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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   23711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Clancy is still getting punished. Spending years in a hospital for the criminally insane is not a good thing.

Sure, but this is only "punishment" in the same sense as that she's getting punished by being a mother whose kids are dead, which is also not a good thing. Going to the hospital for the criminally insane is there to help her get over her insanity so that she can be cured and re-enter society as a safe member, not for punishment; the unpleasantness is just a necessary consequence of the treatment, like how some medicine doesn't taste good. We can label any negative consequence of someone's actions as "punishment," but I don't think that's what people are referring to when talking about not being held accountable. If a bank robber with poor impulse control spends all his money on heroin and overdoses to death, one can claim that he was "punished" in some divine sense for his sins, but I don't think it makes sense to claim that he was held accountable in some meaningful, concrete sense.

If she actually is mentally ill, then consenting to treatment is taking responsibility. Agreeing to be locked up until she is cured (which may never happen) is taking accountability for what happened.

consenting to treatment is taking responsibility. Agreeing

The set of possible sentences for her alleged actions is {exile, death}, so one "consents" only to abide by the terms of their sentence. (The sentence for violating an exile is death, of course.)

What we call the "insanity/mental health defense" is in truth pleading a death sentence [or one that takes away X years of your life] down to exile. What exile looks like is different in the modern day: all land is claimed, so we must create cities of refuge, or "asylums", for those we punish with that exile. It also protects her from the logical consequence of simply being declared an outlaw- if her husband is sufficiently aggrieved, she's physically protected from being killed by him so long as she remains there (a jury might not convict him if he did otherwise, and there's a reasonable argument to be made that is also justice).

Which is why "sane or not?" is the only real question here. Sane = intentional = death; insane = unintentional = exile.

And I do believe it reasonable to think that "a woman who murdered her own children" is strong evidence of insanity, because a brain that violates literally every possible fiber of maternal instinct is probably malfunctioning.

But that's only a "probably", and that is why she's on trial. And the women in society who dare voice anger with men for daring to point that out- when they know in their hearts they would never consider men who kill their children to be insane with the same measure- all do evil themselves.

If she actually is mentally ill, then consenting to treatment is taking responsibility.

Given that there's currently a trial where other people are choosing whether or not to direct this towards her without her consent, it seems evident that she isn't taking responsibility, and lots of people are supporting her avoiding responsibility on the basis that she is suffering from things that are consequences of her being a mother.

In any case, "taking responsibility" for one's actions and being held accountable are different, though related, concepts.

EDIT:

Actually, I realized that this was just a non sequitur. Her being mentally ill isn't the issue here, it's whether or not she's an example of how many women are claiming that hormones make them "mentally ill" to the extent that they ought not be held accountable for their actions, in the sense that when they "take responsibility," it's through "consenting to treatment" rather than "prison, like any non-mentally-ill person would do."

So the above paragraphs that I wrote aren't all that relevant, actually. The whole point here is that we understand that "consenting to treatment" isn't actually meaningfully held accountable to anyone except the mentally ill; to claim that her hormones just made her that mentally ill as to be placed in that lower tier of being "held accountable" is also to claim that vast swathes of women in general ought to be suspected of being so "mentally ill," which puts into question their equal rights.

Pardon me, but bullshit on several accounts.

  1. Whether or not she is "cured" is not meaningfully measureable. Her "illness" is being incorrectly wired to a degree sufficient to kill her kids. Whatever the hell a psychologist or psychiatrist will say about her being cured at any time in the future, sane people would be mad to trust. People don't kill their kids from illness. It takes significantly more fundamental damage.
  2. Treatment means infinite attention by doctors, therapists, nurses etc. It's a burden on society and a treat, pardon the pun, for many mentally ill women, who often love attention regardless of how destructive a thing they have to do to get it.
  3. Taking responsibility/accountability for a crime as major as hers is certainly not done by consenting to expensive and most likely futile treatment. She almost managed to take responsibility/accountability when she tried to kill herself, and she failed to do so when she failed to do so. Taking responsibility for being mentally ill after having commited the crime is, at the very most, a drop in a bucket. A very big murdered-her-children-sized bucket, not a small mentally-ill-sized one. Succeeding in killing herself would have been the least she could have done, but she didn't, and I'm entirely willing to chalk that up as more attention-seeking behavior, see above.

If what I know of mentally ill women is any indication, she will actually enjoy the attention and care.

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