@johnnyprofane1

And those wouldn't be frivolous lawsuits, because if a politician says, for instance, that we need to do something about climate change and some member of the public believes that climate change is a hoax and everyone in the government knows it the court would have to take that seriously and examine that in order to prove that the politician in question wasn't lying.
It wouldn't be enough to just prove that climate change is real, you'd have to prove the politician knew that.

@johnnyprofane1

My point is that If you made it illegal for a politician to lie, every politician would be taken to court with the accusation they're lying every time they made a campaign promise they weren't able to keep or even just say something someone doesn't like.

Even if it's the truth.

And most of the time they'd be acquitted even if what they were saying wasn't true, because there'd be no evidence they knew it wasn't true. And you can't make it illegal to be wrong.

@johnnyprofane1

And all of these instances of people accusing politicians of lying, when they actually weren't...
Well that would make it a lot harder to prove in court that the politicians who were blatantly lying were doing so intentionally.

A politician who tells a blatant lie would almost always be able to claim afterwards that they believed that what they were saying was true at the time and it would be hard to prove that's not true.

@johnnyprofane1

If there was a law that made it illegal for politicians to lie, most politicians would have to spend almost all their time in court explaining that the promises they made during the election were aspirational.

And campaign speeches would suddenly go along the lines of 'If I get elected, I promise to try my very best to implement x policy... But it may not happen, because people in other districts may vote for politicians who don't want that."

(continued one final time)

@johnnyprofane1

Unlike what a certain current sitting US President and his cronies would like to be true, simply getting elected doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want.

Because there are other politicians who were elected on their own promises and intentions and those don't always align.

And all those politicians have to work out amongst themselves, through debating and voting, what actually gets done.

(continued)

@johnnyprofane1

The actually serious answer is that, the recent uptick notwithstanding, politicians in general lie a lot less than the public perception says they do.

There's a big issue with people just assuming that simply getting elected is enough for a politician to do everything they wanted/promised/intended to do. And if they don't, it's because they were lying.

But...
(continued)

@oddtail

There are, in fact, historical German nobles of Slavic descent who did this.

For instance the Schirach family who went from 'Šěrach' or 'Schirach' (meaning 'grey haired') to 'Von Schirach' when they became part of the Austrian nobility.

Strahd's last name is probably based on the actual Austrian family Von Zepharovich.

@oddtail

It makes more sense when you remember that 'Von' denoting nobility does not actually need to be followed by a toponym.

It traditionally was, back when it denoted which fief the noble's title was linked to. But once noble titles became less dependent on the actual holding of a fief, people with a noble title started just putting 'Von' in between their first and last names to denote their noble status.

@rixx

I spent a minute and a half after reading this waiting for my brain to reset.