Category Archive for: bayan

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

on words

We are a nation careless with words.

It is what we are calling out Vice Ganda on, the fact that she even thought to use the rape of a woman as a joke, not a fictional but a real one: Jessica Soho.

Likewise, making fun of her weight is to fall into the concept of beauty according to mainstream capitalist discourse. A woman becomes pretty or ugly as she gains or loses weight.

It is ABS-CBN that put Vice Ganda on that stage and allowed her to get the crowd rolling in laughter at the expense of a woman who is a powerful icon in the rival network. Moreover, she is by all counts intelligent and credible, everything that is not Vice Ganda. That joke was about Jessica’s weight, and the TV network rivalry in this country. Just watch ABS-CBN’s Charo Santos-Concio laughing her head off at Vice Ganda’s jokes, right there on the front row. (more…)

kultura

on Charice

I have nothing but love for Charice. No, I am no fan really, but I find it infinitely interesting when popular culture icons give their mass audience the unexpected or taboo, or something difficult to talk about, something against what we know to be proper or consider as important. (more…)

komentaryo

Vice Ganda’s false apology

there is no doubt in my mind that joking about the rape of a woman is a no-no, which is like joking that you will kill a faggot. these are black and white, they are premised on gender discrimination, these are violent thoughts we do not think, and do not think to articulate when we actually do think about them out of anger or spite.

and yet i get it, too, that really fantastic comedy, the kind that’s intelligent enough to be irreverent, can talk about rape without it being an attack on women, as it does become an attack on the men who think it correct. Vice Ganda was far from intelligent about this joke, and as such there is no saying that members of the audience “didn’t understand it.” (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…)