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Comment by jasonjayr | Hacker News Reader

It's a loyalty test. And he's given his supporters permission to classify anyone who doesn't follow along as 'the enemy' aka 'the other'. It's a shortcut so his supporters know they don't have to give any credence to anything else they say, since now they assign all the other labels and insults he's hurled at 'his enemies' to the person they are talking to.

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Gulf of Mexico -> Gulf of America

Department of Defense -> Department of War

Lake Ontario -> Lake America

AI -> SI

He's been doing this for years. Change the name from something widely used/adopted to something brand new and watch who follows along. Anyone who starts using the new name is a friend, and anyone who doesn't is an enemy.

Twitter -> X

Same playbook.

Apple Computer -> Apple

Google -> Alphabet

Facebook -> Meta

Each of these cases makes sense, though, because the scope of the wider companies had expanded well beyond their original product.

Unlike “Lake America” or “X”, they weren’t renamed just because of ego or out of spite.

I think that is different, alone because the companies still call it "Google" and "Facebook" themself.

I don't want to defend Musk, but renaming a thing you own is a far cry from renaming geography.

(And on that spectrum, DoD > Department of War is somewhere in the middle)

Since he deadnames his own child, I’m happy to deadname his business.

In English?

Trans people typically whose a new name, referring to their old name as their “deadname”. People who insist on using the deadname when they know the person has a new name are deliberately mocking, and even being cruel to, the person who has changed their name.

Musk continues to refer to his trans child by their birth name and gender. I can’t understand how someone would do that to their own child (much less anyone at all).

After purchasing twitter he chose for it a new name and wants everyone to use it, but by not bothering to I’m simply following his example.

I make it a rule to refer to companies by the name they least want to be named by and making sure to tie the old and the new name at every opportunity. More often than not these are attempts to whitewash some crime.

In this case though it appears to be a desire to promote the name as part of committing moral crime.

(Most ppl have forgotten that X was the name of one of the two failing companies forcibly merged by their respective investors to form PayPal. I remember musk being a dick back then too)

Kennedy Center:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Center#Second_Trump_pr...

Including threats to demolish it:

* https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-administration-suggests-k...

This is the right answer. People should start pronouncing it see as in yes in Spanish. Let’s see how long he sticks with it then.

There's already been a few media outlets (and not just the obvious way right pseudo-media) who have started using it, eager to stay in his good book.

So he renamed AI to SI and decreed that all must use it, and whoever acquiesces is loyal and everyone else is a traitor?

Surely there are less embarrassing ways of doing that sort of thing...

It's meant to be embarrassing, that's part of the control strategy. Once you start doing embarrassing things on Trump's behalf, everyone will know you've done a shameful thing, and you can only escape the shame by digging your way deeper into his cult where it becomes a virtue.

That's pretty par for the course - at least, as far as authoritarian regimes go. It's getting very difficult to think of the US as anything but, at this point.

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