.html "Unlike Josh Duggar, I attended college, in part because my family was culturally upper middle class while his family is culturally working class. For me, college was simply expected. Some of the other homeschooling parents—primarily those from working class backgrounds like the Duggars—asked my father if I was truly ready for college, and he assured them that I was—in fact, he said the real question was whether college was ready for me. He had that much confidence that my upbringing had made me impervious to any outside assault....For 18 years I had been sheltered and protected and taught, and now I was ready for combat (spiritual combat, of course). I could not fail. "Except that I could. I was an 18-year-old college student on my own for the first time in my life. I was suddenly exposed to people and ideas and a complex world that didn’t conform to the stereotypes I had been taught. For a long time I maintained the beliefs I had been taught so carefully over the years. Those beliefs may had been my parents’ originally, but during my teens I had accepted and embraced them eagerly. They had become my beliefs. And yet the more I learned of the world around me, the more cracks appeared in my worldview. I ultimately had to break down my entire belief system and restructure it. "Think, for a moment, about the amount of pressure all this puts on an 18-year-old....My parents’ standing in the community and their view of their own success in life was completely tied up in how I turned out. They had shaped their entire way of life and their very belief system around molding me into something very specific, and it hadn’t worked. "That hurt. It hurt to know that I was letting my parents down so colossally.... "The Christian homeschooling community puts way too much pressure on its children. Of course, there are other communities where this happens as well. Think, for a moment, about parents who decide when their children are young that they will go to Harvard—or the Olympics, or what have you—and then spend their children’s entire growing up years driving them and pushing them and denying them a real childhood. The child is expected to fulfill the parents’ dream. We, too, were denied an ordinary childhood and pushed and driven as our parents sought a specific result. The pressure to perform—the pressure to succeed—was tremendous. Our actions reflected on our parents in a fundamental way—and we knew that. "....Josh grew up with all of the expectations and pressures I have described here and then some—Josh grew up in front of the TLC cameras, held out to the world as the most visible child (or product) of Christian homeschooling. Whatever pressures and expectations I felt pale in comparison before those Josh faced. Josh’s actions and choices as an adult reflected directly back on his parents and their beliefs. He—and his sisters—became the proof that their parents’ beliefs and ideology worked. And then he failed." The other pointing to a couple of other new pieces about this story, written by people from similar backgrounds: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/08/its-not-just-about-josh-duggar-some-compiled-readings.html

Thanks! I'm sure Jillly Muffin would agree that I'm surreal! I think she probably finds us all surreal!

The Duggars and footnotes. Yeah, they'll read those. uh-huh.

They think that a bunch of 10-year-olds wearing flip flops and carrying brand-new power tools can build a steel-framed house that'll hold 18 people and counting.