“Is Fish Meat?” One Justice’s Answer Shows Why the Supreme Court Is So Broken
slate.com
slate.com
Further. This article is part of a flood of anti-supreme-court rhetoric that has started in the last couple of years, and I sense sinister political ends behind it.
But sowing distrust in our democratic institutions — be it our election systems, our law enforcement agencies, or the supreme court, is not healthy for democracy. Even though these institutions are indeed flawed.
So when Justice Scalia says: " “Of course fish isn’t meat!” he boomed. “Why else do I—and millions of Catholics—eat fish on Fridays during Lent?” ", he is making a legal argument that there is an established precedent in society that 'meat' and 'fish' are understood as different things.
By the way, two definitions of 'meat' I quickly found on Google:
Oxford Languages: " the flesh of an animal, typically a mammal or bird, as food (the flesh of domestic fowls is sometimes distinguished as poultry ). "
Merriam Webster: " animal tissue considered especially as food / flesh of a mammal as opposed to fowl or fish / flesh of domesticated animals "
So even dictionaries are not that clear-cut that 'animal' should be understood by is pure biological definition and do say that 'meat' is often to be understood as NOT including fish.
Edit: This also illustrates the importance of defining terms in a discussion. A term might have an obvious meaning to me and an equally obvious but different meaning to someone else.
This is the first that I've heard this asserted as a widespread societal thing. That isn't at all my experience in my part of the US. I don't know a single person who would say that fish isn't meat. There are oddball religious stances, but even the Catholics I know don't really consider fish as not being meat.
I'm not saying that nobody at all thinks fish isn't meat, but if you were to assert that publicly, the reaction from the vast majority of people around here would be laughter.
The law exists to bring finality, in a legal sense, to questions with nebulous answers such as this one.
I just don't see how the "is fish meat" question is even a little nebulous, at least in my culture. All but a very tiny percentage of people here, including pescatarians, say it is.
But I'm only talking about the culture I'm a part of. I'm not saying that others thing differently. My only point was that, around my neck of the woods, society does not tend to consider fish as not-meat.
Here in the US, we generally rely on our judicial system (ending at the Supreme Court) to determine these bounds.
> Here in the US, we generally rely on our judicial system (ending at the Supreme Court) to determine these bounds.
The judicial system determines definitions that courts (and therefore regulations) use. Those are very often quite different from the definitions that are used outside of court. (As an example: is pizza a sandwich? The courts say "yes") I'm talking about how people use the language, not courts.
It depends on what you mean by “really consider”. For the religious practice they have, they really consider it not as meat. But that’s a different context than scientific discussions or otherwise.
Words have their meaning based on context. So in the context of Fridays during Lent, Catholics are not eating meat according to their religious instructions. Outside of that context “meat” may be defined in a different way. Meat can also mean the edible part of fruit.
This is what I meant. I think we're on the same page here.
-- Goodfellas
And Henry wasn't even Catholic anymore at this point.
And if they avoid meat on Fridays, they do it for every Friday, all year long.
Yeah this was my gut reaction as well... Why all the hate on the Supreme Court lately?
News you get for free is being paid for by someone / someorg.
I want to know who's agenda is being pushed, and who is paying for these stories and why.
Free news is just junk news (like junk mail) and needs to be ingested with a good measure of memetic resistance.
Poor ruling? Isn't that an opinion?
Unpopular rulings? Which ones are we talking about? Totally subjective. I get that some rulings are unpopular to those paying for the stories... But which rulings, what funding, and why now?
Grift is just a clever/convenient "reason" to justify rhetoric like this. Show me the man and I'll show you the crime, etc.
Which objective criteria you'd like to apply to determine this?
Beyond that its just guesswork. So more data is better. Maybe it's just trendy to crap on democracy, as our culture seems to enjoy crapping on anything that used to be deemed good/noble/just. Bad is good, right is wrong, etc.
Or maybe it's just the old political tactics used by authoritarians... When winning they tend to talk about how "just" and "overdue" the ruling/decision/policy is. When losing they tend to resort to strawmen and character assassination, an Orwellian way of associating decisions they don't like with people of bad character. "Big brother can't be bad" "Oceana can't be good" etc
Personally I don't like all the "crap on democracy" rhetoric that seems to be more and more pervasive. Especially in young people. I've heard it said "Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried".
Popularity belongs to the other two branches of the government.
As the Last Psychiatrist said
"if you're reading it, it's for you".
The older I get the more I see this stuff all around me.
For some reason lately I've been hearing INXS songs everywhere, like 7 or 8 on satellite radio in just a few days. Followed by the same songs in a few bars we frequented. So much so that my GF noticed it as well.
After the 7th or 8th time of pointing out it's another INXS song, my immediate thought was "This can't be coincidence. Who the heck is promoting INXS right now, and why?"
As you said, the message was definitely meant for, and received by, us.
I don't like not knowing why, because in the absence of data the mind will make up narratives to fit the data.
Maybe INXS is being promoted. Maybe I'm just becoming paranoid. Then again, being paranoid doesn't make you wrong.
I guess the point is it's hard to take anything in the media at face value these days.
And it seems to also indicate that Catholics are madmen for following the Pope, who might be wrong about fish. Well, guess what.
This is a linguistic question, and it has origins that date back before Jesus's time and among non-Christian pagans in all sorts of places. Let's look at Europe and Latin.
In Latin, carnem means meat. But it is specifically flesh meat, that is: beef, pork, chicken, etc. It is an umbrella term, and of course there are more specific words, but carnem is a class of meat, and it is associated with the human flesh, and this is why we abstain from this type of meat on Fridays.
Carnem excludes fish. In Roman Catholic discipline, we abstain from eating land animals and birds. Animals that swim in water (some opinions say, cold-blooded) are in the "fish family" as far as we are concerned. Guess what? Alligators are fish. Muskrats, beavers, and capybaras are fish. Call me a madman if you wish. I am just classifying things according to the faith. Try having this conversation with an Orthodox Jew.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/26593/alligator-ok-t...
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/lent-beavers-muskrats-capy...
I think what a canny debater would first do is define the terms. I would've asked the questioner: "How do you define meat? Give some examples and counter-examples. How do you define fish?"
Over-confident? Perhaps, but wasn't that supposed to be the tone of the meal, with a confident Justice welcoming new recruits?
Either way, it is not intellectually honest to assess someone by the quality of their informal/off-the-record comments made to a colleague while eating/drinking. If he's the kind of person painted in this article then it will be reflected in his judgements/writings.
I don't think it's sinister to attempt to align others towards this "political realism" view of the court. Attempting to maintain its mythology of being the sole realm of apolitical reason in the government in fact is pretty nefarious though.
> To be clear, Scalia was no outlier; the same identity-based bias affects us all
You wrote:
> ...all human beings, have cognitive bias. It does not follow that the supreme court is “broken”.
A Kahnemanian focus on bias is an unprofitable framework for analyzing jurisprudence and has no bearing here.
Scalia is not wrong because he used Catholic faith to shape his legal opinions.
Scalia is wrong, full stop, because he cannot:
be objective
entertain perspectives other than his own
subjourn his own beliefs to address hypotheticals
contemplate multiple contradictory ideas at the same time (consider paradox)
impartially adjudicate the law
"Well, that's an interesting question. As a practicing Catholic, per our Pope, fish is not a meat. However, biologically, where meat is defined as the flesh of an animal, of course fish is meat. So I would have to ask you, what is the context of your question? Because in all areas of law, we must consider the social, legal, moral, and scientific norms which may affect our rulings."
In other words, a Justice of the SCOTUS must have a jurisprudence somewhat more nuanced than "because I said so" (judicial primacy).
Last few years? Can you point to a specific time when there wasn't anti-supreme court rhetoric?
> But sowing distrust in our democratic institutions — be it our election systems, our law enforcement agencies, or the supreme court, is not healthy for democracy.
Ironically, you are just parroting nonsense you heard on the news - 'This is extremely dangerous to our democracy'. Distrust of democratic institutions is foundational to america. The founders distrusted democracy. It's why we have checks and balances. You are supposed to distrust democracy because by nature, it's tyranny of the mob highly susceptible to demogoguery.
> Even though these institutions are indeed flawed.
Then we should distrust them.
Also, the supreme court, like the navy, fbi, cia, etc, isn't technically a democratic institution as we ( the people ) don't directlly vote for supreme court justices.
I honestly have no words for anyone looking at these facts and still think there need not change in the very flawed democracy of the USA.
Anyway while I think there is some merit in having judicial appointments which won't/can't be undone by the next administration I think the whole lifetime serving thing seems...unwise. 16 years would seem like a decently long tenure. 36 years is the current record and Clarence Thomas may well beat that if he's not somehow done in for corruption.
Given how heated US politics is becoming (in rhetoric anyway) it's only a matter of time until the justices require presidential level security teams.
The “in good behavior” thing wouldn’t be problematic if the accountability mechanism wasn’t hopely broken in the case of partisan wrongdoing serving either one of the major parties. (IOW, like many problems in the US government, what is broken is ultimately FPTP elections and the resulting partisan duopoly.)
In the USA, Supreme Court judges are nominated by a president (who was elected by through a process of representative democracy), but confirmed (closest to appointed) by a democratically elected Senate.
>making rulings that are at odds with many polls out there
The majority of SCOTUS rulings are bipartisan and non-controversial, but let's say we ignore those and focus narrowly on the ones with some controversy around them. The New York Times[0], a left-leaning and anti-Trump institution has identified 12 cases over this past year as "major decisions" and has compiled a page where you can see how the court ruled, and how the public polled. If you read it, you'll see that the Supreme Court diverged from public opinion on only 2 of those 12 cases.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/07/us/major-supr...
Furthermore, the underlying premise that the Supreme Court should be bound by public opinion is democratic only in the most literal sense and would quickly lead to tyranny of the majority.
So I guess I stand with OP - the fact that you, a "non-American" are convinced that what you wrote are "facts" is soft evidence of there being a deliberate effort to undermine faith in the legal system.
Fish and meat are on different counters because of the cross contamination and shared use of tooling risks.
Fish is generally assumed sterile and can be eaten raw safely, although red meat can be, it is usually not.
They are not on different counters because fish is not a subset of meat.
> To return to my lunchtime debate with Justice Scalia: Biologically speaking, the case is airtight. “Meat” refers to the flesh of an animal. Fish are animals. So when we eat their flesh, we are, by definition, eating meat.
That's Airtight? Is blood sausage with a vegetable casing meat? After all we make a distinction between flesh and blood. Or is it any animal product? Is then cheese made with animal rennet a meat? Is yeast a meat? Was it a meat before we understood biological taxa better, but no longer?
I get it, nerds and techies (like us) love clear categories of things. But the entire point of the law isn't perfect taxonomies, it's to resolve disputes between parties.
Which is to say, bellyaching over the weirdness of definitions isn't a FLAW in the law, -- it IS the law itself. There's nothing broken here.
For some it's simply the flesh of animal, for others it's only the flesh of mammals.
Pretty sure they'd say "chicken meat".
Like beyond the Earth being the center of the universe, the existence of witches and the existence of a god, just to name a few? I think based on this and what he has said in the past, Scalia was a bombastic idiot.