Maybe.

As I wrote elsewhere, I’ve just seen a couple of times Germanic house names written as “von Something”.

That is, however, the full extent of my knowledge on the subject.

I vaguelly remember seeing names of royal Prussian houses listed as “von Something”, hence my question.

The simplest explanation is that the US in not an ally of Ukraine (or Europe).

Isn’t “von Habsburg” the actual name of the house, rather than just “Habsburg”?

That being the case, the “von” should not be translated, same as we don’t translate names which are also normal words with meaning in that language (for example, “White” or “Baker”).

Finland being the legitimate inheritor of the Roman Empire is a plot twist I did not expect!

PS: though the point of ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml is good and ignoring the illogical “soviet taint” “reason” to stop the line of claim from Russia there would mean that whatever is the true inheritor of the Soviet Union (most likely Russia) is the legitimate inheritor of the Roman Empire.

Alternativelly, they’ve just been competent in the execution of their less savory intelligence operations and thus not been caught doing something too outrageous.

It makes a lot more sense for China to arrange an “overdose” than shoot somebody in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight from a car with diplomatic plates and a Chinese flag.

Same for all other countries, by the way, though in Autocracies politicians have less to worry if the country ever gets caught murdering people in foreign soil than politicians in Democracies do (though, judging by a century of American murders, even those in supposed Democracies almost never have to worry about it)

What we’re talking about is “The Great Game”, not Tit-Tac-Toe.

“Striking Hezbollah” is the new “Hamas tunnels” and just like for the last one the Press in many places (most notably the UK and US) is purposefully using that messaging.

This is why in this article in The Guardian (which has a long track record of Consent Manufacturing and cheerleading for Israel) the subtitle they use is:

‘Largest coordinated strike’ against Hezbollah since war began prompts warnings Iran could pull out of ceasefire

rather than

Claimed by Israel ‘Largest coordinated strike against Hezbollah since war began’ prompts warnings Iran could pull out of ceasefire

The fraction of Mankind which trusts Americans is probably very small at the moment.

Do you have a source for that or is it just a conclusion you reached?

The reason I ask is that I vaguelly remember of seeing somewhere that the way the front of modern ICE cars is designed makes the engine literally fall when a high-speed frontal collision happens exactly so that the front can act as a crumple zone rather than the engine being pushed inside the passenger compartment. That being so, things aren’t quite as simple as you say and I think we need actual real world test results showing that difference in safety rather than mere expectations extrapolated from superficial knowleged about cars.

Yeah, the falacy that over a hundred million of people in the US just suddenly woke up and decided that they wanted their country to be controlled by a derranged multi-millionaire extremelly high on the Narcissist spectrum parroting near-Fascist and outright Fascist ideas, doesn’t hold up to even the most cursory logical analysis.

Only tribalist supporters of the “other party”, who thus desperatelly want to believe their tribal chiefs are not at all to blame in any way form or shape for America going down the path that led to a double Trump victory, will cherry pick and twist “evidence”, and be very selective in the logical explanations they’re willing to consider, to create logically-sounding (for the unthinking) theories that exhonerate their own chiefs that are so beyond real Logic that they’re akin to using “Magic” as explanation.

The field from were votes for somebody like Trump were a bountiful harvest has for decades been plowed and fertilized by American politicians and by American billionaires using the Press and Think Tanks their own.

Time for the Pope to start using the excomunicato hammer again.

The returns for insiders of front-running Trump posts/speeches are way smaller than they would be if he didn’t lie and flip-flop all the time: the market simply doesn’t react anywhere as much to whatever Trump states than it would if he was honest and consistent, so the spikes up or down (and thus the gains from front-running his statements) are much lower.

That would only be correct if the voting system was not cyclical.

In reality that’s not the case: today’s vote results help shape which candidates are made available to voters the next time around, the one after that and so on.

So can be perfectly reasonable to look at the options put forward today and decide to not vote in order try and have better options available tomorrow - it’s the logic of trying to preempt a tomorrow were all choices are both worse than today’s worst option.

Mind you, this is not me saying that with Trump as one of the candidates doing so was the best possible choice - just explaining how it’s actually a logical choice if one thought Trump was not the danger he turned out to be.

I suspect that if in the last 3 decades most people had been thinking and chosing in the way I suggest rather than falling for the deceitful simplification that each time they vote they must chose the “lesser evil”, the situation were both the Democrats and the Republicans fielded Genocide supporting candidates would never have happenned since at least the Democrats would have long ago and repeateadly been punished for fielding ever more rightwing candidates and thus never arrived at a situation were their candidate was so far to the right that they support the modern day version of Nazis doing their own Genocide as long as the consequences are kept abroad.

It’s because of such mechanics and decades of too many people falling for the DNC propaganda about the obligation to vote lesser evil, that America moved more and more towards the poverty riddled Fascism shithole that it is today - somebody like Trump as POTUS was always bound to happen when the leftmost party of the Money uber-alles + Political duopoly system in the US found a way to not be punished for keeping on moving ever more to the right and even now there’s really no way this trend will stop (much less revert) until the top power of the land - Money - actually suffers for the country being too rightwing (which, curiously, might happen due to Trump, though the risk is the Republicans just replace him with a more intelligent Fascist).

The Trolley Problem isn’t a correct Games Theory representation of this situation, not even close:

• For starters, those doing the chosing don’t know for sure what’s down each track (we do know now, with hindsight and only for the chosen branch, but that’s long after making the choice and you still don’t know what would be down the other track)
• Second, it’s not an individual choice, it’s a mathematical calculation (not even an average) of multiple choices which were not coordinated (i.e. each individual does not know enough at the time of their own choice to predict the final result), so unlike in the Trolley Problem, there is no individual responsibility.
• Last but not least, this is a cyclical choice were how many victims are on the tracks for the next choice is influenced by what was chosrn in an earlier cycel and even how many people made that choice - sending the tram down a line with more victims now might actually mean fewer victims on the line of one or even both branches for the next choice, or the opposite (clearly past choices created this situation were both candidates were Genocide supporters hence there we’re far more victims on both tracks)

You have either been deceived by this propagandistic misuse of Games Theory and are now parroting it without fully understanding it or you are knowingly being deceitful for the purpose of supporting the leaders of your party.

“Never blame the politicians for fielding a candidate that many would be unable to bring themselves to vote for due to her support of mass child murder, blame instead the people who can’t bring themselves to vote for a supporter of mass child murder”

– This posts and other DNC propaganda posts like it.

Well, the ones on present day Startups do tend to be on the area of the Venn Diagram where Selling intersects with Fraud

Having been in Tech in the last Tech Boom and also in this later one (I was even in Startups some years ago), I can tell you that whilst the previous one was mainly driven by Techies wanting do cool things, this one is entirely driven by grifters with backgrounds in areas like Finance and Marketing.

The present generation of Startup Founders are almost never Technically skilled, rather they’re skilled at Salesmanship (most notably, Pitching) and they don’t dream of cracking some complex problem, they dream about making a lot of money via an Exit Strategy.

The only surprising thing about Altman not understanding Technology in depth is people being surprised by it.

And we “only” had to wait half a century since the last one, during which so much money was blown up in wars that it would have paid for this mission hundred-fold.

Why would progressives stay home to “teach democrats a lesson”?

I mean, people don’t just do things for no reason at all, unless they’re crazy.

The most logical explanation is that they did it ultimately because centrists (i.e. the DNC) were unwilling to appeal to an electorate they want to ruie instead of serve.

A simple logical analysis shows that framing from “centrists” (I added quotes because they’re not in the political center, but rather are hard-right) as actually being an indirect admission of their own guilt - they did not do what politicians are supposed to do, which is appeal to the electorate, hence the electorate did not vote for them.

In Democracy the blame for politicians not being appealing to voters and hence failing to get their votes lies not with the voters, it lies with the politicians.

Sure, “centrists” and their useful idiots loudly cry that people have an obligation to vote for them, but that’s not a mindset of Democracy it’s a mindset of Autocracy.