The slippery slope of slippery slope arguments

[Shermann]

The Republican guard dogs have used slippery slope arguments from their playbook to block common sense reforms or incremental improvements by the Democrats in may areas including:

- Gun control
- Recreational drug legalization
- Social programs / Socialism

Meanwhile, Trump has brought us down a slippery slope of anti-intellectualism. Now Bush 43 was not an intellectual, but I wouldn't characterize him as an anti-intellectual either. McCain and Romney were a mixed bag. But in only three years it has become mainstream to deny science, embrace fallacies, and even snicker at environmentalists.

Where was the Democratic Night Watch on this issue?

[malaise]

1. No - the Con is just the worst manifestation of the cirrent anti-intellectualism

Al Gore's very important work The Assault on Reason was published in 2007.

[Shermann]

2. Hell it goes back to Galileo's time and beyond

But my alarm is the rate at which we're descending, and the power of the individuals pushing the sled.

[malaise]

4. LOL

Good one - I did get your point about the rate of the descent, but in recent times Gore and others have been warning us. It is the Rush Limbaughs, Fuks fake news, other media circus clowns and of course social media who/that continue to press the gas leading to this madness.

[Newest Reality]

6. The irony is...

The irony is that there is access to more information than ever before, all at the tips of one's fingers. Historically, that is unprecedented and so, I have to attribute some of the descent to willful ignorance, confirmation bias and sheer laziness.

Chomsky did point out that the average, hard working person has little time or energy to do research or go beyond a sound bit or a short video saying this or that, no matter how spurious the information may be.

I have looked at the manifold conspiracy theory world, (which is going more mainstream than I ever thought it would) and I see a trend towards accepting and believing just about anything now and even fighting over the veracity of it. Now, I respect people's beliefs, but it is my suspicion that, as older, and even organized forms of religion lose their appeal, people are just filling that space in with new, radical and unsubstantiated beliefs in lieu of acquiring the skills and knowledge to discern that and researching things before they accept and adopt that. That applies to the "conveniently" religious and fundamentalists, but I see a much wider scope here.

Taken as a whole, it could also spell a general decline and breakdown of what we call society. I am all for breaking out of the official narrative and that is very important to our freedom and well being, but to replace that with new and questionable belief systems does not support free thinking as much as it contributes to delusional perspectives and that can lead to the fragmentation and dissolution of a culture. Online access can empower and inform us, but it is looking to be a two-edged sword and might end up accelerating the chaos and confusion of a breakdown of any useful and even vital consensus in the long run.

Some forms of commonality, (no matter how far we all diverge on various topics) really is an important consideration here. Without some common ground, this even goes beyond divide and conquer and becomes more like fragment, diffuse and overtake.

[Shermann]

9. Interesting...

I hadn't thought of fake news as filling the vacuum left by organized religion.

I also see it as the inevitable increase in entropy. Now that anybody and everybody can create a blog or a post and forward information on social media to be mixed in with accurate information, it has resulted in an overall increase in entropy or the amount of disorder in the overall closed system.

So I have taken a quantum view of it.

[Newest Reality]

10. Yeah.

I like your thinking. I tend to investigate things to an extreme degree when I have the time.

I can relate to that analogy.

It also seems to me that, if we interject some new ways of looking at situations, (and I think we are more open to that here) we can gather some fresh insights. That is different from "alternative" views/truth, (which is a problem in itself) and "fake news" in that, we can avoid taking things too literally while appreciating the value of simile, metaphor and the allegorical value of different ways to frame important issues, which is a logical level that fundamentalists and mere believers, (being very general in that sense) may not have realized as of yet.

I do hope that we can recover from this episodic breakdown into a form of social chaos and a lot depends on that. However, it has the potential to be an opportunity as well. The system itself has some intractable problems that are indicating a need for some drastic and long overdue changes. There will be changes, that seems obvious, but the critical aspect is that there is also vulnerability and confusion that go along with it and who is trying to direct and influence that transition are of import.

[underpants]

3. There is only one truth in a cult

And it doesn't matter if the truth from the leader changes or counters the previous truth.

[Shermann]

5. The whole conservative news thing is totally out of control

On the conservative forums there is something like "guruism" going on. They totally reject the Ad Fontes media bias chart with its documented methodology. Instead, they look to their resident gurus to rule on media bias. Their methodology is much more opaque, and they kind of make it up as they go. In addition to the usual MSM culprits, they snicker at sources like PolitiFact and even Wikipedia. When I ask for the official "whitelist" of approved conservative media sources I am allowed to cite, I get chirping crickets. It just doesn't work that way. No, they wait for the troublesome "facts" to be presented first, then a guru gets to decide if it is a biased news source and summarily dismiss it out of hand.

But there is a hole. The conservative news media has not been able to develop a plausible version of a fact-checking site. So there is no "Conservative PolitiFact". When I ask why, I get the response that they don't need fact-checking because they already have all the facts. This, of course, is an absurd fallacy based on a circular argument.

[underpants]

8. You've summarized it perfectly

The first thing a cult does is shower someone with love THEN they convince them they've bee lied to - this separates them from their former world. Next is to establish their own facts.

There is no rebutting them it's facts. Once a new fact or response to facts are created it is drilled into them all day long. By dinner time with the Fox News nighttime shows it's legend and lore and used as a basis to expand upon.

Case in point. Saw this this morning. Friday's News will be gone by tomorrow at lunch.

'Haven't seen that analysis': National security adviser contradicts reports on Russia helping Trump reelection

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/havent-seen-that-analysis-national-security-adviser-contradicts-reports-on-russia-helping-trump-reelection

[Prue]

7. It got caught up in the deflection

Where was the Democratic Night Watch on this issue?

The left was too busy getting bamboozled into apologizing for valuing education. The right framed education as a bad thing, twisting it to mean education was the left being elitists.

I remember watching the leaders on the left try to placate those who were offended and turn around and apologize rather than challenge the premise that education was bad. The right successfully redefined stupidity as a good thing and thus the tea party and trump's base were born.