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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Violence against children has, understandably, a massive cultural taboo attached to it.

This seems like a case of an accidental alliance among different factions who often don't even realize that they're different factions except when things like abortion come up.

The pro-child, pro-life side people think that life is valuable and worth protecting for its own sake. Children are especially worth protecting because they are vulnerable. A child dying is bad because that child loses their ability to be alive in the future and do things and live a life. The terminal utility being lost from murder was the child's utility.

The pro-choice, pro adult-human-female, feminist, female-supremecist etc side thinks that women are valuable. Every child has a mother, most mothers love their children and experience deep suffering and loss, therefore killing a child usually causes lots of harm to a woman. Killing someone else's child is bad because it causes a woman to suffer. The terminal utility being lost is from women (because adult women are what they care about)

So the taboo "killing children is bad" is generally supported by both sides and the taboo is upheld for completely different reasons. When some serial killer or rapist goes around harming children they both rise up and say "this is bad". They both care, because they both perceive harm being done to someone they care about. But one faction's care is conditional on that child having a mother who loves them and is harmed, therefore when that no longer applies they flip. From the perspective of a pro-life person, this seems like a complete 180 that came out of nowhere, but the feminist is being consistent according to her own logic and sees attempts to condemn child-killing mothers as the 180 flip that came out of nowhere. You used to be on her side protecting mothers, but now suddenly you're trying to suppress women's rights.

The taboo seems so strong because both sides have very strong feelings, but the edge cases are different and so when it frays it frays hard.

I don't think this models the feminist side very well, these are the same people who will defend a woman's murderer and hope he doesn't get locked up forever. I think the simple explanation is that to many, and women are more susceptible than men, empathy fuses with sympathy. They experience putting themselves in the shoes of the person being spoken about, the murderer, and they immediately feel the walls closing in. It's not real empathy, they aren't imagining that they're the kind of person that would kill their kid they're imagining that they are themselves in a situation where they have just killed their kids, which they know would have been impossible for them to do in their right mind and thus it would be unjust to expect them to take responsibility for the actions. Yes, this isn't workable reasoning and generalizes in such a way that everyone would be forgiven for every crime, but they aren't doing reasoning, they're doing sympathy and you can observe them doing it every time.

I don't think this is primarily a pro-choice/pro-life story at all. One of the kids she killed was five years old; even an extreme pro-choicer like me (on the record here before saying that I would not really personally detest parents who postnatally aborted a one-month-old) thinks this is unambiguously murder of a human being and should be treated as such. (Also, the usual kind of failure of theory of mind between tribes. No, we really do not believe fetuses are human. Being pro-abortion is really not particularly about women; I had my share of irresponsible unprotected sex back in the days, and felt very reassured by the existence of legal and easily accessed abortion.)

Instead, this is obviously just the usual case of the forces of tribalism having randomly coalesced around some nearly random figure, with the significance of the case for each tribe mostly having become how much significance it has for the other. Whether Clancy is convicted or not would primarily have the effect that it would be a visible public defeat for all the people who staked significant attention and political capital on the opposite outcome. If she is acquitted, it would bias expectations in future conflicts towards "women can get away with anything"; if she is convicted, it would bias expectations towards "all the efforts of women activists can't get one woman acquitted".

If she is acquitted, it would bias expectations in future conflicts towards "women can get away with anything"; if she is convicted, it would bias expectations towards "all the efforts of women activists can't get one woman acquitted".

Which is the exact reason the pro-choice/pro-life debate exists in its current form in the first place. It's really not about killing kids- Palestinian women are more than happy to send them on suicide missions every day. Why would Western women be any different?

The only places that don't have this issue take the posture that both men and women are subordinate to the State- the more subordinate, the more even-handed and pro-social the restrictions (it's still not going to stop the State from killing kids who have disabilities incompatible with life, but that honors men more in the sense that it acknowledges they have to pay for it).

Meanwhile, in the Anglosphere, women are the State.

The pro-choice, pro adult-human-female, feminist, female-supremecist etc side thinks that women are valuable. Every child has a mother, most mothers love their children and experience deep suffering and loss, therefore killing a child usually causes lots of harm to a woman

They both care, because they both perceive harm being done to someone they care about. But one faction's care is conditional on that child having a mother who loves them and is harmed,

I really don't think this is a correct model of what they are thinking. In fact liberals/feminists usually attempt to reduce the amount of authority parents have over their children and a common liberal critique of conservatives is that conservatives only care about children as an extension of their parents and not as autonomous human beings. Pro choice people and liberals also believe they value life for it's own sake and that conservatives don't. They really believe that a fetus is not a baby and so don't see it as de-valuing life.

I also think you underestimate how many conservative or right coded women are pro* Lindsay Clancy.

*it's important to remember that the pro side still want her committed to a mental hospital.

To be clear, this particular split I'm talking about is skew to the typical left-right divide, though I do think it correlates with it. I think there are more of the female-supremecists on the left than there are on the right, but there are some on both, and this illusionary alliance of pro-children allows both factions to exist together on the left or on the right without even realizing they disagree on fundamental issues.

That is, there are "pro-children" people who are for abortion who think fetuses aren't children and therefore don't count, while the pro-female people are for abortion because they think women should be allowed to kill children, and both of them are pro abortion and make fun of the right together.

I admit I don't have a very good understanding of conservative women who are pro* Lindsay Clancy. My best guess is that they combine a strong notion of property rights and familial autonomy combined with a view that children are property, or something like that. But even then, you'd think the father would get a say...

it's important to remember that the pro side still want her committed to a mental hospital.

Some of them do, some of them don't. There are an awful lot of tiktokers who insist that the husband killed the kids and should go to jail while Lindsay Clancy should be completely free. I suppose on some sense this is a different faction than the ones who think it's literally okay to kill kids, but it's all tangled together among people who want her to be free first and foremost because she's a woman and are just looking for excuses.

The pro-choice, pro adult-human-female, feminist, female-supremecist etc side thinks that women are valuable. Every child has a mother, most mothers love their children and experience deep suffering and loss, therefore killing a child usually causes lots of harm to a woman

Yeah, part of me wants to see this as a caricature of feminist thought, but I am reminded of Hillary Clinton's famous claim which was something along the lines of women being the primary victims of war because they lose the men in their lives. It seems that there really is this attitude out there that men have no value except insofar as they offer value to women.

The quote:

Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children. Women are again the victims in crime and domestic violence as well. Throughout our hemisphere we have an epidemic of violence against women, even though there is no longer any organized warfare that puts women in the direct line of combat. But domestic violence is now recognized as being the most pervasive human rights violation in the world.

All she had to do was drop "the primary" and, motivated nitpicking aside, it would have been uncontroversial and at a minimum defensible. As a speech (presumably aimed at women) she could have used emphasis to convey that her focus was on women without explicitly disregarding men. Incredible lack of judgement.

True, but I think she’s an actual, honest-to-God gynocentric feminist, and it never occurred to her that that statement might be controversial. She’s like a pro-lifer who starts off her arguments by claiming we are all made in the image of God. Neither one really thinks about how people who don’t share her foundational beliefs might react.

Perhaps, but she's a politician first and her political instincts should be sharper than those of a simple ideologue. It's the kind of clunker that an intelligent speaker should catch and correct themselves even as they're saying it out loud. A little alarm bell should be going off telling her "I don't think that's what I want to be heard saying". It's 10 years later and we're still criticising her for how ignorant and dismissive it comes across as.

I don’t disagree, but Hillary “basket of deplorables” Clinton wasn’t always the most smooth-tongued of politicians. To your point, though, the quote is actually 28 years old, and we’re still criticizing it.

Or if she had said "the primary victims of the aftermath of war" which seems to be what she is trying to say in the following sentences.

She's had plenty of time to say "that isn't what I meant", if that isn't what she meant.

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