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.