News bits: Cancelling abortion on the internet; White supremacists reject bad data; Bits about Stormfront

  Wired writes:

Texas Could Push Tech Platforms to Censor Posts About Abortion

If passed, the proposed law would also require internet service providers to block websites that discuss access to abortion

State lawmakers in Texas are considering a bill introduced last month that would make it illegal to provide information on how to access abortion. The bill would also require internet service providers to block websites offering content like that in Robin Marty’s book*, allow prosecution of abortion pill “distribution networks,” and permit anyone to sue a person who shared anything about how to access a medical abortion. The proposal borrows from a Texas law passed in 2021 that offers a cash bounty to citizens who sue a person who helped facilitate access to abortion care.

* The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America: The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality, Access, and Practical Support

It sure seems like red state legislatures are in full-blown crazy-go-nuts fascist mode these days.

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When the data is bad, bad people reject it: Stat News wrote in 2017:

White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. 

Some don’t like what they find

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Some of America's radical right is so irrational and incoherent its surprising those people can get dressed in the morning. In stead of kicking the racists out of the Nazi Stormfront neo-fascist social club, they reject the genetic testing as false and keep the impure blood in the racist's tea and cookies party. 

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Understanding extremism: Racism

The bit about Stormfront rejecting the validity of genetic testing raised the question, what is Stormfront. 

Wikipedia comments about Stormfront: Stormfront is a neo-Nazi Internet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site. The site is focused on propagating white nationalism, Nazism, antisemitism (especially anti-semitic conspiracy theories) and islamophobia, as well as anti-feminism, homophobia, transphobia, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy.

Stormfront was founded online in 1995 by former Alabama Klan boss and long-time white supremacist Don Black. The Stormfront website claims to have millions of posts. Some of it's rhetoric is more sophisticated than I imagined. Some is what I imagined. The top of the homepage says this:

The truth is "hate" to those who hate the truth!

We are a community of racial realists and idealists. Black, Hispanic, Asian and Jewish Nationalists openly support their racial interests, with American taxpayers even required to support the Jewish ethnostate of Israel. We are White Nationalists who support true diversity and a homeland for all peoples, including ours. We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!

At the Stormfront science forum, how some of the racists deal with White racial superiority came as a surprise. There was some understanding of biology mixed in with racism:

Re: Bad Arguments Used By White Nationalists

Responder 1:

"Whites are superior in every sense"
That's completely spurious and counter-productive: While Whites have undoubtedly produced a great body of knowledge and achieved tremendous prowess in many fields, we are not 'superior' in every sense. Remember that each race developed under unique circumstances, thus the races developed different relative strenghths and weaknesses.

"Other races are sub-human"
Nonsense. This is a corollary to my previous statement: You wouldn't call a brown bear a "sub-bear" and polar bears the "master bears", despite their obvious phenotypic differences. Each is suited to its particular environment --problems only arise when they are no longer in their ideal environment.

We must remember what we are fighting for --cultural preservation and sovereignty. We must not confound this with irrational hatred of those who differ from us.

Responder 2 responding to Responder 1:

Well, that would be relevant had one bear made an accomplishment over the other. However, with humans this rationale is not applicable, or acceptable. The belief of White superiority should not be up for discussion because it is fact. The White race has made an unparalleled amount of development from ancient times to modern times. We have invented present and early systems of thought, technology, science, society, government, and so on. Without the White race the world, meaning Asia in particular, would have stayed completely stagnant in all of these fields.

Although Asians would have presented minor advancements, you and I both know that without White generosity, their current state of development would be about two thousand years behind and without any significant progression. Why is this? Well, this is due to the fact that Asians do not possess a broad scope of cognitive/mental ability in comparison to that of Whites. As a result, before White intervention, they did not advance through technology, science, etc because of that inability. Haven’t you ever wondered why Japan is the most technologically advanced nation in Asia? Well, it’s because of America. All of the other Asian nations are far behind, and in correlation to this, those nations have not been exposed to Western culture as vividly.

As for the Africans, well, I didn’t include them in my previous statement because it’s fairly obvious that Africans are inferior to Whites in every sense of the meaning. They have invented nothing in their history and consequently have failed to progress past the Age of Stone – about six thousand or more years behind that of us White men. Therefore, the only contender to Whites for racial superiority is Asians, but it has been made clear that they are not as broadly evolved in all fields of survival and intelligence. As a result, Whites are superior.

Responder 2

(note the cheerful avatar)

Responder 3:

Arguments referring to the brains of negroes vs brains of Whites shouldn't be used. Although I personally don't doubt them, they're virtually impossible to prove, and will only make you look silly.

Responder 4 responding to Responder 2:

One cannot use current levels of technology as a valid basis for comprehensive racial capabilities. Using this kind logic, we can argue that in the year 1400 AD, white Europeans were clearly inferior to East Asians since most of the new technologies being invented around that time came from the orient and those asian societies were the most advanced on earth. And in the year 200 AD, both the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire were equally advanced with almost no technology exchanges, so the two races were equal 1800 years ago? You must face the fact that biologically, entire races do not evolve new features overnight. Thus a great deal of the differences between societies are justifiably based on chance occurances and culture in general. And please don't quote Murray's work on human acheivements on me, because I've read it. His statistical models were based on the frequency of names of great visionaries, explorers, and inventors who lived from the ancient times up to 1950. But the frequency tables were developed from available text written after 1950 to present. He was basically counting the number of occurrences of each famous person in all published text written in the last 50 years, ranking the list of people by this metric and then grouping it by race. Now you tell me....given the fact that we live in age where Western Civilization is holding a dominant (though arguably declining) position versus the rest of the world, who will publish more books? Western nations, the semi-industrialized Asians, or the non-industrialized Africans? .... The point of contention that I'm alluding to is that it is extremely dangerous to correlate whiteness with innate superiority. Being white is not an assurance that one is strong or capable or even average. It is up to individuals and cultures alike to strive for and to maintain a dominant civilization.