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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

At best this is unsupported personal opinion and at worst a slippery slope fallacy.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30432317.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30433141.

Slippery Slope fallacy is one of those expressions that gets thrown around a lot when people want to believe the next logical step forward won’t happen. When it constantly happens over and over again, it’s no longer a fallacy…just the next logical step.

Slippery slope is only a fallacy when you have very limited, often a single, data point. You could say using the Emergencies Act is only a single data point or you could say giving in to the authoritarian nature of power hungry politicians has endless data points. If one sees the Emergencies Act as a subset of power hungry politicians, there are already more than enough data points to see where the slope leads. Even before the pandemic there were already plenty of data points to establish that PM Trudeau and his cabinet are power hungry authoritarians. It pretty much comes with the position.

> "A slippery slope argument (SSA), in logic, critical thinking, political rhetoric, and caselaw, is an argument in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

> In a slippery slope argument, a course of action is rejected because, with little or no evidence, one insists that it will lead to a chain reaction resulting in an undesirable end or ends. The slippery slope involves an acceptance of a succession of events without direct evidence that this course of events will happen.

https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...

> The two primary forms of the slippery slope argument are the logical form, (in which acceptance of A must logically lead to acceptance of the undesirable B), and the psychological form, in which it is argued that the acceptance of A will, over time, lead people to be more willing to accept B.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

Also: general hand-waving like "based on this government's track record" does not a pattern make. Like most of my cited sources say: "based on little or no supporting evidence."

The slippery slope argument requires a slope. In your opinion what the parent comment said is a radical departure from what's currently happening.

Personally, I don't think that a government which stamps out protest and bank accounts of political rivals is anywhere but at the bottom of the slope. I've lived in Africa and I've seen how this goes.

I agree and am wondering for my own edification:

What _would_ make a pattern? Is it possible to make any negative predictions without falling into the Slippery Slope?

There's nothing slippery slope-y about a political party freezing the bank accounts of the opponents that are protesting against its policies in the streets. Had this been happening in the countries we (meaning the West) don't like the press would have been up in arms about it, for obvious reasons.

The obvious reason being that the government in question is democratically elected and the ones that (probably) fall into “countries we don’t like” aren’t democratically elected?

Doesn't matter, all that matters is are they on "your side" or not. Had the USA froze assets of BLM and BLM-associated groups during 2020 the "democratically elected" wouldn't have stopped people complaining.

Right, nor is it stopping people from complaining now, is it?

Explain this then? And in case you weren't aware, India is the largest democracy in the world

https://twitter.com/rahulbetgeri/status/1494963031847337985

What’s there to explain? Are you under the impression that all protests are of equivalent legitimacy no matter what tactics they use, what their demands are, and what their non-protest alternatives are?

> The obvious reason being that the government in question is democratically elected and the ones that (probably) fall into “countries we don’t like” aren’t democratically elected?

I mean India is the world's largest democracy, so clearly that's not the obvious reason.

> Are you under the impression that all protests are of equivalent legitimacy no matter what tactics they use, what their demands are, and what their non-protest alternatives are?

That doesn't justify freezing a person's bank account.

Yes, in the sense that all protests should be held to the same standard by the government regardless of legimatcy. As in you can absolutely be against a portest that you don't agree with and deem illegitimate. But, the government does not get to decide what cause is "legitimate" to forbid a group from doing what they encouraged another group to do. The point of protesting is to protest against those in power, not to show how much you agree with them

If the last couple years have taught anything, it's that the slippery slope fallacy is largely a fallacy.

I think it's fine to post personal opinions here, even speculation. I felt like this one was cynical, but not without precedent. Posting links to actions other governments have taken in the past would be nice, but it wouldn't prove the same thing would happen this time. So unless the counter-argument is "what you are saying might happen has never happened before, and could not conceivably happen now" then I don't think lack of support is damning either. Readers should take these rants with a healthy dose of salt, and those who won't probably don't care how they are presented anyway.

Sometimes the slope actually is slippery, it's not always a fallacy.

Remember the PATRIOT Act? It recently prevented me from buying a package of decongestants at Walgreens. I guess keeping my nose clogged helped America fight Al Qaeda or something.

I think government overreach is basically the status quo. Or as the old saying goes, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy".

That is not at all an example of slippery slope. That’s an example of bills being attached to other bills to increase their odds of getting passed. Different problem with different solutions. Has nothing to do and was never claimed to have anything to do with al Qaeda/terrorism/etc.

You chose a funny example of "ever expanding bureaucracy", given that the patriot act is gone as of December 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

I believe that those sunset provisions you were referring to only applied to the surveillance parts of the bill, not the entire PATRIOT Act. Also, they were originally supposed to expire in 2005, so the government kept the power ~3 times longer than the end date of the original bill.

The Patriot Act expired almost three years ago and had nothing to do with purchasing cough medicine that can be used to manufacture meth.

The Patriot Act banned OTC sales of pseudoephedrine. The "Sudafed" you can buy now uses phenylephrine, a drug whose effectiveness as a decongestant is somewhat controversial (quite a few studies have found that it does no better than a placebo)

While technically true, I get the feeling you must be new to government

I don't appreciate the condescending attitude, and I'm well aware of the extensive use of slippery slope fallacies to attack policies or legislation.

It's cheap fear-mongering, getting people to associate an extreme outcome with a much more moderate proposed action.

"If you allow bike lanes in our city, in a few years these bike commies will be trying to spend tax dollars on buying everyone bikes, and then make it illegal to drive your car in the road!"

> "If you allow bike lanes in our city, in a few years these bike commies will be trying to spend tax dollars on buying everyone bikes, and then make it illegal to drive your car in the road!"

strawman fallacy (or "whataboutism" if you prefer (I don't))

It seems pretty weird to try to equate an absurd scenario around bikes, to a situation where governments with track records of accumulating and abusing power might... accumulate and abuse more power. Asserting that "this time will be different" feels a bit naive, no?

Many long term political goals are achieved through incrementalism which others might call the "slippery slope." Incrementalism is a political tactic that is extremely effective. To dismiss it purely as an argumentative fallacy in all cases demonstrates naivety and the person who pointed out that you probably don't understand government was right to do so.

There are probably very few cases where the government implemented a rule or regulation or tax or anything where it was eventually rolled back. The government has a long and documented track record of incrementally expanding its reach and power.

The US homeland security act will never time out. The Canadian emergencies act will likely also continue on forever, but the act doesn't actually have to get worse to BE worse. The act is already dictatorial. The controlling government will just figure out how to apply the emergencies act more liberally against political opponents. That's how it will get worse.

You do realize that this is, in fact, very similar to what the people who stumped for "just letting us have bike lanes" have progressed to advocating, right? Totally car-free roads, roads that technically are car-usable but have been rigged so that they won't support normal traffic, various pushes to force (or "nudge" or "encourage") people to ride bikes or take mass transit instead of driving... etc.

And they even helped with convenient tax credits for taking their preferred modes of transportation! (spending tax dollars)

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Your GP comment was already unsubstantive, which is the main reason why we're getting a flamewar in this subthread, and it's also not cool to feed it as you're doing here. If a parent comment is breaking the site guidelines (which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30432570 was), the thing to do is flag it, not reply by fueling the flames.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've also had to ask you this kind of thing in the past.

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and please don't cross into personal attack. All that is directly destructive of what we're trying for on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My apologies, I don't usually reply like this. I felt like the parent brushed off the points raised too quickly.

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