Big Brother on the shelf

I'm probably in the minority here, but I think "Elf on the Shelf" is freakin' creepy.

Maybe I'm just not much into whimsy.  Or maybe I've watched too many horror movies.  But I find that little face, with the wide eyes and the fixed grin, a tad... sinister.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, there's more than just the resemblance to Chucky that's a problem, here.  Its creators, mother/daughter team Carol Aebersold and Chandra Bell, thought it up in 2004, and wrote a children's book that rocketed into the number one bestseller spot in 2008.  Since then it has only increased in popularity; in 2012 the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade featured an Elf on the Shelf balloon.  This has led to its face appearing damn near everywhere.  The Atlantic writer Kate Tuttle says that The Elf on the Shelf is "a marketing juggernaut dressed up as a tradition," and that the idea is basically to "bully your child into thinking that good behavior equals gifts."  I think that's pretty accurate.  The whole thing seems more about selling stuff than it is about having fun, but maybe I'm a curmudgeon.

Okay, I'm definitely a curmudgeon.  But still.

However, there are people who go even further than I do.  Just a couple of days ago, an article appeared over at Education Action Group News about Professor Laura Pinto of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, who claims that the purpose of The Elf on the Shelf is to get children to "accept the surveillance state."

She calls the Elf "an external form of non-familial surveillance," which I suppose would be correct if the Elf was actually real.  "If you grow up thinking it’s cool for the elves to watch me and report back to Santa," Pinto writes, "well, then it’s cool for the NSA to watch me and report back to the government."

Isn't that a bit of a leap?  This takes the Slippery-Slope Fallacy and elevates it to the level of the Falling-Off-A-Cliff Fallacy.  It takes more than a silly doll to condition children to let themselves be browbeaten by authority.

And of course, it's not like we haven't been doing this sort of thing for years.  Many perfectly rational people were raised on "He knows when you've been sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you've been bad or good, so be good, for goodness sake!"

Which, I have to admit, is kind of sketchy in and of itself.  In terms of creepiness, those lines are right up there with "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, in which Sting informs his girlfriend, "Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you," which I hear gets played a lot at weddings, despite sounding more like a reason for a restraining order than a marriage license.

But I digress.

My general opinion is that Elf on a Shelf is just the latest in a long line of marketing ploys designed to make parents completely crazy around the holidays, and that other than that, it's pretty harmless.  I'll be surprised it's turning kids into Sheeple.  But you never know.  Subtexts and subliminal messages are always possible.  Personally, I'm still a little suspicious of My Little Pony, which I'm convinced was created to give kids the impression that talking in a high-pitched grating whine is "cute."

And to judge by the little children I've seen lately, it seems to be working.

Billboard of shame

It is a puzzle to me why some people seem so concerned about what other people are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

My general attitude is that if it's between consenting adults, have fun.  I don't need to have an opinion about it.  Hell, I don't even need to know about it.  It is, to put it bluntly, none of my damn business.

Which brings us to PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays).

Yes, I know that the acronym shouldn't be PFOX, it should be PAFOEGAG.  But I have to admit that "PFOX" is easier to remember.

According to PFOX's homepage, here's what they're about:

PFOX is a national non-profit organization committed to helping ex-gays and parents and friends of gays who want help, hope and community. PFOX exists to educate, support, and advocate for individuals and parents on the issue of same-sex attraction, and increase others’ understanding and acceptance of the ex-gay community.

Of course, my opinion is that you can be an ex-gay person about as easily as you can be an ex-blue-eyed person.  But PFOX begs to differ:

Each year thousands of men and women with unwanted same-sex attractions make the personal decision to leave behind their former gay identity. And through gender affirming programs, including counseling, support groups, faith based ministries, and other non-judgmental environments, they are largely successful. Their decision is one only they can make.

Calling "pray away the gay" programs "non-judgmental" might be a contender for the Chutzpah Hall of Fame, given that at least once a week we hear about another pastor of a "faith-based ministry" who is calling for gays to be killed, as per the bible.  (Here's one of the recent ones.)

So anyway.  PFOX is pretty clearly an anti-LGBT organization, despite the appearance of the word "friends" in their name.  And this became clearer with the appearance along I-95 near Richmond, Virginia of the following billboard:

There are two things that make this billboard simultaneously appalling and hilarious:

1. The model for both the left-hand and the right-hand photograph is the same person, Kyle Roux of South Africa.  I.e., these aren't twins, it's one guy.
2. Kyle Roux is an out, and proud, gay man who had no idea that his face was being used (twice) on an anti-gay billboard.

"It just seems like there no place in today’s world for an organization that is promoting this as being some kind of deviant or distasteful lifestyle," Roux told reporters when he found out about the billboard.  "Because I’ve lived my life openly gay and happy for my entire life."

On a more serious note, there aren't just two lies on the billboard, there are three.  The third lie is that twin studies support homosexuality as a choice.  Way back in 1993, Whitam et al. published a study that showed that the concordance between homosexuality in monozygotic (identical) twins was 65% -- far higher than you'd expect by chance.  The authors are unequivocal in their conclusion, although they are clear on the point that the mechanism is not known.  They state in their final paragraph, "We are left then with the conclusion that biological factors are strongly operating in the determination of sexual orientation with the precise nature of these factors yet to be understood."

Which raises the question of why someone would lie outright about the science, not to mention the identity and sexual orientation of a model on their promotional materials.  The answer, of course, is that they have to lie, because scientific research has increasingly supported the conclusion that sexual orientation isn't a choice.  But this runs counter to their basic argument, which is that anything other than straight-up vanilla sexual intercourse within the confines of marriage is a sin.  So it's either change your message -- pretty unlikely -- or lie about the evidence.

So PFOX, or PAFOEGAG, or whatever, have been left pretty red-faced over the whole thing.  Not that it's going to alter their approach.  Which is kind of a shame, because while people are born with their sexual orientation already wired in, no one is born an asshole.  Being gay isn't a choice; harassing gays is.

Subordinate Clauses

Well, it's only a couple of weeks out from Christmas, so I expect a lot of you are excitedly trimming trees and buying presents for friends and family and listening to Christmas music.  Despite being an atheist, I love this holiday.  I think a nicely-decorated Christmas tree is lovely; we'd have a tree this year if I could get out of my own way long enough to go get one (which, with luck, will happen this weekend).  Plus, I really enjoy giving presents to friends, so having an excuse to get stuff for people I care about is awesome.

I even like most Christmas music, especially the older carols.  For example, I grew up singing the lovely French carol "Il Est Né, Le Divine Enfant" and still feel nostalgic every time I hear it, and I think that "O Holy Night" and "Angels We Have Heard On High" are absolutely gorgeous.

Some of the newer ones, on the other hand, bring "annoying" to new heights.  For instance, I doubt there's been a more banal set of lyrics ever written than "Little tin horns and little toy drums, rooty-toot-toot and rummy-tum-tum."  And my considered opinion is that whoever wrote "Let It Snow" should be pitched, bare-ass naked, headfirst into a snow drift.

Still and all, I like this holiday and a lot of its traditions.  Which is why I was alarmed to find out that Santa, the Jolly Old Elf, is actually...

... Satan.

Or at least, so says James L. Melton, of the Bible Baptist Church of Sharon, Tennessee.  Melton is virulently against Santa, and not just because of the usual "put Christ back into Christmas" stuff you hear, exhorting Christians to focus more on the religious traditions than the secular ones.  No, Melton thinks it's worse than that.  He says that Santa is literally Satan, and that you shouldn't put out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve, you should put out devil's-food cake.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What are his arguments, you may ask?  I was thinking of just giving a summarized list, but some of his reasoning (if I can dignify it by that name) needs to be seen in the original.  So here are a few examples.

SANTA LIVES IN THE NORTH 

Tradition holds that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, a place ABOVE the rest of us.  

JESUS CHRIST LIVES IN THE NORTH 

"Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King." (Psa. 48:2)

I don't think Psalm 48 was referring to the North Pole, but what do I know?  I'm no biblical scholar, of course.  Maybe the bears that god sent to the Prophet Elisha to eat the children who had teased him for being bald were polar bears, I dunno.

SANTA WEARS RED CLOTHING  

Santa wears a red furry suit.  

JESUS CHRIST WEARS RED CLOTHING 

"And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God." (Rev. 19:13)

Well, there were lots of guys on Star Trek who wore red, and as I recall, they weren't all-powerful.  In fact, nearly every episode, several Red Shirts ended up dying in nasty ways.

SANTA IS OMNISCIENT  

Children are taught that Santa "knows when you've been good, and he knows when you've been bad".  

JESUS CHRIST IS OMNISCIENT 

"The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good." (Pro. 15:3) "And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?" (Mat. 9:4) 

Is it just me, or is the idea of an omniscient being spying on you at all times a little... creepy?  I don't care whether it's Santa or Jesus, I'd rather not have someone watching me in the bathroom.

SANTA FLIES AROUND GIVING GIFTS 

Santa has the ability to defy the laws of gravity and fly around giving gifts to people.  

JESUS CHRIST ASCENDED AND GAVE GIFTS UNTO MEN 

"But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men." (Eph. 4:7-8) 

So, what are you saying, Reverend Melton?  That if I'm good this year, Jesus will bring me a Little Tin Horn and a Little Toy Drum?

There are plenty of others, including Santa's elves being evil spirits, and Santa and Jesus both having white hair.

Then he ends by saying that because Santa is sometimes called "Saint Nick," and an old slang for the devil is "Old Nick," that proves it.  And that was when this linguistics geek sat up and said, "Hey now.  You've left the realm of goofy pseudo-theology and started to mess with false etymology. Them's fightin' words."  Because I happen to know that "Old Nick" is the devil because the German word for demon is nickel (yes, it's a cognate to the name of the metal, which was called kupfernickel, or "copper demon," because its ore looked like copper ore but it didn't produce any copper).  "Saint Nick," on the other hand, comes from the name Nicholas, which means "victory of the people" (from the Greek nike, victory + laos, people).

Of course, Reverend Melton would still think the similarity was significant.  He even says that it's no coincidence that "Santa" and "Satan" are spelled from the same letters, something that was pointed out twenty years ago by the "Church Lady" on Saturday Night Live.

So we're not talking about someone who's rational, here. If you look at other things Melton's written about, you find out on his home page that he's also against Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and rednecks, that he's all for capital punishment, and he thinks kids need to be spanked regularly.

He also said that he doesn't believe in evolution, which is no great shocker.  He says that you can't use biochemistry to support evolution, because biochemistry is "where scientists mix genes and chromosomes in their effort to prove relation between man and animal."

So it's not like Melton has that firm a grasp on reality.

And I doubt whether his message is going to have much impact.  Too many people like Christmas and get into the traditions, whether they approach it from a religious or a secular stance.  I'm thinking that very few of us are going to give up giving holiday gifts because "Santa is a COUNTERFEIT GOD" (the stuck caps lock courtesy of Reverend Melton).

As for me, I hope to get my tree up this weekend.  I've also gotta get cracking with getting gifts for people.  I might even play some Christmas music today.  Time to get ready, 'cuz Satan Claus is comin' to town.

Um.  Santa Claus.  My bad.

Rooty-toot-toot.

Right message, wrong place

It's an uncomfortable situation when you agree wholeheartedly with a group's ultimate goals, and deplore the means by which it's trying to achieve them.

Such is the situation I find myself in with respect to the latest publicity stunt by the environmental group Greenpeace.  Spurred by a United Nations climate change conference being held in Lima, Peru, Greenpeace activists illegally entered the site of the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site to put down pieces of yellow cloth to spell out a message to delegates.

The stunt has outraged Peruvians, not to mention archaeologists, historians, and anyone with a shred of cultural sensitivity.  The 1,500-year-old site is extremely sensitive to damage; even tourists are required to view the lines from the air.  Only on rare occasions is anyone allowed to go to the site on foot, and they are required to wear special footwear designed to minimize damage.

"They are absolutely fragile," said Luis Jaime Castillo, Peru's Deputy Minister of Culture.  "They are black rocks on a white background.  You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years.  And the line that they have destroyed is the most visible and most recognized of all."

Peru's government is planning on suing Greenpeace for damages, as well they should.  As for Greenpeace, it issued an apology, to wit:

Without reservation Greenpeace apologises to the people of Peru for the offence caused by our recent activity laying a message of hope at the site of the historic Nazca Lines. We are deeply sorry for this.

We fully understand that this looks bad. Rather than relay an urgent message of hope and possibility to the leaders gathering at the Lima UN climate talks, we came across as careless and crass.

We have now met with the Peruvian Culture Ministry responsible for the site to offer an apology. We welcome any independent review of the consequences of our activity. We will cooperate fully with any investigation.

We take personal responsibility for actions, and are committed to nonviolence. Greenpeace is accountable for its activities and willing to face fair and reasonable consequences.

Dr Kumi Niadoo, the International Executive Director of Greenpeace, will travel to Lima this week, to personally apologise for the offence caused by the activity and represent the organisation in any on going discussions with the Peruvian authorities.

Greenpeace will immediately stop any further use of the offending images.

Which is all well and good.  But the damage goes beyond the appalling thoughtlessness of tramping all over a protected and irreplaceable archaeological site.  It blows a gaping hole in their message, which is that environmentalists care about the Earth and its people, and have our best interests at heart.  In a time when the issues of climate change, resource acquisition, and responsible environmental management are teetering on the edge, Greenpeace has given policymakers a big old shove in the wrong direction, and given the purveyors of the status quo more leverage in convincing people that environmentalists are irresponsible and thoughtless radicals.

How can anyone have thought this would be a good idea?

As much as I am in agreement with most of Greenpeace's goals, the end does not justify the means.  Not only is the damage to the monument itself an affront, but the damage they've done to their own message might be worse in the long run.  People who were in the "undecided" camp on environmental issues will be that much more reluctant to side with a group that seems not only to lack any cultural sensitivity, but common sense as well.

And the last thing the environmentalists need right now is to make more enemies.

Here's looking at you!

One of the most iconic images from the movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings is the Eye of Sauron, the flaming, all-seeing slit-pupilled eye at the pinnacle of Sauron's castle of Barad-Dûr.  The idea is terrifying; putting on the One Ring allows Sauron's eye to see you, wherever you might be.  You become invisible to everyone else, but uniquely visible to the Dark Lord and his servants.

So it's no wonder that the concept captivated the imagination.  And now, an artist in Russia is making a replica of the Eye of Sauron as part of an installation on the top of a 21-story building in Moscow.

Which has caused the powers-that-be of the Russian Orthodox Church to freak out.

"This is a demonic symbol," the Russian Orthodox Church’s head of public affairs, Vsevolod Chaplin, told Govorit Moskva radio station in an interview.  "Such a symbol of the triumph of evil is rising up over the city, becoming practically the highest object in the city.  Is that good or bad?  I’m afraid it’s more likely bad.  Just don’t be surprised later if something goes wrong with the city."

This is hilarious on several levels.

First of all, the installation, "practically the highest object in the city," is all of one meter tall.  Next to the way the Eye of Sauron was represented in the movie, this thing would be about as impressive as Mini-Me.  

Secondly, the Eye is going to be lit for seven hours.  That's it.  If lighting up a one-meter-tall art installation for seven hours is enough to cause the Triumph of Evil, maybe Evil deserves to win.

Third, I don't even see how the Eye of Sauron could be considered a symbol of evil's triumph.  Sauron was defeated, remember?  The One Ring got melted, and Barad-Dûr collapsed into a heap of rubble, taking the Unblinking Eye along with it.  So if anything, it should be a symbol of the fact that Evil doesn't always win.

But fourth, and most importantly; it seems to have escaped the higher-ups in the church that The Lord of the Rings is fiction.  I.e., it's not real.  Sauron never existed, and therefore by extension his Eye didn't either.  I know this is some pretty complex logic to expect them to follow, but even so.

You have to wonder how such superstition survives.  What kind of worldview do you have to espouse to believe that a rather underwhelming art installation representing a fictional character could cause god to curse a whole city?  This raises magical thinking to new heights.  Higher than 21 stories, even.

And I also wonder what the church leaders are going to try to do about it.  Pray, possibly, because there's nothing like fighting a non-existent threat with a useless solution.  The seven-hour lighting is supposed to happen tonight, and I hope we find out one way or the other.

What I think is likely is that the church will hold some kind of pray-in, the installation will be lit up on schedule and turned off on schedule, and nothing untoward will happen.  Then the church leaders will conclude that the pray-in deflected god's wrath, further reinforcing their view that they've understood the universe correctly.  Hallelujah!  God is so great!

Kind of makes you feel like what Frodo did was all for nothing, doesn't it?

Lawsuits and sinking ships

It's been a bad week for the creationists.

First we had the news in Kansas that U. S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree has dismissed a lawsuit by Citizens for Objective Public Education that claimed that teaching evolution amounted to the endorsement of atheism, calling it "without merit."

COPE objected to the Next Generation Science Standards, which are unequivocal in their support of the evolutionary model, saying that they "lead impressionable students into the religious sphere by leading them to ask ultimate questions like what is the cause and nature of life in the universe — 'where do we come from?'"

This casts science teachers in the role of theologians, COPE says, even though science "has not answered these religious questions and never can."

What's interesting about this is that they're partly right.  Science is closing in on more and more of the big questions -- how the universe began, the origins of life on Earth, whether life might be possible on other planets orbiting other stars.  But where they get this badly wrong is that these aren't religious questions.  Religion answers these questions one way -- "god did it" -- and then promptly says "q.e.d." and closes the book.  It makes no tests of its claims, runs no experiments, does not revise the model if new data comes to light.

Science teachers aren't theologians.  Far from it.  Science and religion as methods are diametrically opposed to one another.  If science and religion come to different answers about a question, you have to choose one or the other.  There is no reconciling them, because their ways of arriving at the truth have little in common.

But in a way, by teaching evolution, we are making a statement with some theological import.  We're saying that science works, that it is in this case a better way of knowing the truth than religion is.  But this isn't that shocking, really.  Even most extremely religious folks trust science in a host of other areas.  It's not like fundamentalists are asking us to jettison the periodic table in favor of revealed truth regarding the composition of matter.  Evolution has become something of a last-stand battleground, where science's evidence-based answers and religion's evidence-free claims are coming to blows.

Crabtree, predictably, danced around that point a little, merely claiming in his ruling that COPE had not been able to provide specific enough details of the injuries NGSS is supposed to have inflicted upon innocent children.  I guess it wouldn't be politic for a federal judge to come right out and say, "Get your damn noses out of the science classroom."


So this has understandably put creationists on the defensive, and far be it from Ken Ham not to be the leader of the pack.  He announced this week that he's starting a billboard campaign in Kentucky, aimed at people who have laughed at his "Ark Encounter" project:

What I find most amusing about this is that he has somehow linked an understanding of science with being liberal, which last I checked weren't the same thing.  But as a ploy, it's pretty shrewd, given that he's operating in a part of the United States where "liberals" are right up there with "baby eaters" in popularity.

But as Hemant Mehta points out, there are a number of other problems with Ham's claim, first and foremost being that atheists could care less if Ham builds an ark, we just want him to follow the law while he's doing it.  (Recall that the whole project came under legal scrutiny when it was found that Ham was requiring all of his employees to sign a contract promising that they'd adhere to biblical literalism, which is illegal for a for-profit corporation that is in line for $18,000,000 in state tax breaks.)

And as Mehta also mentioned, you can't sink this ship largely because it's on land, and we're not really friends.  But Ham has never been known to allow reality to intrude on his vision, so there's no reason we should expect him to start now.

In any case, these efforts strike me as desperation, and it may be that we're seeing the last gasps of this fundamentally anti-science worldview.  At some point, they're bound to give up, right?

One can only hope.  If the creationists are struggling in states like Kansas and Kentucky, it might be that as a nation we can finally move past Bronze Age mythology as a primary basis for understanding.

Skin deep

We were talking in my AP Biology class yesterday about the potential for skin damage from exposure to ultraviolet light.  Later in the day,  a student sent me a YouTube video called "How the Sun Sees You" that uses a UV-sensitive camera to see the sun damage on people's skin (and also illustrates that sunscreen does work, given that it looks an opaque black when filmed in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum).

All of which is well and good, but then I scrolled down to the comments section, which I know I should never do, and I found the following.  Spelling and grammar are as written, so I don't use up my "sic" allotment all in one go:

First off everyone has to stop believing that Melanin a.k.a. Carbon protects us from u.v. rays.  Carbon in the skin actually absorbs ultraviolet rays in a process that is now being called Ultrafast Internal Conversion.  Not one person has mentioned this..  The Elemental Compound for C Carbon is 666.  6 Electrons 6 Neutrons 6 Protons.  The origins of the 666.  The Catholics call It "the mark of beast" which is code for "mark of the our destroyers"  We all know that Carbon is the building blocks of life.  Carbon defines life therefore us Moors who are incorrectly referred to as "Black People" are the building blocks for Human life and biology.  This is true because no one else on the planet possesses the levels of Carbon in the body and brain quite like The Moors. (remember a moor is a black man or women)  In other words, us "Black people" are and forever will be The genetic template for the Human being.  Black ppl we are Human In it's truest form.  Of course there are plenty lies circulating the damn truth.  All non black people are merely human hybrids.  All races were genetically engineered from the supreme Human.  Clones much?  DARK POWER!!

So naturally I thought, "Well, that's a viewpoint I've never run into before."  (I also thought, "I hope this person is on medication" and "this is what it looks like when someone fails high school biology.")  But I did some research, and I found out that this is not the claim of a lone wacko.  This is the claim of a large number of wackos.  There's a whole school of thought (although I hesitate to use either word in this context) that revolves around the contention that people of African descent are superior because they have lots more carbon in them.

Take, for example, the page "Carbon & Melanin Secret of Secrets" over at the amazingly wacky site Godlike Productions.  In it, we find a wall of text that can be summarized as follows:

• Carbon is some seriously mystical stuff.  Besides the 6-6-6 thing mentioned above, it has four bonds that are shaped like a swastika.
• It also has something to do with the Buddhist "om," the Christian cross, and the Greek letters alpha and omega.
• Melanin is dark.  So is carbon.  Therefore melanin is carbon.
• Melanin is the "key to life" and is the "organizing molecule for living systems."
• Melanin is an ordinary conductor, a semiconductor, and a superconductor.  Don't ask me how it can be all three at the same time.
• Satan and Saturn are the same thing.
• Because the symbol for carbon is C, and the symbol for cytosine (one of the nitrogenous bases in DNA) is C, they're the same thing.  It couldn't be because in English, both of them have names that start with "c."
• Some other weird stuff about DMT and alchemy and prophecies that frankly I couldn't read because my eyes were spinning.

I read this whole thing with an expression like this:

What bothers me most about all of this is not that crazy people are making shit up.  That's what crazy people do, after all.  What bothers me is that apparently this claim has gotten some traction amongst people who want justification for believing that dark-skinned humans are intrinsically better than light-skinned humans, and who cannot even be bothered to take a look at the Wikipedia page for melanin, wherein we find that melanin isn't carbon.  It contains carbon, but after all, so does chalk, which last I looked was white.

The ironic thing is that when you talk to actual anthropologists and geneticists, most of 'em will tell you that the biological basis for race is tenuous at best.  Race is a cultural phenomenon, not a genetic one.  If you want your mind blown on this topic, consider the following quote from Alan Goodman:

Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much genetic variation showed up at three different levels. 

One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-groups within that purported race. 

So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua? 

And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic diversity of the world. 

Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one to say that race actually explains very little of human variation...

But, for the most part, you know that the basic human plan is really the basic human plan, and is found almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical cues... And, in fact, though, these may happen to be a few of the things that do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story is told by looking at genes under the skin.

Which should really inform us about how we treat people who don't look like us, shouldn't it?  We're all human.  We have a vast overlap in our genetics, even if you choose two people who look very different from each other.  And at our cores, most of us want the same things -- food, shelter, love, security, compassion.  When we start claiming that people of different ethnicities deserve different levels of privilege, we're engaging in a mindset that is not only destructive, it's counterfactual.

And that applies to all racists equally, whether they're neo-nazis or cranks who claim that anyone without much melanin in their skin is an evil hybrid clone.