I started my new Taki’s Magazine column:

It’s a striking aspect of how out-of-fashion Diversity-Inclusion-Equity has suddenly become in the wake of Claudine Gay’s ouster as the president of Harvard that the most prominent person to take to Twitter to defend DIE has been Mark Cuban …

Of course, Twitter is no longer Twitter, it’s what Elon Musk calls everything—his 1990s financial services firm, his rocket ship company, his son, and lately Twitter—X. If you are a supple-brained 16-year-old (assuming I have any 16-year-old readers), this is likely no problem. But if your mind is as calcified as mine, then name-changing strikes me as ageism.

Names are often changed for leftist political reasons (e.g., for nationalist/ethnocentric reasons (e.g., Bombay to Mumbai), and for corporate reasons.

As an Angeleno, the latter seems especially annoying, since Southern California sports stadiums (Rose Bowl, Coliseum, Dodger Stadium, Angel Stadium) tend to represent local traditionalism. Similarly, I used to live next door to Wrigley Field in Chicago and I can’t imagine calling it anything else.

Then again, I can’t imagine calling the White Sox ballpark anything other than Comiskey Park, having gone to the last game at old Comiskey Park in 1990 (seeing Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr. play side-by-side in the outfield), even though it has officially been named after various flotsam of capitalism since 2003.

The old have plenty of weaknesses, but the tendency to prey on them by needlessly changing verbiage to catch them napping is obnoxious.