I truly appreciate the bravery of these explorations. They are quite unusual to witness because of the cost to the explorer. But the briarpatch must be escaped, and most are not Br’er Rabbit; accommodators are the rule. The thicket is philosophy itself. The western tradition fears the forest, where it finds darkness, and reconstructs its alter-environment between the ears.
In the end, the region between the ears benefits most completely from the upwelling of true Nature in the neurons’ dialog with the mycelium. The unspoken but fully communicative mutuality of signaling. The sensibility supporting the cerebrum is vast and behind the mystery of life.
In the end, we are not meant to be tools – that is a rationalist delusion. Rationalists themselves have succumbed to the forest darkness of their own victimhood. Holistic bodily intelligence is another dimension, not to be confused as a solely human property, as it is in fact, more universal, but an unfortunate casualty of human conceits. Nor does holistic bodily intelligence begin at the skin, but in the synapses between mycelium and neuroplasm.
Eudaimonia is the child of deeper sensibilities not fully comprehensible to human “thought”.
Good argumentation requires agreed upon conditions. I like taking “concept” as a starting point rather than “definition” for the very reasons you explore here. Given the variety of human malfeasance, it is better to argue over whether the concept of genocide or fascism applies to actions, instead of worrying the definition of such terms until they lose all meaning.
“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea.” I am probably one of the few who still remember Walter Winchell’s radio broadcasts during the Second World War and how my parents waited and listened for them. I think the news media in our country have stopped mentioning Ukraine. It is almost as if there is no war in that country.
I am grateful for what the people of Ukraine are doing for the world, so I will try to keep Ukraine in the news. I will be copying and pasting comments from several live reporters living in Ukraine who publish articles on the Medium Daily Digest, an online web page newspaper.
Everything included in my news station will be quotes for their reporting.
Ukraine has begun to reveal the STASH air defense system. It is smaller, more modular, and far less resource-intensive than conventional systems such as the MIM-104 Patriot, which are designed for completely different targets.
Ukraine strikes on May 7th and before on the refinery in Perm have worked, and Reuters reports it is completely out of operation. Last night, Ukraine hit the pumping station.
Ukraine attacked the pumping station in Ufa again yesterday. Smoke was seen rising from the facility. The attacks in Perm and Ufa are critical nodes in Russia’s oil infrastructure, and they are nodes that Ukraine could have hit a long time ago, except that they didn’t at the request of the West. These cut off not just refining, but the supply of crude oil itself.
Kyiv Post reported that Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces carried out precision strikes in occupied Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Luhansk regions in early May, including attacks on Russian air-defense systems and radar stations such as Pantsir and Tor complexes.
Ukraine launched about 200 drones into Russia at about 1600 in broad daylight.
The Krishi oil refinery in the Leningrad district is on fire, as confirmed by local videos, the regional governor's announcement, and NASA FIRMS satellite imagery.
Ukrainian drones also hit the VNIIR-Progress factory in Cheboksary, which makes electrical components for the military.
As a result of the attacks on the Russian port of Primorsk, the missile carrier Karakurt, a patrol boat, and a tanker from the shadow fleet were hit, according to a report by Ukrainian Major General Kumara.
For years, Russia treated its Kinzhal missile like one of the crown jewels of its arsenal. Fast, hypersonic, expensive, and marketed as something built to punch through Western air defenses. According to the Kyiv Independent, Ukrainian electronic warfare specialists say Lima stations have helped suppress or divert 58 of 59 Kinzhal missiles launched at protected targets. Cascade Systems, the developer behind Lima, says the system stopped 26 Kinzhal missiles in the first three months of 2026 alone.
The biggest trick the Nordic states ever played was to make the world believe that they were just helpers of Ukraine. They are, in fact, the architects of a new form of sovereignty. A drone that requires a six-month build in Sweden and costs $50,000 can be made in a week in Ukraine for $2,000. That is not merely efficiency — it is change. This isn’t just cost efficiency. It’s evolutionary acceleration.
I don’t think you’re arguing with rationalists. You’re arguing with intellectually dishonest fanatics and Hasbarists whose job is to deluge the public discourse with mendacious propaganda at any price to the truth so long as it benefits Israel. The question of whether Israel has committed a genocide in Palestine is not a serious one, and anyone proposing to debate it should not be taken seriously. Nor should anyone ever waste their precious mental energy on the parasitic, filthy verbigerating lies of these worthless cranks defending this monstrous crime.
"The Nazis did not jump directly to gas chambers. In their early years in power, they engaged in strategies to make life sufficiently miserable and unsafe for Jews and other scapegoats that they would emigrate. Already at this stage, in 1933, Lemkin wanted any Nazi official who stepped outside of Germany arrested for crimes of barbarism against humanity. He wanted the undermining of a people's cultural, political, and religious foundations of life all recognized on a continuum of a common crime that leads ultimately to the destruction of that people.
"If your immediate image of genocide is the Holocaust, and you believe that any current instance qualifies as genocide to the extent that it resembles mass execution by gas chambers, you are incorrect. The Genocide Conventions aim to sanction and arrest a process well before that point. Preventing genocide doesn’t mean having laws to punish a future holocaust; it means having laws that kick in at recognizable stages before such atrocities can happen—and by normalizing the values in those laws, having a global public less willing to tolerate genocide. The point is not to punish Nazis in 1945. The Nuremberg trials did that anyway with no reference to genocide. The point is to stop Nazis in 1933. The postwar world was reeling from one of the worst crimes in all of human history, and Lemkin’s brilliance lay in conveying the broader patterns of which this crime was part." (footnote omitted)
I am neither a Kantian rationalist nor a "coherentist." I am a consequentialist. If one has a certain amount of time to judge actions, the intent becomes obvious. In the same way that, for instance, if our courts say you cannot discriminate by race but can discriminate by preponderance of party affiliation, if the end result produces discrimination by race, it is a distinction without a difference.
I might suggest that consequentialism as a category is not of the same type as rationalism or coherentism. Rationalism and coherentism are philosophical schools for cognizing reality itself.
Consequentialism is a normative-ethical school for evaluating actions and their justifications. These operate at different levels of the philosophical stack. You can be a consequentialist and a coherentist at the same time. You can be a consequentialist and a rationalist at the same time. The distinction matters because rationalism and coherentism are doing metaphysical-epistemological work about how we come to know anything at all, including how we come to know what concepts mean and what counts as evidence for their application. Consequentialism is doing normative-ethical work about which features of an action determine its moral evaluation once we have already determined what the action is and what its consequences are. The two levels are addressing different questions.
Your discrimination example is doing exactly the work the coherentist framework supports. The court's distinction between race and preponderance of party affiliation fails when the categories track each other closely enough that the outcomes are identical. The judgment that the distinction is a distinction without a difference is itself a coherentist judgment — it operates by looking at the cluster of features that the two ostensibly-different categories generate in practice, asking whether the features cluster together in the same constellation, and concluding that the formal-categorical difference does not survive the attention to the actual outcomes. The judgment is not derived from a foundational definition of discrimination. It is derived from the intersubjective work of recognizing that the cases belong in the same family regardless of which formal-categorical apparatus the court reaches for. This is exactly the coherentist methodology applied to a legal-discriminatory case. The conclusion you reach by consequentialist reasoning about outcomes is the conclusion the coherentist methodology supports. The two are not in conflict. They are operating at different levels of the question.
The deeper integration is that consequentialism itself presupposes a methodology for determining what the consequences are, who the affected parties are, what the relevant time horizon is, and what counts as a morally salient consequence at all. None of these determinations are given by consequentialism itself. They have to be made by the prior operation of attending to what is actually happening, which is the operation rationalism and coherentism characterize differently. The rationalist position holds that these determinations can be made by deductive application of foundational categories. The coherentist position holds that these determinations are made by the cumulative work of registering what the cases actually look like and asking whether they cluster with the constellation of cases the relevant concepts have been tracking. Consequentialism does not adjudicate between these positions. It tells you what to do with the consequences once you have determined what they are. The methodology for determining the consequences is the prior philosophical question.
So when you reach the conclusion that the distinction is a distinction without a difference, you are doing coherentist work to get there, even if your normative-ethical framework is consequentialist. The work of recognizing that the outcomes converge regardless of the formal-categorical apparatus is attention to the cluster of features the cases produce in practice. That work is coherentist methodology in operation. Your consequentialism is the normative-ethical framework that tells you the convergent outcomes are what morally matter. The two are doing complementary work at different levels of the analysis. The disagreement we are having about the Gaza case is not a disagreement at the consequentialist-versus-coherentist level. It is a disagreement at the prior level about what methodology is appropriate for determining what is happening in the first place, which is the level at which rationalism and coherentism actually contend.
I would say we're actually not in disagreement about Gaza, even though I've normally considered myself an Israel supporter until the Gaza escalation. I would say that my example with the Court is simply another example of how the judgment applies.
I appreciate the sophisticated thought that went into this and the apparent intent to truly arrive at a sound conclusion. The one thing you really did not mention though is Hamas. It would be interesting to see you turn your view in that direction. If Hamas were merely a defensive military organization, or if Hamas really was striving to improve the lives of Gazans in any reasonable sense of the word, or if Hamas really allowed anything like pluralistic politics or society, then your argument would seem undeniable. But that is not Hamas in the world I live in.
Having read a smattering of the philosophers you reference, I think your amalgamation of them makes sense to me.
I also see the argument staying at the definition of genocide can be twisted beyond a sincere one. Like much of this age, if the proponents of an action or policy can stop you at the door, so to speak, then they have achieved their goal. The arguments often are for delay, deflection or just for arguments sake.
I tend to want to ask them how many for it to count. If you were standing in front of a firing squad that was targeting a group by race, Religion etc and the killing was ongoing, I would turn to them and ask "is this enough to qualify?". If they approach it casually, I would assume they are trying the barring rhe door approach rather than a response from the core of their humanity.
I'm thinking of getting more aggressive at banning people from my comment section based on what you have written here. If you would like to accuse me of "pussyfooting about definitions", you are welcome to do it elsewhere. But in the interim, you can take leave of your protestations, for I will not responsive to them given the fact that you accuse me of intellectual dishonesty.
I truly appreciate the bravery of these explorations. They are quite unusual to witness because of the cost to the explorer. But the briarpatch must be escaped, and most are not Br’er Rabbit; accommodators are the rule. The thicket is philosophy itself. The western tradition fears the forest, where it finds darkness, and reconstructs its alter-environment between the ears.
In the end, the region between the ears benefits most completely from the upwelling of true Nature in the neurons’ dialog with the mycelium. The unspoken but fully communicative mutuality of signaling. The sensibility supporting the cerebrum is vast and behind the mystery of life.
In the end, we are not meant to be tools – that is a rationalist delusion. Rationalists themselves have succumbed to the forest darkness of their own victimhood. Holistic bodily intelligence is another dimension, not to be confused as a solely human property, as it is in fact, more universal, but an unfortunate casualty of human conceits. Nor does holistic bodily intelligence begin at the skin, but in the synapses between mycelium and neuroplasm.
Eudaimonia is the child of deeper sensibilities not fully comprehensible to human “thought”.
Reading this, I can't get Lewis Carroll out of my head:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Very nice. Your argument here is similar to Gadamer's defense of the 'human sciences' and his rejection of the trivialization of aesthetic knowledge.
Recently Philip Goff has even been making what he claims a Bayesian argument for the existence of God. "Bayesian everwhere" as you say.
Good argumentation requires agreed upon conditions. I like taking “concept” as a starting point rather than “definition” for the very reasons you explore here. Given the variety of human malfeasance, it is better to argue over whether the concept of genocide or fascism applies to actions, instead of worrying the definition of such terms until they lose all meaning.
MY UKRAINE NEWS STATION
“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea.” I am probably one of the few who still remember Walter Winchell’s radio broadcasts during the Second World War and how my parents waited and listened for them. I think the news media in our country have stopped mentioning Ukraine. It is almost as if there is no war in that country.
I am grateful for what the people of Ukraine are doing for the world, so I will try to keep Ukraine in the news. I will be copying and pasting comments from several live reporters living in Ukraine who publish articles on the Medium Daily Digest, an online web page newspaper.
Everything included in my news station will be quotes for their reporting.
Ukraine has begun to reveal the STASH air defense system. It is smaller, more modular, and far less resource-intensive than conventional systems such as the MIM-104 Patriot, which are designed for completely different targets.
Ukraine strikes on May 7th and before on the refinery in Perm have worked, and Reuters reports it is completely out of operation. Last night, Ukraine hit the pumping station.
Ukraine attacked the pumping station in Ufa again yesterday. Smoke was seen rising from the facility. The attacks in Perm and Ufa are critical nodes in Russia’s oil infrastructure, and they are nodes that Ukraine could have hit a long time ago, except that they didn’t at the request of the West. These cut off not just refining, but the supply of crude oil itself.
Kyiv Post reported that Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces carried out precision strikes in occupied Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Luhansk regions in early May, including attacks on Russian air-defense systems and radar stations such as Pantsir and Tor complexes.
Ukraine launched about 200 drones into Russia at about 1600 in broad daylight.
The Krishi oil refinery in the Leningrad district is on fire, as confirmed by local videos, the regional governor's announcement, and NASA FIRMS satellite imagery.
Ukrainian drones also hit the VNIIR-Progress factory in Cheboksary, which makes electrical components for the military.
As a result of the attacks on the Russian port of Primorsk, the missile carrier Karakurt, a patrol boat, and a tanker from the shadow fleet were hit, according to a report by Ukrainian Major General Kumara.
For years, Russia treated its Kinzhal missile like one of the crown jewels of its arsenal. Fast, hypersonic, expensive, and marketed as something built to punch through Western air defenses. According to the Kyiv Independent, Ukrainian electronic warfare specialists say Lima stations have helped suppress or divert 58 of 59 Kinzhal missiles launched at protected targets. Cascade Systems, the developer behind Lima, says the system stopped 26 Kinzhal missiles in the first three months of 2026 alone.
The biggest trick the Nordic states ever played was to make the world believe that they were just helpers of Ukraine. They are, in fact, the architects of a new form of sovereignty. A drone that requires a six-month build in Sweden and costs $50,000 can be made in a week in Ukraine for $2,000. That is not merely efficiency — it is change. This isn’t just cost efficiency. It’s evolutionary acceleration.
So that's my Ukraine news for today.
I don’t think you’re arguing with rationalists. You’re arguing with intellectually dishonest fanatics and Hasbarists whose job is to deluge the public discourse with mendacious propaganda at any price to the truth so long as it benefits Israel. The question of whether Israel has committed a genocide in Palestine is not a serious one, and anyone proposing to debate it should not be taken seriously. Nor should anyone ever waste their precious mental energy on the parasitic, filthy verbigerating lies of these worthless cranks defending this monstrous crime.
Nevertheless, well said.
Oh, I'm arguing with rationalists! That's central to my intellectual project!
https://starfleetbelle.substack.com/p/what-is-genocide
"The Nazis did not jump directly to gas chambers. In their early years in power, they engaged in strategies to make life sufficiently miserable and unsafe for Jews and other scapegoats that they would emigrate. Already at this stage, in 1933, Lemkin wanted any Nazi official who stepped outside of Germany arrested for crimes of barbarism against humanity. He wanted the undermining of a people's cultural, political, and religious foundations of life all recognized on a continuum of a common crime that leads ultimately to the destruction of that people.
"If your immediate image of genocide is the Holocaust, and you believe that any current instance qualifies as genocide to the extent that it resembles mass execution by gas chambers, you are incorrect. The Genocide Conventions aim to sanction and arrest a process well before that point. Preventing genocide doesn’t mean having laws to punish a future holocaust; it means having laws that kick in at recognizable stages before such atrocities can happen—and by normalizing the values in those laws, having a global public less willing to tolerate genocide. The point is not to punish Nazis in 1945. The Nuremberg trials did that anyway with no reference to genocide. The point is to stop Nazis in 1933. The postwar world was reeling from one of the worst crimes in all of human history, and Lemkin’s brilliance lay in conveying the broader patterns of which this crime was part." (footnote omitted)
I am neither a Kantian rationalist nor a "coherentist." I am a consequentialist. If one has a certain amount of time to judge actions, the intent becomes obvious. In the same way that, for instance, if our courts say you cannot discriminate by race but can discriminate by preponderance of party affiliation, if the end result produces discrimination by race, it is a distinction without a difference.
I might suggest that consequentialism as a category is not of the same type as rationalism or coherentism. Rationalism and coherentism are philosophical schools for cognizing reality itself.
Consequentialism is a normative-ethical school for evaluating actions and their justifications. These operate at different levels of the philosophical stack. You can be a consequentialist and a coherentist at the same time. You can be a consequentialist and a rationalist at the same time. The distinction matters because rationalism and coherentism are doing metaphysical-epistemological work about how we come to know anything at all, including how we come to know what concepts mean and what counts as evidence for their application. Consequentialism is doing normative-ethical work about which features of an action determine its moral evaluation once we have already determined what the action is and what its consequences are. The two levels are addressing different questions.
Your discrimination example is doing exactly the work the coherentist framework supports. The court's distinction between race and preponderance of party affiliation fails when the categories track each other closely enough that the outcomes are identical. The judgment that the distinction is a distinction without a difference is itself a coherentist judgment — it operates by looking at the cluster of features that the two ostensibly-different categories generate in practice, asking whether the features cluster together in the same constellation, and concluding that the formal-categorical difference does not survive the attention to the actual outcomes. The judgment is not derived from a foundational definition of discrimination. It is derived from the intersubjective work of recognizing that the cases belong in the same family regardless of which formal-categorical apparatus the court reaches for. This is exactly the coherentist methodology applied to a legal-discriminatory case. The conclusion you reach by consequentialist reasoning about outcomes is the conclusion the coherentist methodology supports. The two are not in conflict. They are operating at different levels of the question.
The deeper integration is that consequentialism itself presupposes a methodology for determining what the consequences are, who the affected parties are, what the relevant time horizon is, and what counts as a morally salient consequence at all. None of these determinations are given by consequentialism itself. They have to be made by the prior operation of attending to what is actually happening, which is the operation rationalism and coherentism characterize differently. The rationalist position holds that these determinations can be made by deductive application of foundational categories. The coherentist position holds that these determinations are made by the cumulative work of registering what the cases actually look like and asking whether they cluster with the constellation of cases the relevant concepts have been tracking. Consequentialism does not adjudicate between these positions. It tells you what to do with the consequences once you have determined what they are. The methodology for determining the consequences is the prior philosophical question.
So when you reach the conclusion that the distinction is a distinction without a difference, you are doing coherentist work to get there, even if your normative-ethical framework is consequentialist. The work of recognizing that the outcomes converge regardless of the formal-categorical apparatus is attention to the cluster of features the cases produce in practice. That work is coherentist methodology in operation. Your consequentialism is the normative-ethical framework that tells you the convergent outcomes are what morally matter. The two are doing complementary work at different levels of the analysis. The disagreement we are having about the Gaza case is not a disagreement at the consequentialist-versus-coherentist level. It is a disagreement at the prior level about what methodology is appropriate for determining what is happening in the first place, which is the level at which rationalism and coherentism actually contend.
I would say we're actually not in disagreement about Gaza, even though I've normally considered myself an Israel supporter until the Gaza escalation. I would say that my example with the Court is simply another example of how the judgment applies.
I appreciate the sophisticated thought that went into this and the apparent intent to truly arrive at a sound conclusion. The one thing you really did not mention though is Hamas. It would be interesting to see you turn your view in that direction. If Hamas were merely a defensive military organization, or if Hamas really was striving to improve the lives of Gazans in any reasonable sense of the word, or if Hamas really allowed anything like pluralistic politics or society, then your argument would seem undeniable. But that is not Hamas in the world I live in.
Having read a smattering of the philosophers you reference, I think your amalgamation of them makes sense to me.
I also see the argument staying at the definition of genocide can be twisted beyond a sincere one. Like much of this age, if the proponents of an action or policy can stop you at the door, so to speak, then they have achieved their goal. The arguments often are for delay, deflection or just for arguments sake.
I tend to want to ask them how many for it to count. If you were standing in front of a firing squad that was targeting a group by race, Religion etc and the killing was ongoing, I would turn to them and ask "is this enough to qualify?". If they approach it casually, I would assume they are trying the barring rhe door approach rather than a response from the core of their humanity.
"There is a tradition that has worked carefully on what this looks like."
Yes. It is often called Buddhism. Hume and James were able to work toward its insights, despite having to navigate through Western ideology.
I'm thinking of getting more aggressive at banning people from my comment section based on what you have written here. If you would like to accuse me of "pussyfooting about definitions", you are welcome to do it elsewhere. But in the interim, you can take leave of your protestations, for I will not responsive to them given the fact that you accuse me of intellectual dishonesty.