Dan Sullivan wrote: BH) Verily, I am... (BH
DS) Or, perhaps, incredibly tactless, annoying, self-centered and disruptive. (DS Tactless? I was accused of "hypocrisy" on a public forum (by a moderator there who calls me a "deformer") and denied the opportunity to defend myself there. This is the same forum where the archives still describe me as a "war pig". (Quick, quote the worst epithet I've ever used against any radical. Go ahead. Make my day. I never have used one, and never will. That's just how I roll.) The moderators there haven't so much as batted an eyelash at such "piss" being splashed around in the LPradicals "living room". I guess some piss is sweeter than others. :-) Does "tact" require that I not take an opportunity to defend myself on the sister forum -- the one that was advertised as an "unmoderated, open, sandbox-style list for wide open discussion"? I protested Montoni's charge of "hypocrisy" by demonstrating how it applies to him. You recently protested <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lpradicals/message/2315> LP Vice Chair Chuck Moulton's use of the word "idiotic" by suggesting he may be "lying" and saying "the LP bureaucracy still has its heads up its assets". I never initiate imagery anywhere near that crude, and yet you're lecturing me about "tact". Self-centered? Yes, I defend my self. I don't see many others volunteering to do it (with notable exceptions like Starchild and Tom Knapp and Beau Cain). Annoying? Disruptive? I'm indeed perceived that way by many who seem to feel threatened by what I have to say. No surprise there. DS) On the face of the actual, individual post, I would not have banned you. However, I wondered at the time if you were partly a victim of your reputation preceding you. This confirms it. (DS Of course I was. The question is: what is it about what I write that makes a radical like Hogarth fear me having posting privileges? Someone gave the answer on LPradicals itself last <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lpradicals/message/1553> August: ) in my personal experience, the radical problem with Brian is not that he's unethical or sneaky, but precisely the opposite -- that he's happy to engage his opponents head-on in open debate, that he's GOOD at it, and that many of us, not being as good at it as he is, tend to lose ... not because we're wrong but because we don't argue as well. That being the case, my argument is "get over it -- GET better at making radical arguments, because trying to avoid our stronger opponents is NOT the way to win." I'm frankly MORE comfortable in arguing in a forum hosted by my opponent, because doing so forces me to rely on the strength of my arguments rather than being tempted by shortcuts that may work in one place, but not in another. You build muscle by lifting weight, not by slinking past the gym and promising to visit it later. ( (To find out who said it, click the link above soon, before Hogarth deletes the post from the archive.) DS) It also suggests that you are clueless about what your reputation is (DS You may think you know my "reputation", but you don't know the first thing about me. I'm the reformer who in Portland protested the de-credentialing of the radical Starchild by giving him my voting proxy on the floor and then voting the way he would on every subsequent motion -- against my own reformer interests. I'm the reformer who stood up to repeated public threats from a purist that I'll be "beaten to a bloody pulp" if I didn't delete a blog posting <http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=274> that satirized that purist LPCA ExCom member by compiling quotes from him. I'm the moderate who gave arch-purist LPCA Southern Vice Chair Mark Selzer technical help in posting the recording that cleared him of the then-LPCA-moderate-leadership's charges of invoking the state against the Party -- charges that I had defended before hearing the recording. I'm the PlatCom reformer rivaled only by the Outright Libertarians Chair as PlatCom's most <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3111> vocal defender of gay rights, but who has been repeatedly <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2530> and publicly <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2244> and demonstrably <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2249> lied about by him and the California Outright coordinator on multiple forums, with never a single apology or retraction or complaint from a moderator. If anyone is "clueless" here, it's not me. DS) Banned from four lists, presumably by at least two different moderators? Could the problem be you and not them? (DS Let's see, two of the bannings were by Susan Hogarth, and the other two were in gay-dominated forums (Outright Libertarians and LP of San Francisco) where I dared to protest the lies about me by these two Outright leaders. See the pattern? Holtz gives evidence to rebut personal attack, gets banned. I would ask that you think for yourself and critically examine the evidence offered by a Libertarian in defense of his reputation, rather than assuming that two or three moderators might not have ulterior motives. (On LPSF-discuss, they also didn't like the success some members admitted I was having in correcting some myths about intervention in Iraq.) DS) I moderate several lists as well, and when someone posts a message whose subject header is an ad hominem attack, I immediately put that person on moderated status, (DS And yet, Montoni didn't put himself on moderated status when he first issued precisely the same "ad hominem attack" against me on a public forum he moderates and that I'm excluded from. In fact, using the word "hypocrisy" is not actually an ad hominem. And did you hear that scientists recently discovered that authentic hypocrisy can actually exist in the natural universe? They found some hiding right next to the long-sought magnetic monopole. :-) DS) It's not because he is thinking dangerous thoughts, etc., but because he is pissing in my living room. (DS So if the subject header is like your "living room", then I guess the message body is like your outhouse, because you seem to have no problem with Montoni pissing there. :-) DS) I didn't think Susan was right when she did this, but not that I see this response, I'm guessing she probably was. (DS And you're probably going to think your (aptly worded) "guess" is confirmed by the mild sarcasm in this rebuke from me, but at this point I just can't bring myself to really care whether you can mentally separate the objective facts from the way this rebuke makes you feel. You've struck me as well-spoken and fair-minded and insightful, and your archived royal <http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html> libertarianism and green <http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/greenlibertarians.html> libertarianism essays recently tipped me into a mindquake epiphany that confirmed my nascent ecolibertarianism <http://ecolibertarian.org/> . But if this is how you operate when someone's reputation is indeed at stake, then I'm no longer convinced I should seek you out as an ally in trying to bring the LP around to geolibertarianism. I'm sure I can find more principled geolibertarians to work with. After all, there are like 7 or 8 of us now, right? :-)
