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TIL the term "Semite" refers to both Jews and Arabs collectively.
@freemo Really? So, by that logic, Islamophobia is antisemitic?
@LouisIngenthron Yup, sure is.
@freemo Hmm, interesting. So, I wonder what the more specific term would be. Antijudaic?
@LouisIngenthron Interestingly despite a semite including all speakers of a semetic language, including jews and arabs, in general practice antisemite refers exclusively to jews... very confusing I know.
@freemo @LouisIngenthron I have never understood this. It gets more confusing when the Ashkenazi are Mediterranean Greek ancestry, and not Semitic. I had someone try to explain how "jewish" was both an ethnicity and a religion once, but the argument seemed to revolve around ignoring testable objective reality.
@JonKramer @freemo It's a common argument. Even the Wikipedia page calls the Jewish people an "ethnoreligious" group.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo , yes, it seems to be common. My confusion is why it's common, but only for Jewish peoples. There has to be some historic reason that just stuck, but since the whole silly history of the theory of different races is fairly new, it doesn't seem to have had time to stick.
It would seem its common among muslims as well.. I have often seen muslims as being referred to as an ethnic group as well.
@freemo @JonKramer Hindus and Buddhists as well. Many religions are closely intertwined with ethnic groups.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo , No argument with Hindus and Buddhists. But how do a bunch of ethnic Greeks call themselves middle eastern Semitic people? That makes as much sense to me as a bunch of Irish guys suddenly deciding they are Sub-Saharan Africans.
@JonKramer @freemo In the modern sense, while ethnoreligious groups were founded on ethnic and religious commonalities, today, they seem to be more inclusive (i.e. either/or instead of both/and). "Jewish" can refer equally to a devout Hassidic Jew as it can to a nonbeliever with Jewish parents. The commonality these days is a shared cultural background. Back to the previous example, both the strictest practitioners and the non-practitioners can attend a Bar Mitzvah together and discuss matters with the same cultural context, despite their wide gulf in religious belief.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo , Absolutely. The common cultural background is unquestionably there, but the ethnic background isn't.
@JonKramer @freemo Sure it is. What do you think ethnic means?
@freemo @LouisIngenthron , my error, I intended to use the word "ethnicity" not "ethnic"
That wouldnt change anything.. ethnicity is just the noun form of ethnic, it still refers to culture not race.
@freemo @LouisIngenthron , it is an interesting side topic, and this is a good place to read more, but my reference was for genetics, not shared love of types of music, clothing, or foods.
Better to use the word race then... what you are really asking is why are jews often considered a race and not just a religion?
I think its complicated.. a **lot** of jews have shared racial origins, but being a displaced people those origins are fuzzy.. whey have fled and integrated and thus have a much more diverse racial background than many. Its probably better to say they are a collection of races that become isolated and displaced so while still having a lot of racial commonality there is also a huge amount of racial diversity.
In short, Jews mostly refuse to give up their racial identity entierly despite being displaced since anctient times
@freemo @LouisIngenthron I intentionally tried to avoid the word "race", since as I previously noted, the word is a recent creation designed to create a hierarchy of fitness of the different genetic groups. A hierarchy that I think objectively does not exist, and can not exist.
@freemo @LouisIngenthron , The Online Etymology Dictionary uses this: "In 19c. also "a group regarded as forming a distinctive ethnic stock" (German, Greeks, etc.). "
Note the use of the term "ethnic". We are talking about words that have very little scientific meaning, but have emotional roots in overt racism, which by default, I try to avoid.
I assure you, I understand the root words, the basic concepts, how it is used in science, the implications when it comes to genetic disease, etc. My error was using "ethnic background" when I meant "ethnicity" because I was not attempting to discuss social behavior identification, but genetics. I assure you I was intentionally NOT talking about 'race.' My point was that there seems to be very limited examples of other disparate genetic groups that attempt to identify with a single genetic group based on a shared religion of part of that original genetic group.
Ethnic refers to groups with common cultures, which generally means tight knit German for example can refer to ethnic germans, racial germans, or people of German nationality.. in this case they clearly point out they are talking about ethinic germans (shared culture) not racial.
@freemo @JonKramer Right, but those variations of "german" are all still considered different words, hence your difference in capitalization.
As I understand it, though, the term "Jewish" refers to *both* those who are of the culture *and* those who are of the faith simultaneously. Hence, "ethno-religious" group.
@LouisIngenthron Yes, but you have to keep in mind from the perspective of most jews (I live in Israel for a year now, so just my impresion) the religion is the culture.. Even people who are not religious jews will follow most of the religious traditions... So even for them in practice their religion and their ethnicity are almost the same thing.
@freemo I haven't been to Israel, so I certainly can't speak to that, but over here, it's more of an identity than a religion. It can almost be boiled down to "which holiday do you celebrate in December?"
I.e. Even as a full-on atheist, I still celebrate some of the Christian holidays because of culture rather than religion. And many of the non-practicing Jewish folks I know are the same way. They don't ever go to temple, but they still go to mitzvahs and weddings.
@LouisIngenthron christiaanity is just as much a ethnoreligion as jews are.. in fact you just described it:
> I.e. Even as a full-on atheist, I still celebrate some of the Christian holidays because of culture
You are ethnically christian, but your "religion" is atheist (or lack of a religion).
@freemo In some ways, yes. But I think there's a big difference in that Christianity is much more aggressive about converting people of different ethnicities than Judaism is.
So, while the Jewish people do have subsets (like the Ashkenazi), it's nowhere near as diverse in culture as Christianity is (mostly because of just how far Christian missionaries will go to convert very foreign people).
For example, pretty much everyone who celebrates Hanukkah does so with roughly the same rituals, right?
Contrast that against this page on Wikipedia with how differently people celebrate Christianity's prime holiday by country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observance_of_Christmas_by_country
@toiletpaper @freemo @LouisIngenthron This is a very interesting thread to read 
@JonKramer @freemo My guess (and I could be very wrong about this) is that the ambiguity stems from racists using "ethnicity" as a dog whistle / proximal term for "race" for so long that it eventually just evolved meanings in common English.
Kind of like how "ignorant" has come to mean something closer to "indignant" in common usage.
Or like how "groomer" used to refer exclusively to predatory pedophiles, but now it's nearly equivalent to "faggot".
For how much bigots tend to claim to be "conservative", they sure do a lot of damage to the English language.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo , I strongly agree with that statement, and by default will avoid the term "race" when I firmly believe that there is but one race, all of humanity.
@JonKramer @freemo See, I have to disagree with that. Just because race doesn't have anything to do with science doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Race is like money. It only matters because it matters to people.
But, so long as it does matter to people, it needs to be acknowledged and addressed, not ignored.
In other words, I'd prefer a world where we're not "one race", but rather we celebrate the many races that comprise the greater whole of humanity.
Race has **little** to do with science, but not **nothing**...
Race is often important for doctors to asses the risk of disease for a patient. For example a black patient is far more likely to be considered for sickle cell anemia should he/she have related symptoms.
That said race is not particularly important outside of a few things like that.
@freemo @JonKramer Right, of course. And, as I know from *M*A*S*H* (lol), primaquine can have negative effects on people of African or Mediterranean descent.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo , I see your point, but I can't get past the idea that the term was popularized by people who thought they could determine the intelligence of different sub groups of humanity by locating bumps on their heads. Phrenology.
The idea of Race can and has been abused... that is a shame, but it doesnt stop race from existing. It does however remind us we have to be **very** carefully how we use race when it comes to science.
@freemo @JonKramer @LouisIngenthron Are humans the only species for which it is appropriate to use the word 'race'? If so, why?
@mediocreape @freemo @JonKramer For roughly the same reasons behind the phenomenon of human beings being the only animals we can recognize by face.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo @JonKramer to put it another way, because human exceptionalism?
@mediocreape @freemo @JonKramer To an extent, but that's far from the whole story.
It has more to do with the way our brains are instinctively hard-wired to process human faces faster than damn near anything else and detect minute differences. It has to do with how that effect is stronger within one's own race (i.e. leading to the common stereotype of "all people of [x] race look alike"). Humans have an endless need to categorize and classify everything, so the fact that we can all detect more minute differences in humans over animals means that we develop more and more specific methods of classification (i.e. see modern video game character creator sliders) for the different categories of humans. Race was just a particularly early category added to that list because our brains are hard-wired to detect it quickly, because we have residual instinct to give in to tribalism and distrust those who don't look like us.
So, I guess what this boils down to is that I believe that implicit racial bias is baked instinctually into our brains. So, it's incumbent on each of us to be aware of that bias to consciously negate it. And to be aware of it, we have to be able to give a name to it.
And none of that applies to animals, only humans.
(Except maybe dogs. I do have an irrational distrust of terriers, and an irrational trust in Labradors)
@LouisIngenthron @freemo @JonKramer I broadly agree, in that 'race' isn't a legitimate material category, but a by-product of one of the core functions of homo sapiens' prefrontal cortex (reducing the cognitive load of stimulus by implementing a system of memory and pattern recognition, the outcome of which is inevitably bias), which has been mistakenly reified as a term describing a materially real thing because human exceptionalism. The difference is that to me it appears a strong argument as to why it is *inappropriate* to use the word 'race' except in the explicit context you've used it, the explication of 'race' as a reductive mechanism, rather than a useful category.
@mediocreape @LouisIngenthron @freemo , I haven't processed the idea of human exceptionalism in this context, but otherwise I think you fairly well captured what i am thinking on this topic. Especially your last sentence.
@JonKramer @LouisIngenthron @freemo Thanks, i appreciate hearing that. I admit i suspect i'm being a bit of a smartass in my use of human exceptionalism in that sense. I mean it in the sense of "homo sapiens has a tendency to accept, without question, conceptual constructs existing exclusively as electrical signals in a few pounds of wet meat they cart around internally as objective and accurate reflections of a 'material reality'".
There's really no other way to be unless one plans on the hardline apporach of reasoning one's way from first principles up to "cogito ergo sum" every morning when you discover 'consciousness', but I intend to at least be aware of the fact that 'the world' is a story we tell ourselves and each-other.
@LouisIngenthron @mediocreape @freemo , just want you to know I have read this post, have reservations about some of the concepts (tribalism, for example) but firmly agree that labradors can be trusted irrationally.
@mediocreape @freemo @LouisIngenthron , excellent question. I would argue that it isn't a term that should be used for human beings either.
@JonKramer @freemo If you let "invented by a bad person" stop you, then you'd have to give up half of the comforts of the modern era.
That's why I'd rather reclaim them for something better and more optimistic.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo , I feel there are some concepts which are best forgotten. Not repurposed, but flatly ignored until they are not even memories.
@JonKramer @freemo And I feel that's an awfully good way to doom yourself to repeat them.
@LouisIngenthron @freemo , you have a very valid point, but I feel the positives outweigh the negatives. But, should we publish negative results when doing scientific experiments? This may not seem to be the same thing, but I think the concepts are very similar, and why I think your point is valid. I just think SOME concepts are best totally forgotten, and we will be unlikely to repeat the errors.
If we took this advice hundreds of thousands of africans would die as I previously explained... That doesnt sound like a prudent thing to do... though as I said it should be treated with extreme caution.
@freemo @LouisIngenthron , that can be avoided by looking at genetics, and not thinking of Africans as a different race separate from the rest of humanity. It's a matter of perspective.
That solution isnt availible to the vast majority of africans, and while I'm all for trying to bring it to them, it isnt.. Which means they would die all the same due to lack of access and you taking away the one cheap measure they have (looking at race).
@freemo @LouisIngenthron , good point. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good, as the saying goes. I'm not sure I can eliminate the dissonance that exists in me regarding this topic.
yes we have to be careful not to let ideologically pure eyes cause real harm to the people we are trying to look out for... it can be counter-intuitive but we do it all the time.
@JonKramer
Whether talking abpit race is important or not is questionable, doesnt change the fact that you were talking about race just trying to call it something its not. If your talking genetic insularity, you are talking about race. Science avoids race because its problematic, but it does recognize its a concept with some relevance (like determining prevelance to certain diseases).
@LouisIngenthron