Mark Strauss’s article Let’s Ditch Dixie: the case for Northern secession [Slate] is some of the most repulsive anti-Southern bigotry I have seen in a long, long time. It’s quite amazing what kind of virulent parochial, racist, classist tripe Northern liberals are willing to spew as long as the target is Southern whites. Consider this immortal passage:

The South is a gangrenous limb that should have been lopped off decades ago. More people live below the poverty line in the old Confederacy than in the Northeast and Midwest combined. You are three times more likely to be murdered in parts of Dixie than anywhere in New England, despite a feverish devotion to law-and-order that has made eight Southern states home to 90 percent of all recent U.S. executions. The South has the highest infant-mortality rate and the highest incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, while it lags behind the rest of the country in terms of test scores and opportunities for women.

Now try rereading the above with The black race substituted for The South. This horsecrap sounds like it came straight out of a Klan or Aryan Nation speech. He repeatedly uses slurs about fried chicken, NASCAR, and other things that are too white trash for his tea-sipping PBS-watching ass. Way to show your progressive class solidarity, brother.

Look, I am a relatively privileged white male in the South. I am not oppressed, no matter what the thugs in the League of the South may want to claim. But, this is pure hatred. And after this Strauss has the shamelessness to say that cutting off the South will get us a more leftist country. Well, gee, Marky, if the country is going to be full of snide little faux liberal elitists, who sums up the cultural differences between South and North as, and I quote, NASCAR fans against PBS viewers, then I’ll be glad to see you gone.

Letters in response to Battle of the Celebrity Gender Theorists have injected a note of sanity into Salon.com’s on-going love-fest for the antifeminist media creation, Christina Hoff Sommers. The Hear Hear! Award goes to the following letter:

Well, well, what have we here? Salon participating in the media phenomenon of giving prominence to the female anti-feminist who labels gender-based academic pursuits as frivolous and lacking in scientific rigor. How about equal space for a reply?

— Susan Saylor

Salon, of course, responded to this challenge by not providing equal space. Their top article is an Arts & Entertainment piece about radio and their top article in Life is an article about vasectomies.

By the way, the most outrageous thing about the original self-indulgent marketing crusade is the way they are cynically exploiting the name of Take Back the Night, the world’s oldest and most powerful women’s demonstration against sexual violence. Not to mention the kitschy, self-conscious appropriation of jargon and logos from women’s liberation and other liberation movements to hawk their marketing wares, which sometimes gets so absurd as to defy parody:

As Netizens, we hold certain truths to be self-evident: that the Internet was created and endowed by its Creator with certain unalienable Rights, chief among these: free Access to uncensored Content, the ability to Shop wherever and whenever one chooses and the general pursuit of e-Happiness.

First Revolution became an e-business trade magazine; now we are taking back the Net. And who is we?

Q: Who is ICONOCAST?

A: An Internet media publisher based in San Francisco best known for its weekly ICONOCAST e-marketing newsletter read by 50,000 senior-level marketing executives.

Q: Who is Michael Tchong?

A: Editor and founder of ICONOCAST, Michael is a well-known commentator on Internet marketing and advertising, with more than 20 years of advertising, publishing and software development experience. He is also the founder of MacWEEK magazine.

Oh yeah. All power to the people.

In response to Michael Tchong’s call for Netizens (what a god-awful word) to boycott offline business and use e-commerce sites on April 3, Ravenous Plankton has called for a Counter-Crusade with April 1 as Take Back the Net Day. Unfortunately, one of the requests is to do something worthwhile online. But never fear, gentle reader; I will not allow this requirement to stop me from publishing my usual blog entries!

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