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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4901 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.

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?

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).

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