Not one of the better essays. Reminds me of somebody poorly channeling Chomsky.<p>Labels are nouns. That's all. Nouns have meaning based on how we use them. Guess what? Nouns are always imprecise. Language is slippery, my dear friends, as those of you who ever tried to write a system based on somebody else's input know.<p>So we're stuck debating and talking about things with words that flex a lot. That's why the #1 thing to do in a discussion, debate, or whatever is talk about terms. It sounds silly, but you have to say things like "when you say 'cat', what exactly do you mean?"<p>As a political junkie, let me offer an example. Reagan rallied against "tax and spend liberals" -- folks who thought of solving problems from the top-down using government funds and power, instead of from the bottom-up. He was so successful, he inspired a lot of radio commentators who beat the "liberal" phrase to death. As of today, the best word that describes what "liberal" used to describe is "progressive", although there are many who are proud to still be called "liberal"<p>The kicker is that "liberal" doesn't _really_ mean what Reagan used it for at all. It originally meant somebody supportive of free speech and action. Heck, as a libertarian, I am a classic liberal. We all probably are.<p>But most of us real people who live in the real world are stuck with messy words like these because humans are not machines. So we say wonderfully obscenely mushy things like "as a liberal I'm not at all supportive of the current progressive agenda"<p>There's a reason the Lincoln-Douglas debates went on for four hours or more. Language is tough to do. It does not reduce to something like p or ~ q. Labels only shut you down if you're damn fool enough not to qualify the label as soon as its used. I'm just glad I'm not writing AI to figure all of this out.