Don’t do this because it “sends America a message.” You are one person, your decision to spend tourist dollars has a negligible effect. You do not make a difference to them.
To whatever extent an aggregate message is felt by Americans, it will be spun by their King as justification for the preexisting messaging about how the world is against them. This messaging will almost certainly be successful — it’s always easier to blame others than look inward. Americans are not exceptional, and will respond to these messages the same way people did in the days of 1930s fascism and in modern China and Russia.
So no; don’t boycott America to send them a message.
Instead, boycott American tourism and products and companies for yourself. It will feel good for your soul. It feels good to stand up for yourself, to stand with your neighbours, with your countrymen, and with our allies around the world. In a world where we can feel like powerless pawns in a game played by evil behemoths — we can at least do what’s right and feel good about that.
American companies care, the tourist industry sounded the alarm that even a 10% drop in Canadian tourists would lead to a multi-billion dollar hit to their industry.
Elon Musk cares, so much that he’d want to make it illegal to speak ill of Tesla. His stock is still dropping and hundreds of billions of wealth that Elon had access to is circling the toilet.
Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it to flip the bird towards Trump, Musk, American and multinational corps that suck up to them, and MAGA.
It can be for both reasons, and it won’t matter how the administration spins it for their base. Starving the beast weakens it regardless of any backlash.
Our aggregate response may weaken them, and that is a great thing to see start to happen and I hope we see more of it.
But the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t matter to them. I don’t matter to them. If all Canadians and Europeans and Chinese stood together they’d feel it — but you and I cannot control what all of these people do.
But we can control what we do. And it feels good to do what’s right. Even if I was the only one boycotting to American travel and products, it would still feel good. Because it’s easy to forget the humanity— you’re a person not just a consumer. As a person it feels good to act, to be active, to not just go gentle into the night.
That’s a message I can get behind, but I’ve been making conscientious purchasing/spending choices for years, sometimes decades, in order to satisfy my own principles. In realms like privacy and intellectual freedom, it meant constantly fighting upstream while general consumer habits gave a mandate to everything I don’t want and left no room for anything I do want. It means being the only person in a group not on Facebook, and also sometimes not really in the group any more either. In realms like buying local, it means being the only annoying person clogging the aisles scouring labels for origin information or paying way more for products that lack the demand which brings scaling efficiencies.
I wouldn’t make different choices today. All the costs of self-hosting and maintaining personal tech infrastructure, trying to work with niche tooling and integrate narrowly-focused independent systems, and missing out on some mainstream stuff still do not outweigh the benefits - at least for me personally.
But let me tell you: it is profoundly more satisfying having a large-scale movement behind you, collaboratively sharing the burden and also having a real, economy-shaping impact benefitting the values that matter to you.
I believe you. Perhaps I’m underestimating the effects of the positive energy coming from how many have joined us across the country and the world.
But my life experience is the opposite of what you describe. I let the devils of nihilism and cynicism cloud me, to rationalize and justify taking the easy route of inaction.
So my message here is not to you and folks like you who were ahead of me in this. You’re better than me. I looked down on people like you because your actions didn’t make a difference. Why should I, a rationalist, take irrational actions that don’t make a difference.
So my message here is to people like me, who have talked themselves out of doing something. To them I say: it feels good to act. And no one can take that away from me.
Ok, now I’m hearing you loud and clear. This is also true and based, with abundant parallels. Like, teenagers think being aloof, distant, or mysterious is cool. More mature adults tend to end up deciding that being open, earnest, and genuine is sexy, even if they don’t care about the things you do. Passion is what’s cool, and apathy is just either insecurity or emptiness.
To me, there is an inherent satisfaction that comes from defying soulless entities trying to dictate my habits, values, and most notably dependence for their gain. There is inherent value in having greater freedom of choice and lower cost to changing my mind than accepting vendor lock-in would permit. And there is greater financial and lifestyle security from reducing the role of cash flow (and big tech) in sustaining that lifestyle. It’s actually pretty comfortable relying more on other forms of self-help, including services that no one can manipulate against my will, or outright rug-pull on me.
I never really though of such things as irrational, but rather assigning different weights to the inputs we’re tweaking and outputs for which we’re optimizing. My values and “weights” are somewhat described by the personalized examples of benefit I presented - albeit scoped down to one particular context. The principles or values that resonate with any particular person do so for a reason. I think if we analyze those reasons deeply enough, we’ll find both the internal motivation and external incentives to either change them or commit to them.
Conversely, I don’t imagine nihilistic choices ever feel particularly good or right.
I think the notes of “America doesn’t care about your principles or actions” are what rubbed people the wrong way in your original comment. And that’s probably because it speaks to that sense of nihilism that likely isn’t well represented on an open-source, Canadian-hosted, left-leaning, mainstream-alternative platform. But such people I would argue, based on global outcomes, are much more representative of the general public even in Canada. I’m upvoting your original comment now, on the basis that this underlying point is a message many need to hear, and probably articulated in the way that those people would hear.
Conversely, I don’t imagine nihilistic choices ever feel particularly good or right.
Exactly correct. I was spiraling in depression about the hopelessness of it all until I decided to actually do something myself.
And then I realized that feeling of trying was at least part of what I was missing all along.
So I boycott, I protest, I volunteer, and dare to be vulnerable and admit I care — not in an ironic or smug way but actually care. And it feels great, especially these days when it feels like many others are beginning to as well.
Don’t do this because it “sends America a message.” You are one person, your decision to spend tourist dollars has a negligible effect. You do not make a difference to them.
To whatever extent an aggregate message is felt by Americans, it will be spun by their King as justification for the preexisting messaging about how the world is against them. This messaging will almost certainly be successful — it’s always easier to blame others than look inward. Americans are not exceptional, and will respond to these messages the same way people did in the days of 1930s fascism and in modern China and Russia.
So no; don’t boycott America to send them a message.
Instead, boycott American tourism and products and companies for yourself. It will feel good for your soul. It feels good to stand up for yourself, to stand with your neighbours, with your countrymen, and with our allies around the world. In a world where we can feel like powerless pawns in a game played by evil behemoths — we can at least do what’s right and feel good about that.
American companies care, the tourist industry sounded the alarm that even a 10% drop in Canadian tourists would lead to a multi-billion dollar hit to their industry.
Elon Musk cares, so much that he’d want to make it illegal to speak ill of Tesla. His stock is still dropping and hundreds of billions of wealth that Elon had access to is circling the toilet.
Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it to flip the bird towards Trump, Musk, American and multinational corps that suck up to them, and MAGA.
It can be for both reasons, and it won’t matter how the administration spins it for their base. Starving the beast weakens it regardless of any backlash.
Our aggregate response may weaken them, and that is a great thing to see start to happen and I hope we see more of it.
But the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t matter to them. I don’t matter to them. If all Canadians and Europeans and Chinese stood together they’d feel it — but you and I cannot control what all of these people do.
But we can control what we do. And it feels good to do what’s right. Even if I was the only one boycotting to American travel and products, it would still feel good. Because it’s easy to forget the humanity— you’re a person not just a consumer. As a person it feels good to act, to be active, to not just go gentle into the night.
That’s a message I can get behind, but I’ve been making conscientious purchasing/spending choices for years, sometimes decades, in order to satisfy my own principles. In realms like privacy and intellectual freedom, it meant constantly fighting upstream while general consumer habits gave a mandate to everything I don’t want and left no room for anything I do want. It means being the only person in a group not on Facebook, and also sometimes not really in the group any more either. In realms like buying local, it means being the only annoying person clogging the aisles scouring labels for origin information or paying way more for products that lack the demand which brings scaling efficiencies.
I wouldn’t make different choices today. All the costs of self-hosting and maintaining personal tech infrastructure, trying to work with niche tooling and integrate narrowly-focused independent systems, and missing out on some mainstream stuff still do not outweigh the benefits - at least for me personally.
But let me tell you: it is profoundly more satisfying having a large-scale movement behind you, collaboratively sharing the burden and also having a real, economy-shaping impact benefitting the values that matter to you.
I believe you. Perhaps I’m underestimating the effects of the positive energy coming from how many have joined us across the country and the world.
But my life experience is the opposite of what you describe. I let the devils of nihilism and cynicism cloud me, to rationalize and justify taking the easy route of inaction.
So my message here is not to you and folks like you who were ahead of me in this. You’re better than me. I looked down on people like you because your actions didn’t make a difference. Why should I, a rationalist, take irrational actions that don’t make a difference.
So my message here is to people like me, who have talked themselves out of doing something. To them I say: it feels good to act. And no one can take that away from me.
Ok, now I’m hearing you loud and clear. This is also true and based, with abundant parallels. Like, teenagers think being aloof, distant, or mysterious is cool. More mature adults tend to end up deciding that being open, earnest, and genuine is sexy, even if they don’t care about the things you do. Passion is what’s cool, and apathy is just either insecurity or emptiness.
To me, there is an inherent satisfaction that comes from defying soulless entities trying to dictate my habits, values, and most notably dependence for their gain. There is inherent value in having greater freedom of choice and lower cost to changing my mind than accepting vendor lock-in would permit. And there is greater financial and lifestyle security from reducing the role of cash flow (and big tech) in sustaining that lifestyle. It’s actually pretty comfortable relying more on other forms of self-help, including services that no one can manipulate against my will, or outright rug-pull on me.
I never really though of such things as irrational, but rather assigning different weights to the inputs we’re tweaking and outputs for which we’re optimizing. My values and “weights” are somewhat described by the personalized examples of benefit I presented - albeit scoped down to one particular context. The principles or values that resonate with any particular person do so for a reason. I think if we analyze those reasons deeply enough, we’ll find both the internal motivation and external incentives to either change them or commit to them.
Conversely, I don’t imagine nihilistic choices ever feel particularly good or right.
I think the notes of “America doesn’t care about your principles or actions” are what rubbed people the wrong way in your original comment. And that’s probably because it speaks to that sense of nihilism that likely isn’t well represented on an open-source, Canadian-hosted, left-leaning, mainstream-alternative platform. But such people I would argue, based on global outcomes, are much more representative of the general public even in Canada. I’m upvoting your original comment now, on the basis that this underlying point is a message many need to hear, and probably articulated in the way that those people would hear.
Exactly correct. I was spiraling in depression about the hopelessness of it all until I decided to actually do something myself.
And then I realized that feeling of trying was at least part of what I was missing all along.
So I boycott, I protest, I volunteer, and dare to be vulnerable and admit I care — not in an ironic or smug way but actually care. And it feels great, especially these days when it feels like many others are beginning to as well.
Why not both?