Category: Culture

What Metro Manila billboards tell us about the Filipino character

July 19, 2011July 19, 2011 benign0 18 Comments

Driving up or down EDSA, the main road transport artery through the Philippine megalopolis of Metro Manila, is like navigating a badly-designed website. The huge billboards that line the iconic thoroughfare competing for the attention of motorists and their passengers are monuments to the aesthetic sensibilities of Filipinos. Manila, after all, is the cultural capital…

Culture, Environment, Media

A call to President Noynoy Aquino to ditch the color yellow

July 16, 2011August 20, 2013 benign0 66 Comments

Tired, old, and quite frankly embarrassing. That’s what’s become of the whole yellow motif of the Aquino clan and its circle of business cronies, relatives, “shooting buddies”, lackeys, Media outlets, and cadre of bloggers, publicists, and “social media activists”. It was the primary colour of a successful propaganda campaign that started in 1983, peaked in…

Culture, Government, Politics, Society

I Donâ€™t Like President Aquino

July 14, 2011July 14, 2011 BenK 14 Comments

Iâ€™ve seen more than enough. Iâ€™m passing my judgment. I donâ€™t like President Aquino. But that is actually secondary to the point I want to make here, so bear with me as I attempt to find a straightforward way to explain it. For an outsider like me, comparisons between the country of my birth and…

Culture, Society

Mitsubishops: the CBCP conveniently absolves its own and remains above the Law

July 11, 2011 benign0 29 Comments

A statement issued last week by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) on the matter of some of its members using taxpayers’ funds to buy luxury sport utility vehicles (SUVs) for use in their “field work,” made it quite categorical: “Our conscience is clear.” But of course it is. This is a statement…

Civics, Culture, Government, Religion

Law and Order – Philippine style

July 6, 2011December 4, 2015 Ilda 334 Comments

The longer I write about Philippine society and its politics, the more convinced I get that the country’s state of law and order is a joke. Take Davao City for instance. All this time I thought that the city was a model for what following the “rule of law” could do. It turns out, to…

Civics, Crime, Culture, Politics

Bishop supports Duterte-style law-and-order and human rights activists shy away from fingering Duterte

July 5, 2011July 18, 2013 benign0 12 Comments

The imbroglio Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte suddenly finds herself in after she punched court sheriff Abe Andres on the face in front of TV cameras is becoming complicated. It is complicated by her family’s uncoordinated public relations approach as evident in the belligerent stance her father, now acting Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, exhibited when he…

Crime, Culture, Religion

AKB48: Computer-generated pop stars and next-gen pop entertainment

July 4, 2011July 4, 2011 benign0 6 Comments

Recently the Japanese pop group AKB48, an “idol” theatre group composed of young girls, created a sensation after a computer-generated “composite” character “joined” the group to appear in a candy commercial. The character, named Aimi Eguchi, became a hit with AKB48 fans who at the time did not know she only existed in a computer….

Culture, Tech Talk

Davao Death Squads – do they deliver results or just more problems?

July 4, 2011 benign0 28 Comments

The alleged assault against court sheriff Abe Andres by Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte is now turning into a media circus. But one good thing that came out of this recent dragging of the premier city of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao into the limelight is the renewed interest in the spotty human rights…

Crime, Culture