You probably should define the word government, particularly if you are advocating having no government - people are likely to misunderstand you.

The same could probably be said for the terms "conservative" and "liberal" from what has been said here.

Terms are known with different certainties. There are, in any culture, between 3 and 20 colors which are "native" in the sense that they are stand alone (like green, red, blue, purple, black) instead of related to the color of something (like gold, indigo, fire engine red). They are called cognitive colors.

By contrast, English has very few smells that are this way (I can think of only "acrid" right now but there is at least one other).

And some things are defined only for how they appear or what they resemble, or how they feel. When people were giving definitions a while back, they made lists of liberals, wrote or quoted poetry.

I don't know what liberal means in politics except in terms of those things some liberals support, or in opposition to conservative. Conservative literally means resistant to change, but that doesn't seem to convey a whole political philosophy for a complex society.

And, as I said before, Buddha probably would have given the question a noble silence, that having been his response to the big philosophical questions of the day (existence of God and transmigration of souls). From the outside, he was considered anti-Brahminical, and still is, in India (the dalits still convert to Buddhism to opt out of the caste system). The noble silence is usually interpreted by Buddhists as meaning he considered the question irrelevant.

So maybe, although they have other meanings in other contexts, conservative and liberal are the cognitive colors of our political spectrum, in that they can be used exclusively by people who don't want to differentiate, and everybody will argue if you try to define something they know when they see.

Yes, that's the one I couldn't think of. Thanks.

The absolute-sounding terms (that aren't) are too often (in my opinion) troll-bait or invitations to arm-wrestling matches.

What was interesting to me is how people tried to define them, not what the definitions were. I'm working on several metaphors and on metaphor itself in real life right now, the form of the definitions accidentally became more important than the content.

Is there any "what" if what is intrinsic and interesting is the patterns of the teeth marks? It was asserted to me that the problem with logical thought was that it was all form, and that metaphorical thought had core, but if the core is all the connections that the metaphor induces, it is just complex form, and I am left with no essence...I wonder if metaphor has an illegal essence, like form has the set of all sets that don't contain themselves.

Sorry to ramble. It is interesting to see which terms can and can't be defined without reference, in the case of things like conservative and liberal it is because they are too complex (maybe) but in the case of "silvery" it is because it is too fundamental.

In any event, may I please have some of whatever that is in your glass this evening? It seems the most pure and evanescent sort of inspiration...

I have spent a week and a half wondering about this bit about whether there is a fundamental difference between thinking in metaphors and thinking in logical progressions. Unfortunately, if I zero in on the metaphors, they break down into small logically plausible steps taken to pull together all the meaning implied by the comparison. And if I zero in on the logical steps, they are compiled by adding a metaphor and pruning it to fit, adding a metaphor and pruning it to fit. Supposedly, the metaphorical process is beyond logic, but it just seems like it is too complex, not too different -- people forget that each step in a complicated proof requires a separate aha! experience, and then a vision sequence of where we have gotten to. I've seen that complex thing before, something is too complex, and you want to say it is infinitely complex, but that requires proof, because waiting to see the end of complexity doesn't work, and on, and on...xuan zhi you xuan, zhung miao zhi men (more mysterious than mysterious, the gate to the essence of all).

That's what is in my glass, I hope you find it all you wished it to be ;-)