Lewis Goodall, a talk show host, calls the cross-border seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro a ‘kidnapping’. His guest and Trump apologist, Angie Wong, rejects the word. She first says ‘arrest’, then ‘extradition’, then finally the improvised ‘special extradition’. Around that single lexical choice, a 12-minute standoff unfolds.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
As a language philosopher, I am evaluating the language and am less concerned with the underlying facts of the matter. Language serves to obscure these facts from the start and then rhetorically controls the narrative and framing.
Video: Source segment being analysed
There is a familiar mistake made whenever public discourse turns heated: the assumption that the real disagreement lies in the facts. This is comforting, because facts can, at least in principle, be checked. What follows examines a different failure mode altogether. The facts are largely beside the point.
Consider a broadcast exchange in which a political commentator and an interviewer argue over how to describe the forcible removal of a head of state from one country to another. The interviewer repeatedly uses the word kidnapping. The guest repeatedly resists this term, preferring arrest, extradition, and eventually the improvisational compromise ‘special extradition’.
What matters here is not which term is correct. What matters is what the interaction reveals about how meaning is negotiated under pressure.
The illusion of disagreement
Superficially, the exchange appears to be a dispute about legality. Was there a treaty? Was due process followed? Which court has jurisdiction? These questions generate heat, but they are not doing the work.
The real disagreement is prior to all of that: which lexical frame is allowed to stabilise the event.
Once a label is accepted, downstream reasoning becomes trivial. If it was an extradition, it belongs to one legal universe. If it was a kidnapping, it belongs to another. The participants are not arguing within a shared framework; they are competing to install the framework itself.
Equivocation as method, not error
The guest’s shifting vocabulary is often described as evasive or incoherent. This misreads what is happening. The movement from extradition to special extradition is not confusion. It is a deliberate widening of semantic tolerance.
‘Special extradition’ is not meant to clarify. It is meant to survive. It carries just enough institutional residue to sound procedural, while remaining sufficiently vague to avoid binding criteria. It functions less as a description than as a holding pattern.
This is equivocation, but not the amateur kind taught in logic textbooks. It is equivocation under constraint, where the aim is not precision but narrative continuity.
Why exposure fails
The interviewer repeatedly points out that extradition has a specific meaning, and that the situation described does not meet it. This is accurate, and also ineffective.
Why? Because the exchange is no longer governed by definitional hygiene. The audience is not being asked to adjudicate a dictionary entry. They are being asked to decide which voice has the authority to name the act.
Once that shift occurs, exposing misuse does not correct the discourse. It merely clarifies the power asymmetry. The guest can concede irregularity, precedent-breaking, even illegality, without relinquishing control of the label. The language continues to function.
Truth as a downstream effect
At no point does the exchange hinge on discovering what ‘really happened’. The physical sequence of events is relatively uncontested. What is contested is what those events are allowed to count as.
In this sense, truth is not absent from the discussion; it is subordinate. It emerges only after a rhetorical frame has been successfully installed. Once the frame holds, truth follows obediently within it.
This is not relativism. It is an observation about sequence. Rhetoric does not decorate truth here; it prepares the ground on which truth is later claimed.
Language doing institutional work
The most revealing moment comes when the guest effectively shrugs at the legal ambiguity and asks who, exactly, is going to challenge it. This is not cynicism. It is diagnostic.
Words like arrest and extradition are not merely descriptive. They are operational tokens. They open doors, justify procedures, and allow institutions to proceed without stalling. Their value lies less in semantic purity than in administrative usability.
‘Kidnapping’ is linguistically precise in one register, but administratively useless in another. It stops processes rather than enabling them. That is why it is resisted.
What the case study shows
This exchange is not about geopolitics. It is about how language behaves when it is tasked with carrying power. Meaning drifts not because speakers are careless, but because precision is costly. Labels are selected for durability, not accuracy. Truth does not arbitrate rhetoric; rhetoric allocates truth. Seen this way, the debate over terminology is not a failure of communication. It is communication functioning exactly as designed under modern conditions. Which is why insisting on ‘the correct word’ increasingly feels like shouting into a ventilation system. The air still moves. It just isn’t moving for you.
We tend to think of speed limits as facts. Numbers. Neutral. Posted. Enforced. And yet almost no one treats them that way.
Roads are engineered to handle speeds well above the numeral on the sign. Police officers routinely tolerate a band of deviation. We know they’ll allow around ten miles per hour over the stated limit. They know we know. We know that they know that we know. Ad infinitum.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Courts accept that instruments have margins of error. Drivers adjust instinctively for weather, traffic density, visibility, vehicle condition, and local customs. A straight, empty motorway at 3 a.m. is not experienced the same way as a narrow residential street at school pickup time, even if the number on the sign is identical. Everyone knows this. And yet we continue to talk about the speed limit as if it were an unmediated fact about the world.
This is not a complaint about traffic law. Speed limits work remarkably well, precisely because they are not what they appear to be. They are not discoveries about nature, but stabilised conventions: administrative thresholds designed to coordinate behaviour under uncertainty. The familiar numbers – 30, 50, 70 – are not found in the asphalt. Never 57 or 63. They are chosen, rounded, and maintained because they are legible, enforceable, and socially negotiable. What makes speed limits interesting is not their arbitrariness, but their success.
They hold not because they are exact, but because they survive approximation. They absorb error, tolerate deviation, and remain usable despite the fact that everyone involved understands their limits. In practice, enforcement relies less on the number itself than on judgments about reasonableness, risk, and context. The ‘fact’ persists because it is embedded in a network of practices, instruments, and shared expectations.
If you end up in court driving 60 in a 50, your ability to argue about instrument calibration won’t carry much weight. You’re already operating 20 per cent over specification. That’s beyond wiggle room – highly technical nomenclature, to be sure.
Blood alcohol limits work the same way. The legal threshold looks like a natural boundary. It isn’t. It’s a policy decision layered atop probabilistic measurement. Unemployment rates, diagnostic cutoffs, evidentiary standards – all of them look objective and immediate whilst concealing layers of judgment, calibration, and compromise. Each functions as a closure device: ending debate not because uncertainty has been eliminated, but because further uncertainty would make coordination impossible.
The trouble begins when we forget this – and we do. When facts are treated as simple givens rather than negotiated achievements, they become untouchable. Questioning them gets mistaken for denying reality. Acknowledging their construction gets misheard as relativism. What started as a practical tool hardens into something that feels absolute.
This is how we end up saying things like ‘just give me the facts’ whilst quietly relying on tolerance bands, interpretive discretion, and institutional judgment to make those facts usable at all.
If this sounds right – if facts work precisely because they’re mediated, not despite it – then the question becomes: what does truthfulness require once we’ve acknowledged this?
I’ve written a longer essay exploring that question, starting from Bernard Williams’ account of truthfulness as an ethical practice and extending it to facts themselves. The argument isn’t that facts are illusory or unreliable. It’s that recognising how they actually work – through stabilisation, constraint, and correction – clarifies rather than undermines objectivity.
2025 has been a good year for this blog. I’ve crossed the 1,000-post mark, and this year it has had over 30,000 page views – best year ever. This month was the best month ever, and 1st December was the most popular day ever. That’s a lot of ‘evers’.
I shared the remainder of this post on my Ridley Park fiction blog – same reader, same books, same opinion. Any new content added below is in red.
I genuinely loathe top X lists, so let us indulge in some self-loathing. I finished these books in 2026. As you can see, they cross genres, consist of fiction and non-fiction, and don’t even share temporal space. I admit that I’m a diverse reader and, ostensibly, writer. Instead of just the top 5. I’ll shoot for the top and bottom 5 to capture my anti-recommendations. Within categories are alphabetical.
Fiction
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – A slow reveal about identity, but worth the wait.
This was very philosophical and psychological. Nothing appeared to happen until chapter 7, as I recall. I felt like I was just eavesdropping on some school chums, which I was. Then came the big reveal.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Classic unreliable narrator.
Again, philosophical, psychological. I liked it.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM (AKA Sam Hughes) – Points for daring to be different and hitting the landing.
This, I read because I was attracted to the premise of memory as it might affect language. It touched on this a tad, but it was mostly about memory, anti-memory, and constructed selves. How can one experience a contiguous, diachronic self with memory gaps? It never quite got that deep, that on occasion it did, as far as I recall.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – Scottish drugs culture and bonding mates narrative.
This is an age-old cult classic – much better than the already excellent films. Fills in what the film cut for its medium. I read several other Welsh books. Filth was an honourable mention, which I also made connexions to Antimemetics, above.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – In the league of 1984 and Brave New World, but without the acclaim.
This flagged a tad at the end, but it was prescient and released in 1922, decades before 1984 and Brave New World. Worth the read.
Nonfiction
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher – Explains why most problems are social, not personal or psychological. Follows Erich Fromm’s Sane Society, which I also read in 2025 and liked, but it fell into the ‘lost the trail’ territory at some point, so it fell off the list.
Moral Politics by George Lakoff
Evidently, I forgot to explain myself in my prior post. I refer to this book and its trade counterpart, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is more of a political polemic, but still worth the read. It’s also shorter. This is about Moral politics – duh! – but it’s about moral language. It was a precursor to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion or Kurt Gray’s Outraged! I found Haidt’s work interesting but reductive; I found Gray’s work merely reductive.
This said, Lakoff and Haidt were the vector through which I came upon my language ontology theory that further confounds language insufficiency. To be sure, Haidt was an unnecessary point, but it did emphasise it. Haidt’s frameworks also give me something to riff on.
Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis – Explains why Capitalism is already dead on arrival.
Nothing much to add here. Technofeudalism is economic fare, albeit with philosophical implications. I enjoyed it. Yanis is also an interesting speaker.
NB: Some of the other books had great pieces of content, but failed as books. They may have been better as essays or blog posts. They didn’t have enough material for a full book. The Second Sex had enough for a book, but then Beauvoir poured in enough for two books. She should have quit whilst she was ahead.
Image: Books I read in 2025 on Goodreads. Full disclosure: I don’t always record my reading on Goodreads, but I try.
Bottom of the Barrel
Crash by J.G. Ballard – Hard no. I also didn’t like High-rise, but it was marginally better, and I didn’t want to count an author twice.
Nah. I felt he was trying to hard for shock value. It didn’t shock, but it put me off. At least High-rise represented an absurd cultural microcosm. I just wanted the story to be over. Luckily, I read both of these sequentially whilst on holiday, so I wasn’t looking to ingest anything serious.
Neuromancer by William Gibson – I don’t tend to like SciFi. This is a classic. Maybe it read differently back in the day. Didn’t age well.
Nexus by Yuval Harari – Drivel. My mates goaded me into reading this. I liked Sapiens. He’s gone downhill since then. He’s a historian, not a futurist.
Outraged! by Kurt Gray – Very reductionist view of moral harm, following the footsteps of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt.
See comments above. ☝️
Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – A cautionary tale on why writing a book on LSD may not be a recipe for success.
Honourable Mention
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was also good, but my cutoff was at 5. Sorry, Jeff.
I did like this, and it was much better than the Natalie Portman film adaptation. This is the first book in a trilogy. I absolutely hated the second instalment. The third was not as good as the first, but it tried to get back on track from the derailment of the second. As I wrote in public reviews, the second book could have been a prologue chapter to the third book with all of the relevant information I cared about. You could skip the second story with almost no material effect on the story or character arcs.
A Christian bloke was arguing morality with me in regard to a recent post. I am considering a fuller response, but let’s focus on this one aspect for the time being.
Being a Christian, I wanted to argue on his own terms. The topic was statutory rape and the ages of consent more generally. I’m no Christian, but I have read the Bible. I’ve done much coursework in comparative religion, so I’m no stranger to their philosophies. A major criticism I’ve heard from Christians of Islam’s Muhammad is that he had a 9-year-old bride. Reading the account of the God and Mary encounter reminds me of another Bible verse:
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?
Audio: Unrelated to this article, I was looking for cover art by Bouguereau. I chose another of his work, but I happened upon La Vague that shares namespace with this painting. This is an aolean piece over a drum loop I wrote several decades ago on some evening. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but I still like it.Image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) – La vague (1896)
In any case – moving on…
I asked my sidekick, ChatGPT, this question:
Given Biblical accounts, how old must Mary have been at the conception of ‘Jesus’?
It provided a verbose response after a terse:
Short answer: uncomfortably young by modern standards, entirely unremarkable by ancient ones. Yes, civilisation is fun like that.
Again, I believe this account is a contradictory ahistorical account, but he believes it, so I’ll charitably treat it as truth.
It continues:
Based on historical scholarship on Second Temple Judaism:
Girls were typically betrothed shortly after puberty.
Puberty for girls in antiquity is generally estimated around 12–14.
Marriage and consummation often followed soon after betrothal.
Mary is described as:
a παρθένος (virgin)
betrothed to Joseph, not yet living with him
living under her father’s authority
All of that places her very squarely in the category of an early adolescent.
Ok, but not good enough. I clarify: I thought that translating παρθένος as virgin is disputed in hermeneutics. [NB: Be careful to specify and contradict to ensure your answer is solid and not hallucinated.]
Yes. You’re right. The translation of παρθένος as “virgin” is absolutely disputed in hermeneutics, and the fact that this still gets presented as settled is… revealing.
What παρθένος actually means
In Koine Greek, παρθένος primarily means:
a young woman
of marriageable age
socially defined by unmarried status
Sexual inexperience is not intrinsic to the term. It can imply virginity in some contexts, but it does not denote it by default.
If Greek wanted to be anatomically explicit, it had other tools. This word is social, not gynaecological.
The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 is ʿalmāh, which means “young woman”, not “virgin”. The unambiguous Hebrew term for virginity would be bətûlāh, and Isaiah does not use it.
When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, ʿalmāh became παρθένος. That choice is defensible linguistically, but disastrous theologically. Once Matthew reads Isaiah through the Septuagint, the mess is locked in.
So the prophecy pipeline looks like this:
Hebrew ambiguity → Greek ambiguity → Latin certainty → English dogma
A masterclass in semantic drift hardening into doctrine.
Luke doesn’t fix this. He inherits it.
Luke uses παρθένος for Mary because:
she is unmarried
she is betrothed
she is under paternal authority
All perfectly ordinary descriptors for a teenage girl in Second Temple Judaism. None of this requires sexual inexperience as a metaphysical state.
The later insistence that παρθένος = virgin in the modern, anatomical sense is not exegesis. It’s doctrinal backfilling.
Why this keeps getting defended
Because once you admit that:
παρθένος ≠ virgin by necessity
Isaiah wasn’t predicting a miraculous conception
Luke may be narrating status, not biology
…a great deal of theology loses its keystone. So the translation is defended not because it’s airtight, but because it’s load-bearing.
Images: Bry circa 2014. Song circa 2004.
Written by Bry Willis in a dialogue with ChatGPT 5.2
Looking through some of the drafts clogging the blog, I decided to whittle away at the queue. I started this months ago. It’s here now, not particularly in sync with the season or recent topics, but I like Sapolsky.
‘Biology is destiny’, say the Christian Right, the bland bureaucrats of morality, the loud whisperers at Sunday school. They want gender to be a tomb carved in marble: you’re assigned at birth, and you stay a perfect statue. But Sapolsky waltzes in and says, ‘Hold up – what do you mean by biology? Which biology? Which markers count?’
Video: Neuro-biology of Transsexuality, Prof. Robert Sapolsky
In the clip above, Sapolsky unpacks neurological evidence that upends the essentialist cheat codes. He doesn’t pretend we now have the final answer to gender. He does something scarier to fundamentalists: he shows just how messy biology is.
The Bed Nucleus, the Finger Ratio, and the ‘Wrong Body’ Hypothesis
Sapolsky discusses three pieces of neurobiological evidence:
Digit ratio (2nd vs 4th finger length): In lesbians, on average, the ratio is closer to what you see in straight men than straight women. That’s a correlation, an eyebrow-raiser, hardly a decree.
Acoustic reflexes (auto-acoustic reflex): Another early finding in women’s sexual orientation, though faint and underexplored.
The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc): Here we reach heavy artillery. There is a neuron population in this region that, on average, is about twice as large in males as in females. In postmortem analyses of trans women (male → female), this region’s size corresponds to their identified gender, not their natal sex. Crucially, that alignment is seen even in trans individuals who never underwent full hormone therapy or surgical changes.
Sapolsky recounts astute controls: men treated (for, say, testicular cancer) with feminising hormones don’t show the same shift.
Also, using the phantom-limb analogy: men who lose their penis to cancer often report phantom sensations; trans women rarely do. That suggests the body map in the brain never fully “registered” that organ in the same way.
He doesn’t overclaim. He doesn’t say, ‘Case closed, biology proves everything’. He says: These data complicate your neat categories. They force you to ask: which biological measure do you privilege? Hypertrophied neurons? Chromosomes? Receptor density? Hormones? All of them simultaneously? None of them?
Essentialism as a Trap
Fundamentalists and anti-trans ideologues deploy essentialism because it’s convenient. They demand an ironclad ‘essence’ so they can exclude anyone who fails their test. But what Sapolsky shows is that essence is simply a scaffold; we get to pick which biological scaffolds we accept. They may choose genes and genitals; the neurobiologist gives them neuron counts and brain-maps. When your ideology elevates one scaffold and ignores the others, it betrays its own contingency.
Moreover, the evidence suggests that identity, experience, insistence (in Sapolsky’s language: ‘insisting from day one’), and internal brain structure might converge. The ‘wrong body’ isn’t a metaphor. It’s a mismatch between internal brain architecture and external form. The stubborn fragments of biology that fundamentalists accept are torn by the dissonance that science increasingly reveals.
What This Means for Trans Rights, Discourse & Strategy
Science is never ‘conclusive’. Sapolsky offers compelling support, not gospel. Anyone claiming this settles everything has never looked at a scatter plot.
Lived experience still matters. Even if we never had brain slices, self-reports, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, narratives remain valid. Brain studies supplement, not supplant, testimony.
Essentialist opponents have boxed themselves in. When they demand biology decides everything, they hand the baton to neuroscientists – and neuroscientists keep running with it. The entire ‘biology’ equals only what I like’ regime is exposed.
Ambiguity is a strength, not a liability. If we insist identity is linear and tidy, we re-enact their demand for purity. Recognising complexity, mess, and variance is radical resistance.
…and this one. A clarification that is also a demonstration. If anything, the Americanisms should give it away.
The Preamble as Method
A previous post—the one with Foucault, Arendt, Sontag, Fish, Mill, and Girard all lined up like theoretical ammunition—was drafted entirely by ChatGPT after a conversation about the Dershowitz piece before it. I fed it my argument about moral contamination and asked it to expand the thesis with additional thinkers. It obliged. I posted it unedited.
I mention this not as confession but as method. If my core claim is that truth equals rhetoric—that there is no unmediated access to reality, only constructed positions negotiated through language, power, and interpretation—then having an AI mediate my argument while I mediate its output is not a bug. It’s a feature.
The question is never “who really wrote this” but “what work does this text do, and under what conditions?”
This is a non-foundationalist position. There is no neutral ground from which to assess claims. There is no Logic floating above rhetoric, no Reason untouched by affect, no Truth prior to its articulation. What we have are competing rhetorical constructions, each shaped by interests, histories, and power arrangements, each claiming—to varying degrees of honesty—to represent something beyond themselves.
The game is not to transcend this condition. The game is to stop pretending we ever could.
What I’m Actually Arguing
Let me be direct about what those two posts were defending, since the theoretical apparatus apparently obscured more than it clarified.
I am not arguing that:
Age of consent laws should be abolished
The French intellectuals were right to sign those petitions
Association with Epstein is irrelevant
Analysis automatically immunizes anyone from moral judgment
I am arguing that:
Liberal discourse routinely launders emotional and political commitments as self-evident logic, then treats anyone who exposes this process as morally suspect.
Legal thresholds are negotiated rhetorical compromises, not mathematical truths. They reflect harm minimization, cultural anxiety, enforcement pragmatics, and historical contingency. To analyze their construction is not to advocate their abolition.
The “moral contamination reflex” treats inquiry as confession—not because the inquiry threatens truth, but because it threatens the claim that certain positions are simply Logic Itself rather than one rhetorical construction among others.
Guilt by association is both a logical fallacy and sometimes a reasonable heuristic. The trick is admitting which one you’re doing at any given moment, rather than claiming your heuristic is deductive proof.
These claims are rhetorical positions. They are not transcendent truths. But neither are the positions they critique.
The Hypocrisy I’m Diagnosing
When someone argues that a 16-year-old capable of choosing abortion should be capable of choosing sex, they are making a rhetorical move. The argument has gaps—abortion concerns bodily autonomy in ways that sex with others does not; capacity for one decision doesn’t automatically transfer to capacity for another; power dynamics matter.
Fine. Point those out. Explain why the analogy fails.
But what actually happens is different. The argument is not refuted. The arguer is diagnosed. Making the argument becomes evidence of desire. Analyzing it becomes evidence of endorsement. Logic is treated as circumstantial proof of guilt.
This is not because the argument is uniquely dangerous. It’s because it threatens a stabilizing fiction: that our current legal thresholds are both pragmatically necessary and philosophically coherent. They are the former. They are not the latter. And the moral panic that greets anyone who points this out is not about protecting children. It’s about protecting the claim that our compromises are something more than compromises.
The same pattern plays out with Epstein associations. Some people knew him socially or professionally in contexts that had nothing to do with his crimes. Some people continued relationships after credible allegations emerged. Some people were directly complicit. These are different categories.
But the discourse collapses them. Everyone in the address book becomes suspect. Association becomes evidence. And anyone who suggests “we should distinguish between these cases” is immediately accused of defending predators.
This is not logic. This is moral theatre. And the fury it provokes when exposed is not righteous. It’s defensive.
The Difference Between Rhetoric and Relativism
Saying “truth equals rhetoric” sounds like relativism. It sounds like I’m claiming all positions are equal, nothing matters, anything goes.
I’m not.
I’m claiming that all positions are constructed through rhetoric, but that doesn’t make them equal. It means we should argue about them on the terms they actually operate—consequences, values, power, effects—rather than pretending one side has Logic and the other side has Emotion.
Some rhetorical constructions are more defensible than others. Age of consent laws, as constructed compromises aimed at harm reduction, are defensible. That doesn’t mean they’re philosophically coherent or that analyzing their incoherence is an attack on children.
Maintaining professional relationships with powerful people who were later revealed to be criminals does not make you guilty of their crimes. But it might raise questions about judgment, complicity, or willful blindness—questions that should be asked specifically, not universally.
The difference is this: I’m not claiming my position is Logic. I’m claiming it’s a rhetorical construction I find more defensible than the alternatives, for reasons I’m willing to argue about.
What I’m criticizing is the move where liberal discourse presents its rhetorical positions as self-evident moral truths, then treats dissent as pathology.
Why the Theoretical Version Failed
The expanded post tried to universalize the pattern—to show that this reflex appears across domains, across thinkers, across history. It succeeded at that. What it failed to do was stay grounded enough for readers to assess whether the pattern I was describing was real or whether I was constructing a persecution narrative.
The problem was strategic evasiveness. By staying abstract, the piece avoided being testable. It gestured at examples without committing to them. It borrowed authority from Foucault and Arendt without doing the work of showing how their critiques apply to the specific cases I had in mind.
This created a gap between what the essay claimed to be doing (defending analysis against moral panic) and what it was actually doing (defending specific controversial figures using theory as cover).
That gap is what critics correctly identified as bad faith.
What I Should Have Said
Here’s the honest version:
The Dershowitz argument is bad. The abortion-sex analogy doesn’t hold. But “the argument is bad” and “making the argument is evidence of pedophilia” are not the same claim. One is logical critique. The other is moral contamination. We should be able to distinguish them.
The 1977 French petitions were misjudged. Calling for the abolition of age of consent laws in that context, with those specific cases, was not wise. But signing a petition is not the same as committing the acts in question, and treating mid-century French intellectual culture as self-evidently monstrous erases the specific debates they were having about law, psychiatry, and state power. We can think they were wrong without treating the question itself as unspeakable.
Epstein’s network matters. Some associations are meaningful. Power enabled his abuse, and understanding how requires looking at who knew what and when. But not every name in a flight log or party photo is evidence of complicity, and the current discourse often treats them as such. We should distinguish between innocent contact, poor judgment, and active enablement—not flatten everything into “guilt by proximity.”
These are all messy positions. They require distinctions, context, and willingness to live in discomfort. That’s harder than moral certainty. But it’s also more honest.
The Meta-Point About AI Generation
The fact that the previous post was AI-generated does something interesting to all of this.
It was rhetorically effective. It marshaled the right theoretical authorities. It structured the argument coherently. It sounded like philosophy. And it was assembled by a pattern-matching system with no beliefs, no commitments, no stakes.
This should tell us something about the nature of rhetoric itself. The text worked—or didn’t—based on what it did, not where it came from. Authenticity is not truth. Authorship is not authority. What matters is whether the construction holds, and under what conditions.
I could have hidden the AI involvement. Many would. The disclosure feels like it undermines the argument’s authority—if a machine wrote it, does it count?
But that reaction itself proves the point. We want arguments to come from authenticated sources, from proper authority, from legitimate speakers. We want to know who’s talking so we can decide whether to trust them. This is not Logic. This is rhetoric all the way down.
The AI wrote a version of my argument that was cleaner and more theoretically sophisticated than I would have produced alone. It was also more evasive, more abstract, less committed. Those aren’t bugs in the process. They’re features of how the system generates text—maximizing coherence, minimizing controversy, staying in safe abstraction.
That I chose to post it anyway, knowing these limitations, is itself a rhetorical move. It says: “I’m willing to use mediated tools to construct my position, and I’m not pretending otherwise.”
What This Leaves Us With
I started with a claim about moral contamination—that liberal discourse treats certain kinds of inquiry as self-incriminating. I then demonstrated this by making precisely the kind of inquiry that provokes that reflex, using examples I knew would be read as defensive rather than analytical.
The responses proved the thesis. Analysis was read as confession. Theory was read as cover. Even asking whether a distinction exists between argument and endorsement was taken as evidence that no such distinction can be maintained.
But here’s what I didn’t make clear enough: I’m not claiming to be above this dynamic. I’m in it too. I have commitments, interests, and positions I’m defending. The difference is I’m naming them as such, rather than claiming they’re simply What Logic Demands.
Truth equals rhetoric. We’re all doing motivated reasoning. The question is not “who has transcended their motivations” but “whose motivations, toward what ends, with what consequences?”
I think the moral contamination reflex produces bad discourse—not because it’s emotional, but because it claims not to be. I think guilt by association is overused—not because association never matters, but because we’ve stopped distinguishing between different kinds of association. I think legal thresholds should be analyzable—not because they should be abolished, but because unexamined laws are dangerous even when well-intentioned.
These are rhetorical positions. I’m arguing for them. I’m not pretending they’re Logic Itself.
If you disagree, argue back. But argue with what I’m actually saying, not with what analysis supposedly reveals about my secret desires.
That’s all I’m asking for. And apparently, it’s too much.
if a 16-year-old can choose abortion, then she should be able to choose to have sex
In the newspaper clipping above, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz argues that if a 16-year-old can choose abortion, then she should be able to choose to have sex. The argument is presented as sober, rational, and juridical. A syllogism offered as disinfectant.
There are many philosophical problems with the equivalence. I am not interested in most of them.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
I’ve written before that age as a proxy for maturity collapses immediately into a Sorites paradox. It assumes commensurability where none exists. It treats human development as discretised and legible, when it is anything but. The law must draw lines. Philosophy does not have that luxury. But that is not why this argument resurfaces now.
What interests me is the moral contamination reflex it reliably provokes. The rule is tacit but rigid: if you reason calmly about a taboo subject, you must be defending it. If you defend it, you must desire it. If you desire it, you must be guilty of it. Logic becomes circumstantial evidence.
This reflex is not new. Nor is it confined to contemporary Anglo-American culture. Half a century ago, it played out publicly in France, with consequences that are now being retrospectively moralised into caricature.
In January and May of 1977, a petition published in Le Monde floated the abrogation of what was then called the “sexual majority”. In January of the same year, a separate petition called for the release of three men accused of having sex with boys and girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Among the signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.
Today, this episode is typically invoked as a moral mic drop. No argument is examined. No context is interrogated. No distinction is drawn between legal reasoning, political provocation, and moral endorsement. The conclusion is immediate and terminal: these figures were monsters, or fools, or both.
The logic is familiar by now. If they signed, they must have approved. If they approved, they must have desired. If they desired, they must have practised. Analysis collapses into accusation.
None of this requires defending the petitions, the arguments, or the acts in question. It requires only defending a principle that has apparently become intolerable: that an argument can be examined without imputing motive, desire, or personal conduct to the person making it.
This is where liberal societies reveal a particular hypocrisy. They claim to value reasoned debate, yet routinely launder moral intuitions through rationalist language, then react with fury when someone exposes the laundering process. Legal thresholds are treated as if they were moral truths rather than negotiated compromises shaped by fear, harm minimisation, optics, and historical contingency.
Once the compromise hardens into law, the line becomes sacred. To question it is not civic scrutiny but moral trespass. To analyse it is to signal deviance. This is why figures like Foucault are not criticised for being wrong, but for having asked the question at all. The question itself becomes the crime.
It is often said, defensively, that emotion precedes logic. True enough. But this is usually offered as an excuse rather than a diagnosis. The supposed human distinction is not that we feel first, but that we can reflect on what we feel, examine it, and sometimes resist it. The historical record suggests we do this far less than we like to believe.
The real taboo here is not sex, or age, or consent. It is the suggestion that moral reasoning might survive contact with uncomfortable cases. That one might analyse the coherence of a law without endorsing the behaviour it regulates. That one might describe a moral panic without siding with its villains.
Instead, we have adopted a simpler rule: certain questions may not be asked without self-implication. This preserves moral theatre. It also guarantees that our laws remain philosophically incoherent while everyone congratulates themselves for having the correct instincts.
Logic, in this arrangement, is not a virtue. It is a liability. And history suggests that anyone who insists on using it will eventually be posthumously condemned for doing so.
On Self-Evidence, Personhood, and the Administrative Nature of Rights
The following sentence is among the most quoted in political history and among the least examined. It is invoked as moral bedrock, taught as civic catechism, and insulated from scrutiny by a reverence that mistakes repetition for comprehension. It is rarely read closely, and rarely read sceptically.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
What follows is not a rebuttal. It is an annotation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Most readers will recognise this as the opening of the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America. Recognition, however, is not comprehension. The sentence survives on familiarity. Once that familiarity is set aside, it begins to fail clause by clause.
I. A Best Case, Briefly
A more charitable reading deserves brief consideration. ‘Self-evident’, in the intellectual context of the eighteenth century, did not mean obvious in the sense of requiring no reflection. It referred instead to propositions taken as axiomatic: not inferred from prior premises, but serving as starting points for reasoning. On this view, influenced by Scottish Common Sense philosophy, the claim is not that these truths are psychologically irresistible, but that they are rationally basic.
Likewise, ‘we hold’ need not be read as an admission of arbitrariness. It may be understood as a public avowal: a political body formally affirming what reason is said to disclose, rather than grounding those truths in the act of holding itself. Read this way, the sentence does not collapse into mere opinion.
Finally, the Declaration is often understood as performative rather than descriptive.[1] It does not merely state political facts; it brings a political subject into being. The ‘we’ is constituted in the act of declaration, and the language functions as a founding gesture rather than a philosophical proof.
Even on this charitable reading, however, the appeal to rational self-evidence presupposes capacities that were unevenly distributed at best. The Enlightenment notion of ‘reason’ was never a raw human faculty equally available to all. It depended on literacy, education, leisure, and institutional participation—conditions enjoyed by a narrow segment of the population.
In the late eighteenth century, large portions of the population were functionally illiterate. The ability to engage abstract political principles, to treat propositions as axiomatic starting points for reasoning, was not merely rare but socially restricted. The universal address of the sentence thus rests on a practical contradiction: it invokes a form of rational accessibility that its own social conditions actively prevented.
Nor is this merely a historical observation. Whilst formal literacy has expanded, the distribution of the capacities required for sustained abstract reasoning remains sharply constrained. What has changed is scale, not structure. Appeals to ‘self-evident’ political truths still presuppose forms of cognitive access that cannot be assumed, even now.
There is an important distinction here between innocent misreading and bad-faith translation. A modern reader who takes ‘self-evident’ to mean what it now ordinarily means is not at fault; semantic drift makes this nearly unavoidable. But to continue reading the sentence this way once its historical and philosophical context is understood is no longer an error. It is a decision.
Under the principle of least effort, claims that present themselves as ‘self-evident’ are maximally efficient. They require no sustained attention, no conceptual labour, and no challenge to inherited categories. For individuals ill-equipped – by education, time, or institutional support – to interrogate abstract political claims, such language is not merely persuasive; it is relieving.
To accept a proposition as self-evident is to be spared the burden of understanding how it works. The sentence can be consumed whole, in a single uncritical gulp. What is swallowed is not an argument, but a posture: assent without inquiry, agreement without comprehension.
This is not a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of a cognitive environment in which complexity is costly, and authority is familiar. ‘Self-evidence’ functions here as a labour-saving device, converting political commitments into ready-made certainties. The capacity to recognise self-evident truths thus functions as an unmarked prerequisite for political subjecthood – a gatekeeping mechanism that precedes and enables the more explicit exclusions to come.
With this in mind, the sentence can be examined clause by clause – not as philosophical proposition, but as rhetorical machinery.
II. An Annotated Deconstruction
‘We hold’
To whom does this ‘we’ apply? Who is included in this collective voice, and who is not? More importantly, what does it mean to hold something that is allegedly self-evident?
Holding is an act of maintenance. It implies agreement, reinforcement, repetition. Beliefs must be held; axioms must be held; norms must be held. Self-evidence, by contrast, is supposed to require none of this. If a truth is genuinely self-evident, it does not need to be held at all. It simply imposes itself.
The opening clause announces immediacy whilst confessing mediation. This is not a subtle tension. It is an outright contradiction. The sentence begins by undermining its own epistemic posture. The axiomatic framing does not eliminate contestability; it displaces it. What is presented as rational starting point functions, in practice, as rhetorical closure.
‘Truths’
What kind of truths are being held here?
The word does far too much work whilst remaining resolutely undefined. These are not empirical truths. They are not logical truths. They are not even clearly moral truths in the narrow sense. Instead, the term oscillates between epistemic certainty, moral assertion, and political aspiration, sliding between categories without ever settling long enough to be examined.
The pluralisation matters. By multiplying ‘truths’ whilst leaving their nature unspecified, the sentence creates an aura of obviousness without committing to a standard of justification. Disagreement is pre-empted not by argument, but by tone.
‘Self-evident’
Unless one invokes something like Descartes’ cogito as a limiting case, nothing is genuinely self-evident. Even the cogito depends on language, conceptual inheritance, and a shared grammar of doubt. Self-evidence is not an epistemic given; it is an experiential effect produced by familiarity, stability, and low resistance.
Here, ‘self-evident’ functions as rhetorical closure masquerading as epistemology. It does not establish certainty; it enforces silence. To question what is ‘self-evident’ is to risk being cast as obtuse, perverse, or acting in bad faith. Inquiry is not answered. It is short-circuited.
‘All men’
This is not the inclusive ‘men’ of abstract mankind. It is a concrete, historically bounded category: adult males, and not coincidentally white ones. The exclusions are not implied later. They are operative here, at the point of entry.
This is the quietly active boundary of the entire sentence. Before any rights are named, before any equality is asserted, the scope of applicability has already been narrowed. The universal tone is achieved by selective admission.
‘Created equal’
Created by whom? And equal in what respect?
The notion of equality here is never specified, because specification would immediately expose contestation. Equal in capacity? In worth? In standing before the law? In outcome? In moral consideration? Readers are invited to supply their preferred interpretation retroactively, which is precisely what allows the sentence to endure.
Some have suggested that ‘equal’ means ‘equal under the law’, but this simply defers the problem. The law defines equality however it pleases, when it pleases, and for whom it pleases. Equality without a metric is not a claim. It is a metaphysical gesture.
It is often said that the Declaration’s universal language contained the seeds of its own expansion. That Douglass, King, and the suffragists appealed to it is taken as evidence of its latent emancipatory power. But this confuses rhetoric with causation. These advances were not the unfolding of a promise, but the result of sustained political pressure, moral confrontation, and material struggle. The language was repurposed because it was available and authoritative, not because it was prophetic.
To call this a ‘promissory note’ is to mistake a battlefield for a contract. Promises are kept by their authors. These were extracted by those excluded, often in direct opposition to the very institutions that sanctified the sentence.
The story also flatters the present. If the promise is always being fulfilled, it is never being broken. Yet the same language remains actively contested, narrowed, and rescinded. Personhood is still conditional. Rights still evaporate at borders, prisons, and classifications. The note, if it exists at all, is perpetually past due.
‘Endowed by their Creator’
No one believes the drafters were referring to genetics or parentage. This capital-C Creator is a theological move, not a biological one. The sentence quietly abandons the pretence of self-evidence and imports divine authority as a grounding mechanism.
This is not incidental. By placing rights beyond human origin, the sentence renders them simultaneously unquestionable and unreachable. Legitimacy is outsourced to a source that cannot be interrogated. Appeals are closed by design.
‘Unalienable Rights’
Here the sentence delivers a double assertion. First, that rights exist independently of institutions. Second, that they cannot be taken away. Both claims fail on contact with history.
Rights are constructed, recognised, enforced, suspended, and withdrawn by institutions. Bentham saw this clearly: ‘natural rights’ function rhetorically to obscure the institutional conditions that alone make rights actionable.[2] And far from being inalienable, rights prove remarkably fragile. The record is unambiguous: rights track status, not humanity. The moment personhood is questioned, rights do not need to be violated. They simply cease to apply.
‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’
Under the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – the framework treating key political terms as structurally underdetermined – these are textbook Contestables.[3] None are measurable. None have stable definitions. None come with clear thresholds or enforcement criteria.
‘Happiness’ is the most revealing substitution of all. Locke’s blunt ‘property’ at least named what was being protected.[4] ‘Happiness’ softens the promise whilst emptying it of content. It gestures toward flourishing whilst committing to nothing beyond tolerable participation.
Life, liberty, and happiness are curated abstractions, not guarantees – property in softer clothing.
III. Personhood as the Hidden Mechanism
Zooming out, the operational logic becomes clear. Rights depend on personhood.[5] Personhood is conferred, not discovered. Declaring non-personhood resolves the contradiction without ever touching the rhetoric.
This is the mechanism that allows a universal language to coexist with selective application. When personhood is withdrawn, rights are not violated. They are bypassed. Ethics never gets a hearing, because the subject has already been administratively erased.
To call this administrative is not metaphor. Personhood is assigned, reclassified, and revoked through documentation, categorisation, and procedural determination. The question of who counts is settled before any ethical consideration can begin.
IV. The Sentence as Prototype, Not Mistake
It is tempting to read this sentence as naïve, hypocritical, or aspirationally flawed. That would be a mistake. The sentence is not a failure of Enlightenment thinking. It is its prototype.
It was never meant to survive scrutiny. It was meant to mobilise, stabilise, and legitimise. Its vagueness is functional. Its incoherence is load-bearing. The sentence works precisely because it is conceptually promiscuous, rhetorically elevated, and operationally evasive. What looks like philosophical sloppiness is political engineering.
V. Why It Still Matters
This sentence is not an historical curiosity. It is the template for modern political language.
Universal in tone.
Conditional in application.
Moral in rhetoric.
Administrative in practice.
The future did not reveal the sentence to be false. It revealed what the sentence was for.
Footnotes
[1] J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
[2] Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution
[3] See The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis for a full treatment of Contestables and their function in political discourse.
[4] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Written by Bry Willis
microglyphics
NB: I wrote this as a polemic rather than in a manner suitable for a journal submission. I did not wish to expend the effort to understand counterarguments. This interpretation stands on its own. This said, in Section I. I still note some historical perspective that is somewhat important. It even illustrates semantic drift, which I cover in A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
This is awkward. I’d been preparing some posts on the age of consent, and I decided to write a formal essay on ageism. Since the age of consent is a moral hot-button topic for some, I decided to frame the situation in a political framework instead. The setup isn’t much different, but it keeps people’s heads out of the gutter and removes the trigger that many people seem to pull. It’s awkward because none of these posts has yet been posted. Spoiler alert, I guess. I could delay this announcement, but I won’t. Here it is.
Democracy is often defended in lofty terms. We are told that citizens are rational agents, capable of judgment, autonomy, and reasoned participation in collective decision-making. Voting, on this story, is not just a procedure. It is the expression of agency by competent participants. That all sounds reassuring.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay and concept.
What’s curious is that no democratic system actually checks whether any of this is true.
There are no assessments of political understanding. No evaluation of judgment. No test of civic competence. You become a fully empowered political agent overnight, not because you demonstrate anything, but because the calendar flips. Turn eighteen. You’re in. This isn’t a minor oversight. It’s the central puzzle my recent preprint explores.
The Proxy Nobody Questions
Modern democracies assign political standing using proxies: simple categorical markers that stand in for more complex qualities. Age is the most obvious. It is treated as a substitute for maturity, judgment, autonomy, and responsibility. But here’s the key point: age doesn’t approximate competence. It replaces it.
If age were a rough indicator, we might expect flexibility at the margins. Exceptions. Supplementary criteria. Some attempt to track the thing it supposedly represents. Instead, we get a hard boundary. Below it, total exclusion. Above it, permanent inclusion. Capacity doesn’t matter on either side. The proxy isn’t helping institutions identify competence. It is doing something else entirely.
Competence Talk Without Competence
Despite this, democratic theory remains saturated with competence language. We are told that participation is grounded in rational agency. That citizens possess the capacities needed for self-government. That legitimacy flows from meaningful participation by autonomous agents. None of this is operationalised.
Competence is never specified, measured, or verified. It functions purely as justificatory rhetoric. A moral vocabulary that explains why inclusion is legitimate, without ever guiding how inclusion actually happens. This isn’t confusion; it’s design.
Why the Gap Doesn’t Collapse
At this point, a reasonable person might expect trouble. After all, if the justification doesn’t match the mechanism, shouldn’t the system wobble? It doesn’t. And the reason matters.
Political participation generates very weak feedback. Outcomes are mediated through institutions. Causal responsibility is diffuse. Success criteria are contested. When things go badly, it’s rarely clear why, or what a better alternative would have been.
Under these conditions, dissatisfaction becomes affective rather than analytic. People sense that things aren’t working, but lack the tools to diagnose how or where the system failed. Crucially, they also lack any way to recalibrate the link between competence and political standing, because that link was never operational in the first place. The system doesn’t aim for optimisation. It aims for stability.
Boundary Drawing Without Saying So
This structure becomes clearest when we look at boundary cases. Why eighteen rather than sixteen? Or twelve? Or twenty-one? There is no competence-based answer. Developmental research consistently shows wide overlap between adolescents and adults, and massive variation within age groups. If competence were taken seriously, age thresholds would be indefensible.
Historically, when competence was operationalised such as through literacy tests, the result was transparent hierarchy and eventual delegitimation. Modern democracies avoid that by keeping competence abstract and proxies neutral-looking. The boundary remains. The justification changes.
What This Does and Does Not Argue
This analysis does not propose reforms. It does not advocate competence testing. It does not suggest lowering or raising the voting age. It does not claim voters are stupid, irrational, or defective. It describes a structural feature of democratic legitimacy:
Democracy works by saying one thing and doing another, and that gap is not accidental. Competence language stabilises legitimacy precisely because it is never put to work. You may think that’s fine. You may think it’s unavoidable. You may think it’s a problem. The paper doesn’t tell you which to choose. It simply insists that if we’re going to talk seriously about democratic legitimacy, we should notice what role competence actually plays. And what it doesn’t.
I’m no fan of holidays. I neither enjoy nor celebrate Christmas. I’m acutely aware of its commercial excesses and its religious inheritance, two institutions I find, at best, tiresome and, at worst, actively corrosive. Whether that’s abhorrence or simple loathing is a distinction I’ll leave to braver souls.
Still, calendars exist whether one consents to them or not, and this piece happens to land today. If Christmas is your thing, by all means, have at it. Sincerely. Rituals matter to people, even when their metaphysics don’t survive inspection.
What follows is not a defence of the season, nor a seasonal moral. It’s a small human moment that happens to involve Santa, which is to say a costume, a script, and a public performance. What interests me is not the symbolism, but what happens when the performance yields just enough to allow someone else to be seen on their own terms. If nothing else, that feels like a tolerable use of the day.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
What Legibility?
When I use the term legibility, it’s usually as a pejorative. It’s my shorthand for reductionism. For the way human beings are flattened into checkboxes, metrics, market segments, or moral exemplars so they can be processed efficiently by institutions that mistake simplification for understanding.
But legibility isn’t always a vice.
Video: Santa signs with a 3-year-old dear girl
Most of us, I suspect, want to be legible. Just not in the ways we are usually offered. We want to be seen on our own terms, not translated into something more convenient for the viewer. That distinction matters.
In the video above, a deaf child meets Santa. Nothing grand happens. No lesson is announced. No slogan appears in the corner of the screen. Santa simply signs.
The effect is immediate. The child’s posture changes. Her attention sharpens. There’s a visible shift from polite endurance to recognition. She realises, in real time, that she does not need to be adapted for this encounter. The encounter has adapted to her. This is legibility done properly.
Not the synthetic legibility of television advertising, where difference is curated, sanitised, and arranged into a reassuring grid of representation. Not the kind that says, we see you, while carefully controlling what is allowed to be seen. That version of legibility is extraction. It takes difference and renders it harmless. Here, the legibility runs the other way.
Santa, already a performative role if ever there was one, doesn’t stop being performative. The costume remains. The ritual remains. But the performance bends. It accommodates. It listens. The artifice doesn’t collapse; it becomes porous.
I’m wary of words like authenticity. They’ve been overused to the point of meaninglessness. But I do think we recognise performatism when we see it. Not in the technical sense of speech acts, but in the everyday sense of personas that ring hollow, gestures that exist for the camera rather than the people involved. This doesn’t feel like that.
Of course, the child could already connect. Deaf people connect constantly. They persevere. They translate. They accommodate a world that rarely meets them halfway. Nothing here ‘grants’ her humanity. What changes is the tightness of the connexion.
The shared language acts as a verbal proxy, a narrowing of distance. You can see the moment it clicks. He speaks her language. Or rather, he speaks a language that already belongs to her, even if calling it ‘hers’ is technically imprecise. Mother tongue is a slippery phrase. Irony does some of the work here.
The point is not inclusion as spectacle. It’s recognition without reduction.
Legibility, in this case, doesn’t make her smaller. It makes the interaction larger. And that, inconveniently for our systems and slogans, is what most people have been asking for all along.
Philosophics 