XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc, talk.politics.guns   
   XPost: or.politics, alt.atheism   
   From: nowomr@protonmail.com   
      
    "Like A Ted Cruz Look-Alike Contest"   
      
   We need to exterminate any whites who fail the DNA test and demonstrate   
   mongrel blood.   
      
   We hope you pass, but prepare to fail.   
      
   White Supremacists Not Happy When DNA Tests Reveal Non-White Ancestry   
      
      
   It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white   
   supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red   
   tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86   
   percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio   
   audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013,   
   charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white   
   enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.   
      
   “Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said,   
   trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”   
      
   Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white   
   nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not   
   uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend   
   of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity,   
   and then using online forums to discuss the results.   
      
   But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is   
   not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron   
   Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to   
   see how members dealt with the news.   
      
   Sponsored   
      
   It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results   
   online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if   
   you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white   
   European, not Jewish.”   
      
   But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said,   
   the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to   
   rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques —   
   while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own   
   qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.   
      
   Panofsky and Donovan presented their findings at a sociology conference in   
   Montreal on Monday. The timing of the talk — some 48 hours after the   
   violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. — was   
   coincidental. But the analysis provides a useful, if frightening, window   
   into how these extremist groups think about their genes. Reckoning with   
   results   
      
   Stormfront was launched in the mid-1990s by Don Black, a former grand   
   wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His skills in computer programming were   
   directly related to his criminal activities: He learned them while in   
   prison for trying to invade the Caribbean island nation of Dominica in   
   1981, and then worked as a web developer after he got out. That means this   
   website dates back to the early years of the internet, forming a kind of   
   deep archive of online hate.   
      
   To find relevant comments in the 12 million posts written by over 300,000   
   members, the authors enlisted a team at the University of California, Los   
   Angeles, to search for terms like “DNA test,” “haplotype,” “23andMe,” and   
   “National Geographic.” Then the researchers combed through the posts they   
   found, not to mention many others as background. Donovan, who has moved   
   from UCLA to the Data & Society Research Institute, estimated that she   
   spent some four hours a day reading Stormfront in 2016. The team winnowed   
   their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted   
   their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.   
      
   About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what   
   they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth.   
   But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the   
   community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.   
      
   Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge   
   about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can   
   reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a   
   sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They   
   will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you,   
   that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded   
   to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t   
   matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others   
   tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is   
   trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky   
   said.   
      
   But some took a more scientific angle in their critiques, calling into   
   doubt the method by which these companies determine ancestry —   
   specifically how companies pick those people whose genetic material will   
   be considered the reference for a particular geographical group.   
      
   And that criticism, though motivated by very different ideas, is one that   
   some researchers have made as well, even as other scientists have used   
   similar data to better understand how populations move and change.   
      
   “There is a mainstream critical literature on genetic ancestry tests —   
   geneticists and anthropologists and sociologists who have said precisely   
   those things: that these tests give an illusion of certainty, but once you   
   know how the sausage is made, you should be much more cautious about these   
   results,” said Panofsky. A community’s genetic rules   
      
   Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe are meticulous in how they analyze   
   your genetic material. As points of comparison, they use both preexisting   
   datasets as well as some reference populations that they have recruited   
   themselves. The protocol includes genetic material from thousands of   
   individuals, and looks at thousands of genetic variations.   
      
   “When a 23andMe research participant tells us that they have four   
   grandparents all born in the same country — and the country isn’t a   
   colonial nation like the U.S., Canada, or Australia — that person becomes   
   a candidate for inclusion in the reference data,” explained Jhulianna   
   Cintron, a product specialist at 23andMe. Then, she went on, the company   
   excludes close relatives, as that could distort the data, and removes   
   outliers whose genetic data don’t seem to match with what they wrote on   
   their survey.   
      
   But specialists both inside and outside these companies recognize that the   
   geopolitical boundaries we use now are pretty new, and so consumers may be   
   using imprecise categories when thinking about their own genetic ancestry   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)