FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
He doesn't even seem that drunk to me. He seems like a man who knows exactly what he wants and makes no apologies for it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
In a somewhat ironic twist, apparently the guy who recorded the viral youtube video at the center of all this, was arrested for gang raping a child in 2022, and had those charges dropped "in the interests of justice" by the same prosecutor's office that this year thought it was in the interests of justice to throw the book at somebody for saying a naughty word. What a funny world we live in.
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.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
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 🙄".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
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.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
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:
- 2026 Tumbler Ridge shooting, February 10, 2026, Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and step-brother before carrying out an attack at a school, killing seven people, including herself.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
As Canada slips down its slippery slope, the legalization of infanticide is being discussed quite calmly within its government. In October, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying that parents should be able to arrange the deaths of babies up to one year old who are deemed to have “very grave and severe syndromes.”
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
The fact that some jurisdictions have banned it?
My understanding is that no jurisdiction in the US has completely banned abortion, and even the strictest states still carve out the customary exceptions for danger to the mother's life or health, rape, incest etc. I'm open to correction on this point, however.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
It wasn't the same list you were looking at, but whenever I go through one of these lists of "trans people murdered for the crime of being themselves in Trump's AmeriKKKa", they seem to be overwhelmingly made up of a) streetwalkers murdered by johns or b) ordinary domestic disputes between romantic partners. A non-negligible proportion were even murdered by a fellow trans person. I'm genuinely curious about the last time an American trans person was murdered in a literal hate crime (i.e. deliberately targeted for violence solely on the basis of their claimed gender identity, or gender expression).
the intensely liberal abortion laws in America are a function of abortion being under threat
How can one possibly say that abortion is under threat in the US?
Also Lindsay Clancy isn't actually an example of people supporting infanticide her supporters aren't saying it's ok she killed her kids
Per the "same, Lindsay" trend, many of her supporters are expressing empathy for her by admitting that they've personally felt the urge to murder their own children.
I made the argument at greater length in my latest Substack post. I find it interesting that Clark only feels the need to explain villainous behaviour as the product of childhood trauma when the perpetrator is female. The male perpetrators in her books never get any such pat explanations.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
First an 8-year-old, then the boy's father, who escaped prosecution for statutory rape pretty much solely due to his ethnicity.
I finished Penance. As I predicted, of the three female murderers, the third is also revealed to have been sexually abused as a child, meaning two of the three were definitely sexually abused as children by male adults, and the third may have been too (she's established to have been acquainted, via her father, with the universe's equivalent of Jimmy Savile). For those keeping score, of the female murderers in Clark's first two novels, 100% were either definitely or probably sexually abused as children or teenagers by adult male guardians.
The novel frustrated me more and more as it went along. When it works, it really works, with spot-on portrayals of the dynamics of friendship groups among teenage girls and the dark sides of Tumblr fandom culture. But there are so many pointless and irrelevant digressions that add nothing and go nowhere. For instance, one of the murderers is established to be an avid fan of two school shooters whose murder spree is a mish-mash of the Chardon high school shooting and Columbine (I vaguely recall Scott stating that the former case is what persuaded him that capital punishment has its uses). She writes creepy fanfiction about one of the killers, clearly projecting her own psychological issues onto him. Fine. But right at the climax of the book, Clark devotes several dozen pages to describing how this school shooting went down, in a town several thousand miles from the main action of the story, populated with characters we don't know. What's the point of this? What does it add to the story?
Then right at the end, it's revealed that the in-universe author of the true crime book we have ostensibly been reading up to this point may have embellished or invented some details about the events of the story. This was clearly intended as a postmodern "how much of what you've read is true???" moment, but by that point I didn't care. Whatever the in-universe "truth" of the story, I know that Clark thinks that the only reason a female person might murder someone is because they were sexually abused as a child. Beyond that, I don't think I need to know much else.
It's a curious example of a patched together from the headlines story. As mentioned above, one minor character is a transparent stand-in for Jimmy Savile, and one of the characters is obsessed with a fictional school shooting modelled on two real cases. Numerous other infamous true crime cases are referred to under their actual names as well. It was only after I finished it that I discovered the actual murder with which the A-plot is concerned was itself modelled on a real case which took place in Indiana in the nineties.
On to The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. It's rather a slow read, but Rosen has a great eye for detail and his prose is stylish enough that it's not a chore to get through. Rosen was childhood friends with Michael Laudor, a legal genius who sadly suffered from schizophrenia, but who was able to flourish in academia with the aid of various accommodations. For a long time he looked like a prime example of how a mentally ill person could triumph over his disabilities, to the point that Brad Pitt and Ron Howard were looking to make an inspirational biopic about him (a project which eventually became A Beautiful Mind), right up until Laudor
I'm not sure how dumping 5,000 soldiers in the ladyboy capital of the world squares with Hegseth's desire to MAMA (Make the Armed forces Macho Again).
On the other hand, going to Thailand and not shagging a ladyboy is like going to Turkey and not eating a fuckin kebab, so who knows. (Link is extremely NSFW.)
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
23hr ago
It's not like the two trends are wholly independent of one another, and I don't know why that would be the null hypothesis.
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.
The article you cite yourself cite claims that abortions per capita increased by 0.7 points between 2016 and 2020. (Which, incidentally, puts the lie to the hysterical comparisons of the USA under Trump to The Handmaid's Tale).
It's also not a like-for-like comparison, as fertility rates have plummeted since Roe v. Wade: can't get an abortion if you never got pregnant in the first place. What you'd really want to do is to compare the ratio of live births to abortions – or, in other words, what percentage of pregnancies end in abortion vs. end in delivery vs. end in miscarriage. I'll do an effortpost on this next week.
Have cases of infanticide increased since the legalization of abortion?
Again confounded by falling fertility rates, but quote Perry:
As Canada slips down its slippery slope, the legalization of infanticide is being discussed quite calmly within its government. In October, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying that parents should be able to arrange the deaths of babies up to one year old who are deemed to have “very grave and severe syndromes.”
If you want to say this is a policy you support, fair enough, but don't tell me it isn't happening.
I'm not even necessarily arguing that abortion and infanticide are becoming more common over time, but rather that the latter is becoming, for lack of a better word, "destigmatised". By way of analogy, no one disputes that homosexuality has become vastly more socially acceptable over the past few decades in Western society, even if the proportion of the population who is gay or lesbian has remained fairly constant.
I'm aware of all of this, and it was the reason I linked the Louise Perry article at the bottom. Infanticide was the norm prior to Christianity. Legal abortion was sold to Western societies with the promise that it would not lead to a renewed normalisation of infanticide. In retrospect, that promise seems to have been an empty one.
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.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Hinckley was the first person I thought of when Freddie deBoer said that an NGRI verdict means Clancy will never leave a mental institution.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I don't often find myself agreeing with @SecureSignals, but he's right in this case. Researching how long it takes to drive to a particular location, then sending your husband to that location to get him out of the house, is rather damning evidence of planning and forethought.
Isn't she paralysed from the waist down?
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