This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 don't know enough about the Clancy case to make any serious comments about it, but one big difference from the Yates case was that Yates had a well-documented history of psychiatric problems, including hospitalizations and multiple suicide attempts, and her family was told that she needed round-the-clock supervision and was not to be left alone, let alone responsible for five small children. And she was still convicted; part of the story everyone forgets is that her conviction was vacated after it was revealed that a prosecution witness claimed she got the idea from an episode of Law and Order than didn't exist (keep in mind that in 2001 there was no easy way to tell if a television episode with a particular plot existed; it only came up in the Yates case afterwards when someone associated with the show got wind of the testimony). Clancy, on the other hand, had some history of psychiatric treatment, but not nearly to the same degree Yates did.
The reason I bring this up is because if you look at the history of insanity defenses, they became prominent in the 1960s, had their heyday in the 1970s, and died a quick death in the 1980s. They existed prior to the 1960s but were relatively rare because available psychiatric treatment was limited and a defendant who was actually psychotic was likely to end up hospitalized for life regardless of the verdict. Once medications became available that enabled people with severe mental health problems to lead normal lives, insanity defenses became more attractive, as the problem was not mental illness in and of itself but untreated mental illness. These two reforms—treatment rather than institutionalization and the recognition that people with severe psychiatric problems shouldn't be held criminally responsible—were fine independently and had been recognized as positives for decades by this point, but the changing landscape made them collide in a way that was disastrous.
People often think that Hinckley was the end of the insanity defense, but Hinckley is a bad example because he was obviously nuts, and ended up locked up for most of his life. He also didn't actually kill anyone. The real end was the Dan White case. White assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, and Willie Brown and another supervisor were also on the list. White's case wasn't strictly an insanity defense but a diminished capacity defense, i.e. his depression at the time of the killings reduced his culpability from murder to manslaughter, and he ended up serving 5 years of a 7 year sentence. What miffed the public the most about the verdict was that White was a normal, well-adjusted adult up until the time of the attacks who had shown no indication of needing psychiatric treatment. The case was the most high-profile of a series of cases wherein the defendant took a half-hour break from sanity to kill a few people before returning to normal. They either claimed diminished capacity, like White, or went through with the whole defense and were committed to mental institutions, only to be released a few years or even months later after psychiatrists determined that they weren't actually nuts and stopped treating them, and they successfully petitioned for their releases on the basis that they couldn't be held in a psychiatric hospital if they weren't receiving any treatment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link