That Elusive Utopia
We’ve occasionally dipped a toe in the various trans subreddits, marvelling at the inhabitants and their improbable woes, but other bedlamite communities are available.
For instance, we could linger in the mood room of Reddit’s anarchists.
Where questions abound:
There’s a lot to unpack in there, what with the implications of crime and the assumption of some inexhaustible human kindness, but let’s press on. In the replies, deep and radical knowledge may await:
My partner would go out and dumpster dive, and I would forage and garden, that was our “grocery shopping.” I knew where to find fruit and wild vegetables. It took about a year to learn what was edible in the area.
A year of hit-and-miss. Bodes well for the digestive tract. And yes, the thrill of other people’s bin contents has been mentioned here before.
Not really selling the lifestyle, I fear.
Living free. In other people’s bins.
So not entirely liberated from those capitalist shackles, then.
I’m sure it wasn’t due to any maladjustment.
I truly miss the experience, but I believe it was too much for my ex to handle and it accelerated their mental health issues.
Okay then.
Other enthusiasts offer their hard-won wisdom:
The word is thievery. Lol.
However,
And then there’s this guru of the alternative:
It’s all kindness, kindness, burglary.
But it’s earning a living that’s ugly, you know.
Readers with a taste for dissonance and convolution will find much to chew on.
Update, via the comments:
EmC quotes this,
And adds,
Squatting – theft.
Commercial burglaries – theft.
Retail thefts – theft.
It is worth noting the extent to which this supposedly heroic “rejection of capitalism,” all this awfully pious “life without money,” does seem to depend on freeloading and thieving from others. Specifically, from those who don’t regard earning a living, supporting themselves and their families, as a vice. Some kind of unendurable indignity.
Decide.
“If you live there, it’s yours,” says one participant.
At which point, a psychological profile may become apparent.
Speaking of human kindness, there are tip jar buttons below.
The “reasonable doubt” combined with (supposedly) her not having any previous significant mental illnesses then the introduction of Zoloft and whatever into the mix makes me more favorable to that argument in an analysis of discrete events sense. Though I now see she was on SSRIs in nursing school. Gee, I wonder how common that is? Yet I have a very hard time, even with the drugs involved, understanding how she could do all those things over all that time that it took, the planning, etc., It wasn’t an impulse decision to kill those children.
On the other hand, since covid it has become very clear to me how thick the medical profession is, most especially the nurses, regarding arrogance and Lindsey herself is likely no exception. Were she anything like these jurors we are hearing from, I would attribute that to being the root of her problem. Still, were the death penalty on the table I would have a hard time convicting her. And yet there is no way I want this person walking free. Can a jury consider such a thing? Can they weigh allowing the accused to say, live next door to them, a factor in their decision?
Either way, I think there is way too much confidence (and God it pains me to say this) on both sides of this issue. There are a huge number of dynamics involved here regarding what is and is not acceptable legally, ethical, and morally to reach a decision in such a case. And especially in regards to free will, something our greatest philosophers have debated for centuries with little progress. Which is partly why juries are composed of 12 people.
Of course this whole trial is in the context of Lindsay, the children become just an afterthought.
Assuming that the landlord-tenant relationship has no future in an anarchist world, how might a couple thousand anarchists decide who lives where?
Later that day…
Right, these alleged anarchists basically want a government. Not exactly the brightest socks in the drawer, are they.
Hopeless unrealism and an unpleasant sense of entitlement do seem to be defining attributes.
Still processing the invoking of kindness while boasting of burglary.
I may be some time.
Well, it is a kindness that the people who were burgled no longer have the stress and worry about their stuff being burgled, it is simple geometric logic.
I don’t know the average age of the participants, but it does read as drearily adolescent.
From the chap quoted in the post, the one whose ex kept having fights with, well, everyone:
Why, it’s almost as if the idea were incompatible with adult responsibilities. And, I dare say, adulthood generally.
What I didn’t know until recently is that it’s possible for a woman to safely take an SSRI prior to becoming pregnant, and then later after giving birth, she becomes susceptible to bipolar activation.
Clancy had taken an SSRI in nursing school to overcome excessive nervousness regarding public speaking. It was temporary.
This is the original filing of the suit against her providers. There’s an amendment adding more caregivers, but I can’t find the link to it.
The suit says that after the births of all three of her children, she’d enter a state of hypomania a couple months later: she’d CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN or get up at 04:00 and do vigorous exercise or otherwise be brimming with energy and sleep only 3-4 hours a night. Then the hypomania would eventually calm down until the next child was born. With each birth the hypomania got worse and lasted longer.
An attentive clinician would recognize that as a bipolar-ish state triggered by giving birth. It’s a known phenomenon, albeit rare, and it means that she’s got latent bipolar tendencies. It also means that if you give her SSRIs, it will activate the condition.
As you read the allegations, you see someone who knows that something has gone terribly wrong, and yet everyone she reaches out to fails to recognize that she had a bad reaction to Zoloft and so moar SSRIs were not indicated.
If the Zoloft triggered a full-blown bipolar state, that state would have lasted long after she stopped taking the meds. People think that they have to show that she had tons of the meds in her system at the time, but when people react badly to psych meds, the resulting injury to the brain can last for months after, if not longer.
People wonder about the prior planning and stuff. The key issue is that she was deeply suicidal FIRST. The decision to take her kids along with her came afterwards. The thing about a suicidal brain is that it tells you that your life is a burning building, so you can either burn alive or jump and end it quickly, just as the people in the upper stories of the Twin Towers did.
The other thing is that in some psychotic states you can retain much of your executive functions but your reality-testing is warped. She may very well have sent Patrick out so that she could end things quickly, but that doesn’t rule out psychosis.
Suicidal people reach a point where they decide to jump rather than continue burning. After that, they conceal their intentions from others because they don’t want to be stopped. They might even seem to improve and become cheerier, because now they see an end to their suffering. It’s a common trap that caregivers fall into, thinking that the patient is out of danger when in fact they’re standing on the ledge. (“SHE LIED TO HER PROVIDERS!” Well, yeah, that’s what suicidal people do.)
A lot of people think the suicide attempt was fake, but her spinal column injuries indicate that she went out the window head-first and landed squarely on her skull on the frozen ground. To me this is the irrefutable fact: she intended to die that night, and she very nearly did. When they brought her in, her core temp was 82F and she went into cardiac arrest, then needed significant transfusions. Had Patrick been gone a bit longer, she probably would have died.
So whatever your theory of the case, you’ll need to start with the fact that she intended to die that night, and interpret all the other facts in that light.
I have long wondered what fraction of the people visiting food pantries are just moochers.
But imagine. A revolution fuelled by cashew milk and vegan pseudo-cheese. Possibly retrieved from someone’s bin.
In Massachusetts, the jury has the option of returning lesser verdicts. The DA charged first-degree, so they could have returned second-degree, manslaughter (voluntary & involuntary), other lesser charges, not criminally responsible, or not guilty at all.
It sounds like the 11 jurors wanted to let her off free and clear, whereas #12 couldn’t bring himself to say she wasn’t criminally responsible.
They were saying he couldn’t seem to let go of the fact that she’d killed three kids, as if that meant nothing to them at all.
Yikes.
It’s one thing to say “This is horrible! Maybe she was too crazy to not do this, but it is still horrible!” and quite another to say, “Kids? What kids.”
Those women scare me to death. They would totally be in charge of the death camps and not bat an eye.
Note, however, the number of commenters who unashamedly admitted to stealing.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the premier of Star Trek.
Damn, I feel old.
Really liked it a lot. But even though I was just a child I noticed lots of flaws.
Hold that thought ’til Friday.
I have the misfortune to be able to confirm essentially everything dicentra had to say about SSRIs, BPD, and suicide planning.
Strangulation takes time. It is a very pointedly personal act and done to prove dominance and power. IDGAF about the hand-waverium about PP psychosis … 3 babies were killed in a very brutal way and very obviously knowing the person who was supposed to love them and protect them was doing it.
She needs to be out-of-society forever. 11 jurors would have her on the street in 6 months.
And I’ll have to hope for vigilante justice at that point.
I.Don’t.Care. She has given up all right to remain in society ever again. If this is about where she’ll be housed for the rest of her life, sure, appropriate discussion. But she doesn’t ever get a chance to do this all over again ala Constance Fisher.
Add Caryn Johnson to that list.
I’d rather you’d rescue me from that thought with something cheerful and uplifting.
…
…
But then why I am here?
There is an increasing tendency of young-ish American leftist women to treat mental disorders as a political movement and as a justification for bad behaviors…
And yet I remain so amiable. I’m positively bubbly.
The un-personing of Susan Sontag. Thread here.
From the thread …
Truth has never been a Leftwing value — social pull has.
Also, I would say, love of a cause which gave them absolute moral authority to do as their whims led them. Giving up the ideology would mean giving up their certainty, their moral authority, and their license to do anything to anyone–all to be replaced by doubt, humility, and hesitancy, which are far less fun.
And also their happy fantasy of a perfectible socialist utopia.
The tragic vision is, in contrast, not fun.
Looks to me like some shøt you can buy at Claire’s but okay.
With a stretchy exercise band you can tie an overhand knot and walk away.
Patrick testified that he had a hard time removing the bands. The prosecution wanted you to think she sat there for 5 minutes, straining to hold the bands tight as she watched the life drain from their eyes.
The prosecutor pulled the bands out of a bag and pretended to loop them around, then she dropped them on the table as they opened back up. It was a deceitful little performance. It was like OJ pretending to put the glove on over the latex.
What if she actually was non compos mentis? Not as a lame excuse but in actual fact. What if she was given the wrong meds by an incompetent Millennial woman, which triggered awful effects in her brain, and every time she went to another provider (all of them women, and most of them Millennials), they kept giving her the wrong meds and misdiagnosing her and reacting improperly to her condition?
Her providers were women from the Participation Trophy generation. They can’t even read analog clocks. Did we not predict disaster as soon as they got into medicine and other critical positions? Have we not strewn plenty of pixels on this very blog complaining about how their arrogance is proportional to their brick stupidity?
Here’s the thing: Patrick agrees with the narrative provided by the defense. He was there. He saw her go insane. If anyone would want to nail her to the wall for this, it would be him.
He got married earlier this year (to a woman who looks exactly like Lindsay). He has no reason to be loyal to Lindsay, and yet he’s also suing her providers for incompetence. I’ll take his interpretation over that of a DA who says “impor’ant” like a California teen.
I’m sorry to hear that. Unless they’ve been there, people don’t understand the depths of despair and distortion that a malfunctioning brain can drive you to.
It’s the lowest goddamn low there is.
Three kids are still dead. Dead at her hands. She is forever unacceptable in society at large. Stick her on an island or mental institution or prison.
That she refuses to take any responsibility for her acts, even *if* she couldn’t help herself, condemns her more. If she regained her morals after the act, she should have been ashamed enough to serve her life locked up.
And if you have any shred of morality after you come out of the “episode”, you’d STILL take responsibility for it.
She’s trying to avoid taking any responsibility for viciously murdering her own children.
While doing some research, I found a Substack article that’s interesting and subscribed, for free, to the author’s Substack.
Three minutes later, I discovered that as a result I’ve been auto-subscribed to the Substacks of half a dozen other people, none of whom are of interest to me. I’m now having to unsubscribe, individually, from the Substacks I’m not interested in. Because if there’s one thing I need in life, it’s more trash in my inbox.
Apparently, this is a thing that Substack thinks readers will appreciate. That it will foster warm feelings.
“There was no compassion . . . which I guess is expected of a prosecution.”
To begin, the prosecution is prohibited from bringing character witnesses in. And under Massacuseets law, unlike other states, when a defendant rasies an affirmative defense, the prosecution has the burden of proof to show the negative beyond a reasonable doubt.
But what strikes me with this statement is the lack of maturity, the expectation that ugly facts – three small children are dead at their mother’s hands – must be claoked with “niceness,” must be sugarcoated so as not to be “mean.”
But it is not cruel to face reality, as ugly as it might be. In fact, that is a juror’s charge: learn the facts that are presented and based upon them – and them alone – render a verdict.
I think that is less and less possible today because of the emphasis society places on “one’s own truth” and “one’s own lived experience.”
Unfortunately, I suspect that this juror would not expect “compassion” if the defendant was not “her,” that is to say, a White suburban woman of some affluence. I believe I have mentioned before of my family connection to the famous axe murderer, Lizzie Borden. While criminal forensics were simply not yet developed at the time of her trial, I think it cannot be discounted that she was acquitted because to the jury, she was “one of us,” a member of the upper echelon of Fall River, Massachusetts. How could a woman of such breeding commit such a heinous crime?
Maybe we do need professional jurors.
There are websites which automatically subscribe anyone who posts a comment.
There are websites which ignore all unsubscribe requests.
I’m assuming there was some carefully hidden opt-out option that I missed, but it evidently defaults to opt-in. Which seems a bit much, really.
I very rarely read Substacks. Once in a blue moon there’s something of interest, but it’s not a platform I’m drawn to – it just strikes me as too generic. Like a newsletter with fairly limited reader interaction and participation. I’m sure there’s good stuff out there, but as a platform it all looks so interchangeable, so lacking in character.
On the upside, it does spare users the hassle of site maintenance, plug-in updates, hosting costs, etc. I can see the appeal in that, certainly. And when moving the blog from Typepad, I briefly toyed with the idea of using Substack. But again, the format itself just doesn’t woo me.
Indeed.
But I am thankful that you didn’t go the borderline-insane James Lileks route with a radically different UI which makes navigation “less than effortless”. I sometimes wonder if people have told him that this discourages frequent visits and deep dives.
Heh. If you think jurors professionally employed by our disgraceful legal system would improve things…I seriously doubt any such arrangement/configuration would have been more likely to return a guilty verdict.
Again, much of this verdict depends on what free will means. Literal words of which of course did not come up at all in the trial, at least according to grok. Some sort of Massachusetts criminal responsibility test was referenced. Because free will as a historical philosophical concept is probably abhorrent to the legal system.
There are soooo many aspects of this case, many of which generated arguments for people talking past each other. All with tremendous confidence on shifting grounds. To me, the case itself, the jury verdict, isn’t the issue*. Though now that these horrible women on the jury, the stereotype bullies that make up our nursing and teaching professions, jury selection seems highly suspect. It’s the (further) outing of the kinds of women who support her regardless of the facts. Much of the jury verdict hinges on what exactly the judges instructions are and in how those words are defined and interpreted by each individual juror.
As for jury instructions, I posed the following to someone on X and got a bit of a scolding. Guessing this person is some variant of a legal asshole. The only person more arrogant than the medical professionals are the legal assholes. To wit:
A discussion ensued.
*And again, to be clear, I want this woman put away, be it prison or an asylum, if not for life, for a very, very long time.
Since the release of interviews with the Clancy Jury Karens, Dr. Clown PhD has dropped a magnificent Xit (pronounced “schit” – which I understand is the technical term for a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter) of footage secretly filmed within the jury deliberation room.
What TikTok-addled clown thought badgering people is a viable marketing technique? Have the same problem accepting e-mail communications from retailers.
https://counter-currents.com/2026/09/it-was-easy-to-smear-charlie-kirk-in-a-foreign-country/
@Stephanie Richer, don’t know if it’s of any interest but I did enjoy Florence King’s article on Lizzie Borden.
Human rights tribunal.
Regarding Mr Kirk, this came to mind:
As an illustration of the psychology of uninhibited progressivism, it’s quite… vivid. And as I said in the linked post, it does invite questions as to the vetting of public school educators and the kinds of personalities the job seems to attract in high concentrations.
WTP, A frustrating exchange. Because mr. Truth.bombs did not argue the scenario you presented, but made up his own. A fairly common occurrence, of course, cf. any discussion of “racism”.
This happens ALL THE TIME. If I simply remark that e.g. the video shows somebody said Y or even NOT X, instead of the supposed horrible X, I get looks like I just deposited a dog turd on the table. Because pointing out errors of fact is RUDE. Bad Form, you know.
Heshe wasn’t “adequately trans.”But the reason for being ‘trans’ is inadequacy.
She went from Anglo to Saxon in a trice.
Let us not forget that although a gentlewoman, Lizzie was no stranger to labor. Her father was a notorious miser and so all the women did housework and yardwork, Her hefting an axe would be easy.
FWIW, Grandpa Sears (my father’s maternal grandfather) always held that she did it and that she frequently “entertained” a “special lady friend” who came up from New York or Boston. There are other connections between Harry and Lizzie Sears with the Bordens and the Rev. Edwin Buck, going back even before the murder. I do think that Grandpa’s grounds maintenance business got a little VC from Miss Borden.
[ Schedules tomorrow’s Ephemera, eyes tiffin. ]
For those unfamiliar with the concept of tiffin.