I Hate Filipino Culture -11 years Later

I Hate Filipino Culture: http://internetjaywalking.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-hate-filipino-culture.html

Almost exactly 5 years ago today, I looked at my blog counter and was quite surprised when I saw that one of my articles gained around 50k views in less than 24 hours and was still gaining views at a pretty fast rate. Then I checked facebook and friends were saying that one of my articles was being shared everywhere on social media and getting pretty strong reactions. It was my first taste of what virality was like. The attention was very flattering but also quite frightening. Along with the overwhelming positive reactions, I was also getting a few negative ones. And we all know how mean the internet can be.  I wrote under my pen name “Jay Walker” but I wasn’t entirely anonymous. I had a photo of my mug on the blog which, according to some of the commenters, was quite douchey and could serve as a “before” photo for a derma ad (I’m paraphrasing). I also saw someone write “liquid sosa” at least once in the comments, one my many nicknames back in gradeschool, so I’m pretty sure someone from that part of my life recognized me.

I’m not the type who enjoys having the spotlight directly on me. I like having it on my creative work but not on me as a person. I didn’t delete the profile photo which everybody had already seen anyway but I tried to maintain anonymity as much as i could. I deleted the links to some of my blogs which contained more information and photos of me. And I changed my name on fb to my real name for a while so no one could find me. I did it because I dreaded the influx of haters on my social media accounts but after reading a couple of negative comments, I quickly got desensitized to it and I didn’t really get affected anymore. I changed it back to Jay walker after a couple of days.

Back in 2007 when I originally wrote the entry, facebook was not as big as it is today.  Social media was plurk and Friendster. When you went viral back then, you went viral within the blogging community, maybe you’d get mentioned in a few forums, have a few memes. It’s nothing like what it is today where something could spread like wildfire through facebook or twitter. When I first posted it on my tabulas blog back in 2007, it got a few comments and reactions but it wasn’t until 2013 when people shared it on facebook and twitter that it went viral.

The fact that it spread the way it did was surprising because although the title was a bit clickbait-y, the body of the article was not written, as some of the commenters said, in a way that could be easily understood by the masses. In the age of memes and road rage videos, articles that are several paragraphs long rarely get viral anymore, especially ones that contain words and phrases like “purveyor of ignorance” and “permeates”.  There are so many ways that one could go viral on the internet. One could easily end up like Cristopher Lao or the Amalayer girl, barbequed to a crisp by internet trolls. I’m glad that I didn’t go viral that way. Perhaps it was also because of the nature of the article that it avoided the worst of internet trolls. Although there were a few immature comments and some that were bordering on violent, they were rare. A lot of the reactions to it were articles in themselves. And even some of the replies that were critical of it were also thoughtfully written.

If I had written it today, it definitely wouldn’t sound as angry. Aging has taken some of the fire and idealism out of me. I would change or add a few things. But I think it still remains timely. Those who were critical of the article have accused it of being homophobic because they thought I said something negative about people who dressed in drag. I explicitly used the word “entertainers” I was talking about entertainers, who aren’t even gay in the first place, dressing in drag and acting like fools sake of a few laughs. There are plenty of those characters in Philippine television. That, I think is promoting homophobia and could even be interpreted as an outright mockery of the their community.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the attention back then but looking back at it now, I’m filled with a sense of pride. For a brief period of time, I was able to move people’s thoughts and emotions en masse with my words, which is the aspiration of any writer or those aspiring to be.

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“I Hate Filipino Culture” first went viral on april 2013 and then went viral again on january 2014. Thanks to everyone who shared it and posted reactions to it.

Some of the posts that I could find on twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=internetjaywalking.blogspot.com&src=typd

Some of the lengthier blog reactions that I found through google:

http://www.unipronow.org/oldblog/a-response-to-i-hate-filipino-culture

https://panobamagblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/who-hates-filipino-culture/

http://pluralphilippines.tumblr.com/post/72055845867/a-response-to-the-article-i-hate-filipino

https://indymiss.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/how-lovely-comments-on-internet-jaywalking/

https://newscenter.ph/2014/04/16/do-you-have-this-most-hateful-filipino-attitude/

Matteo gudicelli posted it twice on twitter

https://twitter.com/mateoguidicelli/status/418691715617144832

https://twitter.com/mateoguidicelli/status/418688072578895872

Unfortunately I can’t figure out how to search old posts on facebook but thank you to everyone who shared it.

What is Intelligence?

How much brain power does it take to invent the wheel? It’s a question that I often pondered about in my youth. It doesn’t seem to take much observational power to notice that round things roll and if you put an axle in the center of a round object, you have a modern day wheel and axle. Modern humans have been around for 160,000 years and the earliest wheel and axle dates to about 3600BC. It took us more than a hundred thousand years to invent what a lot of kids today can probably easily discover in their playtime.

There’s this curious phenomenon called the Flynn effect. It’s the consistent increase in the average IQ of a population over generations. Is it possible that the intelligence of homo sapiens back then was just so far behind that what we consider simple cognitive tasks now, required advanced feats of mental gymnastics?

I remember looking at Leonardo Da Vinci’s mechanical designs when I was prepubescent teen and thinking to myself “I could’ve designed these” I had a pretty high regard my capabilities back then :) But while Da Vinci was no doubt a genius and his engineering designs were advanced for his time, I do think that a lot of people living today would be capable of coming up with similar designs, even without the benefit of formal mentoring or passed down technical knowledge.

Not that that would matter. The days of the single inventor working in their basement changing history may be past us. Most major advances in technology are developed by companies or organizations with several brains working together and more than a couple of thousand dollars in funds. Technology is at the point where collective intelligence, as well as funds, are required for it to advance   

a.) at the left, Davinci's design for a crossbow b.) at the right, my design for a slightly different type of 2 stroke engine when i was in gradeschool. I didn't think that i was lagging too far behind compared to Da vinci back then.(I invented my own alphabet when i was young so i could write in private)

I remember when I was much younger, we were given regular IQ tests by the school guidance counselor. Some questions in the tests were significantly more difficult than others. I would answer the tricky questions first thinking that maybe they would matter more. Maybe they would be worth more points. I thought that I’d impress the person who’s checking the test more if I answered the more difficult questions correctly. And then I found out later on that you’d get the same points for correctly answering the easiest question as you would the most difficult questions. That just didn’t make sense to me and I think I continued doing what I was doing for a while.

And then later on, we were taught a strategy on how to score well on these exams. “Answer the easiest questions first and then progressively go to the more difficult ones. If you run out of time, answer the remaining questions using guesswork.” I asked myself how could this be a reliable measure of intelligence when, on top of being a multiple choice test, you were also taught strategies on how to game it.

Perhaps the tests that we were given weren’t up to international standards but you can train people to do better on these tests. Which begs the question: Are we really getting smarter or are we just getting better at answering this specific test. What exactly does this test measure?

Savants are individuals who excel on one specific task but have difficulties in other cognitive tasks. Kim Peek, the inspiration for the movie Rain Man, for example, could read 2 different pages of a book at the same time with each eye scanning a different page. He could remember everything that he read. His brain has absorbed so much information that he wasn’t just a walking encyclopedia, he was practically a walking Google. He could also do complex calendar calculations which no normal human being would be able to do even with extensive training. Like other savants though, Kim peek was disabled in other areas of his life.

A lot of people with Savant syndrome have damage to certain parts of their brains. Savant syndrome has also been replicated artificially using magnetic stimulation that temporally disables parts of the brain. It’s interesting that rather than requiring more brain tissue, you actually have to disable parts of your brain in order to do tasks that require “intelligence”. Kim peek’s brain actually is missing its corpus callosum or the bundle of nerves that link that the two brain hemispheres together. Our brains filter out a lot of information which it considers unnecessary otherwise we’d be overloaded with information. The theory is that this filtering process is what’s missing in a lot of savants.

Kim peek’s brain could do mental feats that none of us would be able to do but he couldn’t understand metaphors,  his father had to take care of him until his death because he couldn’t survive on his own. He couldn’t even dress himself without assistance. His IQ was measured to be below average but does that mean that he wasn’t intelligent? If someone with Kim Peek’s exceptional memory and computational skills scores low on an IQ test then what is the IQ test not measuring?

There is no scientific consensus on what the definition of intelligence is aside from that which IQ measures, which is in itself is controversial. One interesting fact about IQ test results is that it can be affected by the motivation of the person taking the test. When given financial incentives to score high on an IQ test, subjects can score up to 10-15 IQ points higher which is a pretty significant increase.

IQ is significantly affected by the person's motivation to think and the motivation to solve a problem

Perhaps ancient human beings didn’t find a strong enough motivation to invent the wheel until the Bronze Age when society became complex enough that they could profit from it in some way. We could see a similar trend in today’s technological developments. We could advance our understanding of the universe so much faster if the US would increase NASA’s budget. Currently though, NASA’s budget is only about 2.8% that of the US military budget. Back in the 70s, people thought that we’d have colonies on other planets by now. We haven’t even been back to the moon since 1972. We’re more motivated to spend brain power on problems that we can profit from in the near future.

Most people have their own barometers for intelligence. A lot of psychologists would agree that there are many types of intelligence. There’s mathematical intelligence, linguistic, musical etc. As we’ve seen in the case of savants, excelling in one particular area doesn’t always translate to functional intelligence. I think intelligence lies in the valleys in between. It’s in the motivation to think and the capability to use these different types of intelligence as tools to achieve a certain goal. It’s not just to absorb information but to create something with what has been absorbed.

I think that as a society advances, the value of individual intelligence becomes less and less important. Computers are getting better at solving problems that involve logic, statistics, group behavior etc. Eventually we will realize that even intelligent people can be flawed decision makers and we will rely more and more on data crunching machines. Gifted individuals will do well in their respective fields but the capability to singlehandedly advance humanity may be beyond the individual unless he bands together with other equally capable individuals. From a societal standpoint, more important than individual intelligence is collective intelligence –the average intelligence of a population. It directly correlates with a nation’s GDP, with its technological advancements, with its standards of living. It also affects how far an individual can push his intellect. Even if we do produce a man of Da Vinci’s intellect, if he doesn’t get the funding (which is related to GDP), if he doesn’t get the intellectual manpower that he needs to advance his ideas, he won’t get very far.

To My Father

Starting at around 2 weeks before my father’s death, I started noticing changes in his behavior. It was initially very gradual. Unless you knew him well, you wouldn’t notice it right away. It started with the loss of his sense of time.  He became erratic. He would demand to be released from the hospital one day only to ask to be returned to the hospital the next day. He was in and out of confinement four or five times in less than a month. His liver was failing and it was having a detrimental effect on his brain. It got progressively worse to the point that nothing that he said made sense anymore. He was interchanging words. I had to write down some of the things he was saying so I could figure out which words meant what.

Up Until his last 2 weeks, he had a very sharp mind and he took great pride in it. He used to always say something along the lines of: I could lose my arms or my legs but if I lose my mind, that’s it” He often insinuated that he’d rather die than have a diminished mind. It was a painful thing to watch. The thing that he feared the most, next to death probably, was happening to him and he wasn’t even realizing it.

His warped sense of time was particularly stressful for me and my mother. Minutes became hours for him. He’d accuse me of prioritizing other things over him or not spending enough time at the hospital when almost 90% of my waking time was spent at the hospital. I started resenting it after a while because I was practically chained to the hospital room for more than a month and I had to suspend everything else. I’d leave for 40mins to have lunch and I’d get a text message asking me to come back because I’d been away for too long. That resentment was one of the things that I regretted after he passed away.

2 or 3 days before he passed away, he went into a coma. I remember having to leave the hospital because my car’s starter was starting to fail and I had to get it fixed. I was away for more than 2 hours and I didn’t get that text message that, just a few days prior, caused me so much stress. I remember thinking that at that moment, there was nothing that I wanted more than to get that message demanding that I go back to the hospital. The message never came. He never woke up from the coma. He finally succumbed to the cancer that he fought for years. That clichéd saying about spending as much quality time as you can with your loved ones especially in the twilight of their lives, it’s so obvious but it can also be easy to forget when you’re in the situation.

The last month and a half of my father’s life was an emotional rollercoaster for all of us in the family. There’s one particular memory that stands out for me. I think it was night time or early in the morning. I woke up to the sound of him calling out my name. I got up from my makeshift bed on the floor of the hospital room and walked towards him. He looked at me in the eye and, as if he was lucid for the first time in days, he said “My son”

Today’s your first death anniversary, papa. You had your doubts but I think you’d be happy to know that we’re doing fine.  Your business is doing fine.

You will always be missed.

Deconstructing the most common Dutertian arguments

Have you ever posted something critical of the administration? Were you attacked by dozens of online trolls calling you a drug addict or a yellowtard? Did you scratch your head when you got asked questions like "Why don't you grieve for their victims instead?!!"Well then this list is for you. Here are some of the most popular arguments/questions that have been used in this drug war so far deconstructed

1.) It’s ok to kill drug users because they murder and rape: One problem with this argument is that unless you could prove that ALL drug users kill and rape, you’re saying that it’s ok to kill any member of a group because of the crime of some of its members. That’s like saying it’s ok to kill any Muslim because almost all terrorist attacks are committed by Muslims. Another mind altering substance, alcohol, is also responsible for a lot of crimes including murder, rape and a lot of car related deaths. In a lot of countries, alcohol related deaths actually outnumber drug related deaths but I don’t see anyone carrying banners saying “death to all lasengos”. What we do is we prosecute individuals for the specific crimes that they committed while under the influence of alcohol.

You’ll find plenty of documentation proving that users of hard drugs like shabu or meth can be rehabilitated (Robert Downey Jr would be an example) and not all of them commit rape and murder. We don’t prosecute people for the crimes members of their group have committed or crimes that we think they are LIKELY to commit. If a certain person was killed by a drug addict then that particular addict should be charged with murder. Other addicts should be given punishment that's proportional to the crimes that they have committed.

Furthermore are we saying that it’s ok to kill users of Hard drugs like shabu, or are we going to extend this to users of other drugs like cocaine, LSD, marijuana and ectasy. (even dealers of ecstasy have been targeted recently) Because if you’d look at the numbers, you’d be hardpressed to find a strong correlation between the use of recreational drugs and violence. Some of the brightest minds in history experimented with drugs. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Richard Feynman did LSD, Thomas Edison and Sigmund Freud did Cocaine and if I may quote Bob Marley, a strong proponent of the herb, “peace, love and hug all trees mawn” –Obviously a peace loving bloke, although I may be paraphrasing him on that

2.) Extrajudicial killings are justified because our crime rate has reached national crisis levels. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic example of fear mongering. Not so dissimilar from how bush justified his war on Iraq or how Hitler justified the actions of his Nazi party. You make the populace think that there’s a grave and imminent threat and you can justify extraordinary measures to counter that supposed threat.- Duterte’s chief legal adviser even said that the drug problem is now enough grounds to declare martial law. I’d like to think that we’re smart enough not to fall for that. I hope we are. The murder rate in the US is higher than in the Philippines. Rape cases are higher in the UK. In terms of drug use, we’re not even in the top 10 list.  We are being led to believe that we have an extraordinary situation but data will show that we’re nothing special.

3.) Why do you grieve for the criminals who are getting killed by the police and vigilantes? Why not grieve for their victims instead? Does it really have to be mutually exclusive? Can’t you denounce both? In the first place, you CAN'T even really say that victims of extrajudicial killings are criminals yet. They're only suspects and therefore innocent until their guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt in a criminal court. Innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. Even if you were successful in arguing that murderers and rapists deserve death, it doesn't justify the killing of suspects unless you could prove that they are indeed guilty of murder and rape. Also, violent crime perpetuated by individuals happens in every country. It's a sad fact but it's a given. Violent crime that is openly perpetuated/encouraged by the government against its own people is a lot worse and it happens in states like North Korea and certain African countries that civilization has left behind. 

4.) Unless youre a drug addict, you have nothing to fear. You can tell that to Roman Manaois, Roana Tiamson, Julius Rabina, Jefferson Bunuan and the thousands of SUSPECTS who got reduced to a statistic without getting to the chance to prove their innocence. As recent events have shown, “Top gear justice” aka trial by the mob is quite unreliable. Just because a lot of people think that a person is guilty doesn't mean that he is actually guilty.If we treat due process as something that can be skipped, anyone can be a drug addict or a pusher and anyone can be killed. The purpose of due process is to determine guilt through an objective evidence-based process, more or less. It can never be perfect but it will still be more reliable than a subjective process based on finger pointing and chismis mongering. 

5.) The US has no right to criticize the Philippines because they kill blacks. This argument was not made by a teenage girl but by Mr Duterte himself after he was asked by an American journalist a question regarding extrajudicial killings. It’s like that argument with your girlfriend or bf where you try to dig up every bad thing that you’ve done to each other in the past. It is true that there are plenty of cases of white officers killing unarmed black suspects. If Obama endorsed these killings like Duterte does, then we can say that these acts are state sponsored and we should condemn Obama. But Obama hasn’t praised any of these killings, has never endorsed them and has even condemned some of them. The most that you can claim is that there are a few bad seeds in the American police force (they exist in every country) and that they should be tried. A lot of these killer cops have been tried and convicted.

6 Human rights only protect drug coddlers not their victims:- Contrary to popular Dutertian belief, human rights were not invented by yellowtards or by drug coddlers. These rights predated yellowtards actually. The Universal declaration of human rights were agreed upon and ratified by most of the world’s democratic countries including the Philippines back in 1948 so each individual person can have a chance to stand against even the might of the state. A lot of the rights that you enjoy now are inspired by this declaration. It’s not the job of human rights organizations to investigate every crime that happens in a country. That is the government’s job. Now when governments trample on the rights of individuals, such as the right to due process, that’s when they step in. When duterte said that the UN had no right to criticize the country’s policy on extrajudicial killigs,he was a bit ill informed. Extrajudicial killings are crimes against humanity according to rules that we are a signatory to. Violators can be tried in

Was Teddy Locsin Jr. right about the Filipino Language

When I first read Teddy Locsin Jr's tweets, I thought it was a fake account because it didn’t seem like it was written by a fully matured man whom I thought him to be, prior to reading the tweets. His twitter is like youtube’s comment section with such memorable quotes as “Tangina, anong gagawin ko sa Sabado. Syet. Kahit si Jesus patay, si kong kakausapin”.

I ran this sentence through a Filipino-English translator and it came out as gibberish. Maybe part of the hate is due to the fact that he doesn’t know how to use the language properly yet

While i find his use of words questionable, i don't entirely disagree with him. In my younger years, I used to engage in a lot of debates online. It was good mental exercise. The preferred medium for the debates was always English. I noticed that whenever a debater used tagalog, the ideas didn’t flow as fluidly. I wasn’t quite sure if that was because of the debater or the language that he was using.

In a recent interview, Teddy Locsin defended his tweet by saying that Filipino is a flowery language and not as straight forward as English. I would disagree with his observation. I think that Filipino is actually a more straightforward language. There is less room for subtle nuances and wordplay. It’s easy to say a straightforward sentence like: “I don’t like this” in tagalalog. “ayaw ko ito”. But try saying  “I am somewhat fond of this” without using the world  “medyo” or “konti”

Tagalog is more than sufficient for everyday conversation but when engaging people in formal debates, sometimes you have to wield words with surgical precision or with ambiguity depending on the need. Where tagalog lacks is in denoting degree. There’s no word in between Ayaw and gusto. There are tagalog words that will denote gradation like: medyo, konti, halos. But most tagalog words tend to be in Black or white. Whereas in English, words can denote gradation without the assistance of additional words. Disapprove, dislike, hate, loathe, abhor -These words imply similar things but to different degrees. When combined with adverbs that denote degree, you can be more creative with your expression of disgust or you can express your disgust politely. For example: “I highly dislike your choice of words” “Sir, I slightly abhor your hairstyle”

A somewhat polite way of saying your hairstyle sucks

The lack of gradation in Filipino words probably explains why the word “medyo” tends to be overused in Filipino discourse. I myself am guilty of this. Gutom ka na? medyo. Pagod ka na? medyo. You wouldn’t realize how important it is until you take it away and you’re left scratching your head when asked simple questions.

“Gusto” and “ayaw”-there are no currently used alternative tagalog words that convey the same meaning as far as I know. Whereas the word “hate” has more than 40 synonyms. And that is one of the main reasons why Filipino can be less efficient than English in formal debates. English is a constantly evolving language that absorbs words from other languages and is used by more people. There are significantly more words in the English language than there are in Filipino. With more words, you have a richer palette to compose sentences with.

So did teddy locsin have a point? Maybe to a certain degree. But what’s more important than the language that you use is your mastery of it. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a language that has a richer vocabulary if you’re unfamiliar with most of its words. An experienced artist could paint a masterpiece with just 3 colors. A masterful writer or speaker should be able to express his ideas with whatever words that are at his disposal, whether those words be English or Filipino

He did raise one excellent point in his interview though. English is also a national language and there should be no shame nor treachery in using it.

When the Lion shed its mane

As if pressing the fast forward button on the remote, one moment you’re in a doctor’s clinic for a check up, looking at other patients in the queue in more advanced stages of the disease and getting a glimpse the immediate future through them. The next moment, you’re there, in your own future, seeing what you saw then but this time from a more intimate perspective. The transition from the then to the now is so abrupt that the mind seems to have omitted the in-between stages. It almost feels like I had time traveled.

It's december 27th, just two days after christmas. I’ve been staring at this bed for a while now. It’s a standard hospital bed with a cream colored frame draped in white sheets. It’s an otherwise ordinary bed but it is of particular interest to me because there’s this question that’s been lingering in my head. Is this going to be the bed, the one that he will last lay down on? The “death bed as they call it.”

It was almost 4 years ago when he was diagnosed with cancer. He was only given 6 months by his doctors. If you saw him a month ago, you’d think that he was openly mocking his death sentence. Apart from a fist–sized lump that was growing on his abdomen, he looked healthy. He was mobile, He went to the nearby mall regularly to buy his supplements. It almost seemed as if time was of abundance.

The decline of his health in the last few days was so sudden that I didn’t realize what was happening until it hit me in the face -It felt like being slapped out of a dream where cancer was nothing but an overgrown pimple that won't go away and waking up to reality, staring down cancer's unmasked face. Its grotesque features in plain view. His long period of good health has lulled us into a false state of security. It is like how you see it in the movies after all. I first realized that something was wrong when Christmas eve came and he wasn’t at the dinner table with us.  We always spent Christmas together having noche buena at the same table. We don't have a lot of traditions. This is one of the few and we never missed a single one. I didn't realize how bad it was until the day after Christmas. He was very weak. He wasn't eating, His face was gaunt, his muscles have wasted away. I'm not sure if he really lost that much weight in 2 days or i just didn't pay that much attention bef

If Duterte were president...

There are those who argue that what we need is an iron-fisted leader or even a dictator, a Filipino Lee Kuan yew perhaps. Maybe it's true that a US-style democracy works against us because we’re a country of shallow people and therefore very much susceptible to the influence of demagogues , leaders who appeal to the emotions.  

For some, this iron-fisted leader is Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of Davao who has often times admitted to being responsible for the extrajudicial execution of criminals. This is a fact that's not ignored or even contested by his supporters. For a lot of them it's actually his selling point. For a society that finds cursing and distributing condoms to those who can’t afford it morally reprehensible, it is a bit of an oddity that a politician who espouses extrajudicial killings would find popularity.

The right of every person to a fair trial is ingrained in every modern democracy. It is a globally recognized basic human right. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Duterte’s judgement is indeed impeccable. That he can tell with certainty who is guilty and who is not, rendering trials unnecessary. Surely, Duterte with his impeccable judgement wouldn’t have time to carry out the killing or judging of all of the country’s criminals all by himself. He will have to delegate. Would his delegates be gifted with the same omniscience and “purity of intention” as their boss? We don’t even trust our police force to handle the country’s traffic situation without extorting our motorists. People can’t even fly in this country without the fear of bullets mysteriously appearing in their luggage. Imagine our law enforcement officers operating in an environment where killing offenders of the law without trial is justified. Maybe the Duterte system sort of works within the confines of Davao’s borders but when taken to the national level, the potential for abuse will expand exponentially. It don’t think that one would have to be particularly pessimistic to see that. On the contrary i think one would have to be zealously optimistic not to see it.

The Davao death squad, which the mayor has admitted to having connections with, is not only responsible for the death of rapists and muderers. They've also allegedly executed people who have committed Petty crimes. Minors have allegedly been executed. Even some of the locals of Davao will admit that some people have been killed by mistake -and they're ok with this because they're happy with the peace and order situation in their city. Imagine the misfortune of those people who were killed by mistake -that their lives were sacrificed for the whims of people who demand peace and order at any price. Even if it was just one person killed without a fair trial and killed by mistake, that’s one person too many.

The mayor has a treasure trove of quotable quotes that would be funny if it was coming from a comedian, entertaining if it was coming from an action star but bone-chilling for someone who's running for president. If you really think about it, who really wants death squads roaming the streets of Metro Manila at night looking to deal swift and fatal justice to suspected criminals?

We can only make assumptions because no one has the clairvoyance to see what a Duterte presidency would be like. Maybe the naysayers are wrong. Maybe he will reform the country. Maybe he can straighten the police force. Maybe his "enforcers" will hit the right targets every time, maybe he won't ban algebra and trigonometry. Maybe this, maybe that. We will have to make assumptions about the other candidates too. The one constant though is that this is a person who is known for and has admitted to operating outside of the law to kill. That is a lot of power to give to one man. We’d be giving up a very basic human right in the assumption that we're surrendering that right to a person who has pure intentions and to a system that will not be abused. If we’re inaccurate in our judgement of his ethics, which we already know are already quite questionable to begin with, we're screwed. The legal system exists for a reason. If it is flawed, fix it. By circumventing it, you'd just be replacing a problem with an even bigger one.

Give up the rights of the few for the many. That's what's being suggested. Surely a few innocents will suffer but we’re at war with criminality and at war there are always casualties, right? You’d just have to pray to your chosen deity that that casualty will not be you or someone you know. In a world of progressing civility where rights are gradually being disseminated equally to every race, gender, age, this is several steps back.. The hierarchy of world governments doesn’t go from a full democracy, where the right of every citizen is equal and legally protected, to a system where the rights of the citizens are conditional and can be waived when one man or the Filipino mob demands it. There are plenty of steps in between.

Duterte's supporters might argue that it's only the rights of the criminals that he will be taking away but without the right to a fair trial, innocence is a very fragile, transitory thing. When the authorities, deem you a criminal, you are one and you have no say about it. As one country under one leadership, we're all in the same frying pan. You can't selectively "cook" certain people without getting others or yourself burned accidentally.

When laws are being violated or "circumvented" around me, I would like to think that it’s being done by deviant individuals, not by my own government. That there is an objective legal system that’s not based on one man’s word and that everyone is subject to it. No one should be above it, no one should operate outside of it, especially those in power.

Is Islam a religion of violence

A lot of people see Islam as a religion of violence. If interpreted literally, it can be. But the Bible is just as potent an instrument of hate if also interpreted literally. The punishment for homosexuality in the bible is death (Leviticus 18 and 20), The punishment for worshiping other gods is death, the punishment for blasphemy is stoning… to death. In the bible, a lot of crimes that we would consider petty are punishable by death. We look at acts done by muslim extremists as primitive because that’s exactly what those acts are. They’re following books written at a different time when the concept of civility was not as we know it now. But why is it that more acts of terrorism are committed under the name of Islam than in the name of the Abrahamic God when both religions promote similar punishments for the same crime?

The Roman Catholic church hasn’t always been peaceful and humane. It took its sweet time. Up until the 16^th century, The Catholic church was burning people at the stake for heresy.  A lot of European conquest was partly fueled by the need of the church to convert as much of the world into Catholicism. A lot of people died in the process.

Muslims had a very prosperous civilization in the middle ages. But most muslim countries now are poor and have not been very progressive for a long time. Those that are rich became rich just recently. The hotbeds for terrorism are usually the poorest of these countries. Al qaeda in Afghanistan and ISIS in Iraq -theocracies that progress has barely touched, where life expectancy is short and death is a way of life

When people aren’t dying around you, the value of human life goes up. The death of one soldier in World War 2 doesn’t have the same impact as the death of one soldier today in peace time. We’re not used to death anymore. And when a person doesn’t worry about death happening within the immediate future, that person is free to think about other things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with survival, such as the rights of your fellow man as well as your own. And most especially, since death and killing become taboo, you don't think of killing your fellow man when his beliefs contradict yours.

A lot of the more violent aspects of Catholicism have been slowly rooted out by modernization in Europe -a process that is still continuing today in the free world. It wasn’t too long ago when racism was state imposed and slavery was legal (slavery was permitted in the bible). Look where progress has brought us now. State imposed racism and slavery have been practically eradicated and several states have legalized same sex marriage.

A lot of people claim that religion is the root of a person’s morals but in the modern world, it’s not. . Morality evolves as civilization progresses. As life becomes less of a privilege than it is a right, concepts such as equality gain a foothold in a society's collective consciousness. We no longer live our lives based on the morals of bearded men who lived at a time when human life was a disposable commodity. Morality evolves as society evolves. And we live in a world where morality has evolved to encompass everyone’s rights, including those who don’t belong to our group and those who don’t belong to our religion. Unless you live in Davao, death is no longer the only possible punishment for any given crime.

There are of course those that progress has left behind. Those who choose to hold on to archaic laws and morality. And I think therein lies the answer to the first question in this entry on why one group tends to produce more extremists than the other. One group has progressed more than the other. I think one lesson that we can learn from the Catholic church is that it doesn’t matter if your religion promotes violence and bigotry or not. One can go beyond it and still practice the same religion.

This is not a post against religion. It is a post for reason... For a morality that is carefully thought out and not based on doctrine or dogma. That’s more or less what we have right now in the free world. And it’s something that a lot of people who subscribe to Islamic extremism could use. 

On the INC demonstrations

Photoshopped, you’d say but is it really? Hard to tell exactly considering that plenty of the INC flock who participated in the demonstrations most likely had no idea what they were doing in the middle of edsa and being a bother to metro manila’s normally peace-loving motorists who were then probably quite irate. They managed to bring metro manila’s traffic on a Friday night which is usually at a standstill to a… standstill. I avoided edsa during the demonstrations but as someone who passes through edsa regularly, it’s hard for me to imagine how traffic could be worse on a Friday night at rush hour on a payday. If I tried really hard to imagine it, I’d probably see cars going at negative speed in my head… going back to the offices from which they came, in reverse.

Perhaps separation of church and state is a fool’s dream in a country that is so deeply religious. Artificial birth control, gay marriage, divorce: these are concepts that may never find general political acceptance in your lifetime. A religious group could order its flock to paralyze one of metro manila’s main arteries and they would unquestioningly do so –because the same laws that are applied to every man were applied to their leaders. They’d make democracy work against us if their church leaders also tell them who to vote for. I’m glad that never happens. What is democracy but an illusion in a country where individual thinking is controlled by an elite few who claim to be arbiters of morality and truth.

I am not a religious person and that may even be an understatement but I have no problems with people practicing their religion as long as it doesn’t impede on the rights of others, as long as they don’t force their values on people who don’t share the same views and as long as they don’t force their version of the truth on me.

Going back to that picture. At first glance it may not make sense but if you come to think of it, it’s completely logical -makakapunta ba sila sa kalsada kung di sila nagpunta doon? It only doesn’t make sense because you’re looking for rational thinking where it doesn’t exist. It was photoshopped but it might as well be real

What is my Opinion on Gay Marriage

What is my opinion on same-sex marriage? The US just legalized gay marriage nationwide so people have been expressing their strong opinions on the matter, especially the religious variety. It’s unnatural, they say; It offends them, they say. Some try to rationalize their distaste for same sex marriage by arguing that same-sex couples are unfit to raise kids, by arguing that kids need both a father and a mother -nevermind that the issue of adoption is separate from the issue of marriage itself, that there are plenty of parents not fit to raise a family but are legally given the right to do so … nevermind the fact that single parents are actually allowed by law to adopt children. –let that last phrase sink in for a moment. Also, I’m not sure what passes for “natural” in this hitech age of ours but I imagine that the people complaining that gay marriage isn’t natural aren’t living in the jungle and hunting their own food.

The bottomline is: It doesn’t matter what my opinion on it is. It doesn’t matter what yours is. None of us should be able to repress a group’s rights on basis of personal opinion. Two adults, regardless of gender, should be allowed to spend their lives together and be afforded the same legal rights and recognition as the rest of us. Anything less is no different from state-imposed racism, sexism and other state-imposed isms that we’ve left behind in the past. If the general public finds the idea offensive, they must know that they have a right to be offended but what they don’t have is the right not to be. They also don’t have the right to force their outdated religious sensitivities down people’s throats.

Several decades ago, people of different races were not allowed to get married. It was considered a criminal act punishable by incarceration. Not only was racism popular among the public, it was also state imposed. It seems so backwards to us now that interracial marriage is widely accepted but it was considered taboo back then. At some point in the future, when rejection gives way to tolerance and tolerance gives way to acceptance, people will see same-sex marriage the same way we view interracial marriage now. When they do, wouldn’t you want to be on the other side of the fence?

On cyberbullying part 2

I wrote about cyberbullying in my previous entry and this rant is a continuation of that

There seems to be this recent trend of mainstream publications trying to incite a lynch mob by publicly shaming ordinary people for what wouldn't even be considered misdemeanor offenses.

The video below was shared on top gear and went viral shortly afterwards. It’s a video of two young women in a car trying to ruthlessly awaken a commuter from his deep slumber by viciously blowing their horn. Watch the video below to see the very face of evil (/sarcasm) Seriously, who hasn't tried waking up a friend for the Lulz. Maybe the guy thought that it was mildly annoying but i doubt that he was seriously offended by it. He probably slept again and moved on with his life unlike majority of the commenters on the site. I seriously think that if you replace the two attractive women with two ordinary looking commuters there wouldn’t be as much hate. But because they were driving a car, they looked like arrogant, rich bitches and therefore deserving of the vilest insults.

Top gear is especially fond of this practice. It’s one thing if it’s a random internet nerd posting this story on facebook for his or her friends to see. It’s an entirely different thing if it’s a mainstream publication with magazines that you see in newstands that’s supposedly manned by adults. When you have more than a million followers and you ask the masses to lynch somebody, they will do it with relentless passion. The owner of a maseratti who punched an LTO officer in the face. He was publicly insulted, along with his family without waiting for his side to be aired. Later on it was discovered that the LTO officer was notorious for being an A-hole. Not enough reason to be punched in the face, maybe (?). but at least if there had to be lynching, it shouldn’t have been as one sided as it initially was. Or just leave out the lynching altogether and let the parties involved settle it among themselves. Then there was the beast mode guy, cars parked incorrectly with their plate numbers in full display –also lynched online

I specifically like the comment about not "murdered-ing" the english language. What's most disturbing about this story is not the prank itself but the fact that there are more than 11,000 comments and i'd say more than 90% of them are at least this brutal

I understand the need of these websites to generate traffic but at the very least blur faces out or plate numbers, especially if there’s no illegal offense involved.  There's a reason why plate numbers on cars are usually blurred in photos. You can find out a lot of information about the owner of the car by displaying its plate number, including his or her home address.

Some of these viral stories can be pretty funny and worthy of ridicule. I do laugh at them sometimes but I move on shortly afterwards. I don’t feel the need to dig out more private info about them and then make them public, I don’t feel the need to start facebook pages shaming the people involved in the videos. I don’t feel like raising pitchforks and inviting my comrades to do the same until we receive a groveling apology from the person whose life we have practically destroyed. I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that this lynchmob mentality is getting way out of hand

On Internet Virality

If you’ve driven a car long enough, you probably have been exposed to the predatory beasts that prowl our streets, dressed in green, yellow or sometimes blue. Maybe you’ve been stopped by one of them and maybe you have given in to the temptation of slipping a bill or two. I will not judge you. I don’t have the figures but I strongly believe that you are the majority. Maybe, even I have done it. I used the word “maybe” because sentences sometimes have to be made ambiguous in this very quick-to-judge, social media-savvy society. Really officer? You saw me not wearing a seatbelt from 30ft away in the middle of the night in a tinted car? Well I was wearing a seatbelt. It was my passenger who wasn’t. So you stopped me first and then looked for violations later in the hopes that maybe you’ll get kotong? I’m gonna raise my voice at you and if anyone thinks that I’m a douche for doing so…. I’ll just hope that they don’t have a camera with them. Because I don’t wanna go viral that way. And no, you’re not getting kotong.

The problem with criticizing people through the lens of the internet is that you don’t see your own face until you turn off your monitor and see your reflection on the empty black screen. And then you realize that you have pimples and acne scars just like everyone else. Maybe in the past, you were having a bad day and a security guard said something that irked you off.  Maybe you said “Amalayer? Amalayer?” Maybe you had a heated argument with an MMDA officer -I hope you didn’t punch him in the face like this Maserati driver did just last week. Maybe you did something stupid like drive through a flooded street that resembled a small lake and then blamed the government for your misfortune, just like Christopher Lao. Just be thankful that a TV crew wasn’t conveniently waiting around when it happened.

There’s no question that what the Maserati driver did was WRONG but If the Maseratti driver punched another driver in a Ferrari, the headline would’ve been “two rich men having a spirited and expected altercation”. Instead, it was about an arrogant rich man abusing the poor, in this case a poor and therefore saintly MMDA officer. We’d probably laugh about the former headline but I doubt if there’d be as much hate especially from the masses. One may argue that an MMDA officer is a person of authority and should be respected but you tend to not respect authority very much when you regularly see it being abused.

We tend to see ourselves in groups. The rich, the poor, the abusers, the oppressed. The poor see the rich as evil, some of the rich may see the poor as undesirable. Members within our group are saintly and those outside our group are three headed demons. We demonize those whom we don’t understand, those who are not “us”. I think that’s why in all of these stories, the parties involved usually come from different social classes.

It’s understandable to laugh or ridicule the people involved in some of these viral videos/stories for a brief time. But the seething hate and the bullying that goes on for several weeks to several months, I think is a symptom of something I would like to call “internet induced self-righteousness”. Because everyone’s life or morals appear better on facebook. We see ourselves as better men or women when the truth is we just haven’t been filmed having a meltdown or paying an “unofficial fee” to avoid a queue. Pick an evil. If you’re over 30, I’m sure you’ve done more than a few things that you are ashamed of –things that could be subject to public ridicule

The internet is the ultimate democratizer in that it gives everyone who has access to it a voice to challenge anyone, including those who are much higher up. But when the same power is used against normal people who just had the misfortune of being at the wrong place, with the wrong mental disposition at the wrong time, it just seems like overkill. Facebook becomes a courtroom of a million jurors and instant verdicts. Destroying someone’s life becomes as easy as waiting for him or her to make a mistake and then pressing the record button. It’s all fun and games until you stop to think that it can happen to everyone, including yourself. And then you ask yourself, What skeletons do I have in my closet.

On Typhoon Mario

Once again a freakish storm hit Luzon. Prophesiers of the apocalypse will have a field day, I can picture it already. I remember when Ondoy hit metro manila. It was described as a phenomenon that happens once every half a century or so. Now it’s more like a once a year thing, like other yearly pinoy events, like the  sinulog, pahiyas or the Manila auto show. If it happens any more frequently, we’d be seeing resorts sprouting along edsa.

On the brighter side, we’d have use for our salbabidas all year round –More value for the money, I say. We can market our country as the premiere urban-aquatic destination in Asia. Could be good for tourism. Imagine the reviews "Playing DOTA with your body half submerged in water... definitely a unique experience. 5 out of 5. Would try again. It's definitely more fun in the Philippines"

Of course we must never forget that this is Manny pacquiao’s fault for switching religions, climate change doesn’t exist and we Filipinos will get sarcasm and satire the first time we read it.

The Beauty of Melancholy

Happiness has been put on a pedestal, often described as the ultimate goal in a human being’s life. Depression has been demonized endlessly by thousands of internet quotes. So it may surprise some that there are those who find appeal in melancholy. I for one, can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had not lived through it. I speak from the vantage point of one who was once almost always depressed and alone to someone who has come to terms with his own skin and isn’t as lonely anymore.

All throughout my youth until my early 20’s, I was perpetually depressed. I wouldn’t call it clinical depression because I had plenty of good reason to be depressed. It was mostly because I didn’t have a lot of people around me, also because I wasn’t living up to my high expectations of myself. My self esteem was incredibly low and it severely affected my interaction with people. It was also during this time when I was at my creative peak. My creative outlets were visual art and writing –most of this blog was a product of that particular time in my life.

 Now my life is quite different. I now know what it’s like to be valued by another person, which I’ve discovered, is the biggest self esteem boost that one can get. I also have come to terms with myself, so to speak. The downside is I no longer paint and I rarely write. When I was depressed, all I wanted was for the depression to end but now that I’m quite settled in, I look for it. I’d listen to sad music, watch tragic films. Weird as it may sound, I occasionally try to induce sadness but It doesn’t come as easily as it used to.

The appeal of melancholy is difficult to describe. One sees beauty in it though it’s hard to determine if you actually feel pleasure or satisfaction from that beauty. It feels like viewing the world through a different lens. You see things that you wouldn’t normally see if you’re in a jovial mood, in the company of others. It makes one introspect more. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that most artists and thinkers also tend to be depressive. Marcel proust once said that Happiness is good for the body but it is grief that develops the strength of the mind.

Perhaps everyone is drawn to sadness to a certain extent. We watch depressing films, listen to sad music, we try to induce tears when we’re perfectly happy and it feels good, I think.

Or perhaps this isn’t something that everyone can relate to. But to the artists, the musicians, the writers, the couch philosophers out there, I think you know what I’m talking about -to look at the world, desaturated of color with a slight tint of blue, to appreciate the soft shadows cast on a cloudy day, Maybe it does take a keen eye to see beauty in gloom

On Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda

I actually lived in Tacloban for a year. It was a relatively small city so a lot of the locals recognized each other by their last names. Unless I’m mistaken, Gaisano was their only major mall at the time (97-98). Jollibee was just about to open its first branch and I remember that it was a pretty big deal for the locals. To some of them, it seemed like significant step towards becoming like manila, which I guess was the ideal city for some of them. I remember the househelp saying “may Jollibee na. bakit pa kelangan pumunta ng manila”.

Tacloban changed a lot since I left the city.  Last time I checked, not only did they have Jollibee, they also had KFC, mcdo; They had a robinsons mall and an SM mall was scheduled to open next year.  To see Tacloban in its current state is heartbreaking mostly because of the loss of humanity but also because the typhoon wiped away decades of slow but steady progress. -Progress that the locals cheered for every step of the way.

Photo grabbed from CNN

On the Litol Prince and cuteness in general

Let’s say you were walking along a bridge and you saw the puppy in the picture above. It's immediately obvious that there's a high likelihood that the puppy would be facing a dismal fate as a stray dog or a sumptuous dish in a buffet sometime in the near future.

What would you do?

1. Walk past the dog if you saw nothing while pondering in your head how you came to be a heartless husk of a human being.
2. Using a voice that’s a few octaves higher than your regular speaking voice, talk to it using nonsensical word-sounds like ”anununununu”, “ajooeyjooey”, “moooooeee you’recominghome withmeajoojoo” and proceed to take the dog home.

I was faced with such a conundrum a few years ago while I was passing through the bridge connecting MRT north station and trinoma. I was walking along, blissfully minding my own business when I saw a man with two puppies in the corner of my eye. I stopped to absorb the scene. The man looked homeless. The puppies looked like they were barely a month old, one male and one female. The man was giving the puppies away… in exchange for a little money of course, as capitalist tradition dictates. The dogs were cute so he didn’t have trouble attracting positive attention. A woman passed by, went with option 2 and promptly left with the female puppy, leaving the male puppy behind.

A took a good look at the remaining puppy. A number of thoughts went through my head. With each passing thought, the prospect of brinigng the dog home with me became more and more tempting.

As with every decision involving the heart, I tried to justify the idea in my head until eventually it made so much sense that it was as if the universe itself was telling me to take the dog home. I thought to myself I’d be helping this man, I’d be helping this dog, the man would finally leave the bridge thereby easing the flow of pedestrian traffic, I’d rid the world of one more stray dog and its future progeny, the world will be a better place to live in and therefore peace for all mankind will inevitably ensue. It just seemed like I was making a decision for the betterment of everyone in the immediate area and the world in general.

And so I made my choice. I didn’t say “mooeee you’re coming home with me ajoojoo” … audibly. I did it within the confines of my own head, as all proper men should.

It was after I gave the man my “donation” that it struck me that taking care of another life form that would be entirely dependent on me was like plugging in a USB device in one try.  I had done neither in my life and both required skills that I did not possess.  In my excitement, I also conveniently and intentionally forgot that my family hated animals profusely. Either I had to upgrade my puppy hiding skills to ninja level or the introduction had to be made as perfect as possible

To ensure the highest level of success, I made sure that the little prince was as presentable as possible before I brought him home. I brought him to a veterinarian friend who gave him the appropriate shots. I bought him a cute little collar with bells on it. I think I may have paid more for the collar than for the dog. Written on the collar was the name “Prince”. I’ve never been good at giving names. I’ve come up with names as uninspired as “Pussy” for a stray cat that used to visit our house often,  “Browny” for a dog that was brown and “Blacky” for another dog which was “coincidentally” black.  I probably would’ve named the puppy “white-with-brown-spots-y” if left to my own devices. As creative as a claim to be, my brain just shuts down when it comes to coming up with names. Rather than be blamed in the future for coming up with a very lame name, this time I let the collar decide so it can take the blame instead of me. The dog was gonna be named Prince. Not everyone liked the name but it’s not like they gave me suggestions…  Also, it was the collar’s fault.

The initial reception for prince back at home was less than tepid. The reaction ranged from shock to disgust. I didn’t tell them right away that I picked him up near the MRT station to limit the disgust factor but that didn’t help much. It's good that he was already toilet trained when i got him otherwise he probably would've been kicked out of the house without my knowledge. They didn’t want him inside the house. They didn’t want prince to get near them at all. That wasn’t a problem for prince as he was a very shy little puppy. He avoided all contact with people whenever he could. He hid under one of my book shelves for most of the day and made no sound at all. For the first time in my life, I officially had a pet dog. It just so happened that he was invisible for most of the day. One of the aspects of dog ownership that I was most looking forward to was seeing that wagging tail waiting for me upon getting home. I started thinking that I was gonna be missing out on that with prince.

I’ve always had a soft spot for non-human mammals. I find them easier to like than humans on average. When I was a kid, I’d secretly adopt stray kittens that wandered into our house. I didn't get to keep them very long. I wasn't very good at hiding stuff. It’s a little embarrassing to admit because adopting little kitties is not among the manliest of activities. But I believe that even the manliest of men have a little soft, vulnerable spot that an innocent, wide-eyed stare from a juvenile canine or feline should be able to penetrate, given enough time. Even Hitler, the very face of evil himself, kept and loved animals. I think that some of us do need a dose of cuteness in our lives.

It may be an aberration of evolution that a member of one species would raise an individual from another species but I’m willfully playing along knowing full well that my biological need to nurture is being fooled by one of nature's little tricks. Cuteness is indeed a powerful tool for survival. I shall illustrate the power of cuteness below:

I had to photoshop the tears in because they were nonexistent in the original photo but replace Puss with a puppy and the Dawson's Creek guy's mug with my awesome-albeit-douchey face and this is pretty much a reenactment of what happened when i first met Prince.

It's now been quite a while since I first met the Litol prince. He's not so litol anymore. Some might say that he’s also not as cute but I think that he’s no less amazing.  He shed his shyness after a few months. He's now an uncontainable ball of energy. You leave for a few hours and he greets you like he hasn't seen you in weeks. He's not a big dog but he'd knock you down if you get him excited enough. I didn't quite miss out on the "dog experience" like I thought I would.

Prince wasn't our last dog. A few months after I introduced the litol prince to the dog haters club (my family), my sister brought home Rambo, a pomeranian puppy.  Rambo had it easy. By the time that he came along, everyone in the house was a dog lover or at the very least a dog tolerator.  So even if Rambo was an indiscriminate defecator and urinator he was loved right off the bat. From the time that I brought prince home to the first time he elicited a smile in the face of a nonbeliever, he won every heart in the house one by one. It’s quite amazing to see people who were once animal haters talk to dogs as if they were their own kids; talk about dogs as if they were the staunchest of animal rights advocates. The local dog haters club was eventually abolished. Rambo helped a lot but it was prince who first tore the walls down. Such was the legacy of the litol prince. He changed hearts, minds, he got himself a home and a family without even trying. He now even owns a little bit of internet real estate through my blog. Not a bad life for an “askal”. He's living example that overcoming hate is sometimes only a matter of spending some time with the subject of your hate... and that a little bit of cuteness goes a long way.

On Nationalism, Pride and Individuality

It’s hard to say what passes for nationalism in the Philippines nowadays. If it’s crying “pinoy pride” or claiming that Filipinos are good singers everytime a Filipino appears on a foreign singing competition then you can count me out because I totally don’t care. I don't see how being born in the same country can give people the right to claim achievements of other individuals that they had nothing to do with.

If it involves supporting Filipino products, I’m not really sure how well I’m doing. A lot of times I buy things without knowing where they’re made. I just bought an outlast battery for my car which apparently is a Filipino brand. I only found out a year ago that Figaro was a Filipino company after  patronizing their coffee shops for a while. They didn’t lose my patronage. I almost never watch Filipino movies. I do listen to some Filipino musicians but that has nothing to do with nationalism. I listen to what I like, I buy products from companies that give me good value and have a decent reputation.

In my essay "I hate Filipino culture" which went viral last month, i  enumerated a few Filipino qualities that i hated. I got some flak for it especially when I implied that those who've been exposed to foreign cultures usually grow up to have more open minds. I was accused of having colonial mentality and of worshipping the west (which is curious because i never mentioned the west. I actually mentioned the Chinese.) Regardless, the point was not that other cultures are superior to our own but that  having an open mind necessarily entails being open to other cultures

The world is moving towards internationalism. Differences in culture in the past were mostly due to geographical boundaries limiting contact between different groups of people.  Peoples that closely interacted with each other usually have similarities in  architecture, art, philosophy or language. Colonization isn't necessary for cultural exchange. It naturally happens when there's contact between different cultures and there's nothing wrong with it. Modern technology has practically removed those geographical boundaries. The pacifistic trend in the world today has removed most political boundaries as well. Countries work together to advance human knowledge;  artists draw inspiration from all over the world; architecture, fashion and art are becoming geographically indistinct. -differences in style have more to do with the designer's/artist's individual sense of aesthetics than with which country he or she was born in. We are starting to see a global culture that is becoming more and more homogenous. You may like it or hate it but it's inevitable.

Filipinos are a very proud people. We excessively boast about whatever we can boast about -one only need to look at the comments on a youtube video featuring a Filipino appearing on foreign television to see how prevalent this pandemic is. People would scream pinoy pride, claim that claim that filipinos are good singers/dancers and then we'd bash the hell out of the nonfilipino contestants. I have a problem with this not only because it's annoying but also because we're praising ourselves collectively as a nation for an achievement of an individual that his or her nationality and our nation had nothing to do with. Rather than claim other's achievements as our own, wouldn't it be better if we emulate them? And i don't mean to belittle the accomplishments of our filipino compatriots who've made a name for themselves abroad. I'm happy for them. but doesn't it say something negative about us when we scream pinoy pride with such militant fervor as if our identity as a nation hangs on the shoulders of an american idol contestant?

We want compliments, so much so that we sometimes ask for them directly from foreigners. We are extremely sensitive to criticism. We criticize and make fun of other countries and other races yet we’re up in arms when a fictional novel mentions us in a not so flattering light. The more extreme of the "pinoy pride" crowd exhibit isolationist mentality, rejecting all that is foreign, especially those coming from the west, and labeling those who patronize foreign media/literature or speak or write in a language other than filipino as having colonial mentality.

I love the Philippines because it is home. It’s where the people I know live, the places I visited growing up. I am Filipino but I don’t see myself being defined entirely by that fact. I’m more of a humanist than a nationalist. I’m more proud of what humanity as a whole has achieved and i'm more excited by what it can achieve. I owe more of what i am to being human, a biological fact, than to being a Filipino, which is a sociological construct.

There’s nothing wrong with loving one’s country. I draw the line between mere love and blind nationalism where rationality ends and zealotry begins, where individuality is stifled in the name of the collective. Where the superiority or inferiority of an individual is determined by imaginary borders drawn up by wars past. Love what is good, hate what is not. Try to do something to change it if you can. If it cannot be changed, you do not have to love it simply because it's Filipino and you don't have to think or live a certain way because it's the "Filipino way". Being excessively proud of your heritage sounds like a good idea until you hear someone else mouthing off about how special he is because of his heritage. It gets old very quickly. Nationalism is similar to racism and sexism in that you put people in boxes based on factors that they had no choice over and then you judge each other's value collectively.

Throughout history, nationalism has been responsible for wars, genocide, racism, slavery. It did have a hand in ending colonialism. But the age of colonialism is long over. Wars in the name of country have gone out of fashion. There's no need for a slave revolt when there are no slaves and no masters. 

I'm a strong proponent of individualism and freethought and a lot of things about nationalism run counter to those concepts. When you stop seeing people, including yourself, as individuals but as part of a herd with one mind; When people somewhere, let's say, near the vicinity of Taiwan would beat up innocent foreigners because of an act of their country that they had nothing to do with simply because they were born in that country; When people start thinking that they have a special place under the sun because of the soil under their feet; When people start seeing other people as good or bad, superior or inferior, human or inhuman without knowing anything about them aside from the country where they were born.  -I see nothing constructive or honorable about it. It's primitive and it should go the way of the dodo. The sooner the better. 

In an idealist’s world, people will not be divided by geographical boundaries, not by race, not by religion. Ideologies and morals will not be set by the religion you were born into, the country where you were born or the color of your skin but something that you develop or find yourself by sifting through what’s available out there in the world. In this idealist's world, we all ride under one banner -that of mankind.