Walang pagkilos na kultural na hindi nababalot ng kontradiksyon.
Kontradiksyon ang eleksyon at ang pagsampa ng kahit na sinong artista sa entablado ng sortie.
Kontradiksyon ang pagsusulat bilang hanapbuhay para sa pulitiko.
Kontradiksyon ang pagsusulat ng opinion column para sa diyaryong pagaari ng big business o oligarkiya. (AKO) (more…)
while elsewhere in the world the discussions for women’s day and women’s month 2016 have been on the level of celebrity women’s bodies and slutshaming, role models and raising our young girls, in the Philippines we have a government that cannot even pretend to know what women need, much less what we want. (more…)
Work kept me from visiting the Lumad Camp in the University of the Philippines Diliman early in the week. On Tuesday evening, their second night, I arrived close to midnight to bring a cash donation for the camp’s food fund and some medicines from a doctor.
Feeding 800 Lumad at P50 pesos per head is P40,000 pesos per meal after all. From the moment I heard that they were coming, this was what I wanted to raise funds and get donations for.
Thankfully, my network of real and virtual (i.e., social media) friends were ready and willing to donate, depositing varied amounts into my bank account and hoping it will help in any way. A writer-musician friend got the product he endorses to make a huge tocino donation, with some hotdogs for the kids to boot.
At the tail-end of the week, Art Relief (the heavens bless them!) was coming in to put up their mobile kitchen and feed the Lumad. Many food and water donations came in, too, throughout the week, and one can’t help but be glad that so many are rising to the occasion of the Lumad. (more…)
On election season, it is clear when we’re hearing nothing but pa-cute and pa-media mileage, not just because we must be critical of everything we hear, but because usually it is in these instances that candidates slip up, revealing precisely how little they know of the subjects they speak of, and how they presume — they imagine! — that we will believe anything at all that they say. (more…)
A trip to China at this point in time can only be embroiled in questions about the crisis that is the West Philippine Sea dispute.
But also it is about everything that we know of China from third world Philippines, where global news means Western media, talking about China and Asia using a gaze that is far from objective, and always necessarily – and maybe inevitably – about protecting the interests of the world-power-that-be, i.e., America.
There is nothing like seeing Asia as separate from America, to realize that we might really only be understanding very little about the world. (more…)