You are right! It can mean these things! But it can also mean other things, and (in my opinion) carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used.
"Defund the police" can sound extreme, or counterintuitive, or downright confusing. But it seems urgently important (to me) to understand why so many Americans feel so strongly that they use such intense language, propose such radical changes, and demand something that doesn't make sense to me.
Clearly, there's something I don't "get". It's infinitely more compelling to me to try to "get it" and understand others' viewpoints, and uninteresting to understand why the words they used don't match a conventional definition.
> carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used.
The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.
Respectfully, I disagree. There's no onus here at all, on either side—this isn't some intellectual debate with formal rules, this is a struggle to make marginalized voices heard.
Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant).
The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity.
Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.
We're talking about withdrawing funding, not a specific amount (like in your $100 example)
If I withdraw money from my bank account, I still usually have money in my bank account also. If we withdraw funding from a authoritative service that serves a public function but has also been leveraged oppressively, it doesn't mean there is no funding
> and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"
It certainly _can_ and usually _does_ mean remove completely. Examples:
- "I'm withdrawing my student from this school"
- "The peer review committee has decided to withdraw this erroneous paper from publication"
- "I would like to withdraw $100 from my checking account" (It means the _whole_ $100)
- "He is experiencing heroine withdrawal symptoms" (after not having _any_)