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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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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.
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