Comings and goings

Eight days. Leaving in eight days. I haven't packed. I haven't been obsessing about travel details. I remember what it was like before I left for Oz over three years ago - excited, nervous, ecstatic. Now I feel strangely calm. Like my trip isn't going to take me to live in another country for the next four years. But Singapore is close, so maybe my subconscious figured it would be like a trip to Davao or something. I don't have a place to stay yet, and for the first week I'll be slumming at a student hostel. But I'm not panicking. I guess age brings chill.

(Blogwatch) Engendering rights and other things of ambition

In August last year the Magna Carta of Women finally came out of the legislative wringer and was signed into law. Many feminists were ecstatic, despite a close call just as the bill had been consolidated at the bicameral level. Literally a call from a man of cloth had delayed the bill’s transmission from the House to the office of the President. But no matter, the temporary delay was a mere hiccup in the nearly decade-long history of this piece of legislation. The men of cloth were particularly wary of some provisions on reproductive health services and the prohibition of the expulsion of female faculty and students on account of getting pregnant. But nevertheless these provisions survived intact.

Read the rest at the Philippine Online Chronicles.

Inception - not so much a review as a blubbering fan-girl rave

I didn't bother to read the plot, I just knew it was Chris Nolan and that it was some type of sci-fi flick. From the moment I discovered Memento, I was hooked. For the more Hollywood-friendly flicks he revived the Batman franchise. I've seen The Prestige thrice, and I don't rewatch films often. But this is the first film I've ever seen where half-way through I thought I needed to see it again. Nolan makes you work hard. I had my brows creased a good majority of the movie. If you drop your concentration you'll lose the thread of the narrative but rest assured you will be rewarded for your efforts.

This is a thinking man's film. It references psychoanalysis, physics, principles of art, postmodern philosophy and god knows what else. Its ambitious in scope and in the technicalities of film making. I don't know who Nolan's editor is but he or she should win an award for this one. In hands less adept this could've turned out to be a first class disaster. Ask M. Night Shyamalan.

Watch Inception. This film will literally blow your mind.

Inequality is literally bad for your health

I should like to get a "copy" of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Alas, the pirates of the internets have yet to make them available online.I will have to wait to get to a library :-)

The blurb:

It is well established that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. Now a groundbreaking book, based on thirty years’ research, takes an important step past this idea. The Spirit Level shows that there is one common factor that links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Not wealth; not resources; not culture, climate, diet, or system of government. Furthermore, more-unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them—the well-off as well as the poor.

The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level reveals striking differences, not only among the nations of the first world but even within America’s fifty states. Almost every modern social problem—ill-health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness—is more likely to occur in a less-equal society. This is why America, by most measures the richest country on earth, has per capita shorter average lifespan, more cases of mental illness, more obesity, and more of its citizens in prison than any other developed nation.

Wilkinson and Pickett lay bare the contradiction between material success and social failure in today’s world, but they do not simply provide a diagnosis of our woes. They offer readers a way toward a new political outlook, shifting from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more sustainable society. The Spirit Level is pioneering in its research, powerful in its revelations, and inspiring in its conclusion: Armed with this new understanding of why communities prosper, we have the tools to revitalize our politics and help all our fellow citizens, from the bottom of the ladder to the top.

Here is an excellent review.

And here is a podcast with the authors discussing the book along with Barbara Ehrenreich and Harry Holzer.

(Blogwatch) Health Secretary Ona supports artificial FP

President Noynoy Aquino was notoriously vague on his stand on the Reproductive Health bill during the election campaign. On principle he was not against artificial family planning but did he or did he not support public funding on family planning commodities such as condoms and pills? Was he purposely being vague so as not to antagonize the church? Did he replace former Health Secretary Cabral, a staunch RH advocate, with La Sallite Brother Armin Luistro to please the bishops? Well, now we wonder no more.

Read the rest at the Philippine Online Chronicles.

(Kamundohan) Global land grabbing: When bankers turn to farming

In recent years global “land grabbing” has been fueled by food insecurity and a chance to cash in on biofuels demand. Arable land-scarce countries are looking at “outsourcing” their agricultural production to other nations. Some have responded to the demand for biofuels after the spike in petroleum oil prices in 2008. Apart from governments seeking to secure their population's food security, investors as varied as agro-industrial corporations, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and foundations are looking to lease or purchase foreign land. The global financial crisis of 2008 may have also spurred the acquisition of more “solid” investments as prices of liquid assets fell or disappeared into thin air.

Read the rest at the Philippine Online Chronicles.

Defective Filipinos and Values-formation for Migrants

“Filipinos suffer from a cancer, a cancer that starts here and that we take with us abroad, a cancer that needs to be cured even before you leave. Values, priorities, beliefs, attitudes: this is defective in the Pinoy.”

- Instructor, Pre-departure Orientation Seminar, POEA

Quote lifted from Robyn Magalit Rodriguez' Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World.


This kind of 'values-formation' training has been fully internalized by Pinoy expats here. It seems to me that the psychology of the Benign0 school of thought is a complex mix of love and hate.

Interesting.

Unpacking the Church

In "Chastising Democracy: Does the 'Conservative Turn' among Filipino Catholic Bishops Mean a Retreat from (Democratic) Politics?" Prof. Raneses argues the Church, despite itself, may help deepen democracy in the Philippines. The liberal and leftist critiques of the church as an actor dismiss its role in pluralizing voices.

The article also provides a review of literature on the Philippines and theories of democratization.

Interesting.

Chastising Democracy: Does the “Conservative Turn” among Filipino Catholic Bishops Mean a Retreat from (Dem...

(Blogwatch) It Augurs Well

We’re inclined to believe the worst in our leaders. It is the automatic option. Faced with a choice between blind faith and skepticism, we are apostates. Is it borne of our revolutionary tradition, this distrust of authority? Or more a fruit of our useless labors throughout the years? How does one cope with perpetual disappointment? A refusal to believe in the possibility of anything.

Read the rest at the Philippine Online Chronicles.

Wang Wang Ina Mo!

The vehicles with the privilege of using wang-wang:

1. uniformed police and military vehicles
2. Ambulance
3. Fire vehicles
4. Presidential car
5. Senate President's Car
6. Speaker of the House's Car

Lourd de Veyra rocks :)

A Politics for Hope

If the writing is exceptional it shakes one's complacence, not make one roll one's eyes. It makes one want to act, not vomit. Reading should make one think and reflect. Like this 20 year-old Roselle. On the EDSA Revolution she writes:

Perhaps the error was in reinstating into power the very same bloc that dominated the pre-authoritarian clientilist State. Perhaps the blunder was in the return to State strategies that employed both discursive and actual violence that muffled alternative voices in the ground. Or did we perhaps commit a mistake in waging the Revolution, as it was just a blanket of fictitious hopefulness for the country? Reverting to the final explanation is dangerous: it invites the notion that revolutions are mere fantasy formations conjured out of thin air—a transitory drug that sterilizes dismal conditions in order to prepare for a bigger, brighter future where there can no longer be any faults. This perspective snatches away the interwoven narratives, experiences and struggles that lead up to a political revolution. Moreover, it relegates the animating spirit of revolutionary action into a mere mechanism of governmentality. In defining revolutions as such, we are courting the specters of anti-democracy—its ethereal charm, its powerful guarantees, its poisonous evocation of ungrounded victory—back into the polity. In contrast to all of these, revolutions are political encounters, exchanges, and even opposition by warm bodies in the public space.

In retrieving the spirit of the democratic revolution and allocating it to our own political topography, there is a supplemental need to reappraise our notions of hope and change. A metaphysics for these concepts is inspiring and a good critical juncture at best, but if we leave them hanging within the ranks of collective highfalutin phantasmagoria we betray the struggle purportedly waged in the name of politics. Freedom and democracy are far from empty words: they are charged with the baggage of history and a responsibility for the future. What is asked from us by the active reminder of our revolutionary past is a response in the form of a politics for hope—one that harks back to the past either to ensure that unfreedom will never happen again or to learn valuable lessons from it; one that toils with and for others at the present; and one that commits itself to a future that does not dictate a singular end. The radical democratic spirit solicits much from the ethos of revolutions (though not exclusively); hence, our commitments for democracy must go beyond the realm of attitudes and structures that coddle us from the ruggedness of genuine political life so that we may bring about a transformation of the very processes that shape our constitution as individuals and as a people.

See? She is critical minus the self-loathing. Substantial. Maybe a little difficult to read. And she doesn't make tautological explanations that essentially say - you're stupid because you're dumb!

My greatest pet peeve is writing with a sneer. Some people are able to carry it off because they're brilliant. Some just make me want to roll my eyes. Oh lordy, why do I have to suffer such affront. But hey, the web allocates space for bad prose and even worse political analysis. It is a democracy so all sorts are welcome. Now if only the voices amplified spoke on behalf those who can't and not waste space screaming you're stupid because you're dumb!

Notes from Fanon

“Intellectual alienation is a creation of middle-class society. What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery.” – Frantz Fanon

Is it not possible to celebrate the self without false aggrandizement? To celebrate the self without auto-castigation for perceived overreach or exaggeration?

For the young to be so full of cynicism is a sin committed by those who have come before. For received claims of knowledge to be recycled, and with which to pummel ourselves in perpetuity is my generation’s greatest tragedy. Would some have us in a rotoscope loop to live and re-live the same piece of narrative over and over and over?

To make these claims would have our people frozen in time. If we cannot tell new stories, new stories of and for ourselves, then we should lay down our arms and cease to write.

I’d rather thought this anguish over self-identity was dated. But for it to be exhibited in a 21 year old shows me it is not.

Love, Passion and Patriotism

The book by Dr. Raquel A.G. Reyes Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Porpaganda MOvement 1882-1892 was featured on the Sunday Inquirer magazine today. It is locally available at the Ateneo University Press. It looks mighty interesting.

The blurb:

Love, Passion and Patriotism is an intimate account of the lives and experiences of a renowned group of young Filipino patriots whose propaganda campaign was a catalyst for the country's revolt against Spain. José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano López Jaena, and the brothers Juan and Antonio Luna were talented writers, artists and scientists who resided in Europe during the 1880s and 1890s. As expatriates, they lived outside the social constraints of their own society and were eager to explore all that Europe had to offer. Provoked by racism and allegations of effeminacy and childishness, they displayed their manliness and urbanity through fashionable European dress, careful grooming and deportment, and demonstrated their courage and virility through fencing, pistol-shooting and dueling.

Their studies exposed them to scientific discourses on the body and novel categorizations of pathology and disease, ideas they used to challenge the religious obscurantism and folk superstition they saw in their country. However, their experiences also radically shaped their ideas of sex and sexual nature of Filipino women. Raquel A. G. Reyes explores the paintings, photographs, political writings, novels and letters in their passionate patriotism, and their struggle to come to terms with the relative sexual freedom of European women, which they found both alluring and sordid.

(Self)Critical without the (Self)-loathing

Since our "culture" seems to be under the microscope, here is a list of old blogposts that tackle culture. I think they are critical minus the hate.

What Damaged Culture?:

The point here is, cultures evolve and whether the evolution is judged "good" or "bad" is subjective. A culture is a way of life. And if our culture today means under-the-table deals, graft and corruption, crab mentality, then there was a reason for this. This culture didn't appear out of nowhere. And it is not a natural state of being.

AbsurdiTV:

If television is the modern opium of the masses, then our people today must be drugged beyond the absurd. Have you seen prime time TV shows lately? 4 to 5 solid hours of brain-frying hallucinogenic experience. And since there are two major stations airing them, then that makes 8 to 10 hours total. Whew. Who needs X when you've got GMA-ABS-CBN?


In a Wowowee State of Mind:

But poverty isn't merely a state of mind, it is a social condition. Contrary to little "nuggets of wisdom" we, the educated folk, have been taught since birth, poverty cannot be overcome by simple hard work. An ambulant vendor can work 15 hours a day every day for fifty years and still die with nothing to show for. And the "good life" these days mean that in order to be happy and fulfilled, we need a lot of things to show for.

Poverty is social because it does not mean anything divorced from the environment. Poverty is social because it is relative. Poverty can be measured by a sense of lack. And when we see people in our vicinity having many things that give them happiness, why should we begrudge ourselves of these essential elements of the good life?

The Alipin is not a Slave:

Far from arriving at the same conclusions as Idiot Savant, I read an entirely different insinuation from this American historian. Which really goes to show that we are all colored by our own individual mental/ideational maps. Which probably means it’s pointless to argue this point at all, because we not only see eye to eye, but see through different kinds of eyes entirely.

Rape, Hypermasculinity and Philippine-American Relations:

Was Nicole completely faultless? Did she know she was courting danger by having a few drinks and dancing with these killing machines? Could her rape have been avoided had she behaved more prudently? Had she been born elsewhere, had she not grown up in our post-colonial context with our post-colonial mental maps, then perhaps she would not have consorted with these men. Ours is a story of seduction and false promises. Our culture today is replete with evidence of surrendering to the seduction of a “superior” race. Our indoctrination in the early days has been: All things American is what you little brown brothers must aspire for. American education, government, culture, the American way of life. We are but extensions of the original. The Eve to his Adam.

The Philippines as Open Pussy Country?

Taken individually, these mentalities as aspects of our culture colour our perception of self-hood as a nation, and our identities as Filipinos and Filipinas. In combination, this three-pronged mentality is detrimental to the way we situate ourselves both locally and internationally. Our colonial mentality is deep-seated. Everything Western, particularly American, is superior by all counts. Which implies that what is local is necessarily inferior. The Americans have left decades past, but we have proven to be better colonial masters than they were. 70 years later, the colonial mentality is alive and well, nurtured by pop culture, by elite culture, by us all.

Excising Cinderella, Maria Clara and Inang Maria from Our Minds:

Let us go back then, to the Specters of Cinderella, Maria Clara and the forbearing Inang Maria haunting our nation. These (re)presentations are a product of a particular context in our history. They are a product of colonial enslavement and ideological inferiority. While those days are long over, these specters persist because they have been embedded deep in our culture. This explains the incongruence of these mentalities with the actual events of recent years.

Are We Poor Because We're Lazy?

I know there exist people who have absolutely no incentive to work - thus they laze. What little income they get they spend on non-wealth generating activities. One might say, they engage in rabid consumption - of alcohol and nicotine, gambling and entertainment (not coincidentally the more robust industries in our country). Some engage in criminal activities because in doing so their "talents" yield greater wealth. There are public criminals and there are private ones. Evidently, public criminality is the best means to accumulate wealth in our society. But we can't all be public criminals.

Capital's limitless growth

David Harvey suggests global capitalism's long-term survival is premised on a mathematical impossibility. He presents a truly radical idea - the world should aim for zero growth and distribution of wealth.

He distinguishes growth from development. "Development is about investing in people's creative capacities and powers. You don't need growth to do that. So you can have zero growth and at the same time you can also have radical transformation..."

I don't think the world has exhausted growth possibilities quite yet. There are still places on earth we have yet to plunder and emerging markets with new consumers. Imagine the huge Chinese and Indian markets. There are still virgin forests in Latin America and Africa. Plenty more oil to drill in Eurasia. And who knows what new treasures the ocean might offer once the technology becomes available?

I'll give it a century more. Then humanity will have to reckon with what it has created. We'll all be dead by then, so who cares.