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on dividing the left
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
170 points (100.0% liked)
chapotraphouse
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if all we're doing is talking about stuff, and pushing back on other people who want us to talk about stuff differently, I don't know what we think we're gonna accomplish.
If people are talking about mountains, and someone points out that "this grain of sand is also a rock", how often is that going to be anything other than a distraction from the conversation?
Seriously, describing this as 'pushing back against talking differently' is almost as reductive as the Right's "you want to silence us because we disagree". Scale is important.
A mountain usually isn't a rock [it is made up of many rocks, along with other matter] and, if the conversation is about mountains and not rocks, then the interjecting person is offering an absurd nonsequitur.
The structure of an analogy like this should usually be that it remains the same on a formal level but changes out the specific content for something more familiar. If the formal structure is changed along with the specific content, you're just kind of saying words.
No.
The point of an analogy is that it isn't a 1:1 mapping.
The utility of an analogy is that it conveys a point in a more obvious way. To do this, it can be stripped down, exaggerated and distorted, even logically inconsistent. The only measure of success is whether the point is received, and once that has occurred, the whole thing can be discarded in favour of a return to the original topic, now with a new perspective.
The analogy is merely a conversational tool. If it does the job, put it down and move on.
This kind of pedantic over-analysis is an even more useless interjection, and is a perfect example of something that, while correct in some regard, misses the point and only serves as a distraction.
As I said, "an analogy like this" (emphasis now added).
The goal is that, but the goal and the means are different things. The means, to put it in a more informal way, is that "the same logic applies," which is the everyday way of saying "it has a the same (or similar) formal relation".
Rhetorically you can certainly convince people with an analogy of this kind that in virtually no way maintains the formal relation, but doing so is generally regarded as sophistry. As I explained already, the user's analogy is incoherent and we can imagine a more coherent analogy, but they have done no more of the work to produce that analogy than if they said "imagine we were talking about geological formations and you were preoccupied with a grain of sand," which discards the formal pretense that the real comment maintains.
And this is a forum post, not a spoken conversation, so it doesn't bear the same level of monolinearity and therefore I don't really give a shit if it's off topic.
Oh! I see what you're doing. You're insisting on a specific, unhelpful, and—ultimately—incorrect definition of a term as a meta-commentary on the weakened definition of racism as mere racial animosity as used by the privileged who think they know better than to listen to others, that are the subject of the post.
It's trolly as hell, but very clever, and a far, far better analogy. Bravo!