attempted murder of agency

considering lindsay clancy and the idea of madness

gallons, perhaps too many gallons of lurid ink have been spilled over the lindsay clancy story. the details are hideous and i’ll not belabor them here. i think we’ve all had a surfeit of “true crime” ghastliness on this one already.

the trial has become another one of these circuses around who can and cannot be held responsible and whether “too crazy/impaired to be held accountable” should be a thing in cases like this and as the jury drags on deadlocked, it’s breaking upon some acute lines of division. the whole thing is just perfectly calibrated to generate atavistic horror. she was literally a delivery and labor nurse at mass general. she strangled her three children in the basement of her house then tried to take her own life paralyzing herself in the process of failing. coming home to this is the dark horror in the back of any mind, the beating heart of darkness.

the stance of “well, she was crazy, insane, lacked capacity, was mis or overmedicated” gets taken and the idea of “well, no sane person would do this” carries some weight as an idea but it’s also one perhaps we overweight from fear and ignore the parallels around out of political correctness and societal struggle session fear.

i’m not here to tell you what could make a person do this. i wish, instead, to speak of the reaction to it because i find it both telling and terrifying and would like to draw some contrasts that i find pivotal. lots of people use defenses like this and we seem to be both accepting them and/or being forced to live around them in a manner not conducive to civilizational survival, a move past suicidal and into literal homicidal and infanticidal empathy and watching whatever this lovecraftian horror currently dancing around in the flensed skinsuit of what was once reasonable tolerance and sense and eating the minds of those it infects as though they had looked upon cthulhu is like being dragged into r’lyeh by diversity demons preaching a gospel of un-responsiblity. and it has become distinctly, even savagely anti-human and perhaps anti-woman most of all. and it needs to stop.

this is the part where we need to start being the adults in the room again, real adults who make hard choices, impose hard consequences, and live with them. people speak critically of ideas like “moderate islam” and call it fraud because it refuses to speak and stand against so called “radical” islam. well, guess what? adulthood works the same way and this long descent into tepidly refusing to call atrocity atrocity, monsters monsters, and to break the eggs needed to make a societal omelet that nourishes rather than poisons amounts to the exact same thing.

time to take a stand.

“cuz identity” or “not capable of knowing better” are simply not excuses that a sound society can tolerate from those it allows to walk around near others.

it needs to stop being tolerated.

if you lack this capacity, why on earth would we permit you agency to menace us? it’s like hiring a hyena to babysit your bunnyrabbit.

consider decarlos brown, who murdered iryna zarutska on the train in charlotte. this case is not so very different from lindsay and the outcome, thus far, is “nothing much.” he’s been deemed unfit for trial and is “undergoing care” to see if that can be changed. apparently the poor fellah just did not know better.

this seems like a poor outcome. the man is and has been a menace and the idea that this is owed to him beggars sense.

it’s also a really bad sign.

if a civilization cannot stir to protect itself from a murderer who killed a stranger in unprovoked cold blood as the culmination of a long chain of crimes, arrests, and prison, well, it starts to get a bit difficult to find a path to daylight. we’ve all seen the stats about 80% of crime being committed by people with 3 or more prior arrests. i’ve written about it. the data is manifest and clear and people used to build societies around it. i’m not saying we need to go back to the middle ages ideas of “hang about 1% of each generation” by imposing death as the penalty for most crimes of even moderate seriousness, but i’m not saying it was crazy either. it resulted in very safe societies and it’s pretty clear that the idea of “rehabilitation, not punishment” and “catch and release empathy for those deemed marginal or lacking agency” is not working. london has been studied in this regard and the huge rise in thefts and break ins etc post the victorian period has been documented.

we did not lose the technology, we lost the will. it’s still very possible to have cities without such robbery and break ins. you don’t see such things in singapore or cairo, but that’s because punishment is swift and sure. this is a choice and one the US seems to have lost the stomach to make properly. the EU is descending into darkness because of the widespread idea of “violence = innocence if they didn’t know better.”

that’s just plain mascotism. “these people are not up to civilizational standards so we mustn’t try to hold them to such.”

well then why in hell would anyone want them here?

what basis does this provide for a way of life?

what interests me is that most people, even if they sit and do nothing about it, seem onside with the idea that the decarlos browns of the world should, at the very least, not be in circulation. it’s easy to get people to say “yeah, we need 3 strikes and you’re out back.” fewer support capital punishment, but i hear more and more “yeah, we need it. why spend millions of dollars to warehouse the irredeemable for life when $3 of rope will suffice?” people find it distasteful, but it’s a discussion worth having especially around those who are simply never going to be safe to allow to live near everyone else. there is no perfect. there are trade offs.

but there seems to be a surprisingly large group of people who are taking the other side of this and demanding more mascotting, less responsibility, and “never their fault” reasoning to make every attacker the real victim here.

“never their fault” is a self-refuting basis for civilizational participation.

it feeds into more pre-emptive ideas like “if you’re too crazy to stand trial, you’re also too crazy to live near us.” people seem unwilling to face the reality that one cannot have this both ways.

back in the 80’s, the US became highly resistant to the idea of involuntary psych holds and closed most of the mental hospitals and locked wards. our current homeless and crazy people epidemic is the direct result. so too are many emerging problems and watching the same people who scream “you cannot hold her accountable, it was hormones/bad meds, you cannot hold him accountable, he was disadvantaged or crazy” then advocate pumping mentally confused pre-pubescents full of the wrong hormones and bad meds and then acting shocked when another trans shooter or suicide emerges starts to raise issues about whether they themselves have causative culpability and whether those they purport to help can be held to have agency.

i suspect this is why so many of them resist the idea of accountability for others. they fear it for themselves.

you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too. either these drugs and mental conditions are sufficiently dangerous that being on them or so afflicted constitutes mental incompetence or the drugged and infirm are competent and responsible.

if the risks are high that the latter can, through inattention or happenstance, flip to the former, then someone needs to be responsible for watching it.

and the decision must be a priori, not permissive first then exculpatory if something goes wrong. if these drugs can make you into a homicidal psychotic, whoever put you on them becomes your guardian and bears responsibility if you kill. we’ll charge a bartender for over-serving you (but not excuse you as a result). same should apply here. let’s see what the appetite of these pyhciatrist quacks is for this level of concussed pharma intervention if they are on the hook for outcomes.

honestly, this is a very serious proposal:

“if these drugs are sufficiently powerful that that can make you commit murder and have thatmurder not be your fault, then the person who put you on them must take the blame.” they require an extreme standard of care. i’m 100% serious about this psychiatrist proposal. if you’re going to prescribe murder pills, you’re up for at least negligent homicide. if this outcome was not disclosed by the manufacturer, then they bear responsibility as well. it's on them to test that.

the idea of accountability cannot just vanish when the drugs cause something bad to happen.

let's bring it back and see how rapidly all these shrinks either stop handing this stuff out like halloween candy or decide that "the patient was responsible after all."

if this has that kind of risks, maybe patients treated by it should not be free to mingle with society and care for children.

we’re running into some real problems because the same justice loons who seem to love the idea of “lia” thomas getting to shower with the girls scream the moment anyone starts talking about psych holds. this seems highly concentrated in what is currently claiming to be the feminist movement. there is certainly some bad history here where, in a world before divorce, inconvenient women were branded as “hysterical” and bundled off to sanitariums (though how common this actually was is debatable) but lost in the shouting down around this is the idea that, perhaps lots of people, some of them women, are, either temporarily or permanently, too many fries short of a happy meal to allow to be out and about and in positions to harm others.

consider dimone flemming, called “grossly psychotic and out of touch with reality” by psychiatrist eric goldsmith and found not responsible for her actions by judge audrey stone. she’s in custody under psych eval. i fully expect she’ll get some “treatment” then walk despite having killed her children to “cleanse” them.

this whole line of reasoning is obviously problematic and prone to abuse. every atrocity becomes madness. it’s easy to claim.

“it’s not my fault. i had bad brain and bad meds.”

“Before the killings, Fleming had been treated at a Queens hospital for two months, where she was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and prescribed psychotropic medication, the Times reported, citing court records.”

we can argue “should not have been let out” and try to blame the facility, and perhaps some of this is true, but parts of this case are not as simple as is being made out.

this seems like extenuation:

“But the mother of two did not take her medication as prescribed and instead used marijuana daily — which reportedly exacerbated her mental health symptoms.”

these are choices, choices that dimone was left to make, and to my mind, you have to pick a side:

either she was competent to make these choices and therefore, just as a drunk driver would, bears responsibility for the outcomes arising therefrom

or

she was not competent to make these choices in which case, she should not have been left alone to make them.

that’s the case for “you are a danger to self and others, you need to be institutionalized until you are not.”

this one is a thorny nightmare because, obviously, such a system is outlandishly prone to abuse and granting the state the right to simply take people who have, as of yet, committed no crime and violated no rights and put them in locked wards because of an assessment of capacity rendered by “experts” who may or may not be trustworthy and whose jobs depend upon having patients under their care and what those so empowered and incentivized might do presents a chilling prospect. (of course, so too does leaving lunatics at large until the tragedy occurs)

i’m not sure there is a good choice here or any perfectly firm bright line of principle to which to adhere. we can say “well, you must be compos mentis to have rights and to adhere to a social contract,” but one could counter argue “well, i have no yet committed an act that broke it, so how do you know i lack such capacity? who/what gives you a right to impose this judgement upon a peaceful person?”

there will be no perfect here. there will be trade offs.

but where we are currently sitting does not seem like a good one.

i suspect we’d benefit from taking a fair few people off the streets.

and again, making the shrinks put some skin in the game would certainly sharpen perceptions.

the problem is that the wokester industrial complex of post modern denial of objectivism and morality refuses to accept this and this is what’s hijacking our justice and court systems into the deeply dangerous precients of “we stand with lindsay and just raised $1 million in a go fund me for her and her parents” and “loot cites because of fentanyl floyd.”

the DEI/woke mindrot is one of the most pernicious and absurd inversions of ethics and common sense in the history of bad human philosophies.

it has turned a century of racial progress into race war and the idea of pluralism into privilege.

it has turned whole branches of what is currently alleged to be "feminism" into an anti-woman creed shredding the ideas of workplace pioneers and luminaries like paglia and turning them into literal claims of "we cannot be held accountable because hormones."

just how far are we going to take that? will we take it here?

madeline daly kidnapped her son and took him across state lines in violation of a court order. when police found her she shot the child in the face, killing him to “keep him safe.” “When asked what went through her mind when she saw law enforcement walking up, she replied, ‘Jake can’t get Basil,’” police wrote in the document.”

i’m not sure if she’ll plead insanity. it certainly sounds insane. and what are we to do here? what is the correct societal response to raving infanticide?

the prosecutor in the flemming case above raises an interesting point here:

“In court this week, prosecutors said that trying Fleming for double murder would not serve justice.

“Prosecuting mothers does not and cannot prevent these crimes from happening, but public discourse might,” Bronx assistant district attorney Tiffany Wichman told the publication.”

there may well be truth to this from a deterrence standpoint (though questions about what manner of harm allowing a person like this out on the street would encourage) but this logic also inverts upon itself. if the goal is deterrence for such things, then indeed, post facto prosecution will be of little use. but mandatory psych hold would be.

sure, ideas like that have problems, but are they bigger problems than:

“hey, this woman has serious psych problems, won’t take meds, and smokes loads of weed. let’s leave her in a home alone with a couple of vulnerable kids because we must respect her agency, at least until she kills the kids, then we can say she never possessed it.”

because that does not seem like it worked out so well.

this is where i think many libertarians go awry. the argument of “they have violated no rights so we must not violate theirs” is principled but becomes senseless and outright harmful in cases like “well, we have no right to interfere with that boulder perched precariously above the house until it actually crushes something.” that is the logic of a fool. if a toddler picks up a machine gun, you don’t wait for him to start shooting before you address the matter and what the toddler may or may not want is not the primary concern.

the problem is that we cannot have the discussion. the same courthouse pink parade out demanding “beleive” about lindsay will shout it down.

and we’re letting them.

there are these wild groups making claims like “husband patrick killed the children and framed her, pushed her from the window, used a body double at CVS, was having an affair, or was a neglectful/narcissistic husband who moved on too fast” and even appeals to astrology. “leos don’t kill kids, gemenis do.”

it’s just bizzare. (and conspicuously performative)

it seems like an extension of the “believe all women/me too” ideas where there is just an outright refusal to accept the idea of possible culpability.

it finds a mirror in the folks screaming that karmelo was acting in self-defense and 100 other derangements.

this is a particular form of entitled discombulation and reality denial and it seems to rage through the whole post modern, post morality, post reason sect of lunacy worship and amorality fetish.

there are quite a lot of people here who are not OK.

it's honestly disturbing to watch and, for some of these people the derangement of reason on this topic seems to rise to the level of actual self-proof of the above proposition that they lack the agency and discernment required for culpability.

the joke about “ok, take our rights away” gets a bit unfunny when cast in these contexts.

this sort of “hysteria” was, in fact the line of argument used by those opposing women’s rights. it’s an astonishingly unselfaware pose to ape.

but the issue of responsibility keeps rearing its head.

so many groups and identities.

it’s always someone else’s fault, never yours.

and it’s a matter of no small obviousness that this is all about group membership and that there is one group conspicuously excluded from the “it wasn’t my fault” excuse:

but it goes to a deeper point: all groups need to call their own fouls: men, women, christians, islamics, jews, blacks, whites, yellows, browns, libertarians, constitutionalists, social democrats, all of it.

if you don’t, you lack morality.

if you claim “my group must get special treatment and cannot be held accountable for their actions and choices,” you are actively anti-morality.

that’s a license to be a monster. it’s how we keep getting the worst possible anti-heros from george floyd, karmelo anthony, luigi mangione, rapists who walk, memelords jailed for noticing, and baby murdering mommies called “the real victim here.”

it’s how you get the utter madness of the UK home office publishing content like “sex without consent is rape” as a PSA because “this group of our mascots are too stupid or culturally backwards to know that but somehow it’s still OK to flood the streets with them.”

the contradiction is bitter. we grant them licence to menace but courts let them walk because “they could not be expected to know better.”

nothing is ever the fault of the one who did it.

clancy rally organizer renee kimball: “Any one of us could have been sitting in your chair. So we are behind you, 100 percent. Lindsay shouldn’t even be on trial right now; the systems of mental health care should be.”

spoken on courthouse steps:

“One of my sister-in-laws, it could be one of my best friends, and it could be me.” “We see ourselves in Lindsay Clancy.” “We are all Lindsay Clancy.”

it’s a worst of all worlds societal solvent rooted in the bad, superpositonal notion of “schrödinger’s agency,” a human at once responsible enough to be allowed self-determination but lacking the responsibility to be held to account for the exercise of it. we cannot know which until we observe whether or not they did a bad thing.

they can live in society, but if they attack it, it’s society’s fault.

that’s just flat out madness and mistaking it for justice is a wedge to destroy any notion of a social contract.

the rules are (and must be) simple.

if you want liberty, it comes with accountability; if you refuse to be accountable, you cannot have liberty.

accountability is the highest civic virtue, the one from which all others emerge.

its refusal is a rejection of both agency and of civilization.

the whole of the claims around ideas like "society must protect me but not my children, donate money here" stand as self-indictment of incapacity to live in a golden rule society.

“too ignorant and inbred to know that rape is wrong” stands as same.

likewise “so marginal that all murder is self defense.”

such demands for special dispensation are the precise definition of being unable to be in a social contract.

to be protected, one must be bound.

that is and must be the deal.

definitionally and functionally, these two factors must be reciprocal: my binding to the contract is your protection under it and vice versa. i respect your rights, you respect mine.

if either of us fails to uphold this, there is no contract and if one of us repeatedly claims incapacity to adhere to such ideas and demands the right to violate the lives and property of others, then no contract is possible.

that’s what these deluded advocates are missing. they are outright arguing that they cannot be expected to live in a society with equal (and golden) rules.

when one party or group seeks to possess agency but refuses to be accountable for its application, it's a pure game of privilege. this is the ask of a child, of an inferior, of someone pleading the explicit inability to take equal part in the responsibility of morality and liberty.

accommodation for such people can be made, but never as full participants in a society. when you refuse your responsibility, you cede your rights. in no small irony, they are making the precise argument for the forced mental holds they so abhor. we will not and cannot comply. do not expect or demand it. we’ll not be bound. but no touching us. we have rights!

this is why the whole DEI/wokester ethos is inherently antithetical to civilization. the whole idea is just squalling children demanding to be treated like the adults in the room and demanding special protection they refuse to afford to others.

nothing is ever the fault of "us." it's the society that's blamed.

and that's the unraveling of everything.

it's astonishing to me how broken some of these minds have become and the weirdly self-important pride they seem to take in the breakage. 1000 tik tok and insta selfie videos stand testament. inability to manage self seems to be being held forth as some sort of status marker. what on earth is one to do with that? it's pretty wild stuff.

it rises to the level of self-harm.

these neo-anti-inclusion activists have unwittingly become the precise things their forebears fought against, a living embodiment of an argument to deny rights.

lindsay clancy seems like another one of those moments where we need the reasoned and principled minds to stand up and say "enough" and for the real humans (especially the women), those of agency and ethics, to say "not in my name."

i hope this happens.

every time people keep standing behind these anti-heroes, it sets those who stood back a century.