Don't steelman a fascist (Wisdom of the Year)

Steelmanning is a method used by super honest debaters, whereby they state the opponent's position better than themselves, before chopping it down. This is as opposed to strawmanning, whereby one makes a distorted version of the opponent's argument, or a strawman, and breaks it down. The goal is to break the opponent's argument in such a way that no part of the argument will survive the attack, as the edge cases are also included when you steelman the argument.

However, when you steelman a fascist, you're playing right into their trap. A fascist wants to gain popularity, and they want you to strengthen their argument as well as possible. However, once you have done your part, they won't let you deal the breaking blow. They will silence you by whatever means necessary.

A fascist is wicked.

But the worst part is that, you never know you're steelmanning a fascist until you've steelmanned them.

So if you ever encounter them, don't try to correct your mistakes. Seek the help of God and let God fight that battle. Know that you're only a limited and fallible being.

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Personally, I ended up doing this when I was trying to weigh the arguments on two sides equally, intending to steelman the arguments on both sides, but then I faced pressure from one side, and that ended up with me steelmanning them more while ignoring the other side. Turns out they were the worse side!

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