All This 'Feelings' Nonsense Should Make You Feel Sick

As of this writing, the Lindsay Clancy case is heading toward a hung jury and a mistrial because, apparently, you can’t get 12 Americans to agree that you shouldn’t strangle your three little kids. OK, that’s a bit glib. The legal issue really has to do with whether the jurors believe she had a mental defect that made her unable to tell right from wrong, but this isn’t a hard case. It’s an easy case. It’s only made hard because a significant percentage of our society has decided that reason is inconvenient, as it leads to results that they don’t prefer, so they’ve decided to jettison it completely in exchange for a paradigm in which feelings determine reality. The advantage of a feelzocentric paradigm is obvious. You always get the result you want because the only criterion for any issue is how you feel.

Left unchecked, this idea would be the death of civilization. But of course, the irony is that only civilization can allow the frivolity of a feelzocentric paradigm to persist. Its practitioners are made safe and secure by those of us bound to the harsh rigors of reason. Basically, we create a world where they can act like idiots and not get themselves killed by other people who are controlled by their emotions. You know, kind of like the entire Third World.

I watched some of the closing arguments in the Clancy case, and I did it through the eyes of a 30-year trial lawyer. The defense was in the toughest position because the facts are all against the defendant – she killed her children, one by one, after tricking her husband into leaving her alone so she could strangle them without him stopping her. She then tried to kill herself. All of this is indisputable evidence that she knew what she was doing was wrong when she did it, thereby meaning she was not insane under the law. Understand that merely having a mental illness diagnosis – and about half of young liberal women are diagnosed with some form of mental illness – is not, in itself, a golden ticket to escape from criminal liability. The test is right and wrong – can you tell the difference? And with the facts clearly showing that she could, the defense needed to find an alternative villain. Oh, it was the doctors. It was people in her life who didn’t care enough about her. Someone else was to blame, anyone else. And the defense had to exempt her from responsibility. Oh, she was a good mother – yeah, he actually said that. I’m still trying to figure out why a lawyer would start an argument in the heads of the jurors, most of whom would respond to that with, “How can she be a good mother when she killed her own kids?”

But that’s most of the jurors. Not all of them. Not the feelzocentric ones.

And I listened to the prosecution's closing argument. When you’re doing a closing argument, you want to sum up the evidence, tie it to the law as instructed by the judge, and hand it over, wrapped up in a little bow, to the jury so it has no choice but to rule for your client. And the district attorney here was, I thought, fantastic in the parts I saw. Very calm, very methodical, highlighting bits of evidence, comparing them to the law, and telling the jury what they all meant. It was cool, rational, and logical, and that was probably the problem.

The facts, the evidence, and the law all told the jury that it had no choice but to find her guilty of three cruel and atrocious murders. But all that was outweighed by the feelz.

See, my mistake in appreciating the job the prosecutor did was that I assumed that if you made a rational argument supported by evidence, people would nod along. I should’ve known better. After all, I’m on X enough to know better. A significant number of people no longer respond to rational arguments. They choose the result they want and work backward to get it. That’s why you have morons asserting that the husband did it even though Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers don’t dispute that it was her hands that choked the life out of her children. That’s the power of feelz. Feelz let you ignore evidence that undermines what you want and let you manufacture evidence that doesn’t exist in your head. It’s OK to assume facts not in evidence if it gets you to the result you want.

That’s why you never want an engineer on your jury, or anyone else whose occupation involves objective obstacles like physics or gravity. You want liberal arts types, for whom there is no objective truth. That’s why you want to get wine women on your juries if making your case requires evading personal responsibility, especially white affluent women with a taste for oaky Chardonnay and a husband who dreams of leaping off a bridge.

This has been going on for a while. Thirty years ago, some lunatic actually allowed me on a DUI case as a juror. Let’s just say with my résumé, you would never want me on any jury ever. That’s because I’m going to ask questions and think about things. Remember, lawyers want jurors who aren’t going to do either of those things. That goes for both sides. In any case, the guy blew out the breathalyzer and was a staggering mess when the cop hooked him up. It should’ve been case closed. But no, he was an immigrant, and the Santa Monica housewife on the jury told us that we couldn’t expect immigrants to understand that driving around like Foster Brooks motoring back from New Year’s at the Kennedy compound was wrong. The jury hung. Oh, and the best part came later, because I knew that there was some evidence out there that wasn’t being admitted. I called the prosecutor after the case ended, and he told me the dude was arrested coming home from the party where he was celebrating getting back his driver’s license after his previous DUI conviction.

But in the past, that kind of moron was always kind of the exception. It was also the exception in society. We used to look down on people who weren’t rational. But now we look on them as sensitive, as caring and compassionate. Our Oprahized society celebrates those who prioritize the feelz. How it’s caring and compassionate to let a woman who throttled a trio of babies escape punishment is beyond me. Like you, my mind can’t wrap around people who are entirely bereft of reason in favor of emotion.

We see it online, too, with irrational people babbling endlessly about stupid nonsense in defiance of objective fact. Every time you see some idiot talking about Epstein or those evil Zionist Jews, you’re not talking to somebody rational. You’re not talking to somebody who cares about the facts. You’re talking to someone who’s picked a side and is attempting to shout down the world until the intimidated populace simply concedes. But there is right and wrong. There is truth and falsehood. Epstein was a bad guy, but he wasn’t the head of a giant conspiracy, and no, all your disfavored politicians were not in cahoots with him. No, the Israelis are not committing genocide, and they are not in the wrong here; the semi-human jihadist terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and all the rest are.

And no, it’s not the billionaires’ fault that the feelz people are freaking losers.

Rejecting rationality is more than just annoying. It’s dangerous. You don’t want to live in a post-reason world. You know all those millions of illegal aliens trying to come here? They’re trying to come here largely because the hellholes they crawled out of are our preview of the post-reason world. The success and dominance of European civilization was based on its embrace of reason, despite interludes of irrationality. You know all those boring, stolid, hard-working Europeans, who put their noses to the grindstone and created all that greatness, including, but not limited to, conquering and settling the United States of America and making it a superpower? That was reason at work, not feelz.

But sadly, those who find reason too inconvenient and prefer the cheat code that is governing yourself by emotion have no conception of this. They assume the world that reason created is the world’s default mode, and that they have the luxury of embracing a feelzocentric paradigm. A certain percentage of the population has always done that, but it’s always been low. Now it’s in danger of becoming the majority. And when it becomes the majority, what happens to civilization?

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time overseas, so I have got some pretty bad feelz about how that will work out if we let it happen here. And the inability of a dozen Americans to look at the obvious facts and return a guilty verdict on this hideous woman does not bode well for the future.