We beg to differ.
Back in the Dark and Middle Ages, the Church was practically the State. It maintained a firm and oppressive grip on the lives of the people, bending them to its allegedly holy will. People suffered and were persecuted, and all of these were done in the guise of God’s divine providence. Faith became the sharp…
Read More “The 27th Law: Playing on People’s Need to Believe” »
It seems that there are certain groups of people who are looking to increase the tension between China and the Philippines with regards to the standoff at Scarborough Shoal. They’re doing it through a ubiquitous medium that we couldn’t think of existing without nowadays: the Internet. And they’re doing it by perpetrating what I call…
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” »
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…
