July 30, 2018

The Fembotization of everything.

90 comments:

Fernandinande said...

I got as far as the false first sentence, which, being false, was illustrated by a fictional scene. I'll betcha there were more words and pictures after that!

Ann Althouse said...

It's an excellent video, very fast moving, lots of examples and interesting ideas. I would not have blogged it otherwise.

Ralph L said...

So women are obsessed with their looks because men are obsessed with the way women look? I guess we are controlling them. So sorry! You can quit wasting time and money on makeup, clothes, shoes, hair, etc.

Henry said...

I lasted until Amanda said "Masculine robots get to do a lot of things" while flashing a picture of Wall-E.

Let's check out Eve, shall we?

jaydub said...

I figure I wasted about 4:15 including the ad.

Ralph L said...

There's something about CGI people I find viscerally revolting, yet the "live" fembot was instantly recognizable as human, despite her attempt to hide it.

Henry said...

The Social Media fembot story is kind of interesting.

We're back to fandom, right? The fandom of women for fembots.

rhhardin said...

It's a style video for women.

Ralph L said...

The Cat v. Dog video that follows is better, but the pace on both is too fast for us old people.

buwaya said...

All of these examples are women-followed channels/characters/celebrities.

Its not tech that does this, its just technology supporting instinctual female behavior. Where once it was womens magazines with fashion plates, the 19th century mass media high tech, its now instagram and youtube. Its all fashion, monkey see, monkey do, which is much more powerful in the female. Nothing of this has much to do with men, its all about female competition and status anxiety.

Its also female to blame men for their own errors.

tim in vermont said...

rhhardin is right again.

I kept watching after she said that men were “obsessed” with creating women in fiction while citing a tiny number of pieces of art and myth out of a virtual ocean of art and myth. I guess it would have been better to give us the breakdown of the million followers by sex of the fembot instagram star, but that might have tended to undermine the whole “point” by introducing, well, actual evidence. Is asking for such information “bashing feminism”?

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Ralph L said...

The Cat v. Dog video that follows is better, but the pace on both is too fast for us old people.

I found this comment particularly amusing since, at least to that point, the comment avatars were dominated by cats and dogs.

Ann Althouse said...

"So women are obsessed with their looks because men are obsessed with the way women look?"

Did you watch the whole video? I think not, since the responsibility of women is accounted for.

Those who are not watching but making assumptions.... please watch and listen and talk about the actual video. It's much better than I thought it would be.

tim in vermont said...

Its all fashion, monkey see, monkey do, which is much more powerful in the female. Nothing of this has much to do with men, its all about female competition and status anxiety.


Basically. Sometimes I think that women use their cerebral cortex about as much as men use our nipples.

rehajm said...

rhhardin says what I thought too- it's a video for women to stare into their phones at and get tips.

rhhardin said...

There's Ruby Sparks (2012) a romcom, author writes a woman who becomes real.

Written to appeal to women. They're after the apology and happy ever after.

rehajm said...

I think Ann's being tripped up by the meta.

Ann Althouse said...

Like foot binding and genital mutilation, a lot of this stuff is done by women.

The woman who plays the robot (the one who puts whipped cream on her face) is, I think, critiquing the fembotization of women (while benefiting from looking fascinating because she's portraying the thing she's critiquing).

wild chicken said...

, but the pace on both is too fast for us old people

Mmm yeah. How I hate those hipster quick-cuts. Would it kill them to linger on an image long enough for us to take it in? Or would that reveal some shortcoming?

tim in vermont said...

I think not, since the responsibility of women is accounted for.

Then why did it lead off with the bit on male fantasies of creating a woman? I always thought that good expository writing started out with “tell ‘em what you are going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and tell ‘em what you told them.”

I don’t doubt for a minute that men created the fembot instagram star, there is a lot of math involved and math is hard, but I am not sure who directed them to do so.

buwaya said...

The guy thing - men are very simple.

You attract their attention by presenting an attractive female, in the basic biological instinctual-signalling way.

No matter how its done, or how packaged (as long as the female attractions are visible), it works. Its inherent in the animal.

Women vastly over-think this, or rather, misunderstand their own thinking about it. A misunderstanding that they are programmed for also.

rhhardin said...

Did you watch the whole video? I think not, since the responsibility of women is accounted for.

I watched. The responsibility of women didn't jump out. Instead the style magazine format jumped out.

What was the philosophical argument. Men can handle that format.

pdug said...

"new standards to adhere to and which are costly to fulfill"

Lefty women are sure that when the revolution comes, they will finally get to be the hot ones.

Fernandinande said...

tim in vermont said...
Then why did it lead off with the bit on male fantasies of creating a woman?


Frankenstein was a woman's fantasy about men creating another man.

pdug said...

A possible side-followup to this would be

Why We Should Jettison the “Strong Female Character”

https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-we-should-jettison-the-strong-female-character/

Oso Negro said...

Normal men are not interested in controlling women, but rather in routine vaginal access. It isn't so hard to understand, but has eluded generations of feminists.

rhhardin said...

Cockpit voice warnings are female.

Bay Area Guy said...

I am anxiously waiting for the Stormy Daniels Robot edition. I'm not sure there's be any corporeal distinction....,

tim in vermont said...

Normal men are not interested in controlling women, but rather in routine vaginal access.

Normal men have a much higher interest in not being controlled by women, since women have all of the tools to do so. Women are probably more interested in controlling real men than fictional ones.

I came away from reading Frankenstien, the first “Cli Fi” novel, wishing I had a woman like Mary Shelley in my life. Not wishing I could create one. Who wants a woman whose every move and thought you could anticipate?

tim in vermont said...

In fact, all of this attempts at heightened beauty is about controlling men, ultimately.

pdug said...

The comparions of what Kylie Jenner is doing to various technological analogies are very very silly.

* You putting on lipstick is like Photoshopping yourself!

* Clicking though a changing look "gives the impression" of software upgrades.

Classic "infer/imply" problem there. Does Jenner *give* the impression, or does this viewer/commenter PUSH the impression on herself and us by suggestion?

And then its all about how anxieties about something make us make us make certain visual representations or tell certain stories. Implication that the anxieties are really silly, and there isn't a problem with the change.

tim in vermont said...

Stepford Wives wasn’t porn for men, it was men bashing.

Ralph L said...

After the first 30 seconds, men don't appear or are even mentioned until David Letterman (has he been $MeTood yet?).

Why was Narcissus male?
Because no one would have noticed or cared about a woman looking at herself all day.

buwaya said...

Mary Shelly wrote a remarkably un-gendered novel in "Frankenstein".

It really is an extremely disciplined piece, with a minimum of sentimentality and no real romance, as has always been the female favorite. Women in "Frankenstein" are incidental, mcguffins providing a purpose to the protagonists. It is a work written for men, or it seems such was the intention.

That said, the idea of a female creature is also born in "Frankenstein", it was not created out of the minds of the Hollywood scriptwriters, and is a significant issue in the novel.

Kate said...

I've never heard of Poppy, the woman doing performance art as a fembot. She's a marketing genius. Good for her.

I don't like articles/presentations in which the narrator states "facts" which are actually opinions. I would dispute much of Amanda's claims, yet the video tries to roll quickly past her assertions, giving you no time to question.

Interestingly, my millennials wouldn't watch this because of its quickness. They prefer videos that delve deeply, almost obsessively, into a narrowly-focused topic.

rhhardin said...

A man-designed fembot would have a cameltoe.

Ralph L said...

Why We Should Jettison the “Strong Female Character”

On the Jetsons, the “Strong Female Character” mother was the only normal, sensible person. Same on the Flintstones. And they were mindful of their styles and maintained them with great care.

Ann Althouse said...

"Normal men have a much higher interest in not being controlled by women, since women have all of the tools to do so. Women are probably more interested in controlling real men than fictional ones.... In fact, all of this attempts at heightened beauty is about controlling men, ultimately."

This is why you end up with rules about women covering their hair/face/body in public and keeping them out of public life.

Ann Althouse said...

"'Why We Should Jettison the “Strong Female Character”"/"On the Jetsons..."

LOL

daskol said...

is this so different than the incel community trading tips on how to maximize one's looks? there's an aspect of people, all people, that concerns itself with our presentation. social norms make it easier for women to participate openly vs. "secretive" or anonymous incel communities. it's the metrosexual trend updated for the digital age, but we're only part way there: Kylie Jenner, fembots and women embodying the fembot ideal to critique it garner 10s or 100s of millions of followers, while men participate only in the shadows.
we're only seeing one aspect of these girls and women and related chimerical figures--the one they want to show. the fembot is an interesting diversion for men, but a woman's feminine ideal because they don't have to deal with all the mess of being a real woman. as father to a daughter, I'm hoping my daughter's penchant for dressing herself, team sports and her super fandom of Liza Koshy bodes well for her as she imagines her own ideal self.
Liza Koshy manages to be pretty funny in the Age of That's Not Funny, and I understand she recently got a TV gig or two thanks to her very popular YouTube channel.

Check out her channel for a different kind of YouTube/digital age female ideal.

buwaya said...

I suspect that childrens media requires a stable mother-figure, as a wacky, defective one would distress little kids.

This may have carried over into the implicit preferences of a large part of the adult population, remaining infantilized even when they qualify for the AARP.

buwaya said...

There are very few "incels", or at least those who so identify, and from what I can tell remarkably little in the way of male-targeted vanity/anxiety media, and I suspect that most of that which exists is targeted to homosexuals.

In the old days it was easy to tell what people were interested in, simply by looking at a magazine rack. What material was worth offering to the public? It was a realistic way to judge what was interesting, according to what the publishers could actually sell. The internet hasn't changed this, other than making evaluations more complex.

buwaya said...

Imagine even the "Simpsons", with a wild, drug-addicted, alcoholic Marge.
Or a juvenile-delinquent Lisa.
I mean as stock characters, not a "bizarro world" episode.

It wouldn't work, no matter how realistic the thing actually would be.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Who are the users who are shaping the fembots, and then the real women who end up resembling fembots? In the former case, we get a sense it is men acting out their fantasies of gorgeous women who are also compliant. But aren't the Kardashian and Jenner franchises primarily driven by women?

As I'm about to confirm, I'm not a robot.

buwaya said...

Granted, had it been legal and socially acceptable, the old magazine racks would have been 1/3-1/2 pornography. All of it probably male-oriented.

JackWayne said...

This is a very unthinking piece. An issue is framed/stated. Nothing more. There is no point of view except an underlying sense of disapprobation mostly conveyed by the title of the piece. A waste of time.

Virgil Hilts said...

I watched whole thing and thought it was quite good. But, none of this is being driven by government of some weird culture cabal; it's market driven and (except for the development of sex dolls) mostly driven by (I'm guessing) 14 year-old kids. Had any us here ever even heard of Poppy before watching this? So I worry about this stuff as much as I worry about Justin Bieber or whether start Korean K-pop boys should be exempted from military service.

tim in vermont said...

"This is why you end up with rules about women covering their hair/face/body in public and keeping them out of public life. "

Yep. It's a straight up thwart of female power.

Bruce Hayden said...

"In the old days it was easy to tell what people were interested in, simply by looking at a magazine rack. What material was worth offering to the public? It was a realistic way to judge what was interesting, according to what the publishers could actually sell. The internet hasn't changed this, other than making evaluations more complex."

Here in NW MT, that would probably be guns and maybe the West, but more guns. And handicrafts for the women. But an amazing number of gun magazines.

buwaya said...

The fourteen-year-olds of today will be the 44-year olds of tomorrow, and I suspect they will be much more similar to their 14-year-old selves than to even today's 44-year-olds.

tim in vermont said...

There must be a name in Game Theory for a game that not only can't be solved, but for which there doesn't exist even an optimal solution.

buwaya said...

This is true, there is an amazing amount of "gun culture" these days, even in places they try to suppress it such as youtube.

I think it tracks the explosion of the gun market since the mid-2000's.

Yancey Ward said...

In robotics design and engineering, I wonder how many women are actually working in the field- probably not many.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

tim in vermont said...

Who wants a woman whose every move and thought you could anticipate?

That's what random number generators are for.

Darrell said...

It's nice to see Rudolf Hess's granddaughter doing something trivial.

Bruce Hayden said...

"This is why you end up with rules about women covering their hair/face/body in public and keeping them out of public life."

I think that much of that is using their power over men, and peer pressure over each other, in competition with each other. I will suggest that part of that is a result of how quickly female sexual attraction peaks, then rapidly declines, compared to male sexual attraction. Part of this is tied to fertility, and indicia to signal such. Females at maybe 18-24 are at their peak sexual attractiveness, and can take away the mates of many older women with some ease. The older the women get, the more vulnerable they are to this. Covering women from head to toe in black fabric does a good job at damping down the sexual signals that distinguish between younger women and older ones. Much of female modesty seems to be similar - peer pressure by older and maybe uglier women in order to diminish the effectiveness of female sexual lures, in order to protect these older (and maybe uglier) women from the younger women taking their mates.

bagoh20 said...

A good number of statements in the video were contradictory to the images and the truth. Just one example was that she seemed to suggest that male robots were different becuase they get to do lots of things like kill, at the same time they were showing video of the Fembots which were weapons to kill men.

There is so much content by so many people on the internet now, and I consume a lot of it, but just like everything else, 80% is crap, not to mention the rampant me-too-ism that creates a hundred videos of the same exact thing, often with identical footage. Even with that problem, I love the resource. I can learn about virtually anything in great detail with just a few clicks. I have saved many thousands of dollars by watching a video that explains how to do something that used to be a secret among professionals. It is strange that at a time when you can easily learn how to do almost anything, it seems that fewer people than ever know how to do useful things.

buwaya said...

The Islamic fashion for covering up, among urbanized, westernized Muslim women, was a new fad, in its modern instance, dating from the 1970's, and IIRC Naipaul among others noted that it was female-driven.

There was always such a practice among the Bedu and various Islamic peasant populations (and many of these did NOT traditionally cover up), but till the 1970s it was western-wear all the way for their educated sisters.

Now it seems they all do, even those countrywomen whose mothers and grandmothers didn't.

Lewis Wetzel said...

The video was not even handed. It has this "toxic femininity" thing going on where women are what men make them out to be, and that's the fault of men. Very passive aggressive.

The video claims that in pop culture male robots play many roles, while female robots exist to serve men.
This isn't strictly true. The robot maid/nanny in The Jetsons existed to make life more pleasant for the human housewife & mother. The few recognizably female robots in the Star Wars films were nurses. It would be accurate to say that robots in popular culture are given sexual features that match the role that they play.
Male robots in popular culture are violent, strong, are created to accomplish a task for their human builders, and may be destroyed when they are no longer useful or simply because they cause a problem. If they fail to do as they are told they are considered to be malfunctioning.
What does the first Robocop film tell us about society's attitude towards men? Something unfashionable to discuss, I suppose.

Oso Negro said...

@Tim in Vermont - I think that most of women's attempts at heightened beauty are about competing with other women for status.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

those SJW fembots they made...can they vote?
or are the Dems stuck with illegals/dead people for now?

Jupiter said...

I was struck by this line;

"The point is not just to create women but to control them".

Actually, the point is to create something better than women. Why would you want to control women if you had something better?

gilbar said...

tim in vermont said...
There must be a name in Game Theory for a game that not only can't be solved, but for which there doesn't exist even an optimal solution.


OH! OH! I KNOW! I KNOW!!!'
It's Called Nuclear War! It's a Strange game, the only way to win* is not to play


The only way to win* I never understood Why the movie thought this was profound: It's THE BASIS of our SIOP. No Matter What the Russians try: IT fails. The fancy word is Deterrence.
That's WHY we had 30,000 warheads; to NEVER use them. O'Bama wanted to reduce American throw weight to an amount that would be survivable.... Think about That?
WHY would you want people to know that they might be able to survive a nuclear war?
In the immortal words of the combat engineer in The Battle of the Bulge: That's not the way!

gilbar said...

Ralph L said...
There's something about CGI people I find viscerally revolting, yet the "live" fembot was instantly recognizable as human, despite her attempt to hide it.



It was noticeable how UNHUMAN the robots were . A Turing test, that lets you See the robot is going to fail them pretty easily for some time to come. Can you imagine a robot that you could talk to (make out with) that wouldn't OBVIOUSLY be far less human than Kim Kardashiean (sic)?

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Bring 'em on!

JPS said...

Gilbar,

I like that movie. I like the depiction of the NORAD personnel, standing watch, ready but praying today won't be the day. I particularly appreciate that the cigar-chewing bellicose Texan four-star (written with the real CINC-NORAD, who had much impressed the screenwriters, in mind) turns out to be quite a bit smarter, and more reasonable, than the stereotype. The actor, a former Marine, took some pride in playing him that way. Subversive stuff, for Hollywood in the late cold war.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Maybe women should build robots. Then men could tell them what they are doing wrong.

Bryant said...

Was at the movies yesterday and there was a trailer for Alita: Battle Angel.

https://www.moviefone.com/movie/alita-battle-angel/4HgzZJRqLRKivV8blLO5Z4/video/alita-battle-angel-trailer-2018/5b563e82158f8554dd62aa60/

She is a cyborg so not quite a robot, but obviously along the same lines as wonder woman and other strong heroine movies that have been popular lately. I think the video was interesting and had some good points, but also left out a lot of contrary examples (like eva in Wall-E).

Lewis Wetzel said...

SJW: "The patriarchy has convinced society that men do things and women have things done to them."
Me: "You realize that you just said that the patriarchy did this and women had it done to them?"

Howard said...

Fembots are perfect for cucks who can't win over the hearts of mail-order brides.

Oso Negro said...

@Howard - Fembots may well be preferable for young men looking at the selection of SJWs on campus.

0_0 said...

So women mold their appearance to appeal to- other women. Yes, that is the customer base for IG, Cosmopolitan, etc.

And "we" are to be sad for the unfortunate Kylie Jenner, who is still 10% shy of beint the youngest billionaire ever. Sad!

0_0 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
0_0 said...

And gilbar- it's "Global" Nuclear War. Which the military and our leadership and most everyone understood. Then someone in Hollywood read the book and thought "wow I must tell the world about this!".

Henry said...

It's interesting that Siri and Alexis get pulled into the discussion when they are simply pleasant, disembodied female voices. The Lauren Bacall voice did not make the cut.

This is not the fembotization of everything. It is the feminization of everything -- the default female voice for our digital space.

...most synthetic computerized voices -- at least in the United States -- are female.

But not in Germany!

...a decade ago BMW installed female voices in cars in Germany -- but men there complained, refusing to take directions from a woman.

Then there's this:

“It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNN in 2011. (Nass died in 2013.)

Got that? Don't hate-mail the guy. He's dead.

There's a weird disjunction between the question of whether we are giving orders to our digital assistants ("Hey Siri") or taking orders from them ("in 100 yards, turn left"). But not in Germany.

rhhardin said...

In the front page fembot design, I don't understand the choice of breast shape. Is this focus-grouped?

The optimum is nipples tilting ten degrees upwards, as I remember it. These seem to be older fembot breasts.

Also the Barbie crotch is not a likely male choice.

Inga...Allie Oop said...

“Fembots are perfect for cucks who can't win over the hearts of mail-order brides.”

Howard, you do get down to the nitty gritty of the matter.

The Vault Dweller said...

When the video started with story examples of how men have a latent desire to create women unlike how women create males in real life I thought it was an interesting idea. And I was going to think of other examples but the first thing that popped into my head was Frankenstein. Now of course in the story, Dr. Frankenstein is a man, but the book was written by Mary Shelley. I don't know if the idea centers around reversing gender roles, so much as just creating life or something close to it. After all there are countless stories in Science Fiction of people trying to create life, or semi-life, like robots or androids etc. And in those stories the creations take on both masculine and feminine forms.

Also the video maker's conclusion that this drive is obviously about pure objectification of women seems off. In almost all these stories there is a struggle about whether the creation really is a life or a being, or someone with a soul. And in almost every story that I can remember the viewer or reader is supposed to come to the conclusion that yes the creation is an individual and as such, that individual matters. I base this on how the writer's structure their dialogue and the emotion they seek to evoke regarding the situation. It is almost always the unlikable, nasty guy who is arguing, "It's just a machine!"

Also the video maker's conclusion of how masculine robots get all the cool roles and feminine robots get stuck in feminist purgatory or whatever is just wrong. She ends her list of the 'cool' things masculine robots can do with murder and an image of Robocop (I won't quibble with the fact that Robocop was an officer of the law and thus never murdered and only comit justifiable homicides). But the first image she chose for the poor, feminine robots, was an image of Fembots from the Austin Powers movie. The Fembots job was to literally murder people. I mean it was a comedy so they would shoot poison gas from their boobs, or sometimes grow machine guns from them but they were murderers.

The computer generated 'online influencer' Lilmaquela seems interesting. But pinning this on men seeking to create and control the perfect woman seems like a reach. I don't know who is actually behind it but something tells me that the majority of the people who follow her are probably women. I don't know many men, who when imagining their dream woman would include things like, "Oh and then she was protesting for Trans-rights, oh and then she was protesting for the Dreamers!". This seems more like a largely female created image of ideal women, that other women reject as controlling, but in doing so assume it is some dastardly male plot.

I don't know if what Poppy does is meant as a critique of the objectification of women. I think it is more of an exploitation of something close to the Uncanny Valley effect. By behaving somewhat oddly, she comes across as odd, and thus interesting. For what it is worth she also has put out some music videos, which again makes me think this is more a gimmick to separate herself from other online personalities.

I don't get why the maker of the piece seemed to think that making an artificial woman would loosen or broaden roles of women. Generally if one is going to spend gobs of money, time, and effort on creating something the person is going to aim at creating something that he or she views as a superlative example of what they are trying to create. That necessarily requires some judgment on what is superlative in a robo-woman.

buwaya said...

From Frankenstein - one of many seeds of much later Science Fiction - those mankind-threatening - or mankind-replacing - supermen, or super-things.

"Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world,
yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon
thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon
the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a
condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit,
to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved
by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by
his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my
promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me
as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at
the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race."

tim in vermont said...

Obviously, male fantasies about creating and controlling a sexually passable hot female are statements of fear and failure, not domination, as has been obliquely pointed out in the thread. That was the point of The Stepford Wives. What really rankles feminists is the seditious talk about rebellion against female power over us, against the power that beauty wields over the male animal.

Who wants a woman whose every move and thought you could anticipate?

That’s what random number generators are for


You have an awful lot of faith in ersatz intelligence over man’s intelligence, enough to overlook the obvious hand waving in your reply.

tim in vermont said...

So the battle of the sexes is like nuclear war? No. Even I won’t buy that.

Howard said...

Fembots will eliminate the need for date-rape drug spambots, so there's that!

Howard said...

Hi Inga. Thanks. I work in all the various sewers of the world, so nitty gritty is all I know.

The Vault Dweller said...

Blogger Howard said...
I work in all the various sewers of the world, so nitty gritty is all I know.


Does the level of gritty you find depend on the general level of fiber consumption in the area of that particular sewer system?

Howard said...

Vault: All I know is the shit keeps rolling downhill... it never stops, it just keeps coming and coming and coming: there's never a let-up it's relentless, everyday it piles up more and more and more and you gotta get it out but the more you get it out the more it keeps coming in and then it's Thanksgiving with everyone taking a dump at the same time...

(apologies to Hello, Newman)

The Vault Dweller said...

@Howard This is why the Romans took over the world. The Greeks had some fancy plays and what not, but the Romans, ruled. 99 times out of 100 humanity is better served by a good plumber than a good poet or philosopher.

Drago said...

Howard: "Fembots are perfect for cucks who can't win over the hearts of mail-order brides"

Talk to any group of young japanese men about their dating preferences and they will all tell you the same thing: none.

They are simply not interested in dating, courting, marrying, children, etc.

It's the most amazing thing. They form large groups of men that just play video games, work, travel, etc.

They recognize the financial difficulties and hardships related to raising families in that culture/economic/social environment and none of them want it.

Why marry and have a kid or two and be forced to live in a 2 room apartment with children and work 18 hours per day for the rest of your life just to live what US citizens would recognize as a lower middle class existence?

Howard said...

Drago: Far be it for me to pretend to know what lurks in the heart of Japanese culture.

Aussie Pundit said...

The video is interesting and fun.
But fundamentally it presents benign trends as problems.

buwaya said...

"This is why the Romans took over the world. "

Well, not really. Plumbing is nice, but a military system that kills your massed enemies like a giant human hedge trimmer is more explanatory.

The Gallic War - Caesar

By the man - well, one of them - himself.