[kylehotchkiss]

I think there's a habit amongst people who didn't vote for trump to catastrophize his every move, which helps him by distracting people from maybe the more consequential decisions he makes. Interestingly he didn't name it the Gulf of USA, the Gulf of the United States, the Gulf of Florida or The Gulf of Freedom and Bald Eagles, but after the continent itself, which Mexico is in fact a part of.

What's the expression... "don't take the bait"? There are far worse things happening in the White House for people on both sides of the aisle right now.

[xp84]

Yes, it seems that the #1 lesson he learned from his first term wasn't that you have to have appoint only intense loyalists who will never turn on you, but rather that flooding the channel helps tremendously to cause the important things to blow over more quickly. And the American Left, with their tendency to explode over anything mildly 'offensive,' is absolutely the perfect target for this trolling, since they can be easily trolled with things like this that have zero significance, and are free and legal to do. So that his opponents spend about 90% of their energy fighting the 90% of things that don't matter.

[thepasswordis]

Gulf of America just makes more sense. Calling this the "Gulf of Mexico" would be like calling The Black Sea "The Gulf of Turkey".

[rat87]

Gulf of Mexico is what it has been called so it makes no sense to rename it. Names often dont make sense plus spain and later mexico used to control more territory along the Gulf coatline. Unless you want to piss of one of our most important allies for no reason

[kylehotchkiss]

I agree, the coastline is mostly shared between the two.

Since you brought up Turkey, they renamed themselves recently. Practically a lot of people just can't keep up every countries nuances and just use the old names. It's fine. It seems like a lot of people still use Bombay over Mumbai too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[thepasswordis]

A funny thing: I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Mumbai, and there definitely seems to be a significant number of native residents who still call it Bombay. It was to the point where we briefly wondered if this was referring to two different parts of the same city (south of the Sea Link bridge is Bombay, the rest is Mumbai, maybe).

Names are complicated! Germany/Deutschland, Holland/The Netherlands etc.

Interesting that Wikipedia keeps “Turkey”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey

They also keep Gulf of Mexico.

As a programmer: localization is a PITA.

[kylehotchkiss]

Indian government tried giving things 'post-colonial' names but not all of them stuck equally. I do think Bengaluru is a slightly cooler name than Bangalore though!

[BuyMyBitcoins]

I just want Istanbul to go back to being called Constantinople.

[appleorchard46]

Why did it get the works, anyway?

[bee_rider]

There isn’t a continent called America. It could have been called the Gulf of North America if we wanted to go that way.

I think we can acknowledge that this is just kind of stupid and rude but mostly petty without catastrophizing about the whole thing.

Meanwhile people will actually keep calling it whatever they want. Let’s switch it back and forth every time the White House changes teams, the minor confusion will remind us that the US government is only changing what it calls things. The actual name comes from what the majority of people call it.