3 ms·
Sometimes the slope actually is slippery, it's not always a fallacy. Remember the PATRIOT Act? It recently prevented me from buying a package of decongestants
by Rebelgecko 5y ago
Sometimes the slope actually is slippery, it's not always a fallacy.
Remember the PATRIOT Act? It recently prevented me from buying a package of decongestants at Walgreens. I guess keeping my nose clogged helped America fight Al Qaeda or something.
I think government overreach is basically the status quo. Or as the old saying goes, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy".
- ethanbond 5y agoThat is not at all an example of slippery slope. That’s an example of bills being attached to other bills to increase their odds of getting passed. Different problem with different solutions. Has nothing to do and was never claimed to have anything to do with al Qaeda/terrorism/etc.
- creato 5y agoYou chose a funny example of "ever expanding bureaucracy", given that the patriot act is gone as of December 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
- Rebelgecko 5y agoI believe that those sunset provisions you were referring to only applied to the surveillance parts of the bill, not the entire PATRIOT Act. Also, they were originally supposed to expire in 2005, so the government kept the power ~3 times longer than the end date of the original bill.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoThe Patriot Act expired almost three years ago and had nothing to do with purchasing cough medicine that can be used to manufacture meth.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThe Patriot Act banned OTC sales of pseudoephedrine. The "Sudafed" you can buy now uses phenylephrine, a drug whose effectiveness as a decongestant is somewhat controversial (quite a few studies have found that it does no better than a placebo)