When someone says “death to America”, they aren’t saying “death to Americans”. A government/state is a regime, not all it’s people, despite how much as nationalists love to stoke that sort of patriotism. So I have no problem with the slogan, I call for the fall of the US imperialist regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_America#Interpretation_and_meaning - has some confirmations from various Iranian politicians and a travel writer.
I haven’t given it a try yet, I’ll have to give it a read.
(just checking you actually meant schizoid, which is notably different to schizophrenia. both could make sense here but imply different things)
Nearly all media is state controlled. Even privately owned media companies because both the media and the state are just tools the owning class uses to maintain power.
More info on this:
A good thing about tech is that if you have a spare device (even a cheap single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi or similar cheaper one, or a partly-broken laptop) or a working virtual machine, you can break things. That’s a core characteristic of the old-school hacker mindset, to try stuff and break stuff until you understand stuff. Usually, the worst case, you just reinstall the operating system and have a fresh clean environment (or, better yet, you restore a backup you made! Learning how to fail gracefully is a great skill)
I bricked a certain wacky laptop setup twice and had to start over (luckily with backups) just trying to get a custom startup loading screen. But once I realized why it was breaking and how to avoid it, I had a cooler looking computer!
Was tempted to troll lemmygrad with this classic meme: https://lefty.pictures/post/view/15726
At least one US fash has already, Chadwick Seagraves. The rest might need a little encouragement.
This is what democracy looks like, and it should be respected.
Why should it be respected? Should we respect it any more than the US democracy which elected a thug? A system isn’t automatically respectable just because it’s one type of democracy.
You’re not just gonna leave us hanging without a link, right? …right?
You also have to remember these people have a voice because we give it to them.
In some ways, sure, but these people also have a voice because owning-class mass media gives it to them. You can literally buy a figurative microphone. Pay for a platform. We don’t assume people with money are worth listening too, they’re simply the ones talking on every channel.
The key word in that comment was “symbols”. The Nazi SS aren’t esoteric knowledge.
The post Man Wearing Nazi T-Shirt Gets a Beatdown from Fans at Punk Rock Bowling Fest appeared first on Consequence.
https://consequence.net/2025/05/punk-rock-bowling-nazi-t-shirt/
and direct Instagram link to the video on that page: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKJE7UpxXYX/
I think that if the US government is overhauled, guaranteed UBI would be key to allowing for effective strikes.
In the meantime, we use voluntary strike funds for a similar effect.
The government just says “ok, strike.”
Got any examples? Because what’s first coming to mind for large modern strikes is the train strike that the Biden government explicitly outlawed. (before the environmental disaster in West Palestine, Ohio)
I knew people still under 30 who put it on a playlist because they liked it and didn’t know it was a meme.
It’s more complex than that, and a protest has more important benefits than a mere direct message (incl. networking), but a ruler or military/police won’t change their mind because a million people said “I don’t like this”. There needs to be some threat, like a strike or even violence, to make them suddenly care about ethics.
What are the most important differences?
On the other hand, AI recycling could be an issue on other platforms where user reputation matters more. We don’t have ads or karma tallies by default so its less abusable here.
Same, but I still like this recreation. It has a culture jam aspects to it, like Sonic ‘Ethical consumption’ memes.
Where is that constraint coming from? “Death to [x]” is a statement of a desire.
“Death to Americans” would be a call for the deaths of citizens. Obviously Iran doesn’t consider the typical American citizen to be oppressing them, so they are not interested in calling for that.
Someone yelling “death to America” could still be supporting the death of George W. Bush or Donald Trump, who are Americans. It could even involve combating many in the US military. That’s still very different from calling for “death to Americans”, because the target is the regime, not its citizens simply for being citizens.
But I still think you’ve raised an interesting discussion to have so I’ve tried to answer it.
In an ideal world, regime change. Relatively peaceful dissolution is preferable and possible (consider the death of the Soviet Union).
However, given the ruthlessness of the people with the most power in the US, I suspect they would gladly kill millions of Americans before even considering a peaceful surrender. People are shot by the state in regular protests, let alone one directly threatening the state (case in point - Jan 6 had a protester killed by police). So unless some interesting lucky opportunities open up (such as a military coup), the USA will (continue to) kill Americans to maintain stability, regardless of whether those opposing the USA kill a single American.
Given that situation, it sounds like any resistance to the US is bad because will likely involve deaths of innocent people. Yes, but the other side of the story is that to do nothing ‘‘also’’ results in the deaths of innocent people. To the people running the show, it’s completely normal to oversee the constant atrocious social murder of many thousands each year through poverty, artificial scarcity of food and medication, healthcare denial and other neglect in the name of profit. We overproduce enough food to feed everyone, there’s enough land and property to house everyone.
To do nothing is to allow many Americans to keep dying each day from easily preventable deaths. To fix that system will most likely kill many Americans in the process. You can almost simplify it down to a trolley problem - there’s no clean solution whichever choice you make. But, for each of us, there is a correct decision.