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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.
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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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