“MOSCOW – Officials from the Kremlin, under the close supervision of Russian President Vladimir Putin, have concluded an autopsy of Alexei Navalny, concluding that the recently-deceased opposition leader spontaneously sentenced himself to 30 years in a remote Siberian gulag before then ingesting his own poison that he brought from home.”
I’m not moving the goalposts, America does evil shit in a different way than Russia does. There’s no reason 2 fruits can’t be compared. Like, right now Putin is being nicer to his opponents, due to the genocide America is sponsoring, which is obviously the clear worst possible act. There’s also a lot to be said for Russia staying in their lane. Russia goes to war with their neighbor, USA goes to the middle east, on the literal other side of the globe. America will prosecute Donald Trump but assassinate Snowden, Epstein, MLK, etc. Reversing that doesn’t seem meaningfully worse to me. One could argue it’s better.
I find it hard to believe that you’re not familiar with the famous phrase “comparing apples and oranges,” which is specifically about attempting to compare incomparable items.
Yes, that was my point. In both situations, it’s actually quite easy to compare the 2 sides. Both America and Russia use the playbook “Might makes right”. Go ahead and argue that one or the other is worse, there’s good arguments for both. But claiming they’re incomparable is absurd, unless you’re saying it because you think they are too similar to each other to differentiate between. Just like apples and oranges are both medium size, round, sweet fruits with seeds and a reddish-yellow outside. Both groups are essentially the same thing, with a couple intrinsic, but ultimately insignificant, differences.
That’s the thing: you’re proving the idiom in the way that you’re arguing. Naively, one would expect that comparing fruit is easy; after all, they’re both fruit. Two nations have supposedly, in an official capacity, made the same statement (which I don’t believe without you providing a source, and yes the burden is on you).
The thing is that these are all superficial observations on complex entities. The idiom of comparing two fruits is a common idiom in many cultures, and it’s not for want of an internet commenter pointing out that they’re sweet, have seeds, and are similar colour.
General point: practice making pithy arguments based on well researched points. I’m struggling to see an actual point in the drivel you’re writing. It isn’t a reading comprehension issue; I read and write dense academic articles for a living. Short, pithy sentences are simply better writing.