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Slippery Slope

"If we allow X, next thing you know it'll be Y." Sometimes that's a warning. Sometimes it's just a way to make sure X never happens.

The slippery slope argument says that one step will inevitably lead to a chain of increasingly extreme consequences. Ban one type of speech, and soon all speech is censored. Allow one exception to a rule, and the rule collapses entirely. The structure is always the same: a small, reasonable-sounding change is presented as the first domino in an unstoppable cascade toward disaster.

Here's the thing — some slopes really are slippery. Surveillance powers granted during emergencies have a habit of never expiring. Temporary measures become permanent infrastructure. Emergency economic interventions quietly become standard policy. The historical record shows that certain kinds of power, once granted, are almost never returned voluntarily. So the pattern is real. The fallacy isn't in recognising cascading effects. It's in asserting they're inevitable without evidence, using the worst-case scenario as a guarantee rather than a possibility.

The difference between a legitimate warning and a scare tactic comes down to one question: is there a plausible mechanism connecting A to Z, or is someone just listing scary outcomes to block any change at step A? If the only argument against a policy is "imagine where this could lead," and no one can explain how it leads there, you're looking at fear, not logic.

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