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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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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