Thursday, July 26, 2007

Smearing From the Left: The Slippery Slope and the Malicious Confounding of Two Very Different Kinds of Ideals

Slippery slope fallacies start and end with attempted smearing, and commonly include equivocation, false dilemma, and misconception of ideals; and all of this often deliberately. Sometimes even all of this is contained or implied in a one-word exclamation.
Ideals can be of two kinds: one in which you can never have too much of the valued item (e.g. health), and the second; which involves an ideal range, neither too much nor too little, with evils lying on either side of the range (e.g. hydration/dehydration).
The slippery slope equivocation confounds these two kinds of ideals, in order to smear, by dishonestly generating a false dilemma (e.g. capital punishment inexorably leads to death camps).
The left has to use this smear approach because there are no rational arguments as to why they should have more power...[continued in comments section below]

1 comment:

John S. Bolton said...

[continued from the posting's text]...When they have good arguments, such as for controlling tuberculosis in NYC, they use them, and admit that officials have more than enough power for it.
The response must not be defensive and weak, as if it were responsible and moral to throw out vicious smears, but counteroffensive; strongly refusing to at first, deny what one is smeared with. One would say: you have to try smears, because there are no good arguments for your side of the issue. Their cause will often have to be inferred from what they try to smear one for (e.g. if some kind of discrimination, then aggressive anti-discrimination, beyond what can rationally be argued for, is to be inferred as what they're advocating).
The move towards inferring the cause, is always right, if there is no smear-monger without a cause.