31–40 of 85 posts
Was it hard? People certainly did make fun of it.
The name was changed even though it was a crazy thing for many people. I assume that a new type of political correctness emerged in at least some places, that prevented people from saying "Hey, this sucks, it's ridiculous".
Was it hard? People certainly did make fun of it.
The name was changed even though it was a crazy thing for many people. I assume that a new type of political correctness emerged in at least some places, that prevented people from saying "Hey, this sucks, it's ridiculous".
That doesn't really rise to the level of "hysteria", IMO.
I don't think it was hard to criticize; it always seemed to be a little tongue in cheek and lighthearted. Have you read Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" and discussed the ideas inside with others? While he is right about in general about editorial bias, he ultimately posits that media that shares his own political agenda is good and media that does not is bad. Media-induced hypersensitivity to fear porn is certainly…
Once I was at a gathering in 2003 and somebody had this weird-looking bulldog. Someone asked about it, and it turned out to be a French bulldog. So I said "You mean Freedom Bulldog" and everybody had a laugh.
Related: Big pickup trucks with "boycott France" stickers on them. Like any of those guys had ever bought anything from France!
Characterizing it all as "synthetic" flock mentality is misleading. Fundamentally, humans are herd animals and the US had "just" been attacked. The media most certainly directed it and helped it along (see also: Clear Channel's list of censored songs), but that underlying feeling of being attacked is what supplied the energy driving the fervor. Compare one of the larger memes - "support the troops" (by wearing this cheap bracelet), to the actuality of the soldiers coming home from Iraq being some of the most ardently antiwar people around.
Ultimately cognitive dissonance works because people want to have their fiction validated. They wanted to believe that France was another foe (as opposed to a friend trying to talk sense into us when we were drunk). The management of consumer-facing companies want to believe that their token "solidarity" will help stop Russia's terrible attack on Ukraine. One can view it as useless or one can view it as pitching in what little they can, but the one sure thing is that rationality won't stop it.
PS another connection between the two topics that I can't help but make is that the lack of US/UN involvement in Ukraine is somewhat due to all of the credibility that was wasted on Iraq (et al). So much effort and resources were wasted trying to force "freedom" (ie western business, mostly) onto societies that didn't particularly want it, that now we've finally got a society yearning to escape from the shadow of the USSR and begging for our help, but we haven't the stomach to send troops. And on the flip side, all of USG's interventionist wars ("regime changes") were watched by people like Putin, stoking his paranoia and setting an example for him to do the same thing.
When the freedom fries thing came up it was ridiculous and I am not sure how far it went in other states but they where still french fries in California. As far as I know it was just a republican stunt in the congressional cafeteria and never went beyond that. I think I remember them also renaming french toast to freedom toast. I also remember how my dad reacted on them trying to ban “The Anarchist Cookbook” after co…
This. It was a stunt that didn't even go very far. At the time I frequently bought french fries in a pretty conservative area, and never once saw them listed on a menu as "freedom fries." I was also pretty widely mocked (e.g. this is when it was made very clear that french fries weren't French).
The at least some stuff being done in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems a lot more like a legitimate boycott (though sometimes poorly executed) than the "freedom fries" stunt.
I do avoid buying Russian made products/products from companies that deal with Russia so the target market here is me, I suppose. If the product appears Russian I won't buy it, I assume there are enough others who feel similar that they would rather take it of the market than explain how it is not Russian. This has nothing to do with freedom fries, it has everything to do with the place the product is made.
It was never this bad. The "Freedom Fries" thing was a small subset and not taken seriously. What's going on now, however, is frightening. It's terrifying.
Years ago, when the US invaded Iraq under the pretense that they had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and they were an existential threat that needed to be acted on, protesters like me said, "No, it's about Iraq's massive untapped oil reserves." The US said, "We know where they are; they're in the North, South, East and West." Both the UN and NATO said we don't see any evidence of WMD and it should have stopped there.
The US invaded anyway. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Did the US leave immediately, horrified at the war crime? Or did it stay and place its military bases at all the large oil wells? (We're still there, by the way. I guess like OJ we're still looking for those WMD/the real killer?)
And how did the media, PR, and other popularity-based professions act? Did they condemn the war crime? Or did they smile and say, "Support the troops?" Hollywood made movies, not exposing the crime, but rather how our soldiers were killing kids and how that made them sad.
I don't know if there were reasons for this action in Ukraine. We do know that the US had several biolabs there but the verdict whether it was producing bioweapons is currently split between NATO saying no and other nations (China, Brazil, India) saying yes.
But the cancel culture of anything Russian is gross and, given the last 80 years of US history, deeply hypocritical. Worse, the way the media is colluding to suppress discussion is terrifying to me in a way I can't really express. My main account here on HN is from 2007 but I can't use it. I just want us to discuss things rationally.
I was 19 and in college in America when 9/11 happened and the short answer is that Americans viewed this as a direct attack on their soil like Pearl Harbor in WW2. People wanted to get revenge and hold the attackers accountable. I knew people my age that saw the attack and almost instantly dropped their careers and joined the military. Enlistments saw a huge bump in numbers IIRC. Everyone knew that eventually America…