Troy, that intro "The only law school whose tuition is indexed to the price of the McRib," 

Was the best intro you've ever done.

When all you have is a protectionist hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Ssssshhhhh!   You're not supposed to talk about that.

They're blood enemies and if one triumphs over the other, it'll be the end of the republic!

Seconded.

My favorite observation from the original post is this:

Sex scenes work onscreen when they illuminate character, not when they are trying to arouse the audience. They might not, in fact, be sexy at all.

If you include a sex scene and it doesn't illuminate the character in any way, then its just a sex scene and its only there to distract from some other failing in the work.

Well, clearly James Madison, who wrote the Constitution, disagreed.   He refused to assume those powers because he, after studying history, knew where it would lead.

So we get to the situation where James Madison let Washington DC be burned rather than assume war powers in excess of those granted to him by the Constitution.

So please don't lay that appeal-the-Founders stuff on me as a justification for dictatorship under our Constitution.  You don't get more Originalist than James Madison and you don't get a more existential threat than the British torching the White House.

And if those people, those free citizens, refuse to assist by giving their labor services or turning over their money to the state to fight a war, even if it is an existential threat, that should tell you something.

One of the theories behind the Fall of the Roman Empire is that people stopped resisting the Fall when being Roman was no better than being non-Roman.

If people don't want to fight maybe because they don't believe in the fight, and maybe they don't believe in it because they don't see what they're fighting for as worth it.  

Maybe that society is so corrupt or broken that they don't want to fight to defend it.

And in those rare cases where you're talking about the existence of a society, maybe they don't want to fight because that society isn't worth defending anymore.

But now you're conflating society with government.  Who is society?  Is it the people who want to force others to fight or is it the resisters too?

In reality, what happens, with a few notable exceptions, is that the guys in charge of the government, who command the men with guns, do whatever it takes to survives, principles be damned.  The only principle for them is survival.

That could be_noble when_you're about to be overrun by Huns who are literally at the_gates, but then it gets diluted down so the existential threat_is_claimed to be from people in caves on the other side of the_world.

Sorry, I realize that you were using "the foundations of our culture" and religion as synonyms.  My bad.

By the way, no offense, and I don't ever say this here, but that's a bull [expletive] answer on your part.  Rather than argue or discuss the cause, you've decided that its not worth bothering to discuss.  

Which is unfortunate, because that discussion will allow you to explore and find the cause and maybe a solution.  You're wrong, it's not complicated and it's not a dance.  The history doesn't match your conception of it.  And its frustrating to me that you've shut that down with your notion of "a complicated dance." 

As long as intelligent, freedom loving people believe that and repeat it, it remains a dream.

Not for nothing, but why can only a government preform these services?

You're missing something: The state creates the erosion.

Well, it seems they scan the outside of all mail.  So they'd know we were communicating.  So if they're investigating me, they know to investigate people I'm communicating with.

The NSA thing is worse.  We, you and I, are free to talk about Obamacare, to oppose it.

The NSA thing is about our ability to communicate with eachother.  How are we going to organize a revolution if they can read our private communications?

He "raised an army" through conscription.  So he was all for a man being "naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights," until such time as he needs conscripts for a war.

I'm not Southern sympathizer and I'm sure as hell not going to defend the Confederacy and its economic system built on human slavery.  

But when Lincoln couldn't get enough men, because not enough agreed with him about the need to fight the war, he conscripted them, then he created a paper currency and inflated the hell out of it to pay for it all.

If you want to make an ends justify the means argument, that's fine.  But we shouldn't delude ourselves about the actions he took and how antithetical to republicanism and liberty they were.

Man, read some Micky Spillane.  Not funny, just really hard boiled and really well written.  Mrs. Cole got me a Micky Spillane Reader, three books in one cover.

Or we just listen when he opens his mouth.

Katie, you should like him a hell of a lot less than you do.  You're a lot more libertarian (in the good way) than you realize and certainly far more than he is (which is none at all).