Category Archive for: aktibismo

komentaryo

online journalism fail 1: c’mon rappler

i think Spinbusters does a pretty fantastic job of keeping track of Rappler.com’s foibles, and where my tendency is to generally refuse to even click on any link that leads to that site, in the past year or so, i’ve been clicking more and more. they’ve been messing up.

and no, i don’t even mean the bad writing, or the ungrammatical mood meter — or the mood meter itself as a measure of how people feel about issues (susmiyo, what are we 10 years old?). let me not begin about crowdsourcing, and the-one-thing-worse-than-censoring Pol Medina — making him do choose-your-own-punchline strips. the better to render his commentary toothless, yeah.  (more…)

komentaryo

strike

today, the workers of a Coca-Cola plant in Sta. Rosa Laguna have started their strike.

that is, Coke’s drivers, haulers, fork lift operators, and pickers, almost 300 of them, have refused to go to work, effectively stopping operations in two plants (as i write this at 9AM today), as they call for their most basic rights as workers be respected by Coke. that is, just wages, workers benefits and job security. and ironically, this strike demands that workers be given the right to form a union.  (more…)

komentaryo

explaining Kristel away

as i continue to wrap my head around the aftermath of Kristel’s death, as one grapples with what ultimately is an injustice, one is also forced to respond to the most insensitive comments cloaked in notions of being “more objective” or being “scientifically, medically correct.”

and while we mourn, we are also fuelled to fight. and as many others are out on the streets, are boycotting their classes, i fight the best way i know how: with words.

at a time when social media Pilipinas is revealing its elitism, its utter lack of sensitivity, its denial of the real conditions of poverty that a majority in this nation suffer, i will fight word for word. word for fucking word.  (more…)

komentaryo

wanted: cyber righteous indignation

notes on day 1 of the Cybercrime Law’s enforcement: or is gov’t paying attention?

1. no, because the senators who are now for amending it are only talking about the libel clause. that is not the only problem with this law.

2. no, because while i’ve done it for my social media accounts and other blogs, i know it is easy to ignore the blacked out sites and the blacked out profile pics and cover photos on twitter and FB. it is after all entirely possible that the government is thinking: yehey! no slogans and images that are painfully about us. black is good! also this: the blackout re SOPA and PIPA was powerful because the major sites (wikipedia, google) supported it. in the Philippines, the more powerful blackout would be of media sites (GMA, Inquirer, Philippine Star, ABS-CBN, Rappler), maybe of big business. the blackout of our individual blogs? it would just mean not having an alternative to those media sites. (more…)

komentaryo

#AnonymousPhilippines rocks my world

because you have to know that there was nothing as exhilarating, nothing that has gotten me grinning ear-to-ear since this darn Cybercrime Law was signed by our wonderful President, until #AnonymousPhilippines came along and started this gig Wednesday night (around 10PM on my twitter timeline) with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas website.  which for a good long two hours or so appeared as this:

(more…)