[zcid]

A slippery slope is only a fallacy if you can't demonstrate a downward slide. Once you can demonstrate that slide, the issue needs to be taken more seriously. I believe that over the last two years, we have seen a dramatic increase in censorship from the most powerful companies in the world. I'm not even sure that our governments have the will or power to stop them at this point.

[013a]

A big problem with critics of "slippery slope absolutists" is that often when someone says "Youtube just banned porn, you don't care now but one day they'll come for something you love" the response is "dude that's such a slippery slope, that won't happen." In other words: we just classified the end-state as a correct slippery slope, and now we're thinking that the end-state will never happen because that one argument was wrong.

A correct slippery slope identification is when someone says "A happened, thus Z will happen." That's a stretch. But "A happened, then B, C, D, E, F, and G... Z is looking more likely", its no longer a slippery slope. Its a valid concern. The slope is slippery and we're falling down it. The first case can still be right, even if we only had one data point at the time. Its incorrect to assert it is absolutely right, but its also incorrect to dismiss it just because there's only one data point.

Slippery Slopes are, absolutely, among the weakest logical fallacies to be proven wrong by internet armchair warriors with the Fallacies wikipedia page open in another tab. We can make the easy jump all the way to Goodwin's Law and assert that it is a known historical fact that people in 1930s Germany felt the same thing as these armchair warriors when the Socialists were drug away. And then the trade unionists. And then the Gypsies. And the Jewish population. And tens of millions of good people were killed. Slippery Slopes are absolutely a real thing. Having a fallacy named after them doesn't mean they don't exist.

[patrick5415]

Thank you. Listing to people intone about how dumb slippery slopes are makes one wonder if they think the world is 100% stochastic without a trend in sight.