https://www.mtracey.net/p/lindsay-clancy-menOne of my American moots discussed with me about Christopher Hyatt, Stephen Kershner, and free will, and he did bring up the recent example of Lindsay Clancy and the controversy surrounding her case.
Maverick journo Michael Tracey has already covered the basic facts, so I‘ll skip on reinstating it, and jump onto the meat of the discussion behind this gendered discourse.
For starters, I don’t necessarily agree with the manosphere here, but I do understand their frustration because, more often than not, men get the short end of the stick in civil/family courts which use a lower evidentiary standard compared to supreme courts, especially when it comes to child custody, alimony, child support, divorce, and sex-related charges. Not to mention that society is more lenient towards female criminals compared to their male counterparts even if the crime was done under an episode of psychosis, as demonstrated by gender-based sentencing disparity favoring women over men:
https://sp2016dev.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_gender_disparities.aspxAnd yes, I know Michael here isn’t putting a gendered double standard, but still…
Whilst understanding the frustration, I still don’t agree with it as Clancy herself was not only failed by the very institutions she sought help from, but the warning signs (such as her expressing suicidal thoughts) were there long before the filicides. And it’s with that in mind that I think that the gendered discourse is masking something society is far more uncomfortable with.
In the first line of this text, I did mention the names of Hyatt and Kershner, and with good reason as those figures, despite radically different backgrounds (the former being a niche occultist, the latter an academic that got subjected to an investigative committee that outlasted the Warren commission) all hold that free will is a myth. Kirshner elaborated more on his point, making the argument against punishment in general on the basis that he didn't believe in free will, and therefore punishing someone is just punishing someone whose conditions/ biology/mental traits led them to that path and ultimately did nothing but satisfy a need for vengenance.
I feel like the american prison system and the american public have long ago given up the pretense that incarceration is about rehabiliation. If they did believe in it then conditions would be far better and they'd be paired with say doctors, teachers and psychologists to help them see the errors of their ways and how to correct themselves. And this comes into play as the crux of the issue with Clancy is whether:
- She is being overcharged
- She was in her right mind when committing the murders
Now, I do think she is being overcharged, and that she wasn’t in her right mind. It can be a mitigating factor to kill someone in a bout of temporary insanity like being cheated on or "a crime of passion" if sanity is not lost. I think we've lost sight of the fact, because activists on mental health have been quite strident about this point, that legally speaking, going back to the Greeks, the mentally ill are not responsible for their actions. However, this has never been an easy pill for many people to swallow, and people say cliches like "mental illness doesn’t make you racist/bigoted/kill people" when that’s plainly not true. And this is the main contradiction here: Not gender, but people’s general discomfort with the idea that free will may not exist after all (or that neurological factors may make it unethical to overcharge people for crimes they did when they were, for example, under a state of psychosis), and how that relates to crime.
And as we’ve seen with current events, anything that the masses in western society see as being unresolved (regardless of the actual reality) is bound to turn into a culture war, and the case of Clancy is no different.