Slippery slope?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Slippery slope?

Without further ado, I'll give you an example. It's the term "slippery slope", which appeared twice in an article (Is torture ever justified?) in this week's edition (September 22, 2007) of the Economist.

It says:

One objection to allowing moderate physical pressure is the difficulty of knowing where to draw the line. If stress positions and sleep deprivation do not work, do you progress to branding with red-hot irons and beating to a pulp? And can you rely on interrogators to heed such distinctions? It is the danger of a slippery slope that makes opponents of torture insist on a total ban.

Then, in the next paragraph, it adds:

Israel is the only country in modern times to have openly allowed "moderate physical pressure" as a "last resort". Since interrogators used such methods anyway, it was argued, passing an explicit law would at least make it possible to set out some limits. But in 1999, citing the slippery-slope argument, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that torture could never be justified, even in the case of a ticking bomb. It went on to outlaw techniques such as sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, prolonged stress positions, hooding and violent shaking.

Guessed it?

Well, in the physical sense, imagine a slippery slope in a landslide, with mud and rocks sliding down the valley in much of a free-fall.

The "slippery-slope argument", on the other hand, works like the camel's nose, a metaphor from an Arabian tale which cautions people against allowing a small, insignificant problem to deteriorate into something large, terrible and out of control. If you see a camel roaming round your tent, so goes the story, you'd better chase it off now. If you don't, the camel will poke his nose into your tent. If you do nothing about that, sooner or later it'll stick his head into the tent as well, then the neck and then the torso. Before you know it, the whole camel is in the tent, lock stock and barrel, plundering and already making a mess of things...