wemptronics
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User ID: 95
Not a steelman and my reply time is limited so this may be more disjointed than usual, but I consider this more of a social phenomena than any mindfulness.
- True Crime as entertainment is as popular as ever. It is female coded entertainment. Women being interested in people is not new but we should still #bantruecrime.
- Thanks to the popularity of therapy, mental illness as an acceptable explanation for bad behaviors has become more popular than ever. Trauma, neurodivergent, mental health, etc. Not bad ideas, per se. But all complex concepts become bastardized by the public to some extent. This phenomena may be a cost to the spread of these ideas.
- Female perps are extraordinary and draw attention.
I did not think much of Clancy mentions in proximity until I connected it to a response to another horror story from this Summer. At Electric Forest, an EDM music festival, a newborn was found dead in one of the portopotties. Last I heard, they are still looking for the mother. Anyway, the response to that story has some similarities to Clancy. Here is a reddit thread where by far the most popular comments are to rationalize or sympathize with the mother who had just days before left her baby to drown in filth.
It is a motivated explanation.
- How/why could a mother do such a thing?
- Maybe it was a crypto pregnancy. Maybe she was on drugs and didn't notice. Maybe she thought the baby was dead. Maybe the husband abused her, maybe he did it. Poor thing.
Uncertainty is replaced by a moral position that pushes away any uncomfortable possibility that a woman might just be fucked up, irresponsible, and decided to not deal with an inconvenient "problem." The Clancy case and this festival case are very different, but the social dynamics pushing a generous consensus towards the accused are not. Might also be worth stating that attitudes towards neonaticide vary between cultures and across time.
I don't think he is reliably interesting or worth taking seriously. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can see shapes of Tracey that look like a pundit willing to tell you the hard truths, but as a sort of contrarian liberal with a dash of edgy dirtbag-lite. I crammed him into the ignore bin a long time ago and thanks to your excellent post I now have a recent refresher that illustrates why. Much like Richard Hanania, Tracey has done a good job building an audience for this schtick, but to take what ideas either of them choose to put on paper as serious ones -- as genuine positions that they hold rather than hope to mine -- ruins the schtick, as well as any fun along with it.
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