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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2686 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 23, 2026

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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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