[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

We had known that birds are descended from dinosaurs well before the general public and the majority of paleontologists starting saying "birds are dinosaurs". So simply saying that "we discovered that birds are descended from dinosaurs" is not sufficient to answering your question.

Traditional taxonomy allows for paraphyletic groups, meaning that not all of the descendants of the most recent common ancestor of the group are required to be in that group. So in this case, even though it was known that birds are descended from dinosaurs, they continued to be considered two separate groups, with dinosaurs being a paraphyletic group. Birds were known first, dinosaurs were later discovered and were considered a distinct group, then the link between the the two groups was discovered, but how they were grouped did not immediately change. That birds were not considered to be dinosaurs was a rather arbitrary effect based on how they were discovered and not on any scientific basis.

One book on dinosaurs from 1997 wrote:

In a phylogenetic sense, dinosaurs are not extinct, for birds are theropodan descendants (but see Feduccia 1996 for a dissenting view). For the purposes of this review, however, the term dinosaur connotes what cladists might term "non-avian dinosauromorph." We thus (unrepentantly) use a paraphyletic rather than monophyletic (holophyletic) "Dinosauria." Whatever the scientific merits of the latter, the former is widely understood, and avoids such circumlocutions as "non-avian dinosaur."

A later edition of that same book from 2012 not only uses "non-avian dinosaur" extensively, it also has an entire section on birds.

So why the change? There is a trend in science to prefer cladistic classification, which requires every group to be a clade, meaning that all descendants of the most recent common ancestor of a group are in the group. This effectively means that paraphyletic grouping is being abandoned. So with cladistic taxonomy birds are dinosaurs.

There are other traditionally paraphyletic groups that are still in the process of changing. For example traditionally monkeys were a paraphyletic group, but any clade that includes all monkeys necessarily includes the apes, so in cladistics apes are monkeys. Though, you will still hear many people say 'apes are not monkeys'. Fish was also a paraphyletic group, which included all vertebrates except tetrapods, but of course in cladistics, tetrapods are fish.

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

Shinto should probably be further down considering the crimes committed by Japan when Shinto was the state religion.

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

The new deaths bring the total reported so far by various countries to 577, according to an AFP tally.

The do cite their source.

At least 60 Jordanians also died, the diplomats said, up from an official tally of 41 given earlier on Tuesday by the Jordanian government.

Do you think it's impossible that 41 people could die, reported on, and then more people die?

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

That's not the ingredient list, the list is to the left, and that's not a version number, it's a reference to a food category system.

12.6.1 Emulsified sauces and dips
Sauces, gravies, dressings based and dips, at least in part, on a fat- or oil-in water emulsion such as salad dressing (e.g. French, Italian, Greek, ranch style), fat-based sandwich spreads (e.g. mayonnaise with mustard), salad cream, and fatty sauces and snack dips (e.g. bacon and cheddar dip, onion dip).

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 33 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 50 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

This is the foundation of the current Republican party. There is nothing redeemable.

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

The pope never intended to express himself in homophobic terms, it's just that he is so homophobic that it slips out sometimes.

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

I suspect that they knew it they would have to correct it, but did it anyway because the lie would be spread more than the correction.

[-] wanderer@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

They are probably influenced by Christian Zionists or are Christian Zionists themselves. Their support for Israel is not to support Israelis or Jews, but to use them as pawns to bring about the second coming of Jesus and the Apocalypse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

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On the World Day Against Witch Hunts, Dr Alejandro Sanchez questions why the Church of England is still willing to 'exorcise' children in 2023.

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wanderer

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