Calm in a storm
Analysis and Opinion
By Joe America
I’ll be taking a vacation for about a month and don’t anticipate doing much internetting during this time. This will be my last article for several weeks. Gian, Karl, and Irineo can publish if so inclined. Otherwise we all can just chill.
Social media used to be entertainment, now it is the intellectual soup in which we boil ourselves like unaware frogs. We are no longer assured of any kind of moral togetherness, dirty data are uneducating the masses, and brutality is rising as a statement of what many people long for. As long as it happens to others. Others being people we can no longer relate to as humans because they are just social media handles of no particular humanity.
The US is lost to sense and civility, likely for decades. What a screwed up government, playing to racists and rich people while brutalizing the powerless. The Philippines is a place of calm in a storm, comparatively.
Social media sneaked in, out of control, and no one figured out how to make it a force only for good. AI is simply round two. The peculiarity of humans is found in their tendency to criticize good people for failing to be perfect while accepting bad people because, well, we know they are bad. Our moral books, preachers, and teachers were not able to point out the self-harm caused by this illogical thinking.
The Society of Honor is a calm place of sense in the internet storm of emotionalized nonsense. I hope you are pleased with your contribution, for it has been awesome to read. And I hope you recognize that our collective good will has been durable for 15 years. And there is more ahead.
The two aspects of character that I’m working with JoeJr on are calm and truth. Calm to avoid rage baiting and joining in on emotionalized arguments. And truth (and facts) as the shining light of sensible problem-solving, not conspiracy theories and self-serving “beliefs”.
The MAGA attack on “woke” people in the US is a concocted belief, a man-made fictitious crisis. The attack is racism in disguise. It rejects science. It is applied stupidity, and under-cover cruelty.
The effective counter must be calm and truth.
Protests can be an exercise in calm, so grasp the full meaning. They are gatherings of sense in a sea of cruelty and nonsense.
Onward.
The calm beckons.
_________________________
The Society of Honor by Joe America 
I agree with you Joem. It has become a hodge podge of truth and lies. I prefer WordPress. It is nice blogging here even if my account is public. There is respect unlike in FB.
It’s interesting how easily people can easily be othered on the internet when they are just faces behind an account, when in real life it’s much harder to be unkind when the person in front is a human being who can express pain and discomfort. I’m fluent in 4 languages. While my Tagalog and Cebuano knowledge is only suitable for painstakingly reading the written form at the elementary grade level, there is something I’ve noticed over the years. The most vitriolic and verbally violent comments left on social media pages, news articles, or similar, are either from an American or a Filipino. Well I’ve been told Russians are nasty as well, though I can’t say as I cannot decipher Cyrillic. There has to be a way to encourage empathy so that future generations do better. Lately I’ve found great comfort in the example of Pope Leo XIV.
That’s what people are lacking nowadays Joey…empathy. If you comment against their posts, they’re like mongrels out to bite you.
bark is worst than their bite! these people need to drink more water and eat more vegies, temper them down. next you’ll hear, they have heart attack. too much angst, rage that goes from zero to 100km/hr! in a nanosecond. they ought to follow joeam’s example and go on vacay to chill out.
the most violent comments I have the misfortune of reading come form anti zionists as well as those of kaffieyeh wearing pro palestine’s. we filipinos are quite tame in our comments, mostly. and we dont hide our pretty faces behind dark masks, dark clothes, and dark glasses.
inday sara promised blood bath, yeah, we have blood moon, but blood bath if she’s impeach! she is already being impeach and her blood bath, is probly her monthly, haha.
I think, filipinos is given too much credit for vitriolics, we are not deserving.
The undermining of general education, whether by callous indifference like in the Philippines or malicious intent like in the US was what created the conditions for what both the US and the Philippines face today. Knowledge is like oxygen for the brain; a human body can manage other toxic assaults, but in a state of hypoxia the brain becomes irrecoverably damaged to the point of death.
In a world of humans controlled by algorithms, fixated on little glowing screens, there is much to say about the regulation (or lack of) technologies that become akin to noxious drugs. Let’s just face reality — humans have always been prone to over-indulging on stuff that in small amounts can be good. We have gone from bushmen gorging on a rare treat of wild honey after battling an angry bee hive while hanging precariously off a cliff rock face to having too much of the sweet stuff. So much is our modern decadence that hitting the dopamine pleasure receptors is no longer enough. We have created social media “challenges” to trigger the adrenaline receptors all the while wallowing in self-illusory fears of the unknown to trigger a missing cortisol response.
And I’m sorry, this goes for most Western/Western-adjacent societies, but most especially the Philippines and the US, where there is a penchant of seeing one’s self as the Main Character in a world that is our own oyster. There’s a reason why I often connect similarities between the Filipinos and Americans. Though the direct connection has been but a bit over a century and a quarter both Filipino and American societies have always been highly individualistic — or rather, having a relationship structure based on strong individuals and others who follow along.
Perhaps future sociologists will identify the television reality shows which I greatly despise to be a concrete marker of when people started their break with reality. Reality shows and the burgeoning social media networks which drove fandoms of said shows can be seen as the earliest precursors to an organic algorithm, with later digitized algorithms rising up at first to monetize that human behavior, ultimately leading their creators to conclude that such algorithms can be used as a tool of control.
Recently I had a discussion with a few American technologist friends who asserted that Donald Trump may have been the first “AI President,” who was born of the algorithm and draws power from its network effect. I had to correct these Americans that no, the Philippines had the first AI President in a Rodrigo Duterte brought to power by Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. There will be more of these political entities to come in the future as long more and more humans and societies become enthralled to ever evolving algorithms. There have been genocides caused by the algorithm (Myanmar, Rwanda/DRC), while other conflicts are labeled as genocides when it is not (Gaza). Every day as soon as we connect to the Internet we are entering an information warfare space populated by bad actors and the lobotomized accounts whose disconnected fingers hit “react” to every confirmation bias they see. The world is entering a dangerous phase.
What is the solution? I’m afraid there are scarce few solutions aside from the early Internet adage oft repeated on BBS — “go out and touch grass.” I made it a personal point in the late aughts to disconnect from social media and to build real relationships around me and across the world, from which I’ve derived great pleasure. We must reconnect with reality, and help our friends, family members, and society at large to do so.
Enjoy your vacation Joe!
Keep safe and enjoy Joe.
Inviting Joey to come up with an article if he chooses to do so.
Will talk to Gian and Irineo.
Keep safe and enjoy Joe.
Inviting Joey to come up with an article if he chooses to do so.
Will talk to Gian and Irineo.
have a nice vacay, joeam and family. a month or so is too long without youse, but we’ll hang on and plod on along this crazy life and crazier world. In your absence, I pray that filipinos become resilient, the hated word that many thought made filipinos pushovers so they can be walked on, trampled and discarded. but the ideal resilience of the spirit that made filipinos bounce back no matter the odds, stronger and wiser, and able to discern what is right and what is not. able to take on the world, or just walk away with head held high when needed – is the resilience that matter most.
the world is getting difficult and crueler, reality moreso. we have shoppers that got mowed down by cars driven by drunk drivers, bridges that collapse sending motorists to meet doom, weather that is getting worse with temperature of 40 plus degrees, floods and landslides that caused untold damages, prices of commodities skyrocketing, people that easily lost their patience and wreck havoc, yes we all need a break.
have a nice and calm vacay, joeam and family.
Joe, the phrase that came to me after reading this nice article is “this too shall pass.”
I then asked the AI-driven Copilot of Microsoft Edge to develop a short note on the phrase in the context of your “CALM IN A STORM.” Here’s Copilot’s response:
—
STILLNESS IN THE NOISE
“This too shall pass.” — Ancient Wisdom
Not every battle needs a blaze. Not every voice must rise to be heard.
When the world spins wild, let your center be still. Let the noise fade like the wind that whips past stone.
What you endure today, you will outlast. And when the storm moves on, you’ll remain—anchored in calm, guided by truth.
—
Please pass on to JoeJr along with your wise fatherly advice.
ahem, I got an airpod pro2, great for cancelling noise. I won a pair in a dare.
anyhow, I like noise made mostly by epic humans. all that wailing, laments, debates, discussions, screaming kids, drunks in the kerbside singing, vendors selling their wares, husband and wife fighting, dogs barking, cyclonic wind howling and people running for cover, our coast guard being water cannoned again and the word replying to our maritime woes, etc.
what scares me is when there is no noise, where have all the people gone!