There was a man from Kentucky
In writing he had been unlucky
Try though he might
Each thing was a blight
And his OLLI pals told him, "It's yucky!"
Monday, July 28, 2014
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Fallacy #10 - Slippery Slope
Fallacy #10 - Slippery Slope
This is an ancient fallacy. If you don't kick Moses and his followers out of Egypt, pretty soon we will all forget completely about King Tut. If you let Moses and his followers settle in Israel, none of us will be able to sell our houses for kindling.
This is an extremely modern fallacy. If you allow same sex marriage then the next thing will be armadillos mating with opossums, and we won't be able to handle the roadkill with bulldozers.
Who will pick the cotton? Who will build the roads?
The thing about the slippery slope bogus argument is that it has to leap over all of the intermediate possibilities. It presupposes that there is an unalterable straight line from the act, A, to the cataclysmic absurdity, B.
The person who plays the slippery slope gambit is probably on a pretty slippery slope himself. He has gone to a gunfight armed only with a knife. And no matter how clever is the first argument, it is usually a signal that there are only very thin arguments left. I take a slippery slope argument as an admission of weakness.
But it is amazing how sticky these slippery slopes can be. The state police here in Kentucky rode this broken down hobby horse for many a year, if you allow the growing of hemp we will not be able to identify illegal marijuana patches from our helicopters. Decades of misinformational grease had made the slope doubly slippery.
It is easy enough to say, don't fall for slippery slope arguments, but that sort of discipline will not keep your ignorant fellow citizen from falling. They have been taught at every turn, at every intersection with the collective, that mere survival is solely dependent on seeing every possible slippery slope. Fly, fly, fly away, and don't ask questions.
This is an ancient fallacy. If you don't kick Moses and his followers out of Egypt, pretty soon we will all forget completely about King Tut. If you let Moses and his followers settle in Israel, none of us will be able to sell our houses for kindling.
This is an extremely modern fallacy. If you allow same sex marriage then the next thing will be armadillos mating with opossums, and we won't be able to handle the roadkill with bulldozers.
Who will pick the cotton? Who will build the roads?
The thing about the slippery slope bogus argument is that it has to leap over all of the intermediate possibilities. It presupposes that there is an unalterable straight line from the act, A, to the cataclysmic absurdity, B.
The person who plays the slippery slope gambit is probably on a pretty slippery slope himself. He has gone to a gunfight armed only with a knife. And no matter how clever is the first argument, it is usually a signal that there are only very thin arguments left. I take a slippery slope argument as an admission of weakness.
But it is amazing how sticky these slippery slopes can be. The state police here in Kentucky rode this broken down hobby horse for many a year, if you allow the growing of hemp we will not be able to identify illegal marijuana patches from our helicopters. Decades of misinformational grease had made the slope doubly slippery.
It is easy enough to say, don't fall for slippery slope arguments, but that sort of discipline will not keep your ignorant fellow citizen from falling. They have been taught at every turn, at every intersection with the collective, that mere survival is solely dependent on seeing every possible slippery slope. Fly, fly, fly away, and don't ask questions.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Bad Ideas
Lily Tomlin posed the difficulty, "I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else."
The same could be said about a jillion bad ideas. United Nations?
Allying with Joseph Stalin? The TSA? The NSA? The Iraq War. Don't
you worry that the current incarnation of POTUS is thinking about or
being lured into something else? But we should not fear ideas, rather
we should fear the implementation of bad ideas. Ideas are of such a
constitution that about 97% of them should go away, and then 97% of the
remainder should be rethought. The trouble is that too large a number
of idea people become enamored of their own ideas -- they will see them
to rotten fruition come hell or high water. The second trouble is that
there are too many people who seek fame and fortune by saying yes --
congress people come to mind. It is no short-term skin off their noses
if they implement stupid ideas -- they will be history before history
catches up to them. The most important part for us voluntaryists is
that we regard ideas as potential good, but we see that a good deal of
weeding is necessary to a garden. A rule of thumb: if any idea needs
much coercion, or worse, enforcement, it is likely a horrible idea.
Monday, July 7, 2014
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