I Repent

I found myself using the word "feminist" in an overgeneral way at least twice in the last week.  It is one of the words that I usually qualify, saying "some extreme feminists," or "a type of modern feminist" or something like that. That is more what I have meant to date, because the garden-variety kind I often agree with.  No need to paint with a broad brush when some woman who has personal issues is trying to hide behind a more respectable label with a ridiculous comment.  Every group has those.

I do wonder if there is some increased rate of change in their rhetoric that has nudged me, because it isn't necessarily the youngest who are making the indefensible comments. In fact, I usually ignore young people making extreme statements from any direction, unless it seems to be a window on a new phenomenon. But even if I have picked up something different, that may just be chance or the reporting. If they as a group are not quite what the title used to mean, well, liberals don't believe much in liberal ideas, I'm not sure what conservatives are conserving anymore, progressives deny the progress they helped create, greens want some things that are bad for the environment.  Maybe libertarians are still at least close to what they say they are, but I haven't really kept up with that. Some of the noisier activist ones are more like anarchists - but that may have been always so.

So my apology to anyone offended, and apologies also for lack of clarity on my part.