The Beeb a few days ago:

Campaigners have lost a High Court challenge to the government’s two-child limit on some benefits.

Lawyers representing three families had argued that the policy was incompatible with human rights law.

But a judge has ruled that limiting tax credits and universal credit to a family’s first two children is lawful.

Kate Smurthwaite draws the inevitable conclusion:

I don’t see why the public purse should be paying for Kate Middleton’s third child unless it was the result of rape. Right?

Truth innit!

Disturbing.

There's a lot going on here pic.twitter.com/ewQbIqE5cJ

— jordan (@JordanUhl) April 24, 2018

Today in Parliament Square:

A statue commemorating the life of the suffragist, Millicent Fawcett, has been unveiled opposite Parliament.

She campaigned for women’s right to vote during the early 20th Century and is seen as one of the most influential feminists of the past 100 years.

Prime Minister Theresa May paid tribute to the “truly great” campaigner’s “lasting impact” after it was unveiled.

The bronze casting, by the artist Gillian Wearing, is the first statue of a woman erected in Parliament Square.

How did it happen?

It followed a campaign by the feminist writer and activist Caroline Criado Perez, who also led last year’s successful effort to get Jane Austen to appear on the £10 note.

She said she came up with the idea for the statue when she was out running on International Women’s Day in 2016 and realised the only historical figures commemorated there were men.

Only two years ago. She gets things done.

Some of the hundreds of women and men who gathered to watch the unveiling ceremony were simply there to witness a moment in history.

“It is very important to me to see a woman in Parliament Square. It has taken a long time,” said student Poppy Sharpe, who was there with her friend Macushla Savvides (pictured above).

Boys grow up seeing that they can become someone immortalised as a statue, said Emma Camp, but girls don’t: “It’s about role models.”

But for others it was a chance to stress that the battle for equality fought by Millicent Fawcett and the other suffragists is far from over.

And. And for others it was a chance to stress that the battle for equality fought by Millicent Fawcett and the other suffragists is far from over. The two don’t contradict, they go together.

A basic trope about the reasons for Trump’s appeal to voters is the economic anxiety factor. Niraj Chokshi at the Times points to a study that cites status anxiety.

White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

The study is not the first to cast doubt on the prevailing economic anxiety theory. Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.

If that’s true it at least helps explain how people at the bottom of the ladder manage to see Trump as their dude. Economically that makes zero sense, but culturally it does make some. Trump is neither poor nor working class but by god he is racist.

Her survey also assessed “social dominance orientation,” a common psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. People who exhibited a growing belief in such group dominance were also more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected.

“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said.

…

What does it matter which kind of anxiety — cultural or economic — explains Mr. Trump’s appeal?

If wrong, the prevailing economic theory lends unfounded virtue to his victory, crediting it to the disaffected masses, Dr. Mutz argues. More important, she said, it would teach the wrong lesson to elected officials, who often look to voting patterns in enacting new policy.

Like deporting people and defunding Planned Parenthood.

Massimo Piglucci on Michael Shermer on moral philosophy:

You may have noticed that I don’t opine on quantum mechanics. Or jazz. The reason for this is that — although I’m very interested in both topics — I just don’t know enough about them. Not enough to be able to offer an informed opinion, at any rate. So I sit back, read what other, more knowledgeable people have to say about quantum mechanics and jazz, form my own second-hand opinion, and try to avoid embarrassing myself by pontificating in public.

Apparently, my friend Michael Shermer does not follow the same philosophy. At least, not when it comes to the field of moral philosophy. He has recently published a column in Scientific American entitled “Does the philosophy of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ have any merit?” which starts out simple (simplistic, really) enough, and ends in a crescendo of nonsense. Let’s take a look.

Shermer’s done more than that, he’s written a whole book on moral philosophy. I have no plans to read it.

Massimo picks apart the SciAm column; I’ll share a sample:

After a brief mention of Kantian deontology, the article really veers from simplistic to nonsensical: “Historically the application of a utilitarian calculus is what drove witch hunters to torch women they believed caused disease, plagues, crop failures and accidents — better to incinerate the few to protect the village. More recently, the 1:5 utilitarian ratio has too readily been ratcheted up to killing one million to save five million (Jews: “Aryan” Germans; Tutsi:Hutu), the justification of genocidal murderers.”

What?? No, absolutely not. Setting aside the obvious observation that utilitarianism (the philosophy) did not exist until way after the Middle Ages, no, witch hunts were the result of fear, ignorance and superstition, not of a Bentham- or Mill-style calculus. And this is the first time I heard that Hitler or the Hutu of Rwanda had articulated a utilitarian rationale for their ghastly actions. Again, they were driven by fear, ignorance, superstition, and — in the case of Nazi Germany — a cynical calculation that power could be achieved and maintained in a nation marred by economic chaos by means of the time-tested stratagem of scapegoating. (The latter is also what perpetrators of witch hunting and the Rwandan genocide did: prey on the weak, it’s easy to do and get away with it.)

I wonder where Shermer got the idea that Hitler or the Hutu did what they did for utilitarian reasons. I wonder if he thinks racism itself is utilitarian.

The true nonsense comes right at the end, when Shermer puts forth his preferred view, the one that, in his mind, has allowed for true moral progress throughout the ages: “both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics are trumped by natural-rights theory, which dictates that you are born with the right to life and liberty of both body and mind, rights that must not be violated, not even to serve the greater good or to fulfill a universal rule.”

Setting aside that you get precisely the same result from Mill’s rule utilitarianism, not to mention that natural rights theory has no argument against Kant, “natural rights” are what Jeremy Bentham famously, and correctly, referred to as “nonsense on stilts.” There is no such thing as a natural right, and we, therefore, are not born with them (contra the mindless libertarian mantra that Shermer is repeating). Michael is confusing human desires and instincts — some of which are actually culturally dependent (it is empirically not the case that everyone on earth desires liberty of mind, for instance) with rights. But rights are, obviously, a human creation. Which accounts for why, as Shermer himself notes, they have to be written down in things like the Bill of Rights, and protected by the force of state-enabled law. It’s also why people have come up with different lists of rights at different times. The United Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, provides a much more extensive list than the one arrived at by James Madison and co. back in 1789.

To argue that rights are “natural” is to commit the most elementary logical fallacy in ethics, that of the appeal to nature. And even if one were to overlook that little problem, there simply is no consistent empirical evidence for most of such alleged rights (i.e., desires, instincts) in Homo sapiens or its recent ancestors. Yeah, we all prefer to be alive rather than dead, other things being equal, but natural selection does not care about mere survival, it only favors survival that leads to reproduction. And it favors it, it doesn’t guarantee it. (So you can’t derive a natural right to sex. Too bad!)

This is the sort mess one gets when Michael talks about moral philosophy. Or when I talk about quantum mechanics. Or jazz. Please, let us all stick to what we know. It’s hard enough as it is.

Mind you…we all have more reason to take a stab at some kind of moral philosophy than we do quantum mechanics or jazz. We have more reason to do that if we want to do the right thing, refrain from doing harm, avoid hurting people, be more helpful or generous or kind, be less selfish or mean or a bully. We want to have some idea of why we should, and we may want to explain to other people why we and they should. We have some crude tools for doing that – instinct, training, emotions, experience, observation, rules – but they are crude, and they can compete with each other, and we can just get them all wrong.

It’s a problem. Amateurs bungle it (especially if they’re amateurs like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, both of whom have pretty terrible moral compasses, frankly), but professionals don’t talk to us much.

I had an odd realization a few days ago, which is that I don’t know where the keys on the keyboard are. I know how to hit them fast and accurately, but I don’t consciously know where they are. I do know the QWERTY part, as a unit, but even that doesn’t translate to knowing where the E or the T is on its own. I know the how well enough that it’s overridden the where.

I did a little Facebook post about it and other examples of the phenomenon came rolling in – phone numbers, piano keys, the moves we make when driving, figure skating, ballet. I added my library card number – I’ve noticed many times that I can type it but I cannot simply call it to mind and write it down – I know what the final 7 or so digits are but not their order or where they repeat. I have to pretend to type them to get it right. Unconscious processing is so weird and interesting.

Stewart pointed to Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore exploring how it works at the piano.

This morning Steve Watson contributed the link to the perfect Awkward Yeti.

God damn can this be true?

Nashville mass killer used AR-15 seized by IL police after his arrest at White House while seeking to meet Trump. Father returned rifle and other guns to him before he killed in TN — and that's not illegal. This is the state of gun laws in America 2018. https://t.co/ilVz3TStmE

— Tony Pipitone (@TonyNBC6) April 23, 2018

Nashville mass killer used AR-15 seized by IL police after his arrest at White House while seeking to meet Trump. Father returned rifle and other guns to him before he killed in TN — and that’s not illegal. This is the state of gun laws in America 2018.

From the NBC News article:

Four people were killed and two others were injured when a semi-nude gunman opened fire at a Waffle House restaurant near Nashville, Tennessee, early Sunday, police said. The shooter remained at large Sunday afternoon, and authorities warned that he could still be armed.

Travis Reinking, 29, of Morton, Illinois, was being sought Sunday night on criminal homicide charges, police said. They said he was naked except for a green jacket when he got out of his car at about 3:23 a.m. (4:23 a.m. ET) Sunday and shot two people outside the restaurant with an AR-15 rifle, killing them both.

He then went inside the Waffle House and continued firing, killing two more people, police said. The victims were identified as: Taurean C. Sanderlin, 29, of Goodlettsville, an employee of the restaurant; Joe R. Perez, 20, of Nashville; DeEbony Groves, 21, of Gallatin, Tennessee; and Akilah Dasilva, 23, of Antioch, Tennessee; who was critically wounded and died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

One more salient point: Travis Reinking is white. The victims were black. This was a white guy mass-murdering black people.

Don Aaron, a spokesman for Metro Nashville police, said federal and state authorities had run across Reinking before.

The Secret Service said Sunday afternoon that Reinking was arrested on July 7 and charged with unlawful entry “after crossing an exterior security barrier near the White House Complex.” The Secret Service’s Nashville Field Office and headquarters division were working closely with law enforcement involved in the shooting investigation, the statement added.

He had crossed a security barrier and he then refused to leave, so they arrested him.

After the incident, Illinois revoked Reinking’s license to carry firearms and seized four guns — including the AR-15 that was used in the Waffle House shooting — at the request of federal authorities, Aaron said at a news conference later Sunday.

But Illinois authorities then returned those firearms to Reinking’s father, who Aaron said admitted giving them back to his son.

So, yes, it’s true. This country is pathetic.

I never have understood that Trump insult “Sleepy Eyes” that he uses for a particular tv news host. Jim Wright has an explanation.

Another Sunday morning, another attack on the press from the President of the United States.

“Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd of Fake News NBC just stated that we…”

Wait.

Back up.

Sleepy Eyes?

Sleepy eyes? What? I asked (rhetorically I thought) my audience on Twitter, what does “Sleepy Eyes” even mean as an insult?

Huh?

Sleepy Eyes Chuck of the Fake News? I said, “it’s like he’s tweeting really bad fanfic one line at time. Fifty Shades of Fly Hair Tiny Hands.”

Sleepy eyes.

Ok. Sure.

Except … well, I should have known better. Several readers pointed out that “sleepy eyes” is an anti-Semitic dog-whistle, a racist insult regarding Jews.

And I thought, no, that can’t be … right, can it?

It can. It is. And it’s far worse than that.

I did not know “sleepy eyes” was an anti-Semitic slur.

But it sure didn’t take long to find the truth.

The term’s origin comes from a list of criteria used by Nazi secret police to determine who might be a jew. This list includes traits such as a widow’s peak, dark curly hair, attached earlobes, weak or pointed chins, thick lips with a commonly protruding lower lip, head shape including a low sloped forehead and high flat back of skull … and thick eyelids giving a wary expression of “sleepy, untrustworthy eyes.”

This list was promulgated to the German population via the Gestapo and other Nazi authorities, and commonly used to identify suspected Jews for arrest and removal.

After WWII and the Nazi’s defeat, that list naturally found it’s way to various neo-Nazi, White Supremacist, and other anti-Semitic groups.

“How to spot a jew” is a common search phrase on Google, and the results are hundreds of variations on this list of Nazi-originated criteria.

Chuck Todd is Jewish, a fact that Trump most certainly knows.

It is unlikely in the extreme that Trump would pick “sleepy eyes Chuck Todd” as an insult at random and without malice aforethought.

While Trump himself may or may not know the origin of the insult and who commonly uses that slur today, it’s obvious he surrounds himself with people who use this term openly in the halls of government and business and who DO know what the phrase means and how it is intended.

So that’s interesting. I had no idea.

Do his eyes look especially sleepy?

I’m gonna go with “no.” They’re just eyes. They’re in his face. His face isn’t completely flat – but then whose face is? His eyes are set in his head, the way everyone’s eyes are. They don’t look any sleepier than anyone else’s that I can see. So yes, I think Jim Wright’s explanation makes sense.

And how utterly fucking disgusting it is.

Oh, great – religious war against environmentalists. Peter Walker on Facebook:

Dramatic day in Modesto. Speaking to several dozen farmers and ranchers, Ammon Bundy repeated many of the stories about Harney County and the Malheur Refuge that I’ve researched and found incorrect. But he also took a much more overtly religious approach. Federal “tyranny” seemed almost forgotten. Instead, much of his criticism was aimed at environmentalists (including some at length, personally, by name) who he said drive federal policy and represent a threat to the Judeo-Christian way of life. Those who he claims adopt a “Green” religion are a threat to humanity itself. Meanwhile, the environmentalists he mentioned were outside the door chanting and protesting. Overtly framing it as all but a religious war was a new approach and one that seems deeply worrying.

Not a huge crowd; I guess that’s some comfort.

Laurence Tribe observed on Twitter that the cast of Casablanca included only two actors born in the US, which I found interesting.

Ha. Off the top of my head…Claude Rains, Bergman obvs, Paul Henried, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, the woman who starts singing the Marseillaise… https://t.co/cMEFbeFeed

— Ophelia Benson (@OpheliaBenson) April 22, 2018

I misspelled Henreid. At any rate, Tribe was making a point about immigrants, and a couple of people replied to pick nits and he deleted the tweet, but it was interesting and he was right. The foreign cast was notable at the time. Wikipedia:

The play’s cast consisted of 16 speaking parts and several extras; the film script enlarged it to 22 speaking parts and hundreds of extras.^[13] The cast is notably international: only three of the credited actors were born in the United States (Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page).

…

• Conrad Veidt as Major Heinrich Strasser. He was a refugee German actor who had appeared in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He fled the Nazis, but was frequently cast as a Nazi in American films. A major star in German cinema before the Nazi era, he was the highest paid member of the cast despite his second billing.^[20]
• Peter Lorre as Signor Ugarte. Born in Austria-Hungary, Lorre fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after starring in Fritz Lang‘s first sound movie, M (1931). Greenstreet and Lorre appeared in several films together over the next few years, although they did not share a scene in Casablanca.

• Curt Bois as the pickpocket. Bois was a German-Jewish actor and refugee. He had one of the longest careers in film, making his first appearance in 1907 and his last in 1987.
• Leonid Kinskey as Sascha, the Russian bartender infatuated with Yvonne. He was born into a Jewish family in Russia and had immigrated to the United States.

There are a bunch more in the bit parts.

Much of the emotional impact of the film has been attributed to the large proportion of European exiles and refugees who were extras or played minor roles (in addition to leading actors Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre): such as Louis V. Arco, Trude Berliner, Ilka Grünig, Lotte Palfi, Richard Ryen, Ludwig Stössel, Hans Twardowski, and Wolfgang Zilzer. A witness to the filming of the “duel of the anthems” sequence said he saw many of the actors crying and “realized that they were all real refugees”.^[25] Harmetz argues that they “brought to a dozen small roles in Casablanca an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting.”

So this isn’t right:

But this was shot during the war, and entirely on Warner Studio lots. You aren't suggesting that they "screened" actors to weed out the native-born Americans because of the film's setting? Hollywood (especially at that time) never hesitated to put white Americans into ANY role!

— Steve Sawyer (@SawyerSteve) April 22, 2018

It’s not that simple. Much of Hollywood was always conservative and conventional, sure, but much of it was not. There were plenty of lefties there in the 30s, who were either turned or driven out in the late 40s and 50s, but the purge hadn’t started when Casablanca was made. It was a Popular Front-ish, defeat the Nazis, welcome refugees sort of movie. Tribe’s point was well taken.

There are, we are told, two sides to every question. We must not, we are told, live in a bubble where we never encounter dissenting views. Free speech, we are told, requires inviting and welcoming every opinion no matter how distasteful or threatening.

I give you Great Hearts Monte Vista charter school:

A Texas charter school is apologizing after a teacher gave an assignment to an eighth grade American History class, asking students to list the positive aspects of slavery.

“When I first read it, I thought, this was b.s.,” said Great Hearts Monte Vista eighth-grade student Manu Livar.

Students in the class were supposed to complete an assignment on the “positive aspects” and “negative aspects” of the life of slaves, giving a “balanced view.”

A balanced view. A balanced view of slavery. Can we have a balanced view of the Holocaust? The Rwandan genocide? The Srebrenica massacre? Can we hear about the “positive aspects” of all of those?

When his mother picked Manu up, he showed her the assignment; she immediately sent a picture of it to her husband.

“What the hell is this revisionist history lesson trying to achieve here?!?” said Roberto Livar, Manu’s father, who posted it to Facebook on Wednesday.

That post.

Manu’s worksheet:

This is, in a way, small, but the sheer malice and hatefulness of it are huge.

BREAKING: Trump DHS has formally directed Citizenship and Immigration Services to remove all instances of "thank you" & "we regret to inform you" from denials of #immigration apps.

Not the most important immigration news happening today, but just thought you'd like to know.

— VERY LEGAL & VERY COOL (@matt_cam) April 19, 2018

BREAKING: Trump DHS has formally directed Citizenship and Immigration Services to remove all instances of “thank you” & “we regret to inform you” from denials of #immigration apps.

Not the most important immigration news happening today, but just thought you’d like to know.

Yeah that’s what we need – less “I’m sorry to have to tell you” and more “No.” Less compassion and more brutality. Less generosity and more rudeness. Less kindness and more pure fucking meanness. That will make the world a better place.

This minor cosmetic change (much like removing the phrase "nation of immigrants" from the @USCIS mission statement a couple of months ago) is being carried out for no other apparent purpose than making our nation less welcoming.https://t.co/5jhEJRfWsK

— VERY LEGAL & VERY COOL (@matt_cam) April 19, 2018

He doesn’t have a published public source.

MORE:

-This is true. Sometimes imm. attys know things first.

–@USCIS is a good agency, full of professionals. Sad to see it be politicized.

– I attribute this to mission change, not direct malice. Seems to be reflecting stated Feb goal of ending customer service mentality

— VERY LEGAL & VERY COOL (@matt_cam) April 21, 2018

MEDIA: You're all best off going straight to the source. Contact @USCIS and ask about recent changes to database of form letters that staff use to write immigration denials. If they stonewall, just #FOIA the docs and related correspondence–it is (or should be) all public.

— VERY LEGAL & VERY COOL (@matt_cam) April 21, 2018

I hope reporters follow up.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on So what does a British person look like?

I’m not an expert in British constitutional law, but I’m fairly confident that the Queen does not have the power to decide who will or will not succeed her, without an Act of Parliament. So any rumor about some secret decision to disinherit Charles shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Of course Charles could refuse to accept the Throne when the time comes, or officially relinquish his place in the line of succession. I’ve heard it argued over the years that he ought to do so because of his unpopularity and/or unsuitability to the job. And occasionally there’s a rumor that he will do so, and I have no idea how much stock to put in those. My inclination is to doubt it very much, for at least four reasons I can think of:

1) It would take an extraordinary person to say, effectively, “I have been given an extremely privileged life with the understanding that I would eventually have one job, for which I was trained my entire life. But despite all of that training and support and preparation, it turns out that I would be so desperately bad at the job, or at least, my subjects all think that I would be so desperately bad at it, that I would jeopardize the very institution that it represents, and so I must decline and instead live out a life of privilege with no responsibility.” I’m not sure if I mean extraordinary in a positive sense here. Certainly it would require a great deal of humility. I don’t have any particular insight into Prince Charles, but he does not strike me as that sort of person.

2) I don’t know how seriously to take the series The Crown, but I have heard it remarked that one thing it gets right is the reaction of the Windsors to the Abdication, i.e. that they viewed Edward’s actions as the worst sort of selfishness and dereliction of duty. It seems unlikely to me that the Queen’s son would view passing on the job as any kind of noble or humble act, but rather as a fairly selfish one. Like it or not, it was Charles’s job from birth to prepare for the role, and to refuse to take it would be an admission of failure on a level I can’t imagine.

3) I don’t think it would help save the monarchy. It might do the opposite. If Charles is to pass on the job — the second man in three generations to do so — because William has better poll numbers and a younger, prettier, wife, then it seems to me that this precedent just invites more questions about the monarchy than Charles’s accession would. If it turns out that Princess Charlotte is smart and charming and popular but her older brother George is a bit of a dolt, then will there be clamoring for George to yield his place just like Grandpa did? And if you’re going to start choosing monarchs based on their popularity and public image or perceived ability, then why not just go the whole way and elect them, or have Parliament appoint them to fixed terms like Governors-General in Canada and Australia? Then at least you’d have an entire nation of talent to choose from rather than a single family.

4) If it was going to happen, I think it would have been done a long time ago. The time to do it — if at all — would have been when Charles got divorced and his popularity cratered, and there was the prospect that Charles might spend three or four decades on the throne. Or at least after William became of age. Now, my understanding is that Charles has bounced back a bit in popularity (although I agree with Ophelia that there’s still plenty to dislike) and the public has warmed to Camilla a bit, and it’s unlikely he’d be in for a long reign. No doubt there will be a ton of “abolish the monarchy” think pieces written when the Queen passes, but I think that would happen even if Charles was out of the picture.