Lying Works For Jim Davidson

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2008/11/brian-holtz-responds-to-jim-davidson-multiple-freedom-parties-is-dumb/

Chris, try reading and quoting what I actually write, instead of what Jim Davidson lies about what I write.  Contra Davidson's lie, I've NEVER said you owe the LP your "loyalty".  I just explained above that I think we should be more loyal to liberty than to party.  My point here is just that it's addled to think that the way to improve the LP is to compete with it via another libertarian party.  I explicitly said that trying to replace (as opposed to improve) the LP is one of the two valid reasons to start another libertarian party.  Creating an explicitly anarchist party would be the other reason, and I've never said that the BTP is trying to be an anarchist party.

George, you're new to the LP, and so perhaps you haven't yet learned that the constant Internet jabbering of the same two dozen LP activists -- most of whom are not in any sense LP insiders -- has very little relationship to the actual health status of the LP.  The current little synthesized controversies are nothing compared to the scandals, both alleged and real, of the late 90s and early 00s.  Even if BTP membership were mutually exclusive with LP membership, its current numbers might still be lost in the noise of the LP membership graph.

The example of multiple "statist" parties is only relevant if you think there is no difference in the policy goals of liberal and conservative voters.  Standard anarcholibertarian analysis indeed lumps all the nanny state "sheeple" together, so you get to decide whether such anarcholibertarian analyses meet your own standards of rigorousness.  Much more relevant is the example of the myriad socialist parties and candidates.  I don't see you saying that "the people just go mad for them", just as I don't hear anybody saying that competition has been a boon for them.  That's an inconvenient reality, so it's just ignored.

Thomas, I'm going to take it as a given that the current and previous editors of California Freedom have a shared working conception of what "liberty" is, and are able to recognize the flaws in nanny staters' advocacy of "liberty".  If you believe what you're saying, then you would assert the following: "The best way for the freedom movement to, say, choose a political platform is to create separate freedom parties advocating for platforms like the BTP's, the Restore04 platform, and the current LP platform, and then let the voters decide which is best in a general election."  So, do you dare assert that?  Of course not.  Choice is indeed good, and that's what caucuses and conventions are for.  The deafening silence you hear is all the multi-freedom-party advocates here saying absolutely nothing about why multiple parties is better than multiple caucuses.  Nada. Zip. Zilch.  It's only my central point, and yet nobody here has anything to say about it.