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More excellent work. I really, really love these! I especially love how you are tying in concepts from neuroscience.

Millenials killed soap, for fucks sake.

I had to Google "Millennials killed" to see what popped up, and holy shit, as far as I can tell, Millennials are just ruining the shit out of just about everything.

Not economic conditions or a changing information landscape. Nope, Millennials are specifically and personally killing all the things.

Hey, Business Insider says it's our preferences, so it MUST be so! But at least it's the Baby Boomers' fault.

http://www.businessinsider.com/baby-boomers-caused-millennials-destructive-spending-habits-2017-6

I LOVE that not spending money on frivolous consumer goods has been re-labeled "destructive spending habits". Boomers pioneered actually destructive spending habits in a gluttony of consumerism that literally threatens the future of life on  this planet, but Millennials just not buying shit is "destructive".

Damn, glad you didn't die!

Well, I graduated. I still have my senior thesis to finish, but I have my BS.

My professor said when he gets back from vacation we can discuss having me stay on in the lab between now and grad school.

Congratulations, that is badass!!!

Millenials killed soap, for fucks sake.

I had to Google "Millennials killed" to see what popped up, and holy shit, as far as I can tell, Millennials are just ruining the shit out of just about everything.

Not economic conditions or a changing information landscape. Nope, Millennials are specifically and personally killing all the things.

Right on, man, anytime.

As far as I can tell, the procedure you linked to above requires the use of a fatal injection to the baby. I'm not completely sure if that's the case in all in-tact dilation and extraction procedures, but that appeared to be the case, based on the article. My points above, however, were based on the assumption that the baby would be in-tact and alive, meaning the abortion procedure would have to be non-lethal.

Interestingly enough, the in-tact dilation and extraction procedure appears to have no increase in health risks, contrary to what I expected. What I'm not sure of, however, is whether the fatal injection is required in order to keep the health risks low on the mother, considering she is not dilated to the extent that a normal birth would entail. I imagine that with lower levels of dilation, the baby would have an increase in health risks if it were not to receive the lethal injection. I assume, in this case, the risks would increase for the mother as well.

To be quite frank, it is largely because to allow the fetus to remain alive and unanesthetized through the birth would be tantamount to torturing it to death. It would be brutally inhuman to do that.

I do find it ironic that the complaint about millenials is being brand obsessed, when I can plug "millenials killed X" into Google and get back about a billion hot takes on industries millenials are willfuly and maliciously destroying by not buying things (definitely not because they don't have money).

Yeah, casting millennials as a brand-obsessed consumer culture seems a bit uhhhhhhhh projective.

Thanks, Trix!

Spot on, QG. Related, this classic article: http://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/

Comey testimony this Thursday, 10am DC time, on CBS.

I hope nothing happens to him before then. I have to assume he's probably one of the best-protected individuals on earth right now.

In other words, the specifics of an abortion should be between a woman and her doctor. No one else has any place making those decisions, especially including the government.

While almost all of what PDS said was a waste of brain processing power and time, I did find the proposal to leave the baby in-tact during termination of the pregnancy to be interesting.

While it's not ideal in many cases, as often-times, the abortion might be done to keep the baby from living a bad life because the the parents know they can't provide for it, it does satisfy the "what about the 'bodily integrity' of the baby?" question. Leaving the baby in-tact would obviously lead to more kids in the adoption system, which, as we all know, is awful. But, I could see baby bodily integrity - Non-lethal abortion procedure - being an argument used by the pro-lifers in the future (If they haven't used that argument already. I apologize if I'm missing updated information on the subject. I'm brand new to the abortion debate from the legal perspective.).

Not to mention, I think leaving it in-tact makes the procedure itself vastly different, and more complicated/dangerous/damaging, since the body isn't ready for birth during the time of the abortion.

Just my thoughts.

The procedure which extracts an intact fetus is only used in late-term abortions, which are almost universally abortions of a wanted fetus because the fetus was abnormal and unviable. While the terminology may imply that the mother is a passive recipient of this process, in reality it is usually very similar to induced labor; she experiences not only the pain of labor and delivery, but also additional pain due to the fact that the labor must essentially be forced, as her body isn't ready to give birth, and also the nightmarish emotional pain of knowing that the fetus is dead. There are many medical reasons that this process is safer for the mother than foregoing the labor and delivery through surgical removal, and there is also an important emotional reason, which is that it allows the grieving would-be parents to see and hold the dead fetus, which is often considered to help with the grief process.

Unfortunately, while that article touches on some absolutely factual aspects of the experience of being the "forgotten generation", its critique, ironically, entirely revolves around the very upper-and-middle-class culture values of self-absorption that the poorer members of generation X felt so disillusioned by. If one pays attention, the cultural narrative of GenX is that it was the first generation that simply could not expect to do better, economically, than their parents, as well as, simultaneously, feeling voiceless in the wake of the much larger and more powerful Baby Boomer generation, leaving them directionless in the limbo of meh. It was a time during which it seemed that idealism was hopeless, that no one would ever listen and we couldn't change anything. I think it's the (fairly understandable) combination of hopelessness and powerlessness that is the defining characteristic of GenX, and it's that which meaningfully influenced the direction of Millennial culture. Millennials care, but instead of trying to change the world, they try to change a tiny sphere in which they live.

That was a wonderful read.

However, I do have a question:  Do African-Americans born around 1970 consider themselves "Generation X"? I'm not sure I've seen an essay or cultural artifact about GenX that isn't about privileged white people. 

I mean, I know that the so-called 'golden age' of hip hop* happened during the GenX heyday, which (as the article points out) also benefitted from the unusually good economy; but apart from ironic appropriation I'm not sure that 'typical' GenX culture and the black culture at that time ever really mixed.

Then again, seeing as how I'm a privileged white GenX-type person, there's a good possibility I'm simply blind to it.







*I consider pre-Biggie/Tupac/Puffy to be more of a "Golden Age", to be honest.  The explosion of the hip hop industry seemed to overshadow acts like Public Enemy, KRS-One, the Native Tongues collective, Ultramagnetic MCs, etc.  Then again, I was a punk boy, and never really liked grunge all that much so I'm guessing my hipster is showing.

Yes, black people of the same age range do consider themselves Gen X, though of course their interactions with culture were very different especially given that era was the height of the War on Black People Drugs.