The Catholic church classified beavers as fish for a while so they could be eaten on Fridays. They may not be experts on taxonomy.
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.
Why can’t they just get their shit together?
Too much fiber
I would suggest not enough fiber
Moral fiber and dietary fiber are different. Lol
Never thought about things that way, interesting
Agreed.
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.
You act as though there is only one correct taxonomy. Scientific taxonomy is determined that way - not cultural taxonomy. Different cultures and language groups taxonomize things in their own way. Like if you are speaking a native Botswanan language things are not divided by plant or animal it is sorted into
- Things you can eat
- Things that can harm you
- “Useless” things
Algonquin language distinguishes animate and inanimate but while plants are generally inanimate somethings like feathers are considered animate.
No one is suggesting these taxonomies should be how we categorize things scientifically but at the same time they are not “wrong”. Being able to accept multiple taxonomy systems as functionally correct is nessisary for being able to make useful judgements. In English a blackberry is culturally a berry. We harvest and use it as a berry and have named it thusly while botanically it is an aggregate drupe. Something that helps us interpret it as something closer to a stone fruit. Hence calling it a berry is not wrong. Just not fulfilling the requirements of every available taxonomy. People who are obsessed with being “correct” often latch onto scientific taxonomy but there are risks to creating hierarchy where there is only one right answer that flattens nuanced issues.
Is a fish meat? The level of adhereance to a single answer reveals the individual cultural bias of the individual. Respecting more than one answer means you can better empathize and understand where that person comes from.
You said “science tends to taxonomize by similarity, form and behaviour in isolation”. I am saying that modern science does not form taxonomies on those bases.
If you are talking about the branch of scientific taxonomy that deals with biology only then yes.
But biology is not the only branch of science that sorts things into categories. Chemistry, Psychology, Geology etc. all have different taxonomic principles based in similarity, behaviour and formation. It is fair I probably should have mentioned ancestry in the case of biology as it’s usually the first (and often only) thing people think of when they hear the word “taxonomy” but I admit glossed it over.
Probably since the taxonomy originally being referred to was botony, specifically what counts as a fruit…which is based out of formation and structure of a plant’s ovary. Not ancestry.
Noted!
BEAVER IS FISH, EVERYONE! LET’S EAT EM DURING LENT
I hear rhe tails are actually quite tasty cooked up right.
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.
How about a watermelon gazpacho soup? That would be a fruit soup, which when served cold (as it should be) is effectively a blended fruit salad smoothie
Salsa is basically fruit salad.
https://www.stonehollowfarmstead.com/products/tomato-vanilla-jam
I’ve had a similar one. It’s decent with cheese like manchego but it’s strange.
Tomatos are evil though -Source my autistic ass
Just put ketchup on an apple.
Idk though I love salsa, that’s basically a tomato fruit salad
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.
Barnacle Geese too!
They actually thought barnacle geese came from barnacles in the middle ages. Because apparently no one ever bothered to just watch things back then.
Most beavers I’ve tried taste fishy…
…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”.
Bribery, corrruption, and buying court decisions are the issues of today.
Personal identity and beliefs don’t factor in when its already bought and paid for.
Points to Roe v wade, EPA “major decisions”, etc.
Bought and paid for.
These SC justices are employees of the people that bribe them.
Bribery in many forms exists, but they are making decisions based on their identity. Something tells me you didn’t read the article, you should.
Scallia may have, but it got him killed in the end.
If they have to go back 7 years to being up an example, that would indicate it is very rare they use only their identity to determine rulings.
I don’t doubt they often ignore science but this article indicates that is not the case. Is there not something recent they could refer to?
Clerks don’t talk about justices that are serving or about the court while the clerk is serving.
If you think this is about justice Scalia you didn’t read it
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According to Catholics, yes.
Maybe they got confused by the sea cucumbers…
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”
Can we now claim that it’s a type of fish that are the world’s best pollinators?
I see it as a clever way to circumvent the dumb bureaucracy BS that might otherwise inhibit their ability to protect them.
They could try to rework the system in place, and spend however many months or years working through that process, or they could slap some duct tape on there in the meantime AND look to rework the system.
Yeah its clever but it’s still a dumb thing to have to do. Got to praise the legal team representing the
beefish public at large. The system is broken i think its putting duct tape on duck tape at this point.
Wild
And bumblebees in particular are in a bad spot, for a variety of mysterious reasons.
Why you gotta do my bro-bees like that? :'-(
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.
Part of the problem, eh?
Both sides, eh?
The Democrats never tried to overthrow our democracy, or send tens of thousands of our troops to false wars to make rich people a little bit richer.
That last thing they absolutely did.
Never* denied people access to a healthcare based on their ethnicity or gender, never* banned books, never* tried to make it illegal to express onself, the list goes on.
*after Southern StrategyI think you’ll find that Kennedy is the one that really ramped up the Vietnam war/conflict. He even knew the intervention would fail, but committed more troops anyway. Many southern democrats did indeed try to stop democracy also, during reconstruction. I realize that both of these things are decades or more old, but this goes back to the overconfidence in our group that the article was just describing.
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.
Maybe it shouldn’t be salvaged. It’s not as if people have the power under “representative democracy.”
Power is held by those who can afford to fund campaign propaganda, not by voters.
We can do better. Maybe try a more direct democracy with recall voted and bounded mandates.
IMO, Trudeau promising election reform then backsliding is a great example. There should have been a consequence.
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…
It also didn’t help that in ancient times pigs apparently had a propensity for digging up graves and eating corpses… (Not 100% sure if this is true, but my high school teacher was Jewish and mentioned that as one of the main reasons for why pork isn’t kosher)
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I think the logical basis was most likely to isolate groups from other tribes. We don’t live that group over there. That group over there is trading pigs. It is a new rule, no the law, that you can’t eat pig. No more trade. A generation or two pass and the logical basis is lost to time.
And yet Jewish law considers birds to be meat despite having a completely different category for sky animal.
There’s a historical reason for this. The main restriction on eating meat (beyond what animal you can eat and various other “prep” rules) is that you can’t eat milk and meat. Specifically, you can’t boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk. This was seen by ancient Jews as an abomination and morally bad.
However, you can’t always tell what animal the milk and meat came from. If I have a steak and a jug of milk, do I know that the steak doesn’t come from the child of one of the cows whose milk is in the jug? I don’t know. Chances are it isn’t, but better safe than sorry so all meat can’t be mixed with milk. (Thus, no cheeseburgers.)
But what about chicken? Obviously, chickens don’t produce milk so it’s impossible to cook chicken in it’s mother’s milk. Technically speaking, chicken parmesan should be fine. Except, at some point in history, rabbis got worried that people would eat beef thinking it was chicken and would accidentally mix milk and meat. (I guess people were real idiots back then because I’ve never mistaken beef and chicken.) Therefore, all bird meat was restricted and forbidden from mixing with dairy products.
Meanwhile, fish was never, apparently, mistaken for beef and do remained restriction free when it came to dairy. I can toss a big slice of cheese atop my fish sandwich with no “milk and meat” kosher concerns. (Well, unless we get into rennet, but that’s a different topic.)
Unfortunately, with Judaism, there isn’t a central authority that can say “X rule is outdated and doesn’t need to be followed anymore.” It’s a very decentralized religion and this means that there’s a lot of momentum to the rules. Some changes can take effect in some Jewish communities, but getting widespread change across the entire religion is difficult.
Are dogs meat?
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?”
I have several Indian co-workers who are “vegetarian” but eat chicken which I have been told “is not meat”.
Also, my mom worked for the church and a large number of people would call up every Lent to ask if chicken was meat…
I’m not sure where this idea that meat = beef comes from but it’s very prevalent.
Because if they believed “meat” was more than beef, then they wouldn’t be able to eat pork or chicken during lent.
People let religion bind them, then try to wiggle out of it whenever they can.
I’m mostly vegetarian because I keep kosher and kosher meat is expensive. It’s cheaper to be vegetarian than a meat eater if you’re kosher.
That being said, note that I said “mostly vegetarian.” For complex reasons (which I’ll get into if anyone is interested), fish isn’t considered meat when it comes to kosher laws. So beyond some rules like “don’t eat shellfish,” I can eat fish like salmon or tuna just fine. (In fact, I just made salmon for dinner.)
If I was asked “is fish meat,” I’d say that it was. I wouldn’t default to the religious description except to explain why I’d eat tuna with cheese but not a beef cheeseburger.
A person who doesn’t eat most meat but will eat fish is a pescatarian.
And then they forget, that just a hundred years ago huge parts of the population were more or less vegetarians, because meat was sparse and expensive. In Germany we had the phrase of the “Sonntagsbraten”, so basically a meat dish on Sunday, because it was a special occasion to eat meat at least one time a week.
The cow is sacred in India, so they don’t eat beef. Most of the Western world won’t eat dog or cat, but that isn’t a universal thing and while probably not as common today, it doesn’t mean that it’s an unheard of practice. Until recent times, people would eat what was available which didn’t have alternative value.
Some people do legitimately have to cut out all red meat for health purposes, but other than that, this sounds crazy
I’ve heard that the alpha-gal tick borne meat allergy is on the rise, which is pretty wild.
Whoa, never heard of that. Gonna go look it up.
It’s pretty crazy… It’s a disease that you can get by being bit by a tick, like Lyme disease, but it gives you a severe allergy to red meat. I am not sure of the spiritual implications! Ha ha
Also pescatarians.
quoth nirvana: it’s ok to eat fish cause they don’t have any feelings
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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
SNL, Jessica Simpson?
The Pope has ALWAYS been wrong.
I really enjoyed reading this article, thank you for sharing it :)
I thought it was a great read as well. I’m glad you enjoyed!
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.
Okay but is pizza a vegetable?
Is cereal with milk soup?
Is coffee bean soup?
It’s clearly tea, just like beer
It’s bean broth. And a vanilla, soy, latte is 3 bean soup.
Fish is not meat. It is an animal. And it has muscles. The mammal muscle is traditionally called meat. Science (other than dietary) do not use word “meat” for anything. Just muscle. And dietitians use the same definition of the word meat as traditional. So, saying that “scientifically” meat is just flesh on bones is total baloney, scientifically speaking.
Chicken isn’t meat. Got it.
Checkmate vegans!
Herbivore meat is plant based.
You joke, but I have met people with this belief.
And dietitians use the same definition
I’ll be sure to tell my wife, who actually is a dietitian, that she’s wrong and some person on the internet is correcting her.
She uses meat to describe fish? Really?
Well you didn’t read the article and/or missed the point.
“Of course fish isn’t meat!” he boomed. “Why else do I—and millions of Catholics—eat fish on Fridays during Lent?”
“But from a scientific perspective,” I responded, “isn’t meat just the flesh of an animal? And aren’t fish animals?”
Scalia scoffed. “You’re telling me the Pope has been wrong for centuries?”
Scalia used the bible and the pope as evidence against science on a scientific question. He could have said what you did, and it’d have been accepted. But he espoused stupid reasoning that backed up his life choices. Fuck him and everyone like him that abuse their power without thought.
removed my reduction because - though i disagree with almost 100% of your statement - you are contributing to the conversation. you didn’t say some useless garbage like “this” or “wrong” or “my axe” some such nonsense. you expressed your side of the discussion.
i still disagree. there are traditions that taxonomize bats as birds and whales as fish. these archaic categories do not help us understand the world around us anymore than the ptolemaic geocentric model of the universe. was around a long time. doesn’t make it accurate. but i do agree that meat isn’t exclusively flesh on bones.
“eat the flesh of the olive and discard the stone”
“dry fruits were present before fleshy fruits and fleshy fruits diverged from them”traditionally meat revolved around the sun and the flesh of fish was the center of the universe.
or you know whatever man.
Again, except in dietary, meat is not used in science at all. So, your point about wrong taxidermy is not quite valid. In everyday use this word does not mean fish. It just does not. Go to the store and look at meat and fish product departments/sections. Also, it does make sense to separate them from dietary point of view - there are also several important distinctions between fish and other types of meat, especially in terms of their nutritional profiles and potential health benefits.
If you really want to get into traditionally, meat used to also refer to vegetables, a.k.a. green meat. The word meat comes from the Old English word mete, which referred to food in general. More recently, green meat might have referred to animals fed exclusively on vegetables or plant based feed. And today, with the existence of veg-burgers or Beyond and Impossible meats, those are also sometimes called green meat.
So take me back a few centuries, and everything you eat would be mete, including that fish.
Your argument reminded me of the mammoth meatball from earlier this year :-)
