(source - a great academic blog on
judgement and decision making)
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and live near Washington, DC, and the term I am hearing more and more is SLIPPERY SLOPE. For example, this exchange on a recent It's Been a Minute podcast (host Sam Sanders was interviewing architecture critic Kate Wagner):
WAGNER: ... And this became, like, a big enough phenomenon that the New Statesman published an article about these accounts and how they're, like, weirdly, like, crypto-fascists.
SANDERS: Crypto-fascist - what do you mean by that?
WAGNER: Talking about things like the downfall of Western society and how, like, modern architecture's degenerate, which was a dog whistle used by, for example, the Nazis in order to go after institutions like the Bauhaus and sort of, like, a cultural purge. And there's a lot of sort of cloaked rhetoric about the supremacy of, like, Western aesthetics.
SANDERS: As soon as you begin to talk about the supremacy of the West, you kind of wade into territory of the supremacy of white people.
WAGNER: Yeah. It's a slippery slope.
Note - this was a discussion about the architecture of government buildings. Ugh.
Slippery Slope is code for "lean slightly that way and you will fall directly into a very bad dark place." Avoid those slopes at all costs!
It's a judge-y way to tell you that you dare not compromise, you dare not even listen to anyone not saying or agreeing with exactly with the speaker.
It's a cop out.
It's SLIPPERY because it's hard, yes. But it shouldn't be a barrier. There are lots of tough issues out there, and categorizing any kind of compromise as a slippery slope is just lazy.
As soon as any one or any organization says even thinking about a compromise is a slippery slope, I'm out.
No comments:
Post a Comment