The Catholic church classified beavers as fish for a while so they could be eaten on Fridays. They may not be experts on taxonomy.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Education is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing to not put them on a fruit salad.
Perspective is knowing that botanists and dieticians can have different definitions for what fruit is.
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I'm gonna use my food wisdom to devise a tomato fruit salad just to spite this comment.
A tomato fruit salad is a salsa
Unless you simmer it with garlic, herbs, and red wine. Then it's gravy.
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While this has become a popular saying the more interesting portion I found is that science tends to taxonomize by similarity, form and behaviour in isolation. Culture tends to taxonomize by useage and by weight of historical value bias.
Both are valid because their aims are to do entirely different things. One is to make the study of something more efficient and the other is to inform it's everyday instance of use.
However I find it very unnerving when a judge cares only for cultural precedent and not other ethical systems of determining what is just.
Modern taxonomy is based on ancestory. Similarity of form and behavior are ways of assessing ancestory, but they are no longer the basis of the taxonomy itself.
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Capybara too.
Who dare eat a my precious giant judgy gerbils?
Catholics can only eat the beaver on Fridays? Why would anyone be Catholic?
No no no, they can eat beaver all week long, they just can't eat anything BUT beaver on Fridays. Scholars maintain that this is the origin of the phrase "Thank God it's Friday". I hope you were not deterred from becoming Catholic due to this misunderstanding.
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...Chief Justice Roberts’ oft-cited remark that the job of a Supreme Court justice is to “call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
The concept of identity-protective cognition helps explain Justice Scalia’s reflexive response to the question of whether fish is meat. Rather than dispassionately considering arguments rooted in biology and social practice, he jumped immediately to his group identity as a practicing Catholic. That identity led him to a clear answer that reflected his group’s moral values and shared commitments: Fish is not meat.
That's the setup and knockdown.
Justice Scalia
Scalia has been dead for 7 years.
All the current shit going on with the SC, and they pick this to write about?
It's not about Scalia, it's explaining the concept of justices making rulings based on their own identity and beliefs instead of facts and logic. To, you know, explain "All the current shit going on with the SC".
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Fish may or may not be meat, but bumblebees are classified as fish under California law.
Yep it’s to better protect them as endangered species.
Yeah but its still stupid that they had to do that to get protection.
"You ain't a fish, sorry can't protect you"
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See kids, this is why composition is better than inheritance.
when asked whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposing party are “not just worse for politics—they are downright evil,” 42 percent of both Republicans and Democrats responded “yes.”
Yikes, that’s a terrifying mentality for 42 percent of people to have, that’s downright ruinous to any attempts to salvage the democratic system.
True, 42% of the population thinking that way seems scary, but half of them are right.
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Maybe they should stop having rallies where the crowd spontaneously bursts into chants about how I should be murdered. You know, meet me halfway and stop doing blatantly evil shit.
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I get the need to have a distinction between fish flesh and other meats such as beef, pork, and chicken, but using the same logic as in this article, I've always thought of fish as part of the general "meat" category. It confuses me how Catholics do the "no meat, yes fish" thing. Maybe there's some etymological explanation for why our current-day definition of meat doesn't explicitly have this distinction (assuming it ever did), but if there is, that context seems to have been lost long ago. For some reason, many people now just reflexively believe that fish is not meat -- even non-Catholics.
It has to do with old abstinence laws which stated that meat comes from "land animals" and classified fish as a separate category of creature.
And Kosher laws are absolute insane. Fish must have scales but can't be bottom feeders. Land animals have to have specific types of hooves. Can't mix types of fabric...and other silly stuff that might have had a basis in logic at some point but has been lost.
Yeah, as I understand, these were attempts at guidelines for avoiding diseases, because e.g. pork goes bad very quickly.
But we didn't properly figure out how diseases spread until well past the Middle Ages, so that's why they seem to so random...
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Fish is the exception because one of the miracles Jesus performed was to fed a whole mass of people with only 7 loaves of bread, small fish, and turning water into wine. Catholics sort of re-create this in weekly mass and the Pope lets Catholics eat fish during lent. It's just supposed to be symbolic. But religion always forgets what is symbolic and what is reality.
We are not a very reflexive species.
Pulling out millions of tons of fish from the Oceans is not sustainable. People don't care. If they don't see it, they don't even think about it.
We willfully blind ourselves in any way we can.
When I was a vegetarian I ran into people who thought meat was only beef… so they thought being a vegetarian meant sure, you’d eat pork, lamb, fish, chicken, turkey, just not beef. Kid of a weird thing to think, since for one a chicken is clearly not a vegetable, but also why even bother to make that distinction? “I have a special diet where I don’t eat beef!” and that sounds drastic to them. Some people’s minds are blown by the idea of no animal parts at all, like “What do you eat?”
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And just in case anyone missed the point of his character: he's almost always wrong and an aggressive contrarian by nature. It's celebrated when he's right for that reason specifically.
Chicken of the sea™! Is it Chicken or tuna!?
If you remember, you remember :P
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The Pope has ALWAYS been wrong.
We’re not sure what this all means for the fish sticks from deep in the freezer aisle, but from a definitions-based perspective, a fish out of water sure appears to be meat.
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