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Is conservatism a legitimate ideology? Yes. At its most benign, it aims to maintain the status quo and works for the benefit of the ruling class. At its worst, it supports fascism and actively works against the masses.
That the explicitly murderous rhetoric of, and the culture of impunity bred by Duterte has enabled this atrocity, is a glaring fact of our current life. From injunctions like “… kaunting pagkakamali lang barilin mo na,” to promises that no policemen would ever go to jail, everything that Duterte has been saying and doing has provided the very conditions for these atrocities to emerge and fester.
In the context of community print publications, they should be strengthened not just by the people’s support but by ensuring that press freedom will be promoted and upheld by the government.
When you are “free” to choose between which business you give your money to so you can survive and work tomorrow for another one, you are not free. You are trapped in an endless hell for the benefit of these few businesses.
Biden has a host of issues ahead of him come January – including a healthcare crisis and ethnic and racial violence.
The future of public communication rests on giving relevant media literacy. Audiences should be taught the valuable lesson of asserting and fighting for a media that we all deserve. This means fighting attempts by government to control the media, as well as demanding responsible gatekeeping by the owners of social media platforms.
The media should resist all commercialist trappings and not favor profit over truth-telling. Journalists and news media organizations need to brush up on the normative standards of journalism, if only to realize that bias is inherent and should not be hidden.
Like the Bantayog ng mga Bayani memorial in Quezon City, dedicated to a wide segment of Martial Law martyrs from community leaders such as Dulag to fighters of the New People’s Army in resisting the Marcos dictatorship, or the 1933 Bonifacio Monument in Caloocan honoring revolutionary heroes of the Katipunan who fought for independence from Spanish rule, the Anti-Chico Dam Struggle monument represents a step foward in committing our histories of resistance to public memory in more permanent form. To demolish it would be a grave disrespect of cultural and social history at the very least.
There should be no attempt to regulate video-streaming services like Netflix because the Internet already has several layers of filtering that can be done by clients/subscribers and service providers. Just like in other forms of media, online media or digital media should be self-regulated. Any attempt by government to regulate media content would be a violation of the constitutional provision that prohibits abridging the people's basic freedoms.
To legitimize Filipinx as gender-neutral is to efface and silence Filipino as gender-neutral.
Our country, with the myriad of problems in our healthcare system even before the pandemic, is simply not equipped to adequately deal with the possible harmful effects of these clinical trials on its Filipino participants. Alongside the questionable small-scale trials of the vaccine leading up to this point and the speed at which these trials were conducted (vaccines typically take years to develop), we have all the reasons not to participate, yet here we are, once again knocking on the door of quite probably another bad decision.
Looking at history, one can say that state abandonment is very much the official disposition on which the labor export system is hinged. The Philippine government is fundamentally inclined to function simply as what sociologist Robyn Rodriguez calls a “labor brokerage state,” an institutional apparatus that facilitates Filipinos’ outward labor traffic.
Even if this sounds nebulous, journalistic outputs are inherently biased for the truth. Journalists are therefore expected to use as sources of information the experts (i.e., truth-tellers) instead of “fake news” peddlers.
The challenge for American activists and organizers is to now elevate these contradictions towards the primary question of class struggle; something that hasn’t been done since the Black Panther Party of the 1960s.
In their tens of millions, the workers, peasants and the lower middle class are hungry and angry at the Duterte regime and are eager to move against it. The professionals and entrepreneurs have been deprived of income and have fallen into debt and bankruptcy and are ready to join the toiling masses in concerted actions to protest and make demands. Even the big compradors and landlords who are not his close collaborators now consider him a plague worse than the COVID-19 virus.
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