• Dasus@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    What do you say to someone who looks at Trump and Harris, shrugs, and says “They look the same to me”?

    What do you say? You say “are you suffering a stroke, would you like me to call you an ambulance?”

    Americans aren’t being given a real choice here, too bad, but that’s how it is. Anyone who is eligible to vote but doesn’t realise Trump is a genuine threat to democracy the world over maybe shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

    If you were caught in someplace where you didn’t have access to water, and the only choices were a bottle of piss with blood in it (Trump, in this metaphor) and a warm, stale coke light (Harris, in this metaphor), which one would you choose? Neither of them are particularly enjoyable or healthy in the long run, but if you were in a place which had no access to fresh water (spelling out my metaphor here, but democracy), you would die without consuming liquids. Still, you probably wouldn’t choose the pissy blood, because that’d actually be dangerous to drink no matter how dehydrated you were. A warm, stale coke light would still be a functional drink, no matter how much you’d never choose it if you had an option.

    See where I’m going?

    Chomsky did have a good point once about how there’s a difference of the type of lack of democracy that you can see between America and Russia. (I’m Finnish, btw, fuck Putler.) He made the point that Americans tend to like to think they have a choice, whereas Russians are pretty openly certain they don’t. As a heavy exaggeration, that is. I don’t recall which book it was, but I think it was honestly one of his books from the 70’s about linguistics, which made it weird, since it started with a chapter about CIA shenanigans and propaganda.