In Your Heart

a) No, I'm not going to adopt your superstitions.

b) That's not their name. "Skinwalker" is an english bastardisation. The romanisation of the Diné term is yee naaldlooshii.** Like 1/100 of the valiant defenders of the Navajo on this site even clock that it might be odd for a group native americans to have a centuries old taboo against a very recent (1970s) english word.

c) As far as I can tell, there is no actual taboo against using the name for superstitious reasons. The name is associated with unpleasant topics (cultural association with death, plus, yknow, that time they murdered a bunch of their own tribe members in 1878 through witch hunts, still within living memory when the first ethnographies were being written) and they don't want to talk about them with outsiders.

I always hated when therapists said shit like this or wanted you to “promise” not to kill yourself, because suicide by definition makes you immune from all your obligations. If I break my promise I’ll be dead and you won’t be able to punish me for breach of contract. So why make me go through with this ritual of either lying or making a meaningless promise that’s not enforceable?

Our defiant Netanyahu

This compromise means that US political parties are strange institutions, quite unlike political parties in other democratic countries. It would be barely overstating the case to say that the US simply doesn’t have political parties. The two major US political parties are perhaps best viewed not as civil society organizations but as features of the US electoral system; in this interpretation, the US effectively has a two-stage “runoff” electoral system like the French presidential election system, where anyone can run in the first round and the top two vote-getters then run head to head. But unlike in France, the first stage of this runoff is organized on roughly ideological lines, where candidates who choose to label themselves as vaguely left-of-center run in a separate first-round election from candidates who choose to label themselves as vaguely right-of-center.  In this analysis, becoming a “member” of a major party means no more than deciding which first-round election to vote in. The parties aren’t so much civil society organizations that have their major internal decisions shaped by electoral law, as features of the electoral law that for historical reasons are named after formerly significant institutions in civil society.