Sid 🇵🇸Nov 13, 2023
A user called Aldanimarki designed these, which say "I love chokky milk" in Arabic, kind of as a way to make a point about how westerners see their language as sinister.
Show threadSpace HoboNov 13, 2023

@InternetEh I have a bag made by Tom Bihn a couple decades ago, during a time of intense xenophobia in the US. He put labels in all his bags saying "Fabrique en EU", to play with the fact that the French name for the US is "États-Unis". He also had "Made in the US" written in a variety of other systems (Hanzi, Arabic, etc) depending on who was the target of paranoia at any given time.

Sometimes he put apologies for US foreign policy or aggression on the other sides of these labels.

Show threadSid 🇵🇸
@spacehobo I dunno how far France can look down its nose at anyone on Islamophobia.
Nov 13, 2023 at 11:13pmWeb
Show threadSpace HoboNov 13, 2023

@InternetEh You're quite right, but that was never the point: it was made at a specific time when the Republicans in charge were braying in fury that France wouldn't join them in war on Iraq. They engaged in utterly petty culture-war politics on the issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

My best friend growing up married a Frenchman, and they had to move to Paris because people refused to work with him based on all this.

Freedom fries - Wikipedia

Show threadGunChleocNov 15, 2023

@spacehobo @InternetEh Yep, Germany also got some flak at the time for not joining the illegal invasion of Iraq that destabilized the whole region.

We found the whole "Freedom fries" nonsense both utterly ridiculous and somewhat scary.