Churchhoney

Well, if all this really was in the works, I guess I can see why TLC would be reluctant to cancel things -- they had a big big plan going forward. And maybe they figure that putting a couple of oceans between the Dills and the rest of the Duggs will take care of the how-can-we-watch-and/or-sponsor-this-horribly-dysfunctional-family problem? I don't know, though. I remain skeptical. And if this is their plan, what happens with Jessa and Ben? And did TLC really conclude that the girls' interviews will solidify an audience and sponsorship going forward? .... Or maybe just for a special or two, I suppose .... It's all kinda baffling.

Maybe this is the family's new financial plan. Reveal a scandal, freak out about persecution, sell interviews to the highest bidder. Lather, rinse, repeat. And Derick gets to retire early!

Yeah, I agree. Jefferson agreed, too, I believe. He didn't claim to be a Christian, so far as I know, but a deist. However, my sense is that a lot of other people are more likely to call themselves Christians and yet believe pretty much what he did, especially in the 21st century. I think many sort of expand the definition on their own, maybe because they fear not to be in what's perceived to be in the American mainstream -- believing Christian? I mean -- people don't think to call themselves deists, now. And many seem not to want to call themselves moralists on the Christian pattern but agnostic about some other things -- which probably accurate for many.

Yep, that Reagan National picture shows them heading from the ticket counter to the gates. And, wow, he does seem to have lost a lot of weight.

Oh, my, yes. This is Michelle in a nutshell. She's in every committee picture yet she's never done any work. (after "delivering every one of them," of course)

This covers a lot, but it still leaves one wondering what to say about Th. Jefferson, for example. He explicitly rejected the divinity of Jesus but also said that the recorded utterances of Jesus constituted the most sublime system of morality that ever had been constructed. So he clearly saw himself as a follower in the moral sense but as a non-follower if that implied that Jesus was divine in the sense that the supreme creator he believed in was divine. Clearly in the Duggar sense this is Not a Christian. But for others, I think it's harder to know how to categorize somebody like this. (and I suspect that there are a heck of a lot of people like this, in Jefferson's time and today.) It really is complicated.

Well, the consultant they supposedly used has Huckabee ties but has also been very involved in Arkansas politics generally, I believe. And since JimBob has been as well, it's not really clear that they hooked up with him for some larger, Huckabee-related purpose or not.

I didn't watch it, so thanks for the alarming description. Very interesting. Wow.

That's my guess. I doubt they would have been doing it otherwise, actually. I thought this probably tied in with something I read about how they'd been "working on storylines" for the continuation of the show. .... And this would sure be a storyline. Otherwise, it's not clear they would have one.

I wonder whether those bribery accusations they threw around on national television were sanctioned by their PR advisor or whether they were freelancing. Seems like a particularly stupid thing to freelance about ...

Notice that all of the things you mention here require thinking. Duggars pretty much reject that activity, as directed by their spiritual guide, Big Bill. Because if people are thinking, how are you going to make moves on their innocent teenage daughters or look the other way while your brother fleeces them out of millions? C'mon now.

Can't say I blame you! Good luck with that, Josh.

I think JimBob said (can't believe I'm about to quote in some kind of semi-authoritative way) that the DSM puts the pedophilia cutoff at 16 but would characterize a 14 or 15 year old who touched children as having a paraphilia -- which means having a condition that's borderline....i.e., they're not quite willing to definitively name all such cases as being perverse enough to qualify as full-blown pedophilia in this case. But a paraphilia is still a condition -- and it could easily be trending towards the real McCoy; that's why they mention them in the DSM. In other words, a young teen touching prepubescent girls might not be acting on pedophilic impulses. .... But I'm pretty sure that the words "five years difference" also come into the discussion of whether it's pedophilia or not. (JB conveniently didn't include this fact in his gleeful rebuttal.) And when you're talking nine year olds and, ultimately five year olds, then that does apply. In this case, though, I think we might also be talking mainly about targets of opportunity. Sexual molestation is about power. And these were the people Josh had available to exert power over.

Depends on whether you're a first-degree relative of the dentist.

It's not necessarily evidence, but someone on another forum found online evidence that the Maryland house is already listed for rent -- presumably right away. So it seems they're probably fully removed. I think I would have gone to Florida, actually.

Well, CNN reported a few days ago that one of Huck's longtime pr advisors was working with the Duggars. But I don't think anybody knows the nature of Huckabuck's actual involvement, if any, in that arrangement. The guy's not Huck's conjoined twin, after all, so it's even possible that he's just working with the Duggars because they're also longtime occasional clients/Arkansas associates. Or not. Anyway, here's a new Newsweek piece about it. By the tone of it it's clear that, even if Huck isn't involved in hooking these people up, everybody's still going to assume that he is. http://www.newsweek.com/huckabees-connections-duggars-run-deep-340667

I'm torn between two options. Either they'll let things die down (or not) and then quietly announce cancellation several months from now. Or they'll send up a trial balloon for specials/spinoffs around February 2016 or so, in the form of a special catching-the audience-up-show featuring Jessa/Ben's baby, Jilly Muffin's second pregnancy, Josiah/Marjorie's wedding and/or breakup. Working title: 19 New Things About the Family Formerly Known as the Duggars.

She also won't have any idea how to make friends, most likely, or, perhaps, have any idea that friends are people you can lean on. I didn't. I nearly still don't, many years later. If she escapes, it almost certainly won't be as the whole person who knows how to navigate the normal world normally that many are imagining. She would escape as the somewhat misshapen, years-behind-in-development person she's been raised to be. Then she'd have to take it from there. That's doable, but it's also really hard. Some people may just not feel up to doing it, and I can't blame them.

I sort of think that this shows the fundamental flaw in the Duggars' child-rearing approach. The whole point of Gothard/Pearl-esque/etc child training is that the kids are given no space to use their own wills (those are to be broken) or, as an essential corollary to that, to use their own minds to figure out their own courses of action or determine whether anything is a good idea or not. They're trained, conditioned -- literally had their brains wired -- to interpose nothing between the parent's order and the kid's action. Ergo, those kids are so tightly controlled and so tightly bound to their parents -- especially the older ones, who've been longer exposed to Duggardom and were trained before their parents got tired -- that they've been given as little chance as possible to view themselves as agents in their own right. (The littler ones will have a different set of problems because they are being raised in a combination of massive control-freakness and massive neglect, I would bet.) Anyway, the training that makes the kid a parents' push-button robot might appear to work as long as nothing important comes up that the kid really ought to take responsibility for and handle on its own. They're "trained" to act as the parents would, so they do, and presumably that's in a godly manner, in this family. But ... when something significant that calls for a sense of personal responsibility and reflection does come up, I think it's very likely that a kid trained in this system simply won't take responsibility. They weren't raised to gradually think more for themselves and take on more agency and freedom as they grew older. So they have virtually no practice in doing that. Ergo, Josh. (Goes double, or triple, when you're asking somebody to take responsibility for something that would be an incredibly painful and terrifying thing to take responsibility for in any case. Asking it here -- which we all would really like to do; I know that I would -- is like asking him to go from zero to Mach 7 in 60 seconds, I expect.)

Well, I haven't looked back at exactly what InTouch said, but as I recall it (perhaps faultily), I think the statement could be interpreted two ways, actually. One -- there's more stuff to release. Or, two -- we have watertight answers to everything that the Duggars are going to throw back at us, so throw away, Duggars. What we said is going to stick. Also, if there is more stuff to release, it might be big. But I can also make the argument that it's likely to be much smaller potatoes. Here it is: If they'd released smaller stuff first, InTouch would have come into a huge amount of criticism for nitpicking at this nice family -- causing them all this angst for this really minor revelation! They would have had to be on the defensive immediately, which would have robbed the real revelations of much of their power. I think they really had to come out with the biggest bombshell first, because otherwise they would have damaged themselves before they were able to drop that one. .... Now ... it's not beyond the realm of possibility that they have something equally devastating that they're going to go with, but I think it's every bit as likely -- and probably more likely -- that, if they do have more, it's lesser stuff, comparatively.

I hope someone goes, too. But as someone who left a situation, I'll tell you that nothing about it feels heroic. If some go, it'll be because they're selfish enough to think of their own happiness first, and while that's advisable in this kind of case there aren't any stories in which it makes you a hero, as far as I remember. Decades later, I'm still a rat who left a sinking ship to save herself. I'm happy I left. I wouldn't have survived staying. But I left for me. And, frankly, there's nothing that feels in the least bit heroic about that. Even when you try to to pull others out, you still don't feel like a hero, or at least I never have. Because when people are staying, it generally hurts them to have it suggested that they should not stay. Even when you make a convincing case and somebody else goes, there will likely come times when they'll be sorry they left, because they were probably bound to it more tightly than you. And everybody looks back and sees the mess still there, so being out of it doesn't help the people you were bound to from birth -- hurts a lot of them, in fact -- nor does it help the world very much, just you. Save yourselves! is about all you can yell to these guys, in my opinion. And for some, an exit will eventually feel like salvation. But for others, it may not look that way.

I'll bet that right now some people are wishing they'd printed the Wisdom Booklets in disappearing ink.

Thanks for posting this. This piece looks right on the money to me.

Aha. Is this why Michelle kind of reminds me of Glinda the Witch of the North? But not in a good way?

Sorry to be a spelling noodge..... Once a few years ago I had trouble Googling this guy using the expected spelling, so ...