Everyone Wants to go to Heaven But No One Wants to Die

The Libertarian Party of Florida's executive committee met tonight. Actually they are probably still meeting -- I hung up on the conference call after the two motions I was interested in were handled.

The first motion was a motion to refuse, and refund monies paid for, a sponsorship/ad in the state convention program next month. The sponsor is a publication called The Revolutionary Conservative. The publisher and founder of the magazine is Augustus Invictus.

There were actually sound arguments on both sides of this motion (the best arguments against it had to do with the de facto contractual relationship and the possibility that the sponsors had incurred additional costs in good faith that they would reasonably want to be reimbursed for).

The result: Embarrassingly (if the committee members have the sense to be embarrassed by anything, which I must say I have my doubts about), instead of voting it up or down, the committee decided to avoid taking any kind of position whatsoever and killed the motion with a vote to "postpone indefinitely."

The second motion was a motion to suspend Augustus Invictus's membership in the LPF for one year (that's what the bylaws provide for) on the basis of public threats of murder, clearly with social/political goals in mind, that he made at a debate with Walter Block some time back.

This one was even more embarrassing than the kicking of the Revolutionary Conservative ad can down the road.

EC after EC member said, with faces that I am pretty sure were straight although I could not see them over the phone, that they either 1) doubt that publicly, clearly and irrefutably threatening to murder one's political opponents constitutes a violation of the LPF oath against supporting/advocating initiation of force for political or social goals or 2) doubt that's what he did, even though he did it in front of an audience and was recorded on video doing it.

Some EC members -- mostly the same ones, I think -- expressed a wish that the Augustus Invictus issue would just go away. Not an intention to make it go away by dealing with it, mind you -- just a sort of general feelzesfest that if they click their heels together and whisper "there's no place like Munich" enough times, everyone will forget who and what Invictus is and they won't ever have to grow backbones and handle the situation.

So they voted, effectively, that threatening to murder political opponents is just peachy and that we should all sit down together and sing a round of kum-ba-ya.

And oh, the whining that will transpire when the whole thing flares up again because they decided not to do their jobs this time.

The real sore spot with me is that I know not all of these people are idiots and can't for the life of me understand why their IQs visibly plunge by 50 points or so when it comes to this particular matter.