Canada should change the name of the country below them to “Bottom Canada”
Honestly can’t believe there’s a few million very smart people in America who have to put up with this. Bridges for Americans worldwide are being burned to the ground and there’s no sign of a new enlightened political age arriving on any horizon. Canadians also don’t seem to understand that this situation is only going to get worse and America can no longer be considered a friend.
Canadians also don’t seem to understand that this situation is only going to get worse and America can no longer be considered a friend.
As a Canadian, I very much understand that this will/can get worse, and not just for the US. The problems of America do not stop at Trump. He is merely the distracting, mercurial figurehead of a dysfunctional government and populist movement.
It is not a matter of friendship --- the average American isn't that different than the average Canadian. Some of my best friends and favoured colleagues are Americans. We can't turn this into Americans v. Canadians. We're all just getting exposed to the same social media cues that feed on fear and despair driven by profit and bad actors which leads to an erosion of trust and goodwill. America may just be a few short years ahead of the rest of us. We need to recognize who/what is driving us apart and fight that.
"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.
I can totally appreciate that there’s really not much of a difference between Americans and Canadians in terms of mindset and habits. What i mean is that if Canadians are going to want to stay as Canadians, then they really are going to have to fight for it.
I've been referring to it as the "United States of Lower Canada" (USLC) since, and calling my American family members "Lower Canadians". They giggle in a kind of resigned way.
The orange narcissist will probably see it as a win and the sane people in the country may finally be embarrassed enough to actually do something about him and his cronies.
As a Canadian, we are mostly just laughing about how childish he is. As a Canadian business owner who has American customers, I’m far more concerned about his temper tantrums relating to trade, however so far they have not impacted my sector.
The difference being that in the movie Idiocracy the President didn't assume he knew everything and was willing to listen to people who knew more than him.
This trolling and misdirection are not in the movie. Also, both are clearly effective, and a discourse that warps economic impact on US midterms voters within identities, reduces the chance of exposing the bad consequences and risks of power-politics. So this is quite well timed, and the outrageous quotient is I think also well calibrated.
Charles Chaplin understood it, so please y'all catch up ASAP.
I always felt that film was lazy in how it presents its premise.
Maybe there's naunces I'm missing because I'm not American, but it made me feel a bit gross in the same way a lot of pop culture around 'chavs' in the UK made me feel a bit gross. I don't think always refraining from punching down is a good rule in comedy, but I struggle to find much comedy in things which are nothing but punching down.
Admittedly it's been a long time since I watched it but isn't the introduction sequence straight-up apologia for the theories behind eugenics? The idea 'what if society got massively more stupid' isn't a bad one for a film but 'the rabbit-like hordes of the stupid outgroup ourbred our elite ingroup to extinction' rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe I'm being unfair to the film because of the fanbase as well. I've always seen it as a mild red flag when someone says it's their favourite comedy, but it's hardly the film's fault it got popular on places like reddit.
Maybe I'm being unfair to the film because of the fanbase as well. I've always seen it as a mild red flag when someone says it's their favourite comedy, but it's hardly the film's fault it got popular on places like reddit.
This is circular reasoning: You don't like the film because of the fanbase which you don't like because they like the film.
There is no "apologia for eugenics" in the intro. You have to actively infer that as a logical consequence ("we need to prevent stupid people from procreating as much") of what is shown ("society becomes stupid when stupid people procreate more than intelligent people"). The reason it is only in the intro and is never revisited is that it is just the setup for the actual movie, not a message in itself (the whole sequence is in fact very dissimilar from the rest of the movie). A more accurate setup would be that we have a culture that selects for primitive behavior and is anti-intellectual, but that isn't as funny as showing Cletus fucking everything that moves.
I think it’s a joke, not an apologia. If one can’t read it as a joke, then that’s on them. It’s a piece of satire forming a work of political and social philosophy, and a middling straight-to-video movie.
I feel like I am not good at anticipating election results, but anyway, the people arguing that the midterms will be a referendum on the economy make sense to me.
Expensive gas and groceries are pretty unpopular. I guess some chunk of people will find a way to wholly blame Biden or whatever.
I guess some chunk of people will find a way to wholly blame Biden or whatever.
Markwayne Mullin, DHS Secretary, just yesterday:
“You have a Biden administration that is failing the American people because they are allowing millions of people to come into this country illegally.”
20 months in to a 48 month term and they're still blaming the last guy, and phrasing it as if the last guy is still actively doing things other than having cancer.
The whole admin is a bunch of clowns. And unfortunately they benefit from a right wing media machine that reinforces the nonsense, and a general media environment that is more than willing to sanewash and downplay.
Dems are certainly less evil and marginally more competent, but they are still an unpopular shit show. Even with trump attacking America left and right and becoming deeply unpopular for it they're only a coin flip to win the senate. Vance is the single most likely person to become the next president.
Polls for the last few decades haven't really been all that accurate or good ("it's 50/50" - worthless).
You also seem to be ignoring all the systematic changes that have been made during Trump 2 in your prediction for such huge wins for the democrats. Things like the final destruction of the Voting Rights Act and the extreme Gerrymandering have gone mostly towards republicans. Also 32% of voters (or more) still don't really see a distinction against Donald Trump and The Almighty. Forgive me but I'm not convinced it'll be the bloodbath you think it's going to be. Democrats might have a minor edge in the house when all is said and done and literally nothing else to show for it.
Gerrymandering can help Republicans in the lower chamber† but it can't help in the Senate where they're most scared. Every voter in Texas gets to decide whether to pick Ken Paxton or James Talarico and perhaps more importantly if they can't stomach voting for somebody with a D next to their name, they can decide they were too busy that day to go vote at all so it's not really their fault.
† But it might not, if you turn five 7/3 R seats and two 9/1 D seats into six 6/4 and one 9/1 you risk a dummymander where too many of "your" voters vote the "wrong" way and you have seven Democrats elected even though you still took almost 50% of the vote in some districts and you drew the maps.
Now the trouble is that voters seem to be imagining that if the Democrats take the Legislature that's the whole ball of wax and it just isn't. If there's a narrow D majority in both parts of Congress you can expect that to stall the stupidest stuff from Trump which was subject to congressional oversight, but the useless "We need bipartisanship" mewling will start almost immediately from people who apparently were 100% fine with party-line Republican decisions or executive override.
Gerrymandering is backfiring on the GOP now. It involves reducing GOP margin in supposed safe districts while concentrating DEM voters in others. But if they get the estimate on GOP voters wrong this ends up creating more DEM districts. And this appears to be happening in some places, including 3 supposed GOP districts in Texas where the DEM candidate is leading.
When it became clear this was happening some gerrymandering attempts were aborted, for example in Indiana.
It’s called dummy-mandering, when you try to create more districts that are less safe with tighter margins, but you get the math wrong or sentiment changes by the time the election comes.
By attacking Iran, Trump fucked up the one thing that the average American voter will never forget, because they are reminded of it every day: the price of gas.
It does feel as though the best chance the US had to fix this in living memory would have been if Biden's response to the "United States v. Trump" verdict had been to immediately execute the Justices who said that's fine.
They're clearly OK with that, so it's not a problem that we can't ask them because they're dead, but the remaining Justices might now want to weigh in on whether it's OK to kill Supreme Court Justices if you're President, and might perhaps be expected to decide that's not OK and the earlier judgement was flawed.
Your preferred response to Trump trying to unilaterally seize power when an election didn't go "the right way" is to have Biden execute Supreme Court justices when a case didn't get decided "the right way"? You think that's better?
It's justice. The only sensible way to respond to "We've decided that your Office is above the Law" is to kill the people who made that decision. Most likely the remaining Justices have you incarcerated for murder, because um, yeah, that "The law doesn't apply to Presidents" decision is clearly a terrible idea as you have now demonstrated.
It's not even that many deaths, Trump's decisions have directly killed far more people than that without them having any say in the matter - He isn't (and never will be) in jail for it because of course these assholes get to do whatever they want and a Democrat will maybe send them a stern letter
The response we saw would be appropriate for toddlers but the Justices aren't toddlers, they're adults, they knew perfectly well what they were doing and so the only way to deliver justice was to ensure their decision has consequences.
Such laws would be useful everywhere. First rule: whatever you decide, it's effective after 6 months. Second rule: you can't change first or second rule.
That's because the Democrats are controlled rather than true opposition. It still makes the party a better option than Republicans often times, in that they won't intentionally (but will sometimes accidentally) break things or start new fires, but they rarely (if ever) try to fix what's broken or put out existing fires.
What we really need is to sweep away the existing party duopoly, particularly by dropping the bullshit and actively harmful first-past-the-post electoral system which effectively mandates it.
Tariffs are very populist and both sides have some amount of support for them, so I don’t see them going away. If anything, the democrats are less libertarian than the republicans (historically, before Trump), so I just don’t see them liberalizing tariffs so much as going back to a more sane Obama-style normal.
The socialist wing of the Democratic Party is even less libertarian than the moderates, and it’s hard to call them controlled.
Tariffs as a concept are fine. They're one of the economic tools available to a nation.
What's particularly damaging about Trump's approach to tariffs is the uncertainty. The targets don't always make a lot of sense. They're done haphazardly through questionable paths, which means they're subject to legal challenges. They're changed on a whim when Trump decides he needs to make a splash, or when someone says something he doesn't like, or when he wants to blow up a negotiation, or whatever.
It all leads to a situation where business owners and investors can't really be sure what the tariff landscape is 6, 12, 18, 24 months into the future. Will the tariffs survive legal challenges? Who will Trump decide to tariff next? Which tariffs might be increased drastically next week?
That is not an environment that fosters investment and business growth.
Moderate, business-oriented Democrats and Republicans would all agree with you, BUT these are a group of people that both sides of the party are railing against so they have basically no influence at this point. Even Obama, people selectively remember him fondly (or not) for his compassion and mild socialism, not for his strong free trade stance.
Yes, but it's also Trump and the GOP self-immolating. November is going to be a historic electoral wipeout.
I expect the next administration will push through some laws limiting this sort of idiocy.
The problem is that the bar is now so low that basically anybody will win, by design.
They'll pass some surface level bullshit to treat symptoms, like how lakes can or cannot be renamed. But they'll fail to address any root, systemic issues that allowed this BS to unfold in the first place, paving the way for the other half of the Uniparty to resume power 4-8 years later.
Swiss democracy is doing just fine, it has frequent changing of power and lack of concentration of it built in much more robustly rather than US' pinky promises and wishful expectations. If only EU would be less pushy in bilateral talks and stop bullying it on internal matters and rather focus on its own rising internal... catastrophe(s) behind the doors.
Plus frequent public votes on actually important matters, the mark of adult smart population. Politicians globally will go out of their way to explain to you why Swiss model is bad for other places, but it boils down to who holds actual decision power and accountability.
They did vote to ban minarets, which was odd. Also, the Swiss are fairly conservative in the classical personal responsibility sense, which makes for good citizen voters. They do this through an aggressive policy of education and assimilation that emphasizes “Swissness.” Dropping Swiss style into other countries might not work out as well.
Make public votes elsewhere and you will see laws like those minarets passing left and right. This is what an actual democracy looks like - majority's opinion prevails, not only topic one likes to see happening.
Folks generally like to feel they are objective, but only to the point when something they don't favor is winning. I am guilty of same behavior, part of human nature I guess but its good to realize one's own fallacies
The swiss system mostly works because the people are disciplined, believe in lots of self responsibility, they actually have militias with mandatory participation (like America's 2nd amendment, but the first clause isn't flavor text), you have to join the volunteer fire brigade, etc... Immigrants who want to become swiss citizens...they do a spot check of your home cleanliness to make sure you are "swiss enough".
Swiss democracy is doing just fine, it has frequent changing of power and lack of concentration of it built in much more robustly rather than US' pinky promises and wishful expectations.
Nothing there of that sort apart from maga-level typical claims 'they have nazi gold' which ain't true but it gives a fuzzy feeling of knowing a bit to some less educated folks.
Its most direct democracy globally having most free citizens (depends on viewpoint but I stand behind this claim firmly), bar none. They just don't need to shout about it all the time like US folks do, they simply just deliver, over 800 years and counting.
That’s just another way of saying “whoever you vote for, the government always gets in” if you limit terminology like that. The rise of the Reform and Brexit party undermines the argument of the Wikipedia page somewhat.
And what systemic problems have they addressed since then? I don't live there, but it seems that NHS is increasingly gutted by capital interests, with no end in sight.
At best, you get an illusion of progress. That's not progress.
As a Canadian I say: please don't apologize; we're actually enjoying this.
The US could retaliate in a lot of other ways that could be much more hurtful to us: higher tariffs, break collaboration treaties, etc. The fact that Trump is "fighting back" with something this lame is just funny. It is like watching a 5 year old throwing a tantrum.
Compare this reaction with dogs. When a rottweiler or Doberman is angry with you, it attacks and hurts you. When a chihuahua or terrier is angry at you, it just makes a lot of noise. Trump's reaction is like a chihuahua, it is not like a rottweiler.
Not sure what’s there to apologize about. Canada can still call it Lake Ontario right? Or I wonder if it matters whether it’s on American soil or not whether international bodies recognize it?
Why not choose to feel patriotic about the decision. It gives us recognition for what we've done with the body of water. Arguably the fact that you feel embarrassed or need to apologize shows the lack of patriotism you feel over the body of water, so I think this new name can help future people feel patriotic over it. There is a lot of power in a name.
That doesn't mean it should not be changed. How the lake existed back then and how it exists now is different so it is more deserving of a name change than other name changes that have happened.
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain
This is my kind of patriotism, personally. I love America. I want America to succeed in the world. And I will call my government out when it is fucking it up.
Renaming Lake Ontario on a whim because Trump is no longer happy with the USMCA trade deal he himself made just a few years ago and the negotiations aren't going well because he keeps making crazy demands is squarely in "fucking it up" territory.
Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Ruben Ray Martinez would love to debate you...except they were US citizens who were executed by masked ICE thugs, so they're unable to speak at the moment.
We are absolutely being taken over by a gang / mafia style organization.
As a Canadian, I have to admit: Trump is very, very talented in manipulating the discourse in the public arena.
Gradually, he is steering away the public discussion from what matters: the Iran War, inflation, the abusive police state created by ICE, the rise of China and weakening of international standing of US... We're making a lot of noise about what doesn't matter: what's the name of a lake.
It is like when I admonish my 4 year old son about something he did and he replies: "Look over there!". I think the name of this trick is "non-sequitur".
And you know the funniest part? It has been working for years and will keep working! Remember the "immigrants eat our cats and dogs"?
This low-level debating is exactly what Neil Postman described in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business", in 1985. The entertainment industry makes everyone stupid.
Gradually, he is steering away the public discussion from what matters: the Iran War, inflation, the abusive police state created by ICE, the rise of China and weakening of international standing of US...
Correction: remember what party was leading before they had to fight a far more popular opposition, before they became the recommended choice of the US, before they tried to import the American culture wars into Canada and before they infamously twiddled their thumbs and did nothing while the Americans were starting to talk of annexation?
Pretty sure lake Ontario was named after the native people who lived on its shores, not after the Canadian province. I suppose, lake Michigan and lake Huron are the same. Perhaps we can name them all lake America.
Lots of countries change the names of things, even countries themselves.. Bombay to Mumbai, Ceylon to Sri Lanka, Turkey to Türkiye etc. Yes, some of those are specific to a name in a particular language and all have precedents rather than being entirely new. However, it is a precedent for governments deciding the names of things.
This, as its just made up, reminds me a lot of political/nationalist renaming of things like roads which is very common in parts of South Asia.
Attempts by political states to attempt to nationalize the vernacular should be ignored and rejected in all cases.
The examples you're citing are less ridiculous than these recent stunts, but still should be considered in terms of their intentions and effects.
What's the motivation for trying to detatch the name of something from its existing understanding and historical context?
Why should the attempts to "rebrand" an entire country or geographical feature made by a government -- a particular instituion within society, usually under the control of one narrow faction in opposition to others -- be respected by the whole of society within that country, let alone by people in foreign countries speaking a different language?
Why should, for example, the Turkish government -- which operates in the Turkish language, where "Türkiye" already was the standard name of their country -- be respected in its attempt to get English speakers to write the country's name in orthography that is not readily pronounceable by English speakers, and using characters that aren't standard on our keyboard layouts?
However, it is a precedent for governments deciding the names of things.
??? that's not true at all
reminds me a lot of political/nationalist renaming of things like roads which is very common in parts of South Asia
Isn't that very common in... Canada?
Ottawa, Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway -> Kichi Zībī Mīkan (2023)
Winnipeg, Bishop Grandin Boulevard -> Abinojii Mikanah (2023–24)
Halifax, Cornwallis Street -> Nora Bernard Street (2023)
Montreal, Rue Amherst -> Rue Atateken (2019)
Vancouver, Trutch Street -> šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street (2025)
Victoria, Trutch Street -> Su'it Street (2022)
Calgary, Langevin Bridge -> Reconciliation Bridge (2017)
It's not like the current US admin is the first in North America to decide to rename things for political reasons.
I have lived in South Asia and have never been to Canada and know little about it.
Are the Canadian examples nationalist? It looks like your first example was first renamed after a politician (which is like South Asia) and then renamed again after a pushback to that (which is not like South Asia)
Attempts to rename a body of water that is shared by two countries with the name of one of the countries, unilaterally, is 1) impolite, 2) pretty rare, and 3) completely ineffective and just makes you look weak.
I feel like instances of this kind of decision (also from your examples) fall into two groups: replacing names from colonization with local names, and... Second group name left as an exercise to the reader.
There is less difference than you imply. It is nationalists who are keenest on replacing colonial names. Not all name changes are of colonial names either.
What about when the locals are perfectly happy with the colonial name and politicians (maybe distant from the place) want to change it?
I read elsewhere that Map Quest refused to use "Lake America". I was pleased to find, pretty much on the other wide of the world, their maps also still use the name "Duplication Road" after many decades.
Not sure it's really valid to call this "official". Trump can issue an executive order to the USGS to change names in the GNIS, but the use of USGS/GNIS data as the "official" name of things outside of the federal executive's own activities is itself just a matter of convention.
It seems that there are 363,123 `official_name:` tags in OSM [1], and the discussion thread hints that at least some* of them are due to naming disputes. Given (according to the thread) no-one actually renders the tag on their maps, using that tag in this case seems like a good policy.
He should've renamed New Mexico to New America. I read a while back the state name causes confusion amongst those who think it's part of Mexico.
And while he's at it, Georgia could become Trumpia to avoid confusion with the nation of the same name. (Why even do you have a state named after the granddad of the king you fought off?)
But I guess those might accidentally be useful, so of course he's not going to do them. :P
North Korea has all sort of nasty names ready to throw at America, South Korea, or others, though at least I think they're just name-calling, not considering them as "official" names. (So, in a twisted sense, even North Korea is more adult-like than Trump. I guess that's another cause of celebration for some HN commenters who look up to Trump for being the manly leader who boldly does the right thing that nobody else dares to do.)
Thankfully, North Korea's antics doesn't matter, because nobody is trying to sell map service to North Koreans anyway.
I am Italian, and we get quite pissed when the government issues executive orders (the head of state can't do it), although it happens relatively often. I live in France, and when the president resorted to using them it felt like he was threatening democracy.
The US mechanism seems the strongest of the three, and people have considered this a normal thing in a democracy long enough for this to happen.
Executive Orders really aren't that powerful. They can only command the executive branch to do something and are not legislature at all. Trump is certainly proving you can get pretty creative with enforcement to enact terror though, I'd agree to that.
This also creates these weird situations where the courts (or the Supreme Court, at least) says "Well the executive order is just an order, and federal agencies will actually have to implement it, and until we see the specific implementation, gosh, we can't evaluate whether the order is to do an illegal thing, even though it's pretty clear that illegal things will be necessary to implement the order. Maybe they'll find a legal way to do it, who knows? We certainly don't!"
Half the members of the legislature act like Trump is a king and believe that his Executive Orders are the same as laws signed by themselves. They've said as much on national television.
This feels like the right-wing equivalent of pronoun policing lol. Crazy how the extremes of the political spectrum are so close to each other (like a horseshoe), yet hate each other so much. Doesn't seem like the polarization is near to ratcheting down though, at least not by judging from the comments in this thread.
This feels like the right-wing equivalent of pronoun policing lol.
Nothing about it feels "right-wing" at all -- actual conservatism is all about maintaining continuity and avoiding forced changes to traditional conventions and established social norms.
Trump and his followers are a competing faction of the extreme left, as should be readily evidenced by his economic policies, and it's not at all surprising that he shares the same mentality of inserting political shibboleths into mundane aspects of everyday life.
This is an improvement on starting a war on oil markets and getting I've-lost-count-how-many innocents killed in the Middle East. So in many ways this could be considered a step up for US foreign policy. If Trump can stick to low-stakes pettiness that would be a real win for us all.
Comments
Canada should change the name of the country below them to “Bottom Canada”
Honestly can’t believe there’s a few million very smart people in America who have to put up with this. Bridges for Americans worldwide are being burned to the ground and there’s no sign of a new enlightened political age arriving on any horizon. Canadians also don’t seem to understand that this situation is only going to get worse and America can no longer be considered a friend.
As a Canadian, I very much understand that this will/can get worse, and not just for the US. The problems of America do not stop at Trump. He is merely the distracting, mercurial figurehead of a dysfunctional government and populist movement.
It is not a matter of friendship --- the average American isn't that different than the average Canadian. Some of my best friends and favoured colleagues are Americans. We can't turn this into Americans v. Canadians. We're all just getting exposed to the same social media cues that feed on fear and despair driven by profit and bad actors which leads to an erosion of trust and goodwill. America may just be a few short years ahead of the rest of us. We need to recognize who/what is driving us apart and fight that.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-june-17-2...
I can totally appreciate that there’s really not much of a difference between Americans and Canadians in terms of mindset and habits. What i mean is that if Canadians are going to want to stay as Canadians, then they really are going to have to fight for it.
I've been referring to it as the "United States of Lower Canada" (USLC) since, and calling my American family members "Lower Canadians". They giggle in a kind of resigned way.
North Cuba yearns for freedom and democracy.
It will likely improve when the Russian asset departs, maybe even after the mid terms.
I propose we change it to "Trumpistan".
The orange narcissist will probably see it as a win and the sane people in the country may finally be embarrassed enough to actually do something about him and his cronies.
I apologize to my Canadian friends. This is embarrassing.
As a Canadian, we are mostly just laughing about how childish he is. As a Canadian business owner who has American customers, I’m far more concerned about his temper tantrums relating to trade, however so far they have not impacted my sector.
As an USAmerican I am laughing as well.
(Laughing and crying.)
Mostly crying.
This is Idiocracy the movie IRL. I can't wait for plants to need electrolytes.
The difference being that in the movie Idiocracy the President didn't assume he knew everything and was willing to listen to people who knew more than him.
Jesus, please do not remind me that the President in Idiocracy had better leadership skills than our actual President.
Putting a UFC fighting cage on the lawn of the White House was another acceleration in that direction I didn’t imagine I’d live to see.
No, I'd much rather have Idiocracy than the orange buffoon we actually have in office.
In the meantime, might I interest you in some protein water?
I disagree.
This trolling and misdirection are not in the movie. Also, both are clearly effective, and a discourse that warps economic impact on US midterms voters within identities, reduces the chance of exposing the bad consequences and risks of power-politics. So this is quite well timed, and the outrageous quotient is I think also well calibrated.
Charles Chaplin understood it, so please y'all catch up ASAP.
I always felt that film was lazy in how it presents its premise.
Maybe there's naunces I'm missing because I'm not American, but it made me feel a bit gross in the same way a lot of pop culture around 'chavs' in the UK made me feel a bit gross. I don't think always refraining from punching down is a good rule in comedy, but I struggle to find much comedy in things which are nothing but punching down.
Idiocracy is more like a work of Baudrillardian philosophy though, it isn’t punching down, it’s extrapolating upwards.
Admittedly it's been a long time since I watched it but isn't the introduction sequence straight-up apologia for the theories behind eugenics? The idea 'what if society got massively more stupid' isn't a bad one for a film but 'the rabbit-like hordes of the stupid outgroup ourbred our elite ingroup to extinction' rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe I'm being unfair to the film because of the fanbase as well. I've always seen it as a mild red flag when someone says it's their favourite comedy, but it's hardly the film's fault it got popular on places like reddit.
This is circular reasoning: You don't like the film because of the fanbase which you don't like because they like the film.
There is no "apologia for eugenics" in the intro. You have to actively infer that as a logical consequence ("we need to prevent stupid people from procreating as much") of what is shown ("society becomes stupid when stupid people procreate more than intelligent people"). The reason it is only in the intro and is never revisited is that it is just the setup for the actual movie, not a message in itself (the whole sequence is in fact very dissimilar from the rest of the movie). A more accurate setup would be that we have a culture that selects for primitive behavior and is anti-intellectual, but that isn't as funny as showing Cletus fucking everything that moves.
I think it’s a joke, not an apologia. If one can’t read it as a joke, then that’s on them. It’s a piece of satire forming a work of political and social philosophy, and a middling straight-to-video movie.
You're reading into it too much. It's more likely they needed a comical backstory, and Flagpole Sitta was playing on the radio.
Yes, but it's also Trump and the GOP self-immolating. November is going to be a historic electoral wipeout.
I expect the next administration will push through some laws limiting this sort of idiocy.
So you have faith in the average American voter? (Or at least a plurality of them?)
I feel like I am not good at anticipating election results, but anyway, the people arguing that the midterms will be a referendum on the economy make sense to me.
Expensive gas and groceries are pretty unpopular. I guess some chunk of people will find a way to wholly blame Biden or whatever.
Markwayne Mullin, DHS Secretary, just yesterday:
“You have a Biden administration that is failing the American people because they are allowing millions of people to come into this country illegally.”
20 months in to a 48 month term and they're still blaming the last guy, and phrasing it as if the last guy is still actively doing things other than having cancer.
The whole admin is a bunch of clowns. And unfortunately they benefit from a right wing media machine that reinforces the nonsense, and a general media environment that is more than willing to sanewash and downplay.
A new dimension of doublethinking insanity if they’re having to hold and express that kind of thought in the present tense.
The polls are increasingly dire for the GOP. They're even losing the military vote.
Dems are certainly less evil and marginally more competent, but they are still an unpopular shit show. Even with trump attacking America left and right and becoming deeply unpopular for it they're only a coin flip to win the senate. Vance is the single most likely person to become the next president.
As awful as it is, this is what America is now.
Polls for the last few decades haven't really been all that accurate or good ("it's 50/50" - worthless).
You also seem to be ignoring all the systematic changes that have been made during Trump 2 in your prediction for such huge wins for the democrats. Things like the final destruction of the Voting Rights Act and the extreme Gerrymandering have gone mostly towards republicans. Also 32% of voters (or more) still don't really see a distinction against Donald Trump and The Almighty. Forgive me but I'm not convinced it'll be the bloodbath you think it's going to be. Democrats might have a minor edge in the house when all is said and done and literally nothing else to show for it.
Gerrymandering can help Republicans in the lower chamber† but it can't help in the Senate where they're most scared. Every voter in Texas gets to decide whether to pick Ken Paxton or James Talarico and perhaps more importantly if they can't stomach voting for somebody with a D next to their name, they can decide they were too busy that day to go vote at all so it's not really their fault.
† But it might not, if you turn five 7/3 R seats and two 9/1 D seats into six 6/4 and one 9/1 you risk a dummymander where too many of "your" voters vote the "wrong" way and you have seven Democrats elected even though you still took almost 50% of the vote in some districts and you drew the maps.
Now the trouble is that voters seem to be imagining that if the Democrats take the Legislature that's the whole ball of wax and it just isn't. If there's a narrow D majority in both parts of Congress you can expect that to stall the stupidest stuff from Trump which was subject to congressional oversight, but the useless "We need bipartisanship" mewling will start almost immediately from people who apparently were 100% fine with party-line Republican decisions or executive override.
Gerrymandering is backfiring on the GOP now. It involves reducing GOP margin in supposed safe districts while concentrating DEM voters in others. But if they get the estimate on GOP voters wrong this ends up creating more DEM districts. And this appears to be happening in some places, including 3 supposed GOP districts in Texas where the DEM candidate is leading.
When it became clear this was happening some gerrymandering attempts were aborted, for example in Indiana.
It’s called dummy-mandering, when you try to create more districts that are less safe with tighter margins, but you get the math wrong or sentiment changes by the time the election comes.
By attacking Iran, Trump fucked up the one thing that the average American voter will never forget, because they are reminded of it every day: the price of gas.
The midterms won't look pretty for him.
I hope you're right, but forgive me if I don't party yet. I thought the same thing two years ago.
"In a 5-4 decision..."
It does feel as though the best chance the US had to fix this in living memory would have been if Biden's response to the "United States v. Trump" verdict had been to immediately execute the Justices who said that's fine.
They're clearly OK with that, so it's not a problem that we can't ask them because they're dead, but the remaining Justices might now want to weigh in on whether it's OK to kill Supreme Court Justices if you're President, and might perhaps be expected to decide that's not OK and the earlier judgement was flawed.
Your preferred response to Trump trying to unilaterally seize power when an election didn't go "the right way" is to have Biden execute Supreme Court justices when a case didn't get decided "the right way"? You think that's better?
It's justice. The only sensible way to respond to "We've decided that your Office is above the Law" is to kill the people who made that decision. Most likely the remaining Justices have you incarcerated for murder, because um, yeah, that "The law doesn't apply to Presidents" decision is clearly a terrible idea as you have now demonstrated.
It's not even that many deaths, Trump's decisions have directly killed far more people than that without them having any say in the matter - He isn't (and never will be) in jail for it because of course these assholes get to do whatever they want and a Democrat will maybe send them a stern letter
The response we saw would be appropriate for toddlers but the Justices aren't toddlers, they're adults, they knew perfectly well what they were doing and so the only way to deliver justice was to ensure their decision has consequences.
Unfortunately November is going to be a historic voter supression event like nothing ever seen before.
Such laws would be useful everywhere. First rule: whatever you decide, it's effective after 6 months. Second rule: you can't change first or second rule.
Gavin Newsom has indicated he won't remove all the tariffs if he becomes president in 2028, so some of the idiocy will continue.
That's because the Democrats are controlled rather than true opposition. It still makes the party a better option than Republicans often times, in that they won't intentionally (but will sometimes accidentally) break things or start new fires, but they rarely (if ever) try to fix what's broken or put out existing fires.
What we really need is to sweep away the existing party duopoly, particularly by dropping the bullshit and actively harmful first-past-the-post electoral system which effectively mandates it.
Tariffs are very populist and both sides have some amount of support for them, so I don’t see them going away. If anything, the democrats are less libertarian than the republicans (historically, before Trump), so I just don’t see them liberalizing tariffs so much as going back to a more sane Obama-style normal.
The socialist wing of the Democratic Party is even less libertarian than the moderates, and it’s hard to call them controlled.
Tariffs as a concept are fine. They're one of the economic tools available to a nation.
What's particularly damaging about Trump's approach to tariffs is the uncertainty. The targets don't always make a lot of sense. They're done haphazardly through questionable paths, which means they're subject to legal challenges. They're changed on a whim when Trump decides he needs to make a splash, or when someone says something he doesn't like, or when he wants to blow up a negotiation, or whatever.
It all leads to a situation where business owners and investors can't really be sure what the tariff landscape is 6, 12, 18, 24 months into the future. Will the tariffs survive legal challenges? Who will Trump decide to tariff next? Which tariffs might be increased drastically next week?
That is not an environment that fosters investment and business growth.
Moderate, business-oriented Democrats and Republicans would all agree with you, BUT these are a group of people that both sides of the party are railing against so they have basically no influence at this point. Even Obama, people selectively remember him fondly (or not) for his compassion and mild socialism, not for his strong free trade stance.
The problem is that the bar is now so low that basically anybody will win, by design.
They'll pass some surface level bullshit to treat symptoms, like how lakes can or cannot be renamed. But they'll fail to address any root, systemic issues that allowed this BS to unfold in the first place, paving the way for the other half of the Uniparty to resume power 4-8 years later.
Democracy is illusory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
*American Democracy
Not according to the link above, and the growing array of solvable yet perpetually unsolved problems in other countries.
Swiss democracy is doing just fine, it has frequent changing of power and lack of concentration of it built in much more robustly rather than US' pinky promises and wishful expectations. If only EU would be less pushy in bilateral talks and stop bullying it on internal matters and rather focus on its own rising internal... catastrophe(s) behind the doors.
Plus frequent public votes on actually important matters, the mark of adult smart population. Politicians globally will go out of their way to explain to you why Swiss model is bad for other places, but it boils down to who holds actual decision power and accountability.
They did vote to ban minarets, which was odd. Also, the Swiss are fairly conservative in the classical personal responsibility sense, which makes for good citizen voters. They do this through an aggressive policy of education and assimilation that emphasizes “Swissness.” Dropping Swiss style into other countries might not work out as well.
Make public votes elsewhere and you will see laws like those minarets passing left and right. This is what an actual democracy looks like - majority's opinion prevails, not only topic one likes to see happening.
Folks generally like to feel they are objective, but only to the point when something they don't favor is winning. I am guilty of same behavior, part of human nature I guess but its good to realize one's own fallacies
The swiss system mostly works because the people are disciplined, believe in lots of self responsibility, they actually have militias with mandatory participation (like America's 2nd amendment, but the first clause isn't flavor text), you have to join the volunteer fire brigade, etc... Immigrants who want to become swiss citizens...they do a spot check of your home cleanliness to make sure you are "swiss enough".
Recent rebuttals to the Swiss model:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451032
Nothing there of that sort apart from maga-level typical claims 'they have nazi gold' which ain't true but it gives a fuzzy feeling of knowing a bit to some less educated folks.
Its most direct democracy globally having most free citizens (depends on viewpoint but I stand behind this claim firmly), bar none. They just don't need to shout about it all the time like US folks do, they simply just deliver, over 800 years and counting.
There were more important points made there than "nazi gold"
That’s just another way of saying “whoever you vote for, the government always gets in” if you limit terminology like that. The rise of the Reform and Brexit party undermines the argument of the Wikipedia page somewhat.
And what systemic problems have they addressed since then? I don't live there, but it seems that NHS is increasingly gutted by capital interests, with no end in sight.
At best, you get an illusion of progress. That's not progress.
Very different questions to the one I was answering.
As a Canadian I say: please don't apologize; we're actually enjoying this.
The US could retaliate in a lot of other ways that could be much more hurtful to us: higher tariffs, break collaboration treaties, etc. The fact that Trump is "fighting back" with something this lame is just funny. It is like watching a 5 year old throwing a tantrum.
Compare this reaction with dogs. When a rottweiler or Doberman is angry with you, it attacks and hurts you. When a chihuahua or terrier is angry at you, it just makes a lot of noise. Trump's reaction is like a chihuahua, it is not like a rottweiler.
We’ll never trust the US again, unfortunately.
Not sure what’s there to apologize about. Canada can still call it Lake Ontario right? Or I wonder if it matters whether it’s on American soil or not whether international bodies recognize it?
It's a transparently disrespectful move. Apologizing for disrespectful behaviour is pretty normal.
Why not choose to feel patriotic about the decision. It gives us recognition for what we've done with the body of water. Arguably the fact that you feel embarrassed or need to apologize shows the lack of patriotism you feel over the body of water, so I think this new name can help future people feel patriotic over it. There is a lot of power in a name.
The name is older than the US or Canada.
That doesn't mean it should not be changed. How the lake existed back then and how it exists now is different so it is more deserving of a name change than other name changes that have happened.
It's much better reasoning than the petulant tantrums of a mental infant.
As Oscar Wilde didn't say: "Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious": https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/06/28/patriot/
How do you have pride when the leader of your tribe is a liar, swindler, rapist, thug?
What a simplistic mind that says unthinkingly "Well the leader of my country wants it, I'm not going to question him, rah rah!"
I have pride because America is the best country on Earth composed of the best people on Earth.
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain
This is my kind of patriotism, personally. I love America. I want America to succeed in the world. And I will call my government out when it is fucking it up.
Renaming Lake Ontario on a whim because Trump is no longer happy with the USMCA trade deal he himself made just a few years ago and the negotiations aren't going well because he keeps making crazy demands is squarely in "fucking it up" territory.
/r/shitamericanssay
You'll salute a lake but allow masked thugs to execute citizens in the middle of the street. "Patriotism" really is a hollow concept in America, huh?
America does not tolerate masked thugs executing citizens. We aren't like South America who lets gangs take over territory within the country.
Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Ruben Ray Martinez would love to debate you...except they were US citizens who were executed by masked ICE thugs, so they're unable to speak at the moment.
We are absolutely being taken over by a gang / mafia style organization.
As a Canadian, I have to admit: Trump is very, very talented in manipulating the discourse in the public arena.
Gradually, he is steering away the public discussion from what matters: the Iran War, inflation, the abusive police state created by ICE, the rise of China and weakening of international standing of US... We're making a lot of noise about what doesn't matter: what's the name of a lake.
It is like when I admonish my 4 year old son about something he did and he replies: "Look over there!". I think the name of this trick is "non-sequitur".
And you know the funniest part? It has been working for years and will keep working! Remember the "immigrants eat our cats and dogs"?
This low-level debating is exactly what Neil Postman described in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business", in 1985. The entertainment industry makes everyone stupid.
The Epstein Files.
On Canadians too. Remember what party was leading the polls before Trump started mean tweets?
Correction: remember what party was leading before they had to fight a far more popular opposition, before they became the recommended choice of the US, before they tried to import the American culture wars into Canada and before they infamously twiddled their thumbs and did nothing while the Americans were starting to talk of annexation?
Pretty sure lake Ontario was named after the native people who lived on its shores, not after the Canadian province. I suppose, lake Michigan and lake Huron are the same. Perhaps we can name them all lake America.
It comes from a Iroquoian word meaning "great lake."
And yeah, the name predates the Canadian province.
The United Lakes of America
Actually for "lake Michigan and lake Huron" I am pushing for Canada to rename it to: "Greater Lake of Obama Nobel Prize" :)
Lots of countries change the names of things, even countries themselves.. Bombay to Mumbai, Ceylon to Sri Lanka, Turkey to Türkiye etc. Yes, some of those are specific to a name in a particular language and all have precedents rather than being entirely new. However, it is a precedent for governments deciding the names of things.
This, as its just made up, reminds me a lot of political/nationalist renaming of things like roads which is very common in parts of South Asia.
Attempts by political states to attempt to nationalize the vernacular should be ignored and rejected in all cases.
The examples you're citing are less ridiculous than these recent stunts, but still should be considered in terms of their intentions and effects.
What's the motivation for trying to detatch the name of something from its existing understanding and historical context?
Why should the attempts to "rebrand" an entire country or geographical feature made by a government -- a particular instituion within society, usually under the control of one narrow faction in opposition to others -- be respected by the whole of society within that country, let alone by people in foreign countries speaking a different language?
Why should, for example, the Turkish government -- which operates in the Turkish language, where "Türkiye" already was the standard name of their country -- be respected in its attempt to get English speakers to write the country's name in orthography that is not readily pronounceable by English speakers, and using characters that aren't standard on our keyboard layouts?
??? that's not true at all
Isn't that very common in... Canada?
It's not like the current US admin is the first in North America to decide to rename things for political reasons.I have lived in South Asia and have never been to Canada and know little about it.
Are the Canadian examples nationalist? It looks like your first example was first renamed after a politician (which is like South Asia) and then renamed again after a pushback to that (which is not like South Asia)
Another HN thread made be look up a place name to find out where it was. This is somewhere I have actually been to!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533216
Attempts to rename a body of water that is shared by two countries with the name of one of the countries, unilaterally, is 1) impolite, 2) pretty rare, and 3) completely ineffective and just makes you look weak.
I feel like instances of this kind of decision (also from your examples) fall into two groups: replacing names from colonization with local names, and... Second group name left as an exercise to the reader.
There is less difference than you imply. It is nationalists who are keenest on replacing colonial names. Not all name changes are of colonial names either.
What about when the locals are perfectly happy with the colonial name and politicians (maybe distant from the place) want to change it?
I read elsewhere that Map Quest refused to use "Lake America". I was pleased to find, pretty much on the other wide of the world, their maps also still use the name "Duplication Road" after many decades.
Worse than made up, it's the sort of thing an angry 6 year old would come up with.
Totally unserious behavior, and it's ridiculous that Americans and the rest of the world have to put up with this nonsense.
A small number of Republican representatives and senators could end it all today by publicly supporting impeachment.
See: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1206310
name:en=Lake Ontario
vs.
official_name:en-US=Lake America
Not sure it's really valid to call this "official". Trump can issue an executive order to the USGS to change names in the GNIS, but the use of USGS/GNIS data as the "official" name of things outside of the federal executive's own activities is itself just a matter of convention.
Makes me wonder, has North Korea or Iran made an equivalent declaration about naming the USA "사탄의 겨드랑이" or "زیر بغل شیطان"?
(Google Translate from "Satan's armpit").
I mean, if temper tantrums by the supreme executive are allowed and all.
It seems that there are 363,123 `official_name:` tags in OSM [1], and the discussion thread hints that at least some* of them are due to naming disputes. Given (according to the thread) no-one actually renders the tag on their maps, using that tag in this case seems like a good policy.
[1]: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/official_name#overvie...
Or a future president renaming Mar-a-lago as Epstein's Resort... this opens the door to all kinds of petty behavior.
He should've renamed New Mexico to New America. I read a while back the state name causes confusion amongst those who think it's part of Mexico.
And while he's at it, Georgia could become Trumpia to avoid confusion with the nation of the same name. (Why even do you have a state named after the granddad of the king you fought off?)
But I guess those might accidentally be useful, so of course he's not going to do them. :P
North Korea has all sort of nasty names ready to throw at America, South Korea, or others, though at least I think they're just name-calling, not considering them as "official" names. (So, in a twisted sense, even North Korea is more adult-like than Trump. I guess that's another cause of celebration for some HN commenters who look up to Trump for being the manly leader who boldly does the right thing that nobody else dares to do.)
Thankfully, North Korea's antics doesn't matter, because nobody is trying to sell map service to North Koreans anyway.
I am Italian, and we get quite pissed when the government issues executive orders (the head of state can't do it), although it happens relatively often. I live in France, and when the president resorted to using them it felt like he was threatening democracy.
The US mechanism seems the strongest of the three, and people have considered this a normal thing in a democracy long enough for this to happen.
Executive Orders really aren't that powerful. They can only command the executive branch to do something and are not legislature at all. Trump is certainly proving you can get pretty creative with enforcement to enact terror though, I'd agree to that.
This also creates these weird situations where the courts (or the Supreme Court, at least) says "Well the executive order is just an order, and federal agencies will actually have to implement it, and until we see the specific implementation, gosh, we can't evaluate whether the order is to do an illegal thing, even though it's pretty clear that illegal things will be necessary to implement the order. Maybe they'll find a legal way to do it, who knows? We certainly don't!"
Clown court.
Half the members of the legislature act like Trump is a king and believe that his Executive Orders are the same as laws signed by themselves. They've said as much on national television.
Simple policy (Apple, Google, etc, can adopt):
Changes to major landmarks require a 5-year grace period (wait 5 years).
How much till Planet America?
This feels like the right-wing equivalent of pronoun policing lol. Crazy how the extremes of the political spectrum are so close to each other (like a horseshoe), yet hate each other so much. Doesn't seem like the polarization is near to ratcheting down though, at least not by judging from the comments in this thread.
Nothing about it feels "right-wing" at all -- actual conservatism is all about maintaining continuity and avoiding forced changes to traditional conventions and established social norms.
Trump and his followers are a competing faction of the extreme left, as should be readily evidenced by his economic policies, and it's not at all surprising that he shares the same mentality of inserting political shibboleths into mundane aspects of everyday life.
“If you can be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think.”
This is an improvement on starting a war on oil markets and getting I've-lost-count-how-many innocents killed in the Middle East. So in many ways this could be considered a step up for US foreign policy. If Trump can stick to low-stakes pettiness that would be a real win for us all.
What high stakes stuff stopped when he did this, specifically?
He's doing this as well as all the wars.
The clown show will continue until geopolitical goals are achieved.
We shall now know it as Lake Epstein
It has become painfully evident that he has fairly advanced dementia.