The anti-gay legacy of British colonialism

UK prime minister Theresa May has apologized for the laws criminalizing homosexual acts that were passed by the British during colonial times in the countries they occupied, saying that they were wrong then and wrong now. But the damage done has been, and continues to be, great. Removing those laws after achieving independence has been difficult, with many countries choosing to just avoid the controversy involved with repealing them. 37 of the 53 members of the Commonwealth still have those laws on the books and some, like Nigeria and Uganda, have made them even more severe. Only a few countries, such as South Africa, have made same-sex relationships legal.
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The Talented Mr. Cohen

I am neither the first nor the only person to compare the Trump administration to a soap opera. The resemblance screams at you practically each day. The soap opera elements would be enjoyable as sheer entertainment if the other aspects did not have such serious consequences. But this week comes another comedic turn when a relatively minor character suddenly becomes a major player.
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The great tax scam

I just returned from the post office after mailing my tax returns. Yes, I am an old fashioned guy who still does our own taxes and mails in paper returns, much to the delight of the post office that gets money from my doing so and to the chagrin of the tax preparation companies that would like me to pay for their services, and the Internal Revenue Service for whom it would be much easier to process electronic returns than paper ones.
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Why? Why? Why?

David Buckel, a lawyer who was prominent for his work on behalf of LGBTQ groups, died after setting himself on fire in a New York City park.

In a suicide note left near his body, Buckel said he had used “fossil fuel” to ignite the fire and wanted his death to symbolize what humans are doing to Earth, the New York Daily News reported. Buckel emailed copies of the note to several news organizations, including the New York Times.
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Film review: The Shape of Water (2017)

Last night I watched this film that won this year’s Academy Award for best film and best director (Guillermo del Toro). I am not really a fan of the fantasy genre (the scientific implausibilities grate on me even though I try hard to suspend my critical faculties) but found this film, despite some scenes of violence, to be quite a sweet love story. For those who haven’t heard of it, it is set around 1960 at the height of the Cold War. The US military has found a strange human-like amphibian in the Amazon and brought it back to the US to study in a top-secret facility.
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The US as a rogue world police force

The US has sent missiles to attack Syria. Not only is this a violation of international law, it is also a violation of the US Constitution in that nowhere has congress granted authority to take military action in Syria. The administration claims that it has ‘secret authority’ to wage war though why it should be kept secret is not clear. The administration did not even go through the pretense of an investigation or any public presentation of whatever evidence they have. They have simply asserted that they are justified in taking the action, the same way that they have done many times in the past and later been shown to have lied. And as usual, the UK has been its craven lackey, this time joined by France, both of whose leaders seem to enjoy being part of the macho posturing by Trump.
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The Harris-Murray two-step

An article published in Vox by Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett, three academic psychologists who specialize in studying intelligence, critiqued a podcast hosted by Sam Harris, where he invited Charles Murray to discuss the question of the relationship between race and intelligence. The article (which is well worth reading for its detailed analysis of this issue) criticized Murray for assertions that they felt were unjustified and Harris for not pushing back hard enough and asserting the existence of a mainstream consensus on statements that were in fact highly contentious.
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So tell us how you really feel about Trump …

An interesting guessing game has broken out about the possible identity of a Republican congressperson who made a profanity-laden scathing attack on Donald Trump to Erick Erickson, a right-wing polemicist. The congressperson had clearly wanted his views to be made known while demanding that his identity be kept secret, hardly a profile in courage, but the norm in our political world.
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What the Flynn effect tells us about intelligence

I thought I would use the recent resurgence of interest in the issue of intelligence and race to highlight some lesser-known and more technical aspects of this contentious debate.

While everyone has some intuitive sense of what intelligence consists of, these vary widely from individual to individual due to the amorphous nature of the concept. Is it verbal fluency? Numerical adeptness? Critical thinking? Logical skills? Depending on one’s preferences, one can come up with many different ways of defining intelligence and testing for it. When it comes to quantifying intelligence and trying to measure it (assuming that it can be reduced to a single measure, itself a highly problematic thesis) one must realize that any measure is always a proxy for the quantity being sought and the issue becomes how good a proxy it is.
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Good riddance, Paul Ryan

An aide to the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives has announced that Ryan will retire from congress at the end of the current term. At 48 he is very young by congressional standards and this has prompted immediate speculation as to why he is leaving. He has, of course, given the common and usually bogus reason of wanting to ‘spend more time with his family’.
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