Irony

I have a guilty habit. Y'see, I spend a lot of time perusing websites that espouse opinions with which I vehemently disagree. I consider if part of "knowing thy enemy" and find it fascinating to see the kinds of mental distortions that, say, members of the white nationalist movement go through on a daily basis.

With that preamble, I was wandering around the Stormfront.org website today (no link because I don't want to increase their Google rating any more than I have to) and spent a bit of time on their forums. Lurking only, of course. One of the posters there had an Arthur C. Clarke quotation as his signature. That quote?

"A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets."-- Arthur C. Clarke

The user's name is "sparrow" -- anyone overly interested should be able to verify without too much effort. I suppose Sparrow is completely ignorant of modern theories of human evolution, and the overwhelming evidence that due to a relatively recent population bottleneck (possibly due to an Ice Age) there is virtually no variation among humans of any race or ethnicity, at least when compared to the variation among most other species.

The Wikipedia has a fairly good article on the subject here and those who are sufficiently interested in the history of such social constructs can read Steven J. Gould's excellent The Mismeasure of Man.

Of course, I will not bother pointing this out to Sparrow, because I am a firm believer that one cannot be argued out of a position which he or she was never argued into in the first place -- Sparrow's positions are almost certainly borne out of emotion and hatred, and reason is left far, far behind.