Joshe

I just wonder if a certain combo of meds could have produced her particular claimed psychosis. I'm just trying to steelman her position. Either way though, that evidence you highlighted earlier regarding the voices only appearing during that 20 minute window is too suspicious for me to not lean towards lucid intent. Given that, I'm not sure if there's any evidence at all that could be presented to make me lean the other way. It's just too suspicious.

Schizophrenic patients

Yeah, I lean that way too but how do we know that the cocktail of meds she was on couldn't have produced something like a command hallucination? Have the experts said that's not a thing?

Or a deliberate motive. The problem is we can't know. Right, and this is why she might actually get a NGRI verdict. But how can we know it wasn't planned? Think about it. There are many moms out there who want to be free from their kids for whatever reason. Probably tens of thousands in the US, or at least thousands. I even see local stories pop up like this every couple of months. Recently, a mother and father killed their daughter and tried to dispose of her body in an acid barrel, then called the police and told them the location where she "went missing". The police found the body in the barrel with the parent's DNA all over the outside of the barrel. The ones that make the news are just the ones that went through with it. So, if you really wanted to kill your kids and not be imprisoned, it's not unreasonable to consider someone could concoct a plan that involves admitting to doctors you want to kill your kids months in advance and get yourself on a ton of meds. Again, I'm not saying she did this, I'm just saying it's not unreasonable at all to have on the table, especially with this country's fascination with true crime. If a moderately intelligent person and good actor wants to get away with murder, it's possible. If she has below average IQ, I would probably be more inclined to think she didn't plan it. TBH, I haven't dove deep into her story. Life changes, people change. It's not off at all to me that someone who was once happy became unhappy. Also, a lot of people are self-deceived that they're happy and then wake up to the fact that they're not. This could have happened with her, as it's common.

Check this out: Real psychosis ≠ psychosis caused it "Was it real" and "did it cause this" are two totally different questions, and answering the first one doesn't answer the second. Why realness doesn't entail causation, even for a command hallucination. This is the crux, because intuitively a voice saying "kill them" during the killing feels like it must be the cause if it's real. Three logical wedges say otherwise. First, the clinically documented one: most people who experience command hallucinations don't obey them. Compliance is the exception, not the rule. So "real voice" and "voice that determined action" are demonstrably separable states — the population of voice-hearers is mostly non-compliers, which means a voice's presence underdetermines the behavior. Second, overdetermination: she could have a real hallucination and independent sufficient reasons (the months of suicidal ideation, the conviction the children would suffer without her — the prosecution's alternate theory). If both were present, the act might have happened without the voice, in which case the voice was real and causally idle — a passenger, not a driver. Third, and most important for the legal-shaped version of the question: even a real, genuinely motivating voice doesn't entail lost capacity. Hearing a command, being moved by it, and being unable to refuse it are three distinct states. The insanity question isn't "did psychosis influence her" but "did it strip her ability to do otherwise" — and influence doesn't entail compulsion, logically or clinically.

If you understand evil you can empathize with it, because you know it's unconscious and detrimental to the human it exists in. But that doesn't mean you have to get lost in the empathy. You can feel empathy AND prefer justice at the same time. "People of the Lie" by Scott Peck is a good look into the psychology of evil.

Yeah, that's very damning.

lol, wtf is wrong with you? I'm not sure if you're being playful or just get off on insulting people.

Listen, I'm with you and feel deep empathy for Clancy. Even if she committed the crime outside of psychosis, I still feel deeply sorry for her because she's in an absolute living hell, no matter the circumstances. But I'm considering more than her. You have to consider more of the downstream effects of acquitting her. For example, it teaches every future baby-killer that a string of doctor visits buys a NGRI verdict. (not-guilty by reason of insanity) Also, we can't just rely on an argument about her interior. Even if everything she says is true, the fact of her crime remains. If we start going by who is more believable, you can see how that leads to problems. I'm not saying she's guilty or innocent, I'm just saying there are major consequences for acquittal that should be taken into account.

Andrea Yates, Texas, 2001/2006 — the direct Clancy precedent. Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub, called 911 and her husband herself, and told police she'd killed them to save them from Satan — believing she was so corrupted that her children were doomed unless they died while still innocent. Documented history: two suicide attempts, multiple psychiatric hospitalizations, postpartum psychosis diagnosis, and a psychiatrist who'd warned against having more children. First jury convicted her in under four hours (Texas puts the insanity burden on the defendant, and its M'Naghten test asks only whether she knew the act was "wrong" — she'd said she knew it was against the law). Conviction overturned on appeal over false expert testimony; the 2006 retrial jury found her NGRI. Same woman, same facts, same state — opposite verdicts. It's the cleanest real-world demonstration that the verdict measures the legal machinery and the jury, not the defendant's mind. If you want one case to sit next to Clancy, it's this one. People v. Decina, New York, 1956 — culpability transfers backward to the last voluntary act. Decina had a known seizure disorder. He chose to drive anyway, had a seizure behind the wheel, his car jumped the curb and killed four children. His defense was pure intruder logic: the seizure was involuntary, there was no conscious act, so there's no crime — you can't punish a man for what his body did while his mind was absent. The court said: wrong timestamp. The criminal act wasn't the seizure — it was getting into the car, fully lucid, knowing what his condition could do. Convicted of criminally negligent homicide. The principle: trace back from the harm to the last moment of control and knowledge, and responsibility attaches there — it's the rule that kills "but I was unconscious" whenever a lucid earlier self knowingly deployed a dangerous later self (driving with untreated epilepsy, drinking into a blackout, another Ambien after prior episodes). One caveat: the transfer is negligence-grade, not murder-grade — the lucid self took a reckless risk, it didn't intend a death. Kenneth Parks, Canada, 1987 — the clean automatism acquittal. Parks got up in the night, drove 14 miles to his in-laws' house, beat and stabbed his mother-in-law to death, seriously injured his father-in-law, then drove to a police station and said "I think I have killed some people" — all, the defense argued, while sleepwalking. He had no motive (he was close with his in-laws, who called him "the gentle giant"), a heavy family history of parasomnias, and EEG findings consistent with the claim. Acquitted outright, and the Supreme Court of Canada upheld it in R v. Parks (1992). This is the case that proves courts will accept the intruder logic when the circumstantial silhouette is clean: no motive, no history of violence, documented sleep disorder, and behavior too bizarre to be a plan. It's the mirror image of Decina — no voluntary act anywhere upstream. Brian Thomas, Wales, 2009 — same defense, different flavor. Thomas, a man with a 50-year documented history of night terrors, strangled his wife of 40 years in their camper van while dreaming he was fighting off an intruder — they'd moved the van that evening to escape some rowdy kids, and the threat apparently followed him into sleep. He called 999 himself, hysterical. The prosecution withdrew mid-trial after its own psychiatric experts agreed he was in automatism; the judge told him he bore no responsibility. Useful because it shows even a prosecution conceding the defense when the evidence profile is right — and because the "victim is whoever happened to be nearby" logic is horrifyingly literal. Herbert Weinstein, New York, 1991 — the brain scan in the courtroom. Weinstein, a 65-year-old ad executive with no history of violence, strangled his wife during an argument and threw her body from their 12th-floor window to stage a suicide. A PET scan revealed an orange-sized arachnoid cyst compressing his frontal lobe. Note what the staging behavior does to the intruder theory: he was organized enough to construct a cover-up, which cuts against "no capacity" — yet the lesion was undeniably real and sitting in the decision-making hardware. Prosecutors, reportedly worried a jury would acquit once they saw the scan, offered a manslaughter plea. This is the "what if it were a verifiable brain event" hypothetical escaped into reality — and it landed exactly on the hard question: was the lesion the cause, or an accelerant on an existing fire? Nobody could decompose the causal shares between the cyst and the marriage, so the system split the difference with a plea. Whitman gets cited as the thought experiment; Weinstein is what actually happens when the scan shows up in court. R v. Quick, England, 1973 — the diabetic nurse and the insulin blackout. Quick, a diabetic nurse, assaulted a patient while hypoglycemic — too much insulin, not enough food. The court's ruling drew a distinction that directly answers the "why does the source of the malfunction matter?" question: a malfunction caused by an external factor (the insulin injection) is automatism, a full defense — while a malfunction arising from internal disease would be insanity, which leads to commitment rather than acquittal. Same defendant, same blackout, completely different legal fate depending on whether the cause came from outside or inside the body. The kicker: this means the law's answer to "why is exogenous more forgivable?" is partly just administrative — external causes are treated as one-off accidents unlikely to recur, internal ones as standing dangers requiring containment. Recurrence risk, not moral desert, drives the line.

Learning a bit: Automatism — Acting without conscious control: sleepwalking, seizures, certain drug reactions. The body performed the act; nobody was driving. Legally distinct from insanity — automatism says there was no voluntary act at all, which is a complete defense leading to walking free. Insanity says a diseased mind produced the act, which leads to a hospital. Intruder theory — The idea underlying the insanity and automatism defenses: the person who committed the act was not, in the relevant sense, the person. A psychotic episode, seizure, or sleepwalking state is treated like a temporary intruder operating the body — so punishing the normal self for the intruder's act is punishing someone for another entity's crime. The whole legal fight is over two questions the theory can't answer by itself: how do you prove the intruder was real, and how sealed off from the normal self was it — especially when the normal self had months of warning that an intruder was forming. NGRI (Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity) — The verdict that says: you did it, but the law can't blame you for it. Not a release — it routes you to indefinite psychiatric commitment, often longer than the prison sentence would've been. Massachusetts calls it "lack of criminal responsibility" because it avoids the word insanity. M'Naghten test — The older, narrower insanity standard (from an 1843 English assassination case): did a mental disease prevent you from knowing what you were doing, or knowing it was wrong? Purely cognitive — if you knew, you're guilty, no matter how little control you had. Texas used this on Andrea Yates: she knew drowning her kids was illegal, so jury #1 convicted, even though she believed she was saving them from Satan. Model Penal Code test — The broader, modern standard (Massachusetts uses it): did mental disease strip your substantial capacity to either appreciate the wrongfulness of your conduct or conform your conduct to the law? That second half — the volitional prong — is the big difference: it acquits people who knew it was wrong but had lost the ability to stop. Federal law deleted the volitional prong after Hinckley shot Reagan. Massachusetts kept it. Clancy gets two doors where a federal defendant gets one. Mens rea — "Guilty mind." The mental-state ingredient of a crime. Almost every crime = a bad act plus a culpable mental state; kill someone with neither intent nor recklessness and you may have committed no crime at all. The entire insanity debate is a fight over what happens when the mind that formed the intent was broken. Actus reus — "Guilty act" — the physical half. Must be voluntary. This is automatism's hook: a sleepwalker's strangling isn't a voluntary act, so the crime is missing an ingredient before you even reach the mind. Affirmative defense — A defense that says "even if I did everything charged, here's why I'm still not liable" — self-defense, duress, insanity in most states. Matters because whoever raises it usually has to prove it. Most states make defendants prove insanity. Massachusetts flipped this: once raised, the prosecution must prove sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. Burden of proof — Who loses when nobody can tell. That's the real function: it decides undecidable cases. Same deadlocked-in-the-middle jury convicts in Texas and acquits in Massachusetts purely because the burden points different directions. In an insanity trial about an unmeasurable interior, the burden placement basically is the ruling. Last voluntary act doctrine (Decina rule) — Culpability transfers backward to the last moment you had control and knowledge. The seizure wasn't the crime; getting in the car was. Kills the "but I was unconscious" defense whenever a lucid earlier-you knowingly deployed a dangerous later-you: driving with untreated epilepsy, drinking yourself into a blackout, taking a fourth Ambien after three prior sleepwalking episodes. Malingering — Faking or exaggerating symptoms for legal benefit. The clinical term for "playing crazy." Forensic psychiatrists run structured tests for it, and prosecutors argue it constantly — it's the technical name for the exact suspicion driving the "she went to doctors for plausible deniability" read. Hung jury / mistrial — No unanimous verdict either way = no verdict at all. Not an acquittal — the state can retry from scratch, because double jeopardy only attaches to actual verdicts. An 11–1 for acquittal and an 11–1 for conviction produce the identical legal nothing. Dynamite charge (Allen charge) — The instruction a judge reads to a deadlocked jury, formally asking the minority jurors to reconsider whether their doubt is reasonable given that colleagues disagree. Named for what it's designed to do to holdouts. Some states ban it as coercive; Massachusetts uses a softened version (Tuey-Rodriquez). Information cascade — When people can see others' choices before making their own, early choices snowball and the group converges on whatever started the chain — independent judgment dies. Why "Ask the Audience" (simultaneous, private keypads) hits ~91% while a jury room (sequential, public, pressured) manufactures agreement instead of measuring it. Condorcet jury theorem — 1785 math: if each voter is even slightly better than a coin flip and votes independently, the majority of a large group approaches infallibility. The catch is independence — deliberation destroys it. The theorem is the reason a crowd of amateurs beats one expert on the game show, and the reason twelve jurors influencing each other are epistemically fewer than twelve people.

If you believe her story, then you know she already attempted suicide. When you live with images of strangling your own kids, that would move you into suicidal ideation. So if she does commit suicide, that would be the main contributing factor - the images/memories of what she has done and daily living in the world she created where she killed her kids and jumped out a window to paralysis. Maximum societal shame is second to that. Imagine if all the details were the same but instead killing her own children, she killed someone else’s. Would empathy be lower and punishment easier to dole out? If so, what does that say?

If you strangle your kids, you’re psychologically diseased. Doesn’t matter if it’s involuntary psychosis, OCPD, or just total conscious selfishness. Premeditated murder = sick in the head. Do you have any idea how dumb and fucked in the head you gotta be to plan the murder of your 3 kids? To ideate on that until you actually act on it, means your psychology is severely compromised, even if you're aware of and nurture the thoughts. Justice here is tragic, yet necessary. IMO, she should be locked away for the rest of her life, even if she was suffering a psychotic break. Society can't risk showing mercy to child-killers.

Yeah, for many reasons. For example, in this instance, I have a hard time believing you don't understand the difference between a claim like mine and a falsifiable claim. You keep asking me to prove something that I can't and then marking my position fallacious because I don't prove it. The knowledge stems from pattern recognition trained on volume. It would be like telling me to prove how I knew I was beat and should fold at the poker table. I can't prove that. The inability to prove it doesn't make the read circular or unfounded. It's a perceptual skill. A self-sealing structure can't distinguish its strong reads from its weak ones. I'm simply saying, I have a strong read here, and the best I can transfer it to you is point you to Horney and hope you can get there. I think you understand all this. See, right here, my read is shaky. But if it's right, from my perception, what would that say about you? Can you see how it reads as bad-faith? And not just because this single instance, but because I've seen over a dozen other similar instances. For the time, I remain open as to the cause. Also, I don't experience "charge" as negative or toxic. It's a natural part of being a human. I meant no ill-will. Also, just because I suspect less than ideal character traits in a person doesn't mean I dislike the person (I have bad traits as well). If I didn't like you, I wouldn't be conversing with you. So please don't think I'm over here with some super negative image of you. This is all fun-adjacent for me, lol. But anyway, yeah, cheers mate 😆

Sorry, what exactly did I skip over? You asked "why do you think people miss it?" I responded "because it's a hard thing to see" and explained why it's hard. It's like asking someone who can read sheet music why most people can't and they respond "because they haven't put in the work", and then calling their reasoning for why most people can't read music circular because it relies on them having superior capability. It's fucking absurd Natasha. And I think you know it is. Also, if anyone disagrees with me and wants elaboration/explanation or to stress test it, it's not like I haven't went into great detail about my position. I've elaborated on it and pointed to resources that flesh most of it out, many times. I'm pretty sure you've read most of the stuff I've written on the topic, as you were involved in the threads. You voiced no disagreement on the technical points. Seemingly only disagreement with my confidence level. If you want to argue that I'm wrong, you have to tell me what exactly I'm wrong about. NOT point to some epistemic process you suspect I botched. Karen Horney's "expansive solution" is most of my model. You would need to explore it for several hours and look closely for patterns. But like I said, most people aren't interested in this type of stuff. And unfortunately, that work alone probably isn't sufficient for installing high confidence. I think you have to be able to read well in the first place. But anyway, now that I've explained my interior to you in more detail, did you update your model of me, or do you find my self-reports untrustworthy/unconvincing? Because I feel like you're not updating. I ask because I get the sense that there's another motive beyond understanding me.

Because most people don't models minds with high enough resolution. You said: That's the obvious interpretation and it's what it appears to be for most everyone. When Leo says "You leftists have no clue how much conservatives love their culture", the most accessible interpretation is that a good-faith person is sharing insights. The idea that the person is asserting their position atop a hierarchy is not an easy one to see, and even harder to verify. It takes a good bit of deep psychological insight and analysis to accurately model someone. Most minds aren't interested in that kind of work. And if Leo was never called out on any of this in recent past, the blindness would be even greater. There are several other contributing factors, but this is the biggest.

lol, no. It's just an expression of my innate values. I would never think of myself as "righteous" or being morally superior to anyone else, even if I were. If you built a scale and I ranked high on it, I would not be interested in my high grade because satisfaction from elevation is just cringe to me. "no one else" wasn't literal. I even made sure to include "mostly no one else" once or twice in hopes of avoiding this nitpick, lol. I'm aware of the few on the forum who have acknowledged it publicly. And it's easy to see it's not really a thing on the radar for the vast majority.

@Natasha Tori Maru This is rich. You're doing the same thing to me you're claiming that I'm doing to Leo, which I'm actually not doing. Had you inquired into my interior before writing all this, you could have understood the actual motivation behind my comment rather than guess between two wrong options. So, if you want to understand: Is it intellectual peacocking? No. If someone else would have posted the exact same thing before I did, I never would have commented, unless I quoted it and said something like "100%". Am I trying to change Leo? No. In fact, if the forum had a "hide from Leo" button, I almost certainly would have pressed it here because I don't like saying negative things about people where they can read it. So why did I do it anyway? It's far more complex than either of the options you floated. The motivation to interject in these situations is: toxic or harmful stuff going unnoticed. The point of interjecting these reads is that no one else is or that people are not aware of them. When there's something people aren't seeing, that's when I interject. Crude/visible bad behavior doesn't need me. The sophisticated, room-confusing kind is what pulls me. If everyone could already see it, or if someone already pointed it out, I often don't feel a pull to interject unless there's an open discussion specifically about the topic. And it's not to be the one doing the delivery. I think this is some projection on your part. I actually don't like it when people see me as intelligent or anything like that. I even experience mild agitation when this happens. I don't like to be elevated in any way. I do like to transfer ideas, but not "my ideas", just "ideas". I've never felt special for being the one who has ideas or who can see. This is just weird shit to me. So, when I harp on Leo's superiority complex, it's because of the harm I see in it and because no one else is seeing it. Now, I need to explain how Leo's superiority complex is harmful, because it's not obvious. He's not meaning to harm anyone. It's just a byproduct of his nature. I've explained elsewhere the psychological disposition that produces his behavior regarding putting others beneath him, so I won't elaborate here, but it basically works like this: Leo creates a hierarchy of mind/intelligence/consciousness/awareness and positions himself at the top. Then, when his superiority needs fed, he finds ways to erect that hierarchy and puts people beneath him. This specific instance was "you leftist don't understand conservatives, but I do. I am above you leftists on the mind/intelligence/consciousness/awareness hierarchy." If you don't see it like this, that's on you. I can't tell you how to see the truth of it for yourself, especially when you have the disposition that thinks "remaining open" and refusing to convert evidence into usable conclusions is the wise approach to life. But anyway, whether or not I'm right or wrong about this isn't the point here. The point is that I see harm that most everyone else is missing or letting slide. The harm is teaching people to rank themselves below an unearned authority and to distrust their own perception. People being being nudged to defer and subordinate themselves primarily for the benefit of a grandiose ego, not for their own betterment. All because some dude's ego needs boosted, and at their expense. I see that as harmful and worth calling out. Also, you need to keep in mind. I don't hold any personal grudges toward Leo. I don't walk around with animosity toward him. It's simply the case that when his superiority complex rears its head, I call it the fuck out because sometimes, that's the best or only tool for keeping it in check. I'm not going to pretend like it's not a thing, even if you or anyone else finds it uncomfortable or off-putting. Also, you don't understand my model of Leo. If you did, you would know that there is no fixing this aspect of his behavior. It will exist for the rest of his life. I know you're probably cringing at this statement because you can't fathom how this could be known. But again, it takes specific effort to arrive at such knowledge. Just because you haven't put in the work, doesn't mean you can't. Strap on a sack and start figuring stuff out, is all I can say. No amount of "relating" would ever work here.

What do you mean by "relationally understand you"? You're right, I often don't have high confidence that I know what you're getting at. I pick an interpretation and roll with it and expect explicit correction if I misinterpreted. I try to parse and understand you, then you let me know if I've misunderstood, then I adjust. No need to get hung up on misunderstandings or dwell on the fact that it happened. Good-faith communication keeps moving forward.

I analyze my own behavior 100x more than anyone else's. Understanding the mind is just what I do. Which is why I do it with others as well. For example, I've probably spent over a dozen hours asking "why do I write the things I do on actualized.org", lol. Imagine having deeply inspected every type of action you take, and knowing what the root motivation is. Do that enough, and you no longer need to "inspect" specific actions anymore, as you already know the motivation behind them. You and I keep coming back to this idea of perpetual "not knowing". It's like you don't want to know some things and want them to forever remain open to interpretation or something. Resisting conclusion related to the psyche or something. IDK. Interesting though. Is it possible to fully account for and understand your motivations? If so, what would the implications be?

I'm neither of those things regarding this, so this isn't relevant to me here. Some corners are darker than others. It is what it is.

It’s time to feed Leo’s superiority complex. This is just him finding some weird thing to use as an excuse to tell you he’s more conscious than you all are. It has nothing to do with any deep insight that you’re missing or that he wants you to see. It’s a recurring pattern. Tends to come in waves. This wave probably isn’t over.

Came across an idea the other day that "tired is an emotion", not just a state. The very thought of doing something you don't want to zaps your energy. But insights give you a surge of it. Interesting just how subtle, yet powerful thoughts are.

This is a repeating pattern. About time it was noticed. Natasha likes to put you down under the guise of helping you, then gaslight you that your negative emotion she spawned in you is because you misunderstood her good intentions. She’s really good at it too, so most people don’t even notice. Natasha, wishing you the best.

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