Antisemitic. Every time I hear this word, I can’t help but think of its irony—a term used exclusively for describing discrimination against one community, as if prejudice against them carries more weight than against any other. Perhaps, though, it serves as the best reflection of our hypocrisy.
It's incredible that a term was coined in the 19th Century to describe demonstrable hatred toward Jews, that the term was happily adopted and popularized by people who hated Jews, and now over 150 years later the term itself is pointed to as "proof" of Jewish privilege or conspiracy, perpetuating the cycle of ignorance and hatred under a new guise.
The word has never, in its history, been used for anything other than racism against Jews. There are Semitic languages, not people.
> Due to the root word Semite, the term is prone to being invoked as a misnomer by those who incorrectly assert (in an etymological fallacy) that it refers to racist hatred directed at "Semitic people" in spite of the fact that this grouping is an obsolete historical race concept. Likewise, such usage is erroneous; the compound word antisemitismus was first used in print in Germany in 1879 as a "scientific-sounding term" for Judenhass (lit. 'Jew-hatred'), and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone
The Romani people for example (derogatorily called "gypsies". The term "gyp"—to scam—derives from stereotypes of Romani people) faced some of the most gruesome programs in history before facing the Romani Genocide in WW2. Yet we rarely talk about antiziganism the way we talk about antisemitism and people still casually throw around terms like "gyp"
The term doesn't imply that, but yes antisemitism has historically been more prolific than most other forms of discrimination. Even if we ignore the Holocaust and focus on recent incidents, Jewish victims are very disproportionately represented in hate crime statistics, for example.
Why would it matter? I don't think we should ever justify Islamophobia based on the actions of Islamic states or other Islamic groups; by the same token we should never justify antisemitic hate crimes regardless of our views on Israel.
> The compound word antisemitismus was first used in print in Germany in 1879 as a "scientific-sounding term" for Judenhass (lit. 'Jew-hatred'), and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone
It's not a special term to make Jews special, it's a special term to make Jew hate normalized.
How could that possibly be true when the only people perpetuating this word are groups like the ADL, Israel... If what you said was true, all of these Zionist institutions wouldn't be promoting it.
I checked wikipedia, and actually it states the same as the parent comment. That sentence has five references. It doesn't shock me, given the era, but rather than speculate and squabble, someone could check the references and see if they really do support the statement in the wiki.
I assume hardly anyone remembered, or payed much mind, to the origin of that word by the 1920s. I don't know who coined 'homophobia' or 'feminism' or many other concepts; they're just common words we use.
And I would complain about the false accusation if that was the case. As it stands "antisemitism" is what's being used to label people who oppose Zionism. It's just like how "communism" was used during McCarthyism.
I think the accusations are sometimes unfair, and other times accurate. I wouldn't like for the world just to dismiss hatred towards Jews, or any other group, out-of-hand. More than anything, I would like to see measured and humane discussion in the media about the Middle East; but sadly I don't expect that will happen.
The amount of unfair accusations dwarfs any real ones. For instance many in the VC world have accused Paul Graham of being antisemitic for simply showing concern about Palestinians. To be clear no critique of Israel including that you don't think it has a right to exist is "antisemitic". Israel is a state not an ethnicity and it was formed under what most consider to be illegal and unethical circumstances and it grew through ethnic cleansing. It's official religion is of no consequence when judging its actions.
One way to address that is to become cynical about 'antisemitism', but I hope that doesn't become prevalent. We've already entered an era in which majority groups resent minority grievances. Seems like that could lead to a lot of backwardness.
I alluded to this already, but it's so rare to hear public figures discuss Israel/Palestine without distorting and filtering what they say to promote one or the other side, it makes resolving things impossible.
I think the only backwardness we're going to see is censorship and accusations of "antisemitism" to quiet criticism of Israel. The US House of Representatives literally passed a bill last night equating criticism of Israel with "antisemitism". If people want that word to mean something, the need to start using it for a purpose other than silencing critics.
The fact that people use 'think of the children' as justification to pass terrible bills doesn't mean we should take issues affecting children lightly, right?
A bad bill that weaponises 'antisemitism' is a good reason to oppose the bill's authors and supporters. It is a bad reason to minimise actual cases of antisemitism directed at people who had no involvement with the bill.
No one is minimizing antisemitism though, we're saying that it's being used, often and illegitimately to censor people standing against apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. I'm genuinely curious if you think there's any antisemitism in this thread, because I don't think there is.
Apologies if I worded things poorly in my previous comment.
What I was driving at is that it's easy for a society, once there are widespread complaints about the weaponisation of some problem to slip into dismissing actual occurrences of the problem.
I can promise you that "the ADL and Israel and the Zionist institutions" are not the only ones using the term "antisemitism". I'd personally prefer that it'd be called anti Jewish racism.
Especially when you consider "semites" are a member of an ancient or modern people from southwestern Asia, such as the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, or Arabs. It can also refer to a descendant of these peoples.
So, many Palestinians are Semites as well. And one may conclude when Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, says:
“It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable. The Lord shall return the Arab’s deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world.”*
That this is "Anti-Semitic" speech as well.
It's amazing how buying off 98% of US Representatives can change a cultural and media narrative.
The thing is, the term "Semite" is (except in very archaic contexts) pretty much dictionary-only.
It exists, and has semantic validity. But it does not in any way describe a group that has ever had any kind of common identity. Or as Wikipedia (itself a kind of a dictionary) puts it:
The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics.
Antisemitism specifically refers to hatred of Jews. It doesn't matter whether it's the most accurate term given that it's anti-semitism; that's still what the term means.
Sure thing! They're made of about 300 grams of polyethylene. Towards the end of their lifespan, we can steer them to an area that's easy for us to drive out and pick them up. The payload has a GPS, which lets us track where they are both in the sky and on the ground.
Right now, most weather balloons fall back to Earth and stay where they land unless someone happens across them (since they can't be controlled and only last a couple of hours).
> we can steer them to an area that's easy for us to drive out and pick them up.
What does this look like in practice? As you mentioned I know you don't really have any lateral control, but I imagine you can wait for it to overfly somewhere convenient to descend?
Using this as a vector field, you can do "the balloon is here now, 30 minutes from now it will be there, if it is at altitude Z at that time, it will be follow the wind in this direction" which in turn allows you to predict where it will be in 30 minutes and take the forecast for that location at that time and determine what altitude you want to be at.
Saying I want it to be at X,Y at some time is solving this backwards. Which isn't necessarily easy, but it's computable.
Due to the rotation of the earth, wind current direction rotates based on altitude. If you want to go in a particular direction, you ascend or descend to a altitude that has winds blowing in that direction.
At least, that's how I understand hot air balloons "steer".
> On the one hand, the costs of becoming politically informed—learning about politicians, issues, policies, and relevant social science—are very high for individual voters. It takes a lot of time and energy, which could be spent on other important—or simply more fun—activities. On the other hand, the negligible impact of individual votes means that being informed has little benefit. Given this, political ignorance is rational.
I have been toying with the idea of a system that allows voluntarily delegating my vote to someone who I think is rational, more informed than me, and cares about things important to me, more than me. I would love to know the flaws in such a system.
I don't think adding a level to it would help, a new class of voter-politicians would soon emerge anyway, and they'd probably merge with "proper" political parties.
> While it may seem logical that the king has a queen by his side, that’s not how things started out. In the Indian original, this piece was the king’s “counselor” (mantri in Sanskrit). The Arabs used wazir (“vizier,” i.e., the ruler’s minister/secretary), which was Latinized to farzia, which became the French vierge (“virgin”).
Just the other day I was wondering what a stupid name for the Queen's piece. Not at all logical. It's battlefield and not wedding/ceremony for queen to be by-his-side. Vazir is popular piece name in India as well.
- The one who was laid off/fired will form a to-be-billon-dollar company.
- Suddenly there will be high quality, eloquent and verbose written form of English everywhere (emails, books, movie scripts, blogs, news, poems, school/college essays).
- Climate change protests turns fatal.
- Twitter will be on the path to profitability (don't know what it will have to pay for it though).
