One of the more interesting things to come out of this short period of having Harry Roque as Presidential Spokesperson: it has revealed that the frontline informal communications team of the President cannot be told that they are doing something wrong.
MANILA – President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday advised his critics to unite and form one group … his latest call to dissenters as allies and supporters accused them anew of destabilization efforts.
“I would be happy, really, if they will start to merge into one command. Itong mga Komunista at itong Liberal (Party), at itong mga iba na gustong paalisin ako, mag-isa isa na lang kayo,” he said in a speech in Malacañang.
… “Isang grupo. I think you share the same ideological whatever. Para hindi na masyadong magkalat ang ano… we can focus on all of you,” Duterte said.
the next day, this.
“Pag ang destabilization ninyo patagilid na and medyo magulo na (If your destabilization is worsening and it is becoming chaotic), I will not hesitate to declare a revolutionary government until the end of my term, and I will arrest all of you and we can go to a full scale war against the Reds,” [Duterte] said in an interview with Erwin Tulfo aired over PTV Friday night.
“Mag-declare ako ng revolutionary government, period. And I will declare — I will clear the streets and I will declare all government positions vacant.
Mas matuloy, wala na akong problema kasi habulin ko na ngayon ‘yung mga corrupt para matanggal ko. Sige, mag-demonstrate kayo, bring it to a point na talagang tatagilid ‘yung gobyerno.”
am i so out of the loop that i haven’t heard of, or feel, moves to destablize the duterte government in aid of ousting him? meron ba talagang gumagana na destabilization plots ang mga dilawan at / o ang mga pula?
ang pakiramdam ko nga, parang ang presidente mismo at ang kanyang sobrang matitinik na social media forces ang nangde-destabilize, nanggagalit, nanguudyok, nananadya, practically, literally, goading us into rising up in anger at all the lying and killing.
parang they would like nothing better than to provoke us into what he tagged “EDSA terrorism” (correct me if i heard wrong) which would give him reason, excuse, pretext to declare a revolutionary government. parang si marcos noong 1972 — kinailangan munang ma-ambush si enrile before marcos dared sign proclamation 1081.
but the similarity ends there. for what he wants to do 60 days of martial law would not suffice, so duterte’s being creative. if you’re on facebook, read jose alejandrino’s primer on rev powers that is making the rounds.
once duterte finds an excuse to abrogate the constitution, he will next do a cory instead, declare a revolutionary government, rule by executive decree, change the constitution to provide for federalism atbp., hold a plebiscite in may 2018, the people vote yes, and the shift to federalism happens, i can’t imagine how, though i can imagine da who.
i also imagine that the duterte constitution has already been crafted, naghihintay na lang ng tamang panahon. so bakit ba sobrang nagmamadali? i think it has to do with mindanao. i think nangako siya sa MI at sa MN and he’s being held to that promise or else there will be more war. kung ma-approve nga ang bagong constitution in may 2018, then by may 2019 we would be voting in “new” officials to regional governments and to some kind of parliament. and that would be the end of the revo government daw.
rep edcel lagman insists that there are no destabilization plots or serious threats from the left and political opposition.
He also said that establishing a revolutionary government has no constitutional basis.
“A revolutionary government is the result of a successful people’s uprising or revolt overthrowing an incumbent President and his subalterns like the EDSA People Power revolution,” he said.
He added: “It is not a product of a self-serving declaration of a sitting President ostensibly to retain and prolong the exercise of powers and “crush” perceived enemies of the state.”
but there are ways and ways of spinning the cory “precedent” to make it seem like this is a similar moment for duterte given how radical his federalism agenda, and how great, allegedly, it would be for country. at matagal na niya itong sinasabi. read chit pedrosa’s Federalism is the answer.
In his speech after being proclaimed the standard-bearer of PDP-Laban political party, Duterte said he has no ambition to run for president, but decided to do so when his political party’s leaders urged him to run and push for federalism.
“Kinausap ako to carry the torch of federalism,” Duterte said. “I will build a nationwide consensus for federalism.”
a nationwide consensus would be good. i’m against federalism but i’m open to being overruled by the majority — an informed majority, of course. kung ibig talaga ng presidente na ituloy ang may 2018 plebiscite, may panahon pang pag-usapan ito nang masinsinan. sana may information campaign on what that new constitution would be like, and what federalism coupled with economic liberalization would mean for the impoverished masses and the oppressed middle class, in aid of public discussions in the run-up to a plebiscite. ‘wag naman tayo masyadong biglain.
meanwhile the political oppositions can only warn against a dictatorship, not about what the president thinks he needs dictatorial powers for. in denial ba sila about the president’s agenda? o baka naman okay sa kanila ang charter change at federalism? it’s time to have this conversation, folks.
this post started out lamenting the decline of our english-speaking skills…
Pinoy nurses recruited for jobs in UK fail English test
Fifty-two out of 59 nurses recruited in Manila for a job in Medway Maritime Hospital in the United Kingdom have failed an English language test, stalling their employment.Medway Maritime Hospital in Kent said 52 out of the 59 candidates had failed one or more of the listening, reading, writing and speaking tests.
… that i meant to tie up with randy david’s column that begins with The president as purveyor of fake news and ends on the uphill battle against misinformation and disinformation on social media courtesy of trolls with bad grammar, and who seem to live in a different world.
So huge is the battle against fake news that it cannot be left to the mainstream media to fight it alone. Neither can we expect scholars, experts, and specialists to weigh in all the time and correct the misinformation and disinformation that clog social media. For, there is a public out there that has long harbored a resentment against experts, that trusts in the power of its own commonsense, and that is sustained in its comforting delusion by the bits of information it picks up from Wikipedia.
This fight ultimately has to be waged in the internet itself by digital activists who refuse to have their reality defined by trolls that can neither spell right nor write grammatically, that resort to exclamation points to call attention, and that, most importantly, paint a world we cannot recognize.
agit na agit, of course, ang mga ka-dds sa facebook, and not because david said the president purveys fake news (!) but because david dared call out the bad english of trolls in general. offended na offended both the ones who feel alluded to and the ones who don’t feel alluded to, and this from dswd usec lorraine badoy is priceless:
There is an eloquence in the faulty grammar and badly spelled words of the unlettered. But it is the kind of eloquence you can only hear with your heart—if you care enough to listen to them and not default on denigration—this denigration they’ve had to bear all their lives—and in the hands of those who ought to know better.
eloquence.in.the.faulty.grammar. wow. on a fine day i might concede that it’s not unimaginable, but only if the faulty grammar were not a reflection of faulty reasoning (thinking) because based on slanted (inadequate) information, the kind that the ka-DDS cohort specializes in doling out.
puwede rin namang i-level up ang discourse, aminin na we do have language problems (from english to tagalog) as a nation and let’s do something about it. after all, badoy herself belongs to the smart educated class and if her heart is in the right place, she would want to do something about it? smart-shaming denigrating david does not help the cause of the “unlettered.”
anyway, that got quickly overtaken and overwhelmed when ka-DDS heavyweights declared virtual war on anonymous dilawan blogs like silent no more that tagged as “malacanang dogs” seven senators who did not sign kiko pangilinan’s resolution asking the president to stop the killing of minors. senator sotto, one of alleged “dogs” is so angry, “pakakain ko sa kanila computer nila hindi lang yung words nila.”
sino sila? sass et al. have managed to identify the webmaster, but did he write that particular blogpost? is he obliged to identify who wrote the post? i’m not sure anymore. anonymity has its uses. one is braver, i think, when one is writing anonymously, but also maybe prone to errors because, you know, hindi nakataya ang pangalan?
it was careless of silent no more, tagging tito sotto a rapist when in fact the 1982 pepsi paloma rape case was vs vic, joey, and richie. a little googling and some reading would make such a difference. pero walang oras, ano? nagmamadali kasi, para makarami, kaya bara-bara na lang. this latest post on silent no more‘s fb wall says it all:
SNMph says
We have deliberately left the door open for the TROLLS to earn a living. Thank you for the valued engagements. #SNMph have just hit the 10m engagements mark because of them. Those familiar with how FB algorithm works knows that we have just hit the jackpot! Salamat po!
pera pera lang talaga, ano? trabaho lang, ika nga, but this time with walang patumanggang personalan at bastusan. a new low in pinoy discourse. to think that in 2008 i was complaining about intellectual doldrums and filipino voices, the group blog. as it turns out, those were good times for the blogosphere; it never got any better than that.
by 2012 i was blogging in the wind, lamenting the loss of filipino voices, and feeling my way into facebook. a completely different world meant to promote freedom of expression in aid of democracy but which has now evolved into a weapon for destructive propaganda worldwide. so now, on top of everything that’s wrong with the world, we have to contend with fake news. read Why Fake News Spreads So Fast on Facebook and Social media and democracy: optimism fades as fears rise.
Oxford University researchers said in a June report that social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which were intended to be a platform for free expression, “have also become tools for social control” in many countries.
Governments employ large numbers of people “to generate content, direct opinion and engage with both foreign and domestic audiences,” said the report by the university’s Project on Computational Propaganda.
The researchers, who studied social media in 28 countries, concluded that “every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations.”
… Zeynep Tufekci, a North Carolina University sociologist who studies social networks and activist movements, said the platforms which helped enable the Arab Spring are now being used against dissenters.
“This is not necessarily Orwell’s 1984,” she writes in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas: How Social Media Changed Protest Forever.”
“Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and the blocking of information, the newer methods include demonizing online media and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information overload, doubt, confusion, harassment, and distraction.”
the senate hearing on wednesday should be interesting. the ka-dds camp is siccing senator sotto on LP senators kiko pangilinan and bam aquino who are allegedly behind the well-organized and well-funded propaganda machine run by cocoy dayao et al of silent no more. of course it’s not as if these ka-dds aren’t part, too, of a well-organized and well-funded propaganda machine with matching anonymous questionable-news sites na sino kaya ang nagpopondo. ayon kay kit tatad:
The regime has begun to unravel. Ninety-five percent of the social media trolls that used to support everything DU30 said or did are gone, only 48 pro-DU30 troll sites remain, according to IT experts familiar with the subject.
if true, this could be why the ka-dds vs dilawan war on facebook seems to be escalating. maybe the dilawans are smelling victory and the ka-dds are feeling threatened? or is it the other way around. revolutionary government, anyone? we will know soon enough, i guess.
we get asked: paano ba mag-edsa. aliw. naging verb na ang dati ay noun, which is good. it’s a good question to be asking, and to be thinking on.
in october last year, in the run-up to the burial of marcos sa libingan ng mga bayani, when there was dilawan talk of ousting duterte by staging an edsa in support of the president’s impeachment or a coup d’etat, i said no way. i was sure there was no ousting duterte: aint gonna happen.
…their best hakot efforts would be as nothing compared to the throngs that the duterte camp is certainly capable of mobilizing throughout the country. of course they could also shoot for a “crony”-business boycott a la pre-EDSA 86, but the duterte camp could just as easily mount a counter-boycott of the vp’s business allies, and it’s easy to imagine kung sinong pupulutin sa kangkungan.
but here we are again. and this time, ubos na, said na, ang benefit-of-the-doubt. read radikalchick’s How we lost our rights in 15 months #Duterte.
i thought the CHR one-k budget was past the limit and hoped it would be the last of the offensives for the nonce, coming so soon after the marcos 100 celeb sa libingan ng mga bayani. like, you know, give us a break?
instead it got worse. nasundan ng sereno impeachment — one of two complaints found sufficient in form and substance by house justice committee (next week pa daw si bautista) — na nasundan pa ng ombudsman’s indictment of pNoy over mamasapano, this while the president warns against violent protests on sept 21, the war in marawi rages on, finance sec dominguez salivates for the marcos wealth, jinggoy is suddenly out on bail, and the president just called out chr chief gaston: why daw does he care so much about male kids being killed. omg, the president doesn’t care? it would seem that they really have no valid case vs gascon, and so they’re resorting to dirty tricks to pressure him into resigning. (why kaya aren’t they doing that to comelec chief baustista instead?)
“You are so fixated with the death of young males, kaya nagdududa ako na pedophile kang gago ka.”
offensives galore. nang-iinis, nambabastos, nananadya, dismissing us as bleeding-heart dilawans (which most of us are not) or subversive communists (which most of us are not either), hoping to provoke us, no doubt, deliberately fueling a simmering rage, the kind that could lead to angry protests that could turn violent which would give him the excuse to sic the police on protesters, sabay declare ng martial law.
paano nga ba mag-edsa. all i know for sure is that it will take more than one huge protest rally where dilawans and leftists, and everyone in between, come together for a common cause. the september 21 rally of the multisectoral Movement Against Tyranny (MAT) that very specifically seeks only an end to drug killings and the attendant fascism is one such common cause that both extremist dilawans and extremist leftists (both affirmists and rejectionists) should have no difficulty getting behind in union with independent middle forces.
lampasan muna sana yung “but i want duterte ousted” at yung “but i don’t like leni” for maximum effect in the context of a process unfolding.
the template, of course, is the august 1983 to february 1986 movement that started out as a call to justice for ninoy, justice for all that only towards the end evolved into marcos resign. it bears pointing out that the ruling mantra of every rally over those 30 months was NON-VIOLENCE. it helped, of course, that the cops practised maximum tolerance then, kept their distance, marcos was on his best behavior since ninoy’s assassination, the world was watching kasi.
the world is still watching, but these are different times. we have trigger-happy cops and a president who threatens martial law if rallies get out of hand. sana the cops keep their distance on sept 21. but if not, don’t push back, don’t strike back with sticks or stones, don’t burn rubber tires, not even effigies. where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
non-violent tactics worked then and can work now as long as everyone’s on the same page. one page at a time.