Open Thread: Scotus

(Who’s a good shark?)

I don’t really do domestic politics, but what do you guys think of Trump’s SCOTUS pick?

I’ve been working on some material about instincts and thought this was an interesting graph, relevant to my theory that pregnancy/childbirth have a physical (chemical/hormonal) effect on women, causing their mothering instincts to kick in (mothering isn’t nearly as useful before you have kids as after,) which in turn causes a change in attitudes toward abortion.

Obviously the graph proves little, because people who don’t approve of abortion are predisposed to have more children than people who do. What I really want is a time-based graph, measuring attitudes before and after pregnancy. But I’m having trouble finding that.

Pension obligations (CA specific?)

And here’s a graph of pension obligations. Pensions: they’ve got serious issues.

On to comments of the week. First I’m reposting Unknown128′s question because I can’t answer it, but maybe one of you folks can:

I wanted to ask what the German Nazis view on IQ and IQ testing was. From what I know they didnt realy percieve intelligence as a very valuable trait in the first place, prefering physical strenght, endurance and “nordic racial traits”. They bred warriors not thinkers. Also one does hear that they banned IQ testing or at least strongly disliked it.

Do you know anything specific?

This has been a relatively low comment week, but awards go to Leonard:

Antifa is American as apple pie. The use of violence to achieve political objectives is nothing new to communists, and America is a communist country. The original communist country. Don’t forget the civil war. Antifa is just updated antisla.

The reason why you’re seeing more antifa stuff now is that the communists have lost control of the Potemkin government. It’s not that they didn’t exist; it’s that rioting did not serve much political purpose. Pressuring Obama from the left was easy enough without violence. So using violence was fairly senseless.

and With the thoughts you’d be thinkin:

My understanding is Antifas evolved or are a subset of anarchist and socialist groups mainly focussed on combating fringe nationalist parties like the National Front (UK) or the Front National (FRA), whatever their equivalents were in other Western Europe countries etc, in the 70s-90s. Honestly they’re just black bloc dickheads who want to pretend they’re fighting Hitler.

The general dressing in black and breaking stuff style of leftwing activisim is known as black blocs. Basically just dress up in black cover your face and break things. I think it was popularised as a tactic originally against groups like the IMF and WTO, in the US at least it was probably due to “The battle for Seattle”, that was opposition to the WTO. You get routine riots and mischief by groups who perform the same behaviour for various left wing causes all around the world. I think Oakland has a lot of those guys behaving like dicks semi-consistently. …

That’s all for now. What are you thinking about?