Jim Davidson Learns To Do Web Searches

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

Oh look, Jim Davidson has again made a farce of his verbal tic that he ignores me, and has actually tried to do some web searches to back up his recklessly false claim that I demand that libertarians be "loyal" to the LP.

“I am in the Libertarian Party, and the Libertarian Party is in me…”  I love this one.  It's from an argument I made to an evangelical Christian who buys the latter-day doctrinal invention that Jesus claimed to be God incarnate.  The guy was arguing from the Jesus quote that "God is in me and I am in God."  So I gave this quote as a counter-example and said "Mutual partial inclusion is indisputably not the same thing as ontological identity. (Jesus would never have said that God is exclusively or totally in Jesus.)"  It's just addled for Jim to claim this is a demand for party loyalty.  Still, Jim gets an atta-boy for actually trying to put some of my words between quotation marks.

The quotes about the Greens can be rebutted simply be repeating my claim in the title of this thread: "multiple freedom parties is dumb".  The Greens are a socialism party, not a freedom party or an incumbent party.  The list of arguments against investing in multiple protest parties only gets longer when the other protest parties are not freedom parties.  That's not a demand for loyalty to the Libertarian Party, that's a demand for loyalty to libertarianism.  I gleefully plead guilty to the latter charge.

The fact remains that I have never criticized self-identified libertarians (like Ron Paul) just for deciding to use the GOP as a means to get elected, nor have I ever criticized Libertarians who choose to support such candidates even in races where the LP has mistakenly decided to field a candidate.  I even have offered encouragement and praise to the Democratic Freedom Caucus (whose platform would be better than the LP's after five smallish deletions: http://libertarianmajority.net/democratic-freedom-caucus-redacted-platform), although I've never heard of a self-identified libertarian getting elected to legislative office as a Democrat.

The fact remains that I encourage self-identified libertarian candidates who want to infiltrate the incumbent parties in order to get into elective office, and I've never demanded that libertarian voters boycott incumbent-party candidates.  I do still claim that it's a waste of resources to invest in multiple freedom parties (and multiple protest parties), but I explicitly admit that a libertarian could honestly and intelligently want to replace the LP if he considered it unsalvageable.  I stand by my nine distinct arguments that "competition" among multiple freedom parties is wasteful, and it remains inane to insist that any such argument constitutes a demand for blind party loyalty.