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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25105 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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DEAR FELLOW MEN: You’re making us all look like emotionally-stunted meatheads over this Lindsay Clancy thing

Tracey's takes are always interesting to me, and I enjoy his writing because I often find myself on either side of his opinions on a case by case basis. This time, I'm somewhat against him.

I don't doubt that plenty of men have had less than respectable takes on this case, but the far-and-away more interesting story surrounding this case is the social media response from women at large.

Tracey seems particularly focused on the first-degree conviction that the state is trying to prove, but that's not so interesting to me. Whether she spends 50 years behind bars or 50 years in a mental institute doesn't make a difference to me, really.

I guess my contribution to this is just the observation that what you think is worth talking about and what you think can be ignored is the essence of culture war. Or, put more simply, the culture war is the debate over our unstated and unexamined assumptions about right and wrong, and its hard for us to even realize this is what we're doing in the moment because we're blinded by the emotional flares of the object-level debate.

This is just "Republicans pounce", except men.

I can respect a congenitally disagreeable nuance bro, but that ends the minute they start complaining about the people signaling what they have jumped through so many hoops to countersignal.

Doesn't this entire controversy seem to be rapidly developing into a perfect example of the Shiri Scissor / Scissor statement?

I think it's better characterized as an extension of the increasing trend towards people feeling very comfortable having opinions (especially those that are political adjacent) without any expertise or full context and the related resistance to updating views on getting new information (especially from experts), as well as just lack of critical analysis (especially from social media).

Most of the takes I've seen that engage with the facts are missing pretty big pieces of legal or medical context leading to incorrect or incomplete conclusions - and unlike with "real" scissors people who want to hear more about the circumstances update pretty strongly.

I've also seen takes that totally don't engage with the facts at all, like female doctors going "IDK the husband seems sus" and just refusing to actually look at information about the case, just sucking up whatever pops on TikTok.

It's pure brain rot.

DEAR FELLOW MEN: You’re making us all look like emotionally-stunted meatheads over this Lindsay Clancy thing

Don't care. The meatheads are right on this one.

I guess my contribution to this is just the observation that what you think is worth talking about and what you think can be ignored is the essence of culture war. Or, put more simply, the culture war is the debate over our unstated and unexamined assumptions about right and wrong, and its hard for us to even realize this is what we're doing in the moment because we're blinded by the emotional flares of the object-level debate.

Good point.

My main concern is not about the object level rights and wrongs of the case, but that mothers killing their children in a psychotic break will become the next social contagion.

That's also one of my concerns, something I doubt Tracey has or would consider. Though it's not clear to me that maximum punishment would help in this way. The cat's really already out of the bag in this respect because of how much attention the case has received, because I believe that's a key component in starting the contagion. Success here looks like turning the temperature way down in any way you can while still seeing that justice is served.

I haven't been following this case, but a lot of trial streamers (who I don't peg as woman-power gender warriors) who have actually watched the whole thing seem to think that the prosecution is toast.

Just out of curiosity, which streamers are you thinking of?

Runkle of the Bailey, Law and Lumber, Lawyer You Know.

Any article that speaks to a gender as a whole is to be discounted as hot culture war garbage. You can imagine Quisling saying 'my fellow Norwegians' in the same cadence, with the same amount of concern for his fellow countrymen as Tracey does for his fellow men.

I don't know enough about the Clancy case to make any serious comments about it, but one big difference from the Yates case was that Yates had a well-documented history of psychiatric problems, including hospitalizations and multiple suicide attempts, and her family was told that she needed round-the-clock supervision and was not to be left alone, let alone responsible for five small children. And she was still convicted; part of the story everyone forgets is that her conviction was vacated after it was revealed that a prosecution witness claimed she got the idea from an episode of Law and Order than didn't exist (keep in mind that in 2001 there was no easy way to tell if a television episode with a particular plot existed; it only came up in the Yates case afterwards when someone associated with the show got wind of the testimony). Clancy, on the other hand, had some history of psychiatric treatment, but not nearly to the same degree Yates did.

The reason I bring this up is because if you look at the history of insanity defenses, they became prominent in the 1960s, had their heyday in the 1970s, and died a quick death in the 1980s. They existed prior to the 1960s but were relatively rare because available psychiatric treatment was limited and a defendant who was actually psychotic was likely to end up hospitalized for life regardless of the verdict. Once medications became available that enabled people with severe mental health problems to lead normal lives, insanity defenses became more attractive, as the problem was not mental illness in and of itself but untreated mental illness. These two reforms—treatment rather than institutionalization and the recognition that people with severe psychiatric problems shouldn't be held criminally responsible—were fine independently and had been recognized as positives for decades by this point, but the changing landscape made them collide in a way that was disastrous.

People often think that Hinckley was the end of the insanity defense, but Hinckley is a bad example because he was obviously nuts, and ended up locked up for most of his life. He also didn't actually kill anyone. The real end was the Dan White case. White assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, and Willie Brown and another supervisor were also on the list. White's case wasn't strictly an insanity defense but a diminished capacity defense, i.e. his depression at the time of the killings reduced his culpability from murder to manslaughter, and he ended up serving 5 years of a 7 year sentence. What miffed the public the most about the verdict was that White was a normal, well-adjusted adult up until the time of the attacks who had shown no indication of needing psychiatric treatment. The case was the most high-profile of a series of cases wherein the defendant took a half-hour break from sanity to kill a few people before returning to normal. They either claimed diminished capacity, like White, or went through with the whole defense and were committed to mental institutions, only to be released a few years or even months later after psychiatrists determined that they weren't actually nuts and stopped treating them, and they successfully petitioned for their releases on the basis that they couldn't be held in a psychiatric hospital if they weren't receiving any treatment.

Clancy, on the other hand, had some history of psychiatric treatment, but not nearly to the same degree Yates did.

To expand on this, she was evaluated many times prior to the killings (including specifically for the type of pathology she allegedly exhibits) and those many evaluations did not find she had that type of illness.

Usually in these cases the person has a known and obvious illness or has never presented for psychiatric care.

It seems questionable that someone had been seen by probably more than a dozen mental health workers of various types and nobody spotted it. Either her presentation was exceptionally unusual, she lied about her symptoms, or she was able to minimize in a very productive way. Or she made it up on the advice of her attorney.

I don't know that it's so much that she made it up on the advice of her attorney as it is that it's a plausible defense and the only one really available to her. When people commit unspeakable crimes in the absence of any other motive, the default is to believe they are mentally ill, and she had a history of mental illness. The question is whether her mental illness rose to the level that rendered her unable to tell the difference between right and wrong or appreciate the consequences of her actions. There's definitely enough meat on the bone for her to amount a plausible defense, and it's up to the forensic experts to present the evidence and the jury to decide whether she meets the standard. I'm responding because I don't want anyone to get the impression that I think there's some Yates Standard that Clancy doesn't meet; Yates isn't the standard, and I know too little about the Clancy case to make a judgment about her culpability one way or the other. I was just responding to the original article, which made it sound like the two cases were closer than they were, and that even Yates wasn't as easy a call as the article made it sound.

Fair enough!

After having read the piece: I really don’t understand how he’s going after men here?

The woman doesn’t belong on society, she should be killed, it doesn’t matter if she was psychotic at the time (she was), it just doesn’t fucking matter … the rest of us deserve peace from people who murder.

I don’t need empathy for a child murderer - I guess I have some, like it sucks this happened to her? I just don’t want her in my society … same way I view any violent criminal or weird foreign religion (Islam, not Judaism).

You got a lot of downvotes for this. But I share your opinion. Society is already too complex, too complicated, too wasteful, too full of corruption and degeneracy. Cutting egregious criminals extra slack because they might be crazy is laughable, as if two evils cancelled each other out. They do not.

I have some empathy for a child murderer. I spent years within sight of the clock tower where a mass murderer might have been provoked by his undiscovered brain tumor, and years later I watched incurable brain tumors kill my father mind-first, and it turns out I've got the same nasty oncogene mutation he had. So, while I could never murder any children as I am now, I'm quite aware that I'm made of meat and sometimes meat breaks. There's a one-in-a-billion chance that one cosmic ray hitting exactly the wrong spot on the wrong DNA strand in my head could end in tragedy, and there's probably similarly slim but non-zero odds that some non-cancerous failure of biochemistry could do the same.

So, if that ever happens: please kill me.

If whatever's left in my brain is no longer describable as "me", then I'm already gone, and the faster my body becomes an example to deter any other broken people on the margins, the better. If some part is still me and is still aware enough to know I've killed children, then it will want to die as soon as possible rather than live with that knowledge. I could see some justification for Eighth-Amendment-forbidden flagrant torture, making me suffer more before death for additional deterrence value ... but the quiet, subtle torture of making me suffer a long pointless life of stewing in my own regret, while people loudly congratulate themselves on how compassionate they are to killers? Please, no.

This is all true even if I don't also imagine that the dead kids are my own; my brain just throws an error when I try to make the scenario even worse.

I read that prosecutors are arguing that Lindsay Clancy's apparent suicide attempt was faked, that she didn't cut herself deeply enough for a real suicide and didn't realize that throwing herself out a second-story window would still at least render her paraplegic. I guess their motivation is "we need to make her look more sane if we want first-degree murder to stick", but trying to kill herself out of guilt would have been the sanest thing she did that evening, and it would be both sane and kind of us to help her finish. The vast majority of suicidal ideation is just depression-induced confusion that even the suicidal person will recognize as mistaken in hindsight, if they survive to have the opportunity, but I believe this magnitude of situation is an exception.

It's been commonly known for a long time that murderers get female groupies. Serial killers get female groupies. Mass shooters get female groupies.

I'm confused by the men who are treating Clancy like a new thing - something which demands a large curtailing of rights and responsibilities of women. I think it's largely an effect of the internet and social media, that it feels like there's a larger number of women who are supportive of Clancy than there really are.

The phenomenon itself isnt new. But it does feel like it may have been 'undercounted' in a pre-internet era because there was less opportunity to broadcast and receive it. And if you think female conformity, feminized societies, and social contagion are 'real things', the obvious question is if this is reinforcing and perpetuating things towards negative ends.

This is just another iteration of the 'wait, you think this too?' cycle that's been going on for years now. What's novel is seeing the extent of it now that everybody's veils have been lifted, and the sense that we're witnessing a cult-like level of solidarity that's extended to all members for almost any crime... unless you're Shiloh Hendrix and said the forbidden word.

I don't know who originated the comment that if Lindsay strangled three puppies you'd only see the knives out for her, but it rings true to me.

3-5% of men will commit a violent felony in their lifetime. (About 1% of women will commit a violent felony in their lifetime.)

If 2-4% of women find a violent criminal sympathetic and take actions to express their sympathy, then it seems like we are at parity for how deranged each sex is.

If I saw a poll saying that the majority of women think Clancy should be found insane, then I don't think that means that the majority of women support Clancy, lots of men on this forum also agree that it's possible that Clancy was insane.

I doubt that more than 4% of women are actually materially supporting Clancy.

It doesn’t need to be a majority of women. Just like with Islamism and Socialism, my concern is if there's more support than I am comfortable with before I let the preference cascade do its usual slide. And as we all know, society has had a weakness when it comes to bending itself to satisfy a 'loud minority' once it exceeds a low threshold.

This also not a case being witnessed in a vacuum. The discomfort comes from watching the typical excuse making and minimization extend even to something this heinous. Nor do I think much turns on wether shes 'truly insane'. The question is what to do in the aftermath any way. If the father had murdered his children in a psychotic break, many men may also have a degree of sympathy or understanding for him. My hunch is that none of them would strenuously object if it was determined he still needed to be hung.

But yes, I too would like to see a decent poll on the matter. The displays outside the court and the online defensiveness is distortive. It is also not a clean break away from the kind of soft-pedaling I've encountered irl.

none of them

I mean, for starters, some of us are against the death penalty even as applied to sane murderers.

Ironically, sanewashing the women who post about wanting to kill their own kids like this risks stigmatizing mental illness more. Psychotic people usually don't become murderers. Depressed mothers usually don't kill their kids. But trying to normalize it make it seem like this is the common course of the illness. Like post partum depression is something that takes over your body and uses it to kill kids.

If so, can any mother with PPD be allowed custody of her kids? If your family member has occasional psychotic breaks, can you ever allow them within vicinity of your children? Or yourself? If the illness is this uncontrollable and leads to such terrible outcomes, then surely anyone exhibiting symptoms should be committed to 24/7 care at a psych ward, as mothers with PPD are simply not in control of themself.

I don’t know why this is even a story at all to begin with. Women have been killing their kids in this country since Planned Parenthood was a thing. And for the women who support her and act like a psychological bug light for the psychopaths of the world, mental health experts the nation over have identified who their subjects are. In the case of PPD specifically, perhaps if they can demonstrate they’ve regularly been seeing a psychiatrist and are taking their meds, I don’t see why they should be denied a right to their children.

Post partum psychosis is not post partum depression. Post partum psychosis is an immediate psychiatric emergency with significant threat to mother and child and different symptoms.

PPP vs. Bipolar are the two main psychiatric entities raised by the defense, to my understanding.

Oh, I did not know that was the case. I assumed that, since people are blaming the father and a lack of medical care, that the defense must be blaming some chronic condition. So I just assumed that post partum depression could somehow cause psychosis without looking further into it.

If it was a sudden onset emergency that could not have been foreseen, that changes thing. But then I don't really understand the rhetoric around it.

A complex discussion about SSRI side effects leading to unmasking of occult bipolar disorder is not the kind of thing that spreads well on social media, especially in the setting of the defense actively presenting (lets call it biased) information to the jury to make their case.

Everybody is taking out their favorite axes to grind on this one, but that doesn't really help clear anything up.

I guess I’ll have to join up with her “simp” former husband, whose own children she killed, and her heroic male defense lawyer, and agree that as to her criminal culpability, the elements for “first-degree murder” are nowhere near satisfied.

I was torn on this, but the husband is the only living victim here. If his opinion is she was insane, then I would go with it were I on the jury. It's not the «community's» business as to what to do with her.

It's the community's business to kill Lindsay Clancey like an animal with mad cow disease and then to berate the husband into the ground for not having acted earlier.

I doubt that the woman turned crazy overnight, and unless I'm wrong about that, he is hardly blameless. He could have and should have acted while there was still time, and his failure to do so got his children killed.

And then, unless the community can truthfully claim that the Clanceys were hermits who had nothing to do with anyone, to turn around and slap themselves until they're blue and green for not having intervened earlier.

Everyone failed. Everyone failed and grievous consequences are in order.

It's not the «community's» business as to what to do with her.

Quite the contrarian take for criminal justice regarding multiple homicides.

I was just contemplating the other day, with regards to this specific case, that it seems like a nightmarish parody of soft-on-crime rhetoric that many seem to believe that murder is a borderline victimless crime because it moves its primary victims beyond reach entirely.

It can be simultaneously true that she experienced a true psychotic episode and that this sort of thing simply cannot be allowed to be sympathized with on a public level to the extent that is has been.

The culture war element here is that there are women going on the defense for Lindsay Clancy because she is a woman and because they want to defend the people who think like them. It's a combination of insane empathy coupled with identity politics that makes this what it is. It’s mostly the same crowd that demands full agency for women who are now pivoting to "women have no agency, so it's not her fault" to defend one of their own.

Understanding an uncontrolled mental state is one thing, but I find these people turning that into a "Look what you did, society!" moral defense really irritating.

Could someone steelmom killing your own kids for me?

I'm pretty sure my kids are like 83%ile for being ornery aggravating shitheads but I still can't possibly imagine killing them and would kill myself first if I ever thought stuff like that.

Do kids have room to be 100x more infuriating and aggravating? And some people really are cursed with kids like that? Would that totally warp my values? Are there women actually putting up with kids that shitty? Is there any evidence Clancy's kids were really shitty?

I haven't looked too deeply into Clancy's psychology, but my default expectation is "hated the husband, indifferent to the kids except as symbols of him and ways to get at him". That's the usual psychology of men who kill their families, and women sometimes do it too.

To answer your question directly about aggravation, I really don't think she hated or was annoyed by them.

To steelman, I would say take a belief of yours that you are most certain about. Not sure what that is for you personally. Maybe it's God, maybe it's that the sun will come up tomorrow. Whatever it is, I imagine it to be a belief that has no real shadow of a doubt.

Take the strength of that belief, but change the belief to be one that convinces you that your children will suffer greatly without you unless you "spare" them from the suffering. Then, pile on sleep deprivation, a ruminating personality type in which you can't not think about it, and a hormone imbalance that intensifies your fears and anxiety. I can see how one can be driven to "do the right thing" in that situation.

Since they are arguing insanity, I would assume the problem was with the mother not the kids. Even having "easy" kids is taxing, and could aggravate existing mental health issues. Insanity also helps explain why you don't understand her, as the way you see reality during a psychosis is entirely different from what everybody else perceives. I am not sure it is possible to completely understand such a mindset without experiencing it yourself.

The culture war element here is that there are women going on the defense for Lindsay Clancy because she is a woman and because they want to defend the people who think like them. It's a combination of insane empathy coupled with identity politics that makes this what it is. It’s mostly the same crowd that demands full agency for women who are now pivoting to "women have no agency, so it's not her fault" to defend one of their own.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with this 100%. I don't have a strong opinion about the case itself -- quite possibly she really did have a psychotic break. My objection is to people (mainly women) who automatically side with her because she's a woman. And to this idea that women get to pivot back and forth between being children and adults depending on what's most convenient. And to this idea that women should never be held criminally responsible for anything. (Admittedly, the last two sentences exaggerate the feminist position a bit, but it's really not that much of an exaggeration.)

Between this, Decarlos Brown Jr, and Ronald Exantus, among others, I'm finding my basic distrust of insanity as a criminal defense pretty vindicated lately. It might be a real mitigating factor on some abstract moral-philosophical level, but there's no compelling argument for it, IMO, as a feature of our justice system. (And in Exantus's case, where it was basically a case of jury nullification, we also see the dangers of the idiot public even being exposed to the idea of the abstract moral-philosophical mitigation; it's also convincing me jury trials are, like democracy, not actually such a hot feature of enlightenment liberalism.)

jury trials are, like democracy, not actually such a hot feature of enlightenment liberalism

The classic line here is the "democracy is the worst form of government, except for those other ones that have been tried." I'd be willing to express a similar sentiment for jury trials: have you seen what happens when judges alone get to make decisions? Also the American system at least is a right of the defending party to choose a jury trial, but there are other options available (bench trials).

Even benevolent dictatorship has the successor problem pop up often. Frankly, I'd express similar feelings about public discussion and debate as a consensus-truth-seeking method, but that one isn't, AFAIK, quite as well-documented.

A propensity to have a psychotic break in the first place should be viewed as an aggravating factor. It is part of who a person is. I would find the "demon possession" defense more honest.

I can’t get myself to click on the link. My opinion is I just want the system to work well when we have crime like this. I don’t want to know all the details about someone whose a little crazy and does something like this. It seems like she’s guilty so either execute her or put her in jail for a long time.

But these cases do seem to get a lot of attention from the median American housewife.

Why are we talking about Lindsay Clancy so much?

Obviously, it’s a hot topic in the news, people who normally have heated discussions about The Bachelor are talking about this trial instead. But the motte isn’t one of those groups. Why is this particular social media brain rot such a big deal to the motte? Not criticizing, just noting- we didn’t talk that much about Johnny depp/Amber Heard.

I think it's just another escalation in a set of court-case topics which have been bubbling up to the surface with potential political valence. The Nolan Wells allegations, Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robinson...and people like Ben Crump, Taylor Lorenz and Candace Owens.

I don't even mention those names necessarily negatively; Candace impressed me a while ago when she interviewed Harvey Weinstein, which seemed like an important thing to do regardless of what the facts ultimately are.

But it's becoming clear that this is more than just isolated factions pushing something crazy or at least strange-looking for shock and attention. It's about the collapse of trust turning into potentially dangerous consequences on a wider scale.

Right, we didn’t have Nolan wells discussions. We had lots of Charlie Kirk discussion, because culture wars relevance. We talked about the assassination without letting the Luigi mangione phenomenon have much presence on the forum.

There is a lot more culture war meat here than random celebrity gossip. Maybe it shouldn't have gotten this much attention, but now that it has, the meta is CW relevant.

This is far closer to a gun control debate following a school shooting than celebrity gossip....

Also, there is a giant memetic threat here, that I wont be surprised if we see sympathy for Clance increase cases like this. I think there is a precursor in SIDs. SIDS may have hidden the causal mechanism of infant deaths so effectively that society learned “babies occasionally inexplicably die” rather than transmitting a more specific warning about dangerous parental practices. While this mostly disappeared in sleeping safety reducing accidental suffocation, I suspect that some amount of infanticide also got 'disappeared' into this statistic.

When SIDs is some 'act of God', nobody internalizes or normalizes the idea that some women(and men) can't handle it and are irresponsible with their babies to the point of homocidal neglect or even outright infanticide. The toaster fucking meme is apt here.

I’ve heard over the years that SIDs was just society’s way of covering up infantacide. How true is this? Are their stats? Studies? Not making a judgement either way, just wondering.

Not true in that simplistic of a formulation. But it’s complicated. There was no conspiracy to cover up infanticide across society. Rather SIDs as a catch-all included poorer safety standards / knowledge, accidents, negligence, and yes infanticide but as a minority.

Infanticide, probably not so much- SIDS parents get investigated.

Crappy parenting, though? Yes. There’s a world of difference between intentional infanticide and alcoholic/drug using mothers smothering their babies on accident in a stupor.

Yeah, one thing that's been heavy on my mind in this case has been the prospect of a NAMBLA-esque fringe radical feminist group emerging over the next few years, seeking to normalize maternal filicide years after birth by extension of much of the abortion logic, and causing a lot of trouble in the process.

That already exists. Progressive lawmakers occasionally propose laws allowing infanticide on the part of the mother. Awkward pro-abortion arguments regularly get into ‘this would also apply to a 3 month old’ territory.

Can you cite one of these proposed laws?

A quick search reveals some alarm regarding this California bill. An earlier version of the text (click on the dropdown menu at the upper right corner of the page and go to 2022-03-17) said:

Notwithstanding any other law, a person shall not be subject to civil or criminal liability or penalty, or otherwise deprived of their rights, based on their actions or omissions with respect to their pregnancy or actual, potential, or alleged pregnancy outcome, including miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death.

"Perinatal death" does include infanticide. However, the final version that actually became law (2022-09-27) changed this to "perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero".

Do you think there’s a good chance that someone caught an honest mistake and then it got corrected or do you think this is someone capitulating on their desire to kill babies after birth?

I haven't been following this controversy (remember, I'm just a source gofer, it's @hydroacetylene who brought up the topic), but IMO it's far from impossible that legislators want to legalize infanticide, since legitimate scientists have opened the door to the idea.

I mean, I'm not even thinking that extreme. I just mean creeping incrementalism of abdication of maternal duty being ok.

This is giving me strong mouse utopia vibes.

I don’t know what that means

that reddit atheist meme

Old experiment with mice. Giving them abundance led to inversion of ordinary mouse behavior and collapse of mouse civilization.

Because the crime is heinous. And the support the perpetrator is getting is off the scale.

I hadn't come across Tracey before. He writes like someone who is probably interesting and worth taking seriously. But on this topic, his take is really bad.

Don’t worry ladies: I definitely have some critical observations I could share about your collective reasoning tendencies as well, but that can wait for another time, because it’s the guys who are really beclowning themselves on this one

It's men who are "beclowning themselves"?

It's the pro-Clancy apologists (who, yes, are generally women) who are making videos saying things like: "it was definitely the husband who murdered the kids, because he's a capricorn, and has the same birthday as Donald Trump, which proves he's a violent killer". Or draping themselves out of windows to show solidarity with Clancy. Or describing how they can easily imagine themselves, or their friends, as killing their kids.

But no, to Tracey, these aren't worthy of being labelled beclownment: the real embarrassing thing is to hold the position of "killing your kids is extremely evil" without sufficient nuance. And the people who lack empathy aren't the ones who describe how they can imagine themselves killing their kids; it's the people flinching away from this and calling it evil.

There is a real point underneath what Tracey's saying, but what he's actually saying is ridiculous.

(Note, also, that while he's castigating men for apparently lacking empathy, he's doing so with exactly zero empathy. He's being pointlessly nasty and aggressive. If he wants "men" as a class not to be blamed for being emotionally stunted etc, it might be a good idea for him to lead by example.)

you don’t get the moral highground because you’re willing to declare it’s bad for mothers to kill their babies and toddlers. Yeah, we know. Thanks. Literally no one who’s sane disagrees with that

The issue is the non-sane people who are doing apologism for that! "literally no one who's sane" is doing all the heavy lifting! And he must know this, because otherwise he'd just say "Literally no one disagrees with that". But because there observably are people who disagree with that, he knows he can't say that, so he has to qualify it; but somehow, in the qualifying of it, he doesn't realise (or deliberately ignores) that the qualification contains the counterargument -- which is that these people are behaving insanely.

[men have] somehow come to think that it’s a referendum on “women” in general, or how women are “never held responsible” for anything. What? If that’s what you’re really set on extrapolating here, it’s your own bizarre problem

Absurd gaslighting. The issue that I predominantly see his hategroup pointing to isn't the court, or expert opinion, or Clancy herself -- it's of the disturbing number of people (yes, essentially 100% women) whose entire thing is not holding Clancy responsible, because she is a woman.

Tracey has (correctly) made this a gendered thing. He cannot possibly fail to notice that Clancy's gender is a critical part of why so many are defending her. Within her supporters, the positions of "Clancy did it, but she's a victim!" and "the husband did it, and he's a monster!" coexist without tension, because it's about not holding specifically women responsible.

This isn't the soft bigotry of low expectations; this is Tracey applying zero expectations to women, and then excoriating men over behaviour that's orders of magnitude more reasonable, just, and empathetic, but not perfect. Shockingly, women are in fact capable of being very intelligent, decent, and reasonable. If stuff like "husband is capricorn, therefore murder" doesn't beclown women, but "killing kids is evil and there's no discussion to be had around psychosis" does beclown men, then that speaks to how wildly Tracey has miscalibrated his expections of each gender.

For the record, I largely agree with the psychosis defence. And I agree with @czr: "Whether she spends 50 years behind bars or 50 years in a mental institute doesn't make a difference to me, really." The issue that Tracey has papered over (deforesting the Amazon in the process) is the response of Clancy's supporters, not the psychosis defence itself. Tracey offhandedly going "yeah yeah, maybe some women have bad takes too, but that's so unimportant right now, let's focus on the MEN" is ridiculous.

He writes like someone who is probably interesting and worth taking seriously.

I don't think he is reliably interesting or worth taking seriously. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can see shapes of Tracey that look like a pundit willing to tell you the hard truths, but as a sort of contrarian liberal with a dash of edgy dirtbag-lite. I crammed him into the ignore bin a long time ago and thanks to your excellent post I now have a recent refresher that illustrates why. Much like Richard Hanania, Tracey has done a good job building an audience for this schtick, but to take what ideas either of them choose to put on paper as serious ones -- as genuine positions that they hold rather than hope to mine -- ruins the schtick, as well as any fun along with it.

lulz. Without even opening the article - what a soy, white knighty headline. I basically agree with your point - Anyone lokoing at any of the discourse around this case, and coming away with the hot take that this is a good opprotunity to lecture men, needs to get their head out of their ass out of 2016 tumber.

See, if your comment were directed at Tracey himself, he would hold it up as an example of the typical response men give him. Attacking his character and his motivations instead of his reasoning.

Now, I think he actually invites it by appearing to be those things you called his headline, but he's actually not. He's really a skilled commentator because he's able to pick positions that generate the maximum amount of heat. Recently he took a bold position on Epstein that made him enemies on both sides of the isle (part of his point was that Epstein was/is a perfect storm because both sides' pundits can use it for fodder).

I'm not sure he does this intentionally. I think, in his mind, he's just following his instinct for truth, and he's not corrupted by the mass subscription model independent journalists inherently rely on (AKA audience capture), but I'm afraid there might be an element of this, though it's less obvious than other cases because, like I said in my OP, he's not reliably taking the side of left or right (though he does have left-of-center roots).

It really seems like his main concern is the justice of the matter, and not the social issues surrounding it. He's specifically focused on the state going for the first-degree murder charge, which he thinks is ridiculous, and this is probably why he's so fixated on the male response to the story instead of the female one.

He's really a skilled commentator because he's able to pick positions that generate the maximum amount of heat. Recently he took a bold position on Epstein that made him enemies on both sides of the isle (part of his point was that Epstein was/is a perfect storm because both sides' pundits can use it for fodder)

This is really easy to do, and doesn't require all that much exceptional skill. And one of the easiest ways of doing it is by being a white knight. I'm not saying this guy is generally a white knight or not, but pretending to be the guy who can 'look outside of themselves' and condescend both sides of a debate for being troglydites is really easy and the opposite of being a skilled communicator. One really easy way to generate maximum heat is just by producing really bad takes Here's a bunch of maximally heated coward takes that basically play 'both sides are dumb':

  • All these Republicans are Zionists and IDF dicksucking are really undermining the strategic importance of defending Israel as a middle east ally.
  • Anti-data center views are Chinese propoganda, we should be create a national body co-chaired by leading AI firms and the Fed Gov that pick data center locations.
  • The issue with transwomen in the WNBA is that it's distracting from the real white supremacy problem we're seeing from Caitlyn Clark fans
  • Immigration is too important to leave to the useful idiots on either side, we should let a bipartisan commission of CEOs and economists set annual immigration levels based on labor demand

EDIT: the more I think about this, I had to work harder than I needed to, to just not make these boilerplate neocon takes, which is really all you need for maximal heat.

I think it's harder than it looks, and the skill is in phrasing it the right way. It's easy to bait a hook, but you still need to know which bait is best for your audience and when/where to cast your lure. I don't think any of your examples would work. Tracey's MO recently has been to kind of ignore both sides' storylines in favor of carving out his own niche that no one else is really talking about.

If you looooove tracey so much, why don't you marry him?

  • -11

I am not sure what the point of this joke is, but it's juvenile at best and antagonistic at worse. Please make whatever point you are trying to make some other way (and more clearly).

Porn is bad for men's minds and leading them astray, but prudishness is the enemy of art, so only women receiving Arts Council funding should be able to depict nudity or explicit acts.

I don't think his main concern is justice. Consider the following two quotes from separate parts of his article (emphasis mine):

While a bit more theologically florid than any comparable beliefs ascribed to Lindsay Clancy, a similar theme has emerged in her case — Lindsay also did not go around openly announcing plans to kill her children, and the government is alleging this proves the malicious forethought of first-degree murder. But like Andrea, according to Resnick, Lindsay’s reasons for this intent-concealment were explicable per the internal logic of her psychosis. She did not want to trigger a situation whereby police, social services, or some other agency/individual would have cause to intervene and take the children away, because she believed it was her own solemn duty to protect them. And protecting them required that they be strangled to death with exercise bands.

and

Women empathize with Lindsay Clancy not because they want to "excuse" the triple homicide of her small children -- that's ridiculous -- but because she was overwhelmed and literally begging for help, telling her husband/mother/etc. she was having intrusive thoughts of harming the children, received woefully inadequate treatment that only made things worse, her mental state deteriorated even further, the tragedy happened, and now the state wants to prosecute her for first-degree murder -- as though she's Jeffrey Dahmer or something. Which is also ridiculous

So women are supporting her because she was "literally begging for help" while she was intentionally concealing her condition? She "received woefully inadequate treatment", but they conveniently leave out what "adequate" treatment would have been outside the implied "magically make her feel better without any negative trade-offs like civil commitment or other forced treatment".

He's just making heat to make heat.

At least, with that sort of tone. The hectoring holier-than-though approach with the smattering of profanity is only slightly less condescending than the "silence you whippersnapper your wiser elder is speaking, sit and absorb the lecture" stance that certain boomers take.

What I've noticed on twitter that its largely men having a dialogue amongst each other and FOR ONCE forming a coordinated response that is directly oppositional to the female demands and tearful entreaties, and the actual conflict is occurring where females of various ideological stripes are slamming into a wall of indifference when they try and pry some men to admit sympathy for their position.

And in that light, Mr. Tracey here is creating an opening in the shield wall and basically trying to convince men to grant the requested concessions... under the guise of a cry for civility/respectability. Or so I read it.

Maybe that is uncharitable.

Apparently the discussion around the trial prevented at least one marriage from occurring. I am fairly credulous that this is a real story. And if so, you can extrapolate to more relationships ending because of the situation. The story is not solely about what Clancey did and her motives (or lack thereof) anymore. It is exposing information that men, both individually and collectively, have to decide how to respond.

Anyhow, while we're on the topic of female homicide suspects, here's a breaking story about a (legally adult) daughter taking out a hit on her own mother. There's far more to unpack in there than I am willing to touch right now... but I just ask are 'we' dudes allowed to discuss how psychotic this is:

18-year-old Bryanna Dutcher, set up the alleged hit on her parents after an argument with her mom over chores she was told to do earlier in the day.

and perhaps discuss ways that we might curb the urge to such incidents in the future, Michael? How much respect are we to have for the actions of this young woman who was simply trying to avoid getting kicked out of the house? The mother was allegedly racist, too!

Old enough to vote, old enough to swing. Some cases are easy and, assuming that she was indeed a co-conspirator, the Dutcher case is one of them. I don't see why you are comparing it to an infanticide.

Mothers who kill their children is one of the absolutely classic hard cases - not because it isn't heinous, but because anyone who has been a mother, or even an involved father, bellyfeels that

  • Only a crazy mother would do it
  • A mother going crazy is a "there but for the grace of God" thing, not a "those people are awful" thing.

In England, a separate crime of infanticide (with the same range of sentences as manslaughter) was carved out of murder in 1922 because all murders were capital back then and nobody wanted to hang women for it. It is possibly significant that the law passes just after women got the vote and started serving on juries, but probably not given:

  • There was a single-figure number of women MPs at the time the law passed
  • There was still a super-majority male electorate because the female voting age was set at 30 for the first decade
  • The law had been known to be non-functional since the 1870's. The last woman to actually be hanged for infanticide was Rebecca Smith in 1849 and she poisoned eight children with arsenic (which was seen as a particularly heinous way of killing at the time). Even in the era of all-male juries, prosecutors and judges felt they had to tell the jury that they could assume the death sentence would be commuted in order to get a conviction.

And in that light, Mr. Tracey here is creating an opening in the shield wall and basically trying to convince men to grant the requested concessions... under the guise of a cry for civility/respectability. Or so I read it.

I have this idea for a post kicking around in my head about the difference between being "friendly" vs being "polite" and why calls for civility are often bullshit.

Long story short I grew up in an environment that put a high premium on manners and civility and I spent several years in an abusive relationship in part because my ex would always be appealing to empathy, civility, duty etc... and I would find it difficult to refuse. The key take-away ended up being a recognition at some point that they were doing that reddit atheist meme about how "this argument would never work on me, but maybe if I use it on you you'll do what I want".

Broken reddit link, as usual. I've done that myself. Reddit somehow breaks image links. I suspect due to their great technical incompetence.

It's not completely reddit's fault. There's an automated socmed link rewrite on this site. Twitter gets rewritten to nitter, reddit to old.reddit, etc. The link should work fine if you deactivate it (it works for me).

I find this article morally and politically appalling enough that I would think it would be a cause for reflection on whatever you appreciated about his prior takes.

Exactly, I thought he was going to go on about the guys who are sarcastically defending male serial killers the way the girlies were. That is a bit obnoxious and certainly doesn't improve this toxic discourse.

But no, he's complaining about perfectly normal and reasonable responses:

“SMITE THAT DASTARDLY WOMAN AND HER ANNOYING TIKTOK DEFENDERS” is not impressive reasoning, fellas. If your only reaction to the harrowing outlier tragedy of Lindsay Clancy is to just snarl with animalistic fury at this beleaguered woman, and demand — countervailing evidence be damned — that she be locked up for life in prison, or as many men (but almost zero women) seem to crave, executed on the spot — that’s not an impulse borne of any considered moral judgment.

Sometimes women are in fact dastardly and tiktokers are annoying/cringe. Blow the murderess's head off and let's be done with this. Moral intuitions don't have to be sophisticated if the case is simple. He's found some 200 (verbal) IQ way to sneer in exactly the wrong direction and then spent thousands and thousands of words on this! It's just insane and bizarre, Hanania-esque contrarianism to take an extremely simple case and make all these random analogies 'oh this other psychotic woman thought she was possessed by the devil and so she killed her kids because she thought it was right - let that sink in chuds.' This isn't 7th century Franconia, thinking you are possessed by the devil does not pass muster for legal or moral defence.

Much that's wrong in our civilization derives from a love of complexity and nuance for their own sake.

Thanks for drawing the connection to Hanania; that's exactly where my mind went immediately on reading the article.

I've mostly seen people speak of Tracey approvingly for his aesthetics. He looks like an old-school "real" journalist, aka like he just woke up hungover and still drunk in yesterday's clothes to stand outside the Substack convention demanding Jim Acosta come face him like Achilles challenging Hector.

I would probably think the same if this were the first thing I've seen from him, but I have enough context to situate it properly. He's an inveterate gadfly.

He truly is the Socrates of our era.

"You'd agree, O Glaucon, that in determining the justice of a punishment we must look to the subjective mental state of the offender, and not meerly to the obejctive physical results of the crime."

"Certainly"

"And you'd agree as well that when man is weary of exhaustion, or ill of disease, or intoxicated of wine, that his subjective mental state is sometimes incapable of fully grasping the logical implications of action in that moment."

"Clearly"

"Surely then the ordeal of childbearing and childbirth, and the associated hormonal surges, and the contraindicated use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are of much more effect on the mind than a long night of work, or a stomachache, or a glass of wine?"

"That's it. I'm getting the hemlock."

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