Ban this, ban that. Lets ban everything I don't like! Lets ban the Statue of David even...

It's a slippery slope

> It's a slippery slope

no it's not. there's no such thing as a slippery slope.

ban TikTok. it is a threat.

The proposed law doesn't ban TikTok, it creates an open-ended, mostly unchecked Presidential authority that is not at all restricted to TikTok.

It's not a slippery slope, true, its already the bottom one worries about a slippery slope leading to.

I didn't say "pass the proposed law" I said "ban TikTok" and that's what I meant.

can I ban you? I feel threatened by your idiocy as exposed from your saying clearly false things like "there's no such thing as a slippery slope."

there isn't. slippery slopes are a mythical problem.

the outcome is either the result of a single decision (not a slope) or a result of multiple independent decisions, any one of which could stop the forecasted unintended consequence (not slippery).

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

There's a section of that page dedicated to non-fallacious usage. If a decision makes a subsequent decision more likely, the former a slippery slope to the latter.

There is very little risk that I hurt myself doing cocaine responsibly once. The risk in doing cocaine is that if I do it once, I will be inclined to do it again and so on until I'm a broke addict. If slippery slopes were a mythical problem, I could just commit to doing cocaine only once.

If you ban alcohol, private citizens will be more likely to decide to start a criminal enterprise to supply it outside of the law. If someone is running a profitable criminal enterprise, they'll be less concerned about breaking the law in general and more likely to branch out to violent crimes. If slippery slopes were a myth, we could institute prohibition without risking a massive expansion of the criminal underworld.

I can't find it now, but I saw a comment on HN the other day where a UK citizen expressed how foolish Americans were for disliking their knife laws. Of course they should ban knives in public- knives account for the majority of homicides in their country. No one in the US could be convinced by that argument until effective gun control made it true. Instituting gun control makes it more likely for citizens and politicians to support knife control. (Whether this is worth it is another matter.)

Independent decisions are a myth; every decision is made in the context of the ones that came before.

Who says there’s no such thing as a slippery slope? I can’t tell if your serious… this is dangerous levels of ignorance.

no such thing as a slippery slope in this way.

either the one decision destroys something (no slope into an uncontrollable outcome) or there are multiple decisions which appear as a single destructive decision (multiple independent decisions, rather than a slope into an uncontrollable outcome) even though any decision could have been the one to stop the unintended effect feared in the beginning. the outcome is always under control. maybe not by someone you favor, but it is always under control.

it's literally called "The Slippery Slope Fallacy."

"dangerous levels of ignorance" pfft