The term was coined by an academic and then claimed by fascists to describe their own hatred of jews. If anything, the current meaning as something to be reviled is the reclaimed version.
Antisemitism is a word that a historically oppressed group uses to defend itself. Others taking that away from jews is not the same thing as the reclaiming of queer or the n-word by their communities .
The word is being misused by israel and that's truly appalling, but there is still a valid use case for it's current meaning.
The state of israel is already doing more than enough to "remove the air from the sails of the word "antisemitism".
Antisemitism is real and a real threat and it deserves a term that reflects the level of horror that it has inflicted. Minimizing the horrors of the holocaust against the jews does nothing to combat the holocaust israel is conducting. You can't draw attention to a genocide by minimizing a different genocide. That's not how horror at human barbary works.
No one is happy that israel is abusing the term antisemitism but the solution is to point that out. Or just laugh at israel when they make obviously untrue claims, as most people do.
Using antisemitic to mean hatred of speakers of semitic languages doesn't make sense because no one groups all speakers of semitic languages together. Hatred of jews and hatred of arabs are two very different phenomena with vastly different sets of prejudices and stereotypes, each deserving of their own term.
It's not a conspiracy of the israeli government to modify english words to exclude arabs.
Semitic was a termed coined by a german academic in the late 1700s, to mean semitic languages. Antisemitism was being used to mean hatred of jews by the mid to late 1800s, mostly by german and prussian nationalists describing their own hatred of jews as antisemitism. When english borrows the term from german in 1881, it already meant hatred of jews.
Pretending that you don't know the meaning of 'antisemitic' is only slightly less annoying than pretending that criticism of israel is antisemitic.
Semitic is a term with two main uses - 1) to mean 'jews' in the term 'anti-semitic'. 2) to refer to a particular branch of the afro-asiatic language family. No one is using 'semite' to mean all speakers of semitic languages and even if they did the meaning of the term antisemitic is clear and well understood.
Please, please just stick to pointing out how dumb it is to pretend that criticizing the genocidal actions of a nation state is somehow hatred of jews. This overplayed piece of feigned linguistic ignorance is doing nothing for no one.
Almost every poll that I've seen for ~20 years which asks about policies shows that most left wing positions have at least 50-60% support.
There was a great study years back from princeton looking at the difference between policy outcomes and public preferences at the time. They concluded the US has been an oligarchy since at least the 70s, since no major policy outcome has matched public opinion.
The farthest right faction of our elites are currently pulling so far to the right of the population that the flimsy theatre of representation we have now is actually proving a barrier. Republicans wouldn't be supressing votes if people wanted their ideas.
I really don't have a problem with this. She's a center right candidate from a center right party - of course she'll make an appeal to center right voters.
Sure, I wish we had a left wing candidate or a left wing party. But you can't vote in the election you want, you vote in the election you've got.
I think you're meeting him well more than half way in your interpretation. He didn't condemn making racist jokes, he just acknowledged that people don't like them anymore. That's just not "he thought about it and came around".
"You don’t make the gate, you’re out of the game. The game is where is the gate and how do I make the gate to get down the hill."
He's explicitly looking at this as a necessity of his profession, not a change of heart.
I don't think he's doubling down. Just officially taking back his comments with a bunch of meaningless apology waffle that makes it clear this is not a change of heart, only a change in his official position.
I'm glad that he felt he had to officially change his position, but I think it's incorrect to frame this as "he thought about it and came around".
Your quote is just as clear about that as mine. They both have the official position stated clearly: "I said that the ‘extreme left’ has suppressed the art of comedy... It’s not true.", "I don’t think, as I said, the ‘extreme left’ has done anything to inhibit the art of comedy.”
But the remaining apology waffle makes no sense:
"You can’t say certain words about groups. So what? The accuracy of your observation has to be 100 times finer than that just to be a comedian"
What does it mean that comedians have to be 100 times more accurate than a racial slur?
"things that I use to say that [I can’t because] people are always moving [the gate]? Yes, but that’s the biggest and easiest target"
Target for what? By whom? This sentence still implies that he wants to make the jokes that he used to but can't anymore.
sounds to me like he thought about it and came around
That's not what it sounds like to me. I think a slightly different kind of absolute nonsense just started coming out of his face:
“I said that the ‘extreme left’ has suppressed the art of comedy... It’s not true. If you’re a champion skier, you can put the gates anywhere you want on the mountain and you’re going to make the gate. That’s comedy. Whatever the culture is, we make the gate. You don’t make the gate, you’re out of the game. The game is where is the gate and how do I make the gate to get down the hill.”
Even you generously interpret that as coherent thought, he's still saying that the left changed comedy and you can't make same jokes anymore. No awareness that risky and 'offensive' comedy is fine and everywhere, no awareness that there's a difference between offensive comedy and racism on a stage, no awareness of the social context of his comments amidst the rise of fascism.
He just repeated his comments, but less coherently and with the strongly negative words taken out.
There aren't a lot of good data about this, but that's one of the more detailed that I've found from googling and seen referenced in a lot of articles and papers. It seems to have held up to some right wing scrutiny as well. I'm not an expert, just an interested nerd.
Figure 3 gives ~900 arrests per 100,000 people as the crime rate for official-channels migrants. Close to 1%.
Undocumented immigrants come in at ~half that.
Presidential arrest rate is 1 per 46, close to 2%.
From my reading there are some legitimate reasons to think the undocumented crime rate may be higher, but also that crime by immigrants may be even lower.
Undocumented people report crimes against themselves at a much lower rate. Because you're more likely to be a target of crime by a member of your own group, this probably means crimes by undocumented people are more likely to target undocumented people and go under-reported.
But the crime rate is judged by arrests, so if Texas law enforcement shows more willingness to arrest migrants than citizens - which seems v. likely to me - then we'd expect these numbers to over-estimate crimes by migrants.
That's a 0 point comment on ask historians, from 11 years ago, with no sources listed, no details and little explanation. The follow-up comments have a little more info but only from 1870, and even then it's only talking about land not wealth. Also the only source linked is a NY Review of Books article that 404s.
I think it's fairly safe to assume that wealth inequality was lower before industrialization. That really supercharges the power of capital, encouraging and rewarding larger and larger accumulations of capital. Before that it's also much harder to get reliable data.
Aristotle in the politics mentions a plan to cap wealth inequality at 1:5. Once you have more than 5 times the poorest citizen, your wealth is redistributed. He thinks it too radical, but could you imagine anyone talking about capping CEO pay at 5 times the janitor? That's unthinkable to us.
If humans stopped trying something just because it's never ever worked, we wouldn't have to worry about republican governments getting elected.