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Comment by task_queue | Hacker News Reader

Somehow, national security is contingent on knowing EVERYTHING the public says and does. Total war has gone digital.

I never thought I'd see the day where a sarcastic slippery slope argument about the Patriot Act made in 2004 would manifest into our reality.

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>where a sarcastic slippery slope argument about the Patriot Act made in 2004

I think many people were non-sarcastically making these slippery slope arguments, at least in part because they feared these exact sorts of scenarios.

There were and are many people calling it for what it is. Defenders of the bill would sometimes respond sarcastically with what they thought was hyperbole.

The reveal about warrantless wiretaps slowly encroached on their retorts, but the FISA courts, NSLs and the mass collection of everyone's communications and whereabouts is really when we came full circle.

That's why slippery slopes are not always fallacies.

It's still a fallacy, arguing the fact that fallacious argument can turn out to be true is a fallacy fallacy :)

Wait what? Fallacy fallacy is arguing that "it's a fallacy, therefore it's wrong", AFAIR.

(Or, as it usually works over the Internet, "it pattern-matches some random fallacy list I vaguely remember, so it's wrong!!111".)

No I mean you said that "because it turned out to be true, the original argument wasn't a fallacy", which is kind of "reversed fallacy fallacy" I guess, but I don't think it matters which "direction" it goes for the name of the phenomena. I might be wrong, obviously. I'll ask around...

The more I think about it the worse headache I get, so I'll leave it at that and hope for the best.

OK, it was answered right at the "source":

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/fallfall.html

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