Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions that originated among Semitic people. Hatred of the practitioners of any can be considered antisemitism.

This is a very weird rule. Scientology originated among US Americans. Does that I can refer to prejudice against Scientologists as “anti-Americanism”? It seems to me like you believe that present-day Jews are not actually descended from the ancient Israelites, but you don’t want to go so far as to say that antisemitism can’t refer to hatred of Jews. So you chose a strange rule that would even count hatred of Japanese Catholics as antisemitism. If you think that Arabs are Semites and Jews aren’t you, can just say that.

However you want to define it, it is not exclusive to the practitioners of Judaism.

It’s indeed not exclusive to practitioners of Judaism, as some non-practicing Jews and gentiles mistaken for Jews also experience antisemitism.

The original definition that limited it to hatred of Jews is wrong and misleading.

It’s wrong and misleading because the term itself comes from 19th-century racial pseudoscience mixed with biblical literalism. It persists only out of its inertia as the primary term used to mean “hatred of Jews”. You can argue that the term should be retired for being inaccurate, but you can’t argue for it to be redefined to something else that’s just as inaccurate.

This would be like if someone made up the word “anti-Herculism” to mean hatred of Greeks, thinking that Greeks were descended from Hercules. Then after 100 years of people using the term that way, someone came and said that such usage was misleading and “anti-Herculism” should also include hatred of Italians. After all, Hercules was also a figure in the mythology of ancient Italy and because Italians and Greeks share a lot of cultural and genetic traits. Those things may be true, but they’re beside the point. There is no correct technical meaning of “anti-Herculism” because Hercules wasn’t real.

Judaism is passed maternally.

Jewish identity itself is passed matrilinially, but specific lineages are passed patrilineally: for example, status as a kohen or Levite. If “Semite” were a category in Jewish law, then it would be passed patrilineally too.

This is false. Arabs are hated for being Arab regardless of their religion or skin colour.

That link has exactly zero examples of hatred of Arabs on the basis of speaking a Semitic language. There are perhaps some people who hate Arabs for reasons unrelated to race, religion, or politics – but to say that someone’s prejudice is against “Semites,” defined by the language family, would require that they be prejudiced against speakers of Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic, but not against speakers of Farsi or Turkish. That is not a real thing.

Ashkenazi Jews aren’t the only people in Europe with Levantine ancestry.

Your link said “Past research found that 50 percent to 80 percent of DNA from the Ashkenazi Y chromosome, which is used to trace the male lineage, originated in the Near East.” What are some other European groups that are majority-Levantine in the male line?

If you are going to claim that some Levantine ancestry 2000-3000 years ago means you are a Jew,

I did not claim that. I was responding to your statement that “European Jews can claim it [the term antisemitic] despite having no Semitic ancestry.” If you believe that there is such a thing as “Semitic” ancestry, then European Jews have it, with the exception of first-generation converts.

then there’s a whole lot more Jews than just those who practice Judaism.

It’s true that many Jews don’t practice Judaism. In my opinion, someone is a Jew if they identify as a Jew and if they either converted or have a Jewish parent. It is not just a matter of religion nor just of ancestry.

Including everyone in Palestine more or less.

Yes, Palestinians are descended from the ancient Israelites.

Because some European did something bad, Arabs have to suffer. This does repeat itself.

There are many examples of this, but being asked not redefine a word that has always referred to hatred of Jews is not one of them.

According to your link, Ashkenazi Jews are descended mostly from Europeans on the maternal line but from Near-Eastern, “Semitic” people on the paternal line. The term “Semitic” comes from the biblical Shem, the son of Noah. So if Semitic ancestry were a real thing, then it would refer to the male line, and Ashkenazi Jews would have it.

Past research found that 50 percent to 80 percent of DNA from the Ashkenazi Y chromosome, which is used to trace the male lineage, originated in the Near East, Richards said. […] Richards and his colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is contained in the cytoplasm of the egg and passed down only from the mother […] All told, more than 80 percent of the maternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews could be traced to Europe, with only a few lineages originating in the Near East. […] “The simplest explanation was that it was mainly women who converted and they married with men who’d come from the Near East,” Richards told LiveScience.

But of course, Shem wasn’t a real person and there is no such thing as “Semitic” ancestry. The term antisemitic is a fossil left by 19th-century European racial pseudoscience weaponized against Jews living in European countries. There’s no reason to apply it to a different group of people unless you actually believe that certain races were descended from the biblical Shem.

The same is true of the Semitic language family. The Afro-Asiatic language family used to be called “Hamito-Semitic” from the belief that Africans descended from the biblical Ham and Asians from Shem. Linguists have updated that name, but for now no term has dislodged “Semitic” as the name of a language family.

If you want to claim that the term “antisemitic” refers to the Semitic language family, then it’s a prejudice that doesn’t exist. There’s no one on Earth who hates Arabs and Jews because they speak Semitic languages but is fine with Iranians and Turks. Hatred of both Arabs and Jews is almost always based on race, religion, and politics, not technical classifications of language families. Yes, Elon Musk called Arabic “the language of the enemy,” but there’s no doubt that he’d say the same thing about Farsi, or any other language spoken by non-white Muslims.

And finally, while Jews in the diaspora stopped speaking Hebrew and Aramaic as vernacular languages, they have always prayed in Hebrew and taken Hebrew religious names. European Jewish vernacular languages like Yiddish and Ladino carry Hebrew and Aramaic influences. And of course, many Jews historically spoke Judeo-Arabic, which is obviously a Semitic language.

Zionists and Elon Musk are racist, Islamophobic imperialists. There are plenty of terms to criticize them that aren’t confusing and pseudoscientific.

The best app is whatever you use to consume media in the target language.

The only way to acquire a language is to expose yourself to it in a natural context. You can’t acquire a language just by studying with flashcards or grammar exercises or whatever – any app that offers enhanced versions of those will at best be a minor supplement to actually using the language.

Like the one on Better Call Saul?

sudo apt install gnome

The more popular something is, the less effective it is to criticize it harshly. For example, I think eating meat regularly is, by the amount of suffering it causes, worse than murdering one human. But if I went around calling everyone who ate meat “murderers” and refused to befriend or do business with them, it would just make people think I was crazy and not want to listen to me, because eating meat is seen as normal. On the other hand, when something is seen as abnormal, like being openly racist, shunning people who do it makes others less likely to do it too.

Well, men are also most of the victims of serious crime and do most of all dangerous jobs. These are all consequences of taking more risks.

That’s true. I don’t see what it has to do with my argument, though. I’m pretty sure that testosterone increases risk-tolerance, and that’s part of why it correlates with aggression. Are you suggesting that men have elevated risk-tolerance for reasons other than testosterone, and that risk-tolerance is responsible for aggression instead of testosterone? Or are you saying that risk-taking is important so it’s worth keeping men the way they are even if it causes most serious crime?

No one? YES, there are many people thinking about this.

Most people see violent crime as a problem, but few see it as a problem with men. When people discuss crime, I never hear them frame the problem as “there’s something causing men to commit 10 times as much rape and murder as women: what is it and how do we stop it?” Even feminists who talk about male violence generally don’t frame it that way.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that, it takes a fool, because it’s not necessarily true.

No empirical data can lead us to accept something as “necessarily true,” but it stretches credulity to think that castration would reduce aggression in pretty much every kind of male mammal we try it on except humans and further that the most aggressive humans coincidentally have elevated testosterone levels. I don’t think that you actually believe that, since you said:

It may make them less aggressive, but what else would happen?

I specifically listed the other effects I could think of. If you think something else bad might happen, just say what it is. If your objection is that we should be cautious because there might be unexpected effects… well sure, that’s true, but it’s also a general-purpose objection to any suggestion to change anything ever. You can’t really have any interesting opinions if you accept that reasoning.

What about we make society less toxic first, for example?

I’m in favor of that. But I think there’s a limit to how much you can improve society via culture alone. You could probably design a culture where people would be a lot less selfish than they are today, for example. But I don’t think you could get people to never be selfish at all, because some amount of selfishness is part of human nature. I think the same is true for aggression, and that the minimum amount of aggression you could get from people is in large part of function of testosterone levels.

Furthermore, “make society less toxic” is a goal, not a policy. A policy to reduce violence by making society less toxic could be something like teaching children to play cooperative games instead of competitive ones. That would probably have a small effect in a few decades. But I think chemically castrating men would have a bigger effect in a shorter amount of time than just about any other policy you could think of, and those effects would be in addition to anything else you did.

They also won’t ever want sex

This is not true. Historically, “Many castrati lived rather promiscuous lives. Because their unions could produce no embarrassing offspring to explain, women saw them not only as beautiful, ethereal celebrities of the opera stage, but as prime candidates for affairs.”

their penises will never grow to adult size

I bottomed for a trans women with a highly atrophied penis and had a great time. Tbh I don’t know why anyone cares about penis size.

their voices will always sound like that of a little boy.

Their larynx won’t drop, but they won’t sound like little boys. Only some features of adult male voices are caused by biological puberty—there are a lot of other vocal characteristics that distinguish adults from children and men from women. I’ve known trans men who hadn’t gone on testosterone who still had masc-leaning voices. And adult women sound different from little girls even though their voices don’t drop during puberty.

Now, maybe you’re lesbian or asexual or something, and you’re fine with all that, but I imagine some women would not be pleased.

I’m bisexual, and I’d be totally down to date a guy who looked like this. As pointed out above, castrati were highly sought-after by women in the past. Obviously contraceptives negate the appeal of their infertility, but still, they must have been otherwise sexually appealing enough for women to want to sleep with them in the first place. Sure, it would be a loss for those who only like super-manly men, but that seems like an acceptable trade-off to me.

I don’t think we should castrate men against their will, although I would if I weren’t an anarchist. As it is, I think it would be a good social norm for men to take testosterone blockers.

I’m not sure what “men are inherently violent” means. I think that testosterone makes people more aggressive. Adult men with typical levels of testosterone are more likely to be violent than people with lower testosterone levels. Men with very low testosterone levels are not particularly likely to be aggressive. Aggression is not inherent to being a man, but it is caused by a chemical that’s found in larger amounts in men than in women.

I do think we should discourage toxic masculinity, and I do think it’s responsible for some of the difference in aggression in men and women. However, I think that testosterone also plays a major role.

I somehow don’t believe that [you’re an anarchist].

Since everyone seems to have focused on the thing I said I would believe if I weren’t an anarchist (mandatory castration), I guess I should clarify what the anarchist version of this belief is. When I say “most males should be castrated,” I mean it in the same way as “most children should go to school.” I don’t think that parents or any other authority should force children to go to school if they really don’t want to. However, I think it’s good for children to go to school, I would personally encourage them to, and I think it should be a social norm. I feel the same way about men taking T-blockers. If I got to design society, I would make the norm that when boys reach the age where they get the talk about puberty, they would be given T-blockers and told that taking them will make them less likely to want to hurt people. They wouldn’t be forced to take them, but I think many would choose to if it were seen as a normal and safe way to be a man.

I don’t think there’s any conceivable way we could make this a social norm, so this is just a pipe dream of mine. Nevertheless, it’s a good fit for a “really unpopular opinion” thread.

And [rounding up and exiling immigrants] would still be an insane reaction to [immigrants committing 90% of serious crimes] even if it was true, which no self-identified anarchist should support. Rehabilitation must still be the goal of any justice system.

I agree. My point was to show that there is a double standard in how mainstream society treats men committing a lot of crime compared with any other group committing a lot of crime. I was not trying to say that attitudes towards immigrants, etc. committing crime are correct.

There’s a feminist movement. One of the major theses of the feminist movement is the rape and murder overwhelmingly committed by men.

Point taken, although I’d say that only a small proportion of feminists take male violence as seriously as you would expect people to if it were any other group committing almost all crime.

There are wildly more creative and practical ways to go about [preventing violence by men].

That’s true. I don’t think this idea is practical at all, although I don’t think any practical idea would be as effective in preventing violence as this one.

Spicy hot take: we shouldn’t be castrating bulls.

I actually agree. Humans should not use animals for food or labor, so really the only place we should interact with cattle is in zoos, and I think trained professionals should be able to handle uncastrated bulls.

Correlation [between criminal behavior and high testosterone] ≠ causation!

True, but come on. When we remove the source of testosterone in other mammals, they become less aggressive. About half of all humans have high T levels starting in adolescence, and it’s exactly at that age when their crime rates shoot way up. And some of the most violent people in society also have the highest T levels. Do you really think that’s all just a coincidence? Can you think of a another non-tortured explanation for these observations?

The other effect is that men will have their bodily autonomy violated.

Right, I don’t think we should violate people’s bodily autonomy to prevent crime, which is why I think castrating men should be a norm, not a mandate. However, a lot of people are fine with violating people’s bodily autonomy if it stops serious crimes. They want the state to crack down on people putting heroin in their bodies and becoming violent as a result. Well, I don’t see why they logically shouldn’t also want the state to crack down on people having testosterone in their bodies and becoming violent as a result.

But you wrote a really detailed paragraph defending sex-based eugenics. The thing about eugenics is that it never really went away.

I proposed two methods of reproduction in a world where most men were chemically castrated: (1) men would go off T-blockers while trying for a baby, or (2) people would rely on a small number of uncastrated sperm donors. Of those, (1) is not eugenics, but (2) could be, depending on how the donors were selected. Obviously eugenics is not compatible with anarchism, but as you said, there are a lot of people who still believe in eugenics. My argument is that people who think that the state should limit who gets to reproduce to make society safer should also want it to limit the number of people with high testosterone to make society safer.

It is especially irritating to see someone who claims to be a comrade express views like this. It makes me less confident to call myself an anarchist when my views are associated with eugenics. We already have a tremendous amount of ill will generated by “anarcho”-capitalists and “anarcho”-primitivists; we really do not need more bad takes.

This is the type of take I give when people ask for “really unpopular opinions.” It’s not something that I talk about when I’m trying to advocate for anarchism. And I mean… I don’t think you have much to worry about people associating anarchism with this idea. The only person other than me I’ve ever heard expressing an opinion like it was a weird blogger 10 years ago who was definitely not an anarchist.

I’m a trans woman, so I would be castrated under this policy but would have wanted to be anyway.

Most human males should be castrated.

Men commit almost all rape and murder, but no one seems to think this is a problem we need to do anything about. If any other group committed 90% of serious crimes – let’s say immigrants – people would be calling for them to be rounded up and exiled. But when it’s men, that’s just the way things are, nothing to be done about it.

But we know exactly what to do about it when we’re talking about other species. We castrate male cattle because bulls are dangerous and steer aren’t. Violent criminals typically have elevated testosterone levels. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that putting men on testosterone-blockers is going to make them less dangerous.

What will be the other effects?

1. Men will be be weaker—Meh, physical strength is less useful now than it was in the past.
2. They’ll have less hair on their bodies and more on their heads—Awesome.
3. They’ll won’t be able to get hard—That’s what viagra is for.
4. They’ll lose fertility—They can go off blockers while they’re trying to have a child. Or you could just have a small number of uncastrated sperm donors.

I’m an anarchist, so I don’t want to force this on anyone. But if I believed in prisons or police, I would also believe in mandatory castration.