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Comment by dataflow

2 months ago

Anyone else worried that the next president (even Democrat, if they manage to get one) may well let some of the name changes be?

I worry that the next president isn’t going to lead a charge to codify limits on the power of the presidency, that zero real lessons will be learned and we’ll continue to arrange vast swathes of the system to rely on the good faith of a single person.

The name change isn’t the problem. The problem is that it was even possible in the first place by just the whim of one person.

They're not going to change a damn thing. I saw an interview with Newsom who was asked exactly that and he dodged answering.

  • Note that that might just be because he doesn't want to say something that might lose supporters, not because he would actually do nothing. (I'm not saying he would definitely do something, just that what he does or doesn't say about it right now doesn't indicate much.)

A buddy and I have been joking about when there will be a Western American Ocean and an Eastern American Ocean.

My friends and I are just going to refer to it as Lake Epstein until/unless the executive order is undone. I mean, Trump isn't the only one that can unilaterally change the names of things and in the end, what matters isn't what the government says the name should be but what people actually call it.

Hopefully Mount McKinley will stay. It was named that in 1896 and held that name until Obama decided to make a political statement.

  • Alaskans actually prefer Denali, even the republicans didn’t want the name changed back again. The state of Alaska itself officially adopted Denali as the official name in 1975, long before Obama made the political statement you are hallucinating. This is just Trump making a statement pretending that Obama was being woke rather than requesting something the Alaskans requested on their own.