> I'm trying to steelman
Why? This administration is not acting in good faith, you don't have to act as if they are. People and institutions doing that is part of how we got here in the first place.
Why? This administration is not acting in good faith, you don't have to act as if they are. People and institutions doing that is part of how we got here in the first place.
As you say, that's exactly what got us here. But the alternatives are very unclear, and seem deeply unpleasant.
They could attack the non-steelmanned version, but that just opens them up to having their own comments attacked. You quickly get derailed. (It's sometimes called "sealioning".)
They could propose alternatives, but that too is subject to sealioning. Real alternatives are always subject to tradeoffs, and the answer to "how about you do X instead of attacking me?" is always "no".
They could refrain from discussing it, but that just allows the offenses to continue.
So what often happens is that people persist in acting as if this were a sincere discussion, and hope that a majority will recognize the quality of your argument. It's a lousy plan but I don't have much else to suggest.
Surely there's an antibody response.
Why? The decisions are pretty well politically aligned with the ideology which detests the size and scope of the government (realistically, those aspects which the ideologues feel are not in their interest). What is unexpected is the swiftness and the brutality of action, but revolutions tend to be messy, and make no mistake, this is a revolution.
> This is the actions of a foreign bad actor
Now this sounds like a coping strategy: everything is so preposterous it couldn't possibly be homegrown. Foreign influence and underhanded actions are as old as human interactions, but IMO outright plants can't succeed without a massive economic and power asymmetry between the adversaries.
The entire world seems to be able to 'cope' with that assessment.
Trump's actions towards Putin are highly irrational. Maybe he's being blackmailed, maybe he's being bought, maybe he just has likes Putins style but there is a reason people suspect him despite it being unlikely in the general case.
This is exactly the process that conservatives take to privatise services into their own friends pockets. Destroy services until they're ineffective and use it as an excuse to privatise it.
There's no such thing as small government, only large sprawling private services that the government hands money to.
In reality this would never happen so all these people playing steelman are just detached/insulated.
If the steelmanning fails then you can you can be even more confident that it is in bad faith.
> Why?
It's a sensible practice and good practice