It started out as an in-joke among us here at TLS; now it’s set to become part of Internet lore, as ubiquitous on Web forums as LOL and “all your base are belong to us” jokes: FYLR!
Initialism for “FUCK YEAH LEW ROCKWELL!”
An exclamation of delight at some wondrous gift bestowed upon the world by the magic of the free market, or triumph at the erosion of some bullshit government department or program, in the form of a winking, semi-serious attribution to the ongoing efforts of heroiclibertarian educator and advocate Lew Rockwell.
Alternatively, an informal pseudonym to be used when making adoring reference to Lew.
More generally, an exclamation in celebration of any occasion of total overwhelming pwnage, such as Lew consistently delivers.
Properly used with exclamation point, no matter where found in a sentence.
FYLR! is gonna be interviewed on Colbert next week, FYLR!!!!!
We’ll know this meme has truly arrived when it merits its own entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW). In the meantime, say it with us: FYLR!
Today is the 223rd anniversary of the adoption of the modern American Constitution, on Sept. 17, 1787. Most Americans are too ignorant to even realize that this followed in the wake of the 1776 Declaration of Independence (on July 2, not July 4, 1776), and the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781. Or to understand that the Bill of Rights was not adopted until 1791, two years after the Constitution was ratified (in their hysterical devotion to the flaccid Bill of Rights (see The Bad Bill of Rights) and ignorance about the limited powers scheme of the federal government, they would have to believe there were no rights in the two-year period between 1789 and 1791).
Flag-waving yahoos grin like idiots.
Yet, adopting the Official History and hagiography of our constructivist, utopian Founders, they worship the Constitution anyway, even though it was a coup d’état, even though slavery was permitted, even though it was an illegal, unnecessary, centralizing power play by politicians (see Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power), even though it arguably led to the Civil War, WWI, the collapse of western monarchies and the regressive replacement of traditionalist limited monarchy with socialized democracy, WWII, Naziism, Communism, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (see my When Did the Trouble Start?).
Ironically, today is officially decreed to be “ConstitutionDay” by the Congress, in an act that is itself unconstitutional since the Constitution does not authorize the Congress to establish any such quasi-religious institutions or observances. The very act of official worship of the Constitution is unconstitutional. How fitting.
Down with the Constitution. What a socialist, centralizing, utopian mistake. It is time for libertarians to stop glorifying early America, the Founders, the Constitution, etc., as proto-libertarian. All states are illegitimate, including America’s. As Lew Rockwell observed in stirring words in his article The Enemy Is Always the State:
Let me state this as plainly as possible. The enemy is the state. There are other enemies too, but none so fearsome, destructive, dangerous, or culturally and economically debilitating. No matter what other proximate enemy you can name — big business, unions, victim lobbies, foreign lobbies, medical cartels, religious groups, classes, city dwellers, farmers, left-wing professors, right-wing blue-collar workers, or even bankers and arms merchants — none are as horrible as the hydra known as the leviathan state. If you understand this point — and only this point — you can understand the core of libertarian strategy.
Islam was founded by a successful merchant, and the religion was largely pro-market until the colonial disease of socialism infected the Muslim world. The Koran calls the merchant the most honorable man, saying that nine of ten of God’s bounties come from trade.
Last week, Lew Rockwell posted an item about officers “subduing” and arresting two people who had the audacity to stand where President Obama’s motorcade wanted to go.
I recalled this yesterday as I read an October 1900 newspaper article, which reported an indignity that VP candidate Theodore Roosevelt suffered when newsboys threw mud at him “and greeted him with insulting language . . . as he departed from the church at which he had attended.” The story was a small item several pages into the paper and there is no indication that the boys were “subdued” or arrested, or that they got into any trouble at all. Instead, the mud-spattered TR just huffed off on his way.
The story included no quotes from experts on how terrible it is that our youth would show such disrespect for a great political leader and no editorializing.
Today, of course, this would be the top news story for a week, Chris Matthews would rend his garments over the blasphemy against our civic religion, and the kids would likely be tazed or killed, and, if they lived, charged with felonies.
Another newspaper article from the same month mentioned that trick-or-treaters stopped by the White House and were greeted by President and Mrs. McKinley. The kids weren’t participating in a photo op, but were just knocking on the front door as they would at any other house. Because you could do that, because the president was not a god.
For more details of the good old days when people treated presidents like the ordinary jerks they are (and how far we’ve fallen), I highly recommend Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency.
