Author Jay Tea takes an almost-good post and manages to screw it up...
Mind you, I'm hardly a geneticist here, but he's way off the mark. First off, homogeneous peoples are not necessarily less-healthy. Throughout history, the bulk of people haven't moved around a whole fuck of a lot. This means lots of breeding with your "own kind", and it's why people from certain regions look a certain way. Germans don't look like Englishmen, by and large. It's possible--and even likely--to be 100% German for 20 generations or more and be perfectly healthy and have all of your offspring be perfectly healthy. There's more than enough genetic diversity just the next town over for this to be the case.
You know whose genes I envy? Barack Obama's. That mulatto halfbreed race-mixer product of miscegenation, the half-black and half-white guy in the White House. 100% black, straight out of Africa, on his father's side, 100% American white on his mother's. And his children? Half his mix, half American black -- which means they've probably got a helping of white genes there, too. Those kids are likely to grow up damned near indestructible.
Look at nature, you idiot. Purebreds are messes. All kinds of ugly recessive traits show up when you get obsessed with bloodlines. The hardiest dogs are mutts. The hardiest plants are hybrids -- especially those created by genetic engineering.
Humans aren't dogs. Someone with a single ethnicity is not at all analogous to a purebred dog. One of the more common ways to attempt to replicate a desirable trait in animals is (or, one hopes, was) to breed the offspring with the opposite-sex parent. So unless Jay Tea's mother is also his sister, methinks he can't blame his physical problems on inbreeding.
Moreover, having kids with someone of a different race or ethnicity is hardly a guarantee of health. If it is, my great-grandmother's got some 'splainin' to do on account of my extreme myopia, scoliosis, and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. According to Jay Tea's thesis, her decision to marry an American Indian should've fixed that stuff. And what about my cousin Becky's oldest daughter? Her father was Mexican, which should have guaranteed the girl robust genes, not a shortage of human growth hormone and a lazy eye.
On the whole, everything I've seen suggests having kids with someone of a different race is just as much of a crapshoot, genetically speaking, as having them with someone of the same race. Go where your heart leads you, right? Goodness knows my sister's triracial children are a hale & hearty bunch. (Maybe that's it? Maybe you need to add in a third race for the magic protection against disease.)
The whole thing is stupid...
But it doesn't change the fact that the neo-Nazi dude he was looking at was a total dick.
I have always joked that racists must have horribly boring mealtimes. No tacos, no egg rolls, no latkes or gyros or curries...Point being that if you're a white supremacist, surely you only eat white food, right? (And trust me, I've lived in New England. I know just how boring white-guy food can be.)
My point being--surely racists don't avail themselves of things from other ethnicities, right? Because if you're a white supremacist, then all you need is stuff from white people. So, lets have these twerps prove their superiority. Make 'em live without the contributions of other races.
Mind you, this would require geographic segregation, to ensure their lack of exposure to minor things like traffic lights, safety elevators, sugar, shoes, light bulbs, cataract surgery, radios, televisions, computers, and, oh, any goods brought in by refrigerated trucks. All of these things--and surely a whole bunch of stuff I've missed--owe their current incarnations, if not very existences, to black inventors (check this article out for info on a lot of it). Whoops--I forgot (but Ray Wylie Hubbard reminded me)--they also don't get country music. Or rock music.
Of course, I have yet to think of a downside to this geographical segregation. They can have a go at creating a master race...If Jay Tea's right, they'll fail miserably. (And he probably is right, at least in their case, 'cause I swear there's a pathology going on there and it may well have a biological basis.)
2 comments:
Never could understand the hangup some of these people have about ethnicity. Most of them haven't got the slightest idea of how genetics works, yet they are blathering away about "black blood" and "white blood" and such. The actual genetic differences are purely cosmetic and physical. What they can't seem to figure out is that the big differences in the groups is one of culture, not DNA.
I'd think there would be a not-insignificant amount of inbreeding going on in the attempted creation of that master race, but then maybe I'd just like to think there aren't enough of those white supremacists to preclude it. ;-)
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