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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5341 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?

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