Churchhoney

Maybe failing to notice your gas gauge is an inherited trait. See: JD's plane crash. I'm still wondering how in the world a pilot allows a plane to run out of fuel so soon after takeoff. Seems like "Duggar refueling" is similar to "Duggar time." Highly inconvenient for everyone but -- according to Duggars -- "just one of those things." It's lucky JB supplies all his kids with jobs and money, because who would want any of them as colleagues or employees?

Virtually no gossip sites other than People have proofreaders these days. You have to pay proofreaders. But I'm sure this article wasn't even researched or written by a human. Seeing more than one of that particular kind of mistake, involving given names or surnames that aren't common or famous, is generally a sign these days that a thing was AI-written. More and more stuff is, especially at clickbait sites. "Jinger" wasn't going to show up in the Artificial Author's dictionary. I like "Zinger Dagger" -- or "Dagger Zinger"-- as a character name, though. Nice for an eccentric sharp-tongued superhero (which Jingle unfortunately isn't.)

...and since she's a Duggar, of course she aggressively ignores the facts so she can believe the bar is set high. I'm sure the next generation will be the one that breaks the spell of the JB-and-M mythology, because they won't be getting the perks that have kept Jessa's generation on the string. But it's tragic that it'll take so long. After all, JB and M weren't forced into this situation their descendants now must struggle out of. They freely chose it and chose to impose it.

Teach Yourself First Grade

The Lord works in mysterious ways. ... He may even answer the prayers of atheists -- just waits a decade or so to do it. .... I haven't read a word about any of these people for a couple weeks because of an outsized work project. And wben the job wrapped this morning, I realized that I must feel pretty secure about the Duggs finally not being able to claw their way back on tv, since I still didn't feel any urge to write screeds arguing against their media presence, celebrity status or general evil "principles" and influence, even though I have time again...... Then I came here to read -- and Wow! Wonder if the simmering crap that lurks within the Bates' cutesy facade finally became visible to someone, somehow.... Kind of sounds that way. In any case, it seems to be the year of Gothard-Be-Gone (except in Branson). About time.

True. It's the "Celebrity" Personality, I guess. 😁

This is pretty much what I think, too. With a side of -- "All that giving birth...um...not sure..." if you're one of Meeechelle's daughters, you might well worry (I would!) that you'll be the one who's inherited her uncanny feritility....and when you combine that with a patriarchal Gothardy-type guy (see: banana curls and Jana's single non-nutrition-related plan for this year -- more repeat bible reading through the lens of her cult indoctrination), even with the nicest, most understanding such guy you could be looking at a lot of births. .... A lot. I think the prospect of semi-uintentionally becoming the next Meeechelle would slow down the wedding march for pretty many women, even in patriarchal cults. (Of course, for some others it would send them rushing to the altar....)

The Japanese are the longest-lived people on the planet and they eat seaweed like we eat red meat, french fries, fructose and aspartame. 😁

I don't watch them either....But I think that, like the Duggars, they do play into some crappy and dangerous American traditions and biases (and maybe even just contemporary biases period).....making their doings likely to be seen as no big deal.....It's just a different set of crappy traditions that too many Americans find acceptable. They trade on their looks. They're obsessed with the visuals. They're obsessed with making themselves look good externally above all things. They worship money. They worship celebrity. They make a lot of money -- off mostly stupid crap, as far as I know....And so on..... All that is part of another stupid crappy "religion" of a sort that millions of millions of American embrace and clearly see as not a flawed way of life but a perfectly okay one and even one to emulate. If there was a show about a Muslim family or a family of bookworms, a lot of the talk would be about how weird and disgusting they were. Those aren't common U.S. religions. But both the Duggars' and the Kardashians' are, I think. ...

Exactly. And that's also a big reason why I've always thought the show was dangerous. (and, unfortunately, why it was so likely to get put on tv as some kind of sweet "entertainment") The evils that are craawling all over the Duggar lifestyle are something that our traditions and particular blindnesses prime a lot of Americans to simply not even register. Which, to me, means those evils are also likely to seem somehow okay or even admirable to an alarming number of people.

Thanks. What a great article. Somebody writes the actual stark truth about the horror of the Duggs' antediluvian mean-spirited shit being whitewashed, presented and accepted as "family entertainment." For years and years.

But has she built a shelf for them above the head of the bed she shares with various younger sisters and M-kids her bed so they can fall down and break her skull in the middle of the night? Because that's what the people who really live life to the fullest are diong.

Yeah, that was Katie's dad. Her stepmother was there, too. I personally like anything better if I can't see JB or M in it! 😁

Well, you know, JB can't get any money from JB, or from Josh, so he's gotta get money from somebody. So it has to be the insufficient redactors. And as for the chances of that money going to therapy for J, J, J, and J.....Well, that'd be a good idea, but I expect it might also be a cold day in hell.

As a metaphor, it does rather capture the whole Duggar concept, though -- dim-bulb nobodies with nothing of value to offer who persist in packaging themselves as celebrities, media stars, influential public figures and leaders of their community, Sorta redolent of JB and M's recent parade appearance, to name just one of many examples.

Well, since he's JB and M's son, Hannah's about the only thing he's really allowed to own outright . Gotta make the most of it.

This is what's seemed likely to me, too. According to most accounts, though, the kid went to a different road. The road that's not in front of the Duggars' property but the crossing road that's about 1000-ft away or so across their property and across somebody else's property..... If that's true, then I think it's likely that it was a slightly older kid. .... But if it's true, no matter what the age of the kid, they were out of the house for longer than just a couple minutes because while 1000 ft isn't that far, you wouldn't be traveling it on a path or street or sidewalk but across lawns and through somebody's wooded backyard and so on.... Even as an adult, you'd probably wander a bit rather than just make a beeline as you would from the warehouse to the road they front on. You could get to the crossing road by walking about the same distance from either the TTH or the warehouse, though, of course. So the scenario of a kid escaping the warehouse and Anna and then the police surprising Jana instead could still be true. After all, as you say, it's unlikely anybody passing through would think that a bunch of kids and their mother live in that warehouse.

Yep. For some reason it looks like Mike and Guinn weren't as good as JB and M at training their kids to lie to themselves with absolute thoroughness. 😁

Ah , you forget the expansive joy of reading the Book of Judges, KJV, aloud to a group of pre-school-age children every couple months or so. And intensively coaching them to recite Psalm 1 "from memory" while being unable to correctly pronounce half the words in it, or understand any of them.

For the love of God, read something else!!!!!

I think JB and M did most things by formulas. And Joshley was the "first-born son" and therefore "the leader of their home" when it came to the other kids. Their cult, especially, but also their churches "taught" them that, in those words, frequently. So that's what they taught the kids. They were probably also dim and misguided enough -- and had their egos tied up enough in the certainty that the son born to be leader of their home would be great -- to read his lifelong smarminess, phoniness and shiny hard-edged arrogance as talent, charisma and leadership potential instead of worrying signs that he might be naturally narcissistic, duplicitous, self-absorbed and maybe somewhat brutal. And wonder if they should try to address those things somehow and at least move away from declaring him the little emperor. I'm sure he was constantly held up as a role model. Several people have noted that he was portrayed as a role model in the small churches they were in with the Duggs, too. In my dream world, this kind of thing makes me hope that some of the Duggarlings will someday start questioning these platitudes they were fed and move on to better thinking.

My guess: One day at a time of aggressively portraying herself as a person with a supremely happy heart because Jesus. That's pretty much what she's always done once they beat her allegedly fairly vital original spirit out of her, I expect. It's just that now any and all tiny occasional hopes or dreams that there could be a little change of some kind have probably been extinguished. I expect Jessa's life trajectory has been and will be pretty much the same as Jana's, just with the twist of having a husband and kids. But the twist is kind of minor in real substance, as far as I can tell, She too still dangles from the umbilical cord, even though, like Jana, she probably had some hopes and some potential to do otherwise, I think.. That's why, while I generally loathe both Jer and Der (not yet sure how I feel about Austin), I still think Jill and Jingle are lucky to have them, since their marriages have at least carried them a little way from ground zero. So they're not jjust perpetually rebreathing the exact same air.

Being a Z list celebrity and part of a family or religion or cult or all three that tells you you're one of the most special people in the universe -- and especially chosen by God to tell everybody else what to do -- tends to make you believe you're more like an E-list celebrity, apparently. 😁 Especially if you breathe only the air of a tiny, uneducated, ill-informed bubble.

it always makes me think they may be darned lucky that their belief systems keep them off alcohol and other non-coffee drugs.... Because they do seem to embrace the one addictive substance they have access to pretty fervently. (Even though their belief systems may play a fairly significant role in making them want a little buzz pretty often...)

More social-media exposure than he'd get through practically anybody else is my guess. Jingle's 1.4 million on instagram, 600,000 or so of whom also follow Jer (well, I think most of those are Jingle's, anyway. I'm sure he has a few of his own)...... Like a lot of other churches, they're desperate for just some eyeballs, any eyeballs, in hopes that something about them and their people will appeal to just a few of those people... And the numbers of followers they have because of the Duggars' tv shows are available through very very few people.....