Hacker News Reader

Comment by profmonocle | Hacker News Reader

Does this actually cause any meaningful confusion?

In English there isn't a singular place called "America". As you mention, there's North/South/Cebtral, and together they're referred to as "the Americas". When someone refers simply "America" with no other qualifier, it's clear what they mean.

(Of course in Spanish "America" refers to the whole thing because North and South America aren't considered separate continents. But they have a different demonym for the US in Spanish)

View on HN

The issue is that “the US is not America” is a very well known refrain and this was clearly a deliberate action. Confusion or not, they don’t care. It’s culture war 101 behavior.

If the name wasn’t a big deal they wouldn’t have named it “America.” It’s also hard to give any benefit of the doubt when this admin is so aggressive about changing the names of everything possible to include “Trump” and “America.” It’s clearly a deliberate tactic.

The federal renamings of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario are absolutely dumb culture war moves.

But referring to the US simply as "America" domestically isn't - politicians across the political spectrum do that. If a democratic administration had launched a chatbot, I would be unsurprised to see it called America.gov

If a democrat president had done it I would have the exact same critique, I don’t really care who does it. Though if we’re going to speculate, I would speculate that a Democrat administration would know better and would strike that from the list of possible names. The main difference though is that they would get the benefit of the doubt if they don’t spend so much time doing vanity-related renames. The context matters here. This administration should not ever be extended any assumption of good faith. They are incredibly calculated with these kinds of decisions. Culture war tactics were a huge part of what got them the presidency in the first place

Reply on news.ycombinator.com