We beg to differ.
The Philippines is a country by colonial edict — much like the way the old Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were, as well as many African nations. They are meaningless hollow pin-up states cobbled together for the sheer pleasure, vanity, and mercantile ambitions of their former imperial architects. In the case of the Philippines, even the name…
Read More “A sense of nationalism: The Philippines has no such thing” »
The recent furor over a ruling issued by no less than Donald Trump himself owner of the Miss Universe Organization (MUO) allowing transgender contestants to vie for the Miss Universe title sparked numerous debates around what it means to be a “woman” and what defines “beauty”. The Miss Universe pageant after all is a beauty…
Read More “What Miss Universe really stands for and why feminine beauty exists” »
Introduction When I visited Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia last year, I saw a banner run across the two Petronas towers with the following words in Malay on it: Daulat Tuanku As soon as I could, I searched on Google what this phrase means. It is more or less the Malay equivalent of the English expression…
Read More “Filipinos: like a ship lost at sea searching for a beacon” »
Does the solution to the multitude of ills that plague the Philippines reside in politics? Is it really the quality of government that is behind the chronic failure that is the Philippine nation? Think again. [Photo courtesy Today in History.] Perhaps there was a time when there were lots of scapegoats that Filipinos can count…
Aren’t there enough Filipino men in the country good enough for some Filipino women (Filipinas)? As far as I know, there is no shortage of Filipino men and I haven’t heard of any reports that say there is an imbalance in the sex ratio that would compel some Filipinas to seek men from overseas either….
Read More “Filipinas are forced to look for real men from overseas” »
What did League of Filipino Students (LFS) “activists” hope to accomplish by burning the American flag and defacing the United States embassy facade today (the 16th April)? Did they actually think that they could send whatever noble “message” they imagine their quaint movement to possess to the powers-that-be of what is still the planet’s mightiest…
A familiar concept to us Filipinos is the utak-talangka, or crab mentality. Explaining it in the simplest terms possible, I define it as the “if I can’t have it, neither can you” kind of mindset. Take crabs in a pot. In order to avoid that one of them escape from the pot, they all pull…
The Japanese have a proverb/saying: 仏の顔も三度 – hotoke no kao mo sando Literally, this means “Buddha’s face lasts only three times”. What this means is that even the nicest of persons can get angry after being provoked to a certain extent. Why three? I don’t know, but for simplistic reasons just think of it as…