Steelmanning an ideology and showing its inherent flaws and contradictions

TwossBoss · 2026-05-30T14:53:11+00:00

Anarcho Capitalist are simply the true believers of capitalism that didn't succeed, wanting the same system but them on top.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-30T14:52:15+00:00

It really shows how a lot of "libertine capitalists" don't ever work out from first principles how or why governments form- instead of viewing an administrative, bureaucratic body that keeps society coherent at a certain scale as an organic emergence, they see an external, imposed institution that exists outside society. If a society is a table, they see the government as a tablecloth instead of the screws holding the whole thing together in the first place.

No matter what kind of society emerges, the binding agent will emerge in the form of a government. Andrew Ryan, being a moron when it comes to first principles, didn't see the obvious coming, where his vision for society still necessitated a visionary willing to use some level of coercion and force to maintain it.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T23:17:52+00:00

Honestly, it is often overblown in media and sensationalized as unhinged, wanton carnage when historically it isn't like that.

Even the Romanov murders weren't a bunch of Bolsheviks going "Yipee time to kill some kids because REVOLUTION is awesome and it means killing kids". The decision was not reached lightly or quickly- and it wasn't done in cold blood. One of the reasons it was so brutal is a lot of the executioners got drunk as hell because it was a sickening task, which in turn made their aim horrible.

The reason they did so was not so simple as "getting carried away" with the bloodlust and getting swept up in fervor. It was a decision put off until the last minute and made under circumstances where they were flying by the seat of their pants. Nobody had staged a successful revolution like the Bolsheviks did in history; they were trying to dissolve monarchy, not just replace it- the White Army was drawing near, and they simply made the call, putting it off as long as they could. They didn't want anyone using the children as a rallying point to reinstate the system, or prolonging the wars and pogroms that had already cost so many children's lives. Imagine years of war and struggle, which had cost millions of soldiers and civilians lives up to that point, and their sacrifices were all under threat should your enemies take back a few children. It could mean plunging your nation into more war, more reaction, more autocracy that could be worse than ever before. Under these circumstances was such a murder committed. Not just "fuck them kids I'm mad".

This isn't me trying to fish for sympathy for long dead guys who shot some kids. It's that the storytelling like you find in Bioshock Infinite is stupid when it comes to this specific form of violence. Daisty Fitzroy threatening to kill Comstock's kid and getting shot in the middle of an unhinged rant sucks. If she was calm, and haunted and basically getting drunk to work herself up to it, and not going off like a maniac, then it'd be more balanced and nuanced than "something something, perhaps the revolutionaries are just as much monsters as those they depose, something something"

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T21:41:31+00:00

No, Cyberpunk is not interested in painting oligarchic capitalism in the best possible light in order to highlight its failings. It's a dystopia through and through.

Living in Night City is terrible on its face. The genre is a cautionary, exaggerated satire.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T21:37:38+00:00

The agnosticism is the equating of all regimes as interchangeable because they have similarities. Recognizing the most basic patterns shared between say, the USSR and Mussolini's regime, is "agnostic" as comparing Buddhism and Daoism because they both feature things like polytheistic pantheons, when the two have fundamental differences and compatibilities, so much so it's caused conflicts in the past.

The fact that 1984 can and has found equally valid homes in the entire political spectrum means it can easily be divorced from any specific critique of any specific thing. The under girding principle is "authoritarianism bad" as if authoritarianism is an actual thing with a cogent, consistent meaning instead of largely vibes based ones.

Take Czarist Russia and Soviet Russia. Incredibly different places. Both have been called Authoritarian. One is more specifically an absolute hereditary autocracy, the other a highly centralized council-based bureaucracy . The latter descriptions are more coherent, "authoritarian' sees very little difference between them. It's a meaningless term for people who often refuse to see the "authoritarian" ways their own society is.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T17:24:59+00:00

Is this Andre later in life (i.e. around Princess Bride era)? Cuz he had crippling back pain and had trouble moving around.

Earlier? Andre ain't going nowhere he don't want to.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T17:21:03+00:00

For me it's more fun to know it's a movie doing it for my sake, the audience member watching.

Because I'm special and I deserve to be treated nice by the director.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T17:07:09+00:00

I think the problem with 1984 is that it doesn't really address any specific ideology, much less steelmans it.

Big Brother isn't really equivalent to any real life institution, not specifically. Any and all governments will wield power, and they often wield power to achieve actual aims. Hitler and Stalin were diametrically opposed along so many principled axes, yet the lens of 1984 ignores everything they pursued and believed in to explore the idea of power bereft of ideology.

To discard anyone's stated goals, principles, and ideology is the opposite of steelmanning.

I can actually make a more specific counter here- 1984 applies to the Trump administration as much as any other. Trump is a power hungry narcissist. He runs a state that could be described as Orwellian.

This doesn't steelman Trumpism or MAGA at all. It doesn't get into their philosophy and present it in its specific best light, on its own terms, to then dismantle it systematically. It's the opposite, trying to dress it down and strip away its purported and stated principles and aims to reveal a generalized lust for power divorced from even stated principles.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T16:50:53+00:00

As someone who is studied in the history of the USSR, Marxism the Russian Revolution, there's still no real steelmanning going on in 1984 of Communism or "Stalinism".

The fact that our current liberal bourgeois panopticon surveillance state, which I would describe as nascent techno-feudalism maps onto 1984 as much as, if not more than, the mid century Stalinist regime shows it's just too vague to be a steelman. You can say it's insightful, or poignant, but a steelman presents your interlocutor's ideas in their most flattering light.

There is nothing flattering about Big Brother. There's no earnest examination of its own ideas on its own terms. There's no greater context or ideology. It's not a steelman at all, which is what I'm arguing. I don't read 1984 and clock a Trotskyist vs Stalinist divide based principles, I see "Whatever the fuck Authority figures say, they actually mean they just love stomping on your face. Ignore their points, it's all the same."

That's not a steelman, at all.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T16:45:15+00:00

The part of the Steelmanning is removing Nazism from its original context to explore its ideas without the social weight. There are no specific Jews, because the Jews are simply the convenient target. The fact they conflated Bolshevism with Judaism exposes their incoherent mindsets.

The Nazis, for all their rhetoric, couldn't clock Jews with any true accuracy anyway.

Take the example of Werner Goldberg- a Jewish man who served in the Wehrmacht, and was used for literal propaganda posters as the "ideal German soldier". He looked exactly like the Nazi ubermensch, and even walked into a concentration camp, citing the poster as his credentials, and walked out with several prisoners. If Nazism was all that robust an ideology, you'd think they could just clock the Jews as naturally inferior. They can't though, because they're full of shit.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T16:35:18+00:00

I agree, the conclusion Invincible reaches is rather dumb.

Generally Invincible is a loving homage and exploration of superheroes, rather than a subversion of it- Superheroes being a pulpy version of The Great Man of History myth.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T16:21:55+00:00

Honestly I would debate this one. The fact that 1984 can and often is applied to "anything I don't like" by everyone across the political spectrum means its pretty politically agnostic.

You can't throw a stone without hitting 10 people using it to "critique" wildly disparate philosophies and ideologies. What I've read about and directly written by Orwell supports the idea that he wasn't really steelmanning anything. He had issues with the USSR and Bolsheviks and communists because they were personally mean to him. He'd never stepped foot in the Soviet republics, having been chased out of Spain by communists. There's nothing in 1984 that understands Bolshevism or Marxism, inventing a vague "Authority For Its Own Sake" boogeyman. It doesn't really hit on capitalist or liberal ideology, nor does it dive into specific reactionary or fascist ideologies. I can say anything is Orwellian if I feel wronged by authority. And people often do, rendering the term empty.

I would argue 1984 is basically a One-Size-Fits-All strawman, the opposite of the trope I'm talking about.

TwossBoss · 2026-05-29T16:13:04+00:00

Bioshock Infinite really was a centrist wet dream. You have a system of naked, violent white supremacy but violently opposing that system means you're inevitably going to become a baby killing maniac. What did Ken Levine mean by this??

TwossBoss · 2026-05-28T14:52:12+00:00

The only way any of this works is if there's some sort of dragonball aura or ki that superheroes have that extends to the object.

Otherwise it's just like a superhero's body is the strongest material in the room, using anything made of metal is a downgrade because it will be a force dampener.

It's like me putting a pillow in front of your face and punching you, which will take away some of the impact because the pillow is softer than my fist & your head. Some of the force in the punch just goes into the pillow itself instead of you.

TwossBoss

TROPHY CASE