> Rothbardians have a terrible track record of identifying the lesser of two evils, even when the gap in their evil is vast
I think many Rothbardians are arguing that the gap in evil is about the same or worse for the Ukraine: Supposedly, the U.S. spent $5 billion to foment the 2014 coup d'état (in which the U.S.'s Victoria Nuland was caught on audio pushing who should be the new leader, and that person ended up being the leader), which then led to an attempt by the Donbas to rebel and that led to tens of thousands of deaths (according to the U.N.) through the evil of bombardment by the Ukrainian state over 8 years. I haven't seen casualty numbers for the Russia/Ukraine war higher than that yet.
Most Rothbardians I've heard argue about this are primarily anti-U.S. imperialism and anti-Ukrainian suppression of Donbas/Crimea. They're also anti-Putin but they're just arguing that it's strange to have a one-side view on the conflict.
By analogy, the view I've heard of most can be analogized to Osama bin Laden: Harry Browne and Ron Paul weren't pro-bin Laden, nor were they not anti-bin Laden; they were just simply pointing out that U.S. imperialism is a primary driving force of the evil of bin Laden, and, arguably, the evils of U.S. imperialism are larger, in total.
I'm surprised at your comment of Hungary being largely monolingual. I visited Budapest a few years ago for a week (on a larger trip that included Vienna, Prague, and Bratislava) and found English at least close to as widely spoken there compared to Bratislava at least. It's certainly no Vienna, which seems to be shifting to English as primary language, but the average person on the street seemed at least conversational in English.
"here is probably no other country on Earth with a better grasp of the fact that World War II began with an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to conquer all the countries that lay between them."
There was no "alliance" between Hitler and Stalin; merely a non-aggression pact Hitler broke. Nobody calls the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact an "alliance". Also, this really shows the Poles are ungrateful wretches -it was the Soviets who liberated Poland from Hitler, and had Stalin not occupied eastern Poland in 1939, Germany would simply have gone all the way to the Soviet border. Had Stalin dispensed with his non-aggression pact and instead declared war on Germany, we would have seen a Soviet-dominated Poland five years earlier. The whole whining makes no sense.
"Spending time in the Slavic world you readily see how English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are all part of a common Germanic language family."
Even just watching German and Scandinavian TV series on Netflix and Amazon Prime it is easy to hear the commonalities with English. At certain moments, you think characters have switched to English but haven't ("Kom In" in Swedish or Norwegian, for example).
As for Polish attitudes toward Russia. I have a friend who once tried the little Russian he knew on some Poles he'd just met. They said -- yes, we understand you. We were forced to learn in school. But please never do that again. Let's speak English.
The picture at the foot of Varso looks ugly (the buildings, not the people!). I did a google for Varso and the pictures of the complete structure look ugly. I googled for Warsaw and Budapest, and Budapest looked much nicer. The good bits of Warsaw, which were the old, were ruined by the surrounding ugliness of the new. In the pictures where I could only see old Warsaw, it looked lovely. I am sure there are plenty of perspectives onto Budapest, probably containing buildings built during the post-war era, that are also ugly, but they didn't show up towards the top of the results page.
Having spent time in towns and cities in Slovakia, I've found that they have a delightful medieval core around which there is an outer rim of ugliness that contains lots of communist era apartment complexes. They do tend to add colourful rendering to these apartment blocks, which have somewhat improved them, but the totality of it is still ugly. https://web.archive.org/web/20220406084430/https://kamposlovensku.sk/jpg/galerie/velky/25968_bardejov_Mapa.jpg shows the north eastern town of Bardejov. It isn't the best picture for seeing the medieval core vs Communist outer rim, but you can see the centre in the foreground fairly well, with some view onto the newer structures in the background. Having seen all of it up close, I can say that the inner core is much nicer. I don't know what the rules are, but I doubt they have liberal planning laws in their medieval centre (which is an UNESCO world heritage site). I am glad that the last set of people that tried to bring the future to Bardejov decided to leave the centre as it was.
If you had liberal planning rules, then people would build new stuff in those medieval cores, so on a building by building basis it seems clear that new buildings are valuable to the owner. Is there anything that shows the wider economic effect of building new structures in old cores? I imagine something probably shows up in survey data and tourists flows, but is there anything more? Has anyone managed to isolate in a systematic way the externalities of a buildings like Varso? I guess such things help create office jobs (though, such jobs might not exactly be a thing of 'the future', given this brave new remote work world), but aren't so good for either tourism or the enjoyment of living within the area.
Thanks for your reports and cheerful photos! I recognised on the last picture that there is still the Székely zászló (flag of Szekler National Council in Romania) waiving at the Hungarian parliament.
> Rothbardians have a terrible track record of identifying the lesser of two evils, even when the gap in their evil is vast
I think many Rothbardians are arguing that the gap in evil is about the same or worse for the Ukraine: Supposedly, the U.S. spent $5 billion to foment the 2014 coup d'état (in which the U.S.'s Victoria Nuland was caught on audio pushing who should be the new leader, and that person ended up being the leader), which then led to an attempt by the Donbas to rebel and that led to tens of thousands of deaths (according to the U.N.) through the evil of bombardment by the Ukrainian state over 8 years. I haven't seen casualty numbers for the Russia/Ukraine war higher than that yet.
Most Rothbardians I've heard argue about this are primarily anti-U.S. imperialism and anti-Ukrainian suppression of Donbas/Crimea. They're also anti-Putin but they're just arguing that it's strange to have a one-side view on the conflict.
By analogy, the view I've heard of most can be analogized to Osama bin Laden: Harry Browne and Ron Paul weren't pro-bin Laden, nor were they not anti-bin Laden; they were just simply pointing out that U.S. imperialism is a primary driving force of the evil of bin Laden, and, arguably, the evils of U.S. imperialism are larger, in total.
Great analysis!
I'm surprised at your comment of Hungary being largely monolingual. I visited Budapest a few years ago for a week (on a larger trip that included Vienna, Prague, and Bratislava) and found English at least close to as widely spoken there compared to Bratislava at least. It's certainly no Vienna, which seems to be shifting to English as primary language, but the average person on the street seemed at least conversational in English.
"here is probably no other country on Earth with a better grasp of the fact that World War II began with an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to conquer all the countries that lay between them."
There was no "alliance" between Hitler and Stalin; merely a non-aggression pact Hitler broke. Nobody calls the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact an "alliance". Also, this really shows the Poles are ungrateful wretches -it was the Soviets who liberated Poland from Hitler, and had Stalin not occupied eastern Poland in 1939, Germany would simply have gone all the way to the Soviet border. Had Stalin dispensed with his non-aggression pact and instead declared war on Germany, we would have seen a Soviet-dominated Poland five years earlier. The whole whining makes no sense.
"Spending time in the Slavic world you readily see how English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are all part of a common Germanic language family."
Even just watching German and Scandinavian TV series on Netflix and Amazon Prime it is easy to hear the commonalities with English. At certain moments, you think characters have switched to English but haven't ("Kom In" in Swedish or Norwegian, for example).
As for Polish attitudes toward Russia. I have a friend who once tried the little Russian he knew on some Poles he'd just met. They said -- yes, we understand you. We were forced to learn in school. But please never do that again. Let's speak English.
The picture at the foot of Varso looks ugly (the buildings, not the people!). I did a google for Varso and the pictures of the complete structure look ugly. I googled for Warsaw and Budapest, and Budapest looked much nicer. The good bits of Warsaw, which were the old, were ruined by the surrounding ugliness of the new. In the pictures where I could only see old Warsaw, it looked lovely. I am sure there are plenty of perspectives onto Budapest, probably containing buildings built during the post-war era, that are also ugly, but they didn't show up towards the top of the results page.
Having spent time in towns and cities in Slovakia, I've found that they have a delightful medieval core around which there is an outer rim of ugliness that contains lots of communist era apartment complexes. They do tend to add colourful rendering to these apartment blocks, which have somewhat improved them, but the totality of it is still ugly. https://web.archive.org/web/20220406084430/https://kamposlovensku.sk/jpg/galerie/velky/25968_bardejov_Mapa.jpg shows the north eastern town of Bardejov. It isn't the best picture for seeing the medieval core vs Communist outer rim, but you can see the centre in the foreground fairly well, with some view onto the newer structures in the background. Having seen all of it up close, I can say that the inner core is much nicer. I don't know what the rules are, but I doubt they have liberal planning laws in their medieval centre (which is an UNESCO world heritage site). I am glad that the last set of people that tried to bring the future to Bardejov decided to leave the centre as it was.
If you had liberal planning rules, then people would build new stuff in those medieval cores, so on a building by building basis it seems clear that new buildings are valuable to the owner. Is there anything that shows the wider economic effect of building new structures in old cores? I imagine something probably shows up in survey data and tourists flows, but is there anything more? Has anyone managed to isolate in a systematic way the externalities of a buildings like Varso? I guess such things help create office jobs (though, such jobs might not exactly be a thing of 'the future', given this brave new remote work world), but aren't so good for either tourism or the enjoyment of living within the area.
Point 3 is very interesting ...
That's actually what deterred me from libertarianism for a long time.
Until I read your work, Michael Huemer and David Friedman.
Thanks for your reports and cheerful photos! I recognised on the last picture that there is still the Székely zászló (flag of Szekler National Council in Romania) waiving at the Hungarian parliament.