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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   20140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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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.

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 (…)

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.

I don't think it'd be helpful to restrict common usage of "insane" to the legal category.

Well, given that we're talking about an ongoing court case which hinges on the purported "insanity" of the defendant, I think we risk creating confusion if we describe Clancy as "insane" before that fact has been established in a court of law. There are various other near-synonymous terms which mean nothing in a legal context that we could use instead ("crazy", "psycho", "nutcase", "bunny boiler" etc.). But yes, this is really just a semantic debate.

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