Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.
It’s so weird how some people are so committed to this. “United Statesian” and variants thereof don’t actually solve the perceived problem due to the fact that Mexico is formally the United Mexican States (Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia were all United States of their own in the past too). And besides that, there are so many other examples of countries using the name of something they do not encompass the whole of. South Africa? Not actually the whole of the south of Africa, it turns out. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo? Both not the only country in the Congo basin. The European Union isn’t all of Europe, Sudan doesn’t include South Sudan, and the only part of the river Indus that’s in India is in disputed Kashmir
The Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo
I had no idea these were two separate nations
Ex-Belgian Congo and Ex-French Congo respectively. Which actually means they even share French as an official language. DR Congo is the really big one, and also the one more commonly in the news because it has generally had an extremely rough time of things. It was called Congo-Leopoldville upon gaining independence, then Zaire under a military government, and then finally DR Congo from the 90s up to today.
It’s quite common to refer to them by their capitals to distinguish them: DR Congo is Congo-Kinshasa, Rep. Congo is Congo-Brazzaville. Kinshasa is what they renamed the old capital Leopoldville to, quite understandably in my opinion given what Leopold was responsible for. To make this even weirder, Kinshasa and Brazzaville are literally just on opposite sides of the river from each other (although it is a very big river)
Eh, it is what it is.
ML is pretty well known for mods either power tripping, or at least pushing the boundaries to the edge.
This one could go either way.
Technically the comment was a rule violation, so removing the comment isn’t totally power tripping.
The problem is that your comment was the least political in the whole damn thread. Like, even my comment was a tad more political than yours, depending on how you look at it. And even that was way less than dessalines’ tangent.
The entire post was about language and word usage, and your comment definitely was not political, nor was it in any way rude or insulting.
I’m still really surprised your comment got reported/removed, but mine didn’t. It was confusing as hell when I came back after a response and saw yours gone.
So, yeah, definitely PTB. If they’d nuked everyone, I could see it being clueless mods, but targeting yours just means they got a report and wiped it, so that’s dumber than dammit, even if it wasn’t a literal power trip
For anyone interested, here’s the modlog , and to recap:
You get corrected by a Brazilian correctly saying they’re also American, and disagree with the US’s imperialist co-opting of that term to exclude the majority of Americans.
You respond to them by denigrating “arrogant spanish speakers” (Portuguese is the language spoken in Brazil btw), and get banned for a week.
You’re even continuing to do racist rants in this very thread, like this comment of yours below
The Latin Americans complaining about the use of the term “America” to refer to the country of America were the most arrogant, rude arseholes I had come across.
I’m with you on this one Dessalines.
The thread itself is a shitfest that boils down to idiocy on the same level as “is tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” and “ackshyually water is not wet it wets things”. And that includes both your comment and the comment that you’re replying to. Specially the later, as the guy found some weird hill to die on.
Even then, PTB. As typical for lemmy dot ml.
I’ll also address what estefano is saying in another comment in the same thread, as it’s outright misinformation:
In Brazil, we use USians or Statesians
Most people in the territory controlled by Brazil refer to people in the territory controlled by USA as “americanos” (lit. “Americans”). People who call them “estado-unidenses” (lit. “United-Statians”), like I do, are a minority. And people certainly do not call them by anything remotely translatable as “USians” (EUAnos? That sounds awful*) or “Statesians” (estadenses?).
I used the second one on an academic paper and it went through.
You can submit a lot of crap on academic papers and it’ll still go through. Welcome to Latin America. No, even better - welcome to the world in 2025, the institutions supposed to defend science against the Sturgeon’s Law are busier counting money than doing their job.
As such, “they accepted it” is NOT grounds to claim shite.
Ma que djanho.
*EUAnos sounds like “eu ânus” [I anus] for most Portuguese speakers. (It doesn’t for me but it gets really close.)
I’m really disappointed at how it went down, because I was actually at first really enjoying the discussion of linguistics and geography and how they intersect.
I think it really went south once dessalines piped up. Which…shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose.
