Are we REALLY this weak?

[WesSeid]

Because it is true........

How about some specifics? If he's that bad, I would think you'd want people not to vote for him, and to do that you should give specific reasons why.

 

[TheBlackPeterSchiff]

I guess I just dont care. I have absolutely 0 faith in this system.

 

[CT4Liberty]

If it makes you feel good to vote for a candidate that is not on the ballot and will be lumped in as 'SCATTER' with other candidates then you should do that. That is a vote that is essentially the same as staying home and having a steak, which I hear some may do to make them feel better.

Others however believe there is no guarantee we are going to get Rand or some liberty candidate in 2016 if Romney loses. They are already promoting Rubio and Christie as rock stars so he will have quite a bit of competition.

If Obama wins the Overton window will move further in his direction and Conservative-Libertarian like policies will be more unpalatable and extreme to the masses in 4 years. Romney and the party maybe paying lip service to some of our domestic issues as of late which might be meaningless when it comes to action but at least it keeps these issues in the national dialog. An Obama win will be interpreted as the country moving farther to the left.

Voting for Romney maybe like eating a big shit sandwich but I am not going to blast anyone for doing so considering the facts. You are also deluding yourself that there is no difference between Obama and Romney. They are as far away from each other domestically as Ron is from them.

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."

You know what would really scare the bejesus out of the establishment.... 15-20% of voters voting for anyone but the R or D on the ticket... I personally dont care who it is, write in Paul (like I probably will) ... vote for Johnson (like I might) ... Constitution Party, Green Party, Socialist Party, whatever you want... but until we can make it known that this may not be a 2 horse race they will continue to pull this stuff.

 

[QuickZ06]

How about some specifics? If he's that bad, I would think you'd want people not to vote for him, and to do that you should give specific reasons why.

Try a search on this forum, plenty of threads on this out there. He is against the wars, yet for sending our military to save the "kids" from Kony? And let me remind you Kony's "army" is full of children.

 

[CT4Liberty]

I guess I just dont care. I have absolutely 0 faith in this system.

Then we must change the system!!

 

[TheTexan]

Then we must change the system!!

replace the system, IMO

 

[heavenlyboy34]

replace the system, IMO

+rep

 

[CT4Liberty]

replace the system, IMO

Semantics... either way, apathy will not change or replace the system

 

[NewFederalist]

Well, Romney won fair and square so why would we not support him? ;-(

 

[QuickZ06]

Well, Romney won fair and square so why would we not support him? ;-(

Thats a good one, thanks for the last laugh of the night for me.

 

[anaconda]

peter schiff made a good point yesterday. if romney were to win and a collapse were to happen or if romney failed to improve things and went back on his "promises", rand could stand up and say hey, i worked with you before but you havent done anything. now you have to work with me. if rand were to primary him, it would be a 1 on 1 battle instead of having to share the stage with 9 other candidates. i think too many people are assuming an obama win is the best case scenario if you are just interested in rand winning 2016.

You are not alone with this theory:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/05/22/153295435/mitt-romney-vs-rand-paul-in-2016

 

[Mini-Me]

He wasn't a threat until we showed up. There was no need to undermine him back then. He was just a gadfly for most of those years. Once millions of people started supporting him, that quickly changed.

How did Ron get reelected in 2010 then? How did Justin Amash win? Rand Paul? My point there is that the establishment's ability to cheat is limited. It's there, and they do cheat brazenly, but if you're assuming that trying to prevent a collapse is futile, you're overestimating their degree of control.

Give up? Give up? This fight has barely just begun. We have completed phase 1: the awakening. Politics has served its purpose. We can continue to try to use it to wake up the few left capable of waking up, but for the most part, we have expended the political system's usefulness. We won't get much more out of it.

It's time to start phase 2.

Who said anything about it going away on its own?

I couldn't agree more. But you wish to work within the broken system, so that when the system breaks, we're already set up inside the system so that we can convince people to come to our side. However, it's not going to work that way.

What's going to happen, is that when the collapse happens, we're going to point out to them that we saw this coming, explain to them how it happened, and then show them a path to a brighter future. And they're going to tell us to shove that brighter future up our ass, because they want more State. Dr. Paul has predicted nearly everything that has come to pass today, the police state, the economic collapse, the encroachments on our liberty, the endless wars, the insurmountable debt. Noone cares. They want more State, have always wanted more State, and will always want more State. Future generations are not so hopeless, but this current generation absolutely is. They will oppose us. Always.

Sure. Political action. But that does not necessarily mean that our political actions should be in the framework of their political system. When this collapse happens, we do want to have an infrastructure. But we don't want that infrastructure to be inside of their system. There are simply too many reasons not to do it. They will attempt subterfuge against us, they will undermine us at every turn, and generally just fight us however they can. This makes it very hard for us to organize.

Any "organization" that we attempt to form inside of their system will not work. Because working within the system implies working with Republicans (or Democrats, or any other party), that means we are working with those people. They will be a part of the conversation. This means that every time we try to have meaningful discourse on how to proceed or what should be done, we have to fight off all of those other people who despise liberty and freedom.

The only positive to working within the system is to try to convert new people. And that's a noble pursuit. However, there's not many left to convert. As things get worse, more people will be willing to come to our side, but for now we have reached a ceiling. We can continue to reach out to these people without needing to be inside of their system. If we have our own infrastructure, and as long as we are welcoming to all who want liberty and freedom, as the saying goes - build it, and they will come.

We need to start building our own infrastructure. A political party, if you like. But the purpose is not to win elections. The purpose should be solely to organize like minded individuals. Only with proper organization can we ever hope to achieve anything, and we won't find that organization by trying to "take over the GOP."

The GOP has nothing to offer us anymore. We need to organize ourselves and prepare for the coming collapse. When the system collapses, our infrastructure will be in place, and we'll have much better chances of successfully opposing the rest of the country's desire for tyranny.

You like many others are living in a false dichotomy. Refusing to participate in their system is not "giving up." In my book, I call it "just getting started."

It looks like your core assumption is that political activism has absolutely no chance of working before collapse, because there's no chance on Earth of stopping it now. You could be right of course, and time will tell, but I'd rather try and fail than let your assumption become a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Let it not be said that we did nothing." I can imagine a very different future for us anyway, because the state GOP chairs we've taken over are strong signs that there is indeed a chance...and I think it's definitely worth pursuing.

There is nothing that will change the average person's mind faster than social proof of our ideas being popular and socially acceptable enough to supplant neoconservatism in a major party. That's the real obstacle we face: Even though anyone can internalize rational arguments when they really try, most people don't arrive at their views because of their rationality. That's totally incidental; they form their views for social and emotional reasons. Once more of us begin to understand that, we can start taking advantage of it instead of letting it hinder us so badly.

We already have some degree of organization "outside" the system, including The Libertarian Party, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, etc. Exactly how do you suggest we strengthen that infrastructure to argue our case after collapse (defined by hyperinflation)? Preparing ourselves enough to be the "go-to" people in our communities after a collapse would be fantastic, but we need to keep in mind that the government has "continuity of government" plans that likely include martial law, and it's hard to predict how that might all unfold. What else? How would some other route give us more visibility and credibility (among the masses, not other libertarians and malcontents) than taking over the Republican Party? Note that when the housing market failed and the stock market crashed, people looked to the same old sources of authority who caused the problem for advice on what to do. We facepalmed and banged our heads on walls, but nothing we did could change the simple fact that people are slow to learn from history. Even after a total economic collapse, they will still be hardwired to listen to many of the same institutions that led them to disaster. We should take advantage of this...and why not? In what way would strengthening our "external" organization necessitate ending all efforts to take over the Republican Party and stop a collapse?

 

[TheTexan]

It looks like your core assumption is that political activism has absolutely no chance of working before collapse, because there's no chance on Earth of stopping it now. You could be right of course, and time will tell, but I'd rather try and fail than let your assumption become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's a mathematical inevitability.

There is nothing that will change the average person's mind faster than social proof of our ideas being popular and socially acceptable enough to supplant neoconservatism in a major party. That's the real obstacle we face: Even though anyone can internalize rational arguments, most people don't internalize their views because of their rationality. That's totally incidental; they form their views for social and emotional reasons. Once more of us begin to understand that, we can start taking advantage of it instead of letting it hinder us so badly.

I generally agree with this, but many people will oppose this social change with every fiber of their being. Once the social change is established, they will accept it. But those who oppose us outnumber us. For us to succeed, we will need to oppose them with greater unity and strength.

Exactly how do you suggest we strengthen that infrastructure to argue our case after collapse (defined by hyperinflation)?

Argue the case? No... again, that's fruitless. They can't be convinced through any logical or rational means. We will simply need to win against them through sheer willpower. Our delegates that we earned are a good example of this. Considering the minimal amount of popular support we had, we actually gained a lot of delegates. We accomplished that by acting in unison, and with a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears over that period of time. However, and while the delegate game was moderately successful, it was for simply a single election. It's an unsustainable strategy because for that to work over the hundreds of elections required, we would need to continue at that same pace of effort for many, many years. It's not humanly possible, and we're seeing the results of that now.

Not to mention, that if we were to continue to work the political system with the same amount of effort for many years, that would give our opponents time to respond with a greater opposing force. It's simply not possible.

We must avoid at all costs long sustained efforts, because we will lose the war of attrition. Any political coup d'état must be swift and efficient.

In what way would strengthening our "external" organization necessitate ending all efforts to take over the Republican Party and stop a collapse?

That's not necessarily what I mean. I don't think it's necessary to abandon the effort entirely. But I do believe that viewing the takeover of the GOP as a primary objective is, at this point, a futile endeavor that will only leave us tired, wounded, and disorganized when the time comes where we need to be at our best.

Our primary objective at this point should be to surviving the coming storm, and thriving in the post-collapse environment. I believe taking over the GOP does have merit in the context of surviving and thriving in the storm, and that's a debate worth having. But my point is I do not believe our primary objective should be winning elections, not for now, at least.

Above all, we need unity. And that doesn't necessarily mean we need to agree on the same strategy. It just means that we need to view each other respectfully as equals, and keep lines of communication open. Many people are openly hostile to those who are not on board with the GOP strategy, and in some cases, vice versa as well.

 

[TheTexan]

peter schiff made a good point yesterday. if romney were to win and a collapse were to happen or if romney failed to improve things and went back on his "promises", rand could stand up and say hey, i worked with you before but you havent done anything. now you have to work with me. if rand were to primary him, it would be a 1 on 1 battle instead of having to share the stage with 9 other candidates. i think too many people are assuming an obama win is the best case scenario if you are just interested in rand winning 2016.

That is a very interesting point.

 

[WesSeid]

Peter Schiff wants me to vote for Obama by betting the U.S. will collapse within the next four years? ehhhh....

If I put that much faith in the U.S. collapsing in the next four years, I think I'll have other things to worry about than trying to get a Republican elected in 2016.

Gary Johnson 2012.

 

[krazy kaju]

peter schiff made a good point yesterday. if romney were to win and a collapse were to happen or if romney failed to improve things and went back on his "promises", rand could stand up and say hey, i worked with you before but you havent done anything. now you have to work with me. if rand were to primary him, it would be a 1 on 1 battle instead of having to share the stage with 9 other candidates. i think too many people are assuming an obama win is the best case scenario if you are just interested in rand winning 2016.

Good point. But I doubt any primary challenge to an incumbent President could be successful in this day and age. However, I do think such a primary challenge would be useful as a method for attracting more people to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party.

I believe that the real fight for the future of America is within the Republican Party. The libertarian-conservative wing of the Republican Party needs to take over the Party from the neoconservatives. And the one sure way to defeat the neoconservatives is to let them have a go at governing while we protest loudly and obnoxiously, using all of their failures in order to detract from their ranks while adding to ours. They'll gradually sink themselves, until the only people left carrying the GOP will be the grassroots activists like us.

 

[SilentBull]

I'll be voting for Gary Johnson, but I am really concerned about having Obama in office when the economy implodes. Just imagine what his solutions to the problem will be. Price controls and who knows what else.

 

[Mini-Me]

It's a mathematical inevitability.

We're getting close to that, but not yet. Collapse, as I would define it - hyperinflation without free market money being legalized and used first - isn't absolutely mathematically necessary until the yearly interest payments on the debt exceed GDP. Ron Paul's budget plan this go-around would have been enough to prevent collapse, and it wasn't even especially extreme. By our standards, it was an eminently moderate compromise. Collapse could still come at any time, even tomorrow, but we still have a while to go before avoiding it is completely mathematically impossible.

I generally agree with this, but many people will oppose this social change with every fiber of their being. Once the social change is established, they will accept it. But those who oppose us outnumber us. For us to succeed, we will need to oppose them with greater unity and strength.

Argue the case? No... again, that's fruitless. They can't be convinced through any logical or rational means. We will simply need to win against them through sheer willpower. Our delegates that we earned are a good example of this. Considering the minimal amount of popular support we had, we actually gained a lot of delegates. We accomplished that by acting in unison, and with a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears over that period of time. However, and while the delegate game was moderately successful, it was for simply a single election. It's an unsustainable strategy because for that to work over the hundreds of elections required, we would need to continue at that same pace of effort for many, many years. It's not humanly possible, and we're seeing the results of that now.

That's why the GOP strategy is not a delegate strategy: It's an activist strategy to take over official GOP positions like committee posts, chairs, and eventually RNC slots. With a major party at our disposal, and our ability to give voters and donors their "straight ticket" slate and marching orders, we'll be able to fund a lot more candidates than we can today, and we'll face a lot less popular opposition. Fox News will also be left floundering, because they won't know who to support or how for a while, which will disrupt the status quo and further signal the turning tide.

Most people don't resist us out of an inherent revulsion, but because they look to others around them for cues about how to act. I DO think this strategy will successfully amplify our message, resources, and support base...after which point we'll be able to win both Presidential elections (delegate energy) and a boatload of Congressional/Senatorial seats, which will further propel us to a critical mass of support. That doesn't mean we'll see even 10% of the population becoming hardcore libertarians in this lifetime, but if we give people the right emotional incentives to identify with us, we could see a shift toward Constitutionalism as the public's "average" viewpoint.

Not to mention, that if we were to continue to work the political system with the same amount of effort for many years, that would give our opponents time to respond with a greater opposing force. It's simply not possible.

How so? Unless we talk ourselves out of getting involved (a mentality I'm trying to fight), they're never going to respond with a greater number of activists than we can muster, and that's what matters for taking over the GOP. As far as the general public is concerned, what more can they do to propagandize them that they aren't doing already? Aside from creating a huge cult of personality like the Kim dynasty has in North Korea - an ideal they won't risk the state's immortality for - they're pretty much doing everything they can think of.

We must avoid at all costs long sustained efforts, because we will lose the war of attrition. Any political coup d'état must be swift and efficient.

By all means, we should prepare for a collapse in advance. We should also shift gears once a collapse occurs toward an all-out-push to become delegates to any Constitutional Convention that might occur...but that's the only swift and efficient coup that could realistically occur, isn't it? In the meantime, it's impossible to take over Congress by blitzkrieg, and even attempting to do so would leave us dead on the side of the road from exhaustion.

I also think it's premature to assume an economic collapse will necessarily entail a collapse of government and a political vacuum: They have "continuity of government" plans, and those could go in any direction. They could go for martial law and seizing world resources by military force, for instance, or they could go for martial law and Communism, or they could monetize the debt and hold onto power for dear life by other means...I really don't know what's going to happen, but it's probably going to be very messy.

That's not necessarily what I mean. I don't think it's necessary to abandon the effort entirely. But I do believe that viewing the takeover of the GOP as a primary objective is, at this point, a futile endeavor that will only leave us tired, wounded, and disorganized when the time comes where we need to be at our best.

A boring meeting a month or so really shouldn't be THAT draining or wounding though...even a feisty meeting wouldn't hurt much. Until we actually take over, that's where our GOP efforts would be most efficient...rather than tirelessly expending ourselves campaigning for a particular candidate.

Our primary objective at this point should be to surviving the coming storm, and thriving in the post-collapse environment. I believe taking over the GOP does have merit in the context of surviving and thriving in the storm, and that's a debate worth having. But my point is I do not believe our primary objective should be winning elections, not for now, at least.

I don't really disagree here, but the GOP strategy isn't exactly about killing ourselves to win elections in the here and now either. Winning seats this year would be nice of course, but we need the party infrastructure first - easily gained just by showing up to an occasional meeting - or we'll keep fighting uphill losing battles like the Ron Paul 2012 campaign.

Above all, we need unity. And that doesn't necessarily mean we need to agree on the same strategy. It just means that we need to view each other respectfully as equals, and keep lines of communication open. Many people are openly hostile to those who are not on board with the GOP strategy, and in some cases, vice versa as well.

I do agree here...but I think it's a serious problem that runs deep.

For starters, in order for this to happen, people need to stop actively sabotaging each other's efforts and making harsh judgments of each other over differences that pale in comparison to our differences next to the real statists. For instance, there are people who crap on the LvMI and LRC's eductional attempts and anarchism, there are people who crap on others who try to document conspiracies and wrongdoing, there are people who crap on Gary Johnson or voting for anyone who isn't 100% principled, there are people who crap on the GOP strategy, there are people who crap on Rand, and there are people who crap on GOTV initiatives and political activism altogether...no matter what someone wants to do, another ally is always there to tear it down. With friends like these, right?

That's easier said than done though. As far as the GOP strategy goes, there's an inherent conflict between "take over the GOP" and "leave the GOP and focus on a third party" strategies. I hold no animosity for people who want to sit out of the whole GOP thing or try to promote third parties, but I feel frustration toward people who constantly berate this promising new strategy and call on everyone to abandon it, especially for our previous third party strategy. Not only does it have a lot more institutional hurdles against it, but it has a much longer track record of failure and a much shorter list of accomplishments to its name after all that time. It's has been tried for 40 years already by the LP alone and longer by others of different political persuasions. There's nothing wrong with continuing to pursue it as time allows, but there are a select few on the board who literally spend all their time here trying to undermine the GOP effort by calling it worthless and convincing others to withdraw from it, like it's their job. It's been the theme of thread after thread recently, much of which is coming from kneejerk emotional reactions, but it's really being promoted by the same old culprits who have been at it for months, seizing any opportunity to bring people further down and draw them away from the effort...an effort which needs some concentrated numbers to work, I must stress. There are a few posters that are excessively destructive, but there's one in particular whose motives I suspect: The poster I'm referring to has repeated the same shallow propaganda for months on end, carefully and consistently ignoring any well-thought and specific arguments about the merits of the GOP strategy vs. their preferred third party strategy. This poster simply pretends those arguments were never written in the first place and repeats their original mantra, thereby hitting the "reset" button on the discussion and moving on to discourage (or egg on) more people with the same emotionally-driven rhetoric. Such blatant intellectual dishonesty combined with such an obvious axe to grind makes it hard for me not to see this particular poster as an intentional saboteur, and it's frustrating seeing them single-handedly do so much damage.

On a related issue, I'm going to go off on a tangent here for the rest of this post. It's going to sound like I'm selling Johnson here, but I really just want to use his candidacy as a foil for my thoughts on the current climate of dogmatism and disrespect:
I know for instance that voting for Gary Johnson goes against your own personal principles. I have no problem with people who can't bring themselves to vote for him. It's cool with me, and I sympathize, and I'm not exactly enthusiastic about him either. At the same time, it galls me when I see people calling each other immoral and statists and possessing no libertarian principles and the like, for merely taking the same pragmatic view that Walter Block (and many other prominent libertarians like Rothbard) has taken toward practically advancing liberty in the real world. (See here for instance: http://lewrockwell.com/block/block204.html) This is personally insulting to me, and it's insulting to others, and it also serves to detriment their chosen efforts to advance liberty in the face of the status quo's nearly unbridled despotism. This deep aversion toward voting for anyone shy of perfection (or sometimes toward voting at all), and all of the "giving/withdrawing consent" arguments, appear to be a conspicuously new phenomenon among libertarians, and I cannot help but think that we have been deliberately manipulated by people who have a good handle on how we think. I'm thinking in particular of the CIA here: It wouldn't take a lot of intervention or repetition for psy-ops to have injected these arguments into our discourse, because we're emotionally predisposed to believe them already (we want to wash our hands of the system).

If a candidate would violate the NAP, voting for them cannot be logically construed as a violation of the NAP itself unless you're intentionally voting for them BECAUSE they're going to violate it (as statists do). Realistically speaking, libertarians vote for candidates with the hope that they'll do no harm at all, even though we realize the outcome is going to be a lot more mixed. Indicating a preference for a particular package deal is a lot different from initiating force, and yet libertarians on this board have enshrined this completely non-essential and pathological absolutism as an indispensable libertarian principle. We've gone from recognizing and preferring an ideal of perfection or near-perfection, to demanding it. This attitude is not even remotely in line with what our own role models and predecessors (e.g. Rothbard) thought, and yet here we are attacking each other's libertarian credibility over it in many cases and demanding that the only moral action is to abstain. Shouldn't this be a red flag that something has gone wrong? It's apparent to me that our own principles have been twisted and distorted into something at odds with the real world today in order to paralyze us, but we've lost too much perspective to recognize it.

When it comes to Johnson in particular, I think a lot of hardcore libertarians today are conflating our emotional revulsion for imperfection with the practical knowledge that a very particular type of compromise has led us to our current situation. The particular kind of compromise that has destroyed us is "lesser of two evils" voting, where partisans have voted for someone who will vigorously work to increase government in one area, just because they pinky swear that they'll decrease it in another area (which rarely happens). Over time, the seesaw action of the two parties has led us toward abject statism. This has led to the fallacious and exaggerated arguments that, "There is no such thing as a good compromise," or, "When you're right, and you compromise, you're wrong."

The idea is that any kind of compromise whatsoever is so morally corrupting that it cannot possibly work, but these arguments overlook the fact that there are different degree of winning and different degrees of losing. Think of Lord of the Rings: Frodo made a choice to take the ring into Mordor and expose himself to its corruption, so he could destroy it. That's one heck of a sacrifice he had to make over the ideal catapult scenario...but the catapult was a pipe dream. His real alternative was letting the Nazgûl come to his house to take the ring, and the world would fall into ruin. Gandalf, wiser than Frodo, refused the ring under any circumstances to avoid becoming corrupted...by doing so, he left the responsibility to someone less qualified. (Paradoxically, he at least had the sense of mind to realize the importance of someone doing it. ). The metaphor applies to the liberty movement in a plethora of ways, but right here it applies to abstaining from voting (both in general and in particular elections), and leaving the one ring to all the other voters (a gaggle of orcs) who actively seek to use it and keep it, instead of moving it toward Mount Doom.

If the alternative to a guy like Johnson is letting a complete statist like Obama or Romney completely rape everyone unchallenged (they will anyway since Johnson cannot realistically win, but still), that's a much bigger loss than electing someone who is a compromise between the status quo and what you really want, like Johnson...and it implicitly allows a lot more NAP violations, even if you can technically wash your hands of them. Note that I didn't call Johnson a compromise candidate in and of himself, because that would imply that there's another option in the race who would actually be better for liberty. There's currently not, but if there were, and we were ignoring the best candidate for a more popular one - like the LP has in their primaries of late - that would indeed lead us down the road of self-defeating compromise.

We must always at least aim as high as we possibly can in any given moment...but I also think we should take what we can get whenever we can. It's one thing to believe that any compromise is ethically questionable, but it's logically nonsensical to say that restraining government is somehow so materially different from expanding it that it cannot be done incrementally: Certainly, it's more difficult, especially if we win infrequently enough for our advances to be repeatedly reversed. However, any compromise candidate that genuinely holds out ground and moves the ball in the right direction on every issue - even slower than we'd like - would bring the status quo closer to our true goals, and if we could actually manage to consistently elect people like this, we'd eventually arrive at liberty. Even holding ground without gaining any is preferable to losing more. Practically achieving consistent victory is a ridiculously difficult problem of course, but knowing who to vote for in a particular election is not the kind of problem we should be losing sleep over.

There may be times when the best we can do is so morally repulsive that it would make no practical difference, like a heads-up race between Obama and Romney with no third party candidates...in that case, abstaining or writing someone in is the only course that makes any sense. I do not believe an honest evaluation of Johnson is truly so dismal, but if you search your heart and actually feel that way about him, it's cool. However, I think it would be helpful if you could take a step back and empathize with those of your allies who think differently. To give an example, I know you've been harsh toward rockandrollsouls, and he in turn is unaccepting of an-caps...and what good comes from any of that? You both know deep down that you're allies in the current environment, and you'll likely never be adversaries until the fine day comes when we've already brought government down to a size he's happy with...and that will be a pretty fortunate problem for all of us to have.

Anyway, if you voted for Johnson, the worst case and most likely scenario is that he loses, never gets the chance to violate the NAP, your hands remain clean, and the LP gains an extra point of credibility...not much, but hey. The best case (pipe dream) scenario is that he wins, and the country takes significant steps toward liberty, but you'd have to flagellate yourself every time he violated the NAP, because you've convinced yourself that a vote means "unconditional approval" and that you're responsible for him...when really, you're only responsible for picking the least violent person you could.

Now, here is what I'm getting at:
Despite all the above argumentation, I don't care if you actually vote for Johnson or not. However, it should be very easy to make a mental distinction between actually "approving" of someone like Johnson and merely recognizing him as better in virtually every way than Obomney (and acting accordingly). If you or any of us seriously cannot draw such a distinction, or we cannot conceive of voting in any other light than "legitimizing the system" or "giving a statist approval" or "granting consent," then something has gone dangerously wrong with our mental models. Those are interesting and valid perspectives, but we should be able to recognize that there are equally valid, equally libertarian, and less judgmental ways of looking at the issue as well, which do not unnecessarily impose such demanding restrictions on our options. Once we lose the ability to adopt anything but the most extreme and personally restrictive interpretations we can possibly define for the libertarian ethics of any action, it means our thought patterns have warped themselves into such rigid and coarse-grained absolutes that we can no longer gracefully handle nuance or subjectivity. It's one thing to strive for internal consistency, but I fear that some of us have truly "gone rampant," devolving into unchecked programmatic or formulaic thinking, and it's frankly starting to scare me a bit. It's bad enough that it's happening at all, but we're getting to the point that some of us are demanding this kind of thinking from others and judging them as "unprincipled" otherwise, and it's going to get really ugly if it keeps up.

Similar thought patterns apply to Rand Paul criticism: Most people dislike how he plays politics, but a few seem unable to even allow for the possibility that he's still on our side, and do everything they can to tear him down and antagonize his supporters. This doesn't apply only to an-caps: A number of Ron Paul supporters of all types have recognized the high bar Ron Paul set for not playing politics, then subsequently adopted the more extreme principle that a good person would never play politics under any circumstances. They'll insist on taking the most absolute and pessimistic possible approach toward Rand, like the absurd, "He's no different from the neocons." Confronted with evidence that Ron too played politics at certain times (e.g. the Lamar Smith endorsement), they'll either ignore it, or worse, hold Ron up to an exaggerated and merciless version of the very ideal they originally took from him, when nobody else has ever even come close.

The same black-and-white thinking keeps coming up again and again and causing a huge amount of infighting. Many of us are losing our ability to respect anyone who doesn't think exactly like us. In the case of hardcore libertarians, this often means disrespecting Constitutionalists and paleoconservative allies. Many of them have long been disrespectful toward an-caps, but as of late it seems we're starting more of the fights through our judgmental attitudes. In the case of people disgusted with the GOP, it often means disrespecting people who think working within the party is useful and productive. In the most extreme cases, we're even losing our ability to hold each other to basic libertarian principles without upping the ante and throwing in tons of extraneous principles based on the most pathologically exaggerated ideals we can find, then mercilessly judging each other based on them. It's like we're becoming childish parodies of ourselves, and I don't know what it's going to take for people to step back and reflect.

Oh, man, I'm tired. Forgive me for any misspellings, please...sleep time.

 

[unknown]

I'm obviously writing in Ron Paul.

I cant say who would be losing my vote, Obama and Romney are ideologically identical.

 

[gjdavis60]

It's a mathematical inevitability.

Argue the case? No... again, that's fruitless. They can't be convinced through any logical or rational means. We will simply need to win against them through sheer willpower. Our delegates that we earned are a good example of this. Considering the minimal amount of popular support we had, we actually gained a lot of delegates. We accomplished that by acting in unison, and with a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears over that period of time. However, and while the delegate game was moderately successful, it was for simply a single election. It's an unsustainable strategy because for that to work over the hundreds of elections required, we would need to continue at that same pace of effort for many, many years. It's not humanly possible, and we're seeing the results of that now.

Not to mention, that if we were to continue to work the political system with the same amount of effort for many years, that would give our opponents time to respond with a greater opposing force. It's simply not possible.

We gained delegates out of proportion to our popular support by exploiting a system that was designed to allow a small number of insiders to control the process. We were able to outnumber the insiders because we were organized and had enthusiasm where they only had apathy. But we have also gained a lot of popular support over the past 8 years. And while our delegates were only relevant to this presidential primary, we have won a number of significant elected offices and taken over a number of state and local Republican Party organizations. These achievements will pay dividends for years to come and reflect the slowly growing public support for our message.

As long as the citizens perceive their standard of living in decline they will be open to new ideas, and I believe we can expect to continue to grow the movement politically with increasing success. If the establishment is successful at re-inflating the bubble and delivering another decade of phony prosperity we will have a much harder time prying minds from conventional assumptions about government and politics. In the current environment our opponents suffer from the distinct disadvantage of owning the policies and programs that have put us in this mess. That is our greatest weapon against them in the battle for popular acceptance.