Off Topic The Politics Thread

Seriously, I'm telling all of my family to boycott American products. No hope of real success, but maybe some small wins here and there.

Am I alone in looking at American films and TV programmes now and thinking, wait a minute, why don't you **** off?

USA! USA! USA!

**** right off.

 

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what american made products do you now boycott

 

Amazon, MacDonalds, Starbucks, Twitter (X), Tesla, Ford - but then I've never used any of them before anyway, so that's not hard. There are others, Facebook, for example, that I do use and wish there was an easy non-US alternative to.

 

Sent from your iPhone

 

Samsung, actually.

 

My boycott of Palestinian brands has proved to be remarkably easy thus far.

 

Operating system Android by Google.

 

Yeah, it's impossible to untangle ourselves fully, but I'm determined to do my little bit.

I'm continually banging on to my family about not using Amazon, but it's a losing battle.

 

They could always use Temu as an alternative

 

Or buy direct from the supplier.

 

Labour showing they are just a set of ****ers by proposing to cut disability payments, even to those with extreme disabilities. At least with the Tories they didn't pretend not to be ****s.

 

I buy all my vinyl direct from the artists, even though it costs me more in postage than ordering through Amazon - and often it turns up a day before actual release, so that's a real bonus

 

Was just watching CNN live from the White House Carpark with The Donald rambling like an old senile neighbour, Musk and his son X running around - all totally random and meaningless, also, why isn't that kid at school?

 

It's a total circus.

 

I don't suppose young master X is going to have to work for a living, so maybe our Elon thinks he doesn't need to go to school.

Mind you, Musk has been losing £1m a minute since the start of 2025, so you never know.

 

a few nasa contracts will sort that

 

And they don't make money from it, just from app purchases.

 

Stewart Lee...

Wake up grandad and put your opinions in the pedal bin! If you even think you are well informed you are living a lie. What the world believes today depends on who is controlling legacy media’s last feeble news fronts, like the head-bobbing slaphead Jeff Bezos’s supine Washington Post, and on who programs digital social media sluices, such as Ketamine Ken’s Twitter, currently X, essentially an ape with a megaphone standing in a crowded marketplace shouting unsubstantiated rumours at babies, and showing pornographic photographs to children.

But was it ever thus? Did it just take the unalloyed unpleasantness of Elon Musk to make us see ourselves as we always were, toilet paper people fluttering on the whims of wealthy men’s media outlets, 8 billion dogshit golems, Frankingsteins made of farts?
A radio phone-in about social media on Monday made me understand, with sudden clarity, that horrible hysterical stories drive engagement more than thoughtful true ones. Sorry it took me so long. And so digital media surges right towards the money and JD Vance calls it freedom of speech, as if a barely sentient tapeworm reaching towards a clump of rotten offal was acting with some kind of moral imperative.

A black-cab driver tells a passenger imprisoned in their back seat that Keir Starmer defended the Southport killer’s father; your sister-in-law casually announces that most benefits are claimed fraudulently; and JD Vance informs Europe that it’s illegal to pray in your own home in Scotland. The world thinks what rich men want it to and the truth is a touring lineup of Lynyrd Skynyrd with no original members that you’re still listening to in the hope its version of Free Bird will kick ass.

So what is the point of writing supposedly funny columns about current affairs for a broadsheet newspaper like the Observer? An adjudicated sex abuser is in the American White House, Boris Johnson is in a moated manor house, and I’m supposed to poke fun at them from a three-bedroom terrace house. Liberal media has failed and it doesn’t have the funds to fight back.

Brexit was the making of these spews. It sharpened them because it exposed an interconnected web of corruption worming through Westminster, and made me appreciate the privilege of having a platform to piss on people from. But how many forests fell fruitlessly, five years ago, when I finally revealed the full secret cabbalistic name of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster ****-Business ****-the-Families Get-Off-My-****ing-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson? I had my own viral moment in miniature. But was it worth it?

And yet, as I wandered the streets in lockdown, ordinary Observer readers and their dogs regularly stood at reasonable distances and told me these columns made them feel less alone, and for a moment I understood how Christ felt when all those lepers told him he was a really great bloke. I doubt anything like that ever happens to Giles Coren. Or to Jesus, to be honest, who was probably sick to the back teeth of all those selfish lepers.

But here’s the rub. I appreciate that, as someone who is too tight to advertise his tours, and who has not been invited on to The Graham Norton Show, the market penetration achieved by online circulation of a popular Observer column probably sells me more than a few standup comedy seats. Maybe I need this. That said, twice as many people come to see me live as read the Observer, though this can be explained by lots of angry middle-aged men bringing their bored wives with them.

But since Elon Musk showed social media how to downgrade the visibility of liberal comment and monetise the outraged engagement caused by right-skewed clickbait, I have watched my online views wither. Social media is engineered to suppress the material you are reading now. If you have been directed to this column online somehow, then somewhere there’s a rightwing billionaire that needs to rejig his algorithms.

 

Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster ****-Business ****-the-Families Get-Off-My-****ing-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson