Category: Lifestyle

Philippine online activists step up battle versus ‘pwede na yan’ anti-cybercrime laws

September 27, 2012September 27, 2012 benign0 11 Comments

Hysterics around the enactment and implementation of the Philippines’ Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 (Republic Act 10175) continue to sweep the country’s community of social media “activists”. The new law itself is just another example of Filipinos’ renowned jeepney approach to facing its challenges — another Pinoy-style pwede-na-yan solution (in my colleague Mike Portes’s words)…

Crime, Lifestyle, Media, Society

The latest outrage fad: Protests against the new Philippine anti-cybercrime law have become personal

September 19, 2012 benign0 20 Comments

After scanning online forums and social media discussions in the aftermath of the enactment of Republic Act 10175 also known as the Philippine Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, one thing has become quite evident: the fear mongering that has erupted around the Act (Jojo Robles in a Manila Standard article, for example wrote that “unprecedented…

Crime, Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Society

Why the gagging reflex switches off during sex

September 18, 2012 Kate Natividad 4 Comments

It all makes sense to me now. According to a Scientific American article, sexually-aroused women are harder to gross-out… Sex can be, well, kinda gross. So how do we have sex? Once weâ€™re turned on, it turns out, it gets harder for icky stuff to turn us off. Women, anyway. Gross things just donâ€™t seem…

Glitz and Glamour, Lifestyle

Wanking to lewd Web videos now a crime in the Philippines!

September 17, 2012September 18, 2012 Kate Natividad 33 Comments

Now that there is an anti-Cybercrime law in the Philippines, stuff published online is now subject to the same libel laws that have for some time been applied to stuff published on traditional media like newspapers and magazines and broadcast on TV and radio. I suppose the principle there is that computers and their networks…

Crime, Lifestyle, Tech Talk

Gadget envy: Why Tito Sotto’s plagiarism fails the ‘So What? Test’

September 11, 2012 benign0 7 Comments

Not to put too fine a point to it but Philippine Senator Vicente “Tito” Sotto III is now the laughingstock of the country. His consistent failure to recognise the errors in the way he allegedly lifted material verbatim from several bloggers’ works to use in a speech he delivered to defend his position against the…

Lifestyle, Religion, Society, Tech Talk

Are the obvious solutions to the Philippines’ problems feasible?

August 27, 2012 Kate Natividad 15 Comments

I keep reading about people proposing sensible and obvious things to combat the biggest problems we face today, like controlling (and maybe even reducing) population, reducing carbon emissions, and voting for the best leader. All sounds like the ‘intelligent’ things to do, don’t they? But all that is just asking too much when you consider…

Development, Environment, Lifestyle, Society

Should Ateneo de Manila faculty members who choose to continue to teach ‘reproductive health’ be fired?

August 21, 2012August 21, 2012 benign0 41 Comments

Seeing all the rah-rahs — even (horrors!) mudslinging — being thrown by one camp of the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill “debate” at the other, I just have to take my hat off to the anti-RH Bill advocates who are employing Roman Catholic dogma as the underlying framework of their position. Their argument is pretty well-grounded….

Lifestyle, Politics, Religion, Society

Robert Blair Carabuena self-destructs: are Filipinos angry for the right reasons?

August 15, 2012December 1, 2014 FallenAngel 190 Comments

Apparently in the last 24 hours or so one of the topics, and videos that went viral is this video of a certain Robert Blair Carabuena physically harassing a Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) official. According to the information that was obtained before he deleted his social network accounts, he is a graduate of Ateneo…

Crime, Culture, Lifestyle, Media