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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Fish used to be poor people’s food. It was plentiful around the sea, but it kept for just a few hours without modern refrigeration, so you couldn’t really transport it to the main city market and sell it. It didn’t give you much food security or much money, and it wasn’t as luxurious as meat, which was the food of choice for the higher classes.

    The only fish that was eaten by the higher classes were the ones that could be preserved by salting, drying or smoking, and they were eaten mainly during lent, as a “lean” alternative to meat. It was mostly viewed as a sacrifice. During the late Middle Ages and early modern era, the herring trade started to really flourish, with Holland being a major exporter of herrings, while the Nordic countries like Norway and Sweden exported lots of salted cod and Stockfish (dried cod).

    So I’m sure it was at a moment where eating fish was seen as a humiliation, rather than a treat, like it is today. In North America lobster was considered as very poor food, cockroaches of the ocean, fed to those who couldn’t afford anything else or to prisoners. Sometimes they were even used as fertilizer for the fields.


  • Maybe…

    What I don’t understand is how they can be on an island, surrounded by some of the best fish in the world (including the fantastic Scottish salmon) and the only piece of fish you can find in the whole country is freaking cod with four layers of batter applied to it and fried until the only flavor you can perceive is that of mediocre burnt oil.

    They make good meat dishes (roasts, meat pies), but then they pair them with the most uninspiring sides… The UK cuisine has a few good things, and they have good ingredients, but more often than not they cook them in boring ways and stop there, calling it “good enough”






  • the Tibetans govern themselves within a system similar to that under the Qing

    The King dynasty, also known as the Qing Empire, a literal theocratic empire whose emperor had a mandate from heaven.

    Btw, these excuses of being “just a protectorate”, “for their own good”, “to protect them” etc are very common excuses for imperialists to enforce their own will. Other common excuses are “historical reasons”, “ethnic reasons” or “national security”.

    Conquest is conquest, subjugation is subjugation. If it’s ok for me, but not for thee, then you are a hypocrite.

    Tibet is a Chinese imperial holding because they took away their right for self determination.



  • Also because Russia is now a semi-fascist far right state, as much as the US, if not worse. No idea how it happened that both self proclaimed communists and far right governments will fight and die for Putin.

    Maybe the extremists are not those who support human rights, but those who support authoritarianism, from both sides of the spectrum.


  • It only took a century and the death of the supreme leader.

    The reality is that communist countries have historically been very conservative in their social policies, and most of them are still today. Even former communist countries are, generally speaking, more conservative as a whole than their more democratic neighbors.