PugJesus

FlyingSquid has a tendency to threaten moderator action in response to arguments they're heavily involved in, which often comes off as a last-ditch effort to 'win'.

ptb

Explanation: The mad Emperor Caligula once ordered a Roman army to stab the waves in order to assault the sea, making war on the Roman god of water, Neptune, and collecting seashells as booty. Some suggest this was done as a way to punish and humiliate the army for some perceived offense or cowardice - but really, however you slice it, it's not a good look for Caligula.

"only God may judge us"

It's okay, as an atheist, I only recognize the moral authority of humankind, so judge away.

More seriously speaking, PTB. It would be one thing if the justification was "We REALLY do not want any legal trouble and we are just not equipped to take on any challenges, so we're playing it safe", but "i consider human life sacred"? They can fuck off.

Must be a Tuesday.

No worries! Always good to combat urban legends, in any case!

Lobsters were so abundant in the early days—residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found they washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles—that people thought of them as trash food. It was fit only for the poor and served to servants or prisoners. In 1622, the governor of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, was embarrassed to admit to newly arrived colonists that the only food they “could presente their friends with was a lobster … without bread or anyhting else but a cupp of fair water” (original spelling preserved). Later, rumor has it, some in Massachusetts revolted and the colony was forced to sign contracts promising that indentured servants wouldn’t be fed lobster more than three times a week.

“Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation,” wrote John J. Rowan in 1876. Lobster was an unfamiliar, vaguely disgusting bottom feeding ocean dweller that sort of did (and does) resemble an insect, its distant relative. The very word comes from the Old English loppe, which means spider. People did eat lobster, certainly, but not happily and not, usually, openly. Through the 1940s, for instance, American customers could buy lobster meat in cans (like spam or tuna), and it was a fairly low-priced can at that. In the 19th century, when consumers could buy Boston baked beans for 53 cents a pound, canned lobster sold for just 11 cents a pound. People fed lobster to their cats.

https://psmag.com/economics/how-lobster-got-fancy-59440/

The urban myth overwhelmingly seems to be that prisoners were primarily fed lobster, and a recurring unsubstantiated story of servants refusing to eat it several times a week. Not in contestation is that it was a lower-class food, that it was cheap, or that prisoners in the period certainly were fed lobster oftentimes precisely because it was cheap.

History doesn't repeat, but it certainly can rhyme...

Just doing my best to spread a little trivia on the fediverse! 🙏~~and feel like my college years weren't wasted~~

Dunno, I've seen many more sources in support of the general thrust of the idea (if not necessarily the details that article claims to refute, like it being the primary food for prisoners)

https://www.history.com/news/a-taste-of-lobster-history

https://thekitchenknowhow.com/did-lobster-used-to-be-prison-food/

lmao

Explanation: The Roman pantheon is often equated to the Greek pantheon, to the point of being accused of stealing their gods wholesale from the Greeks. The reality is more nuanced, but the Roman practice of interpretatio (also stolen from the Greeks), seeing all the pantheons of the world as fundamentally the same forces worshipped under different names, and the practice of Romans literally stealing gods from their enemies, muddies the waters a bit.