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 -
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.
You are assuming that society is only okay with abortions because contraception is widespread, and that these women are becoming okay with killing babies because they see abortion as good and necessary. I don't think these things are actually connected. They merely look similar, allowing for post-hoc rationalizing into a slippery slope that never existed.
In reality, mothers were killing their babies long before medical abortions were a thing, and in societies where such were not available. In fact, this is one of the arguments in favor of making abortions legal. Desperate women are doing it anyway, at great risk to themselves. Standardization can only happen when it is legal, and makes it much safer while also allowing for better informed decision making, as the doctor in charge can explain the likely ramifications of the procedure.
So there isn't really a causal line from abortions to baby killings. Neither is there a real connection between contraception and abortions. Women have been aborting their kids long before modern condoms became available, and obviously way before more modern methods like the pill.
Women have also been leaving their infants in the forest to die of exposure for millennia. It is somewhat natural human behavior to kill your young kids before they become useful, whether by leaving a toddler in the woods or by a herbal abortificant.
We thought we were better than all that. First, because we were Christian Europe and Christians would rather suffer nobly than disobey God. Then, as we Enlightened ourselves and Industrialized, we said, "Look at our prosperity! No one starves here." So we walled off a section of natural human behavior - thou shall not kill your kid. Not in the the park, not in the dark, not in the womb, no kids in the tomb. We will not kill them here or there, we will not kill them anywhere!
...But, sometimes even with all this prosperity, there's still times when it's inconvenient to have a child. So maybe we can kill them before they look cute. Ok, that's settled, we can kill them before we get the chance to look at them and get attached. But that's it! Once they're out of the womb obviously we couldn't kill them. They have your eyes and their mother's chin. That seems like a pretty good deliminator, right?
Except a lot of the time, it's still inconvenient to have a child that hasn't reached a certain level of self sufficiency. Can you really blame a woman for being overwhelmed and taking the next obvious step? What crime had she done to deserve the punishment of small children thrust upon her? "It is true that I wished to escape, and I still wish to; is that not lawful for all prisoners?"
So here we are. Do we continue our slide back to "natural human behavior?" Or do we reinforce the wall?
If you want to get rid of inconvenient children you can give them up for adoption, our society has a whole system for that. Dealing with it through official channels might, I guess, be a bit of a hassle with the paperwork and everything, and put strain on one's marriage if the father isn't so hot on the idea, but… surely it can't be more of a hassle than the grueling, humiliating, equally paperwork-heavy process of convincing a judge that you're innocent of murder for reason of insanity; to say nothing of the husband issue. I just don't buy that our society incentivizes women to murder their children for convenience's sake.
And that's the thing about Clancy, really. I simply do not buy that this was a case of a woman trying to get rid of her children because they were inconvenient. No matter how they might hate being a parent, I don't see how a lucid person could possibly do what she did without realizing that they would inevitably be ruining their own life in the process. Either her ability to think through the consequences of her actions was completely disrupted, or it was an incredibly twisted attempt at suicide-by-proxy - either way, these are the actions of someone completely off their rocker, and the subsequent suicide attempt only strengthens that impression. I just can't make the killings make any kind of sense as the actions of a clear-headed schemer who thought she should be allowed to bump off her children because they were clogging up her schedule, and had a cold-blooded plan for getting away with it.
I think you're setting up a false dichotomy, where either a) Clancy was completely off her rocker, and murdered her children in a psychotic fugue state; or b) Clancy coldly, consciously decided to murder her children, expecting to get away with it.
But I think there's a much more plausible third explanation: Lindsay decided to kill herself, but couldn't stomach the idea of a stepmother raising her children in her absence. So she decided "if I can't have you, no one can", and offed them before trying to take her own life. This kind of behaviour is so common there's a Wikipedia page about it*: we just do a double-take with Lindsay because, like all kinds of violent crime, it's far more common for the perpetrator to be a man than a woman. Lindsay probably reasoned that the chances of her successfully killing Patrick were pretty slim, so she went for the next-best option.
*Even a cursory inspection reminds me of how ideologically captured Wikipedia is:
NOT. OUR. CRIMES.
It's not so much that I view these as a hard binary, as that only b] seems like it could possibly have anything to do with an endemic societal issue of devaluing babies' lives because of abortion; so if we rule b] out, that whole aspect of the discourse is left looking like something of a red herring. I didn't mean to imply that if b] was ruled out then Clancy was definitely just an innocent victim of circumstances with no control over her actions whatsoever.
Indeed, I myself further disambiguated the "off her rocker" prong between the momentary psychotic fugue, and the more premeditated option of a convoluted suicide. (I do think that wanting to kill yourself, especially with an accompanying compulsion to kill your own children for the kind of neurotic reasons you describe, constitutes a form of insanity. This isn't to say that it should meet the bar of "legal insanity" qua grounds for acquittal, but legal insanity is a very narrow subset of what we otherwise mean by insanity in conversation, and deliberate self-destruction complete with the annihilation of what one holds most dear out of runaway jealously seems as textbook an example of "crazy" as anything else.)
I agree that anyone who sets out to kill their children and then themselves is "crazy" in the colloquial sense. No one, not even the prosecution, disputes that Lindsay suffered from mental illness. But the evidentiary standard required to establish that a person was insane at the time they committed a crime is much stricter than that required to establish that they suffered from a mental illness. Everyone who was insane at the time they committed a crime has a mental illness, but not everyone who has a mental illness is insane.
I don't think it'd be helpful to restrict common usage of "insane" to the legal category. I don't think calling someone like Clancy insane is simply colloquial/hyperbolic, they simply seem like distinct meanings of the word, with the narrow legal definition being a technical term-of-art, much as "incompetent" and "legally incompetent" are wholly different things, and mathematicians use "irrational" or "imaginary" in ways that are wholly their own. I think there is a legitimate question of whether Clancy was "insane" that is distinct both from whether she was merely "mentally ill" (someone with clinical depression is not necessarily "insane"), and whether she passed the bar of legally insane.
Of course, at this point we're basically on the same page on the facts, we're just litigating semantics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link