Category Archive for: komentaryo

komentaryo

WTF KWF! or what is wrong with Pilipinas?

in undergrad in 1990’s University of the Philippines, i was taking a required Filipino 50 class that was teaching us all to spell in the prescribed Filipino. prescribed, which means that it was up to a Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino, to tell me how to spell my English. that is how to spell English words like engineer into injinir. i asked then why could we not leave English words alone, if only because the need to spell all these English words our way, just really fucks with our sense of those English words.

you do not only spell it in a new and unfamiliar Filipino way, you also end up teaching  students how to wrongly spell the word “engineer.”

in 2013, we are being told by the same Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF) that we must now call nation Filipinas. not Pilipinas. not Philippines. but FILIPINAS.  (more…)

komentaryo

online journalism fail 2: rappler’s churnalism!

it seemed portentous, or maybe just convenient, that a website like Rappler would have one of its “thought leaders” — a most pretentious if not laughable label to begin with (a leader of thoughts? whut.) — writing about her shift from print to online journalism on the same day as Rappler’s more recent foibles.

on June 19 a Rappler news article takes a Facebook status and tears it apart like it’s an interview, while doing some good old fashioned red baiting that endangers the lives of high profile activists. on the same day, its “thought leader” Marites Dañguilan Vitug makes excuses for the kind of news writing that is online, and in the end, that is on Rappler.  (more…)

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…)

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…)