John Derbyshire and I have something in common: I haven’t seen the movie 12 Years a Slave, either. I suspect that is where our similarities end, though.

If you are not familiar with Derbyshire’s work, the National Review fired him last year, essentially for being too much of a racist hack. That should really speak volumes. I’m not going to waste any significant time or bandwidth on Derbyshire’s rantings about 12 Years a Slave, except to summarize that he has identified a genre he calls “abolitionist porn” that overstates how bad slavery was. For some good takedowns of his hackery, see Brian Tashman, Ed Brayton, and PZ Myers.

We do have one additional, very superficial, similarity that I might mention. Derbyshire concludes his “abolitionist porn” screed with a statement that, minus the specific context, I find to be valid and truthful:

In the matter of slavery, though, I already feel sure that the shallow good North, bad South simplicities of Abolitionist Porn and popular perception bear little relation to the thorny tangles of reality.

I suspect that Derbyshire is trying to say that the South wasn’t really that bad, and that’s where I strongly dissent. I would instead posit that the North, applying the standards of today, wasn’t really that good. Continue reading →