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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One sign that students are being effective

While many of us are heartened by the sight of young people becoming politically engaged following the recent spate of shootings, Rachel M. Cohen writes that the sight of students rising up against gun violence has alarmed right-wingers who see this a signs that public education is a breeding ground for dangerous ideas that are taking hold in the minds of young people.
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Some reflections on the Secular Social Justice conference

The Secular Social Justice 2018 conference last weekend was interesting, in that it highlighted the work of secular activists around the country who were working on various issues of importance. After a fiery opening address by Sikivu Hutchinson, we had an array of speakers who spoke on local community organizing, elimination racial inequality in the criminal justice system, disability rights, immigration issues, the war on drugs, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the role of direct action. The presenters were entirely people of color directly involved in this work, not academic types, and thus spoke from personal experience.
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Israel kills large number of unarmed protestors

While attention has largely been focused on other issues, there has been a major escalation in the conflict in Gaza where the Israeli military has used excessive force, including live ammunition, on unarmed demonstrators, killing many. For those who are unaware, Gaza is sometimes referred to as the world’s largest open air prison, a small piece of land blockaded on one side by Israel and the other by Egypt and with the Israeli government intent on punishing the people who live there for the ‘crime’ of electing Hamas as their representatives. This article describes the history of Gaza and how it came to be.
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What a waste of time

This report from the BBC:

For the first time in at least 100 years, the US Cabinet has a bible study group. What do they learn? What does Donald Trump make of it? And why aren’t women allowed to teach?

Every Wednesday, some of the world’s most powerful people meet in a conference room in Washington DC to learn about God.

The location can’t be revealed – the Secret Service won’t allow it – but the members can.

Vice-President Mike Pence. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The list goes on.

In total, 10 cabinet members are “sponsors” of the group. Not everyone attends every meeting – they are busy people – but they go if they can.

Meetings last between 60 and 90 minutes, and members are free to contact the teacher after-hours. So who is the man leading the United States’ most-influential bible study?

Step forward Ralph Drollinger, a seven-foot tall basketball pro turned pastor. Or, as the 63-year-old describes himself: “Just a jock with some bad knees.”