Category: criticism

“the PERFECT time to criticize”

Posted by Erin Denise Chupeco on Facebook
13 Nov 3:30 pm near Manila ·

To everyone bitching about why we shouldn’t be criticizing the government and just help out instead:

1. This is the PERFECT time to criticize. I don’t know about you, but I am sick and fucking tired of the same goddamn story every time a typhoon comes our way five or six times a year: no funds in the budget because government officials wanted a Porsche, or I’m the president but it’s not my fault I’ll just pass the blame onto the cities for not being prepared because passing blame is the ONLY thing I’ve passed in my fucking term so far….

2. Constantly not speaking out about this in the past is the reason we’re all in this shithole. When you know something’s not right, the worst thing you can do is to shut up.

3. I can criticize AND help out at the same time, fuck you very much. If you’d rather not say anything because the current status quo is more important to you than accepting the need for things to change, then YOU’RE part of the problem.

Criticism: not (fun) in the Philippines

By Katrina Stuart Santiago

The world knows of the Philippines by now, for reasons other than a senator who refuses to admit to plagiarism, being the setting for the bustling Asian city in “Bourne Legacy,” and a cybercrime law that might be the worst piece of legislation against freedom of expression since the world wide web.

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The Manila Review interviews Katrina Stuart Santiago

by CAROLINE S. HAU AND MIGUEL SYJUCO  

Last April, literary critic and essayist Katrina Stuart Santiago wrote a controversial polemic about patronage and cliquishness in the Philippine writing establishment. MR editors Caroline S. Hau (CSH) and Miguel Syjuco (MS) probe deeper.

CSH: Your article, “Burn After Reading” (Rogue Magazine, April 13, 2012) is critical of the “us-vs-them” cliquishness of the Philippine writing establishment. You talk about “an unspoken/unconscious/unexplained set of rules” for gaining entry into the writing community, rules that you say have nothing to do with literary merit. What are these rules?

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ressa’s chilling effect

silence
by radikalchick

because i’d be lying if i said that Maria Ressa throwing the words libel and malicious my way didn’t render me speechless, literally and figuratively.

but maybe what was worse than throwing that my way was the fact that it was also retracted with a brush-off: filing a case would be too much for too little. i haven’t been patronized like this publicly, have never felt let down by someone i respect since, oh i don’t know, i applied for a job at UP Diliman and got a version of this from an ex-teacher. but this is different from the latter in that i was not applying for a job with Ressa, and there is no — there is no — notion of seniority that should have mattered here. of course randomsalt has so succinctly pointed out that it isn’t what it seems from where Ressa stands.

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