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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?
Yank
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?
Yanquis
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.
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.
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”?
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’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.
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.
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.
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 too 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.
I don’t have to imagine being a black tourist in Japan, I can just ask the person I know who is one, right now, who says it’s fine. So is your thought experiment based on anyone’s actual experience, or just your racist stereotype of Japanese people?
there is problems with the buy european movement as outlines in other comments here, but as an American: please continue boycotting us, the chances of our government changing for the better are slim, but every bit of protest matters.
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.
I boycott american products because they simply are not worth their price
That’s a pretty Liberal take from someone using a “Lemmygrad” account.
I don’t see how it’s liberal, Marxists don’t take a vow of poverty or reject the laws of economics. US-made products generally are higher priced compared to equivalent performance due to Imperialism inflating costs of production in the Global North.
Fair enough.
a liberal take would be to consume something only based by its place of origin
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Fuck the Maple Leafs alright
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.
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.
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
Buy alternatives for whatever is easy to avoid. Buy what is unavoidable.
lidl cola is best
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.
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.
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.
I Boycott American products because I’m 3 ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ recessions deep and cannot afford them
Does this mean Europeans will also boycott goods that they steal from the 17 countries they still have colonized?
No? Oh.
The post only says they’re “Anti-American”. It never said they were anti-American for any of the good reasons.
Ah, good ole whataboutism.
It’s not whataboutism when my entire ideology is anti-nationalism. You don’t get it, do you? I want all of the Western imperialist nations to collapse, including the European ones.
Your rhetoric is weak and outdated, still viewing the world through borders. You think Musk gives a fuck about borders? Grow up.
Why stop at the western nations?
Yes, let all the empires fall. By default, boycotting goods made by slave labor/colonization would apply to TEMU, Apple, etc.
3 of these 17 territories are colonies of the USA (American Samoa, Guam, Virgin Islands).
When it comes to Europe the extortion of former colonies might be the bigger problem (the Franc Zone or the ongoing exploitation of African ressources).
Right. But, I’m an American who strives to boycott goods produced by slave labor and/or colonization by my own government because I believe class solidarity transcends borders.
The BuyEuropean movement is largely nationalistic and uninterested in class solidarity. Don’t get me wrong, I think the entire world should be boycotting American goods. Let the empire collapse, please.
But, boycotting American goods while still exploiting the Global South for centuries is not a flex.
You will never convince a majority of Western people of boycotting anything for a moral reason.
They boycott America because they finally feel threatened. Just take the W and let them boycott America.
You right lol
You will never convince a majority of Western people of boycotting anything for a moral reason.
And they will probably stop boycotting when the America fascist-meter drop from 100% to the normal 88%
That is very likely. But the American economy is feeble right now. Trump picked a bad timing to go on a tirade.
American Evangelicals and Zionists are bankrolling European far right parties as well. Europe cutting off America is better for the whole world.
Anti-imperialism would make more sense. The US is not the only asshole… (Edit: Just the current worst one.)
Certainly not, but currentky very high in the ranking.
When it comes to contemporary imperialist assholery the US is #1 by far. Since after WW2 they’ve been nothing but shitting on humanity, between the CIA installing puppet dictators to wars (open and secret) killing tens of millions. The list of countries they have fucked with is too long to post here.
And now their former closest allies are annexation targets.
The USSR was a shitty little bitch during her heyday, too. Worse than the US? I’m not sure. Eastern Europe and South America probably have a major difference of opinion there.
In the last few decades I feel like Russia may have the US beat?
If you seriously think either the USSR or modern Russia were/are worse than the USA, you need some perspective.
You think we’re the worst country on the planet at the present moment in 2025? Interesting.
Edit: oh, ml
The US empire currently maintains an imperialist network of over 800 military bases in 70 countries. (For comparison, all other countries combined have only 30 bases)
I’m not looking at opportunity for evil as a metric, just actual evil. Do you think the us causes the most direct suffering?
Absolutely, yes. No other country comes anywhere near what the US empire inflicts on the world daily.
Where is the comparison metric?
Yes. The vast extent of the negatives of maintaining a brutal Empire and the dedication towards thoroughly punishing anyone going against that system makes the US Empire the worst country on the planet.
Boycut companies with too much market power. They just happen to be quite concentrated in the US.
As an American…
send help :(
Generous
