I boycot them because of both!
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Anti-imperialism would make more sense. The US is not the only asshole... (Edit: Just the current worst one.)
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.
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Certainly not, but currentky very high in the ranking.
Does this mean Europeans will also boycott goods that they steal from the 17 countries they still have colonized?
No? Oh.
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).
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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
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.
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lidl cola is best
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.
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why not both
Seems like something I'd come across in r/2westerneurope4you
I was feeling more "American that hates their government" vibes
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.