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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.
Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.
I saw a note on Substack claiming that Shiloh Hendrix was suffering from postpartum depression at the time of the altercation which landed her in hot water. I have no idea if this is true or not, but assuming it is, I imagine there's extremely minimal overlap between the people offering public (and, in some cases, financial) support for Clancy, and the people who think Hendrix should not have faced criminal charges for saying the gamer word.
An even more potent hypothetical, I think, is the observation that none of the women supporting Clancy would have done so if, in the throes of postpartum psychosis, she'd killed three dogs rather than three human children.
The slippery slope, my moral betters would have me believe, is a fallacy: legalising X does not inevitably lead to Y, which is like X but more extreme.
It's all well and good to think that we can draw a bright line in the sand and say that killing a fetus (up to and including a full-term viable fetus) is fine and dandy, but killing a baby outside the womb is not. I know that some high-decouplers can separate these into two completely distinct mental categories. But most people (as I'm sure you're aware, or you wouldn't be reading this) are not high-decouplers. Increased support for contraception inevitably leads to increased support for the morning-after pill inevitably leads to increased support for first-trimester abortion inevitably leads to increased support for full-term abortion – and, as the Clancy supporters demonstrate, for post-term abortion.
The Hendrix comparison is illustrative. One of the strongest surviving taboos in the Anglosphere is that white people should not say the gamer word. No excuses: not if they're singing along with a song by a black musician, not if they're a politician quoting something a black person said, not if they're an academic discussing a piece of classical music by a black composer whose title features that word, not even if they're a professor of linguistics using a word from a completely different language which sounds a bit like the gamer word. Woke people obviously feel that relaxing this taboo even a smidge would lead to an opening of the floodgates (almost like it's a... slope that is... slippery, or something). It follows that we cannot extend grace to any person who uses it, no matter how sympathetic they might be: not even a woman who may have been suffering from postpartum depression and who got into a public altercation with a nonce. This taboo is so rigidly enforced that not even the "be kind" brigade wants to extend any forbearance or forgiveness to Hendrix.
But compare with abortion. It started off with the morning-after pill, then first-trimester abortion, and before you know it, low-decouplers are correctly intuiting that, if a mother killing a fetus at nine months shouldn't be a hanging crime, why should killing a child at five years be? On what grounds can we possibly justify throwing someone in jail for doing the latter, but doing nothing to someone who does the former (perhaps even subsidising their decision at the taxpayer's expense)?
Louise Perry's "We Are Repaganising" continues to trouble me deeply.
This argument seems extremely silly to me. You might as well claim that the end game of people fighting over the thermostat in an office either want to go to 10000K or 1K, and that giving them a single degree will inevitably lead to a slippery slope where all life will perish.
In the real world, when someone is moving from NY to California, they almost never end up defecting to North Korea. If your model of US migration involves one pole in North Korea and another pole in France which both try to attract Americans, I'll wager that your model has little predictive value.
The reason why some people on the left took to defending Clancy is adequately explained by The Toxoplasma of Rage. In short, fighting for a cause (e.g. women) in clear-cut cases (e.g. women oppressed by the Taliban) has very little signaling value, because it is a cost-less signal to send. If you say "The Taliban should allow girls and women access to education", you will have >95% of the US political spectrum on your side. Nice to keep your friends, but totally useless to prove you are part of some in-group.
The Clancy case is great for signaling purposes. "I support women even when they murder their children" is a costly signal to send. Nobody (up to the Lizardsmen's constant) is thinking "this will make a great test case to establish that mothers are entitled to fillicide."
I mean other than all the times it’s happened (see acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and wokeness) it doesn’t work that way. You can take almost any cultural form of degeneration and you can plot it out. In 1940, love songs featured the idea of marriage, in 1950, it was puppy love, and by 2026 “love” is jettisoned from the songs in favor of nearly pornographic descriptions of sex acts. Violence is also much more common and much more graphic and depraved than we would have seen in the mid century. If you dropped your 25 year old grandmother fresh from 1959 or 1949 she’d be shocked by how far we’d fallen culturally and morally.
Nudity in movies is almost completely gone. Basically all forms of drugs taking except pot were more accepted in the past. Heroine was legal for about 20 years 100 years ago. Calling things you don't like gay was ok in the 90s and now it isn't. Calling things you don't like was ok, then it wasn't and now it's back. Most of the world until the mid 1800 had no age of consent laws, the places that had them often set it apallingly low (like 12), in 1980 the blue lagoon was released with partial underage nudity, these days there's talk of raising the age of consent to 21 or 25, which would make the blue lagoon underage pornography because of the male lead . Slavery was almost universally legal until 200 years ago and now it isn't unless it's men getting drafted to go to war. Abortion before quickening was legal under common law until last century, then it wasn't and now it's back. Alcohol consumption was ok for most of history, then people advocated against it and now it's back. Eugenics was bad for most of history, then people advocated for it, and now it's back to being bad. Absolute monarchy was considered the good christian way to rule a country and now it isn't. Etcaetera.
She would probably also be thrilled at how much women have advanced in society.
I think you may have accidentally a word....
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I highly doubt it. Back then, what we have now was an "uncharitable strawman slippery slope" that conservatives would use the try and scare people away from social reforms. If you beamed a woman from back then to now, her reaction would most likely be to "oh my god, they were right", and to become a nun, for good measure.
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All of those things had high status people openly advocating for them in the 60s. No one now is arguing killing your kids is ok.
Yes they are:
Ok that's utterly horrifying.
Consider me intrigued. Killing those unfit for life to remove undue burdens on the welfare state? Yes please, that sounds like fast-forwarding through a few decades of civilizational decay and tackling the hard issues of the future head on. When there is a surfeit of life, too many useless eaters, too many parasites and too much rent-seeking by those who cannot contribute, the edifice of the social economy cannot stand. There must be culling, one way or another, or else there will be ever-more welfare recipients until civilization tears itself apart in order to keep alive those who cannot do so themselves. Mercy-killing those who cannot contribute is a solemn duty of the enlightened state.
But of course that's not what it is. It's just culture war, and killing babies is somehow a sacred cow of one side.
I'm guessing you're referring to the Gnadentod policy / Aktion T4.
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I can't entirely rule out the possibility that, a few months ago, Louis Roy posted something on X/BlueSky along the lines of "Ugh, can't believe it's 2025 and Sydney Sweeney is openly promoting eugenics on national television 🙄".
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Well, no. This is a terrible analogy on the face of it, but that aside, we can observe that parents murdering their children has been totally normal (and legal) in any number of human societies historically. This at least should suggest that it's very possibly going to happen again once the impetus which put a stop to such behavior (Christianity) ceases to motivate people.
Considering the non Christian societies that exist now don't allow child murder I thin we'll be alright.
The ones that got totally curbstomped by Christian societies intent on enforcing Christian values, and who desperately recast themselves to be more palatable to Christian superpowers?
Yeah, I think if that pressure goes away, so too does the change in behavior. There's some inertia, sure, but there's no such thing as obvious universal human morality that includes such oddities as "don't kill your children" or "rape is wrong" or "everyone should be treated with basic dignity."
Also, plenty of Islamic societies absolutely do allow child murder, especially in cases of e.g. honor killings. Smart governments talk a lot about putting such things behind them, but that's playing to what they perceive as Western sensibilities. You know, like when they say "Jihad just means personal internal struggle, lol" or "These aren't slaves, they're guest workers benefiting from economic opportunity!"
No I think most societies had stopped routine exposure of infants the time of colonization. And places like China never made themselves pliable Western clients and they still don't have it.
There are dozens of independent moral codes that have come up with these rules, you don't need Jesus to ban these. Also when you look at the old Testament God gets pretty flexible on some of these.
And that's fucked up but killing a 15 year old for having premarital sex is an entirely different phenomena then infanticide' and I didn't say no place ever kills children just that I don't think we needed Christianity to end the practice given that o one does it anymore expect maybe some far out hunter gatherers.
This isn't just some line to feed Westerners. It's not like the Gulf Monarchs are pro-Jihad they try to get their own population to by it and work with the CIA to crush Islamists everywhere. And also while Jihad "just" meaning internal struggle is obviously overthrowing your Monarch who rules based on Shariah to implement some kind of theocratic republic or suicide bombing random "infidel" civilians are also pretty novel interpretations has history goes.
I'm not just talking about exposure of infants, and either way I disagree. The New World was absolutely rife with ritual child murder. Exposure was also very common in East Asia and India at time of European contact, especially for girls. Sub-Saharan Africa was ofc its own special hell. So, I'm categorically rejecting this one.
But honor killings are not just applied to teens. Check this case out.
I don't think so; and to the degree that this might technically be true it doesn't matter unless those moral codes were influential enough to stop the practices at scale, which they clearly were not. Where they did exist, they generally applied only to the ingroup. When it comes to rape, well, a lot gets lost in cultural understanding of what that means. But the Christian insistence that the woman must consent to a marriage is probably worth thinking about. And even if, hypothetically, several of these systems could have worked, we may observe that only one actually did.
I think we do. I think even in the West it's becoming a lot more popular without Christianity. Why would I expect non-Westerners to not do it when apparently even we can't manage that?
Because they are personally dependent upon their relationship with the West, yes, obviously. Do you think that rhetoric will hold longer than the very instant it is once again advantageous for them to rile their people up to take territory from the kafir? Has it ever, historically?
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Don't you find it at least interesting that feminists are willing to support women even when they murder their children, but not when they say the gamer word? "I support women, even when they use racial slurs when their blood is up" seems like it could be an equally effective costly signal, and yet it wasn't.
I'm sure you'll say something to the effect that supporting Shiloh Hendrix would mark you out as a conservative, so it's a useless signal to demonstrate that you are a feminist specifically. But if that's the case, your entire argument that they're supporting her solely "because she's a woman" collapses. No progressive feminist would be caught dead throwing her weight behind Hendrix. Very few will be caught dead throwing their weight behind JK Rowling. But quite a few absolutely will throw their weight behind a woman who has admitted to murdering her three children. The revealed preferences of this group are not "we will support women no matter what awful crimes they commit" but "we will support women unless they commit certain especially grave crimes, in which case they're on their own". The revealed preferences of this group is that they consider yelling racial slurs or criticising gender ideology less forgiveable sins than murdering one's children.
And the "same, Lindsay" trend on TikTok indicates that many of these women are supporting Clancy not "because she's a woman" but because they have personally struggled with the same urges to harm their children that she found impossible to resist. How many of these women, do you think, would admit to having felt the urge to yell racial slurs at misbehaving ethnic minorities while in the depths of their postpartum depression or psychosis?
I don't think my argument is silly, and I don't think these protesters' behaviour is explicable by a desire to show support for women no matter what they do. I think, rather, that progressive feminists have extremely strict criteria for which women they will and won't throw their weight behind. It disturbs me that a woman who murdered her three children is in the former category, and a woman who yelled a racial slur at a nonce is in the latter.
I think it's intensely interesting as a phenomena but I think you are missing some of the factors in her support. The core of her supporters are suburban white women, not feminists. specifically a kind of overly online, true crime brained suburban white women. The type of people who watched Nancy Grace back in the day. This first and foremost a white women phenomena more than it is about left right politics and indeed these type of suburban white women aren't particularly left coded, and while I'd guess a majority of her supporters are some flavor of liberal, there are plenty of apolitical and right wing supporters of her as well. And a huge portion are outside the Overton window the tiktok astrology girlies are not respectable liberals
As for why not Shiloh Hendrix because women don't care about the gamerword I'd hazard more liberal men have used it then conservative suburban moms and it's not like suburban conservative moms are ok with their sons saying slurs on Xbox live either. And it's just not a salient issue for women it's in the name gamerword. True crime on the other hand is of an issue to women and like catnip or crack to some women this case is more similar to like something like Casey Anthony then a left right political issue. I've heard this described as Qanon for white women which I think covers it and this is truly a gender war thing rather then a left right political thing. Her supporters are literally entirely white women motivated by entitlement misandry and true crime brain. I do think it shows the depths of the women are wonderful fallacy in our society and I've seen a lot of otherwise party line liberal men utterly flabbergasted by women's reaction to this case, so I'm curious if this will lead to any backlash or long lasting effects.
On a somewhat unrelated note I thought Nancy Grace generally has a bas reputation among overly online, true crime brained suburban white women.
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You think astrology and mainstream feminism are different people?
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That's not very convincing. For one, it completely blows up your earlier framing, it's not about "defending women even if..." , it's about supporting them only when they're in the same class, and even the class issue falls flat when you compare it to the reaction to JK Rowling. She was just as popular as true crime is now, when she made her comments on the trans issue, and legions of women built their identity around Harry Potter.
That wasn't me commenting earlier. I don't think it's women issue. You won't see any black women supporting her. As for JK I think that's an entirely different line as in that's political/culture war issue in a way that this isn't. This cuts across potical lines and
You have both left wing and right women on tiktok going nuts with conspiracies' about how she was framed by her evil husband, or about how she was failed by the evil doctors or just can't be held responsible because she's crazy. And that's the main thing no matter what Lindsay can't have been responsible. There's a resistance to responsibility and misandry that runs through it. What it's not is an actual defense of child killing. If man or fat ugly black woman did this they wouldn't care one iota. It's similar to other true crime tempests like Casey Anthony or Madeline McCann, except this one shows some really ugly beliefs that have been simmering under the surface.
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Wasn't Hendrix's target an 8 year old?
First an 8-year-old, then the boy's father, who escaped prosecution for statutory rape pretty much solely due to his ethnicity.
Cite?
Comment.
Another source.
That's the cameraman Sharmake Omar (I'm 99% sure - ages on the stories are off by a couple years, and those are apparently popular Somali names, but photo/video looks like a match), not the father Shire Jimale, but other than that I guess "nonce" was probably going easy on the guy.
Thanks for the links; I don't recall seeing that before.
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Wasn't Clancy's?
5, 3, and 0, not 8.
Did someone here call one of them a nonce, or did you just not understand the reason behind my question?
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