"Right. The warming that isn't happening that isn't causing the Arctic ice to thin. I suppose you can convince yourself of anything if you refuse to look at any evidence that disagrees with your conclusion."
While somehow you fail to realize that the exact same argument can be made against your own position... perhaps even more soundly.
Due to parent posting as AC, and someone who meta-modded it down (in effect, being worse than Anonymous Coward, using mod points to indicate "I disagree", I have seen it fit to re-post this as a full-on quote. So it will take at least 2 more Anonymous Modding Cowards to bury this again.
"Of course! I mean, it's OBVIOUS to anyone with eyes that a medium-term cooling trend means warming is going on - ahem, did you forget to mention it's the hottest year on record? Any climate scientist worth his salt has computer simulations that would predict that and many other potentialities.
But I have to criticize your well-meaning retort which has sadly missed the mark. I'm here to help. I know what I'm about to say will be a tough pill, but I hope you will read it all and modulate your approach.
First of all, your meme is antiquated: it's "Climate Change" now. Even accidentally using the word "warming" could make people wonder whether we've got a clue about what's going on when you combine: the atmosphere, water cycle, dynamic solar radiation output, orbital wobble, stardust, magnetic field change, clouds, vegetation rotting on a planetary scale, volcanism, oceanic flows, etc - and then pile on the overwhelming inputs from man-made sources that dwarf all the rest. Only when you sufficiently take all of that into account and countless other variables would one be able to accurately predict the climate.
** BUT WE KNOW **! That's what you have to always stress in these conversations. We hold the one and only truth, our mathematical models for climate are practically world simulators. That's our secret weapon, we have the facts about settled climate science. 9 out of 10 our scientists agree, that's enough for me! The words "Climate Change" properly convey the complexity of our thoughts and the always-expanding sophistication of our computer models. The word 'warm' is no longer politically correct and must be removed from your vocabulary.
I'd also like to urge you to elevate the conversation more when you're making your points. If you've even got a prayer of changing the insufferable skeptics' minds, you must pepper in louder insults against their intelligence and add many more exclamation marks on your sentences with ALLCAPS!! Shame is a tool, you should feel no shame about shaming the bleary-eyed sheeple! Yell louder until they take notice!!!!
"Extremely naive"? Are you kidding me, is that all you've got? That is almost... FRIENDLY talk! That piece of eurotrash garbage you deign to graciously instruct might have just walked away with a smile! What you gotta do is really shank the (holocaust) deniers in the back and twist it and then break it off! Maybe you were in a hurry when you wrote this, but for godssakes, we're talking about Gaia in crisis! We could literally have months before the seas evaporate! The computer models predict a very sharp spike in planetary temperatures approx. 5-75 years from now!!!!!!!
I just wanted to close by saying that we believe in you and we're pulling for you. Please, PLEASE become the bigmouth, hand-wringing, eco-religious, professorial douche you were born to be - it's for our own good!!!!!!!!!!"
Mod parent up. More than 5. Anecdotes about weird weather mean literally nothing. It happens EVERY YEAR, in various parts of the planet. But it also happens in different places every year.
,br/>
My area had a record cold spring this year, and we now have about 6" of snow in mid-November, which is also unusual. Evidence of "climate change", one way or the other? Hell, no.
"Fact, there's a strain of bamboo for almost every climate."
Uh... no. If you could get any kind of bamboo to do more than barely survive in the climate of my state, you would probably be in the running for a Nobel prize. And no, it isn't Alaska.
No, it is not. We have records of periods that were warmer than now, and even warmer than it is projected to be for 100 years or so. Much of that data is from things such as tree rings and sediment, which are sensitive to seasonal weather. And there is NO significant evidence that the weather was more "extreme" during those warmer periods.
"NYC gets an Irene like storm every 60-75 years and I knew it was due from past statistical records."
I admit that I am nitpicking a bit, but at our current level of technology, predicting storms like Irene in advance of more than a few days is haphazard at best. For practical purposes, one can call it random.
Which means that your prediction that a major storm was "due", is nothing more than a very slightly modified version of The Gambler's Fallacy.
One should not make life choices based on such spurious "reasons"... unless it is your intention to avoid all such possible risks, no matter how slight. In which case you should probably move to Utah or Arizona, or some other such non-coastal region with no tornadoes and few earthquakes.
"I can't put a degree symbol because the slashdot janitors have made an arse of input parsing)"
(Fixed the minor typo.) I agree. Slashdot supports certain HTML tags, some of them deprecated even, but doesn't support common HTML coded characters. Which is just plain weird. It means their back-end code is doing things that are unnecessary, in the way of "sanitizing" input.
Well... what are you going to do? Slashdot is slashdot. With all of its plentiful warts.
Unfortunately, your logic falls well below Mensa-level.
First off, polls show that members of Mensa, as a percentage, include far more "Anthropogenic Global Warming" skeptics than the public at large. Maybe that should tell you something. Secondly, it has already been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that IF the oft-touted AGW models are accurate, then any expenditure less than what it would take to break even the most wealthy nations will not be enough to make a significant difference.
Economist Bjorn Lomborg (English-ified spelling) has estimated that of the models are accurate, the amount of money necessary to reduce temperature by 1/2 degree C over the next hundred years, would also be enough to completely eradicate world hunger, even considering increasing population.
So it's not just a matter of spending money... it's a matter of where the money is better spent. And AGW ain't it. There are a lot of other worthwhile causes.
"And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise."
What you -- and other gullible people like you -- don't take into account is that Anthropogenic Global Warming has only been taken seriously for about those same 10 years... and if 10 years is not enough to disprove a trend, it's not enough to demonstrate a trend, either.
If I were you, I'd go take a remedial course in basic logic.
"Never mind about what we said about the hot weather, just get your tinfoil hats ready when solar magnetic decline and solar minimum freeze (y)our rears off in 2020..."
Seems to me that tinfoil hats would be better protection against all that warming that hasn't been happening. And you could fold it into little boats to float all your possessions when the sea level rises to... wait, what? Back to the level it was 3 year ago.
To me, that's all pretty much irrelevant. There is no way you can convince me that any of the fancy theorizing overrides the very simple fact that without judicial restraint, we would be a nation of men rather than laws. The opposite of the way it is ultimately supposed to be.
Sometimes it pays to step back from the details, no matter how cogently argued, and look at the bigger picture.
"This is entirely an issue with scale of production and distribution channels;"
Partly, but I would hardly say "entirely". Shipping perishables like meat is an expensive process. Therefore, except for giant outlets with an already-huge distribution channel (as you mentioned), it's still usually cheaper to sell (and buy) locally.
Agreed. I used to eat my meat well-done as a child, but that was before I worked at a steak house when I was in college, and learned what I was missing.
"Yup, nobody reputable will run under the LP banner, so all you can do is point to non-LP people as shining examples of the LP. That seems to prove you wrong, rather than right."
On the contrary. The fact that Americans have been loathe to support a third party (not to mention the bias against third parties that has been built-in to our political system over the years), says absolutely nothing against any particular third party, whether Libertarian, Green, or any other. And in fact Paul has run under "the Libertarian banner" before. He just doesn't see the support for third parties -- ANY third parties -- today that it would take to get elected.
"'libertarian' principals don't line up with the LP, from what I've seen, and your proof against that is to say 'But there is a good libertarian, he just refuses to associate with the LP."
Wrong on both counts. As I clearly stated in my earlier reply, you can go to LP.org and look at their official platform. To say that "libertarian principles don't line up with the LP" is simply false. A bald-faced lie, that anybody who wants to go look can prove to themselves. Why didn't you?
Second, Paul can and does "associate" with the Libertarian party. He was a party member for years and has run as Libertarian before. I repeat: according to his own statements, the only reason he runs as a Republican is because he feels it is too difficult to get elected while running under a third-party system. Largely due to the built-in advantages the 2 big parties have given to themselves over the years.
"as if that's a rebuttal, rather than confirmation of my statements, which is how I take it."
Oh, it's definitely a rebuttal. Nothing you have stated has been confirmed at all. In fact, as I stated twice before, a quick look at the LP party platform, which should take you all of about 30 seconds to find, proves you wrong quite easily.
The only reason I mentioned Paul, is that you brought up Libertarians from Texas. Despite running under the Republican banner, Paul still considers himself -- and calls himself -- a Libertarian. So, since you asked for one, there you have one. One who demonstrates quite clearly that you are wrong.
"Sure, there are tons of grazing animals. They still cost three times more per pound than cornfed or CAFO operation beef."
That depends entirely on where you are. In Montana, Idaho, and Washington, for example, there are vast tracts of land that are worthless for just about anything but letting cattle graze. (Often because the land is just too "vertical" for anything else. Sometimes because it's too dry. Sometimes both or something else.)
In those areas, grass-fed beef isn't "expensive", it's what's for dinner. You might have to go a long way to find many that are corn-fed. Except for the last few weeks before slaughter, that is.
I should add (because English comprehension does not seem to be your strong suit): when put in the proper context (i.e., in regard to causality), my comment in no way contradicts the mathematical meaning of "implies".
"If you distinguish between conclusions and implications, as you did in your original post, then you have to be using the common, less-than-certain meaning of "imply," because mathematically the statement is meaningless"
It still doesn't mean that I meant what you are saying I meant. As I have already stated, that would contradict the context of the statement, which you seem to have been ignoring. It also doesn't mean that it was wrong.
"I suspect you know all this perfectly well, and are just mixing up the meanings to muddy the waters."
No. I do not intentionally troll. I said what I meant. You just failed to take the context into account, and in so doing, muddied the waters yourself.
If you turn it around, and assume that I was referring to the mathematical sense (as opposed to assuming that I wasn't), then telling someone that it doesn't even "imply" (in the non-mathematical sense) what they were inferring is also perfectly proper.
So who is splitting hairs and muddying the waters here? What is the purpose of your objection if it wasn't just to try to prove me wrong at something, for some reason? (Which you failed at, by the way.)
"As opposed to moving the goalposts, which seems to be one of your favorite rhetorical tricks?... But that's not what you said originally. You said "No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation," which is a much stronger statement."
I'm didn't "move the goalposts". You took my comment out of context.
The context of my original comment was clear: the "implications or conclusions" I referred to were in regard to causality. That is what the whole comment was about.
Stop accusing me of logical fallacies when you are committing them yourself.
To clarify what I was trying to say: the fact that the Supreme Court is a political body, rather than an unbiased legal body, is merely a reflection that our ideal system is corrupted.
"Basically, this simply undermines your original point... judges are chosen because of their opinions."
It doesn't undermine my point at all. I mentioned this myself elsewhere.
The fact that judges are often, if not usually, chosen for a particular political position does not alter the basic legal principle that judges are supposed to be unbiased, regardless of their personal or political beliefs.
To the extent that they allow their personal beliefs to influence their decisions, they simply aren't doing their jobs.
"I'm a strong supporter of the idea of interpreting the Constitution as it was originally intended, and in the most pro-freedom, anti-government power manner possible, but there's nothing explicit in the Constitution that says it must be interpreted that way."
No, but there are lots of historical documents that make it extremely clear that the Founders intended it to be that way. For example (I quoted this one earlier, it would take me more time to find others):
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson
Wilson was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and was influential in the drafting of the Constitution.
Determining what the law is, is still a matter of adhering to the principle of law ("a nation of laws, rather than men"). Your comment is completely irrelevant to my own.
"I've seen LP members run for national office who ran on the personal platform that they would make abortion illegal."
I have a hard time believing the Libertarian Party would support such a candidate. Are you sure he/she was a member of the national Libertarian Party? Maybe that person was only a member of a state branch (which are separate)?
"he stance on non-defensive wars doesn't match with funding indications from LP candidates who won't make it priority one to stop the massive waste on military. "
Again, I would like to see a concrete example of this. "Some LP candidates" isn't a very convincing argument.
"Hmmm, go meet some LP members in Texas and Alaska (the two places I lived) and tell me what you think of them."
Well, there's one very good example of a Libertarian candidate (who has been running under the Republican banner, though): Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Who has been sending a strong Libertarian message at the national level for over 30 years. A long-time Libertarian, by his own admission he's only a Republican because he doesn't think that third parties can easily get elected in the current political atmosphere.
His positions? Among other things: no non-defensive wars, no Federal abortion laws, no "big-brother" laws... all the things we've been talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
"Right. The warming that isn't happening that isn't causing the Arctic ice to thin. I suppose you can convince yourself of anything if you refuse to look at any evidence that disagrees with your conclusion."
While somehow you fail to realize that the exact same argument can be made against your own position... perhaps even more soundly.
"Of course! I mean, it's OBVIOUS to anyone with eyes that a medium-term cooling trend means warming is going on - ahem, did you forget to mention it's the hottest year on record? Any climate scientist worth his salt has computer simulations that would predict that and many other potentialities. But I have to criticize your well-meaning retort which has sadly missed the mark. I'm here to help. I know what I'm about to say will be a tough pill, but I hope you will read it all and modulate your approach. First of all, your meme is antiquated: it's "Climate Change" now. Even accidentally using the word "warming" could make people wonder whether we've got a clue about what's going on when you combine: the atmosphere, water cycle, dynamic solar radiation output, orbital wobble, stardust, magnetic field change, clouds, vegetation rotting on a planetary scale, volcanism, oceanic flows, etc - and then pile on the overwhelming inputs from man-made sources that dwarf all the rest. Only when you sufficiently take all of that into account and countless other variables would one be able to accurately predict the climate. ** BUT WE KNOW **! That's what you have to always stress in these conversations. We hold the one and only truth, our mathematical models for climate are practically world simulators. That's our secret weapon, we have the facts about settled climate science. 9 out of 10 our scientists agree, that's enough for me! The words "Climate Change" properly convey the complexity of our thoughts and the always-expanding sophistication of our computer models. The word 'warm' is no longer politically correct and must be removed from your vocabulary. I'd also like to urge you to elevate the conversation more when you're making your points. If you've even got a prayer of changing the insufferable skeptics' minds, you must pepper in louder insults against their intelligence and add many more exclamation marks on your sentences with ALLCAPS!! Shame is a tool, you should feel no shame about shaming the bleary-eyed sheeple! Yell louder until they take notice!!!! "Extremely naive"? Are you kidding me, is that all you've got? That is almost ... FRIENDLY talk! That piece of eurotrash garbage you deign to graciously instruct might have just walked away with a smile! What you gotta do is really shank the (holocaust) deniers in the back and twist it and then break it off! Maybe you were in a hurry when you wrote this, but for godssakes, we're talking about Gaia in crisis! We could literally have months before the seas evaporate! The computer models predict a very sharp spike in planetary temperatures approx. 5-75 years from now!!!!!!!
I just wanted to close by saying that we believe in you and we're pulling for you. Please, PLEASE become the bigmouth, hand-wringing, eco-religious, professorial douche you were born to be - it's for our own good!!!!!!!!!!"
Dear parent poster: get a name. This was worthy.
Mod parent up. More than 5. Anecdotes about weird weather mean literally nothing. It happens EVERY YEAR, in various parts of the planet. But it also happens in different places every year. />
My area had a record cold spring this year, and we now have about 6" of snow in mid-November, which is also unusual. Evidence of "climate change", one way or the other? Hell, no.
,br
"Fact, there's a strain of bamboo for almost every climate."
Uh... no. If you could get any kind of bamboo to do more than barely survive in the climate of my state, you would probably be in the running for a Nobel prize. And no, it isn't Alaska.
"This is an expected result."
No, it is not. We have records of periods that were warmer than now, and even warmer than it is projected to be for 100 years or so. Much of that data is from things such as tree rings and sediment, which are sensitive to seasonal weather. And there is NO significant evidence that the weather was more "extreme" during those warmer periods.
"NYC gets an Irene like storm every 60-75 years and I knew it was due from past statistical records."
I admit that I am nitpicking a bit, but at our current level of technology, predicting storms like Irene in advance of more than a few days is haphazard at best. For practical purposes, one can call it random.
Which means that your prediction that a major storm was "due", is nothing more than a very slightly modified version of The Gambler's Fallacy.
One should not make life choices based on such spurious "reasons"... unless it is your intention to avoid all such possible risks, no matter how slight. In which case you should probably move to Utah or Arizona, or some other such non-coastal region with no tornadoes and few earthquakes.
"I can't put a degree symbol because the slashdot janitors have made an arse of input parsing)"
(Fixed the minor typo.) I agree. Slashdot supports certain HTML tags, some of them deprecated even, but doesn't support common HTML coded characters. Which is just plain weird. It means their back-end code is doing things that are unnecessary, in the way of "sanitizing" input.
Well... what are you going to do? Slashdot is slashdot. With all of its plentiful warts.
Unfortunately, your logic falls well below Mensa-level.
First off, polls show that members of Mensa, as a percentage, include far more "Anthropogenic Global Warming" skeptics than the public at large. Maybe that should tell you something. Secondly, it has already been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that IF the oft-touted AGW models are accurate, then any expenditure less than what it would take to break even the most wealthy nations will not be enough to make a significant difference.
Economist Bjorn Lomborg (English-ified spelling) has estimated that of the models are accurate, the amount of money necessary to reduce temperature by 1/2 degree C over the next hundred years, would also be enough to completely eradicate world hunger, even considering increasing population.
So it's not just a matter of spending money... it's a matter of where the money is better spent. And AGW ain't it. There are a lot of other worthwhile causes.
Kevin Trenberth has been caught more than once telling bald-faced lies, even to fellow researchers, about possible weather effects of climate change. He simply has no credibility anymore as a scientist. Please don't quote him again as a source unless you want people to laugh at you.
"And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise."
What you -- and other gullible people like you -- don't take into account is that Anthropogenic Global Warming has only been taken seriously for about those same 10 years... and if 10 years is not enough to disprove a trend, it's not enough to demonstrate a trend, either.
If I were you, I'd go take a remedial course in basic logic.
"Never mind about what we said about the hot weather, just get your tinfoil hats ready when solar magnetic decline and solar minimum freeze (y)our rears off in 2020..."
Seems to me that tinfoil hats would be better protection against all that warming that hasn't been happening. And you could fold it into little boats to float all your possessions when the sea level rises to... wait, what? Back to the level it was 3 year ago.
To me, that's all pretty much irrelevant. There is no way you can convince me that any of the fancy theorizing overrides the very simple fact that without judicial restraint, we would be a nation of men rather than laws. The opposite of the way it is ultimately supposed to be.
Sometimes it pays to step back from the details, no matter how cogently argued, and look at the bigger picture.
"This is entirely an issue with scale of production and distribution channels;"
Partly, but I would hardly say "entirely". Shipping perishables like meat is an expensive process. Therefore, except for giant outlets with an already-huge distribution channel (as you mentioned), it's still usually cheaper to sell (and buy) locally.
Agreed. I used to eat my meat well-done as a child, but that was before I worked at a steak house when I was in college, and learned what I was missing.
"Yup, nobody reputable will run under the LP banner, so all you can do is point to non-LP people as shining examples of the LP. That seems to prove you wrong, rather than right."
On the contrary. The fact that Americans have been loathe to support a third party (not to mention the bias against third parties that has been built-in to our political system over the years), says absolutely nothing against any particular third party, whether Libertarian, Green, or any other. And in fact Paul has run under "the Libertarian banner" before. He just doesn't see the support for third parties -- ANY third parties -- today that it would take to get elected.
"'libertarian' principals don't line up with the LP, from what I've seen, and your proof against that is to say 'But there is a good libertarian, he just refuses to associate with the LP."
Wrong on both counts. As I clearly stated in my earlier reply, you can go to LP.org and look at their official platform. To say that "libertarian principles don't line up with the LP" is simply false. A bald-faced lie, that anybody who wants to go look can prove to themselves. Why didn't you?
Second, Paul can and does "associate" with the Libertarian party. He was a party member for years and has run as Libertarian before. I repeat: according to his own statements, the only reason he runs as a Republican is because he feels it is too difficult to get elected while running under a third-party system. Largely due to the built-in advantages the 2 big parties have given to themselves over the years.
"as if that's a rebuttal, rather than confirmation of my statements, which is how I take it."
Oh, it's definitely a rebuttal. Nothing you have stated has been confirmed at all. In fact, as I stated twice before, a quick look at the LP party platform, which should take you all of about 30 seconds to find, proves you wrong quite easily.
The only reason I mentioned Paul, is that you brought up Libertarians from Texas. Despite running under the Republican banner, Paul still considers himself -- and calls himself -- a Libertarian. So, since you asked for one, there you have one. One who demonstrates quite clearly that you are wrong.
"Sure, there are tons of grazing animals. They still cost three times more per pound than cornfed or CAFO operation beef."
That depends entirely on where you are. In Montana, Idaho, and Washington, for example, there are vast tracts of land that are worthless for just about anything but letting cattle graze. (Often because the land is just too "vertical" for anything else. Sometimes because it's too dry. Sometimes both or something else.)
In those areas, grass-fed beef isn't "expensive", it's what's for dinner. You might have to go a long way to find many that are corn-fed. Except for the last few weeks before slaughter, that is.
"I'm actually fine with this idea of 'fake meat', as long as it's done well."
Done well, or well done? :o)
"If you distinguish between conclusions and implications, as you did in your original post, then you have to be using the common, less-than-certain meaning of "imply," because mathematically the statement is meaningless"
It still doesn't mean that I meant what you are saying I meant. As I have already stated, that would contradict the context of the statement, which you seem to have been ignoring. It also doesn't mean that it was wrong.
"I suspect you know all this perfectly well, and are just mixing up the meanings to muddy the waters."
No. I do not intentionally troll. I said what I meant. You just failed to take the context into account, and in so doing, muddied the waters yourself.
If you turn it around, and assume that I was referring to the mathematical sense (as opposed to assuming that I wasn't), then telling someone that it doesn't even "imply" (in the non-mathematical sense) what they were inferring is also perfectly proper.
So who is splitting hairs and muddying the waters here? What is the purpose of your objection if it wasn't just to try to prove me wrong at something, for some reason? (Which you failed at, by the way.)
"As opposed to moving the goalposts, which seems to be one of your favorite rhetorical tricks? ... But that's not what you said originally. You said "No conclusions, or even implications, can be drawn at all from simple correlation," which is a much stronger statement."
I'm didn't "move the goalposts". You took my comment out of context.
The context of my original comment was clear: the "implications or conclusions" I referred to were in regard to causality. That is what the whole comment was about.
Stop accusing me of logical fallacies when you are committing them yourself.
To clarify what I was trying to say: the fact that the Supreme Court is a political body, rather than an unbiased legal body, is merely a reflection that our ideal system is corrupted.
"Basically, this simply undermines your original point... judges are chosen because of their opinions."
It doesn't undermine my point at all. I mentioned this myself elsewhere.
The fact that judges are often, if not usually, chosen for a particular political position does not alter the basic legal principle that judges are supposed to be unbiased, regardless of their personal or political beliefs.
To the extent that they allow their personal beliefs to influence their decisions, they simply aren't doing their jobs.
"Few legal theories accept legislation as written by legislators as anything more than an 'input' to the law."
That is "judicial activist" thinking. If that is true, then few legal theories are adherent to the clear intent of the Constitution.
"I'm a strong supporter of the idea of interpreting the Constitution as it was originally intended, and in the most pro-freedom, anti-government power manner possible, but there's nothing explicit in the Constitution that says it must be interpreted that way."
No, but there are lots of historical documents that make it extremely clear that the Founders intended it to be that way. For example (I quoted this one earlier, it would take me more time to find others):
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson
Wilson was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and was influential in the drafting of the Constitution.
Determining what the law is, is still a matter of adhering to the principle of law ("a nation of laws, rather than men"). Your comment is completely irrelevant to my own.
"I've seen LP members run for national office who ran on the personal platform that they would make abortion illegal."
I have a hard time believing the Libertarian Party would support such a candidate. Are you sure he/she was a member of the national Libertarian Party? Maybe that person was only a member of a state branch (which are separate)?
"he stance on non-defensive wars doesn't match with funding indications from LP candidates who won't make it priority one to stop the massive waste on military. " Again, I would like to see a concrete example of this. "Some LP candidates" isn't a very convincing argument.
"Hmmm, go meet some LP members in Texas and Alaska (the two places I lived) and tell me what you think of them."
Well, there's one very good example of a Libertarian candidate (who has been running under the Republican banner, though): Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Who has been sending a strong Libertarian message at the national level for over 30 years. A long-time Libertarian, by his own admission he's only a Republican because he doesn't think that third parties can easily get elected in the current political atmosphere.
His positions? Among other things: no non-defensive wars, no Federal abortion laws, no "big-brother" laws... all the things we've been talking about.