Been busy. First, I’ll be posting about the genetic admixture of Afrikaners soon. What I can say is that using genome-wide data from hundreds of thousands of markers it’s pretty obvious that the genealogical studies were correct, and that the admixture into Afrikaners of non-European ancestry is on the order of 5 percent. The sources are Khoisan, Bantu, Southeast Asian an South Asian. Basically exactly what you see in Cape Coloureds, but obviously only a very small fraction. Also, this admixture is likely found to some level in most Afrikaners, probably because it dates to a very old period.
Second, there has been lots of reporting recently about the Islamic State kidnapping Yezidi women to convert them. This article in The Washington Post is interesting because it actually presents some nuance in this barbaric group. Because Yezidi women are not Muslim they are being encouraged to convert, but the militants are not molesting them. At least until they convert. A minor issue in the media coverage is that traditionally in Islam it is allowed to marry Christians and Jews. So this is a case where if they had kidnapped Christian women they could have married them without obtaining a conversion, at least by the standards of most Muslims. Also, note that in the Yezidi villages where massacres have occurred it is reported that it was prompted by the killing of several Yezidis who converted to Islam by the Yezidi elders of the village. This is the sort of thing I mean when I caution against rendering black and white judgments of good or evil in a world of gray.
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