Yeah it's meaningless to fight. Except not really. If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario across the board, and use the difference to find who is or isn't on my side on that issue.

The only people calling it Gulf of America or Lake America are hardcore MAGATs in my social circle. Even former Trump voters in my social circle are annoyed and not using the new names. So it's an effective way to figure out who is or isn't going along with the Administration today.

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xp84 an hour ago | parent [-]

> If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario

This is the same logic that the right wing used when they disagreed with Obama on some issues, so they blocked his Supreme Court nominations just because anything Obama does must be bad.

Sounds like your social circle is in denial. There are certainly plenty of things Trump, buffoon and graft-a-holic he is, has done that are corrupt. Renaming bodies of water doesn't look like one of them. (Obviously, because he would have renamed it after a donor, or at least after himself.)

I mean, sure, we can all call anything whatever. I can call New Mexico "Best Mexico" or call Washington, DC "Bad Washington" and that's my right. But pretending that there aren't official names for things because we don't like the current guy seems immature. It's clearly within the authority of the government. Talk like this makes me think that people want to just live in a reality defined exclusively by party politics where we just pretend every law or policy made by The Bad Party doesn't exist, rather than try to win elections so we can shape the one actual reality.

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dragontamer 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

The President doesn't have an ability to officially change the names of these locations.

They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.

So all this hand wringing about official names or whatever ignores the reality of the situation. This is just another temper tantrum by Trump that we reasonable people can ignore.

The easiest way to do that is to just say Gulf of Mexico.

	▲	xp84 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change. Is it Congress who officially holds that power, then? And are you saying that if Congressional Republicans passed a bill renaming whatever, and Trump signed it, you'd then acknowlege it? Given how vanishingly little they accomplish in Congress already, I'm not sure we'd be better off distracting them from their semiannual debt ceiling/budget hostage situation in order to debate these inconsequential things.