I remember from my school assignments, or those intelligence tests, somewhere in those years there were sections of “Too much information.” This wasn’t a reference to things like “We were so happy my husband and I had sex for the first time in months.” Or, “I have trouble buying pants because my left nut hangs lower than my right one.” Not like that at all. They’d ask questions like: Roberto has twelve marbles. He lost five. The marbles are blue. How many marbles does he have left? You’d have to pick out which bit of information was irrelevant to answering the question.

I thought at the time the point was to assess reading comprehension. But in more recent years I realize there are people who can keep drama separated from their logical thinking, and then there are people who can’t. “Too much information” is a situation that doesn’t exist, for the latter, because everything has to have an effect on the outcome.

You don’t see it with marbles and math.

But you do see it with…”Lindsay Clancy was framed. Her husband Patrick is actually the one who murdered the children. His timeline doesn’t add up. And Lindsay didn’t get the help she needed because the system failed her.”

And…”Christa Pike has been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The execution failed tonight. She is in agony.”

Twelve minus five is seven. It doesn’t matter what color the marbles are.

Granting the supposition that Patrick Clancy murdered his own children and then successfully framed his wife Lindsay…it doesn’t matter if the system failed her or she didn’t get the help she needed. If we’re accepting that her husband did it, that would mean she’s innocent. Innocent and cuckoo, innocent and sane, innocent and not getting the help she needs…it doesn’t matter. And it also doesn’t matter if she’s guilty, because getting the help she needs, or not, she’s still dangerous. But let’s not go down that rabbit hole which has been explored plenty enough already.

Christa Pike committed murder and was sentenced to death for it. The sentence will be carried out…hopefully. One less murderer on the planet. She’s in agony? So what?

We’ve gone down the road a ways, of normalizing this flailing about looking for any little piece of gravel that can be thrown in the cogs. Any wrench to throw in the gears, anything to derail rational thinking, anything to nudge people into emotional reasoning. The marbles are blue — that changes the answer. Eh, no it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Lindsay Clancy, railroaded by her husband, can’t get the help she needs. What’s it matter? And we’re going to remove Christa Pike from existence because she’s a murderer.

We don’t care what she learns from her punishment. Or whether she’s in pain. She’s not supposed to be alive anyway.

For the past several decades, there are more murders. That’s because we treat murderers with compassion, empathy, forgiveness…which the families of their victims never consented to giving. And we look for excuses to unlink their crimes from any deliberations about their moral compasses.

Meanwhile, people guilty of lesser crimes, like littering or jaywalking, must have meant to do it. No “not guilty by reason of insanity” for them. We don’t accept the excuse that they weren’t thinking it through all the way, they’re just guilty. And we don’t care about whether they’re in pain or having a bad day. They just owe the fine, period. Or the jail term. Maybe if they show up to fight it the judge will cut it in half, but apart from that, if they’re guilty they’re guilty and they have to pay their debt to society.

It should be the other way around.

It should work like…I saw the wrapper hit the ground, and darn it, the wind was blowing it around, I’m not as young as I used to be, and I was in a hurry…I got ahead of myself. Okay. Fine suspended, case dismissed. Like that. And then as we work our way through these infractions, up to and including manslaughter, we respond to this increasing severity with — apathy. Okay, so you had a rough childhood. So? You killed someone. Your childhood is like the color of Roberto’s marbles. Doesn’t affect the ultimate outcome. Not even a little bit.

In fact, if you’re hooked on drugs or had a bad childhood and you haven’t got what it takes to get that under control, that’s all the more reason why you should be removed.

I don’t know why we have this backwards. I really don’t.

Observation: Throughout the summer and fall of a midterm year, if the President of the United States happens to be a Republican and male, we marinate in a stew of high profile “news” stories that emotionally divide males and females. And the opinions expressed about these stories would seem to weigh in on an imagined controversy about which of the two sexes should be…something.

No one actually says “Get rid of all the men” or “Get the women back in the kitchen where they belong.” But, the observations I see people making would be pretty useless, and I think even according to them, if the issue under consideration is anything other than “Get rid of this or that sex once and for all.” It’s really a sad thing. We can’t do without the one or the other, we need both. And I think anyone with a working brain understands this.

Hey…isn’t there a song about this?

Reuben, Reuben I’ve been thinking
What a great world this would be
If the boys were all transported
Far across the Northern sea!

Rachael, Rachel I’ve been thinking
What a glad world this would be
If the girls were all transported
Far across the Northern sea!

I’m seeing a lot of people comparing the Lindsay Clancy trial to the “Cornell 7,” fists-on-hips, glowering with disdain upon men who voiced an opinion about a trial that’s been grinding away all these weeks and months about a mother who confessed to murdering her own children. And are now quiet about this Cornell incident that was thrust into the news only hours and days ago, chock full of observations made by others that contradict each other. Of course that’s wrong. Sensible people are going to be quiet while the dust is still swirling, and you have to wait awhile for the “That’s been debunked” rebuttals to stop flying thick and fast.

Are women oppressed, really? Weighed down by a “patriarchy”? Suffering from some ingrained bias that’s loud about female misdeeds like murdering your own kids, but silent in other situations where males are the transgressors? Hmmm. It’s hard to see any group of people as oppressed, when some among them seek to win arguments simply by scolding, clearly accustomed to their class instantly winning arguments merely by expressing disapproval. Is that what oppressed people do?

I’ll go along with the notion there is something terribly wrong, recently wrong, with men. We’ve been changing what it means to be a man. In times past, you looked around for one when you had to lift something heavy or cross a busy street. Now we have these victim-minded women expressing how they see men as menaces and you know, they do have some underlying evidence to offer that’s not just smoke and mirrors, and that should concern everyone.

We used to have the Boy Scouts of America. Now we don’t.

You can thank progressives and lawyers for that.

As always, if we’re going to argue about this stuff, then let’s do it honestly. This popular visualization of men as threats is not entirely based on experiences. It’s been fed to us. There are people out there, who have been given soapboxes and megaphones, who like the idea that men are monsters. They can’t get enough of it. They work hard to broadcast it when and where they can, based on nothing but their attraction to the idea; they fetishize it.

And they destroy company stocks with it:

These people who are so enamored of the idea that men need a good Internet-scolding to put them back on the straight and narrow, or to “overthrow patriarchy,” or banish all the boys to the Northern Sea, are not all women. What they really are, by and large, is cowardly. “Men are bad” is the one thing you can say in an uncontrolled forum that isn’t likely to pick up any energized dissent, and if it does, you can be assured you’ll win and the dissent will lose. Ankle-biting the male sex is punching down, even though a lot of people like to see it as the opposite. Castigating men is quick, easy, fun, socially uplifting and doesn’t cost anything.

But comparing the Cornell situation to the Clancy trial is lunacy.

I see a lot of resentment expressed toward anyone who advances a defense of men beginning with the three words “Not All Men.” As in, not all men are gang rapists, or protectors of rapists. Supposedly, the Cornell incident is an indictment against that, as some fifty frat boys were aware of what was happening and did nothing to stop it. This is not beyond dispute. Time will tell.

But you know, not all women are on board with this man-scolding, and not all women are defending Lindsay Clancy or trying to get her acquitted.

People would do well to remember that for the last hundred years give or take, this friction between men and women has been engineered. It’s “Astroturf”; looks like a grassroots movement, really isn’t. People aggravate these tensions so they can sell things. It works.

That’s a reliable boilerplate-explanation for when you see things over and over again, that should go away, but don’t. That’s the reason why, usually. You’re seeing it over and over because it works.