You cannot separate the economic from the political (the return of the cowardly technocrats)
By Andrew Lim During the presidential campaign of 2016, then candidate Duterte uttered a pledge to revive the country’s steel industry if elected. This blog, along with others were vocal and unanmious: it did not make economic sense at all, with global steel prices dropping. Not helping Duterte was the fact that one of his … Continue reading
Monica Lewinski and women of the Philippines
By Joe America What in the world does the woman who featured in a US presidential sex scandal have to do with the Philippines? It’s complicated, so let’s first try to gather up some ideas. Let’s take four different perspectives on the gender character of the Philippines and then put them together to form an … Continue reading
Hello, Hell. Thy name is Philippines.
By Joe America We passed two historical milestones this past weekend: (1) another year afer the 1986 People Power rebellion with related pushback against a budding Duterte dictatorship, and (2) the first anniversary of the jailing of Senator De Lima. These celebrations, if one can celebrate achievement and cruelty as passages, good and bad, were … Continue reading
The limits of tolerance
By Joe America Tolerance is our ability to put up with people and events that are outside our normal course of being. It is a different from ‘acceptance’ in that the people and events are not necessarily welcomed into our lives. We might tolerate bad language in a movie, but would not accept it from … Continue reading




