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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 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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