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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2680 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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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.

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