Ben Hill and the New South

Posted on | May 20, 2019 | Comments Off on Ben Hill and the New South

As a boy growing up in Douglas County, Georgia, I did not realize that Ben Hill Road, which ran by our family’s house, was named for a historic figure. Benjamin Harvey Hill was a brilliant statesman, hailed as a “peerless orator,” who was so widely admired in Georgia that, although he had eloquently spoken in opposition secession in the crisis of 1860-61, he was nevertheless elected to the Confederate Senate. After the war, he spoke out against radical Reconstruction, and was subsequently elected first to the U.S. House and then to the Senate.

Of all he accomplished in his long career, however, perhaps Ben Hill’s most lasting achievement was his role in inspiring the New South. In a commencement speech at the University of Georgia in 1871, Hill bemoaned the lack of industrial development in the state, and encouraged Georgians to embark on a program to educate their sons to undertake this work. The question, Hill said, was not whether the abundant resources of the South would be developed, but instead by whom these resources would be developed. Would this work be done (and the rewards be reaped) by Georgians, or would her native sons be replaced by others who were more willing and able to take up the mechanical and commercial trades necessary to industrial development?

We must establish schools of science and educate our children. Others will come in and supplant us, and we shall perish truly from slavery. Our own sons must be taught to build and operate all machinery. We must build up schools of science. Our duty towards the negro is plain — we must educate and elevate him.
We must have educated labor, acquire a knowledge of mining operations, and skill in the manipulation of all metals . . . and the prosecution of every craft that will tend to contribute to the material interests of the country, or to develop its wonderful resources. Our children must take the lead and point the way.

This speech proved a pivotal turn in Georgia’s history, because one of those who heard Ben Hill speak that day was a young alumnus of the university named Henry Grady, who as a journalist became the most famous proponent of the “New South.” Grady made his case to the North, urging Yankees to invest in Southern industries, and the result was that soon every good-sized town in the South had a textile mill, and a pro-business attitude came to define the region’s leading cities, most particularly my hometown of Atlanta. My father, who grew up on a farm in Alabama, left home at 16 to work in a textile mill in West Point, Georgia, then after the war attended the University of Alabama on the G.I. Bill. After graduation, he moved to Atlanta, where he first worked a year for the Southern Railroad before hiring on at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Marietta, where he worked the next 37 years. Growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, I witnessed the booming prosperity of “The City Too Busy to Hate,” and as a young journalist saw how communities competed to attract business and encourage economic growth. And what remarkable success! In 1970, when I was in fifth grade, the population of Georgia was 4.6 million; by 2010, the population was 9.7 million — more than doubled. By comparison, during the same 40-year span when Georgia’s population increased by more than 5 million (110% growth), the state of New York’s population increased by just 1.1. million (6%). The result has been that Georgia has increased its influence in national affairs, while New York has waned. Whereas in the 1940s, New York had 45 House seats and Georgia had 10, now New York’s representation has dwindled to 27 House seats, while Georgia has increased to 14.

This historical background is necessary to understanding my indignation at a Yankee journalist’s recent display of ignorance. Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times wrote an article with the headline “Abortion and the Future of the New South,” implying that the recent passage of legislation restricting abortion in Alabama, Georgia and other states was somehow a threat to the region’s progress. The problem, of course, is that Ms. Bellafante considers liberalism as a synonym for progress, and misinterprets contrary evidence:

At the end of last year, LinkedIn, which regularly mines its database of 150 million worker profiles to analyze patterns in American employment and migration, reported that Atlanta had received more workers from New York City than any other place in the country during the preceding 12 months. That development has continued for most of this year.

Ms. Bellafante cites this data after invoking “the system of afflictions that places like New York and San Francisco impose on their young” — i.e., the heavily regulated social-welfare nightmares that degrade the quality of life. It does not seem to occur to her that this “system of afflictions” is yoked to the pro-abortion politics of the Left, for in turning their cities into places where no sane person would want to raise a child, Democrats thereby incentivize abortion. Rod Dreher has taken Ms. Bellafante to the woodshed, but I thought it important to point out how her concept of the New South was at odds with its historic origins. Certainly, we cannot imagine Ben Hill advocating abortion, because his vision of the New South was rooted in a spirit of pragmatic optimism, a hopeful promise that Southerners could adapt to the challenges of an industrial future, so that their descendants might inherit a better life. The advocates of abortion, by contrast, are possessed by an evil spirit, telling young women that there is no such hope for the future, that children are a curse, and that the life of their offspring is without value.

Not only Southerners, but all Americans with a sense of pride in our nation’s history, must reject these wicked voices of the Culture of Death.

If the godless liberals of New York wish to abort themselves into oblivion, I am powerless to stop them, but I hope Southerners will not be persuaded to follow the foolish example of Yankees. The future belongs to those who show up for it, as Mark Stein has observed. Let us do all we can to make America great again for our descendants. Selah.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Category: Abortion, Georgia, History, New York Times

Rule 5 Sunday: I Like ‘Em Dumb And Busty

Posted on | May 19, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

This week we were treated to the edifying spectacle of supermodel Emily Ratajkowski punishing old white men for passing Alabama’s anti-abortion law by removing all her clothes and tweeting about it. Many responded to this brave statement by demanding more such punishment. I merely chuckled, for it’s long been known that these women aren’t being hired because they have all this and brains too; nay, the wisdom of supermodels has been a subject of public derision for years. So since we really don’t care what these people have to say on matters of public import, here’s Ms. Ratajkowski doing what she does best, which is to say, filling out a swimsuit in an attractive manner.

Emily as we like her best – with her mouth closed.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #622, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Liar Or Incompetent Friday, also, the Saturday Gingermageddon. Plus, Bacon Time with Rule Five Redheads!

EBL brings us Daenerys Targaryen, Doris Day, Peggy Lipton, Chiling Lin, Ali McGraw, more Game of Thrones, and Nicole Harrison.

A View From The Beach has The Welsh Wonder, Jess Davies, I Eagerly Await Watching Her Season as a Greenhorn on the Wizard, Having Solved All Its Bigger Problems . . ., UNC SJW Shocked to Find Law Applies to Her, She’s Not Wrong, “River”, RIP: Doris Day, WTF Tuesday, Gone Fishin’ Russiagate, A Dog’s Life, RIP: Peggy Lipton and Another Great Moment in Climate Hypocrisy.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Vanessa Ferlito, and his Vintage Babe is the late Doris Day. At Dustbury, it’s Condoleeza Rice and Madhu Shalini.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

Dweeb World Update

Posted on | May 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Dweeb World Update

If there’s anything that should cause parents to take away their teenage daughter’s cellphone, it’s the thought that somewhere, in his mother’s basement, covered in Cheeto dust, a loser with zero social skills is dreaming about getting his hands on your daughter. There are millions of these antisocial weirdos with nothing better to do than play videogames all day, and all these sick freaks want to get with your daughter. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t seem bothered by this:

If we’re looking for an explanation of why today’s teens are having less sex than previous generations, there’s this: Many of them spend months or even years dating without ever meeting face to face. . . .
While there is little or no research on the phenomenon of long-distance-only relationships among young people, it’s not surprising that it’s happening, say experts. . . .

(The experts are all probably creepy perverts, too.)

“The way me and my boyfriend met was very strange,” says Katelyn Bobbitt, 20 years old and living in Providence, R.I. “We originally met through a YouTuber who was streaming Minecraft.” . . .
“I started getting more and more out of my shell, which is something I did not do in real life,” says Ms. Bobbitt. “I became closer to these people online than I did with my friends I had in high school.” Eight months into their online friendship, Ms. Bobbitt and Jacob Ribeiro declared themselves boyfriend and girlfriend, though they still had yet to meet.
A year after they first struck up a conversation in a YouTube chat thread, Ms. Bobbitt, then 19, told her parents she was in love and that she was getting on a plane to meet a boyfriend they didn’t know existed.
“I just straight up told them I’m doing this and you can’t tell me no,” says Ms. Bobbitt, who had saved money to pay for airfare. “But my dad was just like, ‘You better call me… You better tell me where this boy lives.’”
Now Ms. Bobbitt and Mr. Ribeiro live together. . . .

(Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Bobbitt. Your daughter is shacking up with some freak she met on a YouTube channel. You must be so proud.)

The online environments that allow some people to cultivate more intimate relationships can also become a burden, however. Expectations of that eventual physical encounter can become so great, the couple fears their first in-person meeting could be a disappointment.
That’s what kept Seyar Tahib, a 21-year-old college student living in Fremont, Calif., from meeting up with his girlfriend, he says, even though they’d talked online on and off for a year, and had even begun “dating” without even hearing one another’s voices. Finally, they worked up the courage to meet, and everything turned out fine.
“We were just scared we wouldn’t feel the same after we met each other,” Mr. Tahib says.
Fear that people we know only through the internet might not be who they seem—or even claim—is perfectly rational. In the most extreme cases, people will create fake online personas, known as “catfishing,” to defraud the lonely.
In Ms. Nguyen’s case, both of the online-only relationships she had from age 14 until she was 16 ended when she discovered that the attentive, always-online boys she was dating were busy also dating other girls, online… and in real life.
Tiffany Zhong is chief executive of Zebra IQ, which gathers insights on the behavior and tastes of Generation Z, usually defined as people born since 1995. She runs an app and online community, of which Ms. Nguyen, Ms. Bobbitt and Mr. Tahib have been participants. Another respondent told Ms. Zhong that when she was 16, she had a brief online-only relationship with a boy two years her senior. Two years later, after she had ended the relationship, she discovered that he was in jail for assaulting a female relative. . . .

This is when every father in the world becomes Liam Neeson.

How many times do I have to repeat myself? Online dating is for losers. And it’s also dangerous, because you don’t know who’s on the other side of the screen, hidden behind an online persona. Even if you can authenticate the other person’s identity, however, it should be obvious there’s something wrong with them, because they wouldn’t be on a dating app or trawling the Internet to meet people if they could get a date with anyone who actually knows them in real life. You will never meet anybody nice via online dating, because all the nice people already have real-life relationships with other nice people. What you find via online dating is discarded trash — the substandard losers who weren’t good enough to have relationships with nice people — and also, dangerous creeps who get arrested after locking up a teenager girl in a dog cage.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Culture

FMJRA 2.0: Mother Of Pearl

Posted on | May 19, 2019 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Mother Of Pearl

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Colorado School Shooter’s Father Is Violent Felon and Illegal Alien
The Pirate’s Cove
The First Street Journal
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: Meanwhile, Out In The Desert
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Illegal Alien Rapes Dog to Death
The Political Hat
Dustbury
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Come With Me, Into The Trees
A View From The Beach
EBL

The Return Of The Book Posts
EBL

Nostalgia Is Not a Policy Agenda
Dark Brightness
EBL

S.F. Police Raid Reporter’s Home
357 Magnum
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

In The Mailbox: 05.13.19
357 Magnum
A View From the Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 05.14.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

The Championship Mentality
Animal Magnetism
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

In The Mailbox: 05.15.19
A View From the Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous: #JamesCharlesIsCancelled Edition
Living In Anglo-America
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

Elizabeth Warren Is Over
EBL

In The Mailbox: 05.16.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Guys, Never Do This
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 05.17.19
Proof Positive
EBL

Stupid Is as Stupid Does
Dark Brightness
EBL

Solipsism and Feminist Rage Syndrome

Posted on | May 18, 2019 | 2 Comments

In his third book, The Rational Male: Positive Masculinity, Rollo Tomassi observes that women are prone to solipsistic thinking, making their own feelings the measure of everything, a self-referential point of view that makes objectivity impossible. Of course, many men are also inclined toward solipsism, but in our feminine-primary social order (to employ Rollo’s phrase), only male behavior is considered a proper object of criticism, whereas we are generally forbidden to criticize women. Therefore, the selfish attitudes and emotionalism of women is never noted — at least not by academics or journalists in any “respectable” forum — and these tendencies are indulged, encouraged and even celebrated. In our society, women’s desires are treated as entitlements, so that to deny her what she wants is an infringement of her “rights.” Women are considered to be so morally superior that they are incapable of lying (#BelieveAllWomen) and a woman’s anger is always legitimate.

This is the Red Pill perspective on contemporary culture, and you are free to argue with Rollo — don’t bother arguing with me, as I am merely the messenger — but my point in raising this topic involves the feminist reaction to the recent enactment of laws restricting abortion in several states, particularly Georgia and Alabama. Professor Donald Douglas calls attention to Rebecca Traister, feminist author of Good and Mad:
The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.

Once again, I was mad on television. I am also available for weddings and bat mitzvahs. I’m really the life of the party, I think you’ll find https://t.co/2hD24kcH10

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) May 16, 2019

I wrote about abortion and rage. https://t.co/Al4VQ0Rz8o

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) May 17, 2019

Okay that’s it. I’m going to take my clenched fist, hard heart and spewing hate and use them to bake 48 chocolate cupcakes for my father in law’s 90th birthday.

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) May 18, 2019

Keep in mind, even the draconian law in Alabama only applies to Alabama, a conservative state with a population of about 4.9 million, which is about 1.5% of the U.S. population of 328.9 million. In other words, 98.5% of American women are unaffected by Alabama’s abortion law and, if a woman in Alabama wants an abortion, she can go to another state and obtain one. Rebecca Traister doesn’t live in Alabama and yet, believing abortion to be a fundamental right (because anything a woman wants is a “right”) she has worked herself into a towering rage over a law that doesn’t affect her or any of her liberal friends in New York. Speaking of places where Rebecca Traister doesn’t live, did you know abortion is completely illegal in El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic? Also, with the exception of where necessary to prevent maternal death, abortion is illegal in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Honduras, and many other countries.

Now, I suppose since Ms. Traister cares so doggone much about abortion rights, she’ll soon be venting her rage at leaders of all those countries. But of course she won’t, because what she wants is to continue the relentless slaughter of American babies. She hates Americans so much, she wants all American babies to be aborted, and she especially hates babies in Alabama, because a lot of Christians and Republicans live there.

You might say I’m unfairly exaggerating Ms. Traister’s enthusiasm for abortion, but what else can explain her rage? The U.S. abortion rate has been declining for several years, partly because of more effective contraceptives (e.g., the so-called “morning after” pill). While I don’t know the total number of abortions performed in Alabama last year, I don’t think it’s a particularly large number, and so it is unlikely that many women in Alabama will be inconvenienced by this new law.

Maybe you should read Rollo Tomassi’s books. Just sayin’ . . .

Category: Abortion, Sex Trouble

The Internet Is Making You Crazy

Posted on | May 18, 2019 | 1 Comment

One way to drive yourself crazy is to become obsessed with a problem that is too large, or too distant, for you to influence the outcome — famine in Africa, global warming, “white supremacy,” etc. This is what Jordan Peterson’s “clean your room” advice to young people is about, correcting the “activist” mentality that plagues modern youth:

“Don’t be fixing up the economy, 18-year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with at your peril. So can you even clean up your own room? No. Well you think about that. You should think about that, because if you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?”

Teaching young people to be like Mrs. Jellyby was always a bad idea, and it has been exacerbated by social media, where hashtags become a substitute for rational argument, and kids think they’re changing the world by re-tweeting a liberal celebrity’s message. Those of us who were adults before the Internet existed — I’m 59 — have difficulty understanding how the social-media environment has reshaped the minds of young people, who cannot remember a world before Twitter, Instagram, Tinder, Tumblr and Pornhub. Speaking of which . . .

Pornhub said [May 2] it is “extremely interested” in buying Tumblr, a blogging platform once notorious for the pornography it fostered before it banned adult content last year.
“We’ve long been dismayed that such measures were taken to eradicate erotic communities on the platform, leaving many individuals without an asylum through which they could comfortably peruse adult content,” Corey Price, vice president at Pornhub, said in a statement.
The statement follows Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon is looking to offload Tumblr after failing to meet revenue targets. Verizon wound up with Tumblr as part of its acquisition of Yahoo in 2017. Yahoo bought the then-fast-growing blogging platform for $1.1 billion in cash back in 2013.

As I have previously noted, Tumblr is “effectively worthless.” Once hailed as an innovative platform, the site was wrecked by a social-justice warrior (SJW) mentality that disdained advertising revenue, and its blogging-for-dumb-people system where users could create the appearance of engagement merely by “reblogging” other people’s content. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s billion-dollar purchase of Tumblr was one of the biggest blunders in Silicon Valley history, and the fact that Pornhub might end up owning Tumblr is deeply ironic, considering that Tumblr also hosts some of the most strident radical feminists online.

Tumblr has so many problems, it’s impossible to describe them all. In 2013, nearly half of Tumblr’s users were age 16-24, and that youth vibe was why the site was considered a hot commodity. But much of that audience has been lost to other sites — primarily Twitter and Instagram — and Tumblr’s problems intensified last November after they got hit with accusations of hosting child pornography. Because the site didn’t have enough staff to properly monitor content, Tumblr announced a ban that effectively prohibited all nudity on the site, using some kind of software that flagged as “inappropriate” content that was not even remotely pornographic. The Internet reacted harshly: “Tumblr banning porn is like KFC banning chicken.” The site started shedding users rapidly, and by March, had lost nearly a third of its traffic.

You might think the Tumblr implosion would make other social-media firms think about the downside risk, but Facebook and Twitter continue stumbling forward as if their monopolistic hegemony were secure. However, Professor Glenn Reynolds is sounding the alarm:

Right now, it almost seems as if the social media world was designed to spread viruses of the mind. And that’s probably because it was. While in the earlier days of the internet, ideas spread faster than before, today in the walled gardens of social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, or especially Twitter, ideas spread much, much faster, and with less time for rumination or consideration, than ever before. And that’s by design, as social media companies use algorithms that promote posts based on ‘engagement’ — which typically means users’ emotional reactions — and ‘share’ buttons allow each user to pass them on to hundreds or thousands of friends, who can then do the same. This repeated sharing and resharing can produce a chain reaction reminiscent of a nuclear reactor with the control rods removed. . . .

Read the whole thing. It’s an excerpt from Professor Reynolds’s forthcoming book, The Social Media Upheaval.

Category: How This Here Internet Thingy Works

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Posted on | May 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

It’s possible for me to go many months at a time without remembering that Charles Johnson still exists. Diary of Daedalus called attention to Charles claiming he’d gotten a thousand hateful mentions after his endorsement of Alyssa Milano’s idiotic #SexStrike idea, but good luck finding evidence of these allegedly myriad mentions. Also, his claim that conservatives are “foaming at the mouth” is fictitious; point-and-laugh is far more accurate as a description of the reaction.

Who cares if a menopausal actress denies sex to her liberal husband? For that matter, who wants to have sex with a liberal woman? Ms. Milano’s #SexStrike, even if it were universally pursued by Democrat women, would only impose a hardship on men who vote Democrat anyway, while Republican men continue having sex with their pro-life wives. So if you’re a guy in a blue state like California or Massachusetts, maybe you’d suffer a nookie shortage, but the guys in Alabama and Oklahoma will be happily banging away. Who’s “foaming at the mouth” here?

Also, when was the last time a woman — any woman, amateur or professional — had sex with Charles Johnson? He has never reproduced, and he’s now 66 years old, so it looks like he’s a Darwinian dead end. Reproductive failure is common among liberals, because #science or something. Like a three-toed sloth in the La Brea Tar Pits, CJ is doomed to extinction, and no one will miss him when he’s gone.