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In the Philippines, we have something called "nuisance candidates", or candidates who are eliminated from the ballot under a specific provision of electoral law:quote:-putting the election process in mockery or disrepute The Commission on Elections reviews all candidacies, and eliminates these nuisance candidates if they feel that they fall under these definitions. I was reflecting on it because it technically means that the 2016 Congressional race for Georgia's 6th District could not have happened, because Rodney Stooksbury didn't have a registered address, never appeared on media, never campaigned, and pretty much did not exist at all. And while I'm sure that other democracies suppress undesirable candidates all the time through all sorts of "soft power", I thought it was interesting to mention that we have a perfectly legal channel by which to do so. It also creates this juxtaposition by which a teacher that wants to end privatization of the energy industry and re-regulate the oil industry is going to get laughed out of her candidacy because she also had the idea of banning Dota 2 and League of Legends, while a conservative lawyer that has already promised to Kill All Muslims not once but twice is regarded as a legitimate candidate.
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Jan 2, 2019 14:25
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| # ? May 30, 2024 00:30 |
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Lmao
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Jan 2, 2019 17:27
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We need Dota 2 harm reduction, an outright ban just ensures all the profits end up in the hands of criminals.
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Jan 2, 2019 17:32
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I'd like to record in here examples of blatant government corruption in the Duterte administration for my own memory. Calida firm bags P150M in deals from gov't, including DOJ quote:May 27, 2018 Top Davao gov't infra contractor owned by Bong Go kin – PCIJ quote:September 11, 2018 Diokno in-laws’ firm got P551-M projects quote:January 03, 2019
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Jan 4, 2019 08:12
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Duterte: Let’s just kidnap and torture [Commission on Audit] execs Duterte: Human rights groups out to destroy gov’t Kill rich bishops, Duterte tells [bystanders] Duterte: Kill loan sharks to end ‘5-6’ lending scheme
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Jan 10, 2019 14:34
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1 and a half out of 4 isn't too bad.
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Jan 10, 2019 17:57
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebookquote:As the campaign for the 2016 Philippine presidential election got under way, Facebook began receiving inquiries from candidates on how they could best use the platform. In January the company flew in three employees who spent a week holding training sessions with candidates. When it was Duterte’s turn, the Facebook team gathered with the campaign inside the Peninsula Manila Hotel. The campaign staff was trained in everything from the basics of setting up a campaign page and getting it authenticated with the trademark blue check mark to how to use content to attract followers. As an example of the use of unscripted video, the Duterte campaign was shown a live Facebook video of Barack Obama preparing for his State of the Union speech in 2016. The clip garnered more views than a video of the actual address to Congress. quote:After Duterte won, Facebook did what it does for governments all over the world—it began deepening its partnership with the new administration, offering white-glove services to help it maximize the platform’s potential and use best practices. Even as Duterte banned the independent press from covering his inauguration live from inside Rizal Ceremonial Hall, the new administration arranged for the event to be streamed on Facebook, giving Filipinos around the world insider access to pre- and post-ceremonial events as they met their new strongman. quote:Facebook’s executives say the company isn’t interested in being an arbiter of truth, in part because it doesn’t want to assume the role of censor or be seen as having an editorial opinion that may alienate users. Nonetheless, it’s been under increasing pressure to act. In the Philippines, it began conducting safety workshops in 2016 to educate journalists and nongovernmental organization workers. These cover the basics: an overview of the company’s community standards policies, how to block a harasser, how to report abusive content, how to spot fake accounts and other sources of misinformation. The company has increased the number of Tagalog speakers on its global Community Operations team in an effort to better root out local slurs and other abusive language.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:28
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I didn’t know Facebook was Russian
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Jan 11, 2019 00:50
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gradenko, is Philippine racism vis-a-vis Chinese people living in the country (including ones who have been here for a few generations) as bad as it seems? i read an article about it and some of the rhetoric is identical to classic anti-Semitic nationalist tropes, especially the "you can't be Chinese and a loyal citizen" line
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Jan 11, 2019 01:29
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get that OUT of my face posted:gradenko, is Philippine racism vis-a-vis Chinese people living in the country (including ones who have been here for a few generations) as bad as it seems? i read an article about it and some of the rhetoric is identical to classic anti-Semitic nationalist tropes, especially the "you can't be Chinese and a loyal citizen" line There has always been some level of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Philippines, particularly along economic/class lines, because the Filipino-Chinese community has a lot of oligarchs with names like Henry Sy and Lucio Tan that control most of the Philippine economy. During the 90s, there was a crime wave where Filipino-Chinese children would be kidnapped-for-ransom in the hopes of getting a big payday from their families. What we are seeing recently is an increase in ethnic tensions because Duterte is widely perceived among the opposition as being a sell-out or lapdog to Beijing, and coupled with the fact that there is an influx of mainland Chinese workers here in the Philippines. See, the Chinese put up casinos here (I believe we've seen them do the same in Cambodia?), and then they send in native Chinese both to work within the casinos directly, and also to work within the call centers that service these companies (presumably it's cheaper to run the offices here rather than to set up connectivity between here and China). They rent-out/buy-out apartment units en masse and house them there. So what you end up seeing is certain parts of the city have large contingents of Chinese workers that sort of stick out because they're not even as well integrated as the long-time Filipino-Chinese community, and couple that with the notion that China has been seizing "our" islands in the South China Sea, that Duterte has been taking on huge loans from China, and all the news about other Belt-and-Road initiatives causing smaller/poorer countries to become debt slaves to Beijing, and it stirs the pot into this toxic mix where racism towards the Chinese is blended together with political opposition to Duterte and a sort of nationalist/nativist fervor. I'll be completely honest - I live in an apartment right now, and I'm describing the influx of mainland Chinese as a first-hand account because they live here in the same building as I do, and the landlord has had to put up "no smoking" and "no spitting" signs with Chinese translations as a polite shot-across-the-bow, and even as I write this I feel uncomfortable because I struggle with how to describe these events without sounding like a racist. ___ EDIT: To be clear, I have not really seen nor heard of any particular instances of racially-motivated violence or crime, much less a pattern of such, towards the Chinese. I'm mostly speaking of sentiment, with the concern that such sentiment might spill over into violence at some point. gradenko_2000 has issued a correction as of 09:07 on Jan 11, 2019 |
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Jan 11, 2019 03:58
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The article that get that OUT of my face is referring to is probably this: Why Filipinos distrust China, by Solita Monsod, published on November 25, 2018 And here's one rebuttal to that article that I've seen: Why I Distrust Solita Monsod’s “Why Filipinos Distrust China”, by Caroline Hau, published two days later. While I think it's absolutely correct that Monsod's article is falling into some very uncomfortable racist stereotypes, my issue with the pushback against her views is that it focuses more on her conflation of "mainlander Chinese" and "Filipino-Chinese" and how that puts the latter at risk of being caught up in anti-Chinese sentiment. Indeed, Caroline Hau does belong that community herself, and seems to be more interested in making sure that this narrow exception is carved out, which to my mind would seem kind of ... useless? if we believed that Monsod or whoever she's pandering to are racists - they wouldn't be interested in making such a distinction any more than American racists would try to distinguish between Muslims and Sikhs! And this incompleteness of the rebuttal, I think, comes from a certain unwillingness to examine, or perhaps ignorance of, the fact that the reason why there exists a resentment towards Filipino-Chinese in the first place, is based on issues of class and wealth inequality that end up cleaving closely along ethnic lines. It's true that you don't want this kind of rhetoric going around lest it result in something like the 1998 Indonesian riots that targeted the Chinese community, but at the same time, you can't disarm that kind of tension without looking at the oligarchy as a whole, both because of their class status by itself, but also specifically in their role in enabling the more recent changes in foreign ownership and foreign workers under the Duterte administration.
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Jan 11, 2019 09:05
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Jan 11, 2019 17:01
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I like how this is on a school innauguration too
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Jan 11, 2019 17:56
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Duterte has been slamming the Catholic Church like this regularly because they're one of the most outspoken critics of his drug war and other domestic policies. It's a mishmash of usual anti-religious tropes of "shouldn't meddle in politics because there's a separation of church and state", that the church is only enriching itself, and then some Catholic-specific jabs such as referring to the molestation of children as well the criticism that Catholics violate their own 2nd Commandment because they worship saints (which I think is like usually a Protestant-originating dig at Catholics?)
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Jan 11, 2019 18:13
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just when you thought duerte couldnt get any worse, he outs himself as a calvinist
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Jan 11, 2019 19:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:Duterte has been slamming the Catholic Church like this regularly because they're one of the most outspoken critics of his drug war and other domestic policies. Yeah, that last one is basically a thing Evangelicals and other anti-Catholic Christians say about Catholics based on a total misunderstanding of the Commandment and the nature of Saints. It's a fairly common belief in the US South.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:14
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100 ft statues are way more obviously idolatrous than sainthood.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:And this incompleteness of the rebuttal, I think, comes from a certain unwillingness to examine, or perhaps ignorance of, the fact that the reason why there exists a resentment towards Filipino-Chinese in the first place, is based on issues of class and wealth inequality that end up cleaving closely along ethnic lines. I don't know much about the Philippines so I won't say anything about its circumstances specifically. However anti-Chinese sentiment in SE Asia has long been linked to European ideas and tropes of antisemitism. This connection was made explicit, for one example from 1914: quote:During the early 20th-century, the Thai nationalist King Vajiravudh, also known as Rama VI wrote in his pamphlet The Jews of the East regarding his view of the Thai Chinese. Rama VI commented that the Thai Chinese were a "problem" for Thailand and compared the Thai Chinese to the Jews as a group of outsider aliens who are loyal to their own ethnic group than that of their own host country.[129] He conjuring up a scapegoating image of successful Chinese businessmen gaining their success at the expense of indigenous Thais resulting many Thai politicians to have tempted to blame Thai Chinese businessmen for Thailand's economic difficulties.[130] King Vajiravudh's pamphlet was immensely influential among elite Thais and quickly spread to ordinary Thais, who were then filled with suspicion and hostility towards the Chinese minority.[129] The wealth disparity and abject poverty among the native ethnic Thai majority has resulted hostility blaming their extreme socioeconomic ills on the Chinese, especially Chinese moneylenders as "bloodsucking" exploitative debilitating shylocks. As with antisemitism in Germany, anti-Chinese sentiment was widely conflated with anti-communism. This contributed to many of the massacres perpetrated by right-wing governments in places like Indonesia. Obviously we can't just generalize from one country to another, and maybe Chinese and Filipino relations came from a different place. I'm sure the complexities of circumstances in your country and community are lost on me. Still I hope we can keep in mind the often sordid ideological roots of many modern sentiments. We can't forget context.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:54
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Squalid posted:I don't know much about the Philippines so I won't say anything about its circumstances specifically. However anti-Chinese sentiment in SE Asia has long been linked to European ideas and tropes of antisemitism. This connection was made explicit, for one example from 1914: the chinese in SE Asia like the jews elsewhere are identified as an economically dominant ethnic minority (and somehow simultaneously communists) and thus constantly under threat of being massarced
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Jan 12, 2019 00:23
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i agree that the practice of mainland chinese entrepreneurs going into the philippines and other asian countries acting as agents of loan shark imperialism and only hiring other mainlanders is disgusting. but the stuff in that article about chinese-filipinos is alarming, and the legitimate concerns of selling out to beijing won't help themTypo posted:the chinese in SE Asia like the jews elsewhere are identified as an economically dominant ethnic minority (and somehow simultaneously communists) and thus constantly under threat of being massarced
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Jan 12, 2019 02:16
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around WWI the king of Siam (modern Thailand) wrote an anti-Chinese screed titled "The Jews of the East"
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Jan 12, 2019 04:07
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Fallen Hamprince posted:around WWI the king of Siam (modern Thailand) wrote an anti-Chinese screed titled "The Jews of the East" Squalid posted:I don't know much about the Philippines so I won't say anything about its circumstances specifically. However anti-Chinese sentiment in SE Asia has long been linked to European ideas and tropes of antisemitism. This connection was made explicit, for one example from 1914: lmao you suck so much FH
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Jan 12, 2019 04:20
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Autism Sneaks posted:lmao you suck so much FH lmao if you actually read the thread 
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Jan 12, 2019 07:12
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I don't know if any of y'all remember Teddy Boy Locsin, the TV pundit and former presidential speechwriter with a lot of Nazi sympathizing tweets, but he was made the Philippine Ambassador to the UN early into Duterte's administration, and then more recently was appointed the new Secretary for the Department of Foreign Affairs. In a very 2019 turn of events, he announced a massive breach in passport data ... through his twitter account: https://twitter.com/PhilippineStar/status/1084028771064209410 https://twitter.com/PhilippineStar/status/1084029121338892289 https://twitter.com/PhilippineStar/status/1084029359868993537 https://twitter.com/teddyboylocsin/status/1083927144017752066 These last two tweets are particularly weird/odd/grating because he keeps positioning himself as a third-party in all this, despite the fact that it's his department to run. E: https://twitter.com/teddyboylocsin/status/1084075452640030720 gradenko_2000 has issued a correction as of 18:31 on Jan 12, 2019 |
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Jan 12, 2019 11:39
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I'd excuse the reveal of info through Twitter at this point, if only because it's probably 2nd or 3rd in access for news and info for Filipinos at this point after Facebook. Beyond that though, lmao at this level of incompetence. But then  currently exists with a cabinet whose whole existence is largely based on tearing down or exploiting the things in its purview so lmao.
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Jan 14, 2019 15:09
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get that OUT of my face posted:i agree that the practice of mainland chinese entrepreneurs going into the philippines and other asian countries acting as agents of loan shark imperialism and only hiring other mainlanders is disgusting. but the stuff in that article about chinese-filipinos is alarming, and the legitimate concerns of selling out to beijing won't help them 
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Jan 14, 2019 16:58
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New Filipino workers banned from entering US with H-2A, H-2B visasquote:January 21, 2019 I don't know how much of this is caused by the administration's right-ward lurch, though the overall sentiment in the Philippines seems to be that it's true and therefore deserved.
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Jan 22, 2019 04:34
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oh so this is where all the duterte discussion went to http://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1059884 quote:MANILA -- President Rodrigo R. Duterte on Wednesday said he is “comfortable” with lowering the age of criminal liability to 12 years old. just to be clear, they were previously proposing lowering the age of criminality down to 9 years old, and now i guess duterte is very magnanimously suggesting that they make it 12 instead? thanks merciful leader i also have some friends' hot takes showing up on my fb timeline and boy am i getting angry
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Jan 24, 2019 08:45
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Duterte going all in on his war against Catholicism https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1089433025182457856?s=19
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Jan 27, 2019 09:02
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Jan 28, 2019 07:28
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officially nice
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Jan 28, 2019 10:02
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Jose posted:Duterte going all in on his war against Catholicism okay so the story here isn't about Duterte wanting to blow up a church (yes yes funny joke) but rather ... Last week, there was a plebiscite to ratify the Bangsamoro Organic Law, which would form a new autonomous region in the southern island of Mindanao. This new region would supersede the existing Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) - the BOL would both change the way that the region is administered, but also left open the possibility of expanding the areas of Mindanao that fall within the new Bangsamoro autonomous region. The plebiscite passed as a whole, but in the island of Sulu, the vote count came out to a rejection of the BOL. This doesn't really mean anything as far as the plebiscite's binding results, since the votes are counted in toto, but it's a reflection of how the island where this cathedral attack happened is still rather militant and agitated over this peace deal. Sulu has generally not agreed with being made part of the ARMM to begin with, since they consider themselves sufficiently distinct from the rest of the Muslim population to deserve their own separate autonomy. The BOL never tackled the question of Sulu's separatist sentiment - it was either the BOL got rejected and the ARMM persists with Sulu as part of it, or the BOL passes and ... Sulu becomes part of the new autonomous region. In this context, the likely perpetrators of the attack are part of the long-running separatist movement that are trying to sabotage the BOL or make some kind of political statement about their rejection of its passing. Going back to Duterte, I certainly don't think his administration is competent enough to pull off a false-flag attack without being eventually discovered, but at the same time, this incident is almost certainly going to be used to justify the continuation of martial law within Mindanao (going on for some two years already). It's like that thing with Trump where he'd be too stupid to engineer his own 9/11, and at the same time the government is overrun with too many morons to stop a real terrorist attack if someone did want to strike again, but an attack, real or otherwise, would absolutely be used to ramp-up the police state even more.
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Jan 29, 2019 08:57
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I wrote this back in February 2018 for the Philippines thread in D&D:gradenko_2000 posted:Back in November [2017], the French pharmaceutical manufacturer Sanofi made a press release, stating that their dengue fever vaccine, Dengvaxia, has a significant chance of causing "severe dengue" in cases where a person who has never caught dengue fever before is vaccinated with it, and then gets a real affliction of the virus afterwards It is now one year hence, and: Measles outbreak declared in NCR, Central Luzon quote:Feb 06 2019
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Feb 6, 2019 11:10
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Rappler CEO being arrested on facebook live https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2040019362963124&id=310621318958658&_rdr
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Feb 13, 2019 12:01
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Today, Duterte signed the rice tarrification bill, which lifts import restrictions on rice in favor of a straight tariff. The official line is that this is supposed to drive down rice prices by allowing wider importation of cheaper foreign rice. The reality is that this is being done to comply with WTO trade rules, and will likely lead to further and deeper poverty among rural farmers as they're unable to compete with countries like Thailand and Vietnam. I don't really know how to express my anger except to say out loud that this sort of thing is the far more damaging legacy of Duterte, more than his crude outbursts, more than his alleged kowtowing to China, more than his attacks on the free press. The very first attempt at Philippine independence from America failed over American farmers demanding tariffs on Filipino sugar and coconut oil, and this sort of one-sided economic strangulation is still loving us over eighty-six years later.
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Feb 15, 2019 16:34
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US Secretary of State Pompeo to Duterte: 'You're just like Trump'quote:Visiting US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo drew comparisons between President Rodrigo Duterte and US President Donald Trump during his meeting with the firebrand Philippine leader on Thursday, Malacañang said on Friday.
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Mar 1, 2019 09:43
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I also wanted to share this Op-Ed about the EDSA Revolution, which sums up a lot of my feelings about the subject: Blaming EDSA quote:By encouraging EDSA 1’s being labeled a “revolution,” with all the promise in that description of political and economic democratization and of ending the poverty, social inequality and mass misery that have long haunted this country’s long-suffering people, the leading figures of EDSA 1 — Corazon Aquino, Jaime Cardinal Sin, Fidel Ramos, Juan Ponce Enrile — were at least partly responsible for the perception that what had replaced the Marcos tyranny was democratic rule. I might have mentioned this prior, but the rhetorical problem with this rather leftist analysis of the outcome of the EDSA Revolution, correct as it may be, is that the relitigation of its failures is also wielded by the pro-Marcos right-wing as a whitewashing for his crimes and a justification for the return of his kin into elected office. Or, in the current moment, of Duterte's strongman rule. ___ The other line that sticks out is "the decades-long policy of encouraging foreign investments", because the removal of the protectionist clauses of the 1987 Constitution is a centerpiece of the Charter Change package that the Duterte administration has been trying to push (side-by-side with Federalism), under the guise of it helping attract foreign direct investment.
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Mar 1, 2019 13:20
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How's your water situation going, everyone?  I think I have it easier than some other households; we had water service until just earlier today, when they advised us that water would be cut off between 5pm and 5am until further notice. Argue has issued a correction as of 05:32 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 05:17
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5pm to 4am is the stated time for my place, but it's erratic. I've had water keep flowing until 6pm, I've had water come back on at 2am, I've had water go low pressure instead of being cut off entirely. Definitely keep water stockpiled until we finally get the all clear.
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Mar 24, 2019 14:31
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| # ? May 30, 2024 00:30 |
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For context: Metro Manila's water is serviced by two providers, Maynilad, and Manila Water. Manila Water recently began implementing water rationing as of around March 8, citing a lack of supply. Specifically, Manila Water is saying that due to the onset of El Niño, there's too little water left in the La Mesa Dam for Manila Water to provide normal water service. Now, it's true that the La Mesa Dam's water level is at a critical point, the lowest it has ever been in the last 12 years. However, La Mesa Dam is only supposed to be a secondary water source - most of the water is supposed to be coming from Angat Dam. And Angat Dam is ... doing fine. A CNN team went to Angat Dam on the morning of March 14, and verified that the water level is good for another 3 months or so, by which time we should be out of the dry season and rains should start refilling the dams again. Further, hydrologists have challenged the El Niño story, because if the weather is so warm that it's causing dams to dry up ... why is it only La Mesa dam that's drying up? And even if La Mesa dam is dried up, why would that matter if Manila Water is supposed to be drawing its supply from the not-dried-up Angat Dam in the first place? And then Maynilad, the other water service company, isn't having significant problems, so what gives? Right now, all we know is that Manila Water keeps implementing water outages, but it's not exactly clear why ___ The prevailing story is that because of the design of how water is drawn from the La Mesa and Angat dams, Manila Water can't simply tap Angat dam to 100% replace the water that should be coming from the La Mesa dam. In a broader sense, this represents a deeper problem with the country's utilities provisions in that they're privatized and badly managed - La Mesa and Angat dams have been the source of Manila's fresh water for years, and aside from Maynilad being able to draw additional water from Laguna lake, there's been little improvement in the overall system, despite the fact that water shortages happen every year - it's just that this year is particularly bad.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:51
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