I was thinking of that myself. The sloganeering possibilities are excellent.
Caustin, Texas?
Your sanctimonious whataboutism is duly noted and appreciated. But proposing a change to a toponym due to associations with historical slavery and taking actions to oppose modern slavery are not actually mutually exclusive.
Moreover, the Quantitative Misrepresentation Police would like to point out that the primary reason that there are “more slaves in the world today than there ever have been been [sic] in history” is simply that exponential growth in global population has resulted in at least an order of magnitude more people overall living today than there ever have been in history.
Percentage-wise, on the other hand, it’s estimated that maybe 0.5% of the current world population is living in slavery, while in ancient Roman Italy, for instance, probably over one-quarter of the total population were slaves. In the 19th-century US before the Civil War, for another instance, well over 10% of Americans were enslaved. So, you know, it’s not like there hasn’t been progress on this front, quantitatively speaking.
I suggest Constantinople. Or City#3.
And Maryland was not named after her, nor her cousin/Elizabeth’s sister Mary of England, but after Charles I’s wife.
History is written by the victors, and Bloody Mary was pretty bloody, but so was Elizabeth.
My vote, he was even born in Austin, though grew up 2 hours away.
But in all seriousness, renaming the city is stupid. They could say it’s a different Austin if they really wanted to. Not sure who is the most famous, Bernard if that’s not too warlike for Austin.
Sam Houston was also a slave owner, but paradoxically very opposed to the Confederacy.
Compared to some of his contemporaries he was pretty alright. He had an interest in wanting them to convert, but he wasn’t Cortezing his way around.
Austin is the county seat of Travis County named after William B. Travis:
So an obvious alternative is Travis–the county seat of Travis county.
Or is William B. Travis objectionable too?
Unfortunately there already is a Travis, Texas. But that community only has 60 people–so that name could be changed.
OU-shteen.
The Mathematical Police will be on the lookout for you due to your overly casual use of the term “order of magnitude” since we hit the 1B mark in in the very early 1800s, which is definitely some time “in history”. You may get off with just a warning for the reference to exponential growth. Perhaps true for relatively short periods of time in human history, but not so for many decades. 
Well, if you take the comment literally, it’s obviously impossible, right?
No, I’m not gonna pooh-pooh this, thankyouverymuch. Look, I’m not a fan of the Confederate Statues, I don’t even live in the south. Rip em all down for all I care, I’ll never see one. But they are being ripped down because some people took offense. And people predicted that this was gonna get outta control. And now some idiots ARE making proposals like this (because of offense) that are reinforcing the credence of that prediction. No, I don’t want to erase the founders and stuff like that, and fuck anyone that does.
I realize the chance Austin gets changed is minuscule now (who knows in 20 years the way things are going), but if it does, its not a huge leap from Austin to Washington. These things are incremental, they don’t happen overnight. Plus, yes, it does make leftists look like idiots, and as someone that doesn’t like Trump and wants things to swing to the center, this is NOT helping.
Hey, I never said it was a decimal order of magnitude. 
Nor did I say (and this is a more serious rebuttal to a slightly more serious misunderstanding) that human population growth is currently exponential. But it’s exponential growth that has played the historically most significant role in producing the relatively recent vast increase in global population size.
No! Dumb idea.
There are far fewer than you think who want that. What we do want is to stop holding up slavery and treason as things to admire, and instead see them as things our ancestors did that we’ve grown out of. The monuments come down, but the history books stay.
Make more sense that way?
Heck we’re living in a plutocracy lets cut to the chase and sell the naming rights to the highest bidder. After a while living in Facebook Texas wouldn’t feel too bad. Truth or Consequences New Mexico is doing just fine.
It’s more of a Goofocracy these days.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: There is nothing about a municipal committee report raising the possibility of a municipal name change as a subject for future analysis (and which, if it were officially proposed, most likely could not be effected without a referendum vote) that constitutes “getting outta control”.
And even if the residents of Austin did decide to change their city’s name (and really, who are you, who “don’t even live in the south”, to be telling them what they can and can’t do in a democratic referendum on their municipal nomenclature?), there would be nothing “outta control” about that either.
So why aren’t you all upset about the previous change of the city’s original name (as per Goodnight-Loving’s remark) from “Waterloo” to “Austin” in the first place? Why are you spinelessly endorsing the erasure of Waterloo’s historical legacy?
What’s “not helping” is the silly hysteria of people arbitrarily treating the current versions of municipal names and other toponyms as somehow sacrosanct and immutable, the alteration of which would portend some unspecified but catastrophic disaster.
One of the minor but significant great things about our country, it’s always seemed to me, is the way we routinely treat nomenclature as a form of personal/community expression that (within fairly broad limits) doesn’t have to be screened by supreme authority. Unlike, say, the German registrar rules that police the “appropriateness” of baby names rather draconically, the American system lets you call your baby “Moon Unit” or “November” or “Quartz” if you want to. And we don’t have a National Ministry of Toponym Permanence or anything like that decreeing that historically significant names have to be retained for all eternity.
In short, Ashtura, irrespective of the whole memorialization-of-dead-slaveholders bit, what have you got against freedom?
So, lefty PC sweeping across Texas like a massive stampede of rabid armadillo.
That was the original name.
If the people of Bumfuck Arkansas had a referendum to change the name of their city, would people piss and moan about how it’s erasing history?
Or would people shrug their shoulders and figure that sometimes cities change their names, and as long as the name change is approved democratically, it’s up to them?
We had a similar very silly episode here in Seattle, when they decided to rename King County to the much more appropriate King County. They had to replace a bunch of stationary and change the logos on stuff.
Again, it’s one thing if some foreigners come in and force people to change the name of the city at gunpoint. It’s another if the people who live there decide they’re tired of the name and want to change it.
No. It makes no goddamn sense to raze the DC mall because some people are offended. Why is Austin “bad”, but Jefferson is “good”? Last I heard at least Austin wasn’t banging his slaves.
The Porciuncula River was the original name of the Los Angeles River.
So if we don’t rant and rave and piss and moan about changing the name of the city of Austin, that’s a slippery slope to toppling the Washington Monument?
Here’s the thing. If in 100 years the people of this country are tired of having their capital city named after Washington, then it will be up to them to either change it or keep it.
If the slippery-slope endgame catastrophe is “What if they renamed Washington DC?”, then I say “So what?”
If they rename Leningrad, does that erase Lenin from history? Does it diminish the people who live their? Cities get renamed from time to time, monuments get toppled from time to time. Renaming a city doesn’t result in any broken bones or shed blood, it’s just changing a name. I don’t see any need to rename Washington DC or Washington State or Mount Washington, or any of the hundreds of toponyms named for Washington. But if some future people decide to rename the city in honor of Lrrr, ruler of Omicron Persei 8, then so what?