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Democrats
I've noticed that some conservatives, including Fox News pundits and reporters, refer to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Party" or its members as "Dems". This is incorrect. The party is the Democratic Party. One of them is a Democrat, many of them are Democrats. Republicans are no more entitled to rename the Democratic party "Democrat Party" than Democrats would be if they tried to rename the Republican Party to "Poopy Pants Party", which is only slightly more retarded than "Democrat Socialist Party", a move so stupid that even the Republicans eventually decided not to do it.

This illustrates a big reason why I've gotten further and further away from the Republican party. Remember that "freedom fries" bullcrap? Same thing. "Obama/Osama"? Same thing. This is what you get when you let Rush Limbaugh ursurp the throne of William Buckley and the whole thing collapses in a flurry of anti-intellectualism. I clutched my head in junior high school every time a classmate thought they were being clever by calling our teacher "Mr. Smellyn". I would have had a massive case of adolescent depression if I'd known twenty years ago that the same people would be doing the same thing and would be serious about it. It's dumb. It makes me wince, and not in the good "touché, ya got me" way that we'd both prefer. It's demeaning, but not to the people you think it demeans. Stop it.

(And yes, the same goes for the last 8 years of similar stunts against George Bush, presuming that such stunts were actually taken up by congressmen and media types rather than restricted to random fringey weirdos.)

Nixon Dollars
Today at lunch Xray told me about the new Presidential $1 Coins. The US Mint will be issuing gold-colored $1 coins featuring US presidents in the order that they served, 4 presidents per year. 2009's presidents are Harrison (#9), Tyler (#10), Polk (#11), and Taylor (#12).

Looking ahead, this means that in 2016 the US Mint will be issuing Nixon Dollars. I get giddy just thinking about swaggering up to a bar and buying a drink with a fat sack of Nixons.

(The phrase "Fat Sack of Nixons" is copyright Xray Industries.)

Current Mood: trolling for drieux

My New MacBook

Apple's most recent 15" MacBook Pro is not too much different than the old one. Same chipset, same CPUs, same graphics card, same ports, same generous 8GB/$700 memory limit. The two are similar enough that even after the new model was announced, Apple wasn't offering a discount on the last models: the 2.66Ghz is $2000 either way. I decided to buy one, since I've been looking for an opportunity to upgrade from my MA896LL for several reasons:

The better graphics card means TF2 will run smoother and I can stop blaming that part for me dying all the time.
My 5400rpm 160GB drive is pokey and was getting pretty full, especially since I gave 30GB to Windows.
I stopped being able to buy screen protectors, which have been necessary to keep the keys from bruising the surface of the LCD screen. The new macs have a hard glass pane between the LCD and keyboard which makes the protector unnecessary.

I ended up getting a model MB588LL refurb. It's the MC026LL with a 7200rpm 250GB hard drive. The refurb runs $1699, or $1580 with haineux's Apple employee discount (thanks, man!) You could pay $600 more for the current generation's top of the line but you'd only get:

A larger battery and hard drive that's marginally more difficult to replace.
A less versatile SD card slot rather than an ExpressCard slot that can also read SD cards.
A wider-gamut LCD screen which seems kinda nice but I need to do an A/B comparison.
A 2.9GHz T9600 CPU that runs 5.26% faster than the same-series 2.66Ghz T9550 CPU.
A 500GB hard drive instead of a 320GB drive that's cheap and easy to upgrade.

So far the shiny new thing pleases me. If you've been waiting to upgrade now's a pretty good time to do it. Right now, last-gen models are cheaper and about the same as current-gen models, the hardware platform is mature stable, the refurb discount is significant. Or maybe not. There are two big things coming down the pipe that might be worth waiting for: Blu-Ray, which seems really close to happening, and Nvidia's new line of super-programmable G200M series GPUs. Then again even if those come out in a few months it still won't come cheap like this one. Cheapskates reprazent, yo.

Anyway I'm still getting used to the new model. The unibody case feels quite sturdy, the black chicklet keyboard is fine (and hides finger grime), the button-less trackpad is taking some getting used to, the weaker hinge makes me want to cradle the lid like a newborn baby with a weak neck as I carry it around, and the extra space on the larger hard drive has been canceled out by bloat "upgrading" BootCamp from XP to Vista. Oddly, what I miss most is the collection of stickers on the speck seethru case. Feel free to give me new stickers to replace them.

Protip: Even though Amazon sells a Speck case for about $10 cheaper than the Apple Store, buy one from a brick-and-mortar shop. The plastic casting isn't always perfect and if you get one that doesn't quite fit it'll be a PITA to exchange.

Buddhist Road Sign
Driving around in the back woods of Northern California this weekend we came across this road sign.

We ended up scratching our heads and wondering what the purpose of this sign was. On one hand it seemed useful only to people who were previously familiar with the road's past condition. For people like us, encountering the road for the first time, the sign means "No matter what this road looks like now, remember that it didn't always look like this."

Isn't this kinda obvious? Isn't it not just this road, but everything that's in a constant state of change? I eventually decided that this sign was erected by Buddhists as a recognition of Anicca and a reminder of the benefits of the unconditioned mind, living a life of detachment from desire and expectation.

Palin's Resignation
I was out of network and cell phone range this weekend when Sarah Palin resigned after completing 64% of her term as governor. I have no idea what to think about this - my mind is a tabula rasa right now - but I'm going to read through her announcement (which I've heard was difficult to parse) and try to figure out her explanation:

Many people laughed at William Seward for proposing the purchasing Alaska but they were wrong to do so. (Implication that Palin is also a proponent of Alaska and therefore people laughing at her are wrong to do so? Hasty generalization, questionable cause.)

Alaska is "the air crossroads of the world" (It's true - I fly over it from California to Japan) and "a gatekeeper of the continent" (she can see Russia from her house). Alaska also has moose, oil, minerals, and other important things.

Sarah Palin's administration has done many things in the first half of her term related to oil and gas, bipartisanship, prisons, refusing to let the federal government give them money , and elimination of the state's socialist dairy industry programs. Also something about private jets and chefs.

Things changed when she accepted the VP nomination and people started accusing her of holding a fish, wearing a jacket with a logo, or answering questions. Answering these ethical complaints (and 12 more) has the governor's office $2 million and Palin family half a million dollars. The asymmetric nature of the conflict means that anyone offering a "silly accusation" can force Palin to drain public resources to dispute them. This is not a fruitful or productive activity.

She doesn't want to stop doing the things that make people criticize her and just go back to being a normal governor, and she doesn't want to keep being a liability for the governor's office. So she's announcing she's not going to run for governor again. This means she's a lame duck. Some lame duck governors "travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade ... hit the road, draw the paycheck, and milk it" and she doesn't want to do this so she's going to "take a stand and effect change" by transferring authority to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell.

Palin remaining in office would be like "hit our heads against the wall" resulting in "watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain" so she's going to "take a stand and effect change" by resigning. To use a basketball metaphor she has to pass the basketball of sound priorities to teammate Sean Parnell because she's become ineffective at dealing with defense and opposition.

"I cannot stand here as your Governor and allow millions upon millions of our dollars go to waste just so I can hold the title of Governor. And my children won’t allow it either." Also, people were mocking Trig, which will decrease if she resigns. Like The Troops, she will heroically sacrifice herself for the good of all Alaskans.

She's ending "politics as usual" by getting out of the "politics" part. But you shouldn't be scared of getting into what she's getting out of, because she'll come to your campaign and help you out.

There are few things that don't make sense to me here.

Her motivation. Palin's being constantly criticized, but she's unwilling to "go with the flow" by just "hunkering down" and doing her job in the sustainable way that 49 other governors seem capable of doing. Seems like she's saying "the impulse to say or do crazy things is more irresistable than the impulse to do my job".

Cause and effect. Palin's decided not to run for a second term? Sure, OK. Therefore she's a lame duck? Technically, I suppose. And some lame duck governors become slackers? I suppose they do. So Palin has to resign now. Wait, what? Maybe someone who doesn't want to "go with the flow" should just do their job? Or how about just delaying the announcement so that people don't know you're a lame duck yet? It seems like she's saying "the impulse to slack off and start milking my public office paycheck is more irresistable than the impulse to keep doing my job." And if "travel around the state, to the Lower 48, or overseas on international trade" was so objectionable what about being Vice President? Isn't that exactly what a vice president does?

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Palin's quitting a little more than halfway through her term because of public criticisms of percieved lapses in judgment. Isn't this the sort of lapse in judgment that's going to result in public criticisms?

If I could distill the speech down to a single concept it would be "Public criticism has been too severe and has attracted so much criticism, ridicule, and negative press that Palin couldn't do her job effectively anymore." Is that fair, or am I misreading anything?

(

lgmfeed appears similarly confused. "Palin's central argument .. is just bizarre; no one resigns from state office "for the good of the state" unless they're morally or legally compromised." There's also a summary of right wing blogs' explanations.)

Auditing My Teeth
So I got my teeth cleaned for the first time in 2 years. New dentist in San Rafael. It went more or less OK but with two weird complications.

The first was a question on the patient intake form asking "Would you like to keep your teeth for the rest of your life?" I thought this was a stupid rhetorical question and I was tempted to answer "no" just to be a smartass, but it turns out there was a reason. He said a lot of his patients were coming to him after a long history of dental problems - decay, pain, damage - and they're just fed up. They think their teeth are unsalvageable and just want 'em all pulled and replaced with false teeth. That question is frequently an opening into a discussion about problems, history, past choices, and decisions about the future.

Then he turned me over to the hygenist for the general cleaning, which is where things started getting weird. She mentioned that she was only sleeping 6 hours every night because she's been doing a lot of "studying and volunteering". I asked what she was studying and she said "study techniques at the Church of Scientology. Have you ever come to the end of a page and haven't been able to remember what you just read?"
I said "oh yeah, you're going to tell me about the misunderstood word."
"How do you know about this? Are you a scientologist?"
"I'm not religious, but I do a lot of reading on a lot of religions."
"Scientology isn't really a religion, it's more like a set of useful techniques to help you in the world."
"I don't know about that. Isn't it a fully tax-exempt religious organization?"
"Yes, that is helpful."
"I bet it is. I'd certainly find it helpful if I didn't have to pay any taxes."

At that point I ended up letting her do all the talking and staying really polite and quiet, because she was probing my face with metal tools and I really didn't want her getting annoyed with me. "Whoops, I slipped again, looks like your gums are bleeidng." She spent the whole cleaning session talking about the auditing she went through to clear the charge of the engram that she acquired when her son was abducted, and her "volunteer" work teaching English to Yemeni office janitors at $50/session (which goes to the church). The whole thing would have been interesting/amusing in another context, but it ended up adding a completely new and uncomfortable anxiety-dimension to the dental cleaning. If I go back I'm going to make sure to request someone else.

Transformers 2
I have to admit, the reviews from Transformers 2 have been so horrible that I'm oddly fascinated and am now planning to see it:

"If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you.
- Charlie Anders, Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie, IO9

"Bay magnifies EVERYTHING bad about the first. You thought robot pissing was weak? Check out robot farting, robot crying and giant, clanging robo-testicles. Oh yeah. Michael Bay wanted his big cast iron balls in the film and there they are, dangling off of Devastator in one of the film’s defining dramatic moments. I guess he couldn’t get away with a giant, limp swinging cyber-phallus, so he went with the next best thing. ... Before you try to point out “isn’t that every Michael Bay movie,” let me say: no, it isn’t. He’s never been this completely incomprehensible. It’s like the script was written in one sitting on a Morphine bender, with the writer nodding in and out of consciousness, thinking that he’d already written what happened in his dreams and simply picking back up where the dream left off."
- Massawyrm, AintItCool.com

"The plot behind the endlessly-long series of explosions that Megan Fox's rack is forced to endure is impossible to relate or understand. ... Megan Fox is a magical Disney cartoon, a Jessica Rabbit run wild, and she eagerly invites the camera to attend to her every crevice and flesh-folded intersection. Even as an avowed homosexual, I cannot help but notice just how feverishly she thrusts her secret parts towards the camera at every opportunity. (Of course, the camera thrusts back, as it has the hideous, orc-like eye of "director" Michael Bay leering behind it, and clearlyhe is touching some grotesque and unnaturally short and discolored protuberance of his own flesh the whole while.) ... There are a bunch of machines who are mad at other machines and they enter into many encounters where they whirl around, but if you are any kind of normal person, you won't be able to tell which machine is which, and so it will pretty much look like two or more enormous microwaves with swords violently mating."
- Choire, Flicked Off: 'Transformers 2: The Revenge of Megan Fox's Rack', The Awl

Logo Designers Who Should Be Fired
I'd like to challenge my more experienced readers to list the number of things wrong with this logo:

(Via

tritone from

barfy_logos, a veritable cornucopia of shouldbefired.)

The Dale Earnhardt Intimidator Bucket of Meat Snacks

Let me walk you through this one:

they're snacks
meat snacks
served in a bucket
a bucket of intimidation
as big as a toilet
named after Dale Earnhardt
you get sixty meat snacks per bucket
and you only get your discount if you buy two buckets

A lesser country could hit three, maybe four of these points. But the straight sweep is what makes America great.

Limousine Owners Who Should Be Fired
Spotted on my way to work.

Lorentz Invariance RIP (?)
A while ago I wrote about genuine scientific mysteries. One of the mysteries was the pioneer anomaly first published in 1998 and the probably-related flyby anomaly first observed in 1990. Nobody yet knows what's causing the deviation, but after ten years of carefully ruling out the simple explanations while confirming the phenomenon with more observations this phenomenon starting to genuinely baffle actual scientists.

In April 2001 a guy named J.D. Anderson came up with a formula that seems to predict the observed velocity changes. Although it appears to be accurate, among the problems with this "solution" are that he kinda pulled the theory out of his ass and it seems to violate a really important principle called Lorentz invariance. The laws of physics are supposed to be the same for all inertial observers, but according to Anderson's formula they aren't. This is the basis for a whole lot of physics such as special relativity and it's a pretty big deal.

What people describe as "laws" are actually still just theories. Extensively tested, well-confirmed theories that we've come to rely on and would be really difficult to change because a lot of other extensively tested, well-confirmed theories have been built upon them. This doesn't mean you can't change those theories, it just means that the evidence requiring accomodation must be even stronger and more compelling than the evidence in favor of the old theories, all of which need to be rewritten to accomodate the new findings.

And that's what I thought about when I came across these articles. As if the pioneer anomaly wasn't enough, several recent and otherwise unrelated papers have popped up recently challenging the assumption of Lorentz invariance. That doesn't necessarily prove that lorentz invariance is wrong but it's Very Interesting. Overturning Lorentz invariance will still mean that current science is unacceptably inaccurate, not "wrong" but it would still be a very big deal.

And if Lorentz invariance is wrong this will be startling but not exactly surprising. Science is most often incorrect about assumptions that have not actually been scrutinized or tested. The geocentric solar system, evolutionary biostasis, spontaneous generation - concepts which were just assumed to be true but that nobody bothered to scrutinize by testing their validity. Einstein's assumption might eventually be added to that list.

Standard disclaimer: I'm an amateur, this is not my area of expertise, and I'm probably misrepresenting what's actually going on. Smart folks please chime in.

Advertisers Who Should Be Fired
If you're shopping for a special gift for a special dad please don't ask WH Smiths to help you select something.
Nothing says "thanks, Dad" like a biography of Josef Fritzl.

Team Fortress 2 vs Left 4 Dead
I play a lot of Team Fortress 2, published by Valve and based on the Half Life game engine, in which two teams of vaguely cartoony human-controlled players try to shoot each other. Recently I bought a copy of Left 4 Dead. In some ways it's a very similar game, also published by Valve and based on the Half Life game engine, but there's one major difference, and it is the reason why I have only played this $40 game once.

In TF2 there's a bit of a concept of a team but sometimes not very much. You're usually on a team of between four and fifteen characters against another team of maybe four to fifteen characters. You can play team tactics if you want or you can just run around shooting random enemies. It's multiplayer competitive. You try to shoot other people.

A Left 4 Dead game has 4 players going up against throngs of NPC zombies. You rely on your teammates to pick you up when you fall down, heal you when you're low on health, and round out the team with special abilities - and they depend on you. It's multiplayer cooperative. You have to help other people.

My problem is perceived social obligation. In TF2 if anyone quits it's not a terribly big deal for a number of reasons. The people on your own team are frequently random dickwads who have been calling each other fags and not going along with your brilliant plans. There's a dozen or so of them, a high enough number that most people don't get to know you anyway. If I quit, someone new will probably pop in soon and rebalance the teams.

In L4D - or at least in the one game that I ever played - you're dealing with three other people. You have to get along with them, get to know with them, and cooperate in order to survive all the zombies. And if you quit it's a really big deal. All those people who you spent the last hour protecting and healing will die.

And I can't handle it. I don't have the kind of schedule to play for however long everyone else wants to play, and I don't want to let people down who are relying on me, even strangers in a video game, so I haven't gone back. I'm kinda hoping that this was a big misunderstanding and that the game has a way around this, because it was a lot of fun and I'd love to play again.

Creepy Phone Calls
Recently a female friend started getting 5am phone calls at her house. The guy on the other end wouldn't give his full name (said he was "John"), said that he'd seen her around town and he'd fallen in love and wanted to get the chance to win her heart, didn't seem to care that she already had a boyfriend, and didn't seem to care that she didn't want him calling anymore. He ended up calling several times a day, a few days in a row.

Eventually she went to the police. Calls were traced, doors and windows were barred, bear mace was purchased, all reasonable steps were taken, etc.

Then she remembers that a few weeks ago some stranger posted something on her classmates.com profile saying that he was an old friend from high school, but she didn't remember the guy. Last night I was out at dinner with a bunch of people and Peter suggests that I run a search on that guy's name with pipl.com. Turns out that the guy is a registered sex offender.

This doesn't necessarily prove that this is the same caller but it's an interesting coincidence, and not the kind that helps one get a good night's sleep.

I dug a little deeper. The guy's infraction is CA 290(a)(2)(D): "failing to register as a sex offender", which didn't tell me what the original offense was. I looked through the guy's profile and noticed that he'd been leaving notes in the guest books of other women who also didn't remember going to high school with him. Huh. I considered sending a note to those people, saying "hey this newfound friend of yours is a convicted sex offender" but I decided to wait till the morning when my friend can go to the cops and see what they say.

She talked to the detectives in the morning and it turned out the guy on the other end of the line was *not* the registered sex offender in question, he was a local biker and meth head. So now we had two crazy people to consider. "Fortunately" the biker got picked up for doing something else really bad, and is probably going to San Quentin for it where they will not give him any ice cream. The officer told him about the search warrants and the call traces and told him that he's going to continue to not get any ice cream if he ever contacts her again. Things have been chill for the last week or two, so hopefully this is over.

How To Advocate For Legislative Action

ianvass and I have a difference of opinion about civil rights for homosexuals. Specifically, Proposition 8 vs. legal recognition for same-sex couples. Short summary: I'm for equal legal recognition, he's against it. And we've been having a surprisingly civil discussion about it, all things considered. We've already discussed whether Prop 8 supporters deserve the names they're sometimes called, whether a string of legal victories indicates bias or tyranny, and even whether the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent, intercessionary God who doesn't want us to recognize same-sex unions can be empirically demonstrated, but we haven't yet had the chance to discuss the central issue of the problem: Is the legal recognition or actual practice of same-sex marriage actually harmful to society? Is this actually an issue that society needs protection from, and is Prop 8 effective protection?

I'm not a fundamentalist libertarian but I do think that individual liberty is a good default. People should generally be able to do what they want and government should start taking away liberties or start treating populations unequally only if there's a very strong reason backed by compelling evidence. And I think that CA Prop 8 was stupid evil. I think it's not just a discriminatory and unnecessary infringement of a minority's civil rights, which is evil, but that it also doesn't even actually accomplish anything. It's like racists trying to limit the spread of leprosy in America by passing a law prohibiting black people from hugging each other. It's not just an apparently mean-spirited persecution of a minority group; it's not even an effective solution to an insignificant problem.

But I'm willing to give the other side a fair shake. Perhaps they know something I don't, and I ought to keep an open enough mind that I will be able to accept their perspective if it is valid. In many ways it would actually please me to discover that there was a rational reason to oppose same-sex marriage, because then I'd be able to stop thinking of Prop 8 opponents as confused or delusional and start thinking of them at least as people with a different solution to a problem that everyone can at least agree exists and needs fixing.

If I'm going to be persuaded that same-sex couples ought to have their civil rights and personal freedoms and liberties limited or that someone else could reasonably believe this, the justification has to fit what I hope we can agree is a reasonable five point rhetorical standard.

( the five points )

Here are some examples of reasons which would be disqualified.

( examples )

To be clear, I'm not saying that the above justifications are automatically invalid. I'm just saying that they're not sufficient as I wrote them but you're welcome to put a finer point on it. You can still say "children will be taught gay marriage in school", but you have to also show how doing so would be a problem and how Prop 8 might stop it.

And also to be clear, these are broad rules that we all to follow, not just in this discussion but in all future discussions about civil liberties or reasonable government action. If I'm arguing in favor of laws banning torture or in favor of enforcement against torturers I have to show that the harm they cause is significant, that the proposed solution will mitigate the problem, etc. You should bookmark these rules and hold me to them if I slip up in the future.

Unexpected Compassion
I was just watching this video from the day of the shooting at the holocaust memorial, and I was struck by the comment from the mother of the guard who was killed.

"I know that the person who did this was consumed. When you're consumed you're really not your real self. That thing that's consuming you has you taken over. I do pray that this person will not continue to be in this way because this is torment - the person is actually tormented."

I didn't really stop to think about it until she said it, but it must really, really suck to be the kind of person with such a weird view of the world that shooting up a holocaust museum seems like a good idea. Seeing past the tragedy to what's arguably an even bigger tragedy is a very big-hearted statement for a woman whose son has just been killed by that person.

Librarians Who Should Be Fired
I'm at CLT airport in Charlotte NC, fairly amused by this ad for the Billy Graham Library. Not just because there are "no books to check out" there, but that this is an advertised selling point.

WWDC Apple Announcements
So Apple announced their new OS on Monday and I'm a little disappointed because it looks like the two most exciting features have been dropped.

They've dropped ZFS support. I've been using ZFS at home for about a year and it's one of the most groundbreaking new technologies I've seen in the last few years. It's bulletproof no-fdisk-required stable while offering a bunch of really interesting features to do stuff with storage management, backups, and upgrades that you can't do with any other filesystem.

Resolution-independent displays is a technology to make better use of the super-high-density LCD panels that you can get on many PCs. In 2006 this feature was confirmed to be in 10.5 (the version that was released in October 2007). Technically they were right - there's a setting in Quartz Debug.app which lets you set your monitor DPI to unconventional resolutions - but it's still not a mainstream feature.

And on the hardware side, as a PS3 owner I'm a little disappointed that they're not offering a blu-ray drive option. Dell's been offering blu-ray standard on their XPS line for a while, Lenovo offers it as a $450 upgrade, and it's available from third parties. ("Play Blu-ray movies on your Mac Pro with Boot Camp and Windows XP!") It surprises me that Apple's not on board since they're a member of the blu-ray alliance.

I don't want to be one of those people bitching that Apple won't give them ponies, but I don't think these things are ponies. They're features that were formally announced years ago. Then again the price of the upgrade will be $30, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much. Or maybe these are going to be last-minute announcements. Apple was cagey about publicly available SDKs before releasing one so maybe they're keeping mum on these until it's ready. They've doing all sorts of things with their iPhone - perhaps the focus on mobile stuff has been a drain on OSX development. Harrumph.

Use Toilet! Get Money!!
Times are tough. If you need a little extra income you might want to look into this.

The Slippery Slope
A few years ago I talking with

yanners in Montreal about some difficult moral issue. I mentioned that what made it difficult was the slippery slope - if we accept the problem to a small degree who knows where the madness will end? She cut me off short. "That's just the slippery slope argument, and it's lame." It's taken me a while to accept, but she's right. The slippery slope is a totally lame argument.

Here's why. The 'top' of the slippery slope is a point that reasonable persons agree is more or less reasonably acceptable. And the first few steps down the slope also seem somewhat reasonable to reasonable people. And the 'bottom' of the slope where people agree that things have gone too far. And the argument asks "Where does the madness end? How do we stop ourselves, or know when to stop?

We know when to stop because, as the slippery slope presumes, we are reasonable people who recognize that the top is OK and the bottom is bad and this means we ought to stop somewhere in the middle. Reasonable people who are capable of discussing the pros and cons of where that point ought to be. Reasonable people who are not bound to "follow the argument to its logical conclusion" because we recognize that its conclusion isn't reasonable and that happiness is found in moderation. The slippery slope bothers me because it abandons common sense or reasonable moderation and turns complex issues into oversimplified, black-and-white, all-or-nothing propositions. It pretends that there can be no line if none exists rather than inviting us to discuss where to draw that line. It pretends that moral value judgments are some sort of death pact that must be followed to the grisly end rather than ethical guidelines that inform a series of open choices.

And it fails because of itself. If we allow slippery slopes to dictate our morality and actions where does the madness end? Will I be not allowed to marry a twenty year old because I might want to marry a ten year old? Will I not be allowed to drive 50mph because then I might want to drive 150mph? Should I not be allowed to eat veal because then I might want to eat human children? Of course not. Because we are reasonable people, and we shouldn't use the lack of an exact answer to set the limit at an unreasonable extreme.

Of course there are some people who genuinely don't seem to understand that there's a difference between a zygote and a four year old child, or a rifle and a nuclear bomb, or an adult human partner and a duck. It's fair to ask how to explain the difference to one of those people, especially if you are one of those people. And of course some people will not agree on where exactly the line ought to be drawn - reasonable people can disagree. And of course some people aren't reasonable, and will try to get away with things they know they shouldn't. And of course what some slippery slope arguers are really trying to say between the lines is that some issues can be complex with vague, arbitrary, and subjective edge conditions. And that's true. People are complicated. Life is complex and pragmatic moral choices are difficult. It's important to approach problem-solving and compromise-brokering with that understanding - so that you don't turn the result into a black and white issue. And that's why you shouldn't take the slippery slope cop-out seriously.

Caveat: A "slippery slope" is where things are OK at the top of the slope but get slippery on the way down. Trying to say that everything in a category is bad because some of the things in that category are bad is conflation, which is a lame argument for different reasons.