401: It's a Highway in Canada

The title has nothing to do with this post. It is a quotation from Jeopardy tonight that I found hilarious. Alex Trebek said this after one of the players went down to only $401 in the Final Jeopardy round.

But what this post is really about is... slippery slopes.
This is a term that pisses me off and I've been hearing a lot about it recently. The last time I heard it was about the new Scientology scandal with Wikipedia. Apparently the Church of Scientology has been editing some articles to show themselves in a kinder light, breaching the neutrality of the Wikipedia. So Wikipedia is banning the Church from editing the site, by following IP addresses and the rest of that stuff I don't understand.
I say this is a good step, it's a step towards Wikipedia banning all organizations from editing their own articles. THIS CANNOT BE A BAD THING. But apparently it's a slippery slope, because if we ban Scientologists from expressing their views, then where will we draw the line? Pretty soon the Muslims won't be able to talk about their prayers, and it's all downhill from there, because we cannot anger the Muslims.
I'm sorry, but this type of thinking pisses me off. From what I understand, Wikipedia has a policy, these people are breaking that policy, so they're banned. And they're not banning individuals, from what I understand, they're banning the computers in Churches of Scientology. If they really care enough to change the article, they could find a way.

But more than that, I'm so fuckin' sick of people using the slippery slope as an excuse. Yes, there's a fine line, and if you stumble, you'll fall. BUT THAT'S NOT AN EXCUSE NOT TO DO IT. People who say that it is don't have strong enough ideals, they don't know where their own line is. Because, really, if teaching Neo-National Socialism to a 7 year old girl falls on the acceptable side of that line, then what progress have we made? Have people really forgotten Nazis? Have we forgotten how evil they were? Have we forgotten the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews and at least 5 million gypsies, poles, soviets, radicals and homosexuals were starved, beaten, gassed, shot, burnt and killed as a "purging of society"?
We cannot forget about this, and we cannot allow it to happen again. 11 to 17 million people died as a result of that hatred, and each of those people was a person, who loved and sinned and lived. They lived until they died because of this intolerance. And what really gets me is that this happened because of conformity, because the common German citizen wanted to be like everyone else.
And we have people in our society teaching the same values and intolerance that killed 11 million people.
11. Million.
And there are people who do not want to take this child out of this house because it's a slippery slope from there.

Pardon my French, but what the fuck?
If, at the dawn of the 21st century, there are people repeating the sins of the 20th, then we've obviously gone nowhere. We should just pack our bags, turn in our two weeks notice, hail a cab, and tell it to take us to an empty field. And we'll sit there, looking at the grass and the flowers and the clouds passing by and wonder how, with all this beauty in the world, we can still hate, we can still question, we can still settle for anything less than total happiness and recklessness.
Because we can make a difference, we can say no to this intolerance, to teaching children evil. Because I remember the Holocaust, and I remember the White Rose.

-Lee

(Next time should be happier, I'm planning on talking about The Incredible Hulk)