JRE, the Bylaws and Convention Rules about the Platform are full of references to planks as the unit of change and retention for that document. There is just no way you can claim that the word "basis" means that the Party is forced to indefinitely follow a formatting convention that was only put to use at one convention and then led promptly to the mass rejection of the reformatted platform at the very next convention.
Tim, if the Dallas Accord had been a text, we'd all have seen a copy long ago. At the 1974 Dallas convention, anarchists apparently agreed that the LP would not explicitly call for abolition of the state as long as the originally minarchist Platform/SoP no longer said that “protection of individual rights” is a “legitimate function of government” in a libertarian society. However, the Dallas Accord became an effective veto power for anarchists over any Platform statement that didn't uphold anarchist abolitionist principles. By contrast, minarchists had no equivalent veto power over the many abolitionist Platform statements that conflicted with their own small-government principles. When compared to 2004, the Platform Committee's purely-recycled 2008 proposal does not include any new assertions about the role of government. Instead, it removes the 13 most extreme abolitionist statements that were in 2004, and leaves related statements that are consistent with both incremental reform *and* an anarchist destination.
I wish that just one radical -- any radical -- would explain why it's "divisive" to complain about this asymmetry in the Platform. I'd even accept an explanation from a "centrist" like Brian Miller, but getting him to answer questions is a skill that I decidedly lack. Otherwise, I'd ask him what he means when he says he's "getting pretty friggin’ tired of advocating the expulsion of groups who aren’t liked by various constituencies." I've never heard him advocate any "expulsion", and he's simply addled if he thinks my video advocates it.
No, Mr. Sipos, my "alleged" doesn't mean you're either "mistaken or dishonest", but rather coy. I challenged you to name a reform leader of similar stature to the three radical leaders I identified in my response as clearly suggesting the LP is not the right party for me. If you don't have any such facts at hand, it's not my fault. If you want to play the game of arguing which side's leaders are trying harder to make it uncomfortable for the other side to remain in the party, that's a game I will win every time -- even without invoking my trump of the asymmetry in the party's foundational texts. You of course ignored that asymmetry even after I called it out to you, nor did you answer my response to your drive-by epithet of "Republican lite".
Tim, that was the first I'd seen of that Boaz piece. From my copy of Clark's campaign book I had known that the Rothbard and Nolan critiques of the Clark campaign were unfair, but I had no idea they were *that* unfair and unfounded. If you really do have more material like that on your hard drive, then you need to share. Now.
