Why do Filipinos see incidents, not concepts?
By JoeAmPresident Aquino speaks with relatives of ‘Mamasapano 44’ casualties [Photo source: Philippine Star]
And it is just not Filipinos. It seems that the whole social media buzz saw has chopped our attention spans into bite-sized pieces and our analysis into irrelevant trivial pursuits.
I recently wrote on Facebook and Twitter that President Aquino had a problem because, although he was successful, the fact that he was honest was a threat to those who are corrupt. So they dumped their hate on him.
And they are still dumping, judging from the flock of trolls and analytically handicapped people who descended on my Twitter feed to cite the SAF 44 or bullets in bags as proof positive that President Aquino was neither successful nor honest. The nation’s foreign affairs secretary added his own complaint, citing a problem with the wheels on MRT.
Specific incidents are not a presidency. They are events and they usually have a context other than the president. You have to read more than headlines to get to the truth.
For those inclined to use that trite “yeah, but the buck stops at the top” argument, kindly apply it to President Duterte as well, starting with thousands of dead poor people and a whole lot of dead kids . . . and then move on to *his* loss of control over Philippine seas to China.
I don’t want to review common argumentative fallacies again. We’ve been there already.
I want to raise a red flag. We are going stupid fast. We can no longer read for information or talk in concepts that give data meaning. We’re like a pack of grandmas at the quilting bee chattering about Maude’s fancy new bloomers. Then a minute later we are aghast that the preacher was caught smoking weed. And Bob has a hernia.
Good lord! Then the thinkers are bashed as elitist because none of the grandmas can grasp the point.
That seems to me to be the definition of elite these days. The elite are people with knowledge that others don’t have, and resent.
President Aquino was not perfect. Did my comment say he had to be perfect to be successful? No. That’s nutcase thinking. He raised the nation up. That’s what he did. If you look at the nation’s standing on international ratings, you KNOW it was on the rise, and Filipinos were once again gaining the respect of the international community. If you don’t KNOW this, then you aren’t reading enough, are playing games with us for your own self-interest, or are mentally deficient, and my condolences to you.
President Aquino ran a prudent financial ship, employed competent technocrats is most positions, dealt with issues candidly and transparently, and had the economy humming.
Wadda hell does a battlefield loss mean against the weight of his overall achievements? Or busted train wheels?
Absolutely nothing.
Until Filipinos . . . or Americans or whoever . . . can learn to read for knowledge rather than emotional kicks, and think for lessons rather than irrelevant trivia, we will continue to self destruct. You can’t build a nation on poor facts and lousy analysis.
You just can’t.
And kindly don’t tell me about the glory of “Build Build Build” and how the public loves Duterte.
The point is not Duterte.
It isn’t even the Philippines.
It is you, and your capacity to think constructively.
The Society of Honor by Joe America 
“Constructively.” Is that a new word in the Filipino-English lexicon? Haven’t read that term in Duterteworld. Not in three years.
They don’t think in those terms, I think. They proposed ‘build build build’ then forgot about it. Absolutely no forward or even sideways thinking about how to deal with China. Purely reactive.
Build, construct-same difference. 🙄
In 1955 as Basic ROTC cadet, I Iearned about backfire, backlash, recoil and ricochet. A foot soldier was blown into smithereens because he was dumb to watch and stand behind a recoilless rifle being fired by his buddy. I know but they don’t know that a faulty analogy could lead into unexpected but correct conclusions.
The man in barong in the photo in this thread made me put words into his mouth:
“I don’t know why they’re picking on me”, calling me names, shaming my family, incessantly, mercilessly. I am a spent force, a has been, a faded politician but I did something good for the country; people know my name to have fought against bad people destroying the country. The world say my Mom had RESTORED Democracy; my Dad died for Democracy.
“Why are these people can’t stop picking on me?” Do they want people to bring me back to finish the job? Have I done not enough against bad people? Do they want the people to bring me back to be their national leader again? Are these people foot soldiers lining up behind recoilless rifles? I don’t believe shit happens to good people, although it could take a long time, but surely shit happens to bad people if you read history.
He can dish it out, I am sure he can take it.
This is not saying that he is wrong in blaming Gloria Arroyo in almost all his SONAs.
https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news/specialreports/525570/pnoy-s-sonas-blaming-the-past-praising-the-present-entrusting-the-future/story/
IN OTHER WORDS
Concept: we are going up.
Incidents:
– but aren’t those a lot of bumps and spikes we see along the way?;
– didn’t we stumble greatly in Mamasapano?
I don’t like bumps and spikes; I like smooth. I don’t like 77 soldiers killed.
But how about the thousands of druggies killed without due process? How about our fishermen not being able to fish in our EEZ? WELL … you are just adding the numbers from the small daily incidents, not the single swift chunky event of Mamasapano.
Right. The loss of military and rebel lives was certainly tragic. Mistakes were made, but not by the President in the operation proper. His not being present for the arrival of the caskets in Manila was just the kind of emotionalized criticism that got blown way out of proportion, with no insightful balancing push-back against it. Marawi was multiples worse, and the drug war, multiples of multiples. That shows how crazy the uprising was against Aquino. It underscores my whole point about lack of conceptual reasoning power.
There is something wrong, really, really something wrong with the Filipino psyche. Some have sold their souls to the devil.
This might be playful thinking outside the box on Ms Arlene’s comment.
There are two variables mentioned: ill psyche and soul for sale. As conceptual entities Psyche is not perfect, something could be wrong with it while a soul is a whole, concrete and solid entity.
These two concepts involve Psychology (psyche) and Theology (soul). Whereas soul is theoretically marketable to only one buyer and can be sold only in entirety and not only part of it, Psyche practically and realistically, can only be corrupted permanently and remains with the person. Many believe people lost their souls infinitely when they sell them to the devil, the only authorized buyer of souls.
People who sell their souls don’t lost them forever but they can’t be like animals who have no souls which go to limbo when they die. People who sold their souls get them back when they die but must stay scorching forever with the buyer in hell. Well, these outside the box thoughts could bring lots of money to a revivalist preacher like Elmer Gantry. This is not a learning something for Karl or others.
Seems that many have. It starts at the top, as one friend on FB noted,
This reminds me of the story of the Temptation of Christ. He was offered the World (fancy infrastructure and the promise of riches), the Flesh (for national pride/national ego), and to worship the Devil (loss of morality, honor, and principles by accepting the “kill culture”, slander, spreading of untruths as norms). So sad.
Amen to that: the warfare between good vs evil in a nutshell; virtue vs concupiscence.
counsel of Obedience vs pride and absolute dominion
counsel of Poverty vs greed for and attachment to material things and influence
counsel of Chastity vs carnal slavery
Interesting read why Chinese care little for the common good.
https://www.inkstonenews.com/opinion/why-china-has-no-civil-society/article/3017837
GOLD NUGGETS
There are golden nuggets in that short note by Pi Yijun:
… Such values include Immanuel Kant’s improvement on the golden rule, the Categorical Imperative, which says you must act as you would want all other people to act towards all other people, as if it were a universal law. [Emphasis, mine.]
In the case of China he writes: To become a civil society, China needs to embrace public rules, not private ethics.
SIDE NOTE. I find it interesting that “Pi Yijun is a criminal justice professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing.” Which means, to me, that Beijing saw fit not to censor such writing. But this is my additional comment regarding this: “public rules” as promulgated by the few leaders of China who themselves may act unbound by universally accepted international rules of behavior.
I cannot help adding for emphasis: although, in my opinion, Pi Yijun is right about his note on embracing public rules [if they are considered sound] rather than private ethics, perhaps the general mass of Chinese are not dense enough to realize that such public rules are formulated only by these few leaders and not something they agree with — it has been always like that for centuries or millenniums. So to the mass of Chinese, public ethics serve them better, not the so-called Politburo-ordained public rules.
Public ethics = private ethics.
You hit the nail on the head. Even people who I thought were capable of intelligent analyses and discourse have turned out to be petty, narrow-minded, nitpicking souls. Don’t know if it has to do with old age grey matter calcification or simply a gradual revelation of what they really were to start with. At any rate I hope they constitute only a small percentage of the population (although something tells I could be dreadfully wrong there). Otherwise it’s curtains for this country.
On 7/8/19, The Society of Honor: the Philippines
Agree. They best wake up or snooze for a long, long time.
bravo.
Good of you to visit, cynthia, and offer a kind word.
Related: https://m.dw.com/en/entertainment-tv-makes-you-less-intelligent-more-susceptible-to-populism/a-49503933
This too:
Thanks for the supporting exhibits.
THE DUMBING DOWN OF THE MASSES
Very interesting and useful in helping to explaining what is going on not only in Italy — where the study was made — but all over the world.
Excerpts:
Indeed, by “by priming particular cultural models, light entertainment shows, soap operas, and advertising” can have just as much as effect on behavior as politically biased TV news, the report noted.
…
“Taken together, our findings support the view that exposure to entertainment television, particularly at a young age, can contribute to making individuals cognitively and culturally shallower, and ultimately more vulnerable to populist rhetoric,” the report said, noting that this does not necessarily mean right-wing populism, but rather whatever side of the political spectrum the individuals were more often presented with.
…
The study also notes that age of exposure, either as very young children or as much older viewers, affected receptiveness to populist messaging as well as intelligence: “For individuals first exposed to Mediaset as children, we find that entertainment TV has a negative impact on cognitive abilities in adulthood…these individuals also exhibit significantly lower levels of civic engagement.”
The result of the study is rather intuitive. Locally, the dumbing down of the populace whether HS or college educate — being feed daily with shows such as Wowie, Eat Bulaga, Tawag ng Tanghali — is obvious. The brain is virtually not exercised or stimulated at all except at the lowest level.
Thanks for the link, Irineo.
ADD TO THAT
… The biyearly or is it quarterly (?) Pacquiao boxing extravaganza and all those beauty contests; and we see that the fishermen are more cognitive than most — the fishermen’s daily routine not allowing him enough time to see these inanities, etc.
Based on that study, if I were Xi, I will subsidize the above mentioned shows. No need to use the sophistication of Huawei or ram the fishermen’s boats in our EEZ waters to achieve China’s objectives in PH.
I know from my Italy visits (I usually get a feel of the society I just am visiting by watching TV the first night) what Berlusconi’s TV was about:
1) Eat Bulaga like shows with a lot of talk, singing and laughter, things Italians are also fond of.
2) Miss Italia very much featured. I recall one being interviewed about her work in Catholic lay organizations. She was in bathing suit beside a priest. The moderator and the priest of course looked only at her while she spoke of it, and I grinned.
3) A quiz show with women dressed in different colored bikinis defined as fruits. By answering correctly one could make them strip. Tutti Frutti was exported to Germany and more..
I admit that it felt like a respite from the “boring” German state TV, just like RTL in Cologne, originally Radio Tele Luxemburg broadcasting over the border, was a respite for us bored by the old folks on Channels 1, 2 and 3 – we who voted for Schroder in 1998 when private TV, mobile phones and Internet changed things. Some of us quickly noticed when Schröder lowered our income taxes but raised VAT, meaning making stuff more expensive – others did not. Long story.
I’m going to bring this up, not nice but here goes: seen po angela merkel on t.v. she has pronounced tremors lately, 3x reportedly. is she being slowly poisoned? putin hated her guts. nothing to be concerned about, sabi. so why is she shaking? big things comes from little things, and could well escalate. I would hate to see her felled, good woman of germanic stock.
I’ve seen similar tremors po on those that had ect, electro compulsive therapy, the last line treatment for those with mental disorders; when nothing else work, medications included. but they’re strapped to bed and held tight, else they fall off and hurt themselves during treatment.
with angela merkel, I hope it’s only parkinsons. and not putin’s nefarious machinations.
I hope it is not ALS.
I think she is simply stressed and will be better after her soon to be summer break.
14 years of heavy responsibility and today’s very hard times are taking their toll. She is seeing her announced last term through for two more years.
Thanks.
I’m going to start looking at people as animals rather than sentient beings. Monkeys would be too smart. They at least pick the fleas off one another. Maybe pangolins.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=471612953385303&id=100016098071117
Makes me think about how several decades of Sampaguita productions and hence the continuing fascination and fanaticism with showbiz, and eventual idolatry have affected how our people think. I mean, we’re too much into entertainment, and for the first time in human history we’re seeing more entertainment options than we could try to consume.
very sorry to say po that entertainment is industry the give jobs to lots of people, feeds lot of people too. it provides escapism, much like reading fiction books with people escaping from the mundane and into the lives of fiction heroes and villains. the industry is very competitive, cutthroat pa, skills are finely honed. there are singers and musicians, cinematographers and artists, etc. my lola used to make custom clothes for artists to use. the periods one are tricky to make and takes time, they have to be perfect and convincing.
we have movie idols po, but they’re just idols, they come and go.
there are schools of performing arts po, specialising in drama and theater works. graduates are highly sought and some make it big. with years of hard work and dedication, fame and glory and eventually big pay come with it. but no one rest on their laurels, else they got piles, lol!
Don’t be sorry about your well-put insight.
Those who howled like Banshees about the SAF44 seem mainly indifferent to the residents of Marawi living as refugees in their own country, or to the RectoBank22 who could have died if not for a Vietnamese ship. Witness how the Criticon by Mabanta first only planned to commemorate the soldiers who died in Marawi. The emotionality excludes certain people who are outside their idea of “kami”.
Could the latest Duterte +68 rating be the same as a 68 in the IQ test? 🙂
Sometimes even simple stories tell more..
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10214410023264231&id=1227872308
A very personal view..
There has been a gradual dumbing of the population worldwide.
I grew up with BBC’s Panorama and the Dutch and French equivalents and was under the impression that the world is thinking and improving.
How wrong I was.
We got TV and though it showed us the world and brought Apollo and Vietnam live in our living room, soon people started to get bored and switched to Coronation Street and worse: reality TV.
It really hit home when the root cause of the Challenger disaster came out: PowerPoint… Experts knew what was wrong and wrote a nice report. But reports are difficult to read, so management got them translated into PowerPoint and it became a single line item, was overlooked and oooops, boiiiiing went the spacecraft. To me, that showed how dumbed down we had become. And observing the world with this experience, I am amazed that it gradually gets worse everywhere. A visit to the US blew my mind when I could not find any decent TV program giving full information on issues (like “Panorama” attempts to do). I could not find anybody who could discuss issues beyond “nuke them”. I know that there are jewels like Noam Chomsky but they are not well known even in the US because they are silenced in the press.
Then comes Philippines, a country which tries to mirror the US in many ways. No critical thinking in the schools, you always say “Yes Sir” to your boss and watch dumb TV after work.
People hardly read. Newspapers readers are rare and critical papers are only for the very few. And even there, you are challenged to find balanced reporting.
So, What do you expect?
Ofcourse people cannot see the difference between “lazy” Aquino and “action man” Duterte. They never learned to analyse, they never learned to think, they never learned to take a decission and face the consequences.
Ì think in the army, you would call it “cannon fodder”.
And Facebook and the other (‘un’)social media is making things worse.
It is a worldwide trend which gave us the US president, Brexit and Duterte and is threatening democracy everywhere
As we now know, our very rich fellows pay top dollar to convince people that there is no climate change and we need less taxes but spend more on arms. And in the Filipino case, more on parking spaces and rice drying areas they call roads and useless (but expensive) bridges , but nothing to build a decent legal system or top class education.
In spite of all, there are some great people who see the light. In Philippines, they go abroad like lightning.
So, is this a fatalistic view of an old fart? I don’t hope so. Remember the 60’s and how young people took charge and challenged the establishment and brought us Woodstock and ML.King, hippies and Hawkins?? Now, the young generation needs to do it again and raise hell. It won’t be pleasant. Time is pressing and unlike the 60’s, it’s not about concepts like democracy and liberty. It will be a fight for existence because that is what climate change will bring us. Raw fights for existence. And all these concepts like liberty and human rights will hopefully ride shotgun on the flow.
We have to trust (hope???) that the young generation will rebel and start the fight. The Octavio Cortez and Thunbergs and their armies are my only hope. We, the old farts (which is everybody above 30), have fucked up royally in spite of repeated warnings. Our senses became blunt after the success of the 60’s and we never paid attention to the emerging warnings. Life was good and we worked very hard to build a good life, but got tunnel vision and ignored the obvious consequences of our actions. We thought we could manage everything with PowerPoint, technology and the Internet. We forgot to look around us and include our environment (people and nature).
How wrong we were.
So, we should be very humble and support the emerging young people and hope they make the right decisions for us. Ofcourse we have experience and could offer our support. But that would be more of the stuff which put us in trouble to begin with.
So, where does that leave Philippines????
It is too easy to describe the situation as “cannon fodder”.
We had Gina Lopez, although not exactly young herself, she got a big following amongst the young generation.
Maybe a new “Gina” will emerge and energize the kids. That is one advantage of Philippines, with a population growing like a rabbit warren, the old generation could be outnumbered easily if the young ones get their act together.
Do I see this happening?
Realistically not.
The history of submission is too strong.
But it COULD happen. It SHOULD happen and we have seen stranger things become reality.
So, I hope and pray that somewhere in this huge army of kids, there is one who does not escape abroad but leads this army to a responsible society.
And until then?
Treat it like an addict. There is no use to try to help an addict in the early stages. The addict has to go through deep, deep shit before (s)he feels the need to get out and that is when you can help. Until that time, you’re just wasting your effort.
Like addicts, there is a huge chance that the patient will go belly-up, there is a realistic (but smaller) chance that the addict will kick the habit and emerges stronger. In the last case, it would be great to provide support as I don’t like standing behind the sidelines. But until then? Nothing much we an do to help the patient but to challenge all young people I meet. Maybe, maybe someone gets triggered.
Hope is a beautiful thing.
From another “old fart:” nice, especially the reality-based suggestion in the last paragraph, if no young activist can bring us to that place sooner.
Wonderful picture of history and now. And hope.
*****
1. A very good question… and some nice answers too.
2. Let me offer another perspective.
3. As we have said before, Filipinos do not generally live examined lives. We are not philosophers, we are not cerebral, we are not analytical. What we are as a collectivistic society is that we are tradition-bound.
4. What are our traditions?
5. In the main, they are the world’s ideologies, the world paradigms that intersect and intertwine and that govern our lives. These are:
o Politics: liberal democracy, authoritarianism
o Ethical/religious: Christianity, Islam, agnosticism, atheism
o Economic: market, neoliberalism
6. Now, each world paradigm exists at two levels: the level of theory and the level of practice.
6.1. The practice is the outer layer, and it consists of institutions, rituals, procedures, and customs.
6.2. The theory is the inner layer, and it consists of concepts, values, tenets, and doctrines. In short, the raisons d’être.
7. In general, Filipinos live through the world paradigms at the level of practice and not that of theory. Our epistemology, our way of learning is by example, monkey-see and monkey-do. As a result, we do not see, do not understand the theoretical concepts. What we focus on are incidents and incidentals without the context of the theory. In such blindness, we do not see that the practices often collide and contradict the theory.
7.1. Examples abound. If you think about it, each and every point of conflict in our political and moral lives is the dissonance between theory and practice.
7.2. Irineo recently mentioned that we practice religion at the level of rituals.
*****
Fit likes a glove.
THE CONCEPT OF EXISTENTIAL THREATS
In a larger frame, Herbert Lin of Stanford University writes of three existential threats — Nuclear war, climate change, and cyber- enabled information warfare.
I find the topic relevant to the current blog since we are writing here about Concepts
and how difficult it is for people — and to be fair, not only to Filipinos, but people in general, including my once greatly admired Americans — to think in those terms even in their spare, unhurried lives. Certainly, existential threats comes to a higher consideration in talking about concepts.
Please bear with me [or skip this entirely] as I give the last two Itemized topics from the pdf link:
7. The coming information dystopia
Nuclear war and climate change are arguably the most important existential challenges today that are compounded by the corruption of the information ecosystem. But even if a single miraculous stroke the laws of physics were changed to make nuclear weapons impossible to build and operate and to immediately eliminate anthropogenic emissions at zero cost, cyber- enabled information warfare can still can lead to an information dystopia. Here are some possible elements:
• Adversaries manufacture numerous graphic videos of American soldiers (complete with sound effects) committing battlefield atrocities, and spread them widely through the Internet. Once upon a time, high-quality video forgeries were difficult and expensive to make. AI-based technologies will bring this so-called deepfake capability to the masses, and anyone with imagination, a modicum of technical skill, and a personal computer will be able to distribute reasonably realistic forgeries. Denials will be issued but of course will also not be believed by large fractions of viewers. Even if proof of inauthenticity can be provided, such evidence will not affect the responses of many viewers.
• Political campaigns conduct similar efforts to discredit political opponents (e.g., “showing” an opponent making controversial or disqualifying remarks before an election). But they also use the existence of deepfake technologies to deflect attention from authentic and real evidence of their own political and personal misdeeds. For example, a real video of a candidate punching an old lady who supports his opponent will be dismissed as “one of those deepfakes that anyone could have produced.”
• Financial markets are disrupted by falsified videos of CEOs making announcements regarding company prospects that are much more pessimistic than expected. Attempts to correct the record are drowned out in a subsequent flood of contradictory information, all of which appear at first glance to be authentic.
• Public safety is compromised by reports of local disasters (e.g., explosions of chemical plants that result in the release large amounts of toxic gases). These reports, along with “authentic” video of people choking amidst locally familiar locations (e.g., well-known fields or sport stadiums), cause spontaneous mass evacuations. Contradictory directions for evacuation broadcast using social media result in chaos on the streets and highways.
• Public health is placed at risk when the safety and efficacy of medical treatments known to be safe and effective are publicly questioned through active disinformation campaigns conducted on the Internet and in bookstores. Attempts to provide valid information are met with responses such as “that’s what the pharmaceutical companies and medical establishment want you to think, but just look at what’s happened to our
children.”
• Children in schools are threatened by online campaigns to spread rumor, innuendo, and
positive or negative information about various students. Conducting such campaigns for pay becomes the business model of entrepreneurs who advertise that they can guarantee admission to selective colleges, boost the social standing of the children of their clients, or take revenge on those who have harmed such children, all in anonymous and untraceable ways.
• Journalists, political leaders, and judges are compromised by artfully forged emails and alterations to other documents that are mixed with entirely authentic leaked emails and documents and are indistinguishable from them.
A world with these elements—and many more comparable ones—will be the inevitable result if and when deployment and use of the tools of cyber-enabled information warfare become widespread. And even more troubling is the fact that not every bit of information needs to be corrupted for this dystopian outcome to occur—it will require only a fraction of it to be corrupted for people to lose faith entirely in “objective” and “trustworthy” sources of information, the result of which will be that people will fractionate into their own information realities.
8. Fearing the end of the enlightenment
The Enlightenment established reason and reality as the foundational pillars of civilized
discourse. In such discourse, logic matters, and a logical contradiction between statement A and
statement B means that at least one of those statements is false. The truth of a statement about the world is tested by its correspondence to objective reality rather than by how many people believe it; that is, empirical data are influential. Furthermore, statements known to be wrong or false do not affect conclusions or choices between alternative courses of action.
Cyber-enabled information warfare provides the tactics, tools, and procedures—in
short, the means—to replace the pillars of logic, truth, and reality with fantasy, rage, and fear.
communication and information inflame passions rather than informing reason, play to the worst in people’s cognitive architectures rather than the best, and divide rather than unify. Deliberate corruption of the information ecosystem could be seen as an analog of poisoning water supplies that can be done remotely, inexpensively, and anonymously. All of this is just another way of saying that today it is possible to see glimmerings of an anti-Enlightenment that can possibly take root and that would indeed be the end of civilization as we know it.
Adversaries foreign and domestic that make use cyber-enabled information warfare turn our internal cognitive processes and our external institutional and legal processes against us. Under the cover of “fair play” rubrics and the First Amendment, they have turned us against ourselves. Desperately needed are ways of countering the insidious tactics of cyber-enabled information warfare for ourselves.
How might we proceed? We need action to develop better ways of identifying adversary cyber-enabled information warfare campaigns in progress; good countermeasures to,
In a world of ubiquitous cyber-enabled information warfare, help human beings resist the use of cyber-enabled information warfare operations targeted against them; and good measures to degrade, disrupt, or expose the adversary’s use of cyber- enabled information warfare operations. All of this is easier said than done, however, as cyber- enabled capabilities for information warfare increase while human cognitive limitations remain the same. Our work is cut out for us. If we fail, the world is at increasing risk of large-scale and long-term societal fracture, the end of the Enlightenment, and the start of an informational Dark Age.
https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/lin_ceiw_as_existential_threat-final_bas.pdf?utm_source=Fareed%27s+Global+Briefing&utm_campaign=3a39e6154a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_09_09_36&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6f2e93382a-3a39e6154a-92918093
This, too, is a vibrant statement of the condition of our condition. This thread is power-packed with insight.
There is a reason why rhe TV is called the idiot box.
We use to and still watch rigged quiz and gameshows, scripted prowrestling. fixed basket ball games, toilet humor, any super sad story that accompanies your talent would always be a plus.
But it is what you choose.
If we hoose the boring, educational, transformative shows in the not so idiot smart phones maybe we would be as smart as our phones.
Speaking of toilet humor.
I know two young Sottos doing well.
Wahoo Sotto in Paranaque.
Vico is promising.
I hope they will be much better than their uncle.
About that other young guy Isko.
If he does not reach the finish line sayang naman.
I see questions of his backup plan for the displaced, their heart is in the right place, but we all need to be reminded that the aksyon agad impatience made people vote Duterte.
That TSH tweet about
Sec Locsin saying HRW is pushing the PH into the arms of China,
Is really rich. At the very least it confirms the regard that officials like him — paid for by PH taxpayers — regard the Filipinos they are supposed to serve. It also indirectly supports the truth of the current blog.
Yes.
yay! sec locsin must be celebrating then, hrw is godsend and pushing pinas into the arms of china. duterte must be ecstatic too. friends and friends alike, coming together, lol!
embrace hrw, help and assist hrw, locsin ought to do that and narrow the gap between china and pinas, shorten the distance between them.
it is in locsin’s best interest to support hrw, really. and I dare say, speed it along! lol!
TRIVIA
What is it with Go. He is now a Senator to which post he campaigned without letup. But in the pictures I have seen him in since the Election, I still see him at the back or along with his master Duterte. Is he a Senator or what?
Ah, yes. [My brain lacks the nimbleness I thought I had before.] As the grandson of a neighbor is fond of saying, “Gets ko na.” He is now campaigning for the office of the next president.
Could be. I wonder what voters think about Go when they vote for him. Their entire base of information is fiction.
To illustrate: what is that guy on the left doing here?
Ok, ok. This is just an incident. Is there a concept here?
Oops. Here is the photo:
The concept is lack of ethical bearing, as with China. Laws and rules only apply as the powerful want them applied.
I dont know, but looking at the pic nherrera so kindly posted makes me want to so badly bang the men’s heads together!
RE ROQUE
Yes. As, I have said before and illustrated graphically here in TSH: gray or white becomes that much brighter or whiter in a field of black.
I would take him even with his Barong instead of Panelo’s Suits.
Yes, indeed.
AN INTERESTING NEWS ITEM
A July 4 Inquirer News item has this:
“So far, there’s no definite date but I know that he’s (Duterte) going. So there’s no definite date but he definitely will go to the United States,” Romualdez [PH Ambassador to the US] told reporters in a chance interview during the celebration of the 243rd anniversary of the U.S. Independence Day in Makati City Wednesday night.”
https://globalnation.inquirer.net/177472/duterte-will-definitely-visit-us-ph-envoy#ixzz5tFmxPM7E
I remember Trump inviting Duterte to visit the US early in the latter’s Presidency. I am curious though what the pressing reason is for this desire to go visit Uncle Sam. Tired of Chinese Diet?
Diet in the literal and figurative sense, that is.
Like my Population Control and Nutrition solution for the Philippines, NH. Maybe too much protein and amino acids for DU30??? 😉 too much of a good thing, is also not healthy.
I won’t be surprised if it’s July 20 Saturday, maybe somewhere out west???
variety is the key to life, NH. if choking get rid of said items stuck. 😉
Studies show that they don’t have much protein anyways.
Stop bringing that up,pretty please. Funny and informative at the start, then it becomes disgusting, and no it is not too much of a good thing.
And it is not good for the prostate like you said.
karl, if the protein comes from lots of animal meat, bad for the elderly kidneys too.
karl,
I think NH stumbled onto something here (i’m just adding to it), but this is the metaphor that’ll maybe stick, and turn the tide re DU30’s popular support, “Chinese Diet”.
EVOLUTION OF WEAPONRY ON A GEOPOLITICAL SCALE
On Topic because the “game” or the geopolitical strategy described involves not only the US and Russia but our friend, er … boss, China.
I suppose some boys go through a stage where fascination with battleships, submarines, planes, torpedoes cause these kids to drag their parents to the toy store to buy them plastic or cartoon models of these.
The link gives a fascinating look at the evolution of weaponry. George Friedman, a geopolitical expert describes the evolution of the command of the sea as the foundation of British and US military and economic superiority to the natural evolution of the concept of command of the sea via command of the air to now the big scramble to command of the sea through command of the space because of the new toy — hypersonic missile.
Papa, after lunch can we go to the store to buy a model of a hypersonic missile. All my friends are talking about it. Please, Papa.
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/command-of-the-sea/?utm_source=GPF+-+from+George+Friedman&utm_campaign=124a967a30-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_07_24_02_48_COPY_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ad288f5e57-124a967a30-264725885
China stole much of their hypersonic tech from us, for sure. But the race like 5G or cyber crypto makes for greater innovation me thinks. The future is bright, if climate change doesn’t bite us first that is. 😉
Rapinoe: ‘We have to love more and hate less.’
Yes, yes, yes!
Trump must have been reduced to a stutter to counter the phenomenon of that Rapinoe Speech in the Women’s World Cup Parade in Broadway.
What an enthusiastic mountain of a crowd — makes the canned clapping crowd at the back of Trump, similarly clapping [why do leaders like KJU do that], in his campaign rallies, look like a molehill. Becoming boring really by repetition.
It almost seems as if a new set of leaders is emerging in response to Trump’s autocratic ways. New values. Aggressive. Smart. Determined to bring the US back to its democratic roots. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rapinoe in politics.
An interesting idea!
WHILE the story is from 10 years ago, it has recently resurrected. It is that Filipinos have the average intelligence of a rock—or maybe tree bark on a good day—in comparison to the rest of the world.
https://businessmirror.com.ph/2018/11/06/are-filipinos-dumb/
I don’t think it is a matter of “dumb” as much as confined by centuries of bondage to order-givers, that bondage having built up a large amount of subconscious resentments that get exposed during elections. There are a lot of exceptions to any generalizations. I was reflecting this morning, however, on how different it would be if the Senate were occupied with a lot of people of the character of Hontiveros, De Lima, Aquino, Trillanes, and the like, versus the slugs that make up the majority now. It would be day to night, in capability. It is a shame that Filipinos broadly cannot distinguish between the two, or are so emotionally needful that they punish themselves with their voting decisions.
Thank God for the exceptions to the rule. Erase that, there are zero exceptions from the senate newbies, but there are from the incumbents like Hontiveros. I am anti-divorce, but that is just me, and I am flexible as time goes by.
ON DUMBNESS
The distinction or qualification is important.
One can probably write an extended essay on the subject of dumbness or stupidity, or do an epistemology such as done by edgar, but I would like to add only one simple thought, aligned with your comment.
There is dumbness displayed by legislators (in the House or Senate); and the apparent dumbness displayed by the general mass of the Filipinos. Even viewed from the prism of short term self-interest, I would say the one displayed by the “Honorables” is way out compared with that of the mass. Why? For the reason that the rat-race hand-to-mouth daily living of the uneducated masses is to me more understandable than that of the Honorables.
This might be apropos to the discussion re Filipino & intelligence, but I was gone most of 4th of July weekend in the mountains sucking up what’s left of the fresh air here, Joe, but I got into a discussion with a buddy of mine re Apollo landings as hoax.
And my quick retort to him was you can see it with a telescope, and sure enough we went down to camp and talked some poor dad with his brood w/ a telescope into obliging our hoax argument (pro vs. con), luckily he and his party was game.
To which some other random dude from another camp, commented, No you can’t see it via regular telescopes, not even with Hubble if you pointed it to the moon. HUH??!!! I’m like , so how do we independently verify then????????????
Other countries sent satellites up there to confirm our landings, he said. We (NASA) sent the LRO in 2009 and recorded the mess we left up there.
Moral of the story here is, get 3rd party verification, there’ll be some (or in the Apollo landings as hoax, plenty ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings
see it for yourself here,
http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc
Remember when a study said that we the Filipinos are the most ignorant?
https://businessmirror.com.ph/2018/02/08/ignorant-filipinos/
Why worry about it per this article.
https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/195583-filipinos-ignorant-social-media-study
To see is to believe. Most people unable to distinguish right and wrong think that everything on the “Internet” that is Facebook is real; they react instantly, they gravitate towards what they think affects them, and it’s this tendency with Filipinos that Youtubers found an easy market for which to increase their profits from ads.
And of course, skilled propagandists who found that such people are very impressionable. No wonder why the bad guys have the upper hand.
Thanks for your insights
That’s the sad state of some people’s thinking. For writing this article, I am sure you will be marked as part of the “yellow army”! Many of our people have to learn to focus more on the positive than the negative. The “build, build build” program is good. But, we still have to see results. Certainly, it would be premature to praise Duterte for this program.
Certainly, Duterte does not deserve to be our president. Sadly, his choice reflects the character of majority of our people.
I view yellow as being pro-democracy, pro-human rights, and pro civility. So I don’t mind any labeling done. I get flurries of trolls if I write on Twitter or FB about President Aquino, Sonny Trillanes, VP Robredo, or Senator De Lima. Otherwise they pretty much leave me alone.
UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL PASSED RESOLUTION TO PROBE PH KILLINGS
Here are the numbers on the Iceland-initiated Resolution with the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the thousands of killings in the Philippines associated with President Duterte’s War on Drugs:
– Voting for: 18
– Abstained: 15
– Voting Against: 14
The Resolution was approved.
*****
Good one.
*****
Manang Imee says awanin to that!
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2019/07/13/1934396/philippines-should-cut-diplomatic-relations-iceland-says-imee-marcos
duterte wants another marcos, did not say siya a babalina and a marcos are in order, lol! what’s to cut ties in iceland, full of ice yan e. can anyone imagine imee holding a supersize saw cutting through ice the way nordic fishermen do?
cut off diplomatic ties with iceland, for imee’s info, iceland is hankering towards her home country that is china, getting on the icy wagon of one belt one road. shouldn’t she be establishing better relations with iceland just in case? duterte, bato et al are being taken to high court for crimes againts humanity, and they dont comprise the whole of pinas, just a bunch of blood thirsty suckers that ought to be defanged and decommissioned.
who knows? maybe in the ensuring vacuum and in the absence of duterte et al, imee can make apo bangkay the proudest bangkay in the country, and grab what her angkan coveted the most: the presidency! she can not do that while duterte is around and happily destroying pinas, she playing a sad broken violin and getting only what is left of the ruins, ruling over hapless citizens numb to all.
a smart imee ought to preserve what can be preserved and limit damage.
liberte, fraternite, equalite.
Meanwhile:
https://news.abs-cbn.com/overseas/07/13/19/philippines-36-other-countries-defend-china-over-xinjiang-in-un-letter
Also: https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news/nation/700906/robredo-shrugs-off-impeachment-threat-over-unhrc-probe-support/story/
PACC looks the other way around, much like how VACC is pursuing its own selective form of “justice”; both organizations conveniently ignore blatant corruption committed by many of the politicians VACC supports.
THE SLOWDOWN IN OFW AND BPO EARNINGS
Even our Government Economic Managers may not look smart in the light of the following statistics coming from Habito, former NEDA Chief:
While these [OFW and BPO earnings] have indeed been a boon to us, emerging trends point to an imperative we cannot escape: We simply must shape up on the traditional and more durable sources of foreign exchange inflows: exports, tourism revenues and FDI.
It’s urgent for several reasons. First, we have fallen further and further behind our comparable neighbors on these traditional inflows, while corresponding outflows especially via imports just keep growing.
Meanwhile, inflows via [OFW] remittances and BPOs appear to be slowing down, and may soon start falling. Remittances growth is down to 3- to 4-percent annual growth, after having averaged well into the double digits in the last decade. BPO annual earnings growth is also now in the low single digits, peaking over 20 percent in past years. Industry leaders no longer see the earlier set revenue goal of $40 billion by 2022 as realistic, after barely earning $25 billion last year. These flows cannot be the answer to our persistent shortcomings on exports, tourism revenues and FDI inflows, where the gap with our neighbors just keeps widening.
Is Build, Build, Build the answer? Let us at least hope it helps.
https://opinion.inquirer.net/122553/our-slowing-inflows#ixzz5tSQ3ZDjE
OFW:
BPO:
there’s nothing there!!! was never a positive, just two negatives that don’t make a positive: 1) welfare and 2) illusion.
Steve Jobs said, “Life can be so much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
here’s the video:
Don’t wait for hand-outs (it won’t come); Don’t work only to get back sleep deprivation (you’ll never recover it). that’s OFW and BPO in a nutshell , really.
Joe had articles that tackles our courses -job mismatch.
We have too many Hospitality courses, business management courses but not everyone can own or manage a Hotel or restaurant or own and run a business.
Some do burger flipping, call center agents,lifelong employees.
We need marine engineers and naval architects to build and replace the 160 vessels wiith extended retrofitted lives.
We need to manufacture our own trains.
We must do licensed manufacturing if we can’t have our own brand. But Trump’s trade war is a stumbling block for that. The investors choosing our neighbors also is not helping.
And if you insist EJK is good in the long run, what is good about dead children and parents and investors pulling out because of wishy washy policies that keeps on attempting endless upmanship if not grabbing credit from previous admins .
Mindanao is indian country, karl, no amount of EJKs will make that place ready for railroads.
But that bridge to Bohol via Mactan from Cebu is very doable. railroad with the bridge too!!!
I agree, mismatch with skills and education, like Palm Oil just trying to chase after fads.
Why aren’t there cruise ship destinations yet??? it’s almost 2020!!! the rest of SE Asia have a robust tourist infrastructure to cater to cruise ships, send cruise ships to Palawan!!!
BUILD, BUILD, BUILD!!! is good. but start where it’s feasible , Cebu to Bohol, joining these two islands is key. After that, a robust ferry system like ones found in Puget Sound, hell even indonesia.
Railroads are bad idea for Mindanao. Like the wild west here, stick to better roads instead.
AND Why aren’t we hearing anything going on in the Celebes sea???
As for Trump’s trade war with China , take advantage of it like so many other countries. it’s an opportunity , squandered. 😉
Build Build Build was also what Chancellor Kohl did after German unity. It primarily helped West German firms doing doing the building.
Secondarily it did help areas which already had something else going for them. Parts of Saxony like Leipzig with its strong engineering tradition attracting a BMW plant, or the Görlitz plant for train wagons already known in the Communist era, bought by Bombardier – or Zeiss Jena, the expert lensmakers that reunited with their Western half in Oberkochen. Or the Northeastern beaches of Mecklenburg which attracted local tourism. Or the border areas close to Hannover which benefited from the airport, Volkswagen and other industry already there and cheap land.
Many parts of East Germany have renovated city centers, wide Autobahns leading to them and still no jobs there. There are not as many East German plate numbers on the Autobahn 9 leading into Munich on Monday morning as in the 1990s, but there are still enough. Though some have built houses by now on cheaper Eastern land, with money earned in decades of going West to work. I know two.
Infrastructure helps, but one can build roads to nowhere if not careful. Projects funded by the EU for new members have often also gone the way of Kohl’s Aufbau Ost, profits for German, French, Austrian firms but growth was not automatic.
Romania grew where there already was a knowledge/skills base. SAP built a development center in Cluj, Transylvania because of the top level computer science grads of the university there dating back to the Communist period. Renault took over and modernized Dacia car plants to have low cost car models. Romania also has a lot of BPO (highly multilingual and adaptable people due to centuries of being underdogs) and labor export (one fifth of the entire population) but those are volatile labor markets, not permanent solutions but a good way to earn money quickly for a while. As LCPL_X mentioned, no future, even if Romanian BPOs lose less sleep due to same time zone and Romanian workers can take the bus home often.
“not permanent solutions but a good way to earn money quickly for a while. As LCPL_X mentioned, no future…”
That’s the problem with Filipinos, Ireneo.
it was documented by Antonio Pigafetta when Magellan landed. Many of the island’s women, were given trinkets and beads and shiny objects by Spanish sailors and they in turn spread their legs.
That’s a historic metaphor that can still be applied now.
They open a box from the 1st world, and decide Hey I don’t have to work harder, there’ll be a box coming every month for me (where’s the shabu), and I will eat chocolate for the rest of my life.
BPO came, and the nation’s brightest (liberal arts & technical) all said Hey I have a career. This will be here forever.
temporary is not permanent; shiny does not mean valuable; know your worth. Everything i needed to learn about the Philippines I learned in girlie bars— that is essentially the Philippines , and Pigafetta has been correct this whole time.
Know the difference between illusion and reality, folks.
on Romania, I was once called on to figure out what an old lady was so distressed about, they assumed she looked Arab she must be Arab. but she didn’t speak Arabic, I couldn’t figure it out— so a Mexican buddy, started to speak Spanish real slow and there I guess were plenty of cognate words. And they understood each other.
maybe the Philippines should study Romania more. there seems cognates aplenty here. Thanks , Ireneo (will look more into Romania and BPO as well now).
On the Cushman and Wakefield BPO Index, Philippines was No. 1 and Romania No. 2 among mature locations in 2015.
They switched places in 2016 is what I just saw.
Do they service North America or just EU nations??? interesting. i remember you’ve talked about Romania before as basically ancient Rome’s Australia.
I think mostly EU locations as nearshoring.
Just like most Romanians migrate within the EU, 1-2 hours flight from family. Latin people.
For project work it is good they can come over for workshops or delivery without needing visa.
And English doesn’t work in many EU countries. Romanians with their language that is almost old Latin learn most EU languages easily, maybe they already know the country because they were there..
I onced talked to a customs officer that worked at LAX for a good 30 years, he was recently retired. he was also former military, so I shared my stories. When I mentioned Philippines among my experiences…
He remarked, Filipinos are the biggest liars that go thru LAX. simple questions like what have you brought into the country. whether big or small they’ll lie. just blatant LIES. Yeah, many nationalities lie, but none as consistent as Filipinos.
The old Filipinos especially, and once you find something in their luggage, they’ll say something like, That’s not mine; I don’t know what that is; etc. etc.
and I had similar experience, not as statistically sound as say a customs officer in one of the busiest airports facing asia, but my experience coincides w/ his.
My question, are Romanians also known for similar feats of lying in Europe??? I know Romas (gypsies) are, would probably be closest to Filipinos, but would like to know more about Romanian’s nuances.
THE ACTION OF A CIVILIZED COUNTRY
I find the following item too noteworthy for TSH Readers to miss if they only read the Blog and Comments and not view the Tweet Section where I took this:
IndoPacific_SCS_Info
@IndoPac_Info
1h
#Vietnamese fishing boat rescued 32 Chinese fishermen in the #SouthChinaSea yesterday after their boat sunk. Unlike #China, that rams Vietnamese & #Filipino fishing boats and leave the fishermen to die, #Vietnam acts like a civilized country. @zaldytor @Marybeezzz @societyofhonor
my funny bone is asking po why in the name of the dead clams did the chinese boat sunk? revenge of the fishes baga yon with nemo hitting back and giving the chinese what they deserved, lol! in their greed, their overly loaded boat could not take it and sunk, burdened with prized catches pinoy fishermen can only dream about.
gotta save the chinese fishermen so they can fish again another day, fill up thier boat again. so lucky the chinese were, the vietnamese did not look the other way and leave them to the mercy of the sea. could not be, for sure the chinese surveillance ship would have picked up thieir distress call and send those super fast rescue helicopters their way.
salamat kaayo sa kwento shared, nherrera. thumbs up, po.
Kasambahay, thumbs up man sa imo.
I have bad news and worse news. If Duterte confirms at the SONA that he agreed with Xi to let China fish in the Reed Bank EEZ, then that becomes binding under international law and a brazen breach of the constitution. The worse news is that Duterte has now dictated who should be Speaker, his term of office, and his successor arrogating to himself powers vested by the constitution to a supposedly separate and independent branch of government. To none other than Duterte’s psychophant, weasel and zombie…Alan Peter Cayetano! Its like a scene from Star Trek. We are Duterte Borg, resistence is futile, you will all be assimilated!
Karl Garcia @Karlmisagarcia
Ganyan angabi nila sa tokhang: “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.”
Taken from the Tweet feed above. Again, it’s not merely the killing and the dying, it’s the narrative associated with said acts.
Before Tokhang, during police salvage operations prior, Filipinos were dying aplenty as well.
Landslide happens a bunch of Filipinos die; deforestation/mining caused it, life goes on no one cares; Building collapses , a bunch of Filipinos die; shoddy building materials/cutting corners; no one cares life goes on;
Filipinos get runned over all the time, on the streets at construction sites or in mines; sometimes their family gets paid crumbs $10,000 pesos per life i believe, life goes on no one cares. Hunger, incest, slave labor, did you guys know Samals/badjaos were perfectly content in Sulu before Tausugs pushed them out, effectively creating your own refugee class (Tausugs were pushed by Marcos, thus musical chair),
this was in the late 70s. no one cared then. many converted to islam, but they are mostly animists actually. Maranaws/Maguindanaws sell you guys pirated this and that, but Samal/badjaos you don’t even see. Invisible.
it’s the narrative, not the killings. if Filipinos feel that the culling now is for the better then they will keep on supporting it; they’ve been conditioned to accept killing as just part of life, Filipinos have always had their eyes closed. But there’s been things worst than Tokhang, karl, is my point.
Where were you guys then???
Sure , one could argue that Tokhang is the straw that broke the camel’s back here.
and suddenly Filipinos will awake, but I see most of this as a blip like #BlackLivesMatter social media outrage (much of which fanned by Russians apparently), but one ones actually reaching out to actual victims (ie. why not Wil write about victim families, karl talk about someone he knows personally, or anyone else lend some personal story here, make it anonymous even if that helps).
Tokhang is convenient because it’s in the media, but much of the sufferings/injustice/killings in the Philippines are pretty quiet, hush hush… hidden.
No one’s personalizing this IS MY POINT. stats and UN this or that or EU this or that, of Heyderian this or that, some one please tell a personal story of these killings already!!! TSOH members there in the Philippines. make the general into specifics. Joe, do you have a neighbor? or friend? or your wife’s family/friends that’s been victim of Tokhang???
This is all about narrative, not numbers, folks.
To connect this to the current blog,
let’s hear about incidents now please. actual personal level incidents.
He collects them all daily:
https://mobile.twitter.com/DanSantos8
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2449616965061008&id=100000381844858&ref=content_filter
Like i said, Filipinos die all the time, killings happen there all the time— separate the ones you can attribute to DU30 and his policies re Tokhang.
Google 3 year old Myca Ulpina, human shield, Bato saying “shit happens”.
Joe tweeted about her just a few days ago as well. Pretty much upset people.
“Myca’s death outraged the country when it was labelled ‘collateral damage’ by a senator and former top police commander, Ronald dela Rosa. In reference to the child’s death, he used the phrase ‘s*** happens’. He has since apologised. Police claim Myca died when operatives attempted to buy drugs from her father, Renato, who pulled a gun on them, killed an officer, and used his daughter’s body as a shield against bullets. But the little girl’s mother – who has asked not to be named – said police burst into her home without a warrant as her family slept on June 29 in Rizal province, near Manila. Her daughter was killed by a stray bullet and wasn’t used as a shield, she said.”
Yes, yes. That’s Tokhang. But it can be easily explained as collateral , same shit we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, essentially SHIT Happens! but at least we paid fair market price in blood money.
It’s the clear assassination types that need to surface , Ireneo. ie. named person, then assassination. Like that Cebu PNP colonel, who was just driving down the street. His name is listed somewhere, there’ll be a price for his head, and someone will have claimed that price.
That is pure Tokhang. this can be explained as part of some legit operation (RIP to Myca, not trying to minimize tragedy here), even better if the dad is actually a known drug dealer. Focus on the cops getting killed.
Tokhang is basically like that but its originL intent was to do a house to house. its literal translation is a combination of katok(knock) and another word with hang that means plead.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/tokhang
Oplans tokhang and tambay=SNAFU
“One component of the war on drugs by the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte is Oplan Tokhang. The name of the operation was derived from the toktok (knock) and hangyo (plead). As the name suggests, Oplan Tokhang involves the police visiting the houses of individuals suspected to be involved in the illegal drug trade or as users, to persuade them to stop their activities and submit themselves to authority for potential rehabilitation.”
In essence, it’s just police contact. I’m sure police contact was in place before, otherwise how do police affect arrest.
So Oplan Tokhang just means scaling up , ramping up , of said contacts.
But my point is, if you wanna start investigating these deaths (not just statistics or tally conflating all deaths under DU30) you have to start where you’ll actually see cause/effect. Some lawyer or journalist dying is par for the course in the 3rd world, before and i’m sure after DU30.
Shoddy police work, tactics, is again par for the course in the Philippines.
What’s specific to DU30 is the targeting of cops en mass (that’s unique). Whether you see it as cleaning up (pro-DU30) or EJKs but just on cops (anti-DU30). you’ll see better the cause and effect. thus be able to connect it to the wider EJK phenomena that is DU30’s.
is there a list of cops that have died???
“He’d argue for faster trains in Germany during WW2, to be more efficient at getting product to the gas chambers. Just so you know where he’s coming from.”
NO, Joe, and…
Albert Speer already wrote about this , he argued the priority should’ve been to use said railway to move military equipment/personnel to help the war effort, not Jews/”others” to gas chambers. I’m with Speer, but then again he was just trying to paint himself as a good Nazi after the fact. 😉
But that’s really far from my point here, Joe , my point is to 1) get you guys to focus on personalizing these stories, and 2) to focus on police-on-police EJKs, because cause/effect is easier to prove there.
further thoughts…
1). I don’t think anyone here in TSOH in the Philippines will be able to, which hints at how minimal these killings to the general population really are, ie. druggies tend to associate with druggies and not the general populace. Also hinting at how surgical these killings actually are— give or take.
2). No one’s focusing on police-on-police EJKs, WHY NOT??? locate cops being labelled narco-cops (ie. dirrrty), that have not been killed yet, by the lists and/or by whether they’ve been sent up north or down south to the autonomous regions (this is what DU30 did as soon as he sat in office, listed them or banished them or both, why one or the other, i dunno).
police-on-police EJKs is the key here, karl. 😉
Files are held tightly by PNP. Few cases are investigated. That is a key point of the UN Human Rights resolution recently passed. Of course TSOH would not be able to get at them, even if it were our job. Which it is not. Regular watchdogs like HR Commission or journalists can’t get at them because the cases have not been investigated. What’s to report? At some 4,000 police engagements a year or so ago, only 37 cases had been investigated.
The operations are not benign or surgical as you claim. Crime in Manila is down but murders have doubled. Bodies are falling daily, ambushes and riding in tandems. Are police involved? Who knows. My town, your town (if you were here), would have cases. The impacts are horrid.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2019/04/23/Philippines-war-on-drugs-is-tearing-families-apart-analysts-say/2081556053048/
You are nuts to try to diminish the killings, and obnoxious to instruct “us guys” what to do about it. Do it your fucking self. Contribute some data, some information, and not these ridiculously specious, wholly fallacious, completely nonsensical arguments and questions that goad, mislead, and churn in ever wider circles. I’d ask readers not to pay any attention to you.
Here is a summary of the recent Rand report on drugs in SE asia. The full report is linked in the upper right corner. Commentary on the Philippines begins on page 38.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2733.html
“Where were you guys then???”
Joe: “…instruct “us guys” what to do about it.”
That question , Joe, isn’t for now, it’s for previous years , eras, administrations… ie. before DU30 and Tokhang this all has been going on. But that’s beside the point, more like a rhetorical question.
Here’s my points again, as Incident/Concept matrix:
Incident: Why no personal stories???
Concept: It’s not as far reaching as made out to be.
(### p.s. — I’ve already prosecuted this point here early on , it’s 2019 now and notice no one here has any personal stories of EJKs. thus there’s semblance of care being taken, Joe— surgical, again give or take ### if no one has personal stories of EJKs, that’s fine)
Incident: Cebu PNP colonel gunned down in daylight (can’t find Sup‘s article on this now)
Concept: cop-to-cop assassinations easier to prosecute, it should be easy to match the listed cops, and who’s been killed from said list; more investigative skills to find the ones kicked around the hard area assignments, but like that PNP colonel in Cebu, once dead, simply ask where he/she’s been recently assigned, if Cordilleras/ARMM region then he was deemed a “narco” cop, thus executed,
once you match the names, then the hard part is figuring out which cop in the station (or off site) got the bounty, but getting the list is enough to spur a wider investigation, Joe.
(### this 2nd Incident/Concept is the meat , Joe. 😉 no one here at TSOH need to actually do anything on my behalf , Joe, but if say Senator Trillanes’ staff is again reading, hey i’m glad to be of service. 😉 ### )
p.s.— I’m not shooting down these stories, by the way, not rationalizing them away, i’m simply pointing out that not all stories are the same or equal. sure, some will pull heart strings, some will irritate, make you cry, but we’re trying to prove that DU30’s Tokhang is bad policy.
Don’t conflate stories as all the same. they are not,
thus you want to focus on EJKs, extra-judicial killings. specific to DU30, not killings that have happened before and will surely continue, with or w/out DU30.
Landslides, building collapse, bridges, etc. etc. will continue. so will police salvage ops after DU30, so focus on DU30’s assassinations, harder to shoot down, more difficult to rationalize, again that PNP colonel in Cebu is your template.
there should be more of those, look for PNP cops recently after 2016 transferred to the Cordilleras or Sulu/ARMM. 😉
“Another lawyer has been murdered in the Philippines, the 38th to have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016. The media reported that unidentified gunmen shot dead Rex Jasper Lopoz, 41, as he was about to enter his car outside a shopping mall in Tagum City, in the southern Philippines, on Wednesday evening.
Lopoz’s family believes he was killed because he was representing defendants in drug cases, and that his murder was linked to the Duterte administration’s “war on drugs,” in which thousands have died. Lopoz was also known in the area as a leftist activist.
Lopoz’s murder has been widely condemned – the Integrated Bar of the Philippines said there have been so many deaths “we are almost losing count.” Like Lopoz, several of the victims were lawyers representing the accused in drug cases. Some, like Benjamin Ramos, who was shot dead in November in the central Philippines, represented victims of government human rights violations. Judges have also been targeted.”
============================
Ireneo, this sounds like something similar during the Ecleo case in Cebu. These killing s are common in the Philippines even before DU30. difficult to ascertain.
Tokhang is more DU30, easily connected to DU30 like what Sup posted about some Cebu PNP colonel killed in the middle of the street, he’d been transferred up to the Cordilleras, then to Sulu area, and he was simply appearing in court for a case, then shot.
There’s chaos right now, and sure you can attribute chaos as of DU30’s making, but not all killings will be Tokhang over there.
But that Cebu example would be, hence investigate that, ie. i won’t be surprise if a cop got a bonus after said killing was performed, that’s real Tokhang, official yet under the table. You guys need to be more surgical with which stories to tell here.
focus on stories with a pending case specific, police who have been transferred around to undesirable locations, and stories that ID their killers. Again not all killings there now will be directly DU30s, focus on the ones that are.
ano ba to? saber rattling? forgive my low and humble position, walis rattling lang po ang kaya ko. masakit talaga, the exponential killings under duterte’s watch, not to mention bombings in mindanaw under martial law, lol! gotta love martial law, everything down there in mindanaw goes na. and now, bombers have noticeably upgraded their modus, leaving behind signature as body parts na!
recently po, the pebble ask if death due to heart attacks were included sa 20K ejk count, porbida! the one time hepe ng kapolisan, then hepe one time ng bilibid, beloved of duterte and elected senator, could not tell the difference between heart attacks and bullet wounds!
kapolisan and armed personnel should know, job hazard nila yang mabaril, liveth by sword, e, dyeth by bubble gum, not pwede, lol!
I’m walis rattling for fellow poor and the down trodden. sorry if not enough, but I did try.
The corporal is exercising his brain by detaching it from compassion or community standards of due process, that is, the accepted standards on use of force and fairness, so your try is likely to fall on a deaf heart. But thanks just the same.
He’d argue for faster trains in Germany during WW2, to be more efficient at getting product to the gas chambers. Just so you know where he’s coming from.