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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2680 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 23, 2026

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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 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?

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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