Chilly night. I spent it all bundled up in a knitted tabard with a blanket across my legs, and Serena-cat curled up on the blanket, to keep me warm.
Court of Popular Opinion, the
I personally incline to believe that Lindsay Clancy dunnit, although and because she's insane. But I could be wrong. To illustrate the psychological principle involved, here's a harmless example, a "Three Truths and a Lie" meme from a blog of years gone by...
Shamrock tattoo? Lots of people have tattoos these days, especially if we count the temporary kind. One white eyebrow? Now that's rare, and the blogger had posted selfies that didn't show it. Work experience as a nightwatchman? Sure; some places hire ex-cops or veterans to stomp around with pistols, and some hire nice ladies to sit at desks reading magazines, depending on what's to be watched. Runway modelling? She could easily have done that. I was 99% sure the lie was that she had a white eyebrow.
And I was 100% wrong.
Like other people saying that there's room for doubt that LC killed her children, I'm not saying she's any kind of role model or heroine or inspiration. She's a very, very sick young woman. We could all see that on the TV news clips. She's taken drugs that are associated with violent insanity, and apart from that she was also doped up to the eyeballs for display in the courtroom, and she's a wheelchair dweller. She's not going to walk past you on the street any time soon. Probably not in her lifetime. She'll be lucky if she can recover memories such as which is the tub and which is the toilet. Even about the cruel things people say about her on X, she's probably too far gone to care. But if PC exploited his wife's condition in order to get rid of his inconvenient children and start all over with "honey," he wouldn't be the first man who's done that.
Those of us who've been following the issue know that a lot of people who've used SSRIs develop psychotic conditions. Women don't expect themselves to be too tough to complain about pain as a side effect from a new medication, so typically they report the early stages of the pattern and get their meds changed before they start planning homicide-suicide. 90% of those who go all the way to homicide-suicide are male. But when women reach that stage, well, these people work themselves into the homicide-suicide stage because the drugs they're using give them painful muscle cramps. They don't have strong characters; we know that because they're taking drugs. They don't have strong bodies, either. They are very weak so they often choose the easiest, closest targets for the homicides. In this outlier segment of humankind, men most often kill the women living with them; women most often kill the children. When they have access to firearms or motor vehicles, then they may also kill strangers, co-workers, or even friends. If not stopped they usually go on to try to kill themselves; due to weakness and exhaustion they may fail, but they try. "Killer moms" was a cliche in the newspapers in the early 2000s.
LC's having killed the children would fit a pattern...a pattern that many people, and I'm one, want to see documented and demonstrated to the public. It has very little to do with female hormones; women who use SSRIs may have unbalanced hormones but, if anything, female hormones may protect women from reaching the homicide-suicide stage. It has everything to do with popular and profitable drugs.
It is just possible that my, that our, belief that LC dunnit is a case of confirmation bias. That we want a poster child for SSRI-related psychosis, to draw attention to the overprescription of these drugs and the harm they do, so badly that we want LC to be the said poster child...well, she could still be that, couldn't she, even if PC dunnit.
History, Local
Vince Staten:
Music
Batch.
Adrian von Ziegler.
Mark Knopfler.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Spandau Ballet.
Johann Sebastian Bach.
Snowy White. (I don't care how White he is; to me that sounds like a woman's name.)
University of North Carolina School of the Arts. (Warning. If you listen to the words this is an appalling choice of a musical for college students... In the literal sense of the old English word "hell" was part of the word family that includes "hole" and "cellar." In pre-Christian times it meant a grave, or the grave. In some parts of England people talked casually about "helling" their root crops in their root cellars. So in literal fact we all do go to that kind of "hell"...but still. These are songs from a musical about a young man dying of cancer. Don't give me "dark"; for teenagers this material is ghoulish. Teenagers aren't professional troupers who learn a different musical every week. They're learning their way through each one; they live and breathe each set of words for months on end, and they don't often have a wide enough stock of words, songs, and ideas to balance the ones that are being drilled into their brains. For one student a musical about cancer might be comforting, providing solidarity; for ten it might be unbearably depressing. I think the group's leader may have lived, by now, to wish the group had stuck with Gilbert & Sullivan.)
John Denver.
Leonard Cohen.
John Rich. (If everyone starts learning it now, everyone can sing it when snow falls!)
No comments:
Post a Comment