We beg to differ.
Back when the Spanish Conquistadors first set foot on Philippine shores and claimed all in the name of God and the Spanish king, it would have looked like this all made sense. Christianity, after all, was the “good” religion and Western civilisation regarded as a necessary “civilising” force. Europeans saw themselves as burdened by a…
Frankly I fail to be impressed by all the huffing and puffing about how “shocking” the massacre of 58 people is allegedly in the hands of warlord Andal Ampatuan Jr. I also fail to be impressed by the people who are grandstanding about calls for “justice” and close public scrutiny of (and the proposed televising)…
Read More “There are worse people than Andal Ampatuan Jr and they are among us” »
The recent success of the opening ceremonies of the 2019 Southeast Asian Games and, for that matter, the overall multi-million dollar investment in hosting the Games proves a point. Filipinos, and people in general — rich or poor — love to see and experience nice things. This is the reason the half-witted argument of choice…
Did we really expect a seamless, swimmingly-hosted Southeast Asian Games (SEAG)? This is, after all, the Philippines where nothing works. Filipinos cannot organise their way out of a paper bag and this is reflected in just about every failed system and ways of working borrowed from former colonial masters and sloppily-applied to their setting. It…
As an alumnus of the Ateneo, I can’t help but wonder about what’s really going on in the heads of the members of what is arguably the most elite academic community in the Philippines. Indeed, the Ateneo is so elite that even Ateneans aspire to de-elitisize themselves as soon as they step out of its…
Anybody who’s been on Twitter a lot over the last several days will now have seen the latest fashionable catchphrase “Ok boomer” really taking off. The term “boomer” is short for “Baby Boomer”, a term used to refer to the generation of Americans born within the decade right after World War II ended. It has…
When subjected to extreme situations where it means either life or death, the primal response of the human brain brought about by thousand years of evolution is either a fight or flight response. It is where things are reduced to essentials and the superficial and the miscellaneous take a backseat. To come out alive of…
The saga of the Barretto sisters had gripped the minds of Filipinos for weeks now. In a society obsessed more with people and less with ideas, this recent circus is a bonanza for eyeball-starved mainstream media. Stepping back from the noise and the brain-dead detail of this showbiz fracas it is easy to sse the…
