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You boycot american products because you think you are american.
I don’t because America is a continent not a single country.
Hi, nice to meet you. Where are you from? America. Oh, like Mexico or Chile?
It’s always fun to see their faces :)
This. I’ve gotten some pushback on it, but I believe the US shouldn’t own the term “American”. I say that as a US American.
So… USian?
I hate this argument. The term America has been used to refer to the US for so long now that it’s colloquially the same.
The term “USian” is just as bad as “American” if you really give a fuck about the names of countries because the USA is not the only “United States” they could be part of either. If you’re gonna try to find a word that is instantly recognizable as “citizen of the United States of America” why not just use the one that literally billions of people already use every day?
why not just use the one that literally billions of people already use every day
Estadounidense?
If you’re speaking Spanish, and that’s the colloquial term in your region, yes. That’s exactly how linguistics work.
Could be wrong, but I think that might only be true for English.
What is the official name of Mexico?
Meh hee koh.
So are you being intentionally obtuse or just can’t be bothered to debate in good faith?
In Spanish, American (the demonym) translates to “estadounidense” and in French there’s “étasunien” that basically translate to “USian”. While some get offended, it’s more accurate and avoids the automatic imperialism.
Because we don’t agree with the US’s imperialist co-option of that term to exclude the majority of americans.
How about we call them “Union Members” seeing as they’re part of “the Union” as decreed by their founding fathers? Instead of bulldozing over all of the other “United States” in America and the world by replacing the imperialist “American” with the… Somehow less imperialist “United States Ian”?
Yank
They don’t “own” anything. In multiple languages another correct way to name them is the equivalent of Unitedstadian, this is true for French and Spanish.
I don’t hate all Americans, I’ve met some really cool ones over the years. But I do hate its fake democracy, its vulgar, parasitic oligarchs, its deceitful propaganda networks and the lust for war and global domination that drenches all three.
American exceptionalism is basically a circle-jerk.
I don’t get it
Pro-Euro vs anti-US. The “buy European” movement is generally occupied by a mixture of genuine anti-US protestors, as well as various European nationalists. Kinda like how cottagecore got captured by the far-right, the lack of a cohesive line is leading to some groups pushing Euro-flavored fascism as an alternative to US-flavored fascism, as far right parties increasingly gain ground in the EU.
You can’t generalize so much, the reasons are much broader. It is mainly that it is not desirable that a single country controls the largest part of the internet, and until now that the EU depends almost entirely to applications and services of the US, which, especially in the current situation and the policy of Trump, this dependency and subordination will have dire consequences. Is to promote the technology of european, to convert the EU as a sovereign state at the height of the eye with the current giants technologicas that account for all the market, many times abusive. Monopolies are never desirable, because they tend to be destructive…
Generalizations will always miss finer details, I agree, but this is a phenomenon I have noticed.
The main reason, at least for me, is the mencioned. Too long the EU was the Frog, boiled by the US.
test
Test great success!
Boycut companies with too much market power. They just happen to be quite concentrated in the US.
I’m, despite being European, pro-American. It’s just that what America has become disappoints me much like it disappoints most Americans. I’m not pro this America.
The government has always been responsible for some shady shit, but for a long time there, the US stood for diversity, not against it. Yes it took a long time for certain types of people to receive equal rights, but that was unfortunately the same pretty much everywhere else too. Big American metropolitan cities are huge melting pots of culture though. Go walk around NYC, it’s awesome once you get far enough from Wall Street. I do hope I can one day still go to San Francisco as well, but despite being a white cishet male, I don’t intend to visit the US unless the current admin is replaced with a sane one.
That’s a lot of copium. The US has never really been a diverse place where everyone is equal, it just has very good marketing, brand recognition, and fairy open borders so people tend to move there. Plus with the world speaking so much English it’s fairly accessible.
A lot of the times that you see non-WASP culture in the US it’s just stuff that a tourist might enjoy like cheap food, music, and art, or landscapes that are actively being destroyed by weak governments. So yea, maybe the people who are there and struggling can put on a good show but that doesn’t make it a good place.
The first black person to go to public school is still alive and she’s not even that old. Being gay is still dangerous outside of cities(and even within them sometimes!). There are two different rule sets for white and coloured people that are clear to see. The rich are never punished for their crimes and that’s even when the Democrats, the best they can offer, have all the power to do something about it. They aggressively export regressive ideals to other countries, too.
It’s always sucked.
Do name a more diverse or equal place though. I know in my country you get stared down hard if you dare be to dark skinned. Same goes for many European AND Asian countries (imagine being a black tourist in Japan lmao, they can barely stand white folks).
Many of the older people in my country still think anyone from Africa (which by the way includes Afghanistan) is a monkey. By older I mean 50+ not even like 80 or 90.
The UK and France are definitely more tolerant and diverse, but they also imported black people as slaves way back when, so it’s not like they’re all that much better either.
Plus in much of Europe we still can’t stand gypsies. It’s literally the same thing as with black people in the US historically.
The Arab countries literally import slaves from South-East Asia and Africans can’t even stand other Africans based on cultural differences.
I don’t know, maybe South America? Uruguay nowadays is a pretty good place for everyone I hear. I wouldn’t want to be in South America in the 1900s but half of all that was US-caused anyway.
Ok but how does any of that make it good? That’s being relativistic and we can do soooo much better than that, can’t we?
Do better than jerking off terrible people who are only “totally awesome” because they’re not as bad as some of the other options. Nothing is forcing them to be like that so they have no excuse, and the rest of my original point still stands that your opinion based on what you enjoyed to consume as a tourist is laughably out of touch.
You have still failed to provide an example of a better place.
Yea, because that was a deflection and not what we’re talking about. You said that the US has stood for diversity but at every stage of its existence it has stood on the backs and necks of minorities and has struggled to even admit that it has a problem. Even the last admin was ok with Israel wiping out every Palestinian man, woman, and child and sure that’s across the world but if they’re chill with genocide that sets the bar LOW. And buddy have you SEEN how they disenfranchise minority voters? The gerry-mandering maps are fucking WILD. They don’t give a fuck about the people who, to them, are just cheap labour.
Also I live in Canada which beat the US to gay marriage by 10 years and is where many black people escaped the US to. We are far from perfect but at least we had a female prime minister for a few months and a brown guy with a turban leads one of our three major parties. We also have a huge homeless problem but at least they have access to healthcare, and as far as surface-deep things like restaurants are concerned we have just as much diversity in our cities as the US does(and just as much bland, franchised nonsense out of the cities). French is our official second language but the US only has English despite all its Spanish speakers and the fact that a lot of it is straight-up old Mexican territory.
US stood for diversity, not against it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55574552-not-a-nation-of-immigrants
It is easy to criticize the one country that has the most different nationalities in it for its history with racism. However, can you name another country that has as large a share of minorities and does NOT have a history of racism?
Right off the bat all of Europe is already disqualified. The west dabbled in its’ own colonialism and the east under Soviet rule got so racist, the n-word is the standard way to refer to black people among people over 40. Remember that Yandex source code leak where the master-slave relationship (already a racist terminology) had “n***er” instead of slave? In many Asian countries, black people are also seen as subhuman. Scandinavia pretends to be super tolerant, but it’s superficial. Eastern Europeans are seen as lower class.
People don’t see that the entire world is racist as fuck. It’s so easy to blame a single country and act like it’s the only source of racism in the world. It might just be the most open about it, but there’s still quiet discrimination everywhere.
This is all just projecting the US’s racist settler-colonial history on others. Only a tiny minority of nations were founded in this same way, based on indigenous genocide and eviction (Israel, Australia, Canada are a few others).
Most US states didn’t even end miscegenation laws until the 1960s. It’s the only country on earth that still has slavery in fact and in law, enshrined in the 13th amendment.
The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
- The US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. Even individual US states outrank all other countries.
I asked for a single country that was not racist in the 20th century, but had comparable diversity. You have not provided one yet.
The for-profit prison system is fucked for sure and no other country has fucked up this bad.
Pretty much every African country, most of se asia, most of south america, probably all but maybe 10 countries.
Asia is laughably racist. Africans literally genocide eachother without even having different skin colors. As soon as you add different people, tensions arise. It is natural and has been for all of human history, only recently have we begun to rise above it.
South Americans also literally have the term “gringo” for foreigners. Plus with how large catholicism is in South America, I doubt LGBT people are going to feel very comfortable either. Uruguay of course is a weird exception here.
You just either seem to think racism is only racism if it’s white prolly being racist against black people, or you don’t realize how much racism is really out there. Just because people don’t outright say they hate (insert race or nationality here) doesn’t mean they’re not racist.
The US where and is always neo-liberal capitalism in its maximum expression, currently more than ever. Feudalism disguised as democratic
The US had a 94% income tax rate for the richest at one point. It has not always been what it is now. The country has been looted of both its’ economic strength as well as its’ moral values.
I boycott products because I’m a freaking cheapskate.
I don’t want to see you flying your colonial-ass flag Canada, I want to see you supporting small, local, and indigenous owned businesses. Be pro-people, don’t be pro-country.
I’ve noticed a significant drop in people using the phrase “America bad” as a mocking jibe, since it no longer really works as a hyperbolic statement.
“Fuck America” is more common these days.
It’s too easy to reply “it is” at this point for sure.
Hey hey these two things aren’t mutually exclusive!
True and acceptable, however I don’t feel patriotic.
o7
I don’t either in the typical “my country is the best” way, more like “my country is democratic and that’s why it’s good (also use your influence to make democracy more commonplace pls)”.
It’s mainly about fuck Muskytrump & cia. not generally all US = crap, valid only for certain collectives.
You just defined nationalism (“my country is better, fuck the others”) vs. patriotism (“I love my country and will defend its values”)
And if they’re both rotten, well there’s always a common enemy.
Yeah, the problem in the US for an example is nationalism, not patriotism. True patriots would be fuming at what’s going on. It’s the nationalists that cheer on.
Americans are very good at cognitive dissonance and arrogance.
Seems like something I’d come across in r/2westerneurope4you
I was feeling more “American that hates their government” vibes
why not both?
Not all are easy to boycott
US products > GitHub, Steam (Valve), Dropbox, Oracle, nVidia, Intel, IBM, eBay, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, Pepsi, CocaCola, Microsoft, Google, Pfitzer, Nike…, Which of these support Trump and needs to be avoided because of this? Not even FOSS is a Guarantee. Gimp, GNU Project, Mozilla.org, TOR, even a lot of Linux distros are from the US
Full list of US companies https://fortune.com/ranking/fortune500/?global500_y_n=true
lidl cola is best
You forgot AMD there. Intel alone would be super easy to avoid. But AMD is also based in the US. You kinda need either AMD or Intel if you want to own a useful computer. Or there’s Apple Silicon, but that’s still American. Qualcomm laptop offerings are not that great yet and guess what, it’s also an American company.
This is all a lot harder to boycott than Coca Cola, Nike, etc. I can just buy local soft drinks and Adidas shoes. In fact I currently own Adidas shoes (I’m the kinda guy who buys one pair of shoes, wears the everloving fuck out of them, then buys another pair and the old pair gets used in the garage afterwards) and my clothes already come from European owned brands (that are probably made in Bangladesh or something, I don’t buy a lot of expensive clothes). UPS and FedEx aren’t hard to avoid either. Most of my shit gets delivered via Omniva, DHL or Itella.
The x86-64 CPU monopoly that the US has might honestly be the hardest American thing to avoid. The cloud monopoly is even bigger and we all tend to interact with it in one way or another, but most of us could host our own shit on Hetzner or OVH if needed, so at least no need to directly give them money.
The CPU monopoly can change, until now there are only Russian and Chinese alternatives to nVidia and AMD, but also the EU is on the march with Rhea. We’ll see.
But yes, currently there are no real alternatives yet, …well https://techtelegraph.co.uk/open-source-alternative-to-x86-and-arm-could-take-off-in-2025/
I don’t want to buy Russian or Chinese any more than I want to buy American. Rhea is interesting, but seems only targeted at HPC and uses ARM cores. Now RISC-V on the other hand… Damn I do hope it takes off. I suppose it’s dependent on software support as much as actual CPU support, so once I can actually buy a RISC-V machine, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to widen RISC-V support in the FOSS world. I’m sure there are plenty of projects that will build without a whole load of modifications needed, but need someone to configure the build targets and test.
apart from foss content in which you can simply pick the source code and compile on your machine, or fork or reverse engineer them, in some cases you can either p!rate it outright (hello, ms and riaa!) or have already well established alternatives in your country (sodas, online commerce platform).
either way, you’re not taking down the u.s. by claiming ethical consumption. there’s no such thing under capitalism. the best thing you can do is organize and take down the system that enables big companies that own us.
Yes, FOSS can be forked and gut the code, if you know how to do it. With big apps with millons of lines it is not so easy, less for an normal user, apart to the subsequent maintenance and updates.
no one has got to do everything. the reasons that make some particular software bad for people using them sometimes cannot be simply addressed by technical skills alone, and politics here is the tool.
I always prefer EU soft if they are good alternatives, but I use also an californian search engine since 2 years, with AI, Andisearch, from a small startup, independent, own LLM, also against big brother companies and even surpassing the EU GDPR rule. Until now I found nothing better and more accurate. If a product is good, ethic and usefull, not biased by politic interests, the country of origin is irrelevant.
A lot of these are easy to boycott
Yes, there are a lot of good alternatives out there, but the question is in which products it make sense to boycott. Those from big companies definitively, those from small startups and particular and independent devs or communities, questionable, probably not. Do you want to boycott Gimp? It’s from a californian organisation, for sur it don’t make sense to boycott.
Buy alternatives for whatever is easy to avoid. Buy what is unavoidable.
Soooo, when will all this anti-US consumerist movement result in those Levis 501 jeans I’ve been eyeing dropping in price?
I’m hoping for the perfect intersection of price drop and waistline drop.
Never because Levi’s still wants to make money.
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