Memes

True and acceptable, however I don't feel patriotic.

American exceptionalism is basically a circle-jerk.

Before all this we used to say “Chinese quality, German price”

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.

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.

Hi, nice to meet you. Where are you from? America. Oh, like Mexico or Chile?

It's always fun to see their faces :)

I was feeling more "American that hates their government" vibes

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.

A lot of these are easy to boycott

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.

Ah, good ole whataboutism.

It was always bad, but for many years its energy resources were unmatched, so no country could keep up.
Today the gap is not so big anymore.

Test great success!