“‘There are not many other places where you can get exposed to this stuff, so I thought it was pretty interesting,’ said Garia Sestian, freshman majoring in elementary education.”

Sestian must never turn on the TV, read any newspapers, or browse the Web. I suppose those aren’t technically “places” though, on one reading of “places.” Our elementary kids will no doubt get a great introduction to polemical subtlety from our fresh new batch of Emory-educated teachers, brought up in the spirit of Clintonian linguistic subtlety. Or maybe Sestian just doesn’t get out much.

“According to Armelagos, any trait used will give a different racial classification. This is direct proof of how biological traits cannot be used to define a cultural social fact. Thus, the concept of race is completely arbitrary and artificial.”

Uh huh. The tautology that different traits are in fact different invalidates any form of combining traits into useful statistical classifications? This guy is a “scientist”?

Prof. Armelagos means well, of course. But problems begin when social engineers try to force reality into conformity with false theories promulgated by well-meaning but nitwit or dishonest (or both) professors like him who don’t know their asses from their elbows as we used to say in New York City.

The problems arise when gullible social engineers and utterly slimy opportunist politicians undertake with such gusto the procrustean task of making reality fit well-meaning fantasy, and woe betide groups, individuals, or social classes whose legs, arms, and heads must be lopped off or whose bodies stretched on the rack to make them fit the well-meant bedstead.

1930s Soviet apparatchiks who earnestly, even joyfully carried out Stalin’s genocide of fifteen million Kulak men, women, children, and old people meant well, and I happened to see one of them, now old, interviewed on the History Channel, offering thin, vague, limp, off-hand, doubtless extremely embarrassed apologies for what he and his very well-meaning young idealistic friends did then — supervising the planned, deliberate deaths of millions by starvation and bullets.

Adolf Eichmann’s German and Ukrainian camp guards who without a second thought shepherded whole Jewish families just arrived by train into gas chambers and then went to take a lunch break meant well. So did Pol Pot’s and Khieu Sampan’s guerilla army of brainwashed teenagers who, cheered on by Western Leftists like reporter Richard Bernstein (now with the New York Times, who was at the scene then), hacked two-and-a-half million people to death with garden hoes.

They all meant well. The problem is that well-meaning buffoons like Prof. Armelagos who are too stupid to see truth or who hide it out of political motives are ultimately harmful because all too often their good intentions lead to vast human tragedy.

Truth, of course, is the antidote to such fools — and though you’ll be hard-pressed to get that particular antidote from the mainstream media, thank God The Force (the conservative portion of the internet and blogosphere) is with us. Check out Steve Sailer’s stuff (www.iSteve.com), for example, for a very powerful antidote indeed to this not very bright but quite well-meaning college professor.