When the UK brought in laws around lockdowns and handling covid people here were complaining that it was a slippery slope and the government would never give up those restrictions yet they did exactly that and those laws are no longer in play.
In that case the slippery slope argument was a fallacy.
We've established - quite clearly - that in an emergency the government can lock everything down for 2 years and that lip service to liberty or human rights means nothing. Emergencies happen every 2-3 years. Why won't we see similar anti-liberty measures again in the next 20 years? 'We' 'know' it 'works'. It isn't even clear that we'll be spared another pandemic through that timeframe, the world is quite small these days and it doesn't look like we're winding back on the interconnected globe.
Furthermore we've not proven that the laws have been given up; the impacts of the anti-liberty legislation in the wake of 9/11 took almost a decade to sink in and enter the public discourse. The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table. Probably help protect children and/or fight Russians or something. Worked in China, great impacts on crime, etcetera, etcetera.
The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago. True, with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on. And yes, the restrictions worked against that type of emergency - an airborne virus of pandemic proportions.
It's a fallacy to claim that now that we know all that and the laws have expired, next time there's an emergency of any kind governments will just impose lockdowns and do contact tracing. There's simply no basis for such an outrageous claim.
> The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table.
> with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on
Shouldn't the null hypothesis be that a lack of animal habitats means fewer animals and less chance of zoonotic diseases emerging? I know it's tempting to blame all the world's problems on climate change, but we need to be careful not to exaggerate things and give climate change denialists weak arguments to attack.
> Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.
You may not feel that these systems have been, or would ever be, used against you, but unfortunately people in other countries might not be so lucky[0][1], and bad uses of technology have a way of spreading internationally.
It isn't so much the destruction of habitats in itself as human encroachment of rising density increasing the odds of both contact and exposure as well as transmission to larger human society. Ebola is a horrifying and contagious disease but it is limited in its spread to rural areas where it quickly burns itself out by being too lethal.
> The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago.
Past performance isn't an indicator of future performance. International travel is more common and faster these days. Plus whether or not you buy the idea that COVID in particular came from a lab, the fact that it reasonably could have is enough to predict that viruses will in the near future. That wasn't as big a risk over the last century.
We literally need 1 lab, anywhere in the world, to combine lax standards with dangerous research. That isn't going to be a once-per-century event, it'll be relatively common. The world is a big place.
> and the laws have expired
So I'll readily admit that I haven't paid any attention to laws in the UK which is what we're discussing today. But "oh they've all expired" is an optomistic take. A lot of laws and policies can go through a parliament in a 2 year emergency where mass lockdowns are an option on the table.
So I'm not pointing to a specific example but I'm not backing away from the claim yet either. It is likely that many of the changes made haven't been rolled back, and that a lot of new powers still exist ready to be used in the next emergency. Sure they aren't locking down right now, great. But they've opened a lot of Pandora's boxes about how much power a government is expected to wield as a routine matter. What just happened in the west was some sort of bizzaro story from the tales out of the USSR or China. It isn't a the prologue to a series of great government policies, it is a dark cloud of what might be coming. We can't afford for these ideas to take root; freedom pretty much alawys outperforms in the medium term and I'd rather live free with some risk than watch people be imprisoned for their own good.
There was indeed a slippery slope from "2 weeks to flatten the curve" to extended lockdowns.
I don't think those policies necessarily were a net benefit, either, particularly in the case of mask mandates for children, which weren't shown as effective enough to warrant damaging the mental health of children.
My go-to example is all the talk from conservatives about how allowing same-sex marriage would lead to people marrying animals.
“this is gonna be a totally different country than it is right now. Laws that you think are in stone -- they're gonna evaporate, man. You'll be able to marry a goat -- you mark my words!” - Bill O'Reilly
In that case the slippery slope argument was a fallacy.