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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2966 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 23, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Getting really sick of the enshittification of Google Maps. Any good alternatives that don't autistically warn me to "stay on the current highway in 0.5 miles" and then decline to mention that my exit ramp is 200ft futher on?

Or provide useful and accurate information about which lane I should be in?

Waze with alert only.

Organic Maps on iOS is what I use.

Probably not helpful to you but my tesla's navigation is superb in exactly those ways as well as others.

OsmAnd, which uses OpenStreetMap data, is the main alternative. The free version only lets you download or update maps 7 times (you are supposed to have at least one map and update it monthly) before you have to upgrade to the paid version, but if you download F-Droid (a third-party app store for Android) then you can install the paid version for free.

I prefer CoMaps for most OpenStreetmaps tasks. Less features, but much cleaner UX and much faster map rendering engine.

I also prefer its navigation capabilities, but if we're honest, it (and all OSM apps) suffers from the same problems GMaps has: sometimes, direction priories are not ideal. Yes, my freeway merges into another freeway in 200 meters. That's unavoidable, don't even show me that. What I really care about is where I'll have to go directly after that.

I manage mostly by looking at the map itself instead of the directions.

That makes me think, it would be really nice to have a fine grained settings page for navigation. I practically never want to be told a streetname, to leave a roundabout or to merge. But I always want to know the next city I driving towards.

To what extent is anti-data center pushing big tech into further GOP alignment?

BTW why so much hate for data centers specifically? Is it just "those folks make tons of money and don't give any to us, we must hate them" or is there more to it? I mean yes, they consume electricity/water/space/whatever, so do many industrial sites and nobody (excepting hippie Gaia lovers which are entirely different crowd) cares. Is it just a new fashionable thing to hate or is there anything deeper here? As big industry projects go, they seem to be far from the worst - they don't smell, barely pollute, don't look egregiously bad (in fact, if we ever manage to get away from endless brutalism, they can look as good as one wants) and can be, as I understand, located on the shittiest terrain ever without a problem. Why are they the devil exactly?

I mean yes, they consume electricity/water/space/whatever, so do many industrial sites and nobody (excepting hippie Gaia lovers which are entirely different crowd) cares.

This depends heavily on the localtion. Here in Finland electricity currently a big issue. Not because people hate AI (honestly not that many do in the real world) but because it will likely lead to real and significant electricity price increases while providing very limited economic benefits (due to data centers requiring minimal long term workforce and 90% of the cost being GPUs bought from abroad). This isn't helped by the utterly braindead increase of wind power without requiring similar investment in base or adjustable electricity generation (with many coal plants having even been mothballed due to being uneconomic when spare capacity is ignored by the market and regulations).

OTOH nobody sane considers water or space any sort of problems here given we have both in abundance and data centers don't even have any mechanisms that could pollute local waters.

I dont think space is a concern in any large scale area like a country or a state (by anyone non-retarded anyway), but it can be a local concern.

Imagine if you will that data centers have been built in some old industrial area that regular industry has left. There was land prepared away from residential areas, there is power, grid and all sorts of appropriate infrastructure excess that is ready to go.

The data center operators now want to massively expand to meet the demands of AI and they obviously would prefer to do so in close proximity to their original development. Only they have used up the old industrial space so now expansion will start encroaching on areas dedicated to other things or get closer to residential areas where things like noise will be a concern.

In these sorts of cases space can very much be a concern even if it in the context of the larger stage/country wouldn't be. It is appropriate local space that can be scarce, not space in general.

I freely admit I may be biased by how Finland is, but I just don't see that happening to any meaningful extent. Perhaps this is due to planning differences or simply population distribution, but at least over here the union of "old industrial area", "not enough space nearby for expansion" and "cheap enough lot to make building a datacenter from scratch attractive in the first place" is roughly a null set. Any such old industrial areas near (more than a few individual) residential homes that would be at all attractive to datacenter operators are already economically unattractive due to either being valued higher for residential expansion or having abundant vacant land in other nearby sites.

Imagine if you will that data centers have been built in some old industrial area that regular industry has left.

"Replace shuttered Rust Belt factories with new data centers" has IMO a bit of a nice-sounding vibe to it. Less clear if the infrastructure would be what you want -- less a railyard and more a substation. The telecom connections are probably the easy part. But I don't live in the Rust Belt, so it's not me you'd need to sell on the idea. The "and you have to clean up the Superfund site" is probably a sticking point, too.

Agreed. I see data centers more as something between commercial and very light industrial sites, something like warehouses but with more electricity / telecoms / capital investment need.

If you are anti-AI or anti-big tech, then being anti-datacenter follows quite logically. There area many reasons as to why people hold those positions.

And of course the people who live near where the datacenters are set to be built have a stake in this, and will want to make sure that their communities benefit overall.

The water numbers are wholly made up, but they would be a serious problem if true, and there's been a lot of people pretending that they're true. I can aggressively claim that AOC is a liar -- she's a politician, her mouth is moving -- and recognize that just because people believe her doesn't make them liars.

The electrical consumption and power density concerns are genuinely unusual: some of the larger AI-driven data center plans involve gigawatt values, compared to tens of megawatts for a conventional server farm data center or normal manufacturing plant. The only really comparable industrial plants are the biggest aluminum smelters, and the US has largely stopped anything on that scale. For the most part, this hasn't impacted rates themselves directly, but it's lead to a number of areas being under surge pricing over more of the day, and it's likely to take a few years to fix. Some of this is overstated, since it's been a hot summer and you'd expect increased surge pricing anyway, but the impact does exist.

That's sometimes lead to onsite gas turbine builds, which are genuinely loud.

Some of it's concern about corporation, rather than data centers specifically: see AOC v. Amazon in 2019 for less principled example that rhymes closely, but there have been genuine problems in much of the Rust Belt with various organizations promising a ton of great things in exchange for support today, and those great things getting sidelined with the next business downturn. AI coming after bitcoin and such doesn't help.

((A smaller number are video game fans who want to buy RAM sometime this decade.))

But it's mostly an objection to the technology using whatever arguments are available. Some of that's principled, if not necessarily a principle I agree with: there are genuine problems with the use of AI for spamware, scamware, and employment war crimes; there are some economic concerns that are serious; there's a lot of copyright and intellectual property claims that people make with a straight face. A larger number are anti-these-vibes. And others are just generically anti-big tech.

we find no statistically significant evidence that data-center presence, installed capacity, or capacity expansion predicts residential electricity-price inflation

Of course, it's just 2021-2024, the real expansion is just starting.

That's sometimes lead to onsite gas turbine builds, which are genuinely loud.

There of course is an obvious solution to this, but I am not sure we're allowed yet to say it aloud. It beings with "nu"... But ok, I can get this reason. Weird I never heard this complaint from DC haters before though... I hear water (which is largely BS) and power prices (which I assume is BS too, local utilities are usually under local control and can just ration the power if they want to)

A smaller number are video game fans who want to buy RAM sometime this decade

Nah nobody cares about those folks. I mean I feel their pain - a little, I haven't seriously gamed for over a decade now, but I get it still, it stings to have you hobby require high-priced accessories, I have hobbies like that too. But this wouldn't move the public opinion in any way.

And others are just generically anti-big tech.

I mean I can get it. Big tech behaves like a bunch of assholes, much worse than proverbial "robber barons" - those built schools, libraries and museums (many of which we're still enjoying today), techbros literally are destructively consuming our culture but of all ways to fix this having DCs built somewhere else seems the least productive.

There of course is an obvious solution to this, but I am not sure we're allowed yet to say it aloud. It beings with "nu"...

Unfortunately nuclear power (which IMO should have been built massively more worldwide) is not a solution because building a plant and getting it fully operable takes so many years.

I've read SMRs can be built with as little as 3 years. That seems to be a reasonable timeframe.

Is that "can be built, tested, certified and be fully ready for commercial operation in three years at some future point when the design has become commonplace and any kinks of practical implementations have been worked out" or "can be ready for use in three years starting right now"?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love SMRs to become common but currently building nuclear power has so many steps and hurdles on the way (that are in no way related to the fundamental reactor technology) that I don't see it being a short term solution for the current upcoming datacenter powering issues.

I guess the question is - is this data center thing a fad that will be gone in 5 years, or a long term trend, where a long-term investment would make sense?

There of course is an obvious solution to this, but I am not sure we're allowed yet to say it aloud.

This does seem to be the market the SMR folks were expecting. I hope it works out for them.

But even solar would be a start: it's not like cloud providers don't have expertise in dynamic billing rates. "Inference is cheaper when it's sunny in Nevada" is, uh, fine actually if most of your market is Bay Area tech bros during business hours. The "Claude is slow at certain hours" claims already exist. Maybe there is a market for "run this at some point tonight", too.

This does seem to be the market the SMR folks were expecting. I hope it works out for them.

As do I, but if there's one thing the green types hate more than AI data centers, it's nuclear power.

Believe it or not, Nuclear power has never been as disliked as datacenters currently are, never mind nuclear popularity right now.

Currently 61% of American are in favor of using nuclear power to generate electricity. 59% are in favor of building more plants.

but I am not sure we're allowed yet to say it aloud. It beings with "nu"...

I'm hoping it happens, but it's best-case scenario is multiple years out for new construction, and the power factor stuff can be difficult: AI data centers shouldn't be very prone to microsurges, but it seems like they're still fighting technical problems on that.

power prices (which I assume is BS too, local utilities are usually under local control and can just ration the power if they want to)

They can ration in the same sense that they can deny construction permits, but utilities boards are a lot less responsive to direct votes.

But this wouldn't move the public opinion in any way.

Fair.

That's sometimes lead to onsite gas turbine builds, which are genuinely loud.

This all made a lot more sense, after I learned the incremental source of gas turbines is converting 737 engines, because like RAM the manufacturers of gas turbines have their peodctuon sold for years.

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-powering-data-centers-b1c587a9

BTW why so much hate for data centers specifically?

This new construction is qualitatively different from previous data centers that leaned more toward CPU workloads or storage. Additionally, many of the reasons that cause locals to dislike them have as much to do with the slapdash nature of the construction as the data center itself.

The gas turbines sound like a Geneva convention violation. The construction equipment fucks up the roads going into and out of the construction sites. The owners get sweetheart tax deals that negate the property tax arguments. The ongoing "jobs" they create are usually something like eight security guards working part time for $18/hour with no benefits.

If you live in San Francisco or Chicago, that all probably sounds great. If you live a couple of miles away, it sucks.

The ongoing "jobs" they create are usually something like eight security guards working part time for $18/hour with no benefits.

Ohio's about the lowest cost-of-living state that has a serious data center presence. It's hard to get great numbers given "data center guard" includes everything from armed and security-cleared to glorified stor-all clerk, but at least from a quick check all the big name AI ones look to be starting at 30/hour and better benefits than I've got now.

There's just not many jobs there.

Most of the ones around me are neocloud providers, and they contract out the security.

I wonder if that's part of the disconnect in the conversation here - different companies could well be handling things very differently.

Could be, and I don't have the tooling to check Ohio numbers on those. Would be stupid to pay them less than a McDonald's and sit them in front of million-dollar servers, but wouldn't be the first stupid thing.

I'm reminded of a joke about college football refs and fixing games: "If you want us to believe that they're not fixing the games, pay them enough money that it's not plausible!"

Thé going rate for general maintenance in a data center is six figures.

I'm not going to argue the numbers because you're correct, but I have also seen specialty teams flown in from Texas to handle that maintenance. The actual number of locals doing maintenance post construction is pretty low. The number of people getting their foot in the door to even get the training is even lower.

There's a broad attempt by the pro data center contingent to act like these things are comparable to an old tool and die, or rolled steel mill. They're not even close.

I'm not even against data centers per-se. I'm against the fact that the people building them are functionally pillaging rural communities and doing a half-assed job of it at the same time. They're cramming them in tents, for Christ's sake. I might even be willing to tolerate that, if our local politicians weren't so venal and craven that we can't even extract tax revenues from them.

but I have also seen specialty teams flown in from Texas to handle that maintenance.

I think it's an open question whether or not the human capital to build and maintain advanced data centers exists in these rural areas. I have similar questions about the high-skilled immigration debate writ large. One can raise wages, but if the price elasticity of supply of talented workers isn't high enough, then there will still be a shortage

I think it's an open question whether or not the human capital to build and maintain advanced data centers exists in these rural areas.

Sure, but then you can't pretend "why do these mouth-breathers not want data centres beside their hovels, are they too dumb to see the economic benefit it will bring to their run-down nowheresville backwater?" because there is no economic benefit. The tax breaks sweetheart deals mean the companies pay less than they promised, the jobs are going to outsiders, and if there is bad outcome such as electricity price rises, fucking up local water supplies, etc. then the locals pay it while the benefits go to the shareholders far away.

So if there's no economic benefit, why the tax breaks? Is it just plain bribery, i.e. the tech guys bribing the local government? Because if there's little local benefit, why give them the tax breaks at all? Somebody must be getting something from this deal, otherwise why not tax them as much as possible - they'd have to build somewhere anyway, and if nobody gets any benefit locally, then nobody should be giving them the tax break. I suspect there's some benefit at least to somebody here. Is that just the bribery benefit or there's more to it?

So if there's no economic benefit, why the tax breaks? Is it just plain bribery, i.e. the tech guys bribing the local government?

It certainly seems to be that way.

I guess that from the local government point of view a large business paying <100% of the standard local taxes after tax breaks looks a lot better than a large business paying 0% because they found a better offer somewhere else.

The question is whether the taxes raised are going to be a net benefit after fully accounting for the costs of hosting these businesses. At some point it tips over into a net loss, and the closer it is to that point the less worthwhile it is. Given that one side has billions of investment capital and a fleet of corporate professionals dedicated to getting a datacentre built at the optimal cost while their opposition are a set of competitors each consisting of a bunch of minor league politicians and their under-funded, under-paid, under-experienced and under-qualified admin staff who also have to manage their other various duties it's a safe bet that a deal will favour the business.

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It's AI hate. In my experience, the anti-DC crowd try to weasel out of their position when you ask about (say) streaming video data centers, those somehow being different and fine.

Come on, there's 1-2 orders of magnitude (size, power, ect.) between one of those and an AI cluster.

Not a whole lot, I would think. All of the hard-core Republicans in my sphere are loudly or quietly anti-data center. It seems to be a winning issue with every flavor of populist.

IIRC republicans are split while dems and independents are strongly opposed, per the most recent data. Republicans are also more accommodating to data centers when in power.

I wonder what is the true nature of the Democrat opposition, as a party - do they want the tech bros to bend the knee, hire unionized trans-minority illegal immigrant workers and everything will be ok (as long as they pay the danegeld consistently) or do they want the whole industry to just go away (likely, to China), out of sight, out of mind - as many other industries did? I mean, the hippie wing definitely wants the latter, for them bread appears on the shelves of the supermarket by government magic, but what is the established position here?

I don’t know. I do know that the unions are very upset about the Dem position on data centers.

In terms of actual Democratic politicians, I'd guess that the true nature of their opposition is that opposing it makes them more popular among people who they consider it important to be popular to (i.e. their electorate and also political insiders). As for why it's popular among those people, I don't think it's a phenomenon unique or even unusual to the Democratic party: the true nature of their opposition is that their opposition is yet another dimension by which they get to moralize to others in a way that makes them feel superior. Tech bros have been deeply unpopular among Democrats for close to the last decade, the multiple real downsides and predicted future downsides to AI has made tech bros even less popular, and tech bros tend to have a much more liberal notion of morality than what much of the Democratic base is comfortable with, and so tech bros and their tentacles, in the form of data centers, make for good targets.

I know exactly one person in real life who has loudly and repeatedly claimed to be pro data center this year.

He drove out to Memphis to record a video about how great Colossus was going to be for the community. He never distributed the video and he hasn't publicly spoken out in favor of them since.

Why? Did it turn out Colossus was not so great, or was he told "listen do this and it'll ruin your career"?

I haven't asked, but he's a software developer who is trying to be an influencer. I'm assuming it was either the former or it just turned out that producing the content was entirely too much work.

Who are some people that you strongly suspect to be fabulists that the general populace has not identified?

I made a comment in the context of Jason Arday about fabulists and I used Jordan Belfort, Marcus Luttrell, Chris Kyle, Greg Mortenson, Frank Abagnale, Jr. as examples. I called out or was suspicious of all of them other than Abagnale and I chalk that up to me hearing his story as a child and then not thinking about it. Took 0 convincing.

There are a lot of politicians whose public story has significant mismatches with available facts. From Warren claiming Native ancestry, to Obama being marketed as Kenyan and associating with domestic terrorists, to Ilhan Omar descent from a genocidal war criminal and her fraternal marriage... Seems to be a common theme there. Does it raise to the level of Arday or Abagnale? Probably not, at least not in the public record. But is it in the same direction couple of steps removed? I think so. Most politicians are fabulists by trade, and many of them do not resist the temptation to apply this trade to their own story.

It’s a bit tinfoil hat, but I suspect many of them are completely sheep-dipped actors.

The classic spicy answer to this question is Helen Keller/Anne Sullivan. Not sure what the current consensus is on how much of what Helen Keller did was real, real but exaggerated, or fictional.

Spicy is apt. I would view this as a reddit-tier view aligned with the Tear-it-all-Down, Black-is-White teenegae angsty ethos of many users there.

Keller got into and graduated Radcliffe. There is good evidence that Sullivan misrepresented certain aspects of Keller's achievements at different junctures, but to dismiss them both as fabulists is, at least based on what the historical record suggests, unwarranted.

Edit: I am not saying your take is reddit tier as I took your post as a hypothetical answer.

No offense taken. I offer no opinion whatsoever on the veracity of any particular claim regarding Helen Keller. It's just the example that first came to mind as a popular conspiracy theory fitting OP's theme.

I think the vast majority of anecdotes you hear from actors are probably made up.

I think the vast majority of "great" stories are embellished from a little to a lot. Which isn't a big deal when it's a small audience, but become problematic when millions believe it. After a few retailing the teller can begin to believe it.

"Fabulist" is too strong a term, but for people working in the entertainment industries in Ireland and the UK, attempting to pass yourself off as coming from a more socioeconomically deprived background than you really did (class-Dolezalism) is the rule rather than the exception. If an actor, writer or (especially) musician claims (or implies) to have had a tough working-class upbringing, it's safe to assume they're lying unless they can provide receipts. (Prime example. You can just tell how fed up Beckham is with his wife's pretensions.)

I laughed when I learned that Tommy Robinson's real name was Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon. His family was working-class, but his name certainly wasn't.

It's funny, although a bit irritating that the journalists who insist on calling him that are the same people loudly insisting that it's never acceptable to refer to a trans person by their "deadname", even if said trans person is a convicted rapist or murderer. They're also more than happy to refer to entertainers by their stage names provided said entertainers hold the "correct" opinions.

The movie American Fiction is essentially that. I quite enjoyed it.

I've been meaning to see that.

Spoilers for the movie Saltburn

Saltburn points this out. Oliver get's far more cultural cache by portraying himself to the elites as coming from the underclass rather than what he actually was - upper middle class

Comment from reddit

Especially after we found out Oliver lied about being, it completely flushed any little narrative they had going on down the toilet.

That reveal was actually pivotal to the narrative. I think this isn't translating well across the Atlantic because most wealthy American families tend to be "new money," but people like Felix are descended from people like Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. They're called the owning class because they own vast swathes of land that have been handed down for generations and they can just live off the rent and never have to work. It's a very different kind of wealth from, say, Donald Trump or Jeffrey Bezos.

There's a big contrast between the owning class and middle class people like Oliver (who come from comfortable, privileged backgrounds but ultimately are still expected to work for a living), and there's another big contrast between the middle class and the working class. Especially at universities where students are a long way from home, you get a lot of middle class people pretending to be working class and exaggerating about how "poor" they are, because being working class carries some social capital whereas being middle class is just boring.

John Kiriakou for sure, although I still love him.

Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock.

Myth Busters is full of shit. Hathcock used a fifty caliber Browning machine gun that he had modified into a sniper rifle. The bullet is the size of a man’s thumb, it could easily penetrate the layered glass of a rifle scope. They didn’t even bother to research that so they used a 30-06 round for the test.

That was only one of his many tall tales.

The Mythbusters retested that particular myth, in episode 75, as a result of complaints they tested against the wrong model of scope. Against a much simpler scope with fewer internal components, such as an Vietnamese sniper of the period would likely have been issued, it was found to be plausible.

I'm pretty sure the through-the-scope shot was supposed to be done with his standard rifle, not the .50. particularly because, at least the way I heard it, the shot happened while the two shooters were stalking each other in the wild, and that's not really possible to do with a tripod-mounted Browning Machine Gun.

Every extreme left or right rising star politician is suspect.

Not sure if you’re aware but Abagnale has been exposed as a fraud. I forget who the guy was but there was a comprehensive analysis done that examined his backstory (and a subsequent book has even been written about it) that dismantles his con job; and the movie his story is based on was a complete fabrication. Just like other movies like Bloodsports, Frank Dux was completely exposed as a fraud and his story is wholly made up.

The fact that Abagnale managed to convince the world he was a genius con artist and even get a movie made out of it demonstrates he is, in fact, a genius con artist

I keep saying they need to make a sequel to Catch Me If You Can about the making of Catch Me If You Can, with Spielberg, Hanks, and DiCaprio playing idiot caricatures of themselves.

Truman Hanks as Tom Hanks

Robert Pattinson as Leo DiCaprio

James CromwellStanley Tucci as Steven Spielberg

You've got a stew going on

Everyone playing themselves, with no de-aging cgi or makeup. Except for Frank Abignale Jr., who is played by Gonzo from the Muppets, obviously.

Surely it takes less genius to convince the world you're a genius con artist than actually perform the feats described in the movie, thus necessitating a hierarchy of genius con artists.

Suppose a GCA_0 is a con artist who performed genius cons that did not have to do with convincing people you performed those cons. Then a GCA_n is a genius con artist who convinced the world he's a GCA_n-1, and so on. It probably goes asymptotic at some point where the difficulty of convincing the world of anything in particular approaches a constant value.

A fraud within a fraud. I assumed @zoink was aware of this but his query still holds with Abagnale as an exemplar.

Correct, I first heard Abagnale's story on Focus on the Family when I was a child. I saw him speak in person in my early 20's. While I didn't peg him as a fabulist back then it took zero convincing that he was a fraud within a fraud when I first heard the allegations.

I feel like I listen to too much angsty/"sad boy music" and want to get into stuff with happier vibes. What's some new stuff to listen to? I generally like hard rock/metal and electronic, but I'm open to anything. I value lyrical complexity a lot, which I think has kept me away from trying most pop.

Not sure what kind of lyrical complexity you need, but if you're a metal fan and want uplifting happier vibes, power metal is the way to go.

Sabaton, Battle Beast, Orden Ogan, and Grailknights as some starting points: generally very uplifting, positive, and high-energy, even if the theme of the song isn't particularly happy in every case, and there are a lot of other bands in this vein. Iron Maiden is also good, but I think a little slower and contemplative than many of their descendants.

How about Fellowship? Power metal with upbeat lyrics and themes.

Do you require specifically modern music?

If not, 80s has a lot of music with happier and more energetic vibes. Even many songs about nuclear war are total bangers (like Iron Maiden’s 2 Minutes to Midnight). The era was also musically and lyrically much more complex compared to today even in mainstream pop.

Iron Maiden famously has many songs with lyrics primarily about epic moments in history, geopolitics, myth, and legend.

I can't help you with lyrical complexity, but if happy boy metal is what you're looking for...

You will never love anything or anyone in your life more than Andrew W.K. loves partying

I just saw a tweet and I don’t care if it’s factually true because a it’s definitely directionally true but it seems like Humans overall just hit below replacement fertility. That would seem existential at some point. Shouldn’t we be considering radical policy choices. One big issue is men dropping out of the labor force. One radical thing we could do would be positive male discrimination. Make firms hirer men whenever possible. There are probably a lot more radical policies but more stable male careers would definitely seem to help. Not saying we should do that specifically but it probably should be inside the Overton window.

One big issue is men dropping out of the labor force.

How this related to replacement fertility? I mean, I was under impression you don't need a lot of men to produce a lot of babies - one male can produce hundreds of babies, given the opportunity. Of course, there would be long term concerns about genetic variety, but that's a different issue. Also, from what I understand, the birth rates are actually not positively correlated with jobs and success at those jobs - poor people can make babies very well, and jobless fathers can (and do) father babies with many women, again if given the opportunity.

As a side note, when you have a combination of ideology-driven oppression, declining real wages, welfare state and economic regulation making hiring low-productivity workers unsustainable, it is no wonder that people on the margin of productivity peel off and choose not to bust their asses working for questionable benefit. But I still don't see how that connects to fertility. Traditionally, low fertility was rather a problem of rich societies.

Men are still viewed as providers in a western Christian ideological framework. I guess Musks is going off on more of a pagan route of the king has 20k kids, but culturally that is not ready to scale in the west. Children are raised in a family of 1 man and 1 wife and the man has economic responsibilities to make that happen.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

You don't need to make firms hire men whenever possible. You just need to stop punishing firms for not hiring women and let the market solve things. Or do you think companies want to hire people who are prone to maternity leave and sexual harassment lawsuits?

Seems like this might be worth a top level post in the culture war thread. 'Affirmative action for men to solve the fertility crisis' is a fairly big topic.

Didn’t feel like a long posts. Just wanted a rant that we should do something.

And I could think of a 100 other policy proposals - ban video games, condoms illegal, taxing singles (banning from inheritance guess Rome did that).

Lack of stable male jobs is one issue. Twitter also had trending pics of law firm being all female now. Economic stability is heavily skewed to female industries now (growth of healthcare being a big one).

Banning video games and condoms will not make more men attractive to women in a way that makes babies. It's just job and income based like you said.

Allowing multiple wives and harems might improve TFR, but that's a major cultural upheaval.

I doubt those rich enough to afford raising and nurturing harems-worth of children are numerous enough to make a dent.

Not with that attitude they won't! Perhaps we all would be fortunate to be join the growing brood of all-father Musk.

The radical policy choice will be what religion of marauding barbarians your descendants choose to lose to. They'll have fixed the fertility issue, probably in the most straightforward manner.

https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8yG0N6HnOy8g/2d3c25c3-b784-4c9c-454f-14d8d304ee00/w=1350

There are billions of humans on the planet. There are going to be billions of humans on the planet for the next hundred years. A tiny blip below replacement means the number might shrink very slowly for a decade or two. It is concerning economically for a society built around the assumption that each generation will be exponentially larger than the previous one. It is concerning culturally for ethnic and cultural groups which are below average and worried about being replaced by groups which are above average. It is NOT an existential risk to the human race. There are a bunch of people who have lots of children, and if low birth rates become an existential risk to certain groups then the ones having more children will become more prominent and more confident in their belief structures that cause them to have more children. (This includes but is not limited to minorities. See Malcolm Collins and the pro-natalist movement).

Humanity will adapt and survive, as it always does.

A tiny blip below replacement means the number might shrink very slowly for a decade or two

Population increased caused by above-replacement fertility is exponential. More babies means more parents who have more babies.

The opposite is also true. Fewer babies means fewer parents to have babies. It won't look like decline at first, because on a population tally a 75-year-old looks the same as a 20-year-old, but pensioners can't have babies, no matter how many of them there are. And the mechanism you are proposing (high-fertility subgroups drag up overall fertility enough to make a difference) has really only happened in Israel. For the other 99% of the world, there is no thermostatic mechanism in evidence. More likely population will plummet in the same way it skyrocketted after the industrial revolution.

It is concerning culturally for ethnic and cultural groups which are below average

They are the ones that maintain industrial society.

There are a bunch of people who have lots of children

Right now, that's subsaharan Africans with average IQs in the 70s, plus anti-modernity breeder cults like the Amish or Haredim. All three require industrial society to be maintained by other people. When the other people disappear, who will provide healthcare for the Amish, welfare for the Haredim or food aid for the Africans?

And more to the point, if industrial society does collapse, that makes us much more vulnerable to existential threats like pandemics, asteroid strikes, nuclear war or misaligned-AI takeover.

Although to be honest, saying 'humanity will survive' is pretty cold comfort. Like consoling the dinosaurs with 'don't worry, that big asteroid won't kill all the animals, the mammals will be fine'

The Amish can ship food to the Africans in exchange for brain draining their igbos and Tutsis as doctors.

Yes agree. I almost added a sentence on this. Today it’s more of a worry about maintaining advanced civilization as tfr is most acute amongst those groups. And even then you likely have 100-200 years.

Supposedly Rome had the same issue around the time of Augustus and they tried to reverse the tfr fall with legal changes. The decline will take centuries, but what comes after a dark age is concerning.

I think it's well-within the Overton window if you're a conservative or at least "family oriented." The problem is that it's verboten among most blue-tribers, for whom any incentives, no matter how gentle, toward more traditional family structures are equated to regressive coercion. The best they can do is support cheaper/subsidized childcare, which isn't nothing. However, if the Nordic countries where that already exists are any reference, cheaper childcare alone does little to promote additional births.

It does help. Cheap childcare, social safety nets, and generous parental leave are commonly cited as reasons for why the birthrate in those countries are higher than their neighbors. It just isn't quite enough, as there are problems related to birthrate that seemingly cannot be solved just by throwing money at them.

Cheap childcare, social safety nets, and generous parental leave are commonly cited as reasons for why the birthrate in those countries are higher than their neighbors

It's interesting why that's the case. Lyman Stone says it's because there's an upper bound on free childcare. You can give free childcare from age five (school) or start earlier than that, but ultimately there's a limit because you can't provide free childcare for babies who are -1 years old. Whereas with baby bonuses, you can make them arbitrarily high.

Things working out relatively fine in the Nordics until sometime in the 2010s. Things only really collapsed in the wake of Corona.

It seems to me that the various family friendly welfare interventions did something if we look at fertility in the wake of their introduction in the ~70s but now there is some different problem(s) driving the collapse in fertility. So while a nation like the US could possibly get some kind of benefit from introducing something similar, it's also extremely unlikely to actually get close to solving things.

Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?

Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?

The Nordics, like most countries, saw a collapse in marriage that caused the collapse in fertility. The timing does suggest that smartphones were the cause (although this demographer thinks that the pre-2012 collapse was due to the recession whereas post-2012 is due to dating apps and shortform video). Interventions in the US would probably be more effective because there is a population of religious Americans that already want to marry and have children, so the incentives would be more effective. Whereas in secular Scandinavia paying people more money to have children won't do much if kids interfere with their expressive individualism.

I'm not sure that's accurate for Sweden. While marriage rates have declined, they don't seem to correlate particularly well with fertility over the longer term, and I don't think the Swedish data supports a declining marriage -> declining fertility explanation.

Sweden's fertility rate was 1.68 in 1980, rose to 2.14 in 1990, fell to 1.55 in 2000, and rose again to 1.98 in 2010. What has changed very dramatically is the age of first marriage. For women it went from about 26 in 1980 to around 35 today.

But marriage hasn't really been a prerequisite for having children in Sweden for a long time. By the mid-1970s, first births were already happening earlier on average than first marriages. Long-term cohabitation, usually called a sambo relationship, is completely normalised, including for raising children. Births outside marriage increased from 39.7% in 1980 to 47.0% in 1990, while fertility rose from 1.68 to 2.14 over the same period. That seems pretty hard to reconcile with declining legal marriage itself being the cause of lower fertility.

I'd be cautious about cross-cultural comparisons of marriage rates for this reason. Marriage doesn't have the same cultural valence everywhere, and "unmarried" in Sweden doesn't necessarily mean someone isn't in a stable relationship, unready to have children or that they would be negatively socially affected by having children. It might still be a causal mechanism somewhere else but it doesn't seem to be in Sweden.

There's also a problem with looking at the proportion currently married. If someone has children in their early 30s and divorces at 45, that later divorce lowers the marriage rate without having anything to do with whether those children were born. What we'd really want to know is how many people are in stable relationships at childbearing ages and how likely those couples are to have children.

Interestingly, during Sweden's fertility decline in the 2010s, first-marriage and first-birth rates both fell while entry into cohabiting relationships remained remarkably stable. So people don't seem to have stopped forming relationships. Rather, people already in relationships became less likely to make the transition to either marriage or parenthood. Combined with the earlier information, that suggests that both marriage rates and relationship formation are probably a fairly poor proxies on their own for whatever is actually currently driving the fertility decline, but family formation is definitely being delayed.

Also curious is that the desire to eventually have children seems to have remained fairly stable in the Nordic countries over the last 50 years, with two or three children still being the typical desired number, even as actual fertility has declined substantially.

Something is causing the decline in fertility but I strongly doubt it is lack marriage and even relationship formation, in Sweden at least.

Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?

My bet, as always, is on a combination of industrialization, urbanization, welfare state, electronic entertainment, propaganda and the inevitably declining value of labor. Good luck reversing all those! The world of tomorrow will not be the world of yesterday, and human life will not be what it was.

Add devaluement of motherhood as a status symbol, and the coming of age of feminist women (and men!) who were themselves raised by first-generation feminists. The first generation of feminists grew up with traditional culture and were influenced by cultural inertia promoting childbearing, but the generations after grew up in a dominant feminist society where being voluntarily "childfree" became socially acceptable.

Agreed. That is what I meant by Propaganda.

inevitably declining value of labor

For at least this I think it's the opposite that is the issue. The value of labour is increasing which means that the opportunity cost of having children is increasing as society gets richer. Generous parental leave doesn't really solve this and might even make it worse.

Since there is zero sun competition for some scarce resources, like housing, this leads to delayed family formation.

Cheaper childcare is, literally, nothing*. It's a subsidy for moms to work, which is why progressives are OK with it.

*in high income countries

So, what are you reading?

I'm halfway through al-Ghazali's The Banes of the Tongue. In particular, this is a piece of wisdom which I ought to follow more:

Similar to cursing is supplicating to bring a person evil, even if the supplication is on an oppressor...all of which is censured. A report says, "A person who has been wronged may supplicate against his oppressor until it suffices him, but what is superfluous will remain to the credit of his oppressor on the day of resurrection."

It would be both amusing and dismaying to see what kind of trial I would receive if I was to be judged by what I have mentally said about many public figures in comparison to what they actually deserve.

It often seems like there is a part of my mind which can never shut up about its anger. But there's a common game that people play in bodycam videos where a suspect (who also seems incapable of shutting up) points in some random direction and says to the officer "don't you have better things to do, like arrest another [unspecified evil person, drug dealer, etc.]?" I imagine that mental anger, at least in some forms, plays a similar role: "look over there [and not at oneself]!"

Last year my fiancée and I both read Eliza Clark's Boy Parts, which I thoroughly enjoyed (it was my third-favourite novel I read last year). A few months ago I bought her Clark's sophomore effort, Penance; she told me she enjoyed it, albeit not as much as Boy Parts. I started reading it on my commute this morning. It follows a muckraking journalist writing a true-crime book about a teenaged girl brutally murdered by three schoolmates in a small seaside town in the summer of 2016.

I'm thirty pages in and I'm enjoying it so far, although sadly the few tics and flourishes I found distracting in Boy Parts remain intact in the followup. Clark is a white Millennial Englishwoman who is Very Online and whom I presume had a middle-class upbringing: accordingly, her every waking moment is sodden with terror of getting cancelled for being insufficiently woke. (In the chapter in which the muckraking journalist introduces himself to the reader, he describes how getting cancelled in a Twitter pile-on temporarily derailed his career – something on your mind, dear?) To avert this fate, Clark interrupts her lengthy passages of sharply observed character details and pinpoint-accurate observations of British class dynamics with chunks of boilerplate, calcified woke orthodoxy e.g. going out of her way to mention that the "majority right-leaning" UK media largely ignored the girl's murder: the victim and three perpetrators all being white Britons, the case couldn't be cynically pinned on a grooming gang or an immigrant. It feels defensive and out of place, as if added just before publication at the behest of a sensitivity reader. C'mon Clark, show your power level already!

Last week I finished The Age of Diagnosis by the Irish GP Suzanne O'Sullivan. Her thesis, in short, is that medical diagnosis is more of an art than a science, and that in recent decades medical institutions have begun to err on the side of too much diagnosis rather than too little. This overdiagnosis comes in two main forms:

  1. Carrying out preemptive screenings and unnecessary tests on patients before they report any symptoms. Any oncologist will tell you that time is of the essence when it comes to treating cancer, and on paper the ability to identify and treat cancerous growths before the patient notices anything wrong sounds like a godsend. But O'Sullivan presents some disquieting statistics indicating that certain oncologists may not be as talented at distinguishing benign tumours from malignant as they claim to be, and that, as a consequence, many patients are being subjected to aggressive treatment regimens which deleteriously affect their quality of life for no good reason. Perhaps the most distressing example of this trend is women who undergo genetic testing to be told that they have an X% chance of developing breast cancer, and who undergo preemptive mastectomies before any tumours have been located (famous recipients of these procedures include Elizabeth Wurtzel and, most famously, Angelina Jolie). As O'Sullivan notes, while the margins of error on these breast cancer estimates have shrunk over time, they can never be zero; and even if they were, if you tell a large cohort of women they have an 87% chance of developing breast cancer in the future, the unavoidable conclusion is that some women have undergone mastectomies for literally no reason. We talk about medically unnecessary mastectomies a lot in this space, but it's sobering to be reminded that it's a topic of major concern even outside the domain of "gender-affirming care". O'Sullivan also cites some alarming statistics on the number of doctors who have admitted to ordering medical tests they did not think were necessary, purely to assuage a hypochondriac patient's worries (read: minimise the risk of a malpractice suit). This seems like a potentially under-discussed contributing factor both to lengthy hospital waiting lists and to Baumol's cost disease. When you hear that patients have to wait, say, 12 weeks to undergo an MRI, you can't help but wonder how many people ahead of them in the queue were not thought to be ill by anyone but themselves (not even by the doctor who ordered the scan).

  2. Existing diagnostic categories loosening and distending over time, until they include people who in previous generations would have been considered completely healthy. This is the story we're more more familiar with. No one is merely "shy" or "socially awkward" any more: every such person is now "on the spectrum". No one is "easily distracted": they have ADHD. Sometimes these diagnostic categories stretch to the point of becoming contested illnesses (e.g. "chronic Lyme" disease, "long Covid"). O'Sullivan reserves particular ire for the concept of "masking", wherein "mildly" or "high-functioning" autistic people can supposedly learn to hide the outward symptoms of their condition and pretend to be neurotypical – which effectively turns being autistic into an unfalsifiable claim*. O'Sullivan argues that the excessive focus on people at the "high-functioning" end of the autistic spectrum has resulted in a highly skewed public impression of what autism entails and, consequently, social policies which demote the severely autistic in importance in favour of their "high-functioning" brethren (in other words, autism and other disabilities have become gentrified). O'Sullivan is clearly afraid of being misconstrued as a right-wing culture warrior sneering at Millennial snowflakes diagnosing themselves with ailments they don't have for clout, and is even-handed and sympathetic to a fault, hammering home that suffering is not any less real for being psychosomatic in etiology, and that the people who stand to suffer most from a medically unfounded diagnosis of autism or ADHD are the diagnosees themselves. But there are brief moments where the mask slips, and her exasperation with and contempt for these self-absorbed malingerers is on full display: when she notes that some residents of Australia have diagnosed themselves with "chronic Lyme", despite that country being inhospitable to the tick whose bites cause Lyme disease; when she describes what a high proportion of people diagnosed with ADHD are comorbid with one or more other psychological ailments; when she describes a list of dozens of potential "long Covid" symptoms (including "loneliness") circulated by a woman with a PhD in a non-medical discipline who consistently refers to herself with the "Dr." honorific; when she argues that, in some cases, a nonspecific medical diagnosis is a convenient coping mechanism for people whose life didn't turn out how they thought it ought to have; and the banger quote below (emphasis mine):

Of the scores of people I spoke to, all of whom were adults, all perceived their lives to be better off thanks to a diagnosis. Every person welcomed the diagnosis into their lives. But almost all had left their job, dropped out of education and lost many old friends. Several were housebound.

A fascinating and eye-opening book, but there were parts in which I wished O'Sullivan would be a little less equivocal and even-handed, more willing to take activists to task for their selfishness, more willing to openly discuss how destructive the "self-diagnosis" trend has been. I'd be fascinated to see the first draft and see how many of the hard edges got sanded down by successive rounds of editing.

*As drily noted by Hannah Spier, "masking" is basically synonymous with "emotional self-regulation", something every adult, to a greater or lesser extent, eventually has to learn how to do. Dare I say that the legitimately autistic are distinguished by a literal inability to "pretend" to be neurotypical? Indeed, that they don't even understand the concept of pretending to be neurotypical?

Of the scores of people I spoke to, all of whom were adults, all perceived their lives to be better off thanks to a diagnosis. Every person welcome the diagnosis into their lives. But almost all had left their job, dropped out of education and lost many old friends. Several were housebound.

I saw that happen to an old university friend of mine. I don't suppose O'sullivan gives any advice for helping these people?

It depends on what is happening.

Most of these people fit into specific buckets, which bucket tells you what to do, for example -

-Motivated by secondary gain? (Ex: stimulant seeking). May become a drug addict, otherwise not too problematic since they are doing this to succeed and don't end up in the fail state.

-People who actually just have depression or anxiety and don't want to admit that? Get them treatment for what they actually have.

-People with "something else" many of these people have a personality disorder or something like a conversion disorder and they've found a way to excuse their psychology and experiences. If you can get them the treatment for what they have, do so. Many of these people were never going to flourish anyway.

Lots of people get shunted into all three buckets at higher rates because of modernity sucking.

Not that I recall, sadly.

To your last paragraph, sometimes I think people make statements like that just to see what will stick. When I bought my house out of state, there was an issue involving insulation of the walls we had to hire a contractor to come in and resolve. He got it fixed but at one point, chose to inexplicably leave a shitload of his equipment in a real inconvenient location right outside of the house, while he completely took off to go do another job. He was later confronted and about it and angrily reacted by saying, “Well you have your own stuff laying right here, so why is my stuff a big deal!?” What? It’s my house, you fucking retard. I have the right to have things on it, I also have the right to not have things I don’t want on it, take your shit the fuck up out of here. I have no idea what goes on in these people’s heads. Maybe it’s to say something so stupid the other person just freezes out of confusion and lets it pass? No idea.

There's a revolving set of games that suspects play in these videos, and I think the commonalities are too strong to be explained by anything other than some common structure of the mind. Some day I will map it all out to my satisfaction.

The core activity seems to be gunking up the process and grinding it to a halt through endless talk (which is the main reason why I'm reading this book), but it comes with several variants and corollaries. Importantly, the suspect is almost always "doing nothing," and there is a passivity to the way they describe themselves (Theodore Dalrymple describes this as "the knife went in," ie. never mentioning who was holding the knife) that seems to me to go beyond the desire to avoid responsibility and reach the level of a pattern of thinking. The suspects always want to be treated as normal, and they are obsessed with visible proof, to the point where if there is no visible proof that can be produced at demand, it didn't happen.

I suspect that these (there are other things I've noticed) explain the behaviour you describe. The argument being made isn't "others [allegedly like you] do something similar, so what is the big deal," rather, the argument being made is "I'm doing nothing, and anyways I'm a normal person, so obviously others must be doing something just like that or worse–look, there's the proof!" Of course, the proof is manufactured if it cannot be found.

I understand the pattern. These people hope you’re as credulous and stupid to fall for their antics as they likely are, which turned them into criminals. “There’s always a bigger fish to fry,” is a simple logic. I say, “Cool. After we flush your ass down the toilet first, I’ll be sure to move onto the next turd.” Or handcuff the guy in your custody to the bench and then go after the next guy.

Still reading Feast. Finished my Spanish book which was depressing (really glad I wasn't on the losing side of the civil war, which knowing my politics, especially my youthful politics, I would have been). Starting on State and Revolution by Lenin for book club.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Pretty incredible how far ahead of his time Heinlein was. The politics are so unique too. He was one of one.

Can someone give me a steelman of the popular pro-Lindsay Clancey argument? I’m not really talking about the defense, whose argument is a complex justification for why she medically and legally qualifies for the insanity defense. I’m more asking about the people online arguing that she is a victim and her being prosecuted/this situation is an example of sexism. My wife told me about the case and is very anti Clancey. ChatGPT also gave what I felt is an unsatisfactory steelman. I don’t have a theory of mind for her supporters, and wish to rectify that.

I'm not sure what it would mean to be "pro-Lindsay-Clancey"; I also have only very limited familiarity with the discourse. But if you mean steelmanning having sympathy for Lindsay Clancey, then sure, I'll try.

I do think you have to first accept that psychosis exists and that postpartum psychosis is a thing, even months after birth. This seems well-supported: indeed, just the combination of prolonged severe sleep deprivation plus intense stress and pharmaceutical use can bring on an extended psychotic episode, as this story shows.

People experiencing delusions are not morally responsible for their bizarre behavior during the episode. The psychosis story above describes a series of what sound like waking dreams. Many of us have experienced a dream where we found ourselves doing something uncharacteristic for some bizarre dream-logic reason; we don't hold our waking self morally responsible for those actions

Some murderous parents act from purely selfsh motives. However, that explanation is not plausible in this case. Immediately after the acts, Clancey slit her own throat and wrists and jumped out the window (high enough that she's now paralyzed from the waist down). To me this sounds clearly like something a psychotic person would do, but is not the move of a personal-utility-maximizer.

So if you buy those premises, you're left with someone in a state of extreme ill health who during its onset repeatedly sought diagnosis and treatment but was not listened to, then predictably experienced a psychotic break during which some hallucinatory dream-alternaself took over and murdered her children, plus tried very hard to kill her. I don't personally don't feel any rage at that, just horror and sorrow, same as if someone was repeatedly denied treatment for weird neuro, then unexpectedly had a seizure while driving the kids home on a busy highway. I'd feel the same way about a dad who did the same in similarly motive-less conditions.

So there you go: steelman! I'm actually a little confused about the overall contrary vibe of bitter moral condemnation here, unless I've missed something major and game-changing about the issue. Perhaps some have just fully decided that over-25 women are their hated outgroup, and can handwave this as just another example of hateful acts by hateable people?

I'm not sure what it would mean to be "pro-Lindsay-Clancey"; I also have only very limited familiarity with the discourse. But if you mean steelmanning having sympathy for Lindsay Clancey, then sure, I'll try.

I think you made a very strong argument for, assuming she is insane, her deserving a degree of sympathy. While there are complex arguments for how insanity and culpability interact, her coming to after her disordered thinking becomes ordered must have been the worst moments of her life.

I’m less asking about the defense and more about the culture war that has grown up around the case on both sides. To me, this just seems like a really horrific case that doesn’t really have culture war relevance. From what I grok, the original culture war argument regarding this case seems to take the shape of some feminists arguing that she was unwell and her failure to receive proper treatment was due to anti-woman bias and that the state prosecuting an obviously sick woman is also evidence of anti-woman bias. The rest of the culture war are feminists and anti-feminists reacting to each other.

I haven’t really been able to find a steelman of the argument that her lack of treatment and/or the state prosecuting her is misogynistic. Hence my question.

I haven’t really been able to find a steelman of the argument that her lack of treatment and/or the state prosecuting her is misogynistic.

For the point that her lack of treatment is a symptom of misogyny, I can try. Here's her treatment timeline for the two months before the murders:

  • Nov. 29, 2022: Clancy began seeing Rebecca Jollotta, a nurse practitioner and colleague of Julie Paul. Jollotta prescribed Clancy quetiapine fumarate, also known as Seroquel, the following day. The lawsuit papers said Clancy's "condition deteriorated rapidly after taking Seroquel."
  • Dec. 1, 2022: Clancy reported she was having "intrusive thoughts of harming herself and of harming her children," to Tufts, the lawsuit papers said. Tufts noted she and Clancy discussed that Clancy could have undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
  • Dec. 2, 2022: Clancy reported to Latiesha Dukes, from whom she had been receiving therapy, that she had become addicted to Ativan and that was why she couldn't sleep, the lawsuit papers said. She also reported having suicidal ideation and intrusive thoughts.
  • Dec. 5, 2022: Clancy told Dukes she had contacted ASPIRE Crisis support, an emergency service for people at risk of self-harm, the previous weekend, papers in the lawsuit said.
  • Dec. 6, 2022: During a virtual appointment with Jollotta also attended by Patrick Clancy, Lindsay Clancy reported her mind constantly was running and she was only sleeping three hours per night, the lawsuit papers said. She denied having thoughts of hurting herself or her children, but expressed that she was "afraid as if something awful might happen" almost every day, the papers said.
  • December 2022: After that appointment, Clancy admitted herself to a day program for postpartum depression at Women & Infants Hospital. She reported on admission that she was "numb to all emotion," the lawsuit papers said. The hospital determined Clancy's issues were "more likely related to overmedication and misdiagnosis," the papers said, and that the program wasn't appropriate for her.
  • Jan. 1, 2023: Clancy admitted herself to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital.
  • Jan. 5, 2023: Clancy was discharged from McLean. Over the following weeks, she met with Tufts for 17-minute sessions, during which she "reported becoming desperate and that she was not bonding well with her baby," the lawsuit papers said. The court papers said Clancy also informed Tufts she was "suicidal and homicidal as to her children."
  • Jan. 23, 2023: Clancy last saw Tufts.
  • Jan. 24, 2023: Clancy is accused of strangling her three children in the family's Massachusetts home and attempted to take her own life.

That looks as though multiple professionals ignored her reports of disordered/violent thoughts, and multiple institutions thwarted her active attempts to protect the lives of her children by getting herself safely into daily care before anything happened. Surely it's fair to ask for an explanation: why?

Once that question is asked, there are neutral answers available, sure. Just a black-swan series of incompetent clinicians. Under-resourced services in general. But it does seem to a casual observer as though more resources and awareness of PPD/PPP might have, for instance, ensured that her therapist had more than one quick module of training on what to expect from the condition. Or ensured that there existed an inpatient or day program with enough spots to be able to accept her when she was seeking treatment.

Then, at the same time, there's also the other side of the discourse that you can see right out in the open here, full of men arguing effectively that minimal PPD awareness/sympathy/resources is a good thing actually: because postpartum depression isn't real and doesn't deserve support, that it can only happen right after birth, that moms reporting it are just lazy or whiny, that it shows all women are inherently unstable and deserve to be listened to less (so anyone uncertain if she's in the prodromal phase of PPD/PPP had better not report it, or she's agreeing to deserve permanent chattel status).

This alongside the parallel discourse, also loud and proud on TheMotte, of men saying that in all justice the life of a woman should be to bear as many children as possible in quick succession, then look after them 24/7, while being the material provider (read: office-job attendance, open evenings, intact body, full nights of sleep) is the maximum expected from a husband.

It's clearly fallacious to conclude that just because a group apparently regards you with contempt and wishes you harm, therefore instances of harm or contempt toward you must be the fault of the group. But it is... a very common and tempting fallacy. The last mass shooting, IIRC, we had a guy on here claiming this was because people callously ignore the plight of incels. In another recent CW thread somebody was arguing that feminism in publishing was probably the reason boys don't read.

Maybe it's not a perfect steelman, but is it all that unsympathetic, as the kind of leap of logic people do sometimes make?

This alongside the parallel discourse, also loud and proud on TheMotte, of men saying that in all justice the life of a woman should be to bear as many children as possible in quick succession, then look after them 24/7, while being the material provider (read: office-job attendance, open evenings, intact body, full nights of sleep) is the maximum expected from a husband.

I just want to flag a few things:

  1. If your wife is having kids nonstop, you aren't going to be having the full nights of sleep unless you are a literally absent father (as in, in a different house) and you aren't going to be having open evenings either (at least not all of the time) unless you are a figuratively absent father (as in, tuning out after dinner and refusing to help with the kids at all).
  2. Guys are more likely to have their intact body become not that way on the job compared to women – however the rates are pretty low.
  3. Notwithstanding the above, taking care of kids nonstop is hard work and while I suspect women are at least marginally better suited to it than men (and men likewise at least marginally better suited to e.g. office jobs than women) I think it's at least in some ways "harder work" than a 9 - 5, at least when you are dealing with multiple children, of which at least one an infant or toddler. Having "as many children as possible in quick succession" means that this is pretty much always the case.

I don't think the Motte's trad/pronatal corner is (generally) calling for exactly what you are suggesting (in part because many of them actually have kids and spouses that they actually like) and are aware both that women should not be treated as child production facilities and that in functional households the man bears part of the burden of parenting, just the same as the woman. (But if you are reading Terracotta's post and thinking "heck yes, that's exactly how things should be, you forgot the gigachad image" then, well, I think you are wrong.)

For the point that her lack of treatment is a symptom of misogyny, I can try.

  • Rebecca Jollotta
  • Julie Paul
  • (Jennifer) Tufts
  • Latiesha Dukes

...that's a curious case of misogyny...

...that's a curious case of misogyny.

If the causal model is not "doctor is mustache-twirling villain" but rather "misogyny--> vague institutional belief that since PPD/ PPP happens to moms, it isn't important/isn't real/ isn't sympathetic/ doesn't merit help--> minimal PPD training for clinicians, inadequate funding for programs--> PPP sufferer seeking help encounters only undertrained clinicians and rejections from overburdened programs," then I don't think the gender of the clinician enters much into it.

For a parallel case, in the feminism-in-publishing debate I similarly highlighted a whole bunch of male authors and male publishing execs, but it was rightly pointed out that ideology can exert structural influence at the level of funding, training, hiring, project prioritization, etc., even if you don't see direct malicious action by individuals.

Isn't misoginy actual no-shit hatred of women rather than vague institutional bias? Isn't lived experience suppose to enter the equation here somewhere, and even if they had "poor training", given the amount of TikToks with moms mock-strangling their children, wouldn't one of these women go "oh yeah, I totally went through that" on chance alone? Or are they all childless?

For a parallel case, in the feminism-in-publishing debate I similarly highlighted a whole bunch of male authors and male publishing execs, but it was rightly pointed out that ideology can exert structural influence at the level of funding, training, hiring, project prioritization, etc., even if you don't see direct malicious action by individuals.

And what did you think of that argument?

And what did you think of that argument?

I... thought it was a reasonable-enough counter to "but but but male authors"? (Although I still believe the wider claim fails for various unrelated reasons, most obviously the fact that girls' reading has declined in exact parallel with boys'.) And I was surprised and impressed to see that level of nuanced critical thinking around this issue, and I believe I said so at the time.

Isn't lived experience suppose to enter the equation here somewhere, and even if they had "poor training", given the amount of TikToks with moms mock-strangling their children, wouldn't one of these women go "oh yeah, I totally went through that" on chance alone? Or are they all childless?

I'm not 100% following, but I don't think there's any claim that clinicians didn't recognize she had PPD, just that the risk assessments were perfunctory/ wrong, the level of clinical interest tepid, the treatments actively harmful, and the support that could have saved her children (like the inpatient or day programs she sought) too under-resourced to be available to her.

All of which imho feeds into a steel-mannable (though certainly not airtight) case that overall dismissive attitudes toward a female-only condition, leading to institutional under-resourcing and deprioritization of research/ training, were contributing factors in this case: a case about second- and third-order consequences, not first-order. A case that, once again, I am not necessarily endorsing, just steelmanning because that was the explicit request that opened this conversation.

I think that's where I stand as well. Though, tbh, a dream about killing my kids is the exact thing that would snap me out of my dream, I have never had a dream where I followed through on something terrible. Still, I'm happy to leave this to the professionals, as long as Clancy is kept from ever having power over someone again it's a good outcome.

This is what I wrote at the time Clancy was arrested. It was well received by the community at the time.

The problem is that there are women who are going beyond this general sympathy of, "maybe she's another victim of the psychosis just like her kids." There are women on Tiktok posting videos where they are crying, expressing rage at their kids, throwing ice into the bathtub while screaming, holding infants while looking longingly into the distance, with captions like "Same, Linsday, same." A shocking number of women who are not experiencing psychosis who think that expressing a desire to kill their kids is normal. It's not, and I highly doubt any of these women actually want to harm their kids. They're doing it for attention, as a cry for help, and I recognize this impulse and shudder.

There are women on Tiktok posting videos where they are crying, expressing rage at their kids, throwing ice into the bathtub while screaming, holding infants while looking longingly into the distance, with captions like "Same, Linsday, same." A shocking number of women who are not experiencing psychosis who think that expressing a desire to kill their kids is normal.

Two obvious points about social-media info hygiene that nonetheless bear repeating:

  • Are these people known to you IRL? If not, then assume that a huge proportion are paid troll farms or AI bots, even from accounts that have histories (video; article). It's not even a conspiracy theory for a corrosive issue like this, more like a dog-bites-man/ $20-on-sidewalk situation where exploitative FUD fakeposting would be so easy and effective that if nobody's already doing it, it would disrupt my faith in rational self-interest. Foreign governments, US domestic partisan orgs on both sides, and the platforms themselves (or clients thereof) would all have a hugely strong interest in ginning up this kind of discourse at the expense of horrified normies.

(Related, I recently learned that YouTube even has an internal feature that actively suggests outrageous topics for pro-level content creators to make videos about, right down to the title/angle. Does TikTok have any similar feature, or is there an external AI utility people use to suggest and script their viral post of the day? The murders actually occurred in 2023, but I recall zero of this angry discourse happening at that time, because it really is such a textbook example of a lurid but sadly unremarkable psychotic-break/domestic-homicide-attempted-suicide story. Why the furor and crazy talk now but not then?

  • For the remainder - I loathe our performative edgelord culture with all my being, but outrageously callous statements laced with sardonic humor really do get massively rewarded on social media. Apparently, some people just get thrills from seeing the Overton window blown out however far in the direction of their preferred sympathies. Surely nobody on TheMotte, of all places, should be surprised by this? One sees it in the CW threads about immigrants, women, old people, overweight people, leftists, (...academics, poor people, Democrats, wordcels, journalists, teachers, other races...) all the time. I sympathize with the dissociative feeling one gets from seeing this at work (same, dude, same), but I'm working to convince myself that these are just weak attention-seekers and don't deeply believe any of the crazy shit they say.

I'm not surprised by it at all by the TikTok and agree with you that this is a social media phenomenon. I'm trying to steelman what seems to be an overreaction from men regarding this subject. Clancy may have been psychotic or a stone cold killer, I don't know. That's why we have courts. Why are conservative men treating this like something that necessitates taking away women's rights or like it reveals that the majority of women want to kill their kids?

Do the same skeptical standards not apply to the other side of the discourse? Tweets from random Roman-statue accounts you don't know IRL, assume they're 40% paid trolls, 40% engagement-farming AI/bots, 20% sempai-notice-me folks bidding for attention.

Plus a mass of lurkers just enjoying the pure libidinal thrill of watching their champion bully the outgroup. Which is awful, sure, but a human impulse as old as time.

Matt Walsh is a public figure who is certainly acting like the reaction to Clancy is a real and present danger to kids and men. https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/2090454704778006688 for example. Or this longer video published to the Daily Wire https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/2092756693759209587

Why are conservative men treating this like something that necessitates taking away women's rights or like it reveals that the majority of women want to kill their kids?

My experience of social media indicates that this isn't happening, and it's also not really a conservative phenomenon. It's people joking that if - if - the recent social media outpouring of support for Clancy by women on the basis that Clancy's circumstances made her unaccountable for her actions is reflective of some sort of general belief about women by women, then that is a very strong - damning, even - argument that women ought to have fewer rights, proportional to their lesser accountability. The idea that a majority of women want to kill their kids is something I haven't encountered anywhere.

Matt Walsh is really pushing it.

Some of it just the usual misinformation. Some of it is biased interpretation of facts. A lot of it just women in group bias. There is no steelman because for many of her supporters there is no logical argument for why they actually support Lindsay other than she is a fellow woman.

There's a go fund me for Lindsay's parents. It's surpassed a million in donations. There are some comments that could give insight into why some people are donating.

There is an entire headcannon from some of her loudest supporters about how the husband actually did it or egged her on to do it so that he could get out of his marriage and get married to his now wife. I think some people have too much spare time.

I can think of some arguments like:

"It's emotional reasoning..."

"Feminism and its consequences..."

"Different moral standards..."

But when someone does something completely against your morals, should a steelman really be made?

"Therapy culture has destroyed..."

These women are openly proclaiming on social media that they also want to kill their kids.

"In the times before abortion, many women would..."

At some point you are just gaslighting yourself.

"The stress of having kids can cause parents to..."

Like, are we really doing this? Take a step back. Apologies to the mods if this comes off as consensus building, but this is so far beyond reasonable that I have to wonder if trying to build a mental model of the kind of person who would do this is actually eroding my own personal integrity. The rational response here might actually be:

"This is fucking evil"

As saying anything else opens your mind to ideas which can only ever be bad for you and those you love.

Oh, this is tempting to agree to. I have already upvoted it by reflex. I for one have already expressed my view on this - outside of the libertarian utopia in which parents literally own their children and society has no claim on them, parents having provably killed their children is such an unmitigable breach of all natural law, social contract, basic trust and any ethics whatsoever that the only reasonable consequence is society killing the parent, as quickly as possible, for keeping its own order, for giving justice to the children, and for preventing the impossible farce of the parent living on in any way.

But is this suitable material for the Motte?

Is there a point at which trying to understand others is actually harmful to yourself?

That is really the thing I am trying to get at.

In a forum where Nazi sympathizers are allowed to argue their points, I guess it would not be out of the question for sympathizers of postpartum abortions to be allowed the same grace. If the way I framed my point is too opinionated for this site, then that's fair. I will submit to the authority of the mods.

But I do think the question itself has merits. For people who like the intellectual exercise of building a steelman, I think it is valid to consider that doing so may have unintended consequences.

To your point I think actively giving understanding others a shot is critical, and trying once, twice, or even a couple dozen times won't kill you.

It does make me much more confident about coming to the "Well it's just evil" conclusion. There are certain (very few!) beliefs and behaviors which are great signal shortcuts to knowing a person is worthless.

Why must those opposed to HBD, anti-welfare, anti-DEI etc. arguments to the point of believing they are pure evil tolerate them, yet as soon as a woman kills her own kids (not even someone else's) a defense of such is taboo? This forum positions itself as a neutral ground.

Admittedly, me calling it "evil" could be a step too far.

  1. I would like to believe killing your own kids is a different class of problem.

  2. This is specifically about constructing a steelman of something extremely far removed from your own morals. Whether doing so is possible without your own views becoming slightly closer to what you are trying to represent. I am not saying that sympathizers of filicide should not be allowed to express their views here.

  3. The neutral ground on this site does not mean you don't get pushback. You get to sympathize with Clancy without having your post removed (not saying you personally actually believe this). I get to write that said belief is evil and contrary to everything that makes our society good.

So, a cognitive hazard?

Basically. Seeing a problem from another person's perspective necessarily changes the way you look at it to an extent.

As a potential counterargument, fiction authors routinely place themselves in the heads of some absolutely heinous personalities and don't seem to be worse off for it. But does this mean that this type of cognitive hazards don't exist, or that engaging with them through fiction is simply different?

Or fiction writers are uniquely resistant to these hazards and can safely engage with the subject.

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 know who that is and, after reading the replies, I am thankful for that fact.

I originally learned about this story from my wife. For her, it infuriates her for two reasons:

  1. We are taking care of an infant, so she’s emotionally protective of small kids. She’s also logistically spending more time on the phone.
  2. She has multiple BPD female relatives who often try and pull the card “I’m sick, so I get to treat you badly.” This case seems to be an almost perfect scissor statement for her. She’s quite anti-Clancey, so this is of anthropological interest for me.

I generally think of myself as fairly crusty and well-armored against base emotional currents, but due to some personal events lately, sampling the discourse on this hit me really hard the other night. I'm very, very glad my wife is a sane woman of good sense.

While I wish it wasn't as big of a deal as it is, it is filling that "scandalous legal case" niche that happens periodically in America (what was the last one, Heard vs Depp?) with the biggest probably being OJ.

A lot of the country is thinking about it, in a time where most media isn't scratching that broad itch if you want to know what your common man is doing, it's this.

I can recall making a comment about a megapint of wine over DM with a friend back in the US. I had watched a few bestof clips of the Depp/Heard trial and found that segment funny (Depp is asked about alcohol and is questioned something like "You poured yourself a megapint of wine?" Depp actually seems amused at the term and just asks back: "Megapint?" It's really the kind of interaction made for the internet age. For a while you could find online for sale the Mason jars fixed to winestem glasses of the type seen in the Heard-secretly-filmed videos. They were of course sold as "Megapints." )

My friend had no idea what I was talking about.

The megapint thing was hilarious, but to be pedantic, it would surely take a long time to drink a million pints of wine.

Longer for some than others.

This must be the most surprising "skill issue" I've ever gotten.

The strong argument is basically:

  1. Some crimes shouldn't result in a "guilty verdict" because of mental illness.

  2. Lindsay had one of those illnesses at the time of the murder therefore she was not "responsible."*

  3. Which illness she had is a bit vague - post-partum psychosis and bipolar have been passed around as possible explanations.

The weaker argument is basically:

  1. "No, no, the husband did it!"**

The weaker argument is far more common than is in any way acceptable. It is also very stupid. The strong argument is very strong and is the rule of the land - not guilty by reason of insanity is a thing and should be a thing. If it applies to her case or not is a technical discussion, which is causing problems.

*There are very specific rules for this and this really should be the case. "I have borderline personality disorder, a DSM recognized mental illness, therefore I can get away with murder" ...we have decided that's bullshit, and that seems a reasonable decision. "My grandma got sent to jail because she attacked her nurse because her UTI made her temporarily crazy" is also bullshit and not sending her to prison is a good decision for society.

**A side game here appears to be liberal, privileged white women who cannot imagine a woman would do something bad for any reason. For them it seems easy to imagine a man killing his kids but a woman.

I have also seen the argument float around that she is actually the victim of a society which didn't take her mental illness seriously until it was too late. This is happening to many other parents which is why they relate. I just don't quite think that works when

  1. She killed her own kids. That's a bit like saying Joaquin Phoenix's Joker was not responsible for the murders he committed.

  2. Much of the support is either in the form of denying she did it or "I understand, I want to kill my children too".

There is a strong element of the very popular "anti-psychiatry" and "anti-healthcare" trends. This is absurdly popular online you can see lots of stories of "I brought my husband to the doctor so they would listen" and so on. Never mind that most healthcare workers are female.

In this case it's stupid because she was clearly doctor shopping, signed herself out of inpatient care, and at best lied about her symptoms to multiple people involved in her care.

These kind of people don't let facts get in the way however.

In this case, I think there's an even bigger issue: she made no effort to mitigate the effects of her purported illness on others. If you are truly seeking treatment for an illness that is widely recognized as threatening to others--particularly vulnerable others you have special responsibilities toward, you have a duty to put their safety over your own. Why didn't she separate herself from her kids? Why didn't she tell her husband "I'm not getting the care I need, I'm going to stay somewhere else for a while."? It's not "anti-psychiatry" and "anti-healthcare" trends that cause this. It is entitlement. "Healthcare exists to ensure I don't have to make any sacrifices. I'm already struggling, why should I have to take on these burdens. They failed me."

It’s the toaster-fucker problem again. I think it’s well established that parents sometimes feel dark impulses towards their children: my friend had a child in the very conservative Japan and one of the pieces of official advice the prep classes emphasise most is, ‘no matter how annoying it is or how angry you get, DON’T SHAKE THE BABY’.

In common society this is considered unfortunate and shameful, to be explained quietly only to the relevant parties and not to be said in public. Most certainly not in front of your now-grown children!

But now the internet is making what was quietly and implicitly known into something explicit. Parents are going ‘wait, you wanted to literally kill your children too?’ and experiencing this as catharsis instead of mutual shame. America’s confessional culture and no-woman-is-ever-at-fault-unless-she’s-trad feminism is then turbo-boosting this phenomenon.

not guilty by reason of insanity is a thing and should be a thing.

Why?

Please see example of Grandma above.

**A side game here appears to be liberal, privileged white women who cannot imagine a woman would do something bad for any reason

I've seen at least one joke based on the liberal white women premise that's been floating around, something like: "nothing liberal white women will fight for harder than the freedom to kill their children." My favorite joke/meme so far is the more lighthearted Hasbulla crossover.

Indeed, it is interesting how monolithically white Clancy supporters are. It's rather comical, the sight of them gathered up in coordinated pink shirts like it's a sorority bake sale, where their gesture of support for Clancy resembles a strangling motion. Not even trying to beat the meme gender allegations.

  1. "No, no, the husband did it!"

If they really thought he did it, though, they'd be writing him love letters and sending him bikini pics and stuff.

Thanks for the write up. The strong argument makes sense to me. I can get how someone may or may not agree with it and don’t know enough about the case to judge it. If she’s insane or not is a factual question which, as shown by both sides having doctors testify for them, isn’t super clear cut.

The weak man argument to me seems to just be grasping for straws/motivated reasoning to avoid saying “this woman did a very evil act.” This does seem to be a time where the uncharitable explanation does indeed describe a lot of the supporters of one side.

I don't buy the insanity defense. I can't think of a mother I know that wouldn't do suicide attempts till success if she did such thing in a moment of blackout. It is just not something you can live with when the haze over your brain lifts.

A side game here appears to be liberal, privileged white women who cannot imagine a woman would do something bad for any reason. For them it seems easy to imagine a man killing his kids but a woman.

Just giving flesh to the meme that the only thing white liberal women really fear is accountability.

I don't buy the insanity defense. I can't think of a mother I know that wouldn't do suicide attempts till success if she did such thing in a moment of blackout. It is just not something you can live with when the haze over your brain lifts.

This cuts both ways - the murders were probably not cold blooded, if they were she wouldn't have tried to kill herself and she would have done things in a way that she could have had a life afterwards. The cause of the behavior was probably something else - a formal personality disorder (ex: Borderline), issues of general personality structure, or "less serious" mental illness (like postpartum depression, other forms of depression, or anxiety) interacting with stressors and other features of her environment. These things should not impair her "reality testing" and should leave her with an understanding that what she is doing is morally wrong and a shitty idea. That type of explanation is going to function pretty similarly to a psychotic state in terms of feeling miserable about events afterwards. For both she'd end up with some pretty hefty treatment afterwards to try and reduce the impulse to suicide. They'd look the same three years later, at least looking from the outside as we are.

Just giving flesh to the meme that the only thing white liberal women really fear is accountability.

Much as my impulse is to give them zero credit I can't really do that here. Most people are aware of men as the sex of violence and killing, and some people are aware of "family annihilator" crime (as this may have been) and when that happens it almost always men. If you live in a bubble with little crime than you just aren't going to see the existence of cases like this or of women committing violence, which does happen in the real world but not in their milieu.

Most people are aware of men as the sex of violence and killing, and some people are aware of "family annihilator" crime (as this may have been) and when that happens it almost always men.

If indeed it is true "family annihilators" are almost always men, it would only make it even more striking that, to my knowledge, a male defendant has yet to have men show up en masse to his courtroom in color-coordinated outfits to show him their support. To the extent male family annihilators had/have supporters, it coded/codes heavily female, to say the least (e.g., Chris Watts, Scott Peterson, Jeffery MacDonald).

The strong argument is very strong and is the rule of the land - not guilty by reason of insanity is a thing and should be a thing. If it applies to her case or not is a technical discussion, which is causing problems.

*There are very specific rules for this and this really should be the case.

The problem with this is that women's behaviors have historically been attributed to "mental illness" to a far greater degree than men's, and this disparity has been widely criticized as sexist against women due to the negative impacts it has on women. To fall back on that defense in this case because it is beneficial smells a lot like women wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

The problem with this is that women's behaviors have historically been attributed to "mental illness" to a far greater degree than men's, and this disparity has been widely criticized as sexist against women due to the negative impacts it has on women.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a 4chan troll campaign: Support for Lindsay! Because holding women criminal defendants up to male criminal defendant standards of culpability is a misogynistic form of ableism.

To fall back on that defense in this case because it is beneficial smells a lot like women wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

Ah, so another day that ends in a "y." The usual Schrodinger's feminism: Women are just as emotionally stable and resilient as men, but are simultaneously more emotionally vulnerable due to hormones/post-partum depression/the patriarchy/etc. so they need additional care and support.

Because female hysteria is a real thing. That our society chooses to pretend women are as mentally/emotionally strong and healthy as men doesn't invalidate that.

While the information I have is somewhat limited, with the information I have I do not believe she was afflicted by a psychiatric condition that would make her not guilty. It is worth noting that she was examined by one of the gods of forensic healthcare and while he is somewhat doddering at this time he did side with the defense (and has more information than I do).

All of that being said, what you are saying is both somewhat untrue historically (and is more of a meme than anything) and is very specifically not applicable to the conditions being evaluated in this case (ex: psychosis).

This is a complex technical discussion involving healthcare and legal structures, people trying to shove the culture war into it are walking into a long running conversation with limited understanding.

I was referring to the reaction to the case by onlookers the OP was asking about ("I’m more asking about the people online arguing that she is a victim and her being prosecuted/this situation is an example of sexism."), which I think is based far more on this level of "culture warring" than on the technical details of the case.

My wife is currently watching the trial (only on day 8, so may have additional information later) and is keeping me informed with elements of the testimony that are somewhat inconsistent. I'm not sure this would be enough to conclude someone else did it, but I do find it interesting that there's at least some strange stuff, and this is I think better than "Leos don't kill their cubs".

  • The husband testifies that when he arrived and found her, she told him the kids were in the basement. When the paramedics arrived, she was in and out of consciousness but unable to communicate.
  • Despite finding his wife post suicide attempt, being told the kids were in the basement, and having previously had her tell him that she felt like she wanted to harm the kids, the husband doesn't check on the kids (and find them dead) until after the paramedics arrived. He had previously called down into the basement before finding Lindsay and received no response.
  • Her body temperature when admitted to the hospital was lower than we'd expect for the time she spent out there, which suggests there may be something wrong with the timeline (that she may have gone out the window earlier). They were able to restart the baby's heart at the hospital, which upper-bounds the amount of time the baby could have been dead, so timeline inconsistencies can't just be arbitrarily pushed, that might suggest that she was out the window before the kids were killed.
  • There are blood drops on the door handle leading out of the bedroom Lindsay jumped out of, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that she killed the kids (in a non blood-producing fashion, asphyxiation), sliced her wrists and neck (with a knife that was found in the bedroom), and then jumped out the window.
  • No conclusive fingerprints on the knife, and her DNA was found on only one of the exercise band murder weapons. His was on all the bands, but he untied the bands so that's expected no matter who killed them.

Unfortunately, the insanity defense means that her defense team won't be making a concerted argument that she didn't do it (which may be a rational strategy even if she didn't do it), and I'd really like to see that trial.

This is up there with trying to steelman Jeffrey Dahmer, but I'll give it a go.

Children are exasperating. Their screams are annoying. And it is generally women who are more attuned to their whines and screams than husbands who develop a magical ability to tune it out. Every mom can sympathize with the sense of frustration and frazzled nerves from having three children and a husband who isn't pulling his weight. So it's not about this CASE per se, it's about feeling heard in their own relationships.

And the Clancey supporters are probably not exposed to any actual information about the case. They probably hear she was denied ESSENTIAL MEDICAL CARE, and just snapped and just killed her kids in a frenzy or something. They don't really think about that aspect. They don't know that she planned the crime on Google, sent her husband on an errand, and then systemically killed each child in turn, even pausing to take a phone call from her husband in the middle. That's just outside their filter bubble.

In any case, letting one killer out is a small price to pay for a greater AWARENESS of WOMEN'S EMOTIONAL LABOR. And how sure are we that she even did this crime. Aren't most crimes perpetrated by men. Her husband was recently seen dating another women. Maybe he was the one who did it after all.

The steelman is the claim that she was being abused and her husband made her psychotic. As far as I know, there is no evidence for this; it's pure pop-feminist misandry.

The steelman is the claim that she was being abused and her husband made her psychotic.

Not quite, see my post, but the specific mechanisms raised by the defense and community for psychosis have been very variable and include things like abuse, medication side effects, baseline mental illness, and post-partum illness (which is a rare but real thing).

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