Stupidly huge family gets huger - Page 2

No Jango? Alas.

That picture is Full of Creepy. It's like fucking Village of the Damned.

This woman just has an itch only her husband can scratch.

Is Idiocracy coming true? That woman needs some TLC from Samuel L. Jackson and his radiator ASAP.

All the really smart people need to get to fucking and outbreed these idiots.

I had the great pleasure of voting against the Duggar patriarch in state elections.

I'd guess that the next time she's asleep, her uterus is going to sneak out, buy a Greyhound ticket for another state 500 miles away, and try to live a normal life for a few years before it dies from exhaustion. Seriously, a two week vacation in Cabo isn't going to do it for this particular uterus - it's long past retirement. Head to Boca, little uterus, get a nice condo in a gated community. Play mahjong, sleep in, something, anything. You deserve it!

"Jinger"? Oh get fucked.

There have been a number of studies in my recollection that have found that the more educated and financially independent women are, the fewer children they are likely to have, not to mention the less likely they are to marry. I'd go to the trouble of tracking some links down, but my lunch break is basically up in a minute, so my parting shot will be to the effect that "something something, cultural norms of female dependency blah, stupid patriarchy, I have no solution but those people make me sick"

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

Ah, the Pythons.

Any chance you can dig up a source on this? To be honest, it sounds impossible from a biological standpoint, since the remaining sperm and eggs aren't likely to undergo some sort of metamorphosis once their fellow sperm and eggs are used to create a person (if this were true, the likelihood of gay children would be higher in guys who masturbate more and/or women as they get older and have ovulated more times - sperm and eggs don't really care whether their brethren result in a fetus, menstruation, or a messy sock), and I'd think that a woman's general health has to do with development in the womb a lot more than the fact that she may have had children before. And I think you'd have a tough time linking homosexuality definitively with being the youngest child.

Plus, as mentioned, there's some suspicion that the eldest Duggar son has the gay.

This makes perfect sense, generally speaking. Smart people are more ambitious, have a greater ability to link cause and effect, can delay gratification for the sake of loftier goals, etc. The problem in linking this to families like the Duggars is that their ambition is to fill the world with little Christians, they know exactly what will happen if they have sex, and they don't need to delay gratification because their gratification results in what they perceive as the loftiest of goals.

So, unfortunately, I don't think we can consider the Duggars unintelligent for the same reason we might write off some uneducated minimum wage worker with a huge brood. I'll concede that they're obnoxiously shortsighted in other ways, but it's not like their big family is the result of stupidity and irresponsibility - it was planned, which is even scarier, IMO.

I assumed that the "each kid more likely to be gay than the last" had to do with being surrounded by other boys during the formative years. But I'm rather skeptical of anything that seems to reduce the source of homosexuality to a single factor.

But then there's the question of whether the gender makeup of the rest of the older children is the key factor. I think some might assume (probably incorrectly) that being surrounded by a bunch of girls during the formative years might result in a boy picking up stereotypically feminine traits and interests that could be associated with male homosexuality.

Me, too.

Unless we're talking about professional wrestling. Watch that shit, and you're sure to get into bears quicker than Timothy Treadwell with a gallon of honey tied around his neck.

I assume that this is just a misunderstanding of statistics. I don't think it's that each kid is more likely to be gay than the last, but that one's odds of having a gay child increase with every child you have. For example, statistically speaking, if we go with the ol' 10% rule, a woman with ten children is pretty much a dead lock to have a gay child, whereas a woman with five children only has a 50-50 shot.

But, like Schwartz, I think that assuming that homosexuality has a single "cause" is foolish. I think there are families in which there's some sort of genetic or environmental predisposition* and there are some families which only seem to produce heterosexual people, for whatever reason.

* Take my family, for example. My dad has five brothers and a sister. Half of them are gay. My sister's a lesbian and I'm not exactly the straightest arrow. Absolutely not reflective of what one would predict statistically.

I thought the original post said something about it not just being the odds, but that the younger children were more likely to be gay than the older ones. But like I said, nothing's this simple, not even TEH GHEY.

Yeah, I think that's kind of bullshit, though. As I said, I think it's a misunderstanding of statistics. I'll keep thinking this until the original poster cites a source.

Dozens of gays! Each more queer than the last!

You'd make an excellent sideshow barker, Brad.

This story reminds me of this:

With those skills, he could also be a good narrator of 1950s B-movie trailers.

I'd think it quite the hoot if all of the Duggar kids do wind up gay - it would explain why they're up to 17 kids already:

"What the hell do you mean Jennifer's not interested in any boys? Don't tell me she's spending all her time with the Lipschitz girl again! (sigh) This is your fault! I wanted to try a different position, but OH NO, we just HAD to do it Missionary style! AGAIN! Seventeen times with that position, and you still haven't bought a fuckin' clue yet, huh? We're still getting Christmas cards from San Francisco, Fire Island and Greenwich Village, for God's sake! I don't give a good goddamn about your back pains, we're doing it wheelbarrow for #18, and you'd damn well better come up with another "J" name in the meantime, 'cause I've about had it already!"

JWFokker nicely cited the the relevant portions of the study and one possible biological explanation, but let me clear up a few other (mostly statistical) misunderstandings from this thread.

Actually, if there was a 10% that any single child was homosexual, we would statistically expect a woman with 10 children to only have an ~65.13% chance of having at least one homosexual child.

A woman with 5 children would have a 40.951% chance of having at least one gay child (with your 10% assumption).

As stated in the citation, nothing was said about a single cause, just that birth order (for males) is a contributing factor.

Statistical analysis is meaningless for a single sample. Statistics only "work" (i.e., make sense) when talking about large populations. Just like anecdotal evidence alone is hardly evidence at all (for multiple reasons including both psychological and statistical reasons).

I know there's a serious discussion going on, but is it too late to ask if I'm the only one who thinks the father in the original post looks exactly like the dad from Teen Wolf?

Anyway, carry on.

First off, thanks, JW, for posting the info from that study. It's interesting information and I was mistaken in thinking that it had something to do with statistics.

I'm glad someone with a superior knowledge of statistics showed up. Seriously. Thanks.

We didn't have the text from the study in front of us when I last posted, but you're absolutely right.

Another fun one I've heard - the whorl in the hair at the back of heterosexual men's heads tends to be clockwise. On homosexual men, it tends to be counterclockwise. Here's an article that talks about that study and others.


Yeah, I understand that. I think most of us do.

I'm going to assume that was a tiny swipe at my footnote. That's why it was a footnote - only an idiot would think that what's true for their family is universally true. I just consider myself and my relatives to be something of a curiosity (I know it's a great way to raise eyebrows at parties), so I thought I'd throw it in. I wasn't trying to make an ironclad argument by describing them, I was just trying to be interesting.

The more I look at that photo, I have more and more questions...

1) How many hairstyles does their local QuickCuts have? 2? 3? Would one mullet, mohawk, or hightop fade kill them?

2) How soon will the older kids sacrifice their folks to "He Who Walks Behind The Rows"? ("He wants you too, Jinger. He wants you too.")

3) Whose eyes are deader, these folks or the CGI actors in "Beowulf"?

Dad parts his hair on the right but all the kids part it on the left. Is that his way of asserting his hair authority?

They have eyes?

They look like they eat a lot of ham.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk! (<--- Three Stooges laugh)

I just wanna know how many innocent futon covers had to die for the mother and daughters to have those matching dresses?

Sure, it is part of my job. I also need to realize that I probably sound a little snippy and condescending when I correct things like that, when in fact I'm just sharing information. So, my apologies if I offended you, I really didn't mean to.

Yeah, I wasn't insulting your intelligence, it was more just a reference point since I quoted your whole entry.

Huh, I hadn't heard that one yet, thanks for the link.


*apologizes for sounding condescending*

*apologizes for sounding condescending... again*

I realize that you are an intelligent poster, and I really am sorry for the tone of my email.

I like to teach statistics, so all of this is always floating around in my head, and it rarely comes into play in my every day life. I think my exuberance to be exact in my explanations often translates into talking to people like they are 5 year olds.

Also, I do find your family's sexual preferences interesting.

MissZooey's family... keeping the standard deviation of the population well above zero!

This sentence had me cackling insanely for a few minutes. I don't think you offended Zooey, though. We all knew that just because you have 10 of something that has a 10% chance of being X, it doesn't mean you're guaranteed an X. We just weren't going to work out the math exactly.

Yeah, we're cool, Mr. Monkey. Don't fret.

And Schwartz is right: we (meaning me) weren't going to work out the math. We were going to ballpark the math and fuck it all up.

Here's some math I did work out: (17 kids)/(1 vagina) = a crotch that looks like an autopsy of a giant squid.

I think I only just realised that poor li'l Jinger is possibly meant to have his name pronounced Ginger, as in, the root. I'd been thinking Jing-er (rhymes with Singer) all this time.

I honestly can't decide which is a more hideous affront to good taste.

Obviously, though, such considerations are small potatos in the face of the existential horrors presented by this family. And now, back to statistical analysis!

I think I could stick my whole hand in her vagina and flip a coin.

And now they are going on vacation!

I didn't see this link in any of the three threads mentioning the Duggars.

I think I saw Madeleine McCann somewhere in there.

Agreed.

Thanks for the terror, DaveB.

Scoff if you must, but having a big family is a blast. I have at least three dozen cousins, and even though we can never get everyone together for Christmas dinner, we generally manage 40-45 people. I only have one sister, but I can't imagine growing up without dozens of relatives around.

Didn't you learn anything from Star Wars? The tighter they squeeze, the more siblings will slip through their fingers. My devoutly French Catholic grandmother produced, ultimately, atheistic li'l ol' me.

Seabass please, we prefer to call them Freedom Catholics.