Sorry, Steve LaBianca, but the 2008 LP Platform says all the same things about aggression and force initiation that the 2004 Platform said:
) We believe force and fraud must be banished from human relationships [...] We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose. [...] People should not be forced to sacrifice their lives and property for the benefit of others. [...] No individual, group, or government may initiate force against any other individual, group, or government. [...] The only legitimate use of force is in defense of individual rights — life, liberty, and justly acquired property — against aggression. (
The phrase "zero aggression" has never been in any LP platform, and none of the words "smaller" and "direction" and "toward" is in the 2008 LP Platform. Stop arguing with the voices in your head, and read the platform for yourself.
I'm not "framing" the debate. You ignorantly said the LP Platform is "goal-less", and so I quoted its stated goal to you. You claimed the LP Platform has lost its "foundation" of principle, so I challenged you to identify a principle that it has lost. You've failed utterly to do so.
Michael Seebeck, it's fallacious to claim that the existence of effort to repair/improve the LP platform means that the LP "ignores its infrastructure and base-building". The LP can walk and chew gum at the same time. If you want a sample of what I've been working on besides platform reform, see http://libertarianmajority.net/bh-lp-activism.
Just because you ignore the LP Platform doesn't mean the rest of America will too. See page 1 of http://libertarianmajority.wdfiles.com/local--files/platform-portal/PlatformTruth.pdf for some of the kooky positions taken by the 2004 platform. For the price we were paying, see the list on page 2 of uses of the platform to attack the LP.
As far as I can tell, those attacks have stopped. The Platform is now repaired, and I look forward to you aiming all your derision about platform activism at the radicals who will be trying to re-radicalize the platform in 2010. By the way, can you quote yourself ever criticizing all the wasted effort that was sunk into Restore04? Or was all your criticism reserved for those of us who rolled up our sleeves and hammered out a repaired platform that the delegates could actually pass?
