• someguy3@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    …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.

    Haven’t finished yet but that looks like the setup and knockdown.

    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • someguy3@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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”.

        • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • Zippy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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?

      • Zanz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Clerks don’t talk about justices that are serving or about the court while the clerk is serving.

  • snarf@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • DharkStare@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Neato@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Knusper@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          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…

          • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
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            1 year ago

            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)

            • salton@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              At the time of these religions being formed the Middle East was being rapidly urbanized and deforested and had desertification issues as a result. Pigs seek shade in hot days and water but if given no other option they will follow in just mud and their own filth. Clearly many other cultures didn’t run in to these problems like in China pigs were held in good regard for helping to clean streets in ancient Chinese cities.

        • chinpokomon@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • homura1650@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And yet Jewish law considers birds to be meat despite having a completely different category for sky animal.

    • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • squiblet@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • DharkStare@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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 confirm that chicken wasn’t meat.

        I’m not sure where this idea that meat = beef but it’s very prevalent.

        • kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • Sodis@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • chinpokomon@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

            • squiblet@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              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

    • thisorthatorwhatever@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    Chicken of the sea™! Is it Chicken or tuna!?

    If you remember, you remember :P

  • MxM111@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • NegativeNull@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • chinpokomon@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • 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.

      • MxM111@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.