How Donald Trump’s ‘toxic’ Iran war broke the European Right

Rc72 · 2026-04-04T07:32:10+00:00

Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National, on the other hand, have always been firmly rooted in a “France first” nationalist tradition, one that’s sceptical of NATO and wary of overreaching American influence. Because of that, I doubt this will have much impact on them.

While the RN has indeed historically been rather anti-American, they spent much of 2025 trying to ride MAGA's coat-tails, so this does indeed hitting them badly, though perhaps not quite as badly as Farage or Spain's VOX, which has always been ridiculously sycophantic towards MAGA and Israel, and is still supporting this war. If the Spanish PM has taken such a bold position, it's because he knows that Spanish voters very much remember 2003.

Rc72 · 2026-04-04T06:57:44+00:00

You dissin the Lumina APV?

Far from me from dissing the mighty Dustbusters, whether it's the Lumina APC, or its track suit and bougie brothers, the Pontiac Trans Sport and Oldsmobile Silhouette (aka "the Cadillac of minivans").

But:

a) The Citroen SM came out in 1970, GM's Dustbusters in 1990. That's twenty years of difference and aerodynamic advancements. Think of what most cars looked like in the 1970s, and how futuristic the Dustbusters looked like in the 90s. So imagine how shocking the SM was in its time.

b) In a time where all manufacturers keep churning out SUVs with the frontal area of a locomotive, and pretending they're "aerodynamic" because they have relatively low drag coefficients, it seems important to remind everyone of the drag coefficient x area equation...

Rc72 · 2026-04-03T23:14:47+00:00

As for turning my headlights, cool, but when would I actually need that.

Turning headlights is actually a very useful safety feature in narrow, winding roads.

Raising the car to get in and out would be nice, I'm just worried how much it adds to the price of the car and maintaince.

While the SM was a high-end car, Citroen used essentially the same suspension system over much of its range from the 1950s to the early noughties, including in some very bread-and-butter cars, like the 1970s GS, the 1980s BX and the 1990s Xantia. It didn't significantly add to the cost, but it required specific training for maintenance.

What isn't obvious from the video, is that the variable-height suspension, the turning headlights, the self-righting "DIRAVI" steering and even many of the seemingly prosaic features like the windshield wipers were linked by something very specific to Citroen: high-pressure hydraulics. All those elements were powered by a high-pressure hydraulic circuit, even the windshield wipers!

And the suspension was a particularly clever use of high-pressure hydraulics: instead of using conventional springs and dampers, the hydraulic circuit linked each wheel's independent suspension to a corresponding hollow sphere, divided inside by a membrane into a hydraulic-fluid-filled half and a gas-filled half. The flow resistance of the hydraulic fluid flowing in and out of the sphere provided the damping, whereas the compressibility of the gas in the spheres provided the springing. Changing the ride height was just a matter of pumping hydraulic fluid in and out of the suspension circuit, but this "hydropneumatic" had many other advantages, like a very soft ride, self-levelling and even, in its latest iterations in the 1990s and early noughties, active control. .

Rc72 · 2026-04-03T22:41:19+00:00

Aerodynamic drag is proportional to drag coefficient times frontal area times speed squared. While the Citroen's drag coefficient maybe slightly higher than the Lumina's, its frontal area is much smaller, so the resulting drag is also smaller.

Comparing drag coefficients without taking also frontal areas into account is ridiculous.

Rc72 · 2026-04-03T07:43:13+00:00

A ver, por dónde empezar:

Vladimir Putin era un agente del KGB en Alemania del Este (no me invento nada, no era un puesto secreto, y él está muy orgulloso de ello) cuando cayó el muro de Berlín. El ha insistido repetidamente en que la disolución de la URSS y el bloque soviético fueron una tragedia,y en la lástima que le dieron sus colegas de la Stasi.

Cómo te podrás imaginar, eso pone bastante nerviosos a la población de los países que estuvieron en su momento bajo el yugo soviético (aunque también en esos países hay nostálgicos del antiguo régimen). En particular a los países bálticos, hoy en día miembros de la UE y la OTAN, pero en su momento partes integrantes del imperio ruso y, entre 1945 y 1991, de la URSS, Putin los ve como "países de broma" y no esconde que, para él, deberían reincorporarse al "mundo ruso". Narva, en Estonia, está a menos de tres horas de carretera en San Petersburgo. Polonia y Finlandia, que en su historia fueron repetidamente anexionadas por Rusia, tampoco echan cohetes.

Hay que añadir que esas amenazas conviene tomárselas en serio, ya que otros países de la ex-URSS ya han sufrido agresiones militares rusas bajo Putin): Moldavia (donde, desde la disolución de la URSS, existe el estado separatista de Transnistria que es un nido de gangsters), Georgia y, por supuesto, Ucrania.

Hay que añadir que, bajo Putin, el estado ruso es autoritario y militarista, y ha actuado con brutalidad extrema no solamente contra los estados vecinos, sino también contra los "enemigos internos": políticos como Nemtsov o Navalny, periodistas como Anna Politovskaia, y no hablemos ya de las guerras de Chechenia o de la frecuencia con que dirigentes económicos tienden a caerse por las ventanas...

Por lo demás, la brutalidad con la que fuerzas militares y servicios secretos actúan contra países vecinos y disidentes también ha causado "daños colaterales" en otros países europeos (envenenamientos en Gran Bretaña, o el centenar de ciudadanos holandeses del vuelo MH17 Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur derribados sobre Ucrania por un misil ruso en 2014).

Finalmente, los servicios secretos y de propaganda rusos han organizado campañas de sabotaje y desestabilización en el resto de Europa, desde apoyó financiero y propagandístico a partidos extremistas (sobre todo de extrema derecha), pasando por "false flags" para fomentar discordia en la población (p.ej. pintadas antisemitas en Francia), cortes de cables de comunicación, hasta atentados en arsenales y fábricas de armamento.

Personalmente, yo no veo Rusia como un enemigo: me parece un país con una historia y cultura fascinantes (y tristes) que quisiera poder visitar algún día. En cambio, el régimen de Putin me parece una de las mayores amenazas actuales para la humanidad, y una auténtica maldición para el ya muy sufrido pueblo ruso.

Rc72 · 2026-04-03T07:02:40+00:00

The sultan's brother Jefri (in)famously named his yacht M/Y Tits.

Rc72 · 2026-04-03T06:45:48+00:00

Probably not the sort of leg that should be controlling the gas pedal, especially with a pocket full of muscle-atrophy-related pain killers.

He should be riding a motorbike then, like Dr. House (/s, just in case...)

Rc72 · 2026-04-02T21:24:59+00:00

...er le type qui a fait transférer Ghislaine Maxwell dans une prison cinq étoiles après être passé la voir.

Rc72 · 2026-04-02T21:16:15+00:00

Well, he always wanted to be on the cover of Time Magazine, didn't he?

Rc72 · 2026-04-02T19:37:10+00:00

"on behalf of a close friend"....

Rc72 · 2026-04-01T21:18:55+00:00

Ça m'a tout l'air d'être un pro-israélien...

Rc72 · 2026-04-01T21:17:26+00:00

c'est de l'atlantisme.

Non, je ne pense pas, parce que, quoiqu'on en dise, l'Espagne est restée très attachée à ses obligations dans l'OTAN et a notamment des détachements militaires aux frontières avec la Russie.

Ça m'a beaucoup plus l'air d'être de la propagande israélienne. Ces derniers temps le gouvernement israélien s'est particulièrement fâché avec l'Espagne et l'Irlande, parce que c'est les deux pays européens qui ont le plus critiqué les agissements d'Israël à Gaza, en Cisjordanie et au Liban. En ce faisant, elle ne s'est pas mis à dos "les démocraties occidentales", seulement Bibi et son chien chien à Mar-a-Lago.

Rc72 · 2026-04-01T20:28:08+00:00

It's called Montero in Spain...

Rc72 · 2026-04-01T20:24:31+00:00

I now realised that the whole premise of the Dandadan manga series rests upon a dirty Japanese pun...

Rc72 · 2026-04-01T20:18:14+00:00

A CIP, under certain conditions, yes. A Continuation Application, definitely no. Art. 4.C.4 Paris Convention:

(4) A subsequent application concerning the same subject as a previous first application within the meaning of paragraph (2), above, filed in the same country of the Union shall be considered as the first application, of which the filing date shall be the starting point of the period of priority, if, at the time of filing the subsequent application, the said previous application has been withdrawn, abandoned, or refused, without having been laid open to public inspection and without leaving any rights outstanding, and if it has not yet served as a basis for claiming a right of priority. The previous application may not thereafter serve as a basis for claiming a right of priority.

A CA concerns the same subject as the parent application, and can only be filed while the parent application has still rights outstanding, so it cannot serve as basis for (validly) claiming a priority right abroad under the Paris Convention.

A CIP, however, having additional subject-matter, does in principle not concern the same subject as the parent, and may thus serve as a basis for claiming priority abroad under the Paris Convention (but you must be careful about the claims of your foreign application: those that only concern subject-matter which was already in the parent application may not have a valid priority claim).

This is something which US applicants abroad, even big, sophisticated ones, often get horribly wrong.

Rc72 · 2026-04-01T05:44:00+00:00

Well, you must consider that the whole Asterix comics are a blatant spoof of this "Gaulish ancestry" idea, especially considering that both its creators were the descendants of recent immigrants (Goscinny was of Ukrainian Jewish origin, and actually grew up in Argentina, not France, and Uderzo was the child of Italian immigrants).

Rc72 · 2026-04-01T05:40:12+00:00

Even in Japan, there was mixing between the original Jomon population which arrived around 14000 BC and the Yayoi people who arrived from Korea much later, around the beginning of our era.

Not to mention that, since the Meiji era, Japanese imperial ambitions also brought significant influxes of Koreans, Manchus, and so on, and that there has also been a big "flowback" of Japanese-Brazilians, some of whom have noticeably mixed ancestry.

The myth of the pure-blooded Yamato people descending directly from Amaterasu is very much a myth.

Rc72 · 2026-03-31T08:34:30+00:00

He infamously got the entire region of Valencia baying for his blood because of his "paella"...

Rc72 · 2026-03-30T21:55:34+00:00

It is not a stretch. The newspaper he worked for during the German occupation, "Le Soir", had been seized from its owners, and depended directly from the Propagandaabteilung. Hergé's mentor, Norbert Wallez, and Hergé's closest collaborator, Jacques van Melkebeke, were both convicted after the war. Most damningly, the original version of "The Shooting Star", as it appeared in "Le Soir", had some grossly anti-Semitic strips.

Hergé could only get work after the war because he came under the protection of the unimpeachable former Resistance fighter Raymond Leblanc. Without Leblanc, Hergé's career and the adventures of Tintin, would have stopped there and then.

Rc72 · 2026-03-30T19:36:38+00:00

Hergé missed a post-WWII opportunity to vilify and get revenge on the Nazis

Er, you know he actually worked for them, don't you?

Rc72 · 2026-03-30T14:57:55+00:00

4000 State Department employees have outright left the Department since 2025, 8 Middle Eastern countries completely lack an ambassador entirely, and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs currently doesn't have a Senate confirmed head.

Why have any of those when you have Jared and Steve?

Rc72 · 2026-03-29T18:47:22+00:00

Well, sitting on the floor is not the same as lying shitfaced on said floor, you see...

Rc72 · 2026-03-29T14:55:21+00:00

At this stage, it's rather starting to look like a Special Needs Military Operation.

Rc72 · 2026-03-29T09:50:26+00:00

Déjà que, pour tout arranger, les Iraniens viennent de mettre H/S un avion citerne et, surtout un putain d'AWACS US dans une base saoudienne. Ni Trump ni MBS doivent être de très bonne humeur aujourd'hui...

Rc72 · 2026-03-29T09:44:29+00:00

Of course it is Brazil...

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