• Busloads and Busloads of Christian migrant Ted Cruz Look-a-likes contin

    From John Smyth@21:1/5 to All on Sat Feb 8 23:44:41 2025
    XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

    Nobody wants smelly beaners who look like Ted Cruz invading their small
    town.

    White replacement theory is real. Are you pure?

    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 within the sweeping history of human migration. And users’
    ancestry results can change depending on the dataset to which their
    genetic material is being compared — a fact which some Stormfront users
    said they took advantage of, uploading their data to various sites to get
    a more “white” result.

    J. Scott Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Michigan,
    who has studied consumer use of genetic tests and was not involved with
    the study, said the companies tend to be reliable at identifying genetic variants. Interpreting them in terms of health risk or ancestry, though,
    is another story. “The science is often murky in those areas and gives ambiguous information,” he said. “They try to give specific percentages
    from this region, or x percent disease risk, and my sense is that that is
    an artificially precise estimate.”

    For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as
    “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded
    for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable)
    ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members.
    Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups,
    in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or
    only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these
    test results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one “that allows
    them to say, ‘No, we’re really diverse and we don’t need non-white people
    to have a diverse society,'” said Panofsky.

    That’s a far cry from the message of reconciliation that genetic ancestry testing companies hope to promote.

    “Sweetheart, you have a little black in you,” the talk show host Trisha
    Goddard told Craig Cobb on that day in 2013. But that didn’t stop him
    from redoing the test with a different company, trying to alter or parse
    the data until it matched his racist worldview.

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  • From It's Africoon Month Again!@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 10 12:13:39 2025
    XPost: atl.general, talk.politics.misc, alt.abortion
    XPost: sac.politics, alt.war.civil.usa

    https://media.11alive.com/assets/WXIA/images/375469639/375469639_1920x1080.jpg

    ROSWELL, Ga. -- Roswell Police said a serial rapist is behind bars, after he admitted to committing several rapes.

    Police said Errol Alex Martinez cased his victims, usually targeting single women between the ages of 46 and 60.

    In 2014, police said a woman was beat up and raped in Roswell. The victim told investigators she was walking to work on Holcombe Bridge Road when she was grabbed from behind, dragged into some bushes and raped behind a building.

    Across the city line in Norcross, police said another woman was attacked at bus stop. But a recent attack on a victim, while she slept, lead police to 23-year-old Martinez.

    “He actually confessed to committing a bunch of rapes, in the area,” said Roswell PD PIO Officer Lisa Holland.

    Holland said there were a total of five sexual assaults in Roswell and two more in Norcross.
    Now investigators are trying to determine if there may be more victims out there.

    “He said there was so many, he'd been in so many homes that he can't remember,” Holland said.

    Police said Martinez cased his victims, watching and waiting for several days, before he attacked.

    “Some of these victims had their light bulbs unscrewed in their car port. He was probably watching them and kind of setting it up for him to come into the house without being noticed,” Holland said.

    Police told 11Alive Martinez would take a piece of clothing from his victims that may have contained his DNA.

    He sits in the Fulton County Jail with no bond and charged with simple battery, burglary and rape. He was also connected to a bank robbery in August..

    Police urged anyone who thinks they may be a victim of Martinez, to call the Roswell Police Department at 770-640-4100.

    https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/roswell-police-alleged-serial-rapist-cant-remember-number-of-rapes/85-375463393

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