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The Slippery Slope Can No Longer Be Called a Fallacy
2012: “Come on, man. Gay couples should be able to get married so they can visit their loved ones in the hospital. Gay marriage won’t affect you at all. Only paranoid bigots believe ‘we’re coming for your children.'”
2022: “What’s a woman? Only a biologist could answer that. And if you disagree, you’ll be banned from social media. Also, we’re totally grooming six-year-olds to join the LGBT Alphabet Community, and if you object, you’re an ignorant, hateful bigot. Oh, and if you try to remove gay pr0n from the school library, you’re a bigot and we hate you.”
Aren’t you glad the Bush-Republican Party made the tactical decision to desist from the “divisive” Culture War and focus on Important Economic Issues, wars abroad, and neglecting the border?
Published in General
There’s that old quip that ends with the line “I just hope I die before it becomes compulsory!”
That used to be funny . . . .
It’s not a slippery slope. It’s now a cliff They’re pushing Us over.
Pedophilia will be next.
Check out Scott Yenor’s book on the rolling revolution.
If you can graph several data points, it isn’t a slippery slope argument, it’s a trend line.
Regarding “I’m not a biologist”
They give away the game here. Their trans argument is entirely based on the assertion that there is no biological basis for the concept of “sex”. Yet when pressed to define “woman” they say they need a biologist to do so. Huh? I’d have thought that, based on the trans argument, that they’d need a psychologist … or a psychiatrist.
Even they know it’s a farce.
In fact, it has never been a fallacy. It is a valid form which is frequently wrongly applied. IIRC.
It’s not a slippery slope… we’re in free-fall.
With gay marriage people said that biology doesn’t matter for marriage. And if you were good with that, why should it matter for anything else.
Yes, but it will be called children’s rights or something like that. To protect the young boys who have bigoted parents that won’t let them have sex with men.
Perhaps someone could check on Biden’s current SCOTUS nominee’s college transcripts to see if she took biology.
I can’t tell if the OP is meaning to make a serious assertion about logical reasoning (in which case the title of the OP is incorrect, technically) or to point out that the assertion that a slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, which is correct, sometimes appears to result in a sloppy, illogical thinker concluding that he has rebutted the possibility of a slippery slope result, which he has not.
This meme, made by a liberal in about 2015 to ridicule us, didn’t age well:
Liberal Incrementalism. They start by asking that whatever their cause of the day is be tolerated. Then we have to “accept” it. Pretty soon that’s no longer enough, and they demand that we celebrate it. And now the world is being run by twelve angry activists on Twitter for some reason.
I think it’s more insidious. The left always knew gay marriage was never the end game. (Think of all the professional activists who would have had to get real jobs if gay marriage really were the end of the rainbow.) They willingly lied about it, and a lot of gullible people believed it.
The Confederate statues are another example. When the left began tearing them down, there were “conservatives” like Rich Lowry at NRO, who mocked the idea that removing statues of Jefferson Davis would lead to removing statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
And yet, the removal of statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington was exactly, and predictably where the movement led. It was never about the statues, it was about who controlled the culture. The same thing with Alphabet Activists looking to use the schools to groom the next generation of activists.
All the time through the last 30 years of progressive social change, there was always a plea for those who were “disempowered”.
Now we see what they do once granted a little power.
S’weird how iconoclasts always have a surprise icon to install in the empty space.
It never was always a fallacy.
But sometimes slippery slope arguments are fallacies. It depends on the argument.
The Slippery Slope Argument: Not Always a Fallacy
Yes.
The slippery slope argument can be applied or misapplied to lots of things.
“You want to cut government spending by 5%? Sure, that sounds good, but it’s a slippery slope. You start in that direction and eventually government spending will be cut by 100%. I don’t want to get to that point, so we better not cut the budget by a nickel.”
“You want to raise the speed limit by 5 mph? Yeah, that sounds OK, but it’s a slippery slope. We keep raising it and raising it, eventually the speed limit will be 18,000 mph and that would be crazy. Better to not change it at all.”
The slippery slope argument can always be used to maintain the status quo because if we make a change — even one that nearly everyone agrees with — that sets precedent to turn absolutely everything upside down. I don’t want to be locked into stagnation out of fear that any change will be a near guarantee of future chaos.
To the point, it is not a fallacy — never has been — to apply a slippery slope when fighting an incrementalist force.
Leftism starts as being for the little guy and then it becomes a power grab. Look the race hustlers who have utterly corrupted many legitimate black-American organizations that were made to oppose Jim Crow.
Late to this party, but to round the circle, why didn’t (a white-ish right-leaning senator) someone ask her the follow-up question, “Do you believe that someone like me can authentically identify as a person of color?” Would seem apropos to this silly charade…
The follow-up should have been:
“Are you saying that womanhood depends entirely on biology? Are you a woman? If so, how can you tell if you’re not a biologist?”
How do you know that you’re not a biologist?
Duh. Because I don’t identify as one.
Half a moment. How did you know that he knows he’s not a biologist?
Neither of them saw the predator in the river.
This is why they got conquered over and over. Spending their time talking about happy fish instead of guarding the wall.
This is why they survived, and how the conquered can conquer even the conquerors: literature and philosophy!
Everyone who knows saw this coming. The powers of evil are stronger than the powers of good. Pedo is already here, bestiality is next. Fighting against it is worth it, nevertheless.
ref: Isaiah 5:20 and several Jack Chick tracts for starters.