Category Archive for: pangyayari

komentaryo

Duterte winning: The VFA, timing, divide & conquer

I’ve written before (and often) about the Duterte strategies that have kept him and this government afloat. When I did so, he was still awake most of the time, and not disappearing on us in times of tragedy, there was no major public health concern like COVID19, no volcanos exploding, no communities losing their homes and livelihood while the President slept.

We are undoubtedly in worse times now, and yet we still don’t get it.

Proof of that pudding? When Duterte declared the cancellation of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA). And what did we see? The members of the Left, supporting Duterte on this declaration, asserting that it is “just and necessary”, and the Liberal stalwarts putting it into question by highlighting this government’s pivot to China. On social media the rhetoric is vicious, where the discussion is limited to “tuta ng Kano” o “tuta ni Duterte”; where anyone who even so much as refuses to stand with Duterte on his VFA declaration is seen as a US-ally, or as an enabler of US Imperialism.

Probably the worst example of how terrible things are is Walden Bello attacking retired Justice Antonio Carpio for being on “the wrong side on the VFA issue.” But one must ask: is the Duterte side, the right side to be on?

(more…)

komentaryo

Desperation: Cracks in Duterte propaganda

Let’s call it what it is: desperation.

We are being made to believe by Duterte propagandists that the inclusion of provisions specific to Leila de Lima in the US Appropriations Act for 2020 is a sham. Yes, the same one that Donald Trump signed on December 20 2019. That same one that’s got us all talking about the Magnitsky Act. Someone calls it fake news. Another calls on media to show her where exactly this provision is. So many likes and shares after, and you know this is the kind of irresponsibility that this government has lived off, whether through these purported rogue propagandists or through official agencies like the PCOO and Mocha Uson.

Now in the past two years I’ve ignored these people completely—it’s just not worth it talking to people who have drank the kool-aid. It’s always entertaining though, mostly because it can hold a drop or two of truth. This time though the lapses are so huge, that one can only see it as either a deliberate effort to misinform the Duterte base, and/or get on the good side of Duterte by pointing out that his own people are being dumb. Except that they aren’t.  (more…)

kultura

The tale of an online mob #NachoDomingo

I happened upon the case of Nacho Domingo too late. It was Sunday, September 29. I asked a friend who had posted about social media responsibility and online mobs what he was talking about, and he told me to do a Twitter search for his name.

It yielded little, though the few tweets that came up were ones of mourning and condolences, a lot of regret. By later in the day more and more tweets surfaced that were turning defensive: this is about frat culture, they said. The system is to blame for his death, many others said.

The blame game on Twitter seeped through the rest of the week, with some accounts coming out with names of “people who killed Nacho,” which just continued the cycle of blaming and shaming, bullying and mob rule that brought upon us this death to begin with.

I spent the rest of that Sunday and early last week going through Twitter accounts and mining it for information. Facebook was pretty wiped clean, and there wasn’t much to see there. But Twitter, with its 140-character, shoot-from-the-hip demand — so much of what transpired remained there even as many deleted posts. The sadness grew as this process revealed what it must have been like for one person to see this unfold, and not just on Twitter and Facebook, but also, now we know, in his phone’s inbox.  (more…)

kultura

Institutional, nervous, and other breakdowns

The first time a young writer came out with a Facebook status (dated August 2) about having been taken “sexual advantage” of in a writing workshop, I shared it with a very clear statement about silence. Fresh from the CNN Life panel for the Readers and Writers Fest where we were asked what is the biggest realization we’ve had about the cultural sector, I said that it is about how much of it operates on silence. We don’t know what’s going on, how things are decided, how the systems work, and all that we ever discuss is what we see on the surface: the finished art work, the published piece, the film, the TV show, the dress. But the work that goes into that, the institutions that come into play, the oppressions that are intrinsic to that system — we are kept in the dark about these things. After all, we can be so aware of power relations and capital, and still deny what that truly means. (more…)

komentaryo

George Ty tales: One estate, two names, five children

It’s become interesting the reactions I’ve gotten for deciding to talk about George Ty’s estate controversy. Some have come in the form of links and screencaps from anonymous sources; some are asking questions about who his real wife is. But my favorite is a long-ish comment on this page telling me basically that I’m making a mountain out of molehill, that it’s all much ado about nothing, my questions about why George Ty’s declared estate is but a fraction of his P700-billion-peso net worth before he died. According to this comment, it’s all very simple: George Ty had time to transfer his estate to his different children and business interests, and therefore the declaration of but P3 billion is all possible, and legal, and above ground.

But see, here’s the thing: I’m not even asking about possibility or legality. I’m asking about why it’s even allowed. I’m asking about why it’s even being done. After all, just because something can be done, doesn’t make it right.

Here’s the other thing: telling me not to look into something just makes me want to dig deeper into exactly the same thing. And in the case of George Ty, it’s a wonder what simple Google searches yield, given what is a seeming news blackout from around February 2019 to the present. Layer this with being told this is a non-story, and so many sources sending questions and screencaps, and one cannot help but think that there really is more to this than meets the eye.

(more…)