Category Archive for: pangyayari

komentaryo

DOH, #Covid19, public information: crisis and gov’t distrust

Here’s something that’s become clearer now: Duterte’s rhetoric—that one that’s been sold as a personality quirk, that cracks inappropriate jokes, that same one that shifts towards violence every chance it gets, that dismisses important issues by saying it’s fake news, that evades critical demands of nation by delivering empty soundbites and/or talking about the drug war over and over again, or his perceived enemies like media and America—this Duterte rhetoric is government’s communications policy.

Sure, it might not be written anywhere, but it is the rhetoric that Duterte’s men and women have used, especially when faced with questions from a populace now unable to contain its dismay and disgust. Keeping us preoccupied with soundbites also means we lose precious time for piecing together the parts of the various crises we face.

We see this strategy being used for the COVID19 crisis.

Click here for the rest of it on Disquiet.ph.

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…)