> 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.
To me it seems slightly unfair when any action of USA is taken as the ultimate cause for everything bad that ever happened, while any action of Russia is excused as mere defense.
Like, of course Russian propaganda paints everything as a self-defense against (mostly imaginary) Nazis; including the war in Ukraine today. But to believe this, when you have free access to actual information, is a sign of blindness.
> To me it seems slightly unfair when any action of USA is taken as the ultimate cause for everything bad that ever happened, while any action of Russia is excused as mere defense.
No Rothbardians I know would argue that "any action of Russia is excused as mere defense". Russia's actions are evil, as are the Ukrainians' murder of the people of the Donbas, as are the U.S.'s expansions of NATO and fomenting of revolutions.
These are governments of course. What else should we expect. Rothbardians are anarcho-capitalists, i.e. the government is the ultimate cause for most of these evils.
That's not the point. The point Bryan seemed to be making was that Rothbardians are arguing that Russia's evils are much larger. What is the quantification of this? The U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime killed tens of thousands in the Donbas. How many have been killed so far in the Russia/Ukraine war? I suspect it's less (so far), and doubt it's much more.
Going back to my analogy: The U.S. killed hundreds of thousands in the first Gulf War (including the subsequent no fly zone; see Albright), and bin Laden's declaration of war against the U.S. listed these involvements and the military occupation of holy lands as his casus belli. This is not in any way to say that bin Laden's actions were "excused as mere defense" - what bin Laden did was evil. But arguably, the U.S. killed many more and certainly they did after the second Iraq war. In Bryan's words, the U.S. "gap in their evil [was] vast". This is the basis of Blowback theory. The second Iraq War was also illegal and killed many more than Russia, but the world didn't boycott the U.S. like it's doing to Russia. That's not to say anyone is good in this picture, but the whole picture and all the underlying causes aren't being considered. It's the double standard that annoys many libertarians.
The solution of course is to ratchet down the tensions on all sides, reduce and eliminate government influence in the world, and increase the free market.
Your claim is a perfect microcosm of this current moment: to conflate understanding the evidence -- in toto -- with "support". For some reason, it seems some people have to fit things into a good versus evil model. Geopolitics when it comes to war is almost always evil versus evil, and that's just as true for Russia and Ukraine and U.S. today.
Quoting Rothbard:
"Hitler, in brief, (in foreign affairs) was not a uniquely evil monster or daimon, who would continue to gobble up countries diabolically until stopped by superior force. Hitler was a rational German statesman, pursuing — with considerable intuitive insight — a traditional, post-Versailles German policy (to which we might add intimations of desires to expand eastward in an attack on Bolshevism). But basically, Hitler has no "master plan"; he was a German intent, like all Germans, on revising the intolerable and stupid Versailles-diktat, and on doing so by peaceful means, and in collaboration with the British and French. One thing is sure: Hitler had no designs, no plans, not even vague intimations, to expand westward against Britain and France (let alone the United States). Hitler admired the British Empire and wished to collaborate with it."
> The U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime killed tens of thousands in the Donbas.
I assume you didn't mean the visiting Russian (or "anonymous") soldiers here. Any source on this number?
> Rothbardians are anarcho-capitalists, i.e. the government is the ultimate cause for most of these evils.
And yet, somehow, protesting against the government of Ukraine in 2013 was a bad thing.
> The solution of course is to ratchet down the tensions on all sides, reduce and eliminate government influence in the world, and increase the free market.
> And yet, somehow, protesting against the government of Ukraine in 2013 was a bad thing.
What do you think the $5 billion was for and what was the protest good for if Victoria Nuland pushed in the resulting replacement? I'm sure there were some well-intentioned protesters there, but the whole point of the anti-imperialism argument is that these "color revolutions" are not purely innocent, internal protests.
The basic point still stands: America has been much more evil than any other country in the last 50 years, so Bryan's argument is quite strange that Russia is "vastly" more evil. They're all evil, and Russia's latest evil is Blowback for America's evils. This could have been averted: the U.S. could have stopped pushing NATO. We'd still be left with the U.S. and Russia spheres of evil, but now the world is threatened with nuclear war evil! For what?
> I'm sure there were some well-intentioned protesters there
Like, 99% of them? Let's not go into "all those people in the streets are paid by Soros" territory, please.
> these "color revolutions" are not purely innocent, internal protests.
Sure. If you see people who want something that also happens to be in your interest, you help them. That doesn't make *their* desire less genuine. It just means that now they have more *resources* than they would have otherwise.
Similarly, Russia does this all the time, even in countries that are NATO members. I am not sure what is the exact perspective of the international law on this, but I would guess that as long as you don't give someone literally weapons, it does not count as an aggression.
I believe that you dramatically underestimate the evil of Russia. Look at the historical record: 50 millions of people tortured to death in labor camps (gulags); 5 millions starved to death in Ukraine... I am not even counting wars yet, and Russia has lots of those, too.
(By the way, because comparing with USA is so popular whenever one mentions the horrors of Russia, notice that the number of people in (Soviet) Russian labor camps exceeds the number of slaves in USA by an order of magnitude.)
I will just focus on the core of this argument (don't think you've won the other points; it's just too annoying and tedious to argue with so many strawmans):
> I believe that you dramatically underestimate the evil of Russia. Look at the historical record: 50 millions of people tortured to death in labor camps (gulags); 5 millions starved to death in Ukraine... I am not even counting wars yet, and Russia has lots of those, too.
The Soviet Union was one of the most evil empires in history, from Lenin to Stalin and others, and as you correctly point out, killed at least 50 million and the Holodomor was a genocide. The vast majority of that happened in the early and middle part of the 20th century. So it seems your argument is to look at the sum of evil since the beginning of a country? How far back do we go?
I don't think that makes much sense. It seems to make the most sense to judge current levels of evil by looking at relatively "recent" data. What is "recent" will be subjective, but it seems a few decades is pretty reasonable. Compare the United States to Russia in the last few decades. The United States has clearly been more evil.
By the way, I was born in the Ukraine during the Soviet Union. I had a phase in my life where I was very emotional about the evils of the Soviet Union, no matter what time period someone was talking about. However, talking to my parents and looking at the data convinced me that late 1980s Soviet Union was nothing compared to Lenin and Stalin times. It was still evil, of course, and drenched in malaise that ultimately led to its downfall, but the murderousness was at a completely different magnitude.
> By the way, because comparing with USA is so popular whenever one mentions the horrors of Russia
This isn't a competition. They're all evil. The whole goal here is how do we avoid nuclear war! One place to start is to reduce tensions between evil empires. The strange point Bryan seemed to be making is that somehow the U.S. is less evil, which is belied by the facts. The U.S. empire is insatiable and it seems its push for Ukraine being added to NATO was a proximate cause of this war.
I don't quite understand why pushing NATO membership for countries that desire it is evil. I see this point made a lot, but never an argument supporting it that makes sense of why a defensive agreement is very threatening to other nations. There might be good arguments for it, I just haven't heard one made.
The Rothbardians and libertarians in question aren't arguing that "pushing NATO membership for countries that desire it is evil"; instead, they are arguing that pushing NATO membership of Ukraine was a proximate cause of the Russian-Ukraine war. The argument for this is that Putin pretty much stated that this would be a proximate cause of a war, before the war; for example, see "Russia issues list of demands it says must be met to lower tensions in Europe" by The Guardian on 17 Dec 2021, and many similar stories. After the war, you can read "Putin’s Case for War, Annotated" in The New York Times which lays everything out in more detail. This whole argument is well summarized in "Russia's Ukraine invasion may have been preventable" on MSNBC. As noted in the last article,
"Recognizing this possibility does not excuse Moscow’s actions, which are heinous. Nor does it mean Russia’s insistence on regional hegemony is fair or ethical. And ultimately, it is no
guarantee that Putin would not have invaded anyway. There are other factors — including, but not limited to, Putin's general anger over Kyiv drifting away from Russian influence and
domination and his isolation as a decision-maker — that may have been sufficient to drive the invasion.
But the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow
raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but
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.
This seems like a general problem with contrarians. At some moment they are forced to adopt an absurd opinion, because the reasonable one is already taken by the "sheeple".
I think you pretty much nailed it. I wouldn't say it is forced so much as the frequency of conventional thinking being wrong makes disagreeing with whatever the current thing is reflexive. This tends to short circuit the actual thought process and encourages motivated thinking to justify the contrarian reflex.
Plus, it is really hard to admit that people who happen to be right but for the wrong reasons are still right. So many commentators today will say "You see, [one billion reasons why Ukraine is wrong, the US is wrong, Russia is less wrong] and so everything is bad!" then when pressed will say "Well, yea, Russia shouldn't be invading Ukraine." Commentators need to comment on something, I suppose, and it feels strange to agree with people who your career is made up of opposing.
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.
To me it seems slightly unfair when any action of USA is taken as the ultimate cause for everything bad that ever happened, while any action of Russia is excused as mere defense.
Like, of course Russian propaganda paints everything as a self-defense against (mostly imaginary) Nazis; including the war in Ukraine today. But to believe this, when you have free access to actual information, is a sign of blindness.
"mostly imaginary"? Nope; wrong. The sheer weight of Nazi influence in Ukraine is something I was genuinely impressed by during this war.
> To me it seems slightly unfair when any action of USA is taken as the ultimate cause for everything bad that ever happened, while any action of Russia is excused as mere defense.
No Rothbardians I know would argue that "any action of Russia is excused as mere defense". Russia's actions are evil, as are the Ukrainians' murder of the people of the Donbas, as are the U.S.'s expansions of NATO and fomenting of revolutions.
These are governments of course. What else should we expect. Rothbardians are anarcho-capitalists, i.e. the government is the ultimate cause for most of these evils.
That's not the point. The point Bryan seemed to be making was that Rothbardians are arguing that Russia's evils are much larger. What is the quantification of this? The U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime killed tens of thousands in the Donbas. How many have been killed so far in the Russia/Ukraine war? I suspect it's less (so far), and doubt it's much more.
Going back to my analogy: The U.S. killed hundreds of thousands in the first Gulf War (including the subsequent no fly zone; see Albright), and bin Laden's declaration of war against the U.S. listed these involvements and the military occupation of holy lands as his casus belli. This is not in any way to say that bin Laden's actions were "excused as mere defense" - what bin Laden did was evil. But arguably, the U.S. killed many more and certainly they did after the second Iraq war. In Bryan's words, the U.S. "gap in their evil [was] vast". This is the basis of Blowback theory. The second Iraq War was also illegal and killed many more than Russia, but the world didn't boycott the U.S. like it's doing to Russia. That's not to say anyone is good in this picture, but the whole picture and all the underlying causes aren't being considered. It's the double standard that annoys many libertarians.
The solution of course is to ratchet down the tensions on all sides, reduce and eliminate government influence in the world, and increase the free market.
Read your Rothbard, man. Rothbard would definitely have supported Putin:
https://mises.org/library/review-origins-second-world-war
> Rothbard would definitely have supported Putin
Your claim is a perfect microcosm of this current moment: to conflate understanding the evidence -- in toto -- with "support". For some reason, it seems some people have to fit things into a good versus evil model. Geopolitics when it comes to war is almost always evil versus evil, and that's just as true for Russia and Ukraine and U.S. today.
Quoting Rothbard:
"Hitler, in brief, (in foreign affairs) was not a uniquely evil monster or daimon, who would continue to gobble up countries diabolically until stopped by superior force. Hitler was a rational German statesman, pursuing — with considerable intuitive insight — a traditional, post-Versailles German policy (to which we might add intimations of desires to expand eastward in an attack on Bolshevism). But basically, Hitler has no "master plan"; he was a German intent, like all Germans, on revising the intolerable and stupid Versailles-diktat, and on doing so by peaceful means, and in collaboration with the British and French. One thing is sure: Hitler had no designs, no plans, not even vague intimations, to expand westward against Britain and France (let alone the United States). Hitler admired the British Empire and wished to collaborate with it."
> The U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime killed tens of thousands in the Donbas.
I assume you didn't mean the visiting Russian (or "anonymous") soldiers here. Any source on this number?
> Rothbardians are anarcho-capitalists, i.e. the government is the ultimate cause for most of these evils.
And yet, somehow, protesting against the government of Ukraine in 2013 was a bad thing.
> The solution of course is to ratchet down the tensions on all sides, reduce and eliminate government influence in the world, and increase the free market.
That would be nice, I agree.
"And yet, somehow, protesting against the government of Ukraine in 2013 was a bad thing."
Well, look what it led to.
> Any source on this number?
https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12122.doc.htm
> And yet, somehow, protesting against the government of Ukraine in 2013 was a bad thing.
What do you think the $5 billion was for and what was the protest good for if Victoria Nuland pushed in the resulting replacement? I'm sure there were some well-intentioned protesters there, but the whole point of the anti-imperialism argument is that these "color revolutions" are not purely innocent, internal protests.
The basic point still stands: America has been much more evil than any other country in the last 50 years, so Bryan's argument is quite strange that Russia is "vastly" more evil. They're all evil, and Russia's latest evil is Blowback for America's evils. This could have been averted: the U.S. could have stopped pushing NATO. We'd still be left with the U.S. and Russia spheres of evil, but now the world is threatened with nuclear war evil! For what?
> I'm sure there were some well-intentioned protesters there
Like, 99% of them? Let's not go into "all those people in the streets are paid by Soros" territory, please.
> these "color revolutions" are not purely innocent, internal protests.
Sure. If you see people who want something that also happens to be in your interest, you help them. That doesn't make *their* desire less genuine. It just means that now they have more *resources* than they would have otherwise.
Similarly, Russia does this all the time, even in countries that are NATO members. I am not sure what is the exact perspective of the international law on this, but I would guess that as long as you don't give someone literally weapons, it does not count as an aggression.
I believe that you dramatically underestimate the evil of Russia. Look at the historical record: 50 millions of people tortured to death in labor camps (gulags); 5 millions starved to death in Ukraine... I am not even counting wars yet, and Russia has lots of those, too.
(By the way, because comparing with USA is so popular whenever one mentions the horrors of Russia, notice that the number of people in (Soviet) Russian labor camps exceeds the number of slaves in USA by an order of magnitude.)
I will just focus on the core of this argument (don't think you've won the other points; it's just too annoying and tedious to argue with so many strawmans):
> I believe that you dramatically underestimate the evil of Russia. Look at the historical record: 50 millions of people tortured to death in labor camps (gulags); 5 millions starved to death in Ukraine... I am not even counting wars yet, and Russia has lots of those, too.
The Soviet Union was one of the most evil empires in history, from Lenin to Stalin and others, and as you correctly point out, killed at least 50 million and the Holodomor was a genocide. The vast majority of that happened in the early and middle part of the 20th century. So it seems your argument is to look at the sum of evil since the beginning of a country? How far back do we go?
I don't think that makes much sense. It seems to make the most sense to judge current levels of evil by looking at relatively "recent" data. What is "recent" will be subjective, but it seems a few decades is pretty reasonable. Compare the United States to Russia in the last few decades. The United States has clearly been more evil.
By the way, I was born in the Ukraine during the Soviet Union. I had a phase in my life where I was very emotional about the evils of the Soviet Union, no matter what time period someone was talking about. However, talking to my parents and looking at the data convinced me that late 1980s Soviet Union was nothing compared to Lenin and Stalin times. It was still evil, of course, and drenched in malaise that ultimately led to its downfall, but the murderousness was at a completely different magnitude.
> By the way, because comparing with USA is so popular whenever one mentions the horrors of Russia
This isn't a competition. They're all evil. The whole goal here is how do we avoid nuclear war! One place to start is to reduce tensions between evil empires. The strange point Bryan seemed to be making is that somehow the U.S. is less evil, which is belied by the facts. The U.S. empire is insatiable and it seems its push for Ukraine being added to NATO was a proximate cause of this war.
I don't quite understand why pushing NATO membership for countries that desire it is evil. I see this point made a lot, but never an argument supporting it that makes sense of why a defensive agreement is very threatening to other nations. There might be good arguments for it, I just haven't heard one made.
The Rothbardians and libertarians in question aren't arguing that "pushing NATO membership for countries that desire it is evil"; instead, they are arguing that pushing NATO membership of Ukraine was a proximate cause of the Russian-Ukraine war. The argument for this is that Putin pretty much stated that this would be a proximate cause of a war, before the war; for example, see "Russia issues list of demands it says must be met to lower tensions in Europe" by The Guardian on 17 Dec 2021, and many similar stories. After the war, you can read "Putin’s Case for War, Annotated" in The New York Times which lays everything out in more detail. This whole argument is well summarized in "Russia's Ukraine invasion may have been preventable" on MSNBC. As noted in the last article,
"Recognizing this possibility does not excuse Moscow’s actions, which are heinous. Nor does it mean Russia’s insistence on regional hegemony is fair or ethical. And ultimately, it is no
guarantee that Putin would not have invaded anyway. There are other factors — including, but not limited to, Putin's general anger over Kyiv drifting away from Russian influence and
domination and his isolation as a decision-maker — that may have been sufficient to drive the invasion.
But the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow
raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but
negligent."
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.
Soviet propaganda. Please explain how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre fits in your model.
(The Soviet version was that it never happened, that at least made their story somewhat consistent.)
Reprisals for the 1920 war. Also, irrelevant to the general conclusion.
"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.
This seems like a general problem with contrarians. At some moment they are forced to adopt an absurd opinion, because the reasonable one is already taken by the "sheeple".
I think you pretty much nailed it. I wouldn't say it is forced so much as the frequency of conventional thinking being wrong makes disagreeing with whatever the current thing is reflexive. This tends to short circuit the actual thought process and encourages motivated thinking to justify the contrarian reflex.
Plus, it is really hard to admit that people who happen to be right but for the wrong reasons are still right. So many commentators today will say "You see, [one billion reasons why Ukraine is wrong, the US is wrong, Russia is less wrong] and so everything is bad!" then when pressed will say "Well, yea, Russia shouldn't be invading Ukraine." Commentators need to comment on something, I suppose, and it feels strange to agree with people who your career is made up of opposing.
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.