site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2664 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats