The domain https://fediverse.observer/ redirects to sedo now.
On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:
this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest
this software is no longer developed
Sad to have lost such a great resource.
‘death to america’ is a hyperbolic idiom meaning an end to american imperial dominance, not a wish to harm american people. as an american myself i say it all the time. i want to see an end to the system, not the people living under it. ‘marg bar amrika’ has been a protest chant for 50 years and has been deliberately mistranslated by propagandists to demonize dissent.
what good is ‘america’ to the people it bombs, imprisons and impoverishes anyway?
To your point, I’ve heard this meaning before, although I don’t think it is commonly known to the general populace (which is also to your other point about propogandization).
Potentially against your point, if a slogan/idiom is being intentionally misused for misinformation, it might be time to move to a different phrase, rather than sticking with the corrupted one. Additionally, if multiple phrases could be utilized, it may get the point across better (less likely to successfully propagandize multiple options, than a single option). Although, I suspect propagandists would weaponize the ‘weakest’ commonly utilized option against the cause.
one example that comes to mind is the ‘from the river to the sea’ slogan; it’s a call for equal rights across historic palestine, but gets labelled as a call for genocide by detractors.
changing the slogans doesn’t help because the target isn’t the words, it’s the underlying demand. propagandists will weaponize whatever language you use if the politics behind it threaten them.
the way i see it conceding the rhetorical terrain just means constantly retreating to increasingly watered down language while the actual demand gets no closer to being heard.
I guess my point is a base/group can’t increase membership/size if no one knows what they stand for, or believe they stand for something else completely (misinformation propaganda).
Agreed.
I may not have previously conveyed my thought clearly. I never meant that any slogans/idioms should be watered down. More that they should be utilized like guerrilla warfare. By the time the propagandists have a counter to a slogan, the movement would have already moved to the next (the underlying sentiment/demand remains the same, the words relaying the goal are constantly shifting to prevent capture/misinformation propaganda).
Also, if a slogan doesn’t get countered by the time its switched out, the movement could go back to it again later. The slogan’s return could act as a unifier between the groups the different slogans energized, as I suspect different slogans will have different effects on different sub-groups, and returning to a prior slogan could let everyone know they are on the same team, even if they didn’t know that previously.