Australia is about to undertake a pointless non-binding postal survey about our views on same sex marriage (SSM), which if a majority say ‘Yes’, will see a bill before parliament that politicians will vote on. I.e. an abject failure of how representative democracy is supposed to work (there’s no need for a $120m survey for any other bit of legislation).
As predicted by everyone, the stupid has begun. Here’s one such example I came across on Facebook:
In our book, we ended our section on the slippery slope fallacy with this:
In our book, we ended our section on the slippery slope fallacy with this:
On the other hand, it is important to be aware that when people who lack the mature judgement of the authors venture onto a slippery slope, they will inevitably wallow in ever more bizarre misconceptions and fallacious reasoning until we end up with nothing but gibberish —and finally, the complete destruction of civilization as we know it.The unironic employment of the slippery slope argument, that SSM will lead to ‘our own destruction’, may in fact be evidence that we are seeing the first steps in a series of events of poor thinking, fallacious reasoning and even more bizarre misconceptions, that will lead to the complete destruction of civilisation as we know it. Thus proving, ironically, the deliberately tongue in cheek prediction from the book.
