Category: language

On Trumpian Language and the Institutional Erosion of MeaningTrumpian Language Debate

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“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a few words to go missing from the bylaws.” — not Edmund Burke, but it ought to be.

The Trump administration—America’s reigning monarch of meaningless bombast—has done it again. This time, with an executive order so linguistically cunning it deserves a Pulitzer for Subtextual Menace.

Issued on 30 January 2025, the decree known as “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” (because, of course, it couldn’t just be called Let’s Erase Legal Protections for People We Don’t Like) removed “political affiliation” and “marital status” from the list of protected classes within certain federal frameworks.

And the result? According to documents unearthed by The Guardian, VA doctors can now legally refuse treatment to patients based on their politics or marital status. You know, because being a Democrat apparently makes you too much of a pre-existing condition.

Naturally, the VA and White House are insisting this means absolutely nothing. “Don’t worry,” they coo. “No one’s actually doing it.” Ah yes, the old Schrödinger’s Protections defence—simultaneously removed and unchanged, invalid but somehow still effective.

But here’s the point—and where it ties to the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis I’ve been peddling like a raving madman at the crossroads of post-structuralism and bureaucratic despair: language isn’t just failing to communicate meaning—it’s being weaponised to obscure it.

The Erosion of Meaning Through Omission

This isn’t the blunt-force idiocy of Orwell’s Newspeak. This is something more elegant—more insidious. This is legislative lacunae. It’s what happens when not saying something says everything.

The words “political affiliation” and “marital status” weren’t replaced. They weren’t clarified. They were simply deleted. Erased like a bad tweet, like a conscience, like a veteran with the wrong bumper sticker.

This is language subtraction as a tool of governance.

We’re not criminalising dissent. We’re just making it legally ignorable.

We’re not discriminating against the unmarried. We’re just no longer required to treat them the same.

It’s the bureaucratic cousin of the dog-whistle: not quite audible in court, but perfectly clear to the base.

The Slippery Slope is Now a Slip-n-Slide

This is how you rewrite civil rights without the fuss of saying so. You just… remove the language that once held the dam in place. Then, when the flood comes, you feign surprise:

“Oh, dear. Who could have guessed that removing protections would result in people being unprotected?”

(Everyone. Everyone could have guessed.)

This is not a bug in the legal language. It’s the feature. The silence is the speech act. The absence is the argument.

This is what I mean by language insufficiency: not merely that our words fail to convey truth, but that their very structure is liable to be gamed—exploited by those who understand that ambiguity is power.

Beyond Intentionality: The Weaponised Void

In philosophy of language, we often debate intentionality—what the speaker meant to say. But here we’re in darker waters. This isn’t about intention. It’s about calculated omission.

The executive order doesn’t declare war on Democrats or single mothers. It simply pulls the thread and lets the tapestry unravel itself.

It’s an act of rhetorical cowardice disguised as administrative efficiency.

This is the Trumpian genius: use language like a stage magician uses sleeves. Distract with one hand, disappear with the other.

Final Diagnosis: Policy by Redaction

We now inhabit a political climate where what is not said carries more legal force than what is. Where bylaw gaps become policy gateways, and where civil rights die not with a bang, but with an elision.

So no, the VA hasn’t yet denied a Democrat a blood transfusion. But the table has been set. The menu revised. The waitstaff told they may now “use discretion.”

Language doesn’t merely fail us. It is being made to fail strategically.

Welcome to the new America: where rights aren’t removed—they’re left out of the memo.

Yet again, ChatGPT renders an odd image. Can’t be bothered to amend it.

Speculative Philosophy on Screen: Identity, Agency, and the Fiction of Reality

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Close-up of a human eye with digital glitch effects and overlaid text reading 'What if reality is wrong?'—a visual metaphor for distorted perception and unreliable truth.

Regular readers know I often write about identity, free will, and the narrative constraints of language. But I also explore these ideas through fiction, under the name Ridley Park.

In this short video, I unpack the philosophical motivations behind my stories, including:

  • Why reality is never as it seems
  • Why the self is a narrative convenience
  • What Heidegger’s Geworfenheit and Galen Strawson’s Causa Sui argument reveal about agency
  • And why language fails us – even when we think it serves

This isn’t promotional fluff. It’s epistemological dissent in a new format. Fictional, yes, but only in the sense that most of reality is, too.

▶️ Watch the video: Why I Write the Way I Do

Can One Obstruct Justice in a Place It Doesn’t Exist?

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ICE is out in force again, dragging brown bodies out of homes in Los Angeles like it’s some righteous carnival of due process. Another day, another federal theatre production titled Law and Order: Ethnic Cleansing Unit, where men with guns and names like Chad or Hank mistake cruelty for patriotism and paperwork for moral clarity.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Naturally, critics of these raids are now being threatened with that great juridical cudgel: “obstructing justice.” Yes, you heard that right. If you interfere – say, by filming, shouting, refusing to roll over like a good little colonial subject – you are obstructing justice. As though justice were something you could actually put your hands on in the United States without a hazmat suit and a decade of appeals.

Let’s be clear. There is no justice here to obstruct. What you are obstructing is bureaucratic violence wrapped in legal latex. You are obstructing a system that functions like a vending machine for state-sanctioned trauma: insert immigrant, extract ruin.

Justice: The Imaginary Friend of Empire

Ah, “justice.” That hallowed ideal trotted out whenever the state wants to put a boot through your front door. The U.S. has long since traded its Justice for Security Theatre and capitalist choreography. The blindfold is still there, sure – but these days, it’s a branded sleep mask from Lockheed Martin, and the scales are rigged to weigh white tears heavier than brown bodies.

Let’s run through the usual suspects:

  • ICE – America’s own domestic Gestapo, but with better PR and significantly worse fashion.
  • CBP – Border fetishists whose job seems less about national defence and more about satisfying their Freud-bereft fantasies of control.
  • SCOTUS – That great moral weather vane, spinning wildly between “originalist necromancy” and outright lunacy, depending on how recently Thomas and Alito read Leviticus.
  • Congress – An assembly of millionaires cosplaying as public servants, holding hearings on “the threat of immigration” while outsourcing their lawn care.

And of course, the President – whichever septuagenarian husk happens to be in office – offers the usual bromides about order, safety, and enforcement, all while the real crimes (you know, the kind involving tax fraud, corporate pollution, or drone strikes) go entirely unmolested.

Can You Obstruct a Simulation?

If you stand in front of a deportation van, are you obstructing justice, or merely interrupting the bureaucratic excretion of empire? It’s the philosophical equivalent of trying to punch a hologram. The system pretends to uphold fairness while routinely violating its own principles, then charges you with “obstruction” when you call out the sleight of hand.

This is not justice. This is kabuki. A ritual. A performance piece sponsored by Raytheon.

A Modest Proposal

Let’s just be honest and rename the charge. Not “Obstruction of Justice”—too ironic, too pompous. Call it what it is: Obstruction of Procedure, Obstruction of Power, or if we’re being especially accurate: Obstruction of the Industrial Deportation Complex™. Hell, add a corporate sponsor while you’re at it:

You are being charged with Obstruction of Justice, Presented by Amazon Web Services.

Because when justice itself is a ghost, when the rule of law has become the rule of lawfare, the real obscenity is pretending any of this is noble.

Final Thought

So no, dear reader, you’re not obstructing justice. You’re obstructing a machine that mistakes itself for a moral order. And if you’re going to obstruct something, make it that.

The Rhetoric of Realism: When Language Pretends to Know

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Let us begin with the heresy: Truth is a rhetorical artefact. Not a revelation. Not a metaphysical essence glimmering behind the veil. Just language — persuasive, repeatable, institutionally ratified language. In other words: branding.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

This is not merely a postmodern tantrum thrown at the altar of Enlightenment rationalism. It is a sober, if impolite, reminder that nearly everything we call “knowledge” is stitched together with narrative glue and semantic spit. Psychology. Neuroscience. Ethics. Economics. Each presents itself as a science — or worse, a moral imperative — but their foundations are built atop a linguistic faultline. They are, at best, elegant approximations; at worst, dogma in drag.

Let’s take psychology. Here is a field that diagnoses your soul via consensus. A committee of credentialed clerics sits down and declares a cluster of behaviours to be a disorder, assigns it a code, and hands you a script. It is then canonised in the DSM, the Diagnostic Scripture Manual. Doubt its legitimacy and you are either naïve or ill — which is to say, you’ve just confirmed the diagnosis. It’s a theological trap dressed in the language of care.

Or neuroscience — the church of the glowing blob. An fMRI shows a region “lighting up” and we are meant to believe we’ve located the seat of love, the anchor of morality, or the birthplace of free will. Never mind that we’re interpreting blood-oxygen fluctuations in composite images smoothed by statistical witchcraft. It looks scientific, therefore it must be real. The map is not the territory, but in neuroscience, it’s often a mood board.

And then there is language itself, the medium through which all these illusions are transmitted. It is the stage, the scenery, and the unreliable narrator. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis proposes that language is not simply a flawed tool — it is fundamentally unfit for the task it pretends to perform. It was forged in the furnace of survival, not truth. We are asking a fork to play the violin.

This insufficiency is not an error to be corrected by better definitions or clever metaphors. It is the architecture of the system. To speak is to abstract. To abstract is to exclude. To exclude is to falsify. Every time we speak of a thing, we lose the thing itself. Language functions best not as a window to the real but as a veil — translucent, patterned, and perpetually in the way.

So what, then, are our Truths™? They are narratives that have won. Stories that survived the epistemic hunger games. They are rendered authoritative not by accuracy, but by resonance — psychological, cultural, institutional. A “truth” is what is widely accepted, not because it is right, but because it is rhetorically unassailable — for now.

This is the dirty secret of epistemology: coherence masquerades as correspondence. If enough concepts link arms convincingly, we grant them status. Not because they touch reality, but because they echo each other convincingly in our linguistic theatre.

Libet’s experiment, Foucault’s genealogies, McGilchrist’s hemispheric metaphors — each peels back the curtain in its own way. Libet shows that agency might be a post-hoc illusion. Foucault reveals that disciplines don’t describe the subject; they produce it. McGilchrist laments that the Emissary now rules the Master, and the world is flatter for it.

But all of them — and all of us — are trapped in the same game: the tyranny of the signifier. We speak not to uncover truth, but to make truth-sounding noises. And the tragedy is, we often convince ourselves.

So no, we cannot escape the prison of language. But we can acknowledge its bars. And maybe, just maybe, we can rattle them loudly enough that others hear the clank.

Until then, we continue — philosophers, scientists, diagnosticians, rhetoricians — playing epistemology like a parlour game with rigged dice, congratulating each other on how well the rules make sense.

And why wouldn’t they? We wrote them.

The Scourge: They’re Really Fighting Is Ambiguity

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A Sequel to “The Disorder of Saying No” and a Companion to “When ‘Advanced’ Means Genocide”

In my previous post, The Disorder of Saying No, I explored the way resistance to authority is pathologised, particularly when that authority is cloaked in benevolence and armed with diagnostic manuals. When one refuses — gently, thoughtfully, or with a sharp polemic — one is no longer principled. One is “difficult.” Or in my case, oppositional.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

So when I had the gall to call out Bill Maher for his recent linguistic stunt — declaring that a woman is simply “a person who menstruates” — I thought I was doing the rational thing: pointing out a classic bit of reductionist nonsense masquerading as clarity. Maher, after all, was not doing biology. He was playing lexicographer-in-chief, defining a term with centuries of philosophical, sociological, and political baggage as though it were a checkbox on a medical form.

I said as much: that he was abusing his platform, presenting himself as the sole arbiter of the English language, and that his little performance was less about clarity and more about controlling the terms of discourse.

My friend, a post-menopausal woman herself, responded not by engaging the argument, but by insinuating — as others have — that I was simply being contrary. Oppositional. Difficult. Again. (She was clearly moved by When “Advanced” Means Genocide, but may have missed the point.)

So let’s unpack this — not to win the debate, but to show what the debate actually is.

This Isn’t About Biology — It’s About Boundary Maintenance

Maher’s statement wasn’t intended to clarify. It was intended to exclude. It wasn’t some linguistic slip; it was a rhetorical scalpel — one used not to analyse, but to amputate.

And the applause from some cisgender women — particularly those who’ve “graduated” from menstruation — reveals the heart of the matter: it’s not about reproductive biology. It’s about controlling who gets to claim the term woman.

it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.

Let’s steelman the argument, just for the sport of it:

Menstruation is a symbolic threshold. Even if one no longer menstruates, having done so places you irrevocably within the category of woman. It’s not about exclusion; it’s about grounding identity in material experience.

Fine. But now let’s ask:

  • What about women who’ve never menstruated?
  • What about intersex people?
  • What about trans women?
  • What about cultures with radically different markers of womanhood?

You see, it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: Applied

This is precisely where the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis earns its keep.

The word woman is not a locked vault. It is a floating signifier, to borrow from Barthes — a term whose meaning is perpetually re-negotiated in use. There is no singular essence to the word. It is not rooted in biology, nor in social role, nor in performance. It is a hybrid, historically contingent construct — and the moment you try to fix its meaning, it slips sideways like a greased Wittgensteinian beetle.

“Meaning is use,” says Wittgenstein, and this is what frightens people.

If woman is defined by use and not by rule, then anyone might claim it. And suddenly, the club is no longer exclusive.

That’s the threat Maher and his defenders are really reacting to. Not trans women. Not intersex people. Not language activists or queer theorists.

The threat is ambiguity.

What They Want: A World That Can Be Named

The push for rigid definitions — for menstruation as membership — is a plea for a world that can be named and known. A world where words are secure, stable, and final. Where meaning doesn’t leak.

But language doesn’t offer that comfort.

It never did.

And when that linguistic instability gets too close to something personal, like gender identity, or the foundation of one’s own sense of self, the defensive response is to fortify the language, as though building walls around a collapsing church.

Maher’s defenders aren’t making scientific arguments. They’re waging semantic warfare. If they can hold the definition, they can win the cultural narrative. They can hold the gates to Womanhood and keep the undesirables out.

That’s the fantasy.

But language doesn’t play along.

Conclusion: Words Will Not Save You — but They Might Soothe the Dead

In the end, Maher’s definition is not merely incorrect. It is insufficient. It cannot accommodate the complexity of lived experience and cannot sustain the illusion of clarity for long.

They are defending nostalgia.

And those who cling to it — friend or stranger, progressive, or conservative — are not defending biology. They are defending nostalgia. Specifically, a pathological nostalgia for a world that no longer exists, and arguably never did: a world where gender roles were static, language was absolute, and womanhood was neatly circumscribed by bodily functions and suburban etiquette.

Ozzy and Harriet loom large here — not as individuals but as archetypes. Icons of a mid-century dream in which everyone knew their place, and deviation was something to be corrected, not celebrated. My friend, of that generation, clings to this fantasy not out of malice but out of a desperate yearning for order. The idea that woman could mean many things, and mean them differently across contexts, is not liberating to her — it’s destabilising.

But that world is gone. And no amount of menstruation-based gatekeeping will restore it.

The Real Scourge Is Ambiguity

Maher’s tantrum wasn’t about truth. It was about fear — fear of linguistic drift, of gender flux, of a world in which meaning no longer obeys. The desire to fix the definition of “woman” is not a biological impulse. It’s a theological one.

And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.

And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.

This is why your Language Insufficiency Hypothesis matters. Because it reminds us that language does not stabilise reality — it masks its instability. The attempt to define “woman” once and for all is not just futile — it’s an act of violence against difference, a linguistic colonisation of lived experience.

So Let Them Rest

Ozzy and Harriet are dead. Let them rest.
Let their picket fence moulder. Let their signage decay.

The world has moved on. The language is shifting beneath your feet. And no amount of retroactive gatekeeping can halt that tremor.

The club is burning. And the only thing left to save is honesty.

When “Advanced” Means Genocide: A Case Study in Linguistic Implosion

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This post draws on themes from my upcoming book, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. The transcript below is taken from a publicly available exchange, which you can view here. Consider it Exhibit A in language’s ongoing failure to bear the weight of meaning.

Transcript:

KK: Konstantin Kisin
DFW: Deborah Frances-White

KK: I’m saying we were technologically more advanced.
DFW: So you’re saying we’re superior to Australian Aboriginals?
KK: That’s quite the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m not saying we were superior, I’m saying we were technologically more advanced.
DFW: So, how is that the opposite?
KK: Superior implies a moral quality. I’m not making any moral implication. You seem to be, but what I’m saying is…
DFW: I think most people would hear it that way.
KK: No.
DFW: Again, you’re a very intelligent man. How would most people hear that?
KK: Most people would hear what I’m saying for what I’m saying, which is…
DFW: I don’t think they would.
KK: You seem to get quite heated about this, which is completely unnecessary.
DFW: Um…
KK: You think it’s necessary?
DFW: I’m a bit stunned by what you’re implying.
KK: No, you’re acting in a kind of passive aggressive way which indicates that you’re not happy…
DFW: I genuinely… I’m being 100% authentic. My visceral reaction to a white man sitting and saying to me, “And why were we able to commit genocide on them?” and then just pausing—
KK: Yes.
DFW: …is very visceral to me.
KK: Well, let’s go back. First of all, it’s interesting that you brought up my skin colour because I thought that was the exact opposite of the point you’re trying to make in the book.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities

Dissection: Language as Battlefield

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities – especially those laced with power, morality, and history. This transcript is not a debate. It is a linguistic trench war in which every utterance is laced with shrapnel, and each side thinks they’re defending reason.

Let’s pull a few of the shell casings from the mud.

1. Semantic Contamination: “Technologically more advanced”

KK attempts to offer a dry, neutral descriptor. DFW hears supremacist teleology. Why? Because “advanced” is culturally radioactive. It doesn’t merely denote a technical state—it connotes a ladder, with someone inevitably on the bottom rung.

When language carries historical residue, neutrality is a delusion. Words don’t just mean. They echo.

KK is making a semantic distinction. DFW hears a moral claim. Both are right. And both are talking past one another, because language is attempting to cleave affect from description, and it simply can’t.

2. Disambiguation Does Not Save You

KK’s insistence—“I’m not saying we’re superior”—is a textbook example of denotative desperation. He believes clarification will rescue intent. But as any linguist (or postcolonial theorist) will tell you: intent does not sterilise implication.

Language cannot be laundered by explanation. Once spoken, words belong to context, not intention.

KK thinks he’s holding a scalpel. DFW hears a cudgel. And here we are.

3. Phatic Collapse: “Most people would hear…”

This is where the wheels come off. KK argues from semantic specificity. DFW argues from sociolinguistic reception. It’s Saussure versus the TikTok algorithm. Neither will win.

Communication disintegrates not because anyone is lying, but because they are playing incompatible games with the same tokens.

4. Identity as Index: When the Speaker Becomes the Speech

DFW’s invocation of “a white man” is not a derailment—it’s the inevitable endpoint of a system where words no longer float free but are yoked to their utterer. This is the moment the failure of language becomes a failure of interlocution. Argument collapses into indexical entrapment.

At this point, you’re no longer debating ideas. You’re defending your right to use certain words at all.

Which brings us to the final breakdown.

5. Moral Authenticity vs Logical Precision: Unbridgeable Grammars

KK: I am making a logical distinction.
DFW: I am having a visceral reaction.

The failure isn’t moral. It isn’t historical. It’s grammatical. One is operating in a truth-function logic game. The other is reacting within a trauma-informed, socially indexed register. These are grammars that do not overlap.

Conclusion: Language Did What It Always Does—It Failed Us

If this brief and brutal dialogue proves anything, it’s this: you cannot extract meaning cleanly from words when the words themselves are sponges for history, hierarchy, and harm. The moment we ask language to do too much—to carry precision, affect, ethics, and identity—it folds in on itself.

And that, dear reader, is precisely the argument of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that meaning does not reside in words, and never has. It lives in the gaps, the silences, the misfires. That’s where the truth—whatever’s left of it—might be hiding.

Follow the wreckage. That’s where the signal lives.

The Disorder of Saying No

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A Polite Rebuttal to a Diagnosis I Didn’t Ask For

A dear friend — and I do mean dear, though this may be the last time they risk diagnosing me over brunch — recently suggested, with all the benevolent concern of a well-meaning inquisitor, that I might be showing signs of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

You know the tone: “I say this with love… but have you considered that your refusal to play nicely with institutions might be clinical?”

Let’s set aside the tea and biscuits for a moment and take a scalpel to this charming little pathology. Because if ODD is a diagnosis, then I propose we start diagnosing systems — not people.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

When the Empire Diagnoses Its Rebels

Oppositional Defiant Disorder, for those blissfully unscarred by its jargon, refers to a “persistent pattern” of defiance, argumentativeness, rule-breaking, and — the pièce de résistance — resentment of authority. In other words, it is a medical label for being insufficiently obedient.

What a marvel: not only has resistance been de-politicised, it has been medicalised. The refusal to comply is not treated as an ethical stance or a contextual response, but as a defect of the self. The child (or adult) is not resisting something; they are resisting everything, and this — according to the canon — makes them sick.

One wonders: sick according to whom?

Derrida’s Diagnosis: The Binary Fetish

Jacques Derrida, of course, would waste no time in eviscerating the logic at play. ODD depends on a structural binary: compliant/defiant, healthy/disordered, rule-follower/troublemaker. But, as Derrida reminds us, binaries are not descriptive — they are hierarchies in disguise. One term is always elevated; the other is marked, marginal, suspect.

Here, “compliance” is rendered invisible — the assumed baseline, the white space on the page. Defiance is the ink that stains it. But this only works because “normal” has already been declared. The system names itself sane.

Derrida would deconstruct this self-justifying loop and note that disorder exists only in relation to an order that never justifies itself. Why must the subject submit? That’s not up for discussion. The child who asks that question is already halfway to a diagnosis.

Foucault’s Turn: Disciplinary Power and the Clinic as Court

Enter Foucault, who would regard ODD as yet another exquisite specimen in the taxonomy of control. For him, modern power is not exercised through visible violence but through the subtler mechanisms of surveillance, normalisation, and the production of docile bodies.

ODD is a textbook case of biopower — the system’s ability to define and regulate life itself through classification, diagnosis, and intervention. It is not enough for the child to behave; they must believe. They must internalise authority to the marrow. To question it, or worse, to resent it, is to reveal one’s pathology.

This is not discipline; this is soulcraft. And ODD is not a disorder — it is a symptom of a civilisation that cannot tolerate unmediated subjectivity. See Discipline & Punish.

Ivan Illich: The Compulsory Institutions of Care

Illich would call the whole charade what it is: a coercive dependency masquerading as therapeutic care. In Deschooling Society, he warns of systems — especially schools — that render people passive recipients of norms. ODD, in this light, is not a syndrome. It is the final gasp of autonomy before it is sedated.

What the diagnosis reveals is not a child in crisis, but an institution that cannot imagine education without obedience. Illich would applaud the so-called defiant child for doing the one thing schools rarely reward: thinking.

R.D. Laing: Sanity as a Political Position

Laing, too, would recognise the ruse. His anti-psychiatry position held that “madness” is often the only sane response to a fundamentally broken world. ODD is not insanity — it is sanity on fire. It is the refusal to adapt to structures that demand submission as a prerequisite for inclusion.

To quote Laing: “They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”

ODD is what happens when a child refuses to play the game.

bell hooks: Refusal as Liberation

bell hooks, writing in Teaching to Transgress, framed the classroom as a potential site of radical transformation — if it rejects domination. The child who refuses to be disciplined is often the one who sees most clearly that the system has confused education with indoctrination.

Resistance, hooks argues, is not a flaw. It is a form of knowledge. ODD becomes, in this frame, a radical pedagogy. The defiant student is not failing — they are teaching.

Deleuze & Guattari: Desire Against the Machine

And then, should you wish to watch the diagnostic edifice melt entirely, we summon Deleuze and Guattari. For them, the psyche is not a plumbing system with blockages, but a set of desiring-machines short-circuiting the factory floor of capitalism and conformity.

ODD, to them, would be schizoanalysis in action — a body refusing to be plugged into the circuits of docility. The tantrum, the refusal, the eye-roll: these are not symptoms. They are breakdowns in the control grid.

The child isn’t disordered — the system is. The child simply noticed.

Freire: The Educated Oppressed

Lastly, Paulo Freire would ask: What kind of pedagogy demands the death of resistance? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he warns of an education model that treats students as empty vessels. ODD, reframed, is the moment a subject insists on being more than a receptacle.

In refusing the “banking model” of knowledge, the so-called defiant child is already halfway to freedom. Freire would call this not a disorder but a moment of awakening.

Conclusion: Diagnostic Colonialism

So yes, dear friend — I am oppositional. I challenge authority, especially when it mistakes its position for truth. I argue, question, resist. I am not unwell for doing so. I am, if anything, allergic to the idea that obedience is a virtue in itself.

Let us be clear: ODD is not a mirror held up to the subject. It is a spotlight shining from the system, desperately trying to blind anyone who dares to squint.

Now, shall we talk about your compliance disorder?

Full Disclosure: I used ChatGPT for insights beyond Derrida and Foucault, two of my mainstays.

Semantic Drift: When Language Outruns the Science

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Science has a language problem. Not a lack of it – if anything, a surfeit. But words, unlike test tubes, do not stay sterile. They evolve, mutate, and metastasise. They get borrowed, bent, misused, and misremembered. And when the public discourse gets hold of them, particularly on platforms like TikTok, it’s the language that gets top billing. The science? Second lead, if it’s lucky.

Semantic drift is at the centre of this: the gradual shift in meaning of a word or phrase over time. It’s how “literally” came to mean “figuratively,” how “organic” went from “carbon-based” to “morally superior,” and how “theory” in science means robust explanatory framework but in the public square means vague guess with no homework.

In short, semantic drift lets rhetoric masquerade as reason. Once a word acquires enough connotation, you can deploy it like a spell. No need to define your terms when the vibe will do.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

When “Vitamin” No Longer Means Vitamin

Take the word vitamin. It sounds objective. Authoritative. Something codified in the genetic commandments of all living things. (reference)

But it isn’t.

A vitamin is simply a substance that an organism needs but cannot synthesise internally, and must obtain through its diet. That’s it. It’s a functional definition, not a chemical one.

So:

  • Vitamin C is a vitamin for humans, but not for dogs, cats, or goats. They make their own. We lost the gene. Tough luck.
  • Vitamin D, meanwhile, isn’t a vitamin at all. It’s a hormone, synthesised when sunlight hits your skin. Its vitamin status is a historical relic – named before we knew better, and now marketed too profitably to correct.

But in the land of TikTok and supplement shelves, these nuances evaporate. “Vitamin” has drifted from scientific designation to halo term – a linguistic fig leaf draped over everything from snake oil to ultraviolet-induced steroidogenesis.

The Rhetorical Sleight of Hand

This linguistic slippage is precisely what allows the rhetorical shenanigans to thrive.

In one video, a bloke claims a burger left out for 151 days neither moulds nor decays, and therefore, “nature won’t touch it.” From there, he leaps (with Olympic disregard for coherence) into talk of sugar spikes, mood swings, and “metabolic chaos.” You can almost hear the conspiratorial music rising.

The science here is, let’s be generous, circumstantial. But the language? Oh, the language is airtight.

Words like “processed,” “chemical,” and “natural” are deployed like moral verdicts, not descriptive categories. The implication isn’t argued – it’s assumed, because the semantics have been doing quiet groundwork for years. “Natural” = good. “Chemical” = bad. “Vitamin” = necessary. “Addiction” = no agency.

By the time the viewer blinks, they’re nodding along to a story told by words in costume, not facts in context.

The Linguistic Metabolism of Misunderstanding

This is why semantic drift isn’t just an academic curiosity – it’s a vector. A vector by which misinformation spreads, not through outright falsehood, but through weaponised ambiguity.

A term like “sugar crash” sounds scientific. It even maps onto a real physiological process: postprandial hypoglycaemia. But when yoked to vague claims about mood, willpower, and “chemical hijacking,” it becomes a meme with lab coat cosplay. And the science, if mentioned at all, is there merely to decorate the argument, not drive it.

That’s the crux of my forthcoming book, The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that our inherited languages, designed for trade, prayer, and gossip, are woefully ill-equipped for modern scientific clarity. They lag behind our knowledge, and worse, they often distort it.

Words arrive first. Definitions come limping after.

In Closing: You Are What You Consume (Linguistically)

The real problem isn’t that TikTokers get the science wrong. The problem is that they get the words right – right enough to slip past your critical filters. Rhetoric wears the lab coat. Logic gets left in the locker room.

If vitamin C is a vitamin only for some species, and vitamin D isn’t a vitamin at all, then what else are we mislabelling in the great nutritional theatre? What other linguistic zombies are still wandering the scientific lexicon?

Language may be the best tool we have, but don’t mistake it for a mirror. It’s a carnival funhouse – distorting, framing, and reflecting what we expect to see. And until we fix that, science will keep playing second fiddle to the words pretending to explain it.

The Trust Myth: Harari’s Binary and the Collapse of Political Credibility

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Yuval Noah Harari, always ready with a digestible morsel for the TED-addled masses, recently declared that “democracy runs on trust, dictatorship on terror.” It’s a line with the crispness of a fortune cookie and about as much analytical depth. Designed for applause, not interrogation, it’s the sort of soundbite that flatters liberal sensibilities while sanding off the inconvenient edges of history.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Let’s be honest: this dichotomy is not merely simplistic – it’s a rhetorical sedative. It reassures those who still believe political systems are like kitchen appliances: plug-and-play models with clear instructions and honest warranties. But for anyone who’s paid attention to the actual mechanics of power, this framing is delusional.

1. Trust Was Never Earned

In the United States, trust in democratic institutions was never some noble compact forged through mutual respect and enlightened governance. It was cultivated through exclusion, propaganda, and economic bribery. The post-WWII boom offered the illusion of institutional legitimacy – but only if you were white, male, middle-class, and preferably asleep.

Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, women – none were granted the luxury of naïve trust. They were told to trust while being actively disenfranchised. To participate while being systemically excluded. So no, Harari, the machine didn’t run on trust. It ran on marketing. It ran on strategic ignorance.

2. Dictatorship Doesn’t Require Terror

Equally cartoonish is the notion that dictatorships subsist purely on terror. Many of them run quite comfortably on bureaucracy, passive conformity, and the grim seduction of order. Authoritarians know how to massage the same trust reflexes as democracies – only more bluntly. People don’t just obey out of fear. They obey out of habit. Out of resignation. Out of a grim kind of faith that someone – anyone – is in charge.

Dictatorships don’t extinguish trust. They re-route it. Away from institutions and toward strongmen. Toward myths of national greatness. Toward performative stability. It’s not that terror is absent—it’s just not the whole machine. The real engine is misplaced trust.

3. Collapse Is Bipartisan

The present moment isn’t about the erosion of a once-trustworthy system. It’s the slow-motion implosion of a confidence game on all sides. The old liberal institutions are collapsing under the weight of their hypocrisies. But the loudest critics – tech messiahs, culture warriors, authoritarian nostalgists – are no better. Their solutions are just new brands of snake oil in sleeker bottles.

Everyone is pointing fingers, and no one is credible. The public, caught between cynicism and desperation, gravitates either toward restoration fantasy (“make democracy work again”) or authoritarian theatre (“at least someone’s doing something”). Both are dead ends.

4. The Only Way Forward: Structural Reimagination

The only viable path isn’t restoration or regression. It’s reinvention. Systems that demand unconditional trust – like religions and stock markets – are bound to fail, because they rely on sustained illusions. Instead, we need systems built on earned, revocable, and continually tested trust – systems that can survive scrutiny, decentralise power, and adapt to complexity.

In other words: stop trying to repair a house built on sand. Build something else. Something messier, more modular, less mythological.

Let the TED crowd have their slogans. We’ve got work to do.

Redémarrer avec le français : Un voyage après 30 ans

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English translation below.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. (in English/en anglais)

J’ai toujours aimé la langue française, depuis mon enfance. À l’université, j’ai suivi quelques semestres de français en tant qu’option libre. Même mes enfants ont été exposés à la langue dans leurs jeunes années, avec des phrases françaises glissées dans mes conversations. Mais voilà, c’était il y a longtemps ; aujourd’hui, c’est une autre histoire.

Cela fait maintenant plus de 30 ans. Bien que je capte encore des éléments de la langue de temps à autre, il y a bien longtemps que je n’ai pas regardé un film en français ou lu Le Monde. L’attrition est rapide, et c’est bien pour cela que je souhaite me remettre en selle.

Je partais souvent en voyage avec mes livres et mes albums vinyles — je sais, je suis un peu démodé — mais tout cela a été perdu dans un incendie. J’ai donc dû repartir à zéro.

Aujourd’hui, je n’ai même pas l’impression d’être un B1. Honnêtement, je dirais que viser un niveau A1 serait déjà ambitieux. Ma force a toujours été la lecture, mais mon vocabulaire en pâtit. Ensuite viennent l’écriture, suivie de l’écoute et de la parole, bien loin derrière. Bref, voici comment je compte m’y prendre pour retrouver au moins le niveau B.

Ma méthode

J’ai commencé par des matériaux de lecture basiques. Et quand je dis “basiques”, je parle de livres pour enfants. Je sais qu’il faut choisir un contenu qu’on peut lire à 98 % sans dictionnaire. Personnellement, je me permets 90 %, mais je ne cherche pas systématiquement à vérifier un mot.

Dans la pratique, je lis jusqu’au bout pour comprendre le sens global, en notant des mots ou des conjugaisons que je ne connais pas. Quand un mot m’est inconnu, je le note. Parfois, je le retrouve plus tard, et il m’éclaire. À une deuxième lecture, je cherche les mots qui restent obscurs. Comme un puzzle, tout commence à prendre sens.

Mon premier choix a été la version française du manga One Piece. Mais, comme j’avais l’impression de ne pas respecter ma règle des 90 %, j’ai vite dû abandonner. Premièrement, il y avait trop de termes maritimes à cause du thème pirate. Deuxièmement, les éléments de bande dessinée m’ont déstabilisé.

Je me suis ensuite tourné vers Le Petit Prince. Un classique, n’est-ce pas ? Eh bien, il est un peu daté. Et il ne respecte pas entièrement ma règle des 90 %, mais je persiste. En restant fidèle à ma méthode, j’ai opté pour des histoires courtes pour adultes débutants. Chaque histoire est suivie d’un résumé et de questions de compréhension, avec des réponses en français, ce qui est un bonus pour l’autocorrection.

J’ai aussi consulté des ressources en ligne pour améliorer mon écriture et ma compréhension orale. Et bien sûr, il y a trop de vidéos YouTube pour les compter.

Mon point faible reste… eh bien, mon point faible. Alors, j’ai demandé à ChatGPT des idées, histoire de ne pas avoir à engager un tuteur de langue. Petite confession : j’ai essayé une application de langue basée sur l’IA, mais je l’ai trouvée plus frustrante qu’autre chose, alors j’ai vite abandonné. ChatGPT m’a suggéré d’utiliser la fonction “saisie vocale” de Google Docs, paramétrée en français. Je l’ai testé. En lisant des passages de mes histoires disponibles, l’application comprenait parfois ce que je disais, parfois pas. Bien que cette approche ait des limites évidentes, cela m’a permis d’évaluer ma diction et de la corriger en conséquence.

Je viens de redémarrer mon parcours. J’espère trouver le temps et maintenir l’endurance nécessaires. D’ici là, voici donc le premier rapport de cette nouvelle aventure.

ENGLISH VERSION

Getting Back to French: A Journey After 30 Years

I’ve always loved the French language since I was a child. At university, I took a couple of semesters of French as free electives. I even exposed my children to it in their younger years, peppering my speech with French phrases. But that was then; this is now.

It’s been over 30 years. While I still catch bits and pieces incidentally, it’s been a long time since I watched a French-language film or read Le Monde. Attrition sets in quickly, and that’s why I want to get back in the saddle.

I used to travel with my books and record albums—dating myself, of course—but they were lost in a house fire, so I had to start over.

These days, I don’t even feel like I’m at a B1 level. Honestly, A1 feels like a stretch. My strength has always been reading, but my vocabulary has suffered. Next comes writing, followed by listening and speaking, which are far behind. Anyway, here’s my approach to getting back to at least the B-range.

My Approach

I started with basic reading materials. And by “basic,” I mean books for children. I understand that one should choose content they can read 98% of without using a dictionary. I allow myself 90%, but I don’t reach for one anyway.

In practice, I read to the end for comprehension, marking words or conjugations I don’t know. If I come across a word I don’t know, I make a note of it. Sometimes I’ll see it again, and it will click. On a second pass, I’ll look up any still-unknown words. Like a puzzle, it starts coming together and making sense.

My first choice was the French version of the One Piece manga. But, as I wasn’t following the 90% rule, I quickly had to abandon it. First, there were too many nautical terms because of the pirate theme. Second, the comic book elements threw me off.

Next, I thought of Le Petit Prince. A classic, right? Well, it’s a bit dated. And it doesn’t fully adhere to my 90% rule, but I persist. Staying true to my method, I grabbed some A1 short stories for adult beginners. Each one is followed by a summary and comprehension questions, with answers in French, which is a nice bonus for self-correction.

I’ve also engaged with some online resources for writing and listening comprehension. And, of course, there are too many YouTube videos to count.

My weakest link is still… well, my weakest link. So, I asked ChatGPT for ideas short of hiring a language tutor. Full disclosure: I tried a language-learning AI app and found it more frustrating than not, so I ditched it. ChatGPT suggested using the voice typing feature in Google Docs set to French. I tried it. Reading passages from my available stories, the app sometimes understood me, sometimes didn’t. Whilst there are clear limitations to this approach, it allowed me to assess my French pronunciation and correct it accordingly.

I’ve just restarted my journey. I hope to find the time and maintain the stamina. Until then, this is my documentation of step one.