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As other people have already said, this issue is a landmine of people having different ideas of what words mean. It makes me afraid to call myself anything, without my interlocutors first saying what they mean by the words, or simply "tabooing" the words and saying in long form what my position is.

I think in the end the morass of confusion comes down yet again to people not understanding basic set relations. I wish I could just shove a simple Euler diagram up every time the topic comes up to explain to people the relations between them. (Not you, who seem to already understand them; you just prompted me to think of this again).

Hell, I have a bit of web space, so here's a simple graphic to shove in people's faces for the future.

Egalitarianism promotes equality. Feminism most literally promotes the feminine. Feminism just to the point of equality, defending women's rights, is therefore also egalitarian. But not if it goes beyond that, which is not unheard-of; individual acts of misandry promoting women over men are still feminist, both by self-appelation of many of the people doing them, and just plain literal application of the word, even if feminism as a whole isn't like that. Promotion of the masculine would be masculism, not that anybody uses that term. Masculism just to the point of equality, defending men's rights, is therefore also egalitarian. But not, of course, if it goes beyond that, into misogyny.

Simple set theory here, people.

Also known in Oceanic mythology by names like Kavai, Havai, Kavaiki, Havaiki, Kavaiki, or Hawaiki, after which Hawai'i was named (its discoverers believing they had found the mythical lost land where all their peoples descend from).

Or as I like to call it, Auei.

I am also writing a book, kind of. 20 years ago I haphazardly began a process that I eventually intended to become an epic series of stories (epic in the original sense of a bunch of interconnected smaller stories) once I had my life well-enough sorted to work on them well, to make them my life's work, my magnum opus; and failing that, this year I decided to finally put some real effort into it anyway even though I still really don't feel like I'm in the right headspace to be writing properly.

I'm basically summarizing the highest-level structure of the overall thing into 243 short three-paragraph synopses of the episodes of which it's composed, adding up to about the length of a short novel (60kish words) by the time I'm done at the end of this year. I'm over 2/3 of the way through it now.

I'm continually posting the work in progress to my website as I go: The Chronicles of Quelouva.

I wish more people could see things like this.

My political positions are somewhere way off the usual spectrum but would definitely usually be called more left than right by most people (except, weirdly enough, some who call themselves on the left, though they in turn look awfully far to the right to me), so I'm not in exactly the same boat as you. But I share similar sentiments about most presidential candidates in my living memory. I don't exactly like any of them, and whenever a Democrat has been in office my general sentiment about politics could be summed up as "disappointment". But then a Republican gets in office and my god would I love to be merely disappointed again.

The earliest president I can remember really having an opinion about was Clinton (I lived through others but wasn't politically aware yet), and I remember my thoughts on him being swept up in a general "ugh why is our government so dumb and doing dumb things all the time" (though the Republican attacks against Clinton seemed even dumber, trumped up transparently on trivial pretenses).

Then we got Bush in office, and man, the 90s started looking like political glory days in contrast.

Then Obama got elected and... hardly anything changed from when Bush had been president, other than the figurehead of our government no longer sounding like a complete moron ever time he opened his mouth. My overall sentiment was "charming orator, but meh on policy". (And again, the ridiculous frothing-at-the-mouth Republican outrage searching to find any pretense to tear him and his administration down easily drowned out my disappointment in the actual policy getting made).

Now we've got Trump and... "meh" sounds like a nice vacation. It reminds me of an old job of mine, where so many days were just total clusterfucks that "boring" became praise of a day. A boring day was a good day, because the usual alternative to boring was a shitstorm. Obama's politics were boring and did not at all live up to the hype, but god would I love to just have a boring government again now.

A while back I wrote a brief synopsis of how I thought the Matrix trilogy should have gone that was kinda similar to your idea except for the ending.

That is true that left and right simply isn't good enough, and the Nolan chart is a step in the right direction, but I still think it doesn't go nearly far enough. I find myself wanting to be further left than the top of the chart, but also further up than the left of the chart, in a region outside the chart entirely.

This is the political spectrum I think in.. The orientation of my chart is a bit of a compromise; the original sense of the terms "left" and "right" would run from what on that chart is upper left to lower right (which is the sense in which I meant "left" in my previous post), while a growing modern sense of the terms tends to run from what on that chart is lower left to upper right, so I've oriented it halfway between those.

Things tend to drift downward and rightward by default unless actively fought against -- that's where we started from, before anyone had the thought that maybe governments should be anything more than the reign of strong men over weak -- and those positions are stable, easily entrenched, and hard to escape from. Things in the upper half and left half meanwhile are unstable and tend to easily collapse -- back to the lower right, of course. That makes those (far upper and far left) positions impractical, but they're exactly the kind of crazy I think we need to make people realize just how far off the spectrum we think in true moderation is. In addition to that, we also need more moderate "right"-libertarians (like the Libertarian party) and European style social democrats (like the Green party).

I find the mainstream Democratic party as expressed in recent decades (Clinton and Obama) to be a lukewarm centrist compromise position, neither libertarian enough nor socialist enough, but certainly a better alternative than contemporary Republicans, who share most of the same flaws and then add a bunch of their own; just so long as they can avoid slipping down into their own form of "left"-authoritarianism that's just as bad in a different way.

But we really need the crazies way out in the upper left lunatic fringe to shift the perceived center up and to the left; not actually out into that fringe, but further away from the black hole of tyranny we (everyone) are always continually slipping toward unless we can manage to fight it.

I do actually have objections to the terminology that Money coined, precisely because it causes exactly this confusion, but the two concepts he coined the terms for do actually need to be kept separate. I just wish he'd have coined some New Latin terms of art instead of repurposing existing English words, and I have some suggestions for better terms myself, but those are unlikely to catch on and Money's terminology is entrenched in all the literature about the topic now so that seems like kind of a hopeless battle to fight.

There is an absolute sense of political spectrum as well. Different constructions of political spectra will have different senses of absolute, but that's based on the criteria you use to define the spectrum, not relative to one political viewpoint on the spectrum.

On the political spectrum as I would construct it, with two axes of liberty and equality, all the mainstream points of view fall into one quadrant of that spectrum, but that doesn't mean that my point of view is somewhere far off in another quadrant. I think everybody in the other quadrants are all crazy too, and I try to state in the moderate areas around the center of the spectrum; it's just that the mainstream debate seems to agree on a certain kind of illiberal and unequal flavor of crazy, and so don't see it as crazy at all, and see everything outside of that quadrant, a full three quarters of the possible positions, as collapsed down to one end of the other of their little myopic view of the possibilities. It's hard to even describe my position in that parochial framework of Democrats and Republicans...

Here, it's easier to draw you a picture.

"I'm somewhere between a libertarian and a European-style social liberal, but not a 'moderate' anywhere between Democrats and Republicans, and not actually directly between Euro-liberal and libertarian either... I'm more like a libertarian socialist, no that's not a contradiction in terms that's what anarcho-socialists usually call themselves, except I'm not actually one of them because I'm propertarian and they're not... no that doesn't make me an anarcho-capitalist either... I'm like between an anarcho-socialist and an anarcho-capitalist... no anarchism doesn't mean that..."

Analytic philosophy's adherence to mathematical rigor is what saved it from falling down the post-modern hole that swallowed up all the "other humanities".

(I'm not fond of that category "humanities" and how philosophy doesn't fit well into it. Paintings and literature are just arts. History is a thing of its own that transcends all the fields, arts and sciences alike, and so is philosophy. Lumping half the arts in with two big overarching fields in their own right doesn't sit well with me. Math also shouldn't be lumped in as a science, that's a thing of its own too on part with art, and we're completely lacking the normative analogues of science, engineering, and technology, although some things like sociology and anthropology are approximating a normative analogue of science, and bus-econ courses are in the right general area for a normative analogue of engineering and technology, but that whole area is woefully underdeveloped).

(I drew a diagram of something like this once, though I wasn't sure how exactly to incorporate history into it).

This reminds me of an essay, Architecting Governware, that I wrote about a year ago. This one makes a more explicit analogy, and draws political conclusions from the software metaphor rather than the other way around, and compares libertarianism and socialism rather than "conservativism" and "liberalism" (which are not antonyms except by historical accident of the earliest progressives being liberals), but it's similar nevertheless:

There are two ostensibly competing approaches to architecting software: designing the front-end first and then programming whatever necessary to produce that front-end; or programming the back-end first and allowing whatever interface design flows naturally from that back-end to surface.

Software architected solely by designers often looks nice and is "easy to use" in one sense: approachable to the general user and not just the technological elite. But such software is just as frequently horribly inefficient, inconsistent, and buggy, making it in other senses very difficult to use outside of its prime use cases.

Software architected solely by programmers, on the other hand, may be a marvel of ingenious consistency and efficiency and may even be provably mathematically correct. But it will often have an interface apparently based in the philosophy that if you can't figure this out on your own, you don't deserve to use such software.

The technological elite often prefer software architected more by programmers than by designers, because they have the ability to make precision demands of it and have it do exactly what they want, and it stays out of their way otherwise; whereas designer-architected software tends to slow them down and keep them from doing what they are trying to do.

General users, on the other hand, often prefer software architected more by designers than by programmers, because for whatever faults it has, most of them can usually at least go about using it somewhat and get some kind of functionality out of it, instead of having to beg or pay the technological elite to get them what they need.

But the best software is undoubtedly architected by teams with both design insights and programming insights, collaborating to create a product which consistently and efficiently offers the desired functionality in an appealing, intuitive, discoverable manner, approachable to general users without holding back the more adept, and even making the latter more productive in their work.

Socialists are like software designers: they have all the right ends in mind, they want to make the world a place that is comfortable and easy to make a living in for anyone, not just an elite few; but they often have no regards for the correctness of the means used to reach these ends. For the sake of justice, equality, and the general welfare, they will often disregard or downplay the possibility of such means to lead to a lower overall welfare for the whole of society (inefficiency), of dissolving the principle of equality before the law (inconsistency), or of commiting injustices themselves in the pursuit of the "greater good" (incorrectness).

Libertarians, on the other hand, are like software programmers: they place tremendous emphasis on never allowing the smallest violation of rights to fly (correctness), on treating everyone as exactly equal before the law (consistency), and within those restraints, on generating the greatest output for the least cost (efficiency). However, they often stop there and assume that the best outcome will just naturally follow from this with no further effort necessary; and that if people can't make themselves a comfortable, easy living within such a framework, then they obviously must be doing something wrong and not deserve such wealth anyway.

The wealthy social elite often prefer a government adhereing to libertarian principles more than socialist ones, because they already have the means of getting what they need from it, and

A lot of anti-gay stance is based round the concept that being gay is a choice and not a fundamental attribute.

And that is a stupid debate, on both sides.

I like to eat blue cheese. A lot of other people think that's gross. Say some of them wanted to prohibit it. Would we then argue about why I like to eat blue cheese, whether I was born that way or learned that behavior or make a conscious choice every time I feel like eating blue cheese, whether other animals like to eat it too.... or would we ask simply whether there's anything wrong with it?

Likewise, if I were some kind of crazy who compulsively maimed people. There are some animals who are like that too, like dogs that have been mistreated and bite everybody. Maybe life broke my mind, or maybe I was just born that way. Does that excuse such behavior? It it's harmful, it's harmful, and should be prohibited no matter why people do it. And it it's harmless, it's harmless, and should be permitted, no matter why people do it.

It doesn't matter, at all, whether being gay is something you're "born with" or "a choice". The only reason that would be relevant was if you had already determined that there was something wrong with it and were looking for the cause in order to prevent it. By conceding that the cause of homosexuality is relevant, even defenders of it are tacitly agreeing that there is something wrong with it, and simply "excusing" said behavior with "but they can't help it!" That is hardly a helpful defense.

Velocity is relative, but acceleration isn't relative. Rotation involves acceleration. So it isn't equivalent to say that X rotates around Y is the same as Y rotates around X. (Hypothetical example: consider a universe empty except for a single planet which is rotating. What does it mean to say it's rotating, without reference to background stars? Is it equivalent to a model where we say the planet doesn't rotate? No - we could see the difference in a centrifugal force causing the planet to bulge as it rotates.)

Actually, there have been some rather famous debates about whether space is absolute or relative (see the Leibniz-Clark correspondence) which ended on the unanswerability of that very question. To empirically test the difference, we'd have to have a planet situated in a universe like ours, and a planet in an otherwise empty universe - clearly an impossible experiment to conduct.

I actually wrote a paper a long while back (for a class on Philosophy of Space and Time) arguing, in part, that a planet (or in my example a bucket full of water) rotating in an otherwise empty universe is a nonsense scenario, because there's nothing for it to rotate relative to.

In short, acceleration IS relative, but it's relative to the background of all the stars and galaxies in the universe; they are our common reference frame.