Ask HN: Why was it hard to criticize Freedom Fries hysteria while it lasted?

> "In a 2005 opinion poll by Gallup, participants were asked if they felt the renaming of French fries and toast was "a silly idea or a sincere expression of patriotism;" 66% answered it was silly, 33% answered it was patriotic, and 1% had no opinion."

I think you answered your own question. If it’s a fairly meaningless protest, why should the counterprotest be meaningful at all?

Edit: Not to imply support for it didn't exist - plainly it did. This was just my experience on the East coast. However, earnest public support for it seemed so rare, it honestly was almost like even the people who proposed it understood it was kind of more something funny/irreverent, rather than a serious protest. I'm not sure how valid that interpretation is.

After 9/11 US politicians started to wear little flags on their suits. I think that lasts until today.

I also remember how my dad reacted on them trying to ban “The Anarchist Cookbook” after columbine. We bought a copy, and so did a lot of other Americans at the time.

I don’t see your example with the kefir in the same light you do. What I see is a company marketing itself (sort of similar to green washing or rainbow washing) and not some sort of consent. The only consensus I see is that many companies are pulling the same advertising move. Have you asked people around you what they think about it? How many told you they think its ridiculous?

This feels a lot like that, only with the media encouraging it this time. That leads to more people and groups jumping on the bandwangon. It's a chance to indulge in guilt-free cruelty to a designated outgroup.

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 would go after the attackers and a lot of people felt like it was their duty to help. And people that couldn't directly help felt like they had to do whatever they could to show support--the 'freedom fries' thing came from that feeling.

Politically it was a weird climate. We were just a year past the 2000 election--one of the most divisive and contested elections we had ever seen (Gore vs. Bush, where the election effectively came down to a supreme court decision on Florida ballot counting). Many people viewed Bush as a failson who just golfed and didn't know how to run a governor's office, much less a country. 9/11 instantly put him in the spotlight and for better or worse his reputation was vastly improved by showing some leadership in a time of crisis. It was very, very difficult to criticize him or his lead up to a war against Iraq (even when all signs pointed at the war being illegitimate and unrelated to the attacks).

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.

Even people who supported freedom fries were mostly tongue in cheek. I faintly remember people being much more serious about France and Germany's ties to Iraq's chemical industry.

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 an issue, and the good people of this board like to think they are invulnerable to it. Ha.

At the beginning, in 2016, it was made very clear by the Leavers that it was unthinkable that the UK would end up outside the single market and without a free trade deal with the EU. "No Deal Brexit" was called a scaremongering fiction and was promptly dubbed "Project Fear".

Once May invoked Article 50 in early 2017, it became clear that the softest Brexit possible would be harder than even the hardest Brexit countenanced by Leavers during the referendum.

Suddenly, the whole debate pivoted to a whole new one, where No Deal was renamed Hard Brexit: harder than any outcome mentioned in the referendum. Then, it was continuously repeated that people had, in fact, voted for that Hard Brexit.

It was very strange, and I felt like I was taking crazy pills as the options were redefined, it felt, almost overnight, and it seemed everyone just went with it.

There are always people who are scared of dissenting. History often refers to these people as "collaborators", if it bothers to refer to them at all.

Some learned from that and didn't let themselves get whipped up by propaganda during our latest round of crises. Most did not.

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.

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.

The most visible reaction was people would fly the American flag on their car, sometimes multiple. Stuff like this was pretty common, though far from ubiquitous: https://www.amazon.com/US-American-Patriotic-Window-Clip/dp/.... Within a few years most of that stuff went away, as the flags wore out or people got new cars.

That's beer. Not a bottle of virus. But people are not superficially logical.