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Garbage

Entry 2371, on 2024-11-01 at 12:31:14 (Rating 4, Politics)

The word "garbage" seems to be featuring prominently in American politics at the moment. The Democrats claim Trump thinks Puerto Rica is floating pile of garbage, and Biden thinks Trump supporters are garbage. But Trump never said that, and there are some extremely reasonable people who support him, so in reality the only garbage is the opinions of the politicians and many of their supporters.

Let's look at some of the rhetoric recently seen in the US...
Trump is a fascist.
Kamala's a communist.
Trump is the last chance to save America from a complete communist takeover.
Trump is Hitler.
Vote for Trump to save democracy in America.
Kamala is the antichrist.
Illegals are overrunning the country.
Democracy dies in darkness.

While the last one is possibly true, the rest are pure nonsense. Trump isn't a fascist and Harris isn't a communist. The country seems to have lost its mind. To provide some nuance here, I do have to say that you could argue that some of those characteristics exist to a small degree in each candidate. Harris does tend towards communism and Trump to fascism, but those things aren't necessarily bad in moderation.

Personally, I would prefer a Trump victory, but if the Democrats win instead it won't be the end of the world. There are enough safeguards in place in the American system to ensure that even someone as incompetent as Harris can't mess the country up too much, and if Trump wins his more extreme ideas would also be vetoed.

But the idea the "democracy dies in darkness" has some merit. It isn't really darkness that is the problem here though, it is the over-abundance of light, but light which reveals falsehoods and hyperbole more than truth.

There is an additional problem too. That is that most of the media are grossly biased. They exaggerate the bad side of the Republican's behaviour and minimise the same thing from the Democrats. Every time I see a "fact check" pointing out an inconsistency in one of Trump's statements I can think of several times Harris has been at least as inaccurate with no repercussions.

I know that few people take the media seriously any more, and they are on the road to extinction, but they still have enough influence to affect the outcome of an election which is apparently so close.

The fact is - and don't just ridicule this without thinking about it - X (previously known as Twitter) is now the best place to find out what is really going on. I know it is owned by Elon Musk, who is on the Trump team, but in my experience there is more pro-Harris material there than pro-Trump.

And fact checking is prevalent, including a lot of fact checking on Elon himself, who tweets a lot! It really does seem to be a neutral source, despite its owner being obviously biased. When I say "neutral" I don't mean there are a lot of rational, balanced views there, I mean there are a lot of deranged rants, but at least they occur in similar numbers on each side, and most are fact-checked.

If Trump wins we should get some much needed changes to the government bureaucracy and a correction of many of the more unnecessary existing policies, but after that Trump won't be president any more, and anything too extreme he has done can be corrected.

If Harris wins, she will be the first female US president and she will very likely make a total mess of it, which will show that just being a woman doesn't make you a better choice. She will likely only serve one term and then the corrections to her incompetence can be made.

See how this works? In most democracies the party in power alternates between left and right. They both make a mess of it in different ways, but then someone else comes in, fixes the mess, then makes an even bigger mess of their own. It's not the best system in the world, but what's the alternative?

I only wish that the standard of debate was a bit higher. Currently there is almost no value in anything either the politicians or the media say. Democracy dies in darkness, especially when it is buried in garbage!

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