I know you mean well Fen, but some of the things you write make me shudder.
I don't recommend "rising above it." You should reject it. AI is perfectly capable of making an argument based on principal, but the current world is not requiring him to do so. You should reject definitional games, here especially, but also in life, which is much harder, and make him explain his preferred policies and address the concerns.
Well, the thing of it is that some things in life do need updating, and many terms previously were insufficiently specific or relevant.
Needing to "update" is not the same thing as recasting a clear meaning as something different. Social scientists used to try to create new words that explained their point, but the points were often so ridiculous that people rejected the words and the ideas. We get a "backlash" against "politically correct," for example. They gave up on that idea.
Instead they grabbed the idea of re-envisioning words that are incredibly loaded as describing everyday run of the mill concepts and pushing their ideas through that model. This also coincides with their goal of moving language to match the laws already written. They can't change the law - cause they can't win the political fight that it would take, but if they change the language they automatically change the law based on that language. It's been an overt goal for a while.
Justice is blind. The fact that we've failed to achieve perfect justice is a result of too much consideration of things like race, not too little consideration of things like race. It will never result in an increase of justice to increase the amount of race we use in determining outcomes for the same conduct.
To me there is an inevitable conflict between being stuck in your ways and between change just for the sake of change.
That's a fiction. The "conflict" is not with change for the sake of change. It's with targeted change for very specific purposes. The purpose of making impossible to have opposing views - if any position opposed to the one true position is "racist" (no matter what it is) and racism is evil, by definition anyone opposing the enlightened is in fact an evil racist that can be discounted.
The purpose of eliminating the ability to think through an argument.
The purpose of encoding political positions into the default moral positions.
The purpose of changing specific concepts in specific ways with highly predictable legal consequences.
The purpose of encoding political positions into law without ever getting a majority agreement.
It's fundamentally anti-democratic to seek not to persuade people but to eliminate their ability to even raise a contrary voice.
You do need to allow for updates, and for rethinking concepts, but of course the pathological version of this is pushing for changes that are either partisan or else self-serving. But blocking all change just on principle throws the baby with the bathwater.
Except none of that requires the methods they are using. When methods don't match stated benefits it means the true goals are not what they say.
This is the fact, already a reality in Canada, that makes the "I don't use the far-left definition" a sticking your head in the ground kind of answer. It doesn't ever stop at being just a theoretical disagreement if you let things go too far, and in the U.S., which is uniquely obsessed with defeating those who disagree, a pathological direction is virtually guaranteed. That fact alone is not the fault of the left, but of those who perpetuate and encourage a system of division.
Those who do this are the left. It's their only political operation. They have reasoned arguments, they have empassioned ones.
Find where they actually listen to the other side and make compromises (you can't).
