The Debate: Presidential vs Parliamentary

MARENG WINNIE MONSOD. … As I see it, the advocates for a parliamentary-federal over our present presidential-unitary form of government are going to get their way by hook or by crook.

By crook:  use the “restrictive” economic provisions of the Constitution as an excuse for calling for a Constituent Assembly to remove the restrictions.  Why is this considered by crook?  Because once a Constituent Assembly is called  (that’s our legislators), there is nothing that can stop them from discussing and changing the entire constitution. The result:  disaster for the Philippines

By hook:  calling for a constitutional convention with representatives from each electoral district, probably with the condition that these representatives are not sitting politicians but are “independent” minded.  Unfortunately, this will not stop the political dynasties from choosing either from their families or their friends or dummies to run for this convention.  The result: disaster for the Philippines.

Read Part I: The Historical Background https://marengwinniemonsod.ph/2022/09/17/the-debate-presidential-vs-parliamentary/

Red is a spectrum

ANTONIO CONTRERAS

… To be left or right is determined by someone’s view of the economy. Being on the left means believing that globalization should primarily serve humanity instead of the interests of global corporations, that corporate interests should be regulated to protect the environment because they wouldn’t do so if they are left alone, and that corporations should have social responsibility and should not be fixated on profits only. A leftist believes in economic regulation and in protecting the marginalized, even if it means interfering with the operations of the free market. Hence, leftists believe in minimum wages and price controls. They believe in taxing the rich more, and using taxes to finance social programs that would even include investing in the arts. While some leftists are socially authoritarian, most leftists are socially libertarian. They adhere to individual freedom, and would support divorce, same-sex marriages and abortion. They oppose the death penalty.

Being an activist for these causes, and questioning state authority, when done peacefully and under the ambit of laws, should not and cannot be considered as dangerous to the Republic. Under these rubrics, I am personally a leftist who is also a social libertarian. My score in the political compass test is a minus 6.88, with minus 10 being the score for being perfectly leftist, and a minus 7.23, with minus 10 being the score for being perfectly libertarian. I am not even a centrist by all accounts.

There has been too much confusion in the way popular and ordinary discourse has branded the left as essentially communist, and then further committing an egregious error of associating communism only with the armed left. Some even go to the extent of associating the left in general, and communism in particular, with authoritarian regimes. This is the ground from where red-tagging emerges as a pejorative, where liberal-progressives who espouse leftist and libertarian beliefs end up being lumped together with Marxist, Leninist and Maoist rebels, and worse, terrorists.

This corruption of political labels and categories has to end. Being leftist is different from being an armed rebel, in the same manner that being an activist does not necessarily mean that one has taken up arms to topple the government. Likewise, it is a fallacy to contrast communism with democracy, considering that there are communist and socialist parties that compete in democratic elections in countries like India.

The ideal response to red-tagging is to clarify that not all kinds of red should be tagged as enemies of the state. Environmental activists who propose green economies tend to be leftist in orientation, and so are feminists and gay activists. Organized labor unions tend to be leftist in orientation. The hatred being espoused by many diehard Duterte supporters and Marcos loyalists toward liberal activists, that even translate to their dislike of the US Democrats, is misplaced simply because they are premised on fallacious imaging and assumptions. There are many good people who are fighting for socially relevant causes that under these misinformed rubrics would fall in the category of enemies of the state. A cursorial look at history would reveal that practically all major social benefits that people now enjoy, from wage protection to social amelioration policies, are largely the result of leftist and progressive activism. These include giving ayuda (financial assistance) and educational assistance.

… The solution to political violence is not red-tagging but to make sure that the interests of the marginalized are served by legitimate institutions of the state. And the better response to red-tagging is to show that some types of red are, in fact, essential in achieving that end.

Climate deniers’ claims: Separating reality from idiocy

BEN KRITZ

THE so-called World Climate Declaration that is supposed to be such a “savage blow” against the “political orthodoxy” of anthropogenic climate change is more like a wet noodle than a whip when it comes to the actual arguments it presents. It bases its assertion that “there is no climate emergency” on five claims, all of which have been repeatedly debunked for years as they are either misrepresentations of scientific findings, outright lies, and in one case, lunacy of a depth that would make Velikovsky look sane.

As I said in my previous column, there is no debate about climate change; the basic premise has already been accepted and made part of the governing policy of the entire world because there is a vast amount of evidence to support it. There may be debate, and there probably should be, about the best ways to respond to the climate crisis, but the question of whether or not there is a crisis has long since been answered. That raises another question, however: Why should anyone continue to try to convince a tiny, malcontented minority that refuses to even read the scientific data lest it threaten their ideology with uncertainty?

It is a fair question, and one that I mentally review every time I take up this subject, especially after reading, and in a few cases responding to the flood of offended comments from climate deniers that inevitably follows. Honestly, I do not expect to “convert” anyone, because I do not believe that it is within the power of human argument to actually do that, at least when it comes to the topic of climate change — it is a bit like trying to convince a deeply religious person that his God doesn’t exist.

Fortunately, Earth itself will — in that Darwinian way nature works — sort out the climate deniers without help from me or anyone else. There will inevitably come a time when every climate denier will experience the effects of what Man has wrought on the environment firsthand, and that experience will either compel them to get with the program, or remove them from the human equation entirely. In the meantime, the real point of taking them to ask for creating and spreading disinformation is to prevent them from encouraging people to harm themselves and their communities. Practices and policies that lead to a cleaner, healthier environment are good and improve our quality of life, whether there’s a specific reason for them or not; exhorting people to resist those practices and policies is simply malicious, sociopathic demagogy.

So, not for the first time and almost certainly not the last, let us take a closer look at the spurious arguments made in defense of the assertion that “there is no climate emergency”:

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

This is certainly true, and no climate scientist has ever suggested otherwise; in fact, a large part of what makes climate research so complex is the challenge of accurately identifying natural cycles so that the human impact on them can be likewise accurately determined. Over Earth’s long history, there have been periods of global warming and cooling, many of which were characterized by significant increases or decreases in greenhouse gases. What the climate deniers leave out, however, is that those historic increases in CO2 and methane led to serious environmental disruptions, including mass extinctions. Far from being evidence that human emissions are inconsequential, the environmental record is even more proof that massive increases in greenhouse gases are lethal to life on Earth.

Warming is far slower than predicted

This assertion is simply a lie. Several research studies already published over the past couple of years, along with ongoing research — which is being continuously conducted for the very purpose of determining whether climate models are accurate or not — show that the warming of the planet has tightly tracked model predictions, dating all the way back to even the comparatively crude models of the 1970s.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models

As the previous assertion is false, so is this one. Climate policy may differ from place to place, and thus be more or less effective, but it is all based on the same set of accurate data.

More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet

This is the most ridiculous of the claims made in the so-called World Climate Declaration. Plants do indeed need CO2, but more CO2 in the atmosphere does not create more plants. As the world’s forest cover disappears at an accelerating rate, the amount of CO2 that plant life can absorb from the atmosphere is constantly decreasing, while the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by human activity increases — to the point that there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 800,000 years, with far less plant life to absorb it.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters

The best answer to this assertion is “yes and no” because this is the aspect of climate science that is the most complicated and bears the largest degree of uncertainty. While scientists have nailed down broad climate trends — increasing CO2 levels, increasing sea and atmospheric temperatures — and certain broad effects, such as overall increase in the global average temperature and sea level, the models are not as accurate for predicting short-term, regional effects. It is a matter of scale; a model built on a dataset that encompasses the entire globe over a timescale of millennia has limitations if applied to a specific country or region for a period of decades or years.

Nonetheless, some specific, real-time effects have been accurately connected to the warming of the planet over the past 250 to 300 years since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Global warming has established a hotter baseline for summer temperatures, which dramatically increases the odds of more frequent, more extreme, and longer-lasting heat waves, which in turn increase the likelihood of more frequent and extreme weather events — including more extreme winter weather, due to the pole-ward shift of warmer sea and atmospheric temperatures altering weather patterns.

ben.kritz@manilatimes.net

Heroism

RANDY DAVID

Heroes are exemplary individuals who embody a community’s highest values and ideals. “Heroes” and “nation” typically go together because a country’s best-known heroes are those whose lives are intertwined with the nation’s emergence, emancipation, and transformation.

Without any doubt, the Filipino people’s two greatest heroes are Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio. Rizal, for offering through his writings and exemplary life a vision of Filipinos as a people capable of attaining the highest achievement within the reach of nations, including that of self-rule. Bonifacio, for organizing and initiating the revolution that eventually freed the country from Spanish colonial rule.

The Filipino nation regularly celebrates their lives and holds them up as models of patriotism, to be emulated by generations of its citizens, particularly the youth. Other communities have their respective heroes, too. The Catholic Church has its martyrs and saints. Revolutionary movements have their ideologues and warriors.

At about this time every year, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation plucks out of anonymity some four or five Asians, and casts a light upon the heroic work they do to make the world a better place, especially for the poor and neglected sectors of society. Offering innovative solutions to new and existing problems, often in the face of great adversity, these Magsaysay laureates are living heroes in their own way. They serve as models of an alternative life worth living in a materialistic and self-absorbed world.

A hero is thus the closest personification of a value or set of values that a given community desires to preserve, reinforce, and promote. The battle for a nation’s memory is, at bottom, a battle to maintain its core values in a rapidly changing world. There are, however, times when swiftly unfolding events bring out a change in the national mood that contradicts values enshrined in existing state commemorations.

If the theory is right, the resulting cognitive dissonance compels either a revision in action — for example, by abolishing the commemoration of an event, or a change in attitude, such as by offering a different and less dissonant interpretation of what happened.

The 2022 presidential election brought the son and namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos to Malacañang. The meaning of Marcos Jr.’s election by a big majority of Filipino voters seems to clash with everything that Ninoy Aquino Day, commemorated on Aug. 21 every year, seeks to represent. This special nonworking national holiday, instituted in honor of the former senator and martial law detainee, unavoidably recalls that fateful day in 1983 when, coming home from foreign exile, he was shot to death at the airport while under military escort.

As I argued in last week’s column, Ninoy Aquino’s assassination triggered a national outrage that eventually brought down the Marcos Sr. dictatorship. His martyrdom to the cause of democracy was immediately recognized and was undisputed in the years that followed. The people’s memory and appreciation of his heroism remained stable even after nearly three decades, when his son Noynoy was elected president.

It is remarkable that in a 2011 Social Weather Stations opinion poll on the personalities that Filipinos regard as genuine Filipino heroes, Ninoy ranked No. 3 — after Rizal and Bonifacio. (Thanks to Mahar Mangahas for bringing this out in his column the other day.) Together with Cory Aquino at No. 4, Apolinario Mabini at No. 5, and Emilio Aguinaldo at No. 6 — these names were the only ones that received double-digit percentage mentions. One wonders how the Aquinos would fare if the same poll were conducted today.

What is certain is that President Marcos Jr.’s administration has not seen it fit to remove Feb. 25 (the people power revolution) and Aug. 21 (Ninoy Aquino Day) from the list of official national commemorations. Neither has the administration signified any support for one lawmaker’s proposal to rename the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It’s not hard to understand this. Not only will doing so appear vindictive, it also directly challenges the Filipino public’s sense of values.

This, however, does not mean that attempts to rewrite history to make it conform with the current political configuration is about to come to an end. As the film “Maid in Malacañang” indicates, the drift of current efforts appears to be toward a reinterpretation of the past in order to paint the Marcoses less as whimsical wielders of power and more as ordinary people with little control over events, and their political enemies less as the self-sacrificing heroes they are held out to be, but more as vicious and opportunistic power players.

Like everything in society, values change. Therefore, our conception of heroism and who our real heroes are is also bound to change. In 1981, writes historian Alfred W. McCoy, Marcos Sr. requested Pope John Paul II to ride a helicopter to bless the giant steel cross atop Mt. Samat in Bataan. By doing so, the visiting pope made Mt. Samat a shrine, “and by analogy honored Marcos as a hero, just as he would soon beatify (Lorenzo) Ruiz as a martyr.”

But only two years later, McCoy continues, Ninoy Aquino came home “to die a martyr before military executioners, stealing the Rizal-like heroism that Marcos so assiduously cultivated and subverting the ideological foundations of his authoritarian regime.”