I hope he doesn't hear about the Gulf of California. He is not going to understand that the Californias were Mexican and, thus, the Gulf is still named after the fact. He's going to claim some wacky s*it like "the name indicates it belongs to one of our states", "Mexicans are trying to steal California's assets", or something like that.
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Rational National pointed out that the 'Gulf of America' name was actually a joke Colbert made back in 2010 when he was still doing the Colbert Report.
Roughly 2 minutes into this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BtzFxY66F7s
Old article about MSFT donating to Colbert's 'Gulf of America' charity aimed at cleaning up / mitigating oil spills from rigs that broke after Katrina:
We live in the Demented Clowns timeline, honk honk.
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But then they bitch about China and their wrongdoings in the South China Sea
Yeah because a stupid old man wanting to change the name is totally the same as building islands and putting military bases on then
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Which America? South America? North America? How can it be the gulf of the entire continent?
It technically lies between north and south america.
It is a more fitting name than that of the USA.
It is nowhere near South America. The Gulf of Mexico is in North America, touching Mexico, the United States, and Cuba.
The name makes sense because, technically speaking, it is an ocean basin. Most of the basin goes towards Mexican territory; not meaning the touching of the borders but that it covers what would be Mexican territory. It "pushes" or "delves" more towards Mexico. (I hope I'm explaining myself, lol).
It has been called "the Gulf of Mexico" for about five centuries and it made even more sense less than two centuries ago before the United States stole a big chunk of northern Mexican territory.
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Wait until he hears about Mexico not being named America either!
Anyone think he'll want to take over the rest of Mexico and make it part of America?
Between that and telling Canada they should become a state, I wouldn't be surprised if we get some manifest destiny v2 trying to conquer the continent.
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Actual, literal toddlers are really taking over the US, aren't they?
Actual toddlers are less hateful then them. Still stands. Hateful toddlers.
I don't know, but toddlers tend to make more sense...
President Musk will be livid that his suggestion to call it 'Gulf of X' was shot down.
President Musk will get his way and they will make a compromise and call it the Gulf of X-ico.
*Gulf of X-ica
Besides the absurdity of this, who gets to decide the name of a geographical feature?
If this were to actually happen wouldn’t it mean literally nothing? Like maybe officially in the USA it would be referred to by its new name but why would other countries follow? And I get that that the USA does a lot in the Gulf, but from my [very basic] understanding most of it is international waters.
Could legislation be proposed to rename the Atlantic Ocean? And if so wouldn’t that just end up with the USA following strange semantics other countries don’t?
It mostly would.
Hungary renamed an iconic square in Budapest like 10 years ago. Most of the city still calls it Moscow Square.
So, the way a geographical feature gets named, or renamed, is if the rest of the world recognises it as such.
Sometimes a name change of a feature, or the annexation of a region, gets internationally recognised not because everyone agrees to it, but everyone wants to stay on diplomatic good terms.
There's a similar situation going on with the Persian Gulf/Arabic Gulf.
If America doesn't have to adopt the metric system they sure as shit don't have to name everything the same.
Everyone can call geographical features however they like in principle.
There's something similar here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Japan_naming_dispute
Countries can decide internally to call something whatever they want. One example is how not everyone in the world agrees on how many continents there are and uses some different names (like Eurasia). A more relevant case is how most of the world calls the ocean between Japan and Korea the Sea of Japan, whereas Koreans call it the East Sea.
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