I think co-opting a word that has a specific definition (especially one tied to any specific culture), so that one can use it in a much broader sense, in a debate about political matters, is unnecessarily and foolishly inflammatory. It adds a layer of upset in an area where there is already enough upset that one would be better advised to seek SHARED definitions rather than using differences of definition to highten the tension. People do quite a bit of this without awarely intending to, so I am raising it in the hope that people might set an intention NOT to do it. Isn't this discussion in particular meant to focus on peace??? Does it make sense to start a war to discuss peace? :~)

Remember all the uproar at Mudcat when people started flinging around the term "folk nazi" and people who'd lived through the REAL Holocaust properly jumped up and suggested it was a prety bad and hurtful analogy?

I think discussing differences is hard enough without over-dramatizing a topic by the use of loaded words one KNOWS others define differently. It's a real shortcut to upset. And lazy.

Now that some of you have indulged me by defining your sense of this word, an opportunity is there-- for each of you to respond to one another within the definition you understand the other person to have been speaking from. Not defending your own terms, but trying to actually understand each others'.

Betcha can do that. :~)

~Susan