Odds and Ends, 12/16/21

In der news.

See this.  OK, but I have already made most of these points previously, including in the "racial purity" essay at Counter-Currents.

In the end, it doesn't really matter how current populations came to be. It matters what they are today and what they will be tomorrow. EGI is forward looking. The EGI of ancient peoples were their concern, not ours.

Following up on this, look at this astonishing lack of self-awareness:

See this.

And this.

Much of what Johnson says about Spencer can apply to Johnson himself. And, again, if Spencer was and is such an obvious "tool" why did Taylor, Johnson, Brimelow, Derbyshire, Regnery et al. take him seriously and associate with him at one point?

Johnson can't and won't answer that. He is a fraud...in his own words, a "tool."

The deeper question is this. Why talk about Spencer? If it is just to "pile on" Spencer as an individual, then that shows how petty Greggy is. However, if one criticizes Spencer has representative of the fundamental problems of Der Movement, then much of the Counter-Currents criticism of Spencer applies to Johnson himself. My criticism of these people is not personal; I could care less about them personally. But, to paraphrase Nietzsche, they are a lens through which I focus on "movement" defects.

And if you want to see what an outrageous hypocrite Johnson is, here is a comment excerpt by Johnson from that Spencer article comment thread:

The very idea that people might have principled disagreements is foreign to people who think entirely in terms of personalities.

Remember: That is from a person who "bans" people from his blog who disagree with him or criticize him in the slightest, followed by defamation of those people as suffering from "insanity."

I keep on beating the drum about covid and the vaccine in response to the insanity of Der Movement on those subjects.  The “movement” apparently doesn’t realize the damage it is doing with this.  From the standpoint of practical issues and optics, Der Movement’s attitude alienates both normies – the majority of whom are vaccinated – and, especially, educated STEM people, who mostly would be aghast at the “movement” “take” on these issues. On a more basic standpoint, the “movement’s” attitude reflects deeper problems – irrational, ignorant, crazed behavior that demonstrates poor judgment and cognitive and behavioral deficiencies. “Movement” “leaders” either actually believe that viruses don’t exist and that the vaccine (a “toxin”) is more dangerous than covid itself, or, possibly worse, they know better, but cater to the worst stupidities of their followers so as to build the “brand” of the “leaders” so as to maximize “D’Nations.” So, “movement” “leaders” either are crazed and ignorant or they are mendacious grifters of zero character who sacrifice intellectual and moral integrity to make a buck.

Against HBD Filth, 10/1/21

Against HBD scum.

HBDers start whining when their own ethnies are targeted. Other folks though are fair game.

Med Europe (490/99) – based on Spain, Portugal, Italy results. In a way, one can see the Euro crisis – which is mostly affecting the PIGS – as the invisible hand’s way of bumping down the Med countries to a level more in line with their lower human capital (relative to the Germanic countries).

And this outrageous lie, not supported by genetic data:

Turks and Greeks genetically similar.

And of course.

HBDers weep.

Derbyshire weeps; the genetic facts.

Another surprise was that the engineered mice had less breast tissue, meaning that EDAR could be the reason that East Asian women have generally smaller breasts.

Well, if “generally” you mean that the typical East Asian woman has the body of pre-pubescent boy, then, yes.

East Asians are sometimes assumed to have evolved in a cold environment because of their narrow nostrils, which conserve heat, and the extra eyelid fat that insulates the eye. But the Broad team calculates that the EDAR variant arose about 35,000 years ago in central China and that the region was then quite warm and humid. Extra sweat glands would have been advantageous to the hunter-gatherers who lived at that time.

East Asians – a TROPICAL, global south people, with cheating and manipulation of their “PISA scores.”

The execrable HBD Nordicist site The Occidental Observer is using a Negro-Herrenvolk alliance to defame (Southern) Italians once again.

First of all TOO scum, these “IQ differences” do not exist with respect to currently available actual IQ data.

…our results demonstrate quite clearly that raw scores [on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices] of children from Sicily are not lower than those [of children from the North and Central-South] reported by Cornoldi et al. (2010). On the contrary, they are sometimes higher…Naglieri et al. (submitted for publication) studied the differences between the psychometric qualities of the CAS [Cognitive Assessment System] for the Italian and US standardization samples. Although the goal of that study was not to make regional comparisons, they did report that there were no significant differences (F(1, 806)=2.19, p=.11) between the average CAS-Italian Full Scale standard scores (set at a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15) for students from the northern (M=100.5; SD=13.2), central (M=101.2; SD=11.9), and southern (M=103.1; SD=11.6) regions of Italy. The mean standard scores for the students in the north were only slightly lower than the mean for those in the south (effect size=.21). These results suggest that a test of intelligence that measures basic neuropsychological processes, and does not include academically laden verbal and quantitative tests, yields small differences between the regional groups. These findings also amplify the importance of measuring intelligence directly when comparing groups and argue against using reading, math and science test scores as "proxies for intelligence" (Lynn, 2010a).

Second of all, TOO filth, using E1b1b as some sort of quantitative measure of historic admixture from the Middle/Near East or North Africa (MENA) is absurd; those measures require autosomal data. Never mind that carriers of that NRY include: John C. Calhoun, the Wright brothers, Lyndon Johnson, Napoleon and Hitler, William Harvey, and David Attenborough – hardly Southern Italians. Were they all admixed with MENA?

To demonstrate Lynn’s lack of logic, consider the following. If one thinks that NRY such as E1b1b directly correlates with “admixture” then the peoples of the Balkans are, via Lynn’s “reasoning,” highly admixed with MENA people. But there is no evidence of this from autosomal data; in PCA, Balkanoids (as well as S. Italians, by the way) are found exactly where one would expect to find them with the “genes mirror geography” paradigm. These people are not being pulled toward MENA populations in any manner independent of normal genetic clines that track with geography. Further, there are no unsupervised admixture data that I am aware of that supports such MENA admixture.

Also, even if we take Lynn’s IQ “estimates” at face value, to ascribe the IQ differences (10 points or more) to MENA admixture would necessitate at least 50% MENA admixture or a MENA IQ of 60 or some strange non-linear dominant negative effects of “low IQ alleles.” There is absolutely no evidence for any of that; thus, the “math” doesn’t add up to ascribe alleged intra-European IQ differences to MENA admixture.

Lynn is a pseudoscientific fraud. He commits the most obvious flaw of pseudoscience – he starts out with his desired conclusion and then works backward with cherry picked and misinterpreted data, and bizarre conclusions, and therefore “justifies” his own hypotheses. That TOO publicizes this trash underscores what a trashy, pseudoscientific site it itself is. Lynn’s Italian IQ ideas fail the fact test, the data interpretation test, and the logic test.

See this about Chinese IQ. The Lynn fraud continues to be uncovered. Also see this.

This new white nationalism tried to put on a happy face, but unfortunately it had embraced a prejudice just as irrational and just as dangerous as the white leftist obsession with mass non-white immigration. By disassociating themselves from the more aggressive white racialists of the past, who typically subscribed to the view that whites occupied the highest plane of evolutionary development, it was believed that white nationalists would be able to pursue their own agenda in relative peace. Under the cloak of Asian supremacy, race-oriented differential psychologists would be able to further consolidate their research on negro intellectual inferiority without having to endure constant leftist taunts of “white supremacist!” or “Nazi!”

The shift from white intellectual superiority to Oriental intellectual superiority in the late 1970’s was a last-ditch effort at ideological and racial self-defense in the face of overwhelming odds. White nationalists, the ideological inheritors of the traditional conservative establishment, had their backs up against a wall. The primary white nationalist imperative was to ensure white racial survival. Placing East Asians at the top of the racial hierarchy, despite all of the earlier historical, biological, anthropological, craniometric and paleontological evidence that had been adduced in favor of white superiority, was supposed to allow them to pursue this primary directive without being molested by a leftist-controlled establishment determined to snuff out all dissenting opinion. East Asians were chosen for this role because they were, under the old racial hierarchy, almost as evolved as whites, unlike the other races who were viewed as closer to the more primitive Homo erectus or, in Darwin’s time, the gorilla. In continuing to make this choice, Richard Lynn fans are confronted with a dilemma: if East Asians are so superior, why bother focusing on preservation of the white race? Shouldn’t the best genes be allowed to survive and propagate? If this is the case, whites should make way for an East Asian world by diluting themselves out of existence through non-white immigration and miscegenation. Whatever its short-term goals, in the long run, advocacy of Oriental racial superiority is the logic of white genocide on a large scale.

Getting back to the anti-White HBD Nordicist trash site The Occidental Observer, note how they work with Negroes to leverage the "work" of China-worshipping pseudoscientists to racially defame non-Herrenvolk European ethnies. As the quote above suggests, Amren/Taylor as well as TOO/MacDonald are race traitors supporting "the logic of white genocide on a large scale."

This is surprisingly sensible. It goes against Traditionalist Golden Age nonsense, as well as Guntherite Nordicism. Practically speaking, we need racial separation, genetic isolation, combined with judicious eugenics. Over time, there will be more racial divergence; hence, purity.

Food for Thought: Value the European

A question of value.

A typical comment one sees these days, this from Counter-Currents (emphasis added):

Gonzaga

Posted March 4, 2021 at 8:03 am | Permalink

Gen X Dago-Anglo-Teuton Mix here. Six “siblings”. Unfortunately, my ma had her tubes tied so the rest are transracially adopted. Seriously, I still love my misguided hippy parents but they were way ahead of the cuck curve.

I guess I took cues from my folks because I married an Asian woman and had two smart and happy little Hapas. Obviously this well before CC came into my life. At least my wife is based toward Blacks. I mean sincere hatred that would make Derbyshire blush. That’s making relocation to a Whitopia easier.

As a practical matter, White advocates need to decide what to do with White allies and other real world messiness. For example, should I encourage my kids to marry White, either explictly or implictly (move to a Whitopia)? What about White hispanics? Where do you draw the line? Rather than some heroic fantasy, the future of White America is likely to resemble the South of Brazil via a state sanctioned slow cleanse, i.e. Mestizaje Americana.

Well, this is something one sees fairly often at pro-White sites, particularly at American Renaissance and Counter-Currents: Men who claim that before they got involved in racialism they married non-White women and in some cases had mixed-race children with them. Now, most of these people are better than Derbyshire and therefore essentially admit that they represent a problem and, for the most part, they, unlike Derbyshire, do not promote miscegenation. However, they typically fall back to the idea that the rest of us need to decide what to do with their "real world messiness." I'm not sure why we are obligated to resolve their problems; in any case, I'm not particularly sympathetic to them and their situation.

But I want to use that comment to make another point, one I have made previously, but one that does need to be made again. There are more and more cases like this, not only in the "movement," but in the American population generally. Not only do we see more and more "pure" non-Whites, but we are seeing more and more mixed-racers, hybrids of all types, what Pierce called "almost Whites," as well as those even more admixed. Check out any public school in coastal blue states (and even in some in red state "flyover country"), and check out the student body in any typical American college or university. You will observe non-Whites, partial Whites, and almost Whites, of every and any race, face, and hue. Confronted with this rising tide of color, "White advocates" need to really understand how increasingly rare and valuable are folks of good Old World European ancestry, people whose bloodlines are the same as that of their ancestors from "the old country," people who are not "smart and happy little Hapas" but Europeans, wherever they live, people who, if married, are married to others like them, and if they have children, they are of like kind. And it doesn't matter if these folks are dastardly swarthoid Meds or Slavic hunkies or whatever, whatever that Old World ancestry may be, or whether it is a mixture of European ethnic stocks; in a world of ever-increasing "racial color," these people are valuable, valuable specimens, and should be considered, and treated, as such.

Now, this does not mean that I am saying that "all Europeans are fungible" or whatever lies that anti-Sallis hysterics wrongly ascribe to me. Differences exist, and it is of course normal for people to prefer their own subgroups - e.g., Nords preferring Nords, Meds preferring Meds, Slavs preferring Slavs, etc. - and, yes, "racial purity" is a myth and, yes, degrees and types of mixtures and admixtures in the Old World stocks may differ. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, that is all acknowledged.

But all of that doesn't change a damn thing. The main point remains. As Color relentlessly replaces White, and as Kaufmann's dream - our nightmare - of a "whiteshift" occurring where all those "Hapas" are redefined as "White" becomes ever more actualized, the rareness and value of peoples of European ancestry, of those of the Old World Stock, of whatever type, becomes ever more important. We need to recognize each other, value each other, help each other; in the end, it is ourselves alone.  It is The West Against the Rest, with "the West" here defined as those of us of the Old World Stock, wherever we may live and whatever European ethnicity, or mixtures of ethnicities, we may be.

That is something that should be -  must not be - ever forgotten.

Side-note: And, with respect to "White hispanics" - if those people are, more or less, racially European, essentially equivalent to Old World Iberian stocks, possibly with very low New World admixture not to any significant degree than some White Americans with their "Indian Princess" ancestry, then fine,"White hispanics" are White. However, if by "White hispanics" you mean John Ray's ideal of light-skinned mestizos, people with high levels of New World admixture, then they are not "White hispanics."

That's where we can "draw the line." And, no, the comment writer should NOT encourage his children to marry Whites. If he can still ask that question means he values his own personal interests, coupled to the choice he made, more than the good of race and civilization.

Other news:

Of related interest to the main topic of this post, see this. Just looking at the description of the contributors, it seems full of Herrenvolk, Nordicists, ethnoimperialists living in other people's nations, so it seems, business as usual for Der Movement.

Question – why does Eric Kaufmann have a password protected website page dealing with “ethnic violence and genocide?”  It seems quite peculiar. After all, if the page was dedicated to opposing “ethnic violence and genocide” – which I would think is also opposed by most people throughout the world – shouldn’t it be public?  I’m certainly not implying anything, merely asking some sincere questions. Again, most peculiar, indeed.

How many “movement” lies can be jammed into one single sentence?  Let’s see:

ArmedCitizen  alex the remote control fridge 

What could possibly go wrong with an experimental untested mRNA gene altering injection with zero clinical research?

I count four.  Not bad, prime “movement” dishonesty there. It is hard to tell sometimes though whether Der Right specializes more in ignorance or more in mendacity. It’s a real competition!

Fetishists Weep

In der news.

See this summary.

Sequencing the genomes of over 400 Viking men, women, and children from ancient burial sites, researchers found evidence of genetic influence from Southern Europe and Asia in Viking DNA dating back to before the Viking Age (750 - 1050 A.D.).

Is Durocher being fitted for a straightjacket just about now?

Asia…hello, Bjork and David Bromstad! Or are the “Ladogan” phenotypes from the earlier North Asian/Siberian influxes?  It’s of great benefit to all humanity!

Some years ago, on another of my blogs, noting the discovery of some Arabic artifacts (coins, I believe) from Viking-era Scandinavia, I speculated on the possibility of “exotic” gene flow there, for which I was attacked by another (not Durocher in this case) individual, who also claimed (to another person) that there was no gene flow from Southern to Northern Europe for “10,000 years” (or some other similarly large number).

To which I now repeat my mantra, re: Der Movement:

Wrong, wrong, they’re always, always, always, always, ALWAYS wrong.

No doubt we will soon see an updated edition of March of the Titans, with added material on admixture in Scandinavia and on multicultural Vikings.

Seriously though, both sides here are wrong. The Right has always been wrong with their sweaty fetishism and their insistence on racial purity narratives; the Left is wrong when they use the discovery of genetic outliers and low level admixture to paint a false picture of a multicultural past that somehow justifies mass immigration today – as if the odd Dago or Asiatic in Viking-era Scandinavia justifies having Swedish cities of today becoming Afro-Asiatic war zones, or to mean that indigenous Scandinavians are not a relatively homogeneous North Germanic people. Both Right and Left are dishonest about race and ethnicity.

Of course, the results of that study will be being overblown for leftist, pro-immigration political reasons. However, the bottom line is that, whatever the past influx, ethnies are genetically distinct, and Scandinavians are a distinct Northern European Germanic group.  

Scandinavians are indeed a relatively homogeneous North Germanic people. It’s just that “relatively” is not the same as Der Movement’s “absolutely.”

This goes back to my essay on the racial purity myth. The issue is not one of purity but one of distinctiveness.  Europe and non-Europe are distinct from each other; more narrowly, Northern and Southern Europe are distinct from each other; Western and Eastern Europe are distinct from each other.

Distinct does not mean hermetically sealed; it does not mean “pure.” Gene flow, within reason, is compatible with distinctiveness.  Maybe at some point, the retarded “movement” will understand this, and be able to effectively respond to leftist mendacity with respect to the leftist cry of “see, you were always multicultural."  No. A single drop of black paint dropped into a 100 gallon drum of white paint is not the same as dumping 40 gallons of black paint into that same drum.

Your wonderful “race realist” allies from the world of HBD:

JohnEngelman  

Two of the best friends I have had were black. One was a college professor who taught at Howard University. One was a co worker at an electronics firm…My co worker was a good Christian and a good family man who took his family to church every Sunday.

I have liked every black person I have known by name…

Remember, wops and hunkies are the problem; nice Blacks, law-abiding Hispanic immigrants, and those high, high IQ Jews and Asians are your friends!

HBD Jew supports racial and cultural assimilation.

Always remember that the alien Levantine filth Unz is your enemy (emphasis added):

America today stands as one of the very few examples in history of a large and successful multiethnic society. If we are to continue and extend our success–which is hardly foreordained–we can only do so by returning to the core principles of Propositions 209 and 227: ethnic assimilation, and individual equality under the law. Otherwise, we face the very real threat of future movements along the lines of Proposition 187, each worse than the last, and on a national scale. There are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism.

And don’t forget treasonous filth like Durocher and Johnson who write for Unz.

Here is a wonderfully coherent Counter-Currents comment on the death of Francis Parker Yockey:

TimothyS

Posted September 19, 2020 at 2:42 am | Permalink

“An apparent suicide.”

Reach out for help you f… fools. Don’t hang up that phone. Ask for help. Idiots, selfish idiots.

There’s no stopping a Phil Haney. But for anyone else, there are a lot of people who will reach out to help you. Don’t let humiliation get in the way. Unsuspected people will take your call again and again. Keep making those calls. Don’t lose heart! They’re busy, tired? Ask them who THEY would call.

Later, it will not be your absence, but the self-doubt:. Why did my friend, my cousin, my son kill themselves? Am I WORTH IT? There is something wrong that will gnaw at them for years. That doubt will cruelly torment them long after all your problems are ‘solved’.

Counter-Currents – the gift that keeps on giving!

If the Trump campaign had any sense, they’d focus on this issue and hammer away at it mercilessly. To try and forestall accusations of “racism” (I wouldn’t care, but I assume the Trumpians do) have Carson explain it (and if there are some law forbidding a cabinet member from making political commercials, then use another of Antifa Don’s Negro buddies).  Some of Dementia Joe’s SJW suburban support may dissipate if folks had a clear idea of the situation. But given the affirmative action incompetents and Jews surrounding Der Trumpening, I am not sanguine that the campaign will take advantage of this gift of an issue.

The beginning of the Alt Right?

It is unlikely Johnson will write any “in bed with the press” articles about this.  Why expect any consistency from the clown show?

Greg Johnson on his moronic livestream: “Yockey died for our sins, as someone said.” 

That “someone” was “Ursus Major” of the Euro-American Student Union, and that quote was brought to everyone’s attention recently by my recent post – I very much doubt Johnson remembered the original essay.  No doubt Johnson saw that from EGI Notes.  So, yet more Johnsonian mendacity by omission.

No worries, Greg, Ursus Major as well as Yockey would have considered your petty nationalism as disgusting treason.  It are the sins of ethnonationalists that Yockey died for.

Borat: Yockey - “very American” – what a moron.  Maybe petty nationalist ethnonationalists should pontificate on things other than Yockey.

Racial Purity and EGI

The following was posted on a Maltese discussion site.

Please read this.

Leftists and other critics of racialism typically like to make the argument that past admixture in a group is a reason why it is “silly” and “unreasonable” for that group to wish to maintain its existence as a distinct biological and cultural unit, eschewing immigration and admixture with alien peoples today and in the future.

In the essay linked to above I explain why racial purity is a myth and why it is wrong to claim that a group purported to have past “admixture” cannot avoid immigrant influxes and further admixture. That claim is nonsense; every group, whatever its origins, has a right to defend its interests, has a right to repel unwanted outsiders, and has the right to determine its ethnic future. The possibility of past admixture – real or imagined – does not obligate any group to open its borders to any comers, and does not obligate a group to let itself become dispossessed by foreigners and admixed out of existence.

Every group – going back in the mists of time - is composed of other past groups, mixtures of ancient tribes and more recent incursions – that does not alter the fact of the existence of these different current groups, each with their own histories, their own characteristics, and their own interests.  These past mixtures are part and parcel of what today’s groups are and this past cannot be changed even if we wanted to.  But groups can determine their future.  Ethnic genetic interests are thus always forward-looking, groups today have their genetic interests based upon what they are today, looking forward to their posterity in the future.  Past admixture, to the extent it occurred, was a concern for the peoples of those times.  The people of today have their own concerns, for the present and the future. 

Ultimately, what is important is not a non-existent purity but the existence of difference and distinctiveness.  That groups are different and distinct from each other is sufficient reason to wish to preserve those differences and to safeguard that distinctiveness; purity has nothing to do with it.  A family unit that strives to pursue its interests does so because it is a family, not because someone has labeled that family as “pure” or “impure.”  It is enough that the family exists, different from others.  As for families, so similarly for nations and races.

Consider a nation like the Dominican Republic. Genetic studies suggest that ~ 40% of the Dominican gene pool is derived from sub-Saharan Africans (with about 52% European and 8% Amerindian).  The typical Dominican, on average, is therefore a mulatto with some Amerindian mixed in as well.  What does this mean politically?  Should Dominicans then welcome an invasion of millions of, say, Nigerians or Haitians?  No.  Does it obligate them to further admixture? No, it does not. The Dominican people have the right to control the ethnic and racial makeup of their nation and decide what they want for their racial and cultural future.  Past admixture does not obligate future admixture nor does it obligate for or against any type of immigration policy.

Now, if that holds for a nation that exhibits a large degree of admixture, then it certainly holds for the nations of Europe where any admixture is going to be at least an order of magnitude less and most typically of ancient origin.  

In any case, the Maltese are a European people.  In PCA analyses (for whatever they are worth), Maltese are found in the same general genetic location as Southern Italians and Greeks.  The Maltese, like all other peoples, have the right to safeguard their biological and cultural uniqueness and to determine the future direction of their ethnic evolution.  Moronic suggestions that “you are already admixed, so why not mix more” are thus revealed as empty sophistry.  Indeed, by that logic, humans should take no pains to prevent microbial infection or even to practice basic hygiene – after all, aren’t our bodies already infested with various microbes and mites?  We have intestinal bacteria – so why not the bubonic plague as well?

National Socialism and Fascism

Is National Socialism Type I Fascism? – the case of Latvia.

Read this. Excerpts (emphasis added) and comments:

Abstract

Aside from equating it with Hitlerism, there have been few scholarly attempts to define national socialism and specify its relation to the broader category of fascism. This article posits that national socialisms are a sub-genus of fascism, where the distinguishing feature is an ultaranationalism based on a palingenetic völkisch racism, of which anti-Semitism is an essential element. Thus, national socialism is not just mimetic Hitlerism, as Hitler is not even necessary. National socialist movements may even conceivably be opposed to the goals and actions of Hitlerism. To test this definition, the case of Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts [Thunder Cross] movement is analysed. Based on an analysis of its ideology, Pērkonkrusts is a national socialist movement with a völkisch racialist worldview, while also being essentially anti-German. The case study even addresses the apparent paradox that Pērkonkrusts both collaborated in the Holocaust, and engaged in resistance against the German occupation regime.

A problem for my own definition of national socialism is the emphasis here on völkisch racism. See below for more detailed discussion of this..

National Socialisms as a Fascist Sub-Genus

Of the vast and growing corpus of scholarly and popular literature on national socialism – usually pertaining to Nazi Germany – very rarely is this fundamental concept defined. The reasons for this could be twofold. Firstly, it might be assumed as self-evident that ‘national socialism’ is simply synonymous with the mid-twentieth century German version of National Socialism (also known as ‘Nazism’ or ‘Hitlerism’) associated with Adolf Hitler and his nsdap. In the case of national socialist organisations outside of Germany, these are either de facto subsidiaries of the German mother party, or derivative, mimetic movements. In this view, any party with a swastika as its emblem and a violently anti-Semitic ultranationalist platform simply could be assumed an unoriginal copycat, seeking to exploit the success of the nsdap in Germany.

That is the general "normie" viewpoint – national socialism is merely Hitlerism.

Should one observe European history in the years between 1920 and 1945 from the periphery, or even simply from a non-Germanocentric perspective, this assumption of subordination or mimesis quickly proves itself unsatisfactory for explaining aspects of, for example, local collaboration in those countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. How could there have existed what my colleague Terje Emberland has termed an ‘oppositional national socialism’ in wartime Norway, which both collaborated closely with the ss, and also opposed many of the policies of the German nsdap and the collaborationist Nasjonal Samling [ns; National Unity] regime of Vidkun Quisling? Our research on Norway thus suggests that not only amongst Norwegians were there different, competing understandings of national socialism, but that also within German Nazism there were even significant differences between Himmler’s ss and the mainstream nsdap ideology. Thus, it would be preferable to speak not of a single National Socialism, but of national socialisms in the plural.

The key point is this: “Thus, it would be preferable to speak not of a single National Socialism, but of national socialisms in the plural.” Up to this point, I agree. The problem will be a specific interpretation of national socialism in terms of a Nordicist, Germanocentric, völkisch racialism.

Another significant obstacle to the formulation of a general definition of national socialism stems from the resistance in certain circles to accepting it as a phenomenon within the broader category of fascism. 

Type I “movement” retards are prominent in this resistance.

Ian Kershaw, however, makes convincing arguments for why German National Socialism should be properly included within the family of fascisms, all of which had their own unique and particular characteristics.

This is in my opinion the correct view. Fascism is the more generic political genus – palingenetic ultra-nationalism; national socialism is a more specifically “racist” – in the sense of a strong focus on biological racism – form of fascism. The question is whether this racism has to be specifically “völkisch.”

To assume that there is a generic fascism of which German National Socialism is a specific expression, and that there are not just one, but several national socialisms, would sooner or later necessitate augmenting the taxonomy by defining a national socialist sub-genus. Building on the definition of generic fascism proposed by Roger Griffin, the following general definition of national socialism is proposed: Given that ‘[f]ascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’, then national socialism is a type of fascism where the populist ultranationalism is based on palingenetic völkisch racism, of which anti-Semitism is an essential element. Thus, I posit that the distinguishing feature of national socialisms within the broader family of fascisms is the centrality of a völkisch, racialist worldview.

Here is where I strongly disagree.  The racialist (or racist) national socialist worldview does not have to be specifically völkisch as it is defined below – i.e., a specifically Nordicist, Type I, Ostara, “runes and boots” Germanic racialism. Instead, the racialism can be for any group – at least, any European group - and can be evaluated in a empiricist, scientific manner. It can also incorporate certain non-biological, Yockeyian, High Culture components.

As Griffin has pointed out, all fascisms are to some degree ‘racist’, insofar as ultranationalism celebrates the greatness of one’s own nation and culture, thereby fostering a sense of superiority over other peoples. Fascist ideology is thus intrinsically hostile to liberal multiculturalism, free migration, and other individual-driven mixings of peoples, religions, and cultures. At the same time, this does not necessarily mean that all fascisms must embrace racist positions – e.g. social Darwinism, eugenics, or even anti-Semitism – as central to their understanding of their nation’s relation to society and the world.

Fair enough.

Within national socialism, however, the nation is always organically linked to the race: just as the organically conceived nation (Volk) provides the genotype for the individual’s phenotype, so, too, does each nation reflect a phenotype of the genotype provided by the common racial identity. Maintaining the racial Erbbild [genotype] and improving the Erscheinungsbild [phenotype] of both individuals and the entire Volk was a key concern of German National Socialism, particularly for Heinrich Himmler and the ss.

Fine – but this does have to be völkisch?

Even though this impetus to improve the racial stock of the nation can lead national socialists to support the introduction of eugenic policies in the name of ‘racial hygiene’, this should not be taken as evidence that national socialists subscribe to a rationalist, positivist view of race as a supposedly biological phenomenon. Upon closer inspection, racial ideology in national socialism has only relatively superficial traits in common with, for example, the ‘scientific’ racial biology and eugenics practised in interwar Scandinavia, which was connected to the social engineering of a new, modern society.

In a sense, this criticism is correct – the Type I Nordicist Ostara view has little to do with genuine racial science. In that sense, it is akin to HBD – perhaps why there is a degree of association and compatibility between Nordicism and HBD.

Racialist thinking in national socialism is neither rationalist, nor aiming towards modernisation. Instead, it is völkisch racialism, derived from the ideological worldview of the völkisch movement that began in the late nineteenth century. Völkisch racism fostered a sacralised view of an assumed prehistoric Aryan race, from whence the most advanced nations and civilizations of the world arose. In the case of the inter-war German and Scandinavian national socialists, the highest rungs of the racial hierarchy were seen as being occupied by Germanic or Nordic peoples; however among national socialist movements since 1945 the emphasis is more on global ‘white supremacy’ of light-skinned groups of Europeans generally. Nevertheless, a clear bias towards an idealized ‘Nordic’ identity infuses national socialism, even in societies that are not usually considered ‘Germanic’.

Here we see a definition of völkisch racism that is more or less accurate. That nonsense was, is, and always will be, an embarrassment. While national socialism has traditionally been linked to that nonsense, my argument is that it does not have to be. The racism - or racialism – of national socialism can have positivist, scientific, and rational bases. It can also have, as argued above, a Yockeyian component that is based on an honest reading of history and fundamentally even with more mainstream cultural/civilizational paradigms, such as Huntington’s civilizations. Thus, national socialism as a genus of fascism focused on specific Race-Cultures, with a strong, but not exclusive, biological component, can be broader than just völkisch racism.

Coupled with the mythology of race…

Mythology?  Well, the völkisch interpretation is mythology, but the empirical interpretation is not.

…is a view that races and nations are formed in symbiosis with their physical surroundings, with the land being the source of many of the physical and spiritual characteristics of the Volk. A strong connection to both the natural and cultural landscape is thus important for maintaining the vigour of the nation. Life in cities alienates the individual from the moral compass that being one with the soil provides, leading to racial and cultural dilution and degeneration. In its völkisch racism, national socialism thus is an ideology of Blut und Boden [blood and soil], favouring the pure, healthy peasant ways to the modern, urban, materialistic lifestyle that was both morally and physically hazardous. 

Here we see how “traditional” völkisch national socialism is definitely a Type I fascism of the “runes and boots” type, with underlying themes of Tolkienism, anti-technics, anti-urbanism, anti-empiricism, anti-modernity, a backwards – and backwoods – “traditionalism.”  That’s pure Type Ism.

Selecting a Test Case of Non-Hitlerite National Socialism

The definition of national socialism as a sub-genus of fascism presented above will herein be tested using a case chosen to collide head-on with the prior assumption of mimesis with the German nsdap. If it can be adequately proven that the Latvian Pērkonkrusts [Thunder Cross] meets the definition’s criteria, then this will be an example of an explicitly anti-German national socialist movement.

Although Pērkonkrusts is not entirely unknown in the literature on fascism, few scholars have researched this movement in detail. Even fewer still have asked the question whether Pērkonkrusts constitutes a Latvian form of national socialism. One of the few to do so is German historian Björn Felder. A sub-chapter to one of his books is even entitled, ‘The Pērkonkrusts Movement: “Latvian National Socialists”?’ While admitting that Pērkonkrusts exhibited many ideological affinities to German National Socialism, in his analysis, Pērkonkrusts looked more to Italian Fascism for inspiration, or more closely resembled Corneliu Codreanu’s Iron Guard in Romania.

You can read more on this in the essay.  The point made is that this Latvian movement had characteristics of an anti-Hitlerian – or at least non-Hitlerian – völkisch national socialism, although identification with the more Type II Italian and Romanian variants are fascism confuses the issue, since those variants are at odds with Type I völkisch fascism (i.e., traditional national socialism).

…Pērkonkrusts did not see itself as an appendage or copycat of German National Socialism; at the same time, the ambiguity of these statements can be interpreted as reinforcing the argument that Pērkonkrusts was national socialist.

Fine.

Similar rhetorical distancing was used regarding fascism. In an unsigned article from 1933, ‘What is fascism?’, the party newspaper asserts: ‘Even though Pērkonkrusts is far from being fascism, and admits that this is a system suited only to Italy, nevertheless…’ By equating fascism exclusively with Italian Fascism, Pērkonkrusts could deny – despite the charges of its liberal and leftist opponents – that it is, indeed, fascism, while at the same time freely expressing its admiration for the accomplishments of Mussolini’s regime. Needless to say, contemporary political opponents were not convinced.

Silly semantics on the part of the Latvians.

The Pērkonkrusts Ideology: Palingenetic Völksich Racialism or Not?

To what extent was Pērkonkrusts national socialist, that is, a type of fascism where the populist ultranationalism is based on palingenetic völkisch racism, of which anti-Semitism is an essential element? One of the first problems to address is whether Pērkonkrusts had a racist ideology, and whether it was völkisch. Did, for example, Pērkonkrusts contrast the Aryan race to the Jewish one in its worldview? Historian Uldis Krēsliņš contrasts Pērkonkrusts with Štelmachers’s alnsp, which proclaimed Latvians to be the ‘purest’ Aryans, by citing a passage from a speech where Celmiņš dismisses the idea of ‘biologically pure’ Latvians, since ‘a pure Latvian type does not even exist [nemaz nav]’. For Krēsliņš, with the exception of Štelmachers, the racial terminology employed by Pērkonkrusts and other Latvian radical nationalists was ‘more an expression of an historical, religious, or moral-ethical’ signifier.

That is all not very empiricist.  However:

Elsewhere, this sentiment is reiterated by the deputy leader of Pērkonkrusts, Prof. J. Plāķis: after discussing the negative influence of secret organisations controlled by the Jews, it was stressed that ‘only by keeping our race pure, protecting and maintaining our people’s traits and traditions, can Latvians persist as a people’. This was clearly a palingenetic racialist nationalism.

But, how was race defined?  Never mind  that “racial purity” is unrealistic.  Preservation and advancement (improvement) of the stock that actually exists is realistic.

A formulation from the 1933 article, ‘Who Are the Latvians of Pērkonkrusts’, is immediately recognizable as belonging to the ideological worldview of national socialism: ‘In addition, one must particularly mention those tendencies created by Jews to conquer the world and destroy nationalism and the Aryan peoples.’…This contradistinction between Jews and Aryans could even take improbable forms: for example, when an editorial in Ugunskrusts explained that, of course, the Germans wanted to turn Latvia into a colony with the Latvians as their minions, but, being Aryans, at least they were forthright in this; Jews, on the other hand, were disingenuous and surreptitious in their plans to subjugate other peoples.

Der Movement has always “marched on.”

Furthermore, the Pērkonkrusts party press clearly identified the Latvians’ ancient forebears, the Baltic tribes, with the primeval Aryans, particularly in context of discussions of the neopagan religion of Ernests Brastiņš, Dievturība. An article in Ugunskrusts on Dievturība reports Brastiņš’s view that the Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, and Indic peoples arose from the original Aryans, and that the Latvians are the direct descendants of the Aryans in their language and religious worldview.

Note the inclusion of "Indic." Pure Type I retarded “traditionalist” esoteric nonsense. That’s völkisch to the core, I suppose.

Thus, from its very beginnings, Pērkonkrusts was infused with an intrinsically racialist worldview that fits well with the definition of national socialist völkisch racialism. Völkisch ultranationalism, however, is not only about the Aryan ‘blood’; there is also the sacralization of the relationship to the ‘soil’. The Latvian land, saturated in the sweat and blood of the forefathers, was sacred: it was here their heroic ancient forebears fought; here their ancestors’ remains are buried. None is more closely entwined with the beloved landscape than the Latvian arājs – ‘ploughman’. The official party programme of Pērkonkrusts already lists as its second point: ‘Latvia is and shall remain an agricultural country. Its economic policy should conform solely to this rule.’ The state should actively support and develop agriculture, while limiting and controlling industrialisation.

Again, we see the pure Type Ism there, the ultra-“traditionalist” “twigs and branches” “hobbit hole in the forest” anti-modernism that I despise. If that is national socialism, then I want no part of it.  But such völkisch nonsense should not define the fundamental essence of national socialism.

Nevertheless, this racialism is tempered by nationalism: ‘The Latvian nation is our faith, the boundary of our understanding of race.’ Latvians in the southeast of the country that had over the generations opted to identify as Poles or Belarusians would need to be won back to the nation; this was part of the campaign to regain ground ‘everywhere the Latvian language is or has been heard’

"Latvian language" = “Latvian speakers?” Does this emphasis on language rather than “blood” sound familiar?  One hears it today coming from a part of the world geographically close to Latvia.

The goal was a Latvian Latvia in the traditional of the ethnic Latvians, ‘where the question of minorities [would] not exist [nemaz nebūs]’. The two main minorities targeted by Pērkonkrusts were the Baltic Germans and the Jews: the former, as descendants of the Teutonic Knights, represented the historical foes of Latvian national aspirations, while the latter represented the forces of degenerative modernity. Echoing the later ethno-pluralism of Alain de Benoist, Celmiņš says that ‘non-Latvians’ – Germans, Poles, Russians, and Jews (sic)...

Why “sic?”  Denying that Jews are an ethnic group?  “Latvian” Jews are genetically distinct from Latvians – that is a scientific fact.  “Latvian” Jews are Ashkenazim, who are genetically distant from the Baltic peoples.

…– have their own homelands, so they should leave the territory of Latvia to the Latvians. Interestingly, neither Estonians nor Lithuanians are to be considered ‘foreign nationalities’ in the Latvian Latvia envisioned by Pērkonkrusts…Celmiņš expanded this to the idea of a possible Nordic-Baltic bloc together with Finland and Sweden.

Whatever.

Conclusions

Herein, I have not only proposed a definition of national socialism that is not dependent on Hitler, I have also argued that Pērkonkrusts from Latvia constituted an anti-German form of national socialism. The defining feature of national socialism as a sub-genus of fascism is that its palingenetic ultranationalism is based on völkisch racialism. As such race and nation are essentially linked, but in a metaphysical way as much as a biological one. For national socialism, the Jews as a race are hostile to the aspirations of the Aryan family of nations, seeking to enslave and degrade them through various of phenomena of modernity, including capitalist materialism, hedonist consumerism, and Bolshevism. In order for society to move forward, national socialism requires a reconnection to the soil and the core values of the ancestors. The völkisch ideology idealizes the qualities of the northern European peoples, but in its various expressions can be more or less Nordicist or pan-Germanic, as the pro-Baltic and pro-Nordic, but anti-German nature of Pērkonkrusts ideological worldview demonstrates. This fact also offers a way of explaining the heretofore paradoxical issue of why Pērkonkrusts could collaborate with the German Nazi occupiers in unleashing genocide against the Jews of Latvia, while at the same time engaging in activities that ranged from subversive to resistance in pursuit of their own anti-German political agenda. It is thus my hope that we can move on to a comparative study of various national socialisms that allows the research to move beyond the dead-end assumptions of mimetic Hitlerism.

If national socialism can be anti/non-Hitlerian/German, it can, in theory, also be anti/non-Nordicist and anti/non-völkisch.  Note: “The völkisch ideology idealizes the qualities of the northern European peoples, but in its various expressions can be more or less Nordicist or pan-Germanic, as the pro-Baltic and pro-Nordic, but anti-German nature of Pērkonkrusts ideological worldview demonstrates.” OK, fine, that is völkisch, but one does not need to define national socialism solely in terms of “the völkisch ideology.” I define it differently above, in a manner that focuses on Race-Culture, with a strong but certainly not exclusive biological emphasis, with the “biological” being positivist and empirical, not dealing with mythical “racial purity” and certainly compatible with a militant pan-Europeanism.  The Race-Culture in question can be broadly European, with smaller sub-groups having their own particularisms preserved as well.  I object to a specifically völkisch national socialism.  True enough, historically speaking, national socialism has been a particularly moronic form of Type I fascism, but it does not have to be.  We can make of it what best suits us, as long as it is consistent with the core ideology, as I have outlined above. If fascism can have “protean” aspects, and a degree of flexibility in its expression, why not the national socialist sub-genus of the fascist genus?

The difference is perhaps that of descriptive vs. prescriptive perspectives. The author of the piece being reviewed is focused on describing how national socialism was historically manifested in the past (descriptive, while ignoring more modern manifestations of that political sub-genus), while my outlook is one of prescription, e.g., what national socialism should be. Thus, EGI Notes/Western Destiny, as a Type II fascist groupuscule, promotes a Type II pan-European form of national socialism.

Sallis, Strom, and Racial Purity

Depends who writes it, I guess.

Remember this essay?  Remember the criticism the basic points received from the Nutzi peanut gallery?

Read this from Strom, emphasis added:

We have common ancestry with every living creature on this planet, if you go back far enough. So the old racialist idea of “purity” — meaning an unbroken, nearly identical lineage going “back to Adam” — was wrong from the start. Purity is the wrong word; those who used it were unaware of the ever-evolving nature of life. They were ignorant of evolution, which is a branching process; they didn’t know that all the races, varieties, subspecies, and species that ever lived are branches on one metaphorical tree — and that, going backwards in time, all the branches eventually converge into one at the root.

Question: Is the crazed mestizo “Chechar” going to accuse Strom of “sophistry?”  Does Strom – long associated with radical Nordicists like Pierce – have a “Medicist” agenda?  Or is he just talking hard science and plain common sense?

So: If Sallis writes it, then it’s bad.  If Strom writes it, it’s acceptable.  The exact same point, expressed by two different people, received in completely different ways.  Does that tell you anything?  

Then, this:

As the writer David Sims tells us, “Morally speaking, a flaw is anything that works contrary to survival. In any proper moral system, survival has the highest value. Why? Because nothing matters to the dead. Because neither truth, nor justice, nor freedom, nor prosperity have any value at all to extinct groups. Because only to something alive may anything else be good. If a moral system gives to anything but survival the highest place of value, sooner or later a conflict will arise between survival and whatever that other thing is.

Agreed, and that’s a point I was making long ago at Majority Rights, arguing against both the cognitive elitism of GNXP, and the aracial conservatism of John Ray.  We care about various ideas, in the last analysis, based upon how they affect us as people, as evolved organisms, and an idea does not benefit a group if that idea contributes to that group’s demise, or even if it doesn’t positively contribute to that group’s survival.

Regurgitating obviously wrong ideas about an absolute racial purity, which is easily discredited by the Left, does not serve the cause of survival.  A forward-looking emphasis on EGI and evolution (concepts that are not incompatible, by the way, regardless of “movement” lies that EGI favors “genetic stasis”) does enhance group survival – such arguments are proofed against an honest scientific critique.

I’m an Indigenous Swarthoid

A riposte.  Red font emphasis added.

This is what the “movement’s” fetish with “racial purity” has given us.

I warned all of you fetishists:

The concept of (absolute) racial purity was originally a racialist meme, one which had particular relevance in the New World environment of the intermingling of highly distinct racial groups (European, Amerindian, and Negro), Negro slavery, and fears of miscegenation. However, today, in the age of genetics, racial purity has become an “anti-racist” concept, a meme of the anti-White Left, a weapon to be wielded against the concept of racial preservation. The leftist argument goes like this:

Premise 1: The reality of race and the legitimacy of racial preservation depends upon absolute racial purity.

Premise 2: Absolute racial purity does not exist (as scientific studies tell us).

Conclusion: Therefore, there is no such thing as race, and racial preservation is illegitimate and irrelevant.

So, this is a logical argument that comes to a false conclusion because of a faulty premise: Premise 1. Premise 2 is however correct. Genetic studies tell us that groups heretofore thought “pure” are likely the result of ancient mixes of other groups.

But, hey, don’t listen to me. Instead follow the great and good Durocher and Ash Donaldson. Victory awaits!

It is also funny how “there is no such thing as indigenous peoples” applies to Europeans, but not to, say, Amerindians or Australian Aboriginals. Curious, that.

 “There’s no such thing as a Dane or a Swede or a German.” 

Hmmm, how about: “There’s no such thing as a Jew or a Nigerian or a Chinamen.” Mr. Netanyahu, tear down that wall!  Nigeria, hand over your land to Bushmen and Hottentots!  China, hand over your territory to all who wish to invade; after all, your national existence is an illusion!

I have, of course, dealt with the question of “what is indigenous?”  See here.

A simple one sentence definition: A group is indigenous when it is the oldest extant group inhabiting a territory in which the group underwent ethnogenesis.

Of course such groups are not “pure” – why should they be?  And why should fast talking Jews and their Goyishe kop puppet liars stop the analysis at “Africans and Russians?” Why not Homo erectus?  Why not self-replicating RNA molecules floating around in the primordial soup?

And by the way, you stupid bastard, ancient steppe peoples were not genetically equivalent to modern Russians.  They were not “Russian” any more than a Cro-Magnon from Provence was “French.”

In my case, I’m an indigenous swarthoid and damn proud of it!  Skin darker than a Nigerian and nostrils wider than an Angolan!

Derb the racial hypocrite.

Twenty years ago, my mother was bedridden and near death. It was one of the last times I was with her, perhaps the very last time—I'm not sure. She was drifting in and out of awareness, sometimes just saying things out loud—random things, clear and coherent but not connected to each other.

So I was sitting there by the bed and heard her say: "I don't mind dying. At least I knew England when she was England."

Yeah, Derb, if your mother was still alive, would she see England in the faces of her grandchildren?

Trump will monitor the situation!

There is no truth to the rumor that Greg Johnson, being taller than Richard Spencer, scorns Spencer as an incompetent manlet.  No truth at all!  But, hey, focusing on a bagel dwarf and “incels” helps distract from things like this.  At this point, I think these guys are just trolling us. They can’t still be serious about racialism, can they? I mean, it’s a joke, right?

Yet, Taylor can’t be there because he’s banned from the EU.  The whole thing is curious.

The Wile E Coyote Theory of Racial Admixture in Europe

No line drawn on the European continent.

Ash Donaldson weeps.

The most striking finding is a clear signal of admixture into northern Europe, with one ancestral population related to present-day Basques and Sardinians and the other related to present-day populations of northeast Asia and the Americas.

Me Chinese, me make joke, me draw runes on my can of coke.

Some more.  Less in the Northwest than the Northeast, but there’s still some.

Now, no doubt there’s going to be a bit more non-European admixture – and here I refer to real admixture, not artefactual admixture resulting from limited choices of parental populations in ancestry testing – in the South and East of Europe than in the more isolated Northwest of Europe.  But it is a matter of degree (and of kind), not of a binary yes/no.

The fetishists envision racial admixture in Europe sort of like Wile E Coyote painting a line on a road. They imagine some sort of magical, mysterious line drawn through the European continent, so that on one side of the line you have absolute racial purity going back through the mists of time, and on the other side, the populations are all heavily-mixed cringing colored subhumans. However, racial and genetic reality doesn’t work that way. There are qualitative and quantitative differences in admixture, but not absolutes of zero vs. large. It’s relatively low throughout Europe, with a bit more in some areas, and of different types.

See this.

Particularly this – if for no other reason – demonstrates the impossibility of absolute purity.  And there are other reasons – various influxes shown by population genetics – that result in low levels of real admixture.  But this is not all found on only one side of Wile E Coyote’s line.

That devil Forrest!  Read this. 

At a Chinese Labor Convention held in Memphis, Tennessee in 1869, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest pledged $5000 to bring in 1,000 Chinese workers.

An HBDer? Or maybe he was a Silker – he wanted some black-booted Chinese girls with guns guarding the borders of his plantation.

Or maybe he thought they were relatives, who knows?  Ethnic nepotism!

No, no, a thousand times no!  Too many carbs there!  Eat instead dem dere Big Macs and bacon-wrapped beefsteaks, washed down by gallons of full-fat milk!  What’s a little bariatric surgery and Da Vinci prostate surgery between friends?

The South Asian-Hispanic alliance.  Brown is a brown does.

See this.

And this.

Remember the EGI Notes paradigm: The existential meaning of Asians is hatred of Whites and of the West.  Would Sallis ever steer you wrong?  

Grading the Testers

Best and worst of the worst: A survey of some ancestry testing companies. Introducing the term “parental privilege.”  In all cases, emphasis added.

This is an opinion piece on some examples of the “state-of-the-art” (such as it is) in commercially available ancestry testing; this is not meant to be comprehensive.  I’m not going to discuss online accusations that the companies fudge results to “stick it to racists.”  For the most part I’ll discuss the actual product, with a few words here and there about certain other issues.

Before we begin, let’s take a look at “movement” Type I droolcup commentary:

Tostig 

I think that it is weird how some people clutch at microscopic bits of DNA and pretend that they are something they are not. My DNA is 90% Southern England, 5% German and 5% Norwegian. The two 5%s, is due to those Vikings raping and pillaging everywhere. Actually, at least 30% is down to the hunter gatherers who followed the retreat of the ice. I do not desire any exotic mixture 

Alfred the Great Tostig 

Your DNA is very similar to mine. The admixture that we have is from kindred, white races. So we are pure.

Yeah, Alfred.  How about this instead – you derive from ethnies well represented in your testing company’s parental population database, ancestral components labeled as “European.”  You are essentially being compared to yourself.  Congratulations.

The perfect “historical” example of this was DNAPrint Genomics using Hapmap CEU – essentially Anglo-Mormons from Utah – as the parental population for “European,” followed by Pennsylvania German-Americans getting significant levels of “East Asian admixture.”  By those standards, Mitt Romney was undoubtedly a pureblood.  So, tell me, Alfie – if the PA Germans had been used to define “European” instead of Utah Mormons, what do you think would have happened to all that “East Asian admixture?”

I’m sure the Type I peanut gallery response to that question would be: (((((crickets)))))

For information aimed at Normies see the following:

See this.

And this.

Also, see Dienekes’ criticism of these tests and their use of parental reference populations for “training data."  Note that many companies include customer data as part of their parental populations, and that data is not verifiable to the extent data derived from academic publications are.  Are customers’ reported ancestries accurate?

Please keep in mind I am focusing here on ancestry, not health data, and I am focusing on autosomal ancestry data, not NRY or mitochondrial DNA, single locus markers that I have zero interest in. If you are into health data, 23andMe provides some of that, although people have complained about the accuracy of such data (stories about that are found online), and several companies provide NRY and Mito data that seem reasonably accurate.

The following comments are based on my reading about, and analyzing, the tests and some online results, based on my own scientific knowledge, the population genetics literature, what is known about human population history, as well as logic and common sense.  The viewpoint is informed by a concern for politically relevant EGI, rather “movement” obsessions about “purity.”

I have long criticized 23andMe, which is an absolutely terrible test – it seems like the most popular such test among both Normies and Nutzis, it has majestic flaws, it is constantly misinterpreted, and in my opinion the company’s lack of transparency about certain realities borders on fundamental dishonesty.  As one example of the latter, consider: 

23andMe amusingly explains “unassigned” this way:

It is also possible to see a percentage of your DNA listed as “Unassigned.” There are two reasons why a piece of DNA might have unassigned ancestry:

The piece of DNA matches many different populations from around the world.

The piece of DNA does not match any of the reference populations very well.

That’s amusing because obviously the second explanation is what makes sense; the first is absurd.  The whole purpose of the test is to identify and distinguish ancestral components. Since humans share 99+% of their DNA, excuse #1 should in theory apply to everyone equally.  If the riposte is that we are talking about specific haplotypes stretching across chromosomal fragments, and those are not so widely shared, then how could it be possible for a stretch of DNA (chosen for examination for its value in assigning ancestry) to be so widely shared as to be “unassigned” to begin with?  And why would most of this “unassigned” show up only at the highest, most conservative, confidence level?  How come this “matches many populations” fragment is assigned to specific populations at the 50% interval?  And why is it that the “unassigned” just so happens to show up for those individuals for whom parental population coverage is relatively lacking?  Coincidence?

It’s obviously point #2 - the fragment doesn’t match the limited reference populations. At the most conservative setting they admit this is “unassigned,” but at the lower settings they just pick whatever population samples they have available at the time that may be slightly more similar to the fragment than are others. To say that 30% or 40% or 50% or whatever of someone’s genome, which is being used to distinguish ancestry in the first place, is common to many populations is ludicrous if you think about it - it is just coming from a population that may be more intermediate in the clinal genetic range than the parental populations they use.  If the DNA fragment is one that is similar between “many populations” than how can they distinguish it in some people and not others?  Simple answer – the “privilege” of being a member of a population well represented as a parental population. This is what I term “parental privilege” in ancestry testing – some people derive from ethnies well represented as parental populations, so those individuals get good matches and relatively “pure” results. For these lucky people, suddenly the “shared by many populations” (faux) problem no longer exists. This company makes it sound (for point 1) that, hey, it’s just a generalized piece of DNA, but then they ignore that it just so happens – a coincidence no doubt! – that people who derive from certain parental populations can have that fragment very easily assigned. It is "common to many populations” only when no matching parental population can be found in their database. “Parental privilege” is analogous to a form of affirmative action in ancestry testing. 

A perfect example of parental privilege can be read here.  Note that, with the most conservative confidence level for 23andMe this person was getting only 0.3% unassigned ancestry. 0.3%!  Meanwhile, other people, at the same confidence level, get in the range of 30-50% - two orders of magnitude higher!  How can you compare the accuracy of those sets of results?  It is absurdity.  Someone who at the highest, most stringent, confidence level offered by the company, has only 0.3% of their ancestry unassigned is obviously getting much more dependable results than someone who has 30% or 40% or 50% or whatever high level of their ancestry as unassigned.  Amusingly, this person is still not satisfied by the fact that they are essentially being compared to themselves; thus:

The lack of defined reference samples from specific countries within the British Isles also sometimes gives confusing results. I have one project member with seven of his eight great-grandparents born in Wales and one great-grandparent born in Devon. At AncestryDNA he comes out as 64% Irish and 12% Great Britain, 12% Scandinavia and 11% Trace Regions. At Family Tree DNA his ancestry is reported as being 97% from the British Isles and 3% from Finland and Siberia.

Well, others have it worse.  And then read this, an excerpt:

One could thus reasonably infer that, rather than ancestry, commercial DNA test results represent current geographic distribution of various population groups living wherever they happened to be living when the companies collected their samples. A customer's DNA matches inform them of not where their ancestors might have come from in the past, i.e., their ancestry, but rather current geographic distribution of similar patterns of DNA bits that each company happens to probe for. Is that DNA-based heritage or ancestry, i.e., hints of ancestral people customers may have descended from? Sounds far from it.

I agree and that is one of the points I make in this post; one flaw in these tests is using extant populations to model past “admixture” events, and this is particularly comical since even “pure” extant populations are mixtures of earlier groups.  Further, to use extant populations in a fair manner you need broad parental populations, which as we have seen, and will see more below, do not exist.

Getting back to the “unassigned” issue, online comments by customers speculating that “unassigned” regions may be due to “admixed regions” also fails as a logical excuse.  First, it doesn’t consistently fit with the idea of a fragment being read as shared by groups (excuse 1) – being shared by different groups is not necessarily the same as being a mixture of those groups. Second, on an even more fundamental logical level, it fails because all extant ethnies are mixtures of past groups, but are being definitively assigned as a specific ethny if that ethny is well represented as a parental population today. If an ethny is a parental population, then a similar fragment is assigned to that ethny, regardless of the ethnic history that created that stretch of gene sequences. So, this excuse basically conflates with the more realistic excuse 2 – insufficient coverage of parental populations. It’s not a mysterious piece of DNA widely shared but yet distinct for any group represented in the parental populations, and it cannot be shrugged off at the same time as admixture. It is poor coverage. Adding more parental populations will create matches to those regions even at a 90% (“conservative”) confidence level, and make all the results more accurate and realistic.

As stated above, using extant ethnies to estimate deep ancestry is not going to give consistent results, as we in fact observe. Then there is the problem that people take seriously the labels companies give to particular ancestral components – as if a name is more than just a convenient label and instead carries some deep and objective meaning about the underlying objective ancestry. If a company decided to label some type of ancestry “Martian” does that mean people with that ancestry are descended from little green men?  True enough, the labels do have some meaning on the broad scale.  No company is going to label Sino-Japanese ancestry as “European.”  They have some standards.  But as we dig deeper, the correlation between names and objective meaning starts to fall apart.

An example of the labeling problem is that some of these companies label Ashkenazi ancestry as “European” while ancestral components that are part of the European genepool (e.g., enriched in Southern Europe), entering from the Neolithic to Bronze Age to Classical Age (and to some extent possibly from more modern intrusive invasions and migrations) are labeled “Western Asian” or “Southwest Asian” or “Middle Eastern” or “North African” or “Turkish/Caucasus” due to similarity to gene sequences found in modern populations from that region.  Greg Johnson’s admixture component, if real and not an artifact, is likely from such an ancient source. 

Thus, a problem here is that Jewish genes are labelled “European” while parts of the European genepool are labeled as something else. Again, labels are not the things themselves; dependent on the biases and parent populations of a given company, a given ancestry can be assigned to different continental population groups.  For example, why not label Ashkenazi as Middle Eastern? Why not invent a “Neolithic” or “Mediterranean” label (instead of “West Asian" or “Southwest Asian”) for component autosomal ancestries enriched in those regions where J2 NRY is common?  One labeling scheme is as justified as the other.  If the idea is “we label based on where the ancestries are most enriched in modern times,” then great – last time I looked Israel is not in Europe.  Inconsistent much?

Also, if we were to assume some, any, or all, of this purported admixture is real (and only at the highest confidence levels should it really be possibly so considered), and if we note that current populations are being used as the parental populations, the it is clear that “Western Asian” or “Southwest Asian” almost certainly tracks with the dispersal of J2 NRY and would most likely be ancient Neolithic, Bronze Age, and perhaps Classical population movements. Later invasions would be Berber-Arab and would track with North African/Arabian ancestral components – although some of these can be ancient as well, particularly with contacts between Southern Europe (particularly Iberia) and North Africa in ancient times (as well as the modern Moorish intrusive elements).  We should not conflate “West Asian” with “North African” – these are not the same racially or historically. Consistently with these tests, ancestral components like Anatolian genetics seem to track with J2 NRY, so it appears it is an ancient component, and showing up in European populations because of poor parental population coverage

And again we come back to the issue of parental populations.  European ethny “X” – not a parental population – is characterized by a test as having some degree of “admixture” compared to the parental populations available. However, if “X” itself is used as a parental population, then individuals from “X” will see most (and in some cases all) of the “admixture” disappear, since they are being compared to the consensus of their own ethny.  

The riposte to that would be that “that is an unfair obfuscation of the underlying genetic realities.”  Perhaps.  But why can’t the same be said about other groups used as parental populations?  As noted above, when DNAPrint Genomics was using CEU Utah residents as the European parental population – basically using Anglo-American Mitt Romney types as the reference population for "European" - some German-Americans (*) were getting “East Asian admixture.”  Most tests today have Germans as one of the parental populations, so few if any Germans are getting any such admixture. So, groups used as parental populations are “privileged” (see above) in the sense that members of such groups, or genetically closely related groups, are going to get minimal to no “admixture,” as they are being compared to their own ethny.  The riposte to that would be that “well, we 'know' from 'racial history' that some groups are more admixed than others, so the choices of parental populations makes sense.”  Perhaps, but that is mostly subjective, and when based on genetics data it is circular reasoning.

Objectively, we could just use raw genetics data for genetic kinship analysis – by its nature kinship analysis includes all sources of autosomal genetic variation, including admixture – but people seem not to want that and/or companies refuse to offer it. In any case, the companies can’t be so stupid as to not know that the choice of parental populations directly affects the results.  They (with the one exception below) just don’t want to admit it.  

One point I’d like to make is that although 23andMe’s “chromosome painting” has some advantages if done correctly - identifying chromosome blocks and the timing of putative admixture events – the key point is “if done correctly.”  In most cases, just looking at SNP frequency data is going to be much more dependable, because the higher-level analyses are increasingly dependent on proper parental population samples (as well as an overall proper methodology).  If you misidentify several SNPs out of the many used, well, that’s not good but not “fatal” to reasonably accurate results, as long as the rest of the SNPs are more or less correctly characterized. But if you misidentify an entire chunk of someone’s chromosomes, then you are going to markedly alter their ancestral composition.  I trust it is clear why this is so – it is the difference between misidentifying individual alleles vs. misidentifying haplotypes that cover significant portions of the genome.  The latter situation amplifies the error because the error constitutes such a large percentage of the ancestral calculation, while the former error is relatively minuscule.

So, I’d trust the data based on SNP frequencies more given equal parental population representation.  That doesn’t mean the SNP frequency data are correct – the company may have made errors in that as well – but we are talking about relative probabilities here.

In summary, 23andMe gets a C for people who have good parental population coverage, they good a F for those who do not, so the overall grade for 23andMe is a D.  And that’s not good. It’s terrible in fact. By comparison, evaluating DNAPrint’s test by today’s standards, it would be a D- or F, while by the standards of its own day it was maybe a C+ or B-. In a relative sense, 23andMe is far worse, and in a gross sense, it is at best only marginally better. It’s a disaster. I’m not impressed by DNATribes either – parental population coverage there is relatively good, but…STR analysis? An F for them.  They've announced they are going out of business - should they be upgraded to an A for that?  In my opinion, DNATribes is/was even worse than 23andMe, and we can only hope 23andMe follows DNATribes' lead in closing up shop.. And, I’ll give FamilyTree DNA an F – F for FBI.  Genetic privacy matters. Enough said about that.  What about other tests?

We can consider AncestryDNA, yet another substandard test.  If you look at their website, they make it sound like they have a really large number of parental populations, for example “see all regions” at their website. However, when the customers get their results, it is the same old story with the standard reference populations. True enough, the company will tell customers, in a qualitative sense, where the more specific place of origin of their majority ancestry most likely is, but that’s it.  The more specific subregions are not being used as reference (parental) populations, and they are not directly used in a quantitative sense to give the ancestry proportions.  The company’s website is therefore in my opinion highly misleading.

As a positive, they give errors bars, which is a plus; however, the range they give is sometimes extremely broad.  Results can vary over a range of 10-20%, etc. That’s not very precise, and demonstrates why these tests cannot be used to determine exact cut-offs. A person “100% pure” may actually be, say, 85%, and a person “85%” may actually be 100%.

From an online forum about this company’s test:

thednageek says:

September 13, 2018 at 10:00 am

Thank you for the kind words. I’d love to hear how your new results compare to your tree. Northern Europeans seem to be quite happy with the new estimates; southern Europeans less so.

I can’t say I’m surprised.  Look at the reference populations. In general, the sample sizes for Southern Europe are less than that of Northern or Eastern Europe. Italy has the most at 1000, but that is less than France, “Germanic Europe,” England/Wales/”Northwestern Europe,” as well as “Eastern Europe”/Russia.  Population genetics studies have shown greater genetic heterogeneity in Southern Europe than the North. So, good coverage is particularly important in the South. Consider that the “movement” likes to tell us how Northern and Southern Italy are radically different, racially speaking. If that is so, then those regions should have their own separate reference populations. Or are they really similar? You can’t have it both ways. If Lombards and Sicilians are less similar than are Norwegians and Swedes to each other (the company has Norwegians and Swedes as separate reference populations), then the different Italian subgroups should have their own reference (parental) populations. On the other hand, if those Italian groups are so similar that a general “Italy” category is sufficient, then all the fetishists should stop foaming at the mouth over intra-Italian differences. Again, you can’t have it both ways. In general though, a test that distinguishes Norway from Sweden, and England from Scotland, should probably break apart places like Italy into subregions – which would be more honest given how they advertise the test on their website.

Actually, even some of those well represented regions have problems.  What is “Germanic Europe?” Why not Germany alone?  Why not separate North and South Germany?  Different regions of France?  Separate Russia from other Eastern European nations?  England vs. Wales vs. “Northwestern Europe?”  And Ireland and Scotland combined?  Why?  Now, as I have said, areas with greater genetic heterogeneity require more coverage, but, still, e,g., the English and Welsh are not identical and should not be lumped together as such.

I also read where the newest version of the test (like 23andMe) uses haplotypes rather individual SNPs. If you do that, you MUST have excellent coverage for your reference (parental) populations.  An error is misidentifying an entire chromosome block is going to be a lot more damaging than getting scattered SNPs incorrect  That amplifies the problem of insufficient reference population coverage and is another explanation why Southern European results have gotten worse after the change.

So, AncestryDNA gets a D/D+ for overall results, which would have been upgraded to D+ for giving error bars (however broad), but because they are (in my opinion) misleading customers as to what the reference base actually is and how detailed it is for subregions, they get downgraded to a D.

Now we will consider another terribly flawed and incompetent test - the National Geographic Geno 2.0 (Helix) test, which uses Next Generation Sequencing, is purported to be designed to look at “deep ancestry,” but that make the error, consistent with other companies, of using extant, narrow, parental populations as proxies for “deep” ancestry, which is a major flaw.  Their “reference populations” are extremely limited (as usual – the typical “parental privilege”), the labels they give ancestral components are strange, and the website is reported by some customers to be difficult to use.  We will consider the various versions of the Geno tests, of which Helix is one.

Putting aside this person’s (somewhat dated) opinions of the tests (keeping in mind she derives from populations that may have better parental coverage – even at that time – than others), I find it interesting that a person who is predominantly of Northern European heritage has a substantial contribution of “Mediterranean” and “Southwest Asian” ancestral components as measured by one (older?) version of the National Geographic “deep ancestry” test.  Granted that there is an unknown component in her genealogical ancestry, still, I believe that these data – to the extent they are in any way meaningful – likely represent Neolithic (and perhaps Bronze Age) influences.  In other words, these components – including “Southwest Asian” – are a natural part of the European genepool, albeit represented to different degrees in different parts of Europe. Of course, I disagree with their “Mediterranean” category that lumps together genetically and historically disparate groups; however, in that case, it may represent a common thread (Neolithic?) of these groups, with the rest of the total ancestry of these groups being different. In any case, once again, we see the danger of taking labels literally, and also the problem of using current extant parental populations to represent ancient ancestral components.  

See this.  We note several things here.  There isn’t a good range of parental populations. We note that all European populations – including Northern European populations – are bring represented as being composed of different ratios of Northern European, Mediterranean, and Southwest Asian ancestral components (with some populations having low levels of other ancestries).  Thus, different ethnies are represented as diagnostic ancestral components.  Also, some of these populations are considered by 23andMe as distinct, discrete “pure” populations but are here represented as mixes of various ancient ancestral components.  

Here is yet another (“next generation”) characterization of reference populations with their respective ancestral components.  We notice three crucially important things.  First, many of the populations are the same as in the original list (discussed above) but the ancestral components are different. The same populations, with the same gene sequences, are being represented differently with alternate sets of ancestral components (each component given descriptive labels by the company). Thus, how a population’s ancestral components are represented, and how those components are labeled, can change over time; differing between various versions of a test and of course varying between different company’s tests. Second, again we see that European populations are composed of different components, they are all “admixed” to some degree based on the ancient components identified by the test. Third – and this applies to both versions of the National Geographic reference populations – what is considered mixes here would be considered “pure” in 23andMe, demonstrating how concepts of “purity” differ with what reference populations are used, how companies decide how to represent those populations, and what labels are used for description. Thus, in 23andMe, “European” includes “Greek/Balkan” as a category, as that is represented as part of their parental population base.  In theory, someone genetically similar to 23andMe’s Greek/Balkan reference population could be “100% Greek/Balkan” and hence “100% European” – while that same ancestry in the National Geographic test will be shown as a mix of different ancestries, mostly European but some non-European.  It’s the same gene sequences, the same ancestry, but interpreted in widely divergent ways by the companies and the tests. What one company labels “pure” another company – digging deeper in the ancestral mix – considers to be “admixed.”  It’s all relative, not something definitive and set in stone. There’s nuance and interpretation, shades of gray, not black and white.  And both Nutzi fetishists and Normie ignoramuses cannot understand this.

Ancestry results are not something that can be interpreted as absolutes, they are dependent upon methodology, parental populations, labels given to ancestral components, all leading to whether the company is assaying more recent ancestry, or “deeper” ancient ancestry.  The “purity” myth is on display here, since “100% pure” ancestries in one test will be represented as mixtures of components in a different test. Labels and interpretations are not the same as objective reality. And this is a crucially important point. The ancestral components themselves are certainly made up of mixtures of earlier population groups.  For example, with respect to the “Eastern European” component, which most possibly reflects Slavic ancestry, the company states (emphasis added):

The large Eastern European component is typical for the region, and is itself a genetic composite of years of migration through the region.

So, again, this is something “movement” fetishists don’t understand – the ancestral components that they perceive as “pure” are themselves mixtures from earlier times, mixtures containing components that may well trace from outside of Europe.  That is the nature of human biological reality.  There is no “purity.”  Instead, there are greater or lesser degrees of genetic similarity and difference.

If “Eastern European” does in fact reflect a basic Slavic ancestry, and if these results can be trusted, then it is interesting that Balkan South Slavs like the Bulgarians are heavily Slavic, only a few percentage points less than Russians and Poles, and more than the Czechs, all groups typically considered “more Slavic” than are Balkan groups.  So, there may well be evidence for a common Slavic ethnoracial foundation for all these groups. Also note that Romanians are more “Southern European” than are Bulgarians, despite the fact that Romania is just to the north of Bulgaria, and based on simple gene flow you’d expect the results to be the opposite.  Maybe there is something to the idea that there is a significant “Latin” “Roman” component to the Romanian ethny in addition to Slavic and other elements.  What about “Diaspora Jewish?”  Described as a distinct category here (and in 23andMe more specifically as “Ashkenazi Jewish”), academic population genetics suggest that this is in actuality a combination of Middle Eastern and European genetics.  Once again we see a category that is either a single distinct “pure” ancestral component, or a mixed component, dependent on how it is analyzed and interpreted.  

What about statistical significance?  Confidence levels?  Error bars? And, more fundamentally, what was the reason for changing the ancestral components between the different versions of the tests?  Whatever the reasons, there’s no explanation that I find satisfactory; the overall attitude of all these companies tends to be “trust us, we’re the experts,” and the customer base accepts that, with some grumbling from those more skeptical and better informed.  None of these companies provide the nuanced interpretations and more detailed explanations that I am providing with this post.

The National Geographic test does tell customers the two groups they are most similar to.  Fine, but not enough.  There needs to be a complete list, with quantitative measurements of genetic kinship.

In summary, although some of the ideas behind the National Geographic test are interesting, the test itself is as bad as 23andMe (or worse).  The basic problems are the same – lack of sufficient reference populations, lack of nuanced understanding of the meaning of the ancestral components, lack of real statistics, and the subjective labels given to ancestral components.  If we couple this to a bad website, lack of explanation, and changes between all the different versions of the test (without sufficient explanation), this test is lucky to get a D, and not a D-.

Then we have LivingDNA, which has a leftist anti-racist narrative behind its founding, and which has received some criticism from customers online (but, then, of course, all these companies have their share of dissatisfied customers).  The results from this company seem to be slightly more plausible than that generated from 23andMe, which isn’t saying much, but suffers from the same basic problem – individuals from ethnies likely not well represented in their parental database get skewed results.  I say “likely” because the company provides remarkably little information (that I can find) on their methodology and parental population database, but given the results they generate and given the general history of companies having weak representation of certain ethnies, it’s a fair bet that this company also exemplifies “parental privilege” for certain ethnies. So, basically, it is a real bad test, only slightly better (if that) than 23andMe and National Geographic.

They also exhibit the curious results that a person of 100% genealogical ancestry X turns out to be a mix of X, Y and Z – despite the fact that, e.g., Y and Z are known to be components of X. This is the same problem with all of these companies.  It may well be that X is not represented well in their parental database; hence, the problem.  That is more likely that the X person is really so much Y and Z that it presents in addition to the Y and Z inherent in X.  Of course, the companies of course explain none of this nuance to their customers.

Indeed, a major weakness of this company (besides their politics and the questionable results) is the relative lack of information they provide about the test itself, and about the results, to their customers.  On the one hand, it’s a weakness, but then, given that much of the information provided by other companies is questionable at best and bogus at worst, maybe being reticent is a positive.  Addition by subtraction, so to speak.

No surprise of course that results from this test can very markedly differ from that obtained from, for example, 23andMe. Who expects consistency, what with different methodologies, parental population databases, gaps in those databases, labels given to ancestral components, etc.?  Don’t expect careful statistical analysis either. We certainly can’t have that!

I note that they say results can be “refined” in the future as their database expand, a tacit admission that they do not presently have good coverage of certain ethnies.  That also emphasizes the impossibility of utilizing precise cut-offs as the always-fuzzy boundaries are ever-shifting.

So, with all these weaknesses, balanced out by (possibly) marginally more plausible results than 23andMe, this company gets a “healthy” D+ for their efforts.  Really, I could have given them a D, but they seem to be relatively new, so I’ll be generous for now, and we’ll see if they improve or get worse (more likely).  I do not like their politics, but I’m not grading them on that.  I’ll expect them to ruin their test with “upgrades” the same as every other company; in that case, they would then get the D (or D-) they likely really deserve.

Getting back to inconsistency of results – as we can read in various online articles and blog posts, people who use multiple companies typically get markedly divergent results.  The main ancestry is usually similar but after that it all falls apart. Now, if the tests and their interpretations were all sound and consistent, how could that be possible?  The answer of course is that with different sets of narrowly defined parental populations with insufficient coverage and different ways of breaking down ancestral components and different approaches to labeling those components, of course the results will be different.  And, lacking sufficient information, as well as statistical information, how can we say one result is more accurate than another?  The only thing we can go on is how well the results match what academic population genetics data say about the ethny or ethnies making up a person’s genealogical ancestry.  If that’s the case, then why take the tests?  Just go to the published papers. And, laughably, the companies do not even give customers remotely similar calculations for percentages of Neanderthal ancestry. What is it?  Do they use different caveman reference populations?  One company uses Fred Flintstone and the other uses Barney Rubble?

The deCODEme site used to have a free, good (albeit qualitative) kinship comparison based on 23anedMe data – ranking relatedness to a global ethnic groups, arraigned by continent, and those results seemed reasonable, but it seems no longer offered. The original 23andMe site used to have a more quantitative estimate of relatedness at the continental and sub-continental (e.g., Northern vs. Southern European) level, as well as a PCA plot, but unfortunately they did away with that in favor of material less politically relevant (or not relevant at all).

I suppose if someone has the money to try every testing service they could look into it, and try all the companies, for personal interest. Again, this essay is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of every company; I may have missed a test that is particularly good or bad. This post is instead meant as a brief and cursory survey of some of the main current competitors in the field, coupled with some general commentary on the tests themselves.

In any case, I agree with Johnson here.  Past “Old World” admixture is part of the European genepool.  Certainly, we can always strive to improve the genetic situation (e.g., eugenics), but we are what we are. We have to look to the future, not the past.

Grades for (autosomal) ancestry testing companies:

23andMe: D

FamilyTree: F 

AncestryDNA: D

National Geographic: D

LivingDNA: D+

DNA Tribes: F

Others are not worth mentioning or I have insufficient data.

The patterns is of very low grades, reflective of the reality that the overall state of current commercially available ancestry testing is poor.  And just as the companies claim that the data they present to their customers may change and become more “refined” with more parental population coverage, so may the grades I give these companies change (likely for the worse, given their poor performance heretofore) and become more refined with more data as well.  So,expect grade updates in the future.  Also, new companies may come into existence and  those may be evaluated as well.

The most urgent need is proper parental (or “reference”) population coverage.  Nor more “parental privilege” affirmative action for some groups and not for others.  Either add more parental population coverage or have the integrity only to offer the tests to customers who match the reference profiles.  Otherwise, it is all a misleading fraud.

In addition, these tests need to be interpreted in a relative (e.g., greater or lesser degrees of different ancestral components comparatively speaking) rather than an absolute e.g., definitive results with hard cutoffs, concerns about “purity”) fashion.  Given the realities of uncertainty and methodology, even a good test would need to be interpreted in such a fashion, much less the mediocrity we have to deal with. Of course, Nutzis will remain incapable of understanding any of this.

Really, what is needed is genetic kinship assays on all populations, comparing individuals and populations to each other, but I suppose such a biopolitically relevant metric is nothing we should expect any time soon (or ever).

One could argue that ancestry testing as it exists today could be, at best, an amusing personal hobby for individuals, if it wasn’t being politicized by actors on both the Retard Right (see quotes at the beginning of this post) and the Loony Left (LivingDNA’s anti-racialist agenda, deCODES’s “gotcha” of Watson, and the Cobb setup debacle).  But we live in an age where everything is politicized, for better or worse. In that case, we had better focus on genetic kinship, which is politically relevant with respect to EGI.

But instead we’ll have more juvenile ignorant blustering from entitled Nutzis basking in their “parental privilege” affirmative action ancestry results.

*See this:

Needless to say, I was very, very surprised with the results of my DNAPrint "geographic ancestry" test results when I received it, and it showed a 21% East Asian content and 79% European instead of a 100% European which I had expected. In discussing this with AncestrybyDNA lab personnel I have learned that surprisingly to them some other PA Germans tested have had similar significant high teen, low 20's% East Asian content results. At present they have no clear explanation as to why.

The “clear explanation” seems obvious in retrospect. Compared to the Romenyite parental population for “European,” some Germans would appear to be 4/5 Romney and 1/5 Chairman Mao.  If the parental population had been “PA Germans” then all those folks would have been “100% European.”

I’ll say it again for the mentally slow: The results of ancestral component testing is going to absolutely and directly depend on the choice of parental populations.

I need to summarize the whole “parental privilege” problem for the Nutzi crowd.  I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.  Let’s consider it first in outline form.

1. A company defines a particular ancestral component as “European.”

2. The reason for that label is that the ancestral component is defined by a parental (or reference) population (or populations) that is European.

3. But why does the company label a particular parental/reference population as European?  Well, it is because the population is historically tied to Europe, it derives from a nation or region within the boundaries of Europe, the population came into existence as a distinct group within Europe.  All of which essentially matches much of what I define as an indigenous population.

4. Very good.  So an ancestral component is European if it is derived from, or defined by, or represented by, a population that is European. European populations tend to possess ancestral components that are “European” because those components are defined from an analysis of European populations.

This is saved from being circular reasoning by the fact that the initial definition of a population as European is not based on the ancestral components (that are themselves defined as European because they come from populations labeled as European), but instead because of the historical existence of the population within Europe, as an indigenous population of Europe, so defined.

5. OK.  But, if population groups A,B,C, and D are all historically European ethnies, if they all historically exist and existed within specific regions of Europe, then why should A and B be among the parental populations that define European ancestral components, and not C and D?  There is no reason to privilege A and B over C and D.  The only practical reason is that the company simply doesn’t have any, or enough, samples from C and D, while they have many samples from A and B.

6. Because of this deficit of C and D, and presence of A and B, individuals of ethnic background A and B, or ethnies very similar to A and B, are essentially being compared to themselves in the test.  If A and B define the ancestral components of “European,” and your ancestry is A and/or B (or something similar), it stands to reason you will test out as being close to, or at, “100% European,” with the subpopulation being A and/or B. Again, you are essentially being compared to yourself.  

On the other hand, individuals from C and D are being compared against a standard defined by A and B.  So, individuals from C and D will be represented as “mostly A and/or B” but with some “E and F”- with “E and F” being ancestral components labeled as from other, non-European, populations that happen to be well-defined in the parental population database.

7. On the other hand, if C and D were included as parental populations, then their ancestral components would be included as “European” and results for individuals of C and D ancestry would be similarly “European” as for A and B, with the subpopulations in this case being C and/or D.

And in the rare cases in which testing companies decide to be honest, they admit the reality of “parental privilege” – although of course they do not term it as such.  Thus, we read:

On the old Decodeme site (login was required, so no URL available), the following was admitted (emphasis added): 

The reference population samples were obtained from the HapMap project – they are:

1) European Americans from Utah – who most likely have a majority of north European ancestry

2) Yoruban Nigerians

3) Chinese from Beijing and Japanese from Tokyo.

The characteristics of these reference population samples and the clinal nature of human genetic variation (i.e. the fact that people typically become gradually more different as you travel further from your country) have several minor implications for the interpretation of the results. For example, a deCODEme user with a majority of ancestors (during the past >2 generations) from south-east Europe, will typically see higher percentages of African and Asian ancestry than a deCODEme user whose ancestry is mainly from north-west Europe. The difference will be small, but present.

So, deCODEme at least had the honesty that populations not represented in the parentals would exhibit artefactual “admixture” due to clinal differences in gene frequencies.  As to what level of difference is “small” they do not say, but keep in mind that another company was stating that close to 9% “admixture” was close to the levels of statistical significance. 

Here’s the response from our scientist who developed the algorithm underlying ancestry painting: “There’s no case that I’ve seen where 9% Asian ancestry does not indicate genuine East Asian or Native American ancestry. I’ve looked at order thousands of individuals of known ancestry, that approximately cover the gamut of human diversity. Thus I would regard 9% as a reliable indication of East Asian or Native American ancestry. That said, 9% is close to the threshold above which the following statement can be made, so it is still theoretically possible, albeit very unlikely, that the prediction is not true.

If that is so, and then you add to that the extra uncertainty due to “parental privilege” what are we talking about here as potential error for non-privileged populations?  10%?  15%? More?  In some cases that falls with the errors bars provided by companies like AncestryDNA!

Now, of course, there really is some (modern, historical) admixture in Europe, higher in some regions than in others.  But the amount of real admixture is much lower than what would suppose from looking at commercially available ancestry testing that inflates admixture for the reasons explained above – an inflation that, by some happy coincidence, just so happens to be compatible with the leftist political views of the companies, their founders, and their employees.

While single locus markers are absolutely useless on an individual basis, they do have some utility for populations, with results averaged out over large sample sizes. Such data suggest that real admixture in Europe tops out at about 5%.  And much of that is non-European Caucasian or Central Asian.  More divergent sub-Saharan African or East Asian admixture is going to be significantly less than 5%.

So, in the end, the real reason why something like the post linked here is essentially correct is that the typical “movement” activist is too stupid to understand all of the points made in my post that you are currently reading here at EGI Notes. Even when the companies themselves admit that “parental privilege” is real, even when the companies admit the fairly large statistical error, and even when confronted with the obvious logic that someone essentially compared to themselves is going to be, by necessity, ”pure,” the Nutzi retards still won’t get it.  Or, maybe it is not that they are too stupid, but that they lack the incentive. After all, those who benefit from affirmative action rarely criticize the program; the same applies to “parental privilege.”  Let some testing company start using, say, Sardinians as the reference population to define “European,” and all the Nutzis suddenly start getting “exotic mixture,” and I’m sure they’ll all cry bloody murder.  All of a sudden, everything written here, and all the open admissions of the companies themselves, will become crystal clear and acceptable.