Meanwhile I find Duncan vaguely fascinating like he is a very weird bug
I don’t know[1] for sure what purpose this analogy is serving in this comment, and without it the comment would have felt much less like it was trying to hijack me into associating Duncan with something viscerally unpleasant.
I wasn’t sure if I should include the analogy. I came up with it weeks ago when I was remarking to people in my server about how suspicious I find things Duncan writes, and it was popular there; I guess people here are less universally delighted by metaphors about weird bugs than people on my server, whoops! For what it’s worth I think the world is enriched by the presence of weird bugs. The other day someone remarked that they’d found a weird caterpillar on the sidewalk near my house and half my dinner guests got up to go look at it and I almost did myself. I just don’t want to touch weird bugs, and am nervous in a similar way about making it publicly knowable that I have an opinion about Duncan.
I’ve tried for a bit to produce a useful response to the top-level comment and mostly failed, but I did want to note that
“Oh, it sort of didn’t occur to me that this analogy might’ve carried a negative connotation, because when I was negatively gossiping about Duncan behind his back with a bunch of other people who also have an overall negative opinion of him, the analogy was popular!”
Oh, no, it’s absolutely negative. I don’t like you. I just don’t specifically think that you are disgusting, and it’s that bit of the reaction to the analogy that caught me by surprise.
“Oh, I’m going to impute malice with the phrase ‘gossiping behind my back’ about someone I have never personally interacted with before who talked about my public blog posts with her friends, when she’s specifically remarked that she’s worried about fallout from letting me know that she doesn’t care for me!” is also kind of a take, and a pretty good example of why I don’t like you. I retract the tentative positive update I made when your only reaction to my comment had been radio silence; I’d found that really encouraging wrt it being safe to have opinions about you where you might see them, but no longer.
It is only safe for you to have opinions if the other people don’t dislike them?
I think you’re trying to set up a really mean dynamic where you get to say mean things about me in public, but if I point out anything frowny about that fact you’re like “ah, see, I knew that guy was Bad; he’s making it Unsafe for me to say rude stuff about him in the public square.”
(Where “Unsafe” means, apparently, “he’ll respond with any kind of objection at all.” Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”)
*shrug
I won’t respond further, since you clearly don’t want a big back-and-forth, but calling people a weird bug and then pretending that doesn’t in practice connote disgust is a motte and bailey.
I kind of doubt you care at all, but here for interested bystanders is more information on my stance.
I suspect you of brigading-type behavior wrt conflicts you get into. Even if you make out like it’s a “get out the vote” campaign where the fact that rides to the polls don’t require avowing that you’re a Demoblican is important to your reception, when you’re the sort who’ll tell all your friends someone is being mean to you and then the karma swings around wildly I make some updates. This social power with your clique of admirers in combination with your contagious lens on the world that they pick up from you is what unnerves me.
I experience a lot of your word choices (e.g. “gossiping behind [your] back”) as squirrelly[1] , manipulative, and more rhetoric than content. I would not have had this experience in this particular case if, for example, you’d said “criticizing [me] to an unsympathetic audience”. Gossip behind one’s back is a social move for a social relationship. One doesn’t clutch one’s pearls about random people gossiping about Kim Kardashian behind her back. We have never met. I’d stand a better chance of recognizing Ms. Kardashian in the grocery store than you. I have met some people who know some people who you hang out with, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that I had any affordances to instead gossip to your face, or that it’s mean to dislike your public blog posts and then talk about disliking them with my friends[2].
Further, it’s rhetorically interesting that you said “Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”″ You didn’t try a lot of different dynamics! I said I was favorably impressed when you didn’t respond. If someone is nervous about you, holding very still and not making any hostile moves is a great way to help them feel safe, and when you tried that (or… looked like you were trying it) it worked. The only other thing you tried was, uh, this, which, as I’m explaining here, I do not find impressive. However, scientists have discovered that there are often more than two possible approaches to social conflict. You could have tried something else! Maybe you could have dug up a mutual friend who’d mediate, or asked a neutral curious question about whether there was something I could point to that would help you understand why you were coming off badly, instead of unloading a dump truck of sneaky nasty connotations on my lap. Maybe you believe every one of those connotations in your heart of hearts. This does not imbue your words with magic soothing power, any more than my intentions successfully accompanied my analogy about weird bugs. You still seem sneaky and nasty to me.
I maintain that I sincerely like squirrels; I am using a colloquial definition which, of definitions I found on the internet, most closely matches the Urban Dictionary cluster.
The “I talk about things with my friends, you brigade” conjugation is not lost on me but I wish to point out in my defense that, as I said in my original comment, I did not intend to touch this situation where it could possibly affect you until it seemed like it was also affecting Said, of whom I am fond.
It doesn’t seem like too many people had a reaction similar to mine, so I don’t know that you were especially miscalibrated. (On reflection, I think the “bug” part is maybe only half of what I found disagreeable about the analogy. Not sure this is worth the derailment.)
For what it’s worth, I had a very similar reaction to yours. Insects and arthropods are a common source of disgust and revulsion, and so comparing anyone to an insect or an arthropod, to me, shows that you’re trying to indicate that this person is either disgusting or repulsive.
I’m sorry! I’m sincerely not trying to indicate that. Duncan fascinates and unnerves me but he does not revolt me. I think that “weird bug” made sense to my metaphor generator instead of “weird plant” or “weird bird” or something is that bugs have extremely widely varying danger levels—an unfamiliar bug may have all kinds of surprises in the mobility, chemical weapons, aggressiveness, etc. department, whereas plants reliably don’t jump on you and birds are basically all just WYSIWYG; but many weird bugs are completely harmless, and I simply do not know what will happen to me if I poke Duncan.
I think most poisonous frogs look it and would accordingly pick up a frog that wasn’t very brightly colored if I otherwise wanted to pick up this frog, whereas bugs may look drab while being dangerous.
Poisonous frogs often have bright colors to say “hey don’t eat me”, but there are also ones that use a “if you don’t notice me you won’t eat me” strategy. Ex: cane toad, pickerel frog, black-legged poison dart frog.
I don’t know[1] for sure what purpose this analogy is serving in this comment, and without it the comment would have felt much less like it was trying to hijack me into associating Duncan with something viscerally unpleasant.
My guess is that it’s meant to convey something like your internal emotional experience, with regards to Duncan, to readers.
I think weird bugs are neat.
I wasn’t sure if I should include the analogy. I came up with it weeks ago when I was remarking to people in my server about how suspicious I find things Duncan writes, and it was popular there; I guess people here are less universally delighted by metaphors about weird bugs than people on my server, whoops! For what it’s worth I think the world is enriched by the presence of weird bugs. The other day someone remarked that they’d found a weird caterpillar on the sidewalk near my house and half my dinner guests got up to go look at it and I almost did myself. I just don’t want to touch weird bugs, and am nervous in a similar way about making it publicly knowable that I have an opinion about Duncan.
I’ve tried for a bit to produce a useful response to the top-level comment and mostly failed, but I did want to note that
“Oh, it sort of didn’t occur to me that this analogy might’ve carried a negative connotation, because when I was negatively gossiping about Duncan behind his back with a bunch of other people who also have an overall negative opinion of him, the analogy was popular!”
is a hell of a take. =/
Oh, no, it’s absolutely negative. I don’t like you. I just don’t specifically think that you are disgusting, and it’s that bit of the reaction to the analogy that caught me by surprise.
“Oh, I’m going to impute malice with the phrase ‘gossiping behind my back’ about someone I have never personally interacted with before who talked about my public blog posts with her friends, when she’s specifically remarked that she’s worried about fallout from letting me know that she doesn’t care for me!” is also kind of a take, and a pretty good example of why I don’t like you. I retract the tentative positive update I made when your only reaction to my comment had been radio silence; I’d found that really encouraging wrt it being safe to have opinions about you where you might see them, but no longer.
It is only safe for you to have opinions if the other people don’t dislike them?
I think you’re trying to set up a really mean dynamic where you get to say mean things about me in public, but if I point out anything frowny about that fact you’re like “ah, see, I knew that guy was Bad; he’s making it Unsafe for me to say rude stuff about him in the public square.”
(Where “Unsafe” means, apparently, “he’ll respond with any kind of objection at all.” Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”)
*shrug
I won’t respond further, since you clearly don’t want a big back-and-forth, but calling people a weird bug and then pretending that doesn’t in practice connote disgust is a motte and bailey.
I kind of doubt you care at all, but here for interested bystanders is more information on my stance.
I suspect you of brigading-type behavior wrt conflicts you get into. Even if you make out like it’s a “get out the vote” campaign where the fact that rides to the polls don’t require avowing that you’re a Demoblican is important to your reception, when you’re the sort who’ll tell all your friends someone is being mean to you and then the karma swings around wildly I make some updates. This social power with your clique of admirers in combination with your contagious lens on the world that they pick up from you is what unnerves me.
I experience a lot of your word choices (e.g. “gossiping behind [your] back”) as squirrelly[1] , manipulative, and more rhetoric than content. I would not have had this experience in this particular case if, for example, you’d said “criticizing [me] to an unsympathetic audience”. Gossip behind one’s back is a social move for a social relationship. One doesn’t clutch one’s pearls about random people gossiping about Kim Kardashian behind her back. We have never met. I’d stand a better chance of recognizing Ms. Kardashian in the grocery store than you. I have met some people who know some people who you hang out with, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that I had any affordances to instead gossip to your face, or that it’s mean to dislike your public blog posts and then talk about disliking them with my friends[2].
Further, it’s rhetorically interesting that you said “Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”″ You didn’t try a lot of different dynamics! I said I was favorably impressed when you didn’t respond. If someone is nervous about you, holding very still and not making any hostile moves is a great way to help them feel safe, and when you tried that (or… looked like you were trying it) it worked. The only other thing you tried was, uh, this, which, as I’m explaining here, I do not find impressive. However, scientists have discovered that there are often more than two possible approaches to social conflict. You could have tried something else! Maybe you could have dug up a mutual friend who’d mediate, or asked a neutral curious question about whether there was something I could point to that would help you understand why you were coming off badly, instead of unloading a dump truck of sneaky nasty connotations on my lap. Maybe you believe every one of those connotations in your heart of hearts. This does not imbue your words with magic soothing power, any more than my intentions successfully accompanied my analogy about weird bugs. You still seem sneaky and nasty to me.
I maintain that I sincerely like squirrels; I am using a colloquial definition which, of definitions I found on the internet, most closely matches the Urban Dictionary cluster.
The “I talk about things with my friends, you brigade” conjugation is not lost on me but I wish to point out in my defense that, as I said in my original comment, I did not intend to touch this situation where it could possibly affect you until it seemed like it was also affecting Said, of whom I am fond.
Positive reinforcement for disengaging!
It doesn’t seem like too many people had a reaction similar to mine, so I don’t know that you were especially miscalibrated. (On reflection, I think the “bug” part is maybe only half of what I found disagreeable about the analogy. Not sure this is worth the derailment.)
For what it’s worth, I had a very similar reaction to yours. Insects and arthropods are a common source of disgust and revulsion, and so comparing anyone to an insect or an arthropod, to me, shows that you’re trying to indicate that this person is either disgusting or repulsive.
I’m sorry! I’m sincerely not trying to indicate that. Duncan fascinates and unnerves me but he does not revolt me. I think that “weird bug” made sense to my metaphor generator instead of “weird plant” or “weird bird” or something is that bugs have extremely widely varying danger levels—an unfamiliar bug may have all kinds of surprises in the mobility, chemical weapons, aggressiveness, etc. department, whereas plants reliably don’t jump on you and birds are basically all just WYSIWYG; but many weird bugs are completely harmless, and I simply do not know what will happen to me if I poke Duncan.
What about “weird frog”? Frogs don’t have the same negative connotations as bugs and they have the same wide range of danger levels.
I think most poisonous frogs look it and would accordingly pick up a frog that wasn’t very brightly colored if I otherwise wanted to pick up this frog, whereas bugs may look drab while being dangerous.
Poisonous frogs often have bright colors to say “hey don’t eat me”, but there are also ones that use a “if you don’t notice me you won’t eat me” strategy. Ex: cane toad, pickerel frog, black-legged poison dart frog.
Welp, guess I shouldn’t pick up frogs. Not what I expected to be the main takeaway from this thread but still good to know.
Don’t pick up amphibians, or anything else with soft porous skin, in general, unless your sure.
...why do they bother being poisonous then tho?
I believe it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
I liked the analogy and I also like weird bugs