Avoid the building metaphor

To avoid building metaphor is important in any life or death situation. If one conceptual metaphor is allowed to act as precedent for choice of another, then, it is very easy to justify arbitrary actions of any kind at all:

There is no guarantee that the empathic integrity of the original choice of metaphor will be retained in those which rely on prior metaphors to make sense.

For example, to invent the idea of virtual community is to liken a simple group editing system to a physical place. Since physical places have the risk of violent confrontation and exclusive property rights, those who accept the idea of this "virtual community" also can be made to accept the idea of "police" or "security guards" to "protect" people who are in fact in danger of nothing more than having their feelings hurt by harsh words. Or, worse, that such "police" or "security guards" (i.e. a sysop power structure) can or should be trusted with when to perform otherwise reprehensible behaviours, e.g. outing, that would be unjustifiable if they were not being compared to physical behaviours by their real world analogs, e.g. beatings, torture, and etc. By comparison to "real thugs" the "virtual thugs" seem quite benign but in fact have justified quite dangerous behaviour by building metaphor.

Sometimes building metaphor is inevitable and appropriate, however, e.g. the overloading of the term "trolls" to identify heretics and outsiders in net fora, literally forces those so labelled to respond by building a mythological response with such elements as a world tree, Raganarok, and so forth: this defensive use of metaphor to rally those oppressed by facists is not only excusable, but desirable, as long as it is avoided when it is not necessary. If there is no confusion with group entity then the risk of becoming overly identified with the mythological troll race is low.

Unfortunately, those who identify with police or paramilitary groups, and secretly wish to have powers to do unaccountable physica harm to others, seem to revel in the sysop role and actively invite confusion of their role with that of some real authority, often becoming enraged when there is no recognition of that claim by those who consider them usurpers.