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Notes -
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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