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Convincing, sure. But what were you convinced ... of? Being 'gaslighted', over who did the laundry last or over black crime, sucks, but do invertebrates help anyone realize that? Is the abusive boyfriend or SJW trying to "violate your soft tissues"? How does that tell us anything beyond "being tricked"? If there's any sense of 'aha, this is true!' you get from the insect paragraph that you wouldn't from a description of gaslighting itself ... what did you just start believing that you didn't before?
Strong emotions can be deceptive, but they aren't always. Sometimes they're being triggered for a good reason, and sometimes it's worth noting when and how the instinct and the truth align.
Definitely, but that's not what I'm arguing - it's specifically about the way the insect metaphor is used. If you already know gaslighting is bad, and have some sense of why it's bad, thinking there's some disgustingness to it beyond the actual harms it has, in a way that's related to insects, doesn't seem important. 'assertive writhing mass'?
I think there's something to my objection. It's not specifically to ilforte's comment or themotte, it's a very broad and common thing, present in most fiction, poetry, etc
hmm. can you elaborate? Is it something specifically about insects, or more generally about visceral imagery?
It's about very broadly poetic analogies. When you're moved by an aesthetic or piece of writing or find it appealing, that corresponds to learning, believing something new. If I read a particularly nice passage about everyone living in harmony in a socialist utopia, or about the glory of a noble battle, that's not just some aesthetic pleasure that's disconnected from anything, that's a specific claim about the kinds of things worth doing and their effects.* If I read 'being gaslighted is like botflies erupting from the liar's foaming mouth and corkscrew-drilling through your eardrums into your neural tissue' and am like 'wow ... so compelling ...', what am I convinced of? I'm worried it's a general sense that 'gaslighting is bad' that isn't informative. Maybe if you read a few paragraphs that characterizes particular aspects of progressive gaslighting, even via analogy - it might enable you to understand better how it's bad - but when you read 'gaslighting is like a roiling mass of hairworms' ... what? Okay, I believe that now, I believe there's something to the way hairworms are viscerally disgusting that also applies to progressive gaslighting. But I don't think it does? Hairworms are viscerally disgusting because once they burrow their way into your skin, they hurt you, and absent modern antibiotics there's not much you can do to stop them. Progressive ideas, by contrast, are virtually everywhere, and the only real way to beat them is to understand why they're bad.
not sure i explained that well.
*Modern fiction still invokes this, but the way it's so disconnected from day-to-day life both hides that and, imo, causes people to come to believe, and act on, various half-baked, incoherent ideas
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