The Slippery Slope

Please promise me you will never use the slippery slope argument. It's just lazy and its only result can be maintaining the status quo. We don't live in the best of all possible worlds. Therefore, any issue of any importance will be a slippery slope. This doesn't mean people shouldn't take a stand.

Say you're arguing that increasing surveillance, especially on people who have no criminal records, is a slippery slope: before you know it, all our rights are gone. Now just imagine, there is someone making the exact opposite argument. Let terrorists or criminals or whomever have the knowledge that they're not being watched, and it's a slippery slope: before you know it, "they" will be ruling the streets (the pro-surveillance argument reminds me of that old French adage - "you should beat your wife everyday; if you don't know what she's done wrong, she does" - horrible, isn't it).

Between the both of you and your slippery slope arguments, nothing can be done to change the status quo.

Like I said, any issue of import is inherently situated upon a slippery slope. The slippery slope argument just looks at the extreme at either end of the issue, rather than at all that complex grey stuff in the middle. So instead of taking issues to their "logical" extreme, people need to take a stand: come up with a solution, try and break the problem up into smaller bits so they can be addressed concretely. I don't care how you do it. But until we live in a better world, there's no point in looking at theoretical extremes. They're glib and useless.

It's ironic that the slippery slope argument is actually a slippery slope itself: a slippery slope to poor reasoning and intellectual laziness.

I'm now stepping off my soapbox. Back to knitting next post.

FO - Beau

I finally finished Beau. 

R said something like, "well, now you can use these measurements for the next jumper you make me." I think that means success.  

After re-knitting with the number of stitches called for by the pattern, I knit in the round, up to the base of the sleeve. Then I knit up the sleeves, and attached them so I could keep knitting in the round, because I am terrible at sewing sleeves in and it would have looked messy and horrible. I used a raglan decrease where the pattern asked to bind off stitches; therefore I decrease more on the sleeve side than the body. I used kitchener stitch to join the front and back at the shoulder.

I had made the body too short, so I had to undo it from the bottom, and while I was there, I did a few short rows on the back. Now it seems to be just right!

Now I think I'm going to make a clapotis for myself - I've made a few, but always for other people.