King of Murder and Vulgarity

KING OF MURDER AND VULGARITY

ARCHBISHOP VILLEGAS: TAKE A STAND AGAINST MURDERS, VULGARITY

Kristine Joy Patag (philstar.com) - May 23, 2018 - 11:37am

MANILA, Philippines — Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas has rallied the faithful to take a stand against the “Reign of Murder and Vulgarity” engulfing the nation.

Villegas, former head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, did not mince his words in rousing the Catholic flock to take a stand: “[A]mong all the social ills that are slowly eating up our national soul, the murders and the vulgarity are incredibly and sadly of the list.”

“Years from now, this chapter in our history as a people will be called the Reign of Murder and Vulgarity. We have had enough!” the archbishop said, in his message for the Feast of Mary Help of Christians commemorated on every May 24th of the year.

The Catholic leader also lamented the killings of Filipinos who are “defenseless and silent poor.”

He said: "If they were not killed by government agents, the government agents have been incredibly yet systematically unable to trace the killers and bring the wheels of justice to roll."

During his helm of the CBCP, Villegas has been vocal in condemning the spate of killings in the country. President Rodrigo Duterte’s war against drugs has claimed a staggering number of thousands of Filipino lives since it started in July 2016.

Vulgarity used to mock the dead

Villegas also pointed out that the vulgarity that has pervaded in the Filipinos’ conversations. He pointed out that women have been disgraced habitually “as if it were a standard policy to mock womanhood and reduce the God given dignity of personhood to genitals.”

“We have become numb to vulgarity. We laugh at vulgarity instead of getting shocked and angry,” he added.

While the Catholic leader did not identify anyone, he said that the decline in courteousness in national conversations happened since two years ago—roughly since the start of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.

The acid tongued leader has made headlines for his misogynistic remarks against women, especially of female government officials. The Malacañang usually downplays the chief executive’s remarks as mere jokes or sarcasm.

Villegas also said that vulgarity has been used to “mock the memory of the murdered; to calumniate a faithful departed who cannot defend himself; to gossip about the dead; to add inconsiderate sorrow to the grief of those they have left behind.”

“Is murder to be excused due to unproven immorality of the killed? Enough!” he added.

The archbishop did not identify anyone, but his remarks days after Duterte made public remarks against Fr. Mark Anthony Ventura.

Weeks after Ventura was gunned down while blessing children, Duterte has lambasted the slain priest in his speeches. He said that the Cagayan priest had “illicit affairs with the wives of politician, a police officer, a military man and a businessman.”

Leaders of the church have also taken offense at Duterte’s remarks and said that the killing of Ventura is an “evil act.”

Villegas stressed: “There is hostility towards decency. Human life is under threat. It would be naive to hope that things will improve without us lifting a finger.”

“Think. Pray. Work together,” Villegas called.

Read more at https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2018/05/23/1817907/archbishop-villegas-take-stand-against-murders-vulgarity#MwRF6OWhLlhL0OyV.99

‘HOW MANY DEATHS WILL IT TAKE?’

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:09 AM June 25, 2018

This is the fundamental question of our time. Exactly how many people have been killed in the Duterte administration’s signature antidrugs campaign?

The police have been less than forthcoming. They tried the old redefinition trick, creating different categories. They gave conflicting numbers. They even raised what the Supreme Court called a “ridiculous” argument that submitting police documentation on the killings to the Court, in a pending legal case, would compromise national security.

After the Court warned them, through the Office of the Solicitor General, that “the OSG’s continued refusal… will lead this Court to presume that these information and documents, because they are willfully suppressed, will be adverse to the OSG’s case,” the PNP finally began submitting the information, but only in parts.

…Today’s forum at Ateneo de Manila on “emerging evidence and data” — emerging, that is, from the government’s antidrugs campaign — promises to bring much-needed clarity to a murky situation.

The forum will showcase the first findings of an unprecedented research project by a consortium of universities that include Ateneo de Manila, De La Salle University, the University of the Philippines and the Columbia Journalism School (through its Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism).

…The first patterns they discerned are truly disconcerting.

…While we should rightly be provoked by the troubling patterns in the administration’s antidrugs campaign, however, we should also direct our attention to other questions the landmark research project raises. Here are two:

First, what does almost complete dependence on police sources at the precinct level mean for the documentation of the killings?

…What happens if the killings have reached such a scale that police precincts are instructed to fudge the details, to deliberately downplay the numbers?

Second, the picture that the consortium’s research project describes is based almost exclusively on media coverage.

What happens in those areas (many outside the National Capital Region) where lack of resources prevents local news organizations from covering or reporting drug-related killings?

The researchers are up front about this serious limitation of the database; but it also means that the complete picture of drug-related killings must be worse than reported.

“How many deaths will it take before [we know] that too many people have died?”

Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/114163/many-deaths-will-take#ixzz5Np45agQq

HUMAN RIGHTS VS HUMAN LIVES?

By: Ma. Ceres P. Doyo - @inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:24 AM July 26, 2018

In 1998, I was among those invited to the 50th anniversary celebration of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, held in Paris. The huge gathering was in the same venue, Palais de Chaillot, where The Declaration was drafted and adopted on a chilly December Day in 1948. Sometimes The Declaration was called “Best-Kept Secret,” because decades after it was adopted by nations, human rights continued to be violated all over the world by those who either were not in on the “secret,” or chose to pretend they knew nothing about it.

…The President, looking somewhat under the weather and minus his rude and crude ad libs, dutifully read from a teleprompter. Out flew a tirade against human rights advocates: “Your concern is human rights. Mine is human lives.” An OMG! moment there.

He continued: “The lives of our youth are being wasted and families are destroyed, and all because of the chemicals called ‘shabu,’ cocaine, cannabis and heroin.”

…The gullible and brainwashed believe this, not comprehending that the human rights violations by agents of the state against civilians are the issue, because these agents of the state are supposed to be the protectors, not violators, of civilians’ human rights. To put it bluntly, who will protect us from our protectors?

“The lives of our youth are being wasted.” Yes, in the Duterte drug war, it is mostly the youth whose lives are indeed wasted, because they are ended by bullets from law enforcers whose mandate is to kill, kill, kill. Because “nanlaban,” meaning “the victims fought back.”

…From Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of Caloocan Diocese: …“Is not the right to life the most basic human right? Yes, use the full force of the law, file charges against violators, jail the pushers and the suppliers, but save the users; do not kill them! Besides, we cannot rehabilitate dead people anymore, can we?”

From Lan Mercado, international development worker and human rights advocate: “In making the false dichotomy between human rights and human lives, Duterte was being facile about the killings he instigates. He is misleading the public to think that human rights are not important compared to the human lives he says he protects through the war against drugs… This one line is the most manipulative in Duterte’s State of the Nation Address, making people who approve the killings feel they are just and righteous because they stand for human lives, and if they have been having doubts or guilt pangs over 20,000-plus murders, or the violated rights of mostly poor people victimized by extrajudicial killings, they should feel vindicated. This one line fuels the ignorance about how human rights are integral to the protection of human life.”

Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/114889/human-rights-vs-human-lives#ixzz5Np5vej30

DISTURBING CULTURE CHANGE

By: Jose K. Tirol - @inquirerdotnet

05:03 AM June 13, 2018

Malacañang’s spokesperson justified the President’s liplocking with a married OFW as an accepted “part of our culture” — consensual, a gesture of endearment to all Filipino workers, and just a playful act. The chief presidential legal counsel has also likened it to kissing a grandchild. One senator has even compared it to professional actors doing kissing scenes onscreen. The woman herself said she had no problem with it; after all, she did behave like a giddy schoolgirl onstage.

In a Facebook post a few days ago, I made the oversight of simply focusing on the woman, without saying anything about the President himself. The sad fact is that I’m no longer surprised by whatever misogynistic, irrational act or statement the President does or says, and so sometimes I don’t bother to say anything anymore.

I suppose this is precisely the problem for many of us nowadays. We give up commenting, or worse, caring, because we take the President’s behavior as a given. We take it as a part of him we can no longer change. We take it as predictable unpredictability. We take it as an accepted part of our culture. So, yes, the spokesperson is right, but he is also wrong.

That liplocking incident was not playful, nor just an act. This particular instance is becoming part of our reality, a resignation to what is, a conscious decision to surrender to the perceived inevitable. Sixteen million people can’t be wrong, right? Survey results can’t be lying, right? The President can’t

possibly be wrong, right?

Merriam-Webster defines culture as “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group,” and “the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time.” Fine, we can work with that.

Culture, however, is actually not a constant. It is not a natural creation, but something developed, shaped and institutionalized over time. The same can be said for political culture, musical culture, religious culture, and so on and so forth. Across generations, we learn to love new kinds of food and create new forms of literature, accept new forms of social relationships, and develop new usages for words, if not invent new terminologies altogether.

Culture starts somewhere, and this is the process Filipinos have to be more conscious of, more concerned about.

The current shift is extremely alarming. The culture we embrace — that increasingly accepts EJK, machismo and misogyny, the willingness to bully the weak and cave in to the strong, the justification for carnality and crassness as simple humor, and the tweaking of truth beyond recognition—says something terrifying about us.

Because what we unquestioningly accept as a playful act, a supposed form of endearment to millions of our people working abroad, becomes easily incorporated into the national psyche. The belief that it-looks-consensual-therefore-it-is-ok is passed on to our children and our children’s children — that this is the proper way to treat women and to react to vulgarity. With cheers and video no less, as if to say, Yes, I’m so proud of what he just did, again.

Well, I’m not proud of what he did. And neither should you be.

As this new and disturbing culture increasingly becomes part of us, integrated into our daily life and social interactions, we tend to forget that correspondingly something else is displaced, something else becomes less of us. That is the respect we once had for women, the respect we once had for the office of the President, the respect for national sovereignty, the respect for truth, for the values we used to be proud of, but which we now fail to defend with our silence. Or, worse, we now mock and belittle.

I fear for the society my children will grow into. I fear for the road we are taking, a road too easily traveled by a society that relishes populist rhetoric without taking a step back to see exactly in what direction it is going. Because every time we fail to question, to challenge, to critique, change for the worse will come, if it isn’t already here.

Jose K. Tirol, PhD, is an assistant professor of the Department of History of Ateneo de Manila University.

Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/113890/disturbing-culture-change#ixzz5Nr06Pldp

DUTERTE’S DOUBLE STANDARDS

By: Gideon Lasco - @inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:28 AM June 28, 2018

If our leaders are to be credible, they must live by their own standards. They must practice what they preach and abide by the principles they claim to espouse, especially when they use the same to condemn others.

Very few, if any, of our presidents can be said to have fulfilled this consistency, and, despite his promise of change, President Duterte has been no exception.

“I hate corruption,” he says. But despite the fact that the Marcoses have plundered so much from our country, Mr. Duterte has unashamedly boasted of his indebtedness to them and—lest we forget—even buried the late dictator in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Despite his vow that he will not tolerate “even a whiff of corruption,” he has stayed silent on the foul stench emanating from his own appointees, many of whom he “recycles” once the issues around them have subsided.

Another thing Mr. Duterte has professed to hate is drugs. But does he, really? In his “drug war,” innocent children and suspected (not proven) drug users have been killed, but the drug smuggling case involving billions has not prospered; neither have cases involving his allies.

There is an undeniable need to act on drug issues, but the more the “drug war” drags on, the more it becomes clear that it is actually his populist government that uses drugs: as a weapon to spread fear, win popular support, and stifle dissent. Alas, as the recent Ateneo-La Salle study demonstrates, it is the poor who find themselves on the receiving end of this deadly double standard.

Then there is his profession of an “independent foreign policy.” How independent? He speaks against colonialism, but he has all but surrendered our islands in the West Philippine Sea to kowtow to Xi Jinping and allow Chinese companies to take over various projects. He tried to pull off a jetski stunt—in the opposite direction. Amid reports of the Chinese Coast Guard taking our fishermen’s catch, and despite indelible signs of Chinese island-building, the President’s patriotic pretensions are nowhere to be found.

Mr. Duterte’s double standards are also seen in the way he deals with people in government. He magnifies his opponents’ faults, and minimizes exactly those same faults when his allies commit them. For instance, he wields “excessive foreign travel” as a club against people he does not like—Commission on Higher Education’s Patricia Licuanan, for example (eight trips in one year)—but is silent on the travels of his supporters, including Mocha Uson (eight trips in 10 months). Uson’s very appointment, by the way, is another double standard from a president who promised to appoint the “best and the brightest” in government.

Finally, he condemns people’s behavior but is blind to his own. “That foul-mouthed nun,” he says of Sister Patricia Fox, impervious to the foulness of his speech. “She is screwing the nation,” he says, baselessly, of Sen. Leila de Lima, oblivious to his public display of lurid behavior.

He demands respect, but is unwilling to give any. He speaks of dignity, but is unwilling to act dignified. He insults people’s character and even their physical appearance, but sees no contradiction in not applying those same standards to himself.

Surely we will hear from him again: the man who, like Herod, mocks God, the man with seemingly so much hate burning in his heart. Who will he condemn tomorrow? The oligarchs save his allies? The imperialists save China? The crooks save his friends? The suspected drug personalities save his own son? The rude people of this world, save his own self?

…President Duterte, for as long as people crave power, there will be people who will defend your every move. And for as long as you yourself remain in power, there will be people who will find profundity in your jokes, spirituality in your curses, truth in your lies, and hope in your promises.

But it does not make your double standards any less clear to the growing number of Filipinos who are not—or are no longer—impressed with your drama and your empty braggadocio. Before you take the bully pulpit anew, please spare some time to look at something that seems to have gathered dust somewhere in Malacañang: the mirror.

Follow @gideonlasco on Twitter. Send feedback to mail@gideonlasco.com

Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/114229/dutertes-double-standards#ixzz5Nr0yRZfo

WOMEN IN THE PHILIPPINES HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF PRESIDENT DUTERTE’S ‘MACHO’ LEADERSHIP

By SUYIN HAYNES

Time.com

July 23, 2018

As Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte prepared for his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Monday, his third since assuming power in 2016, protesters took to the streets in and around Manila. Police expected around 40,000 protesters against his administration and 40,000 in favor of the controversial leader.

Among those anti-government protesters are women’s rights activists, who have increasingly been speaking out against the Duterte administration. Since taking office in June 2016, the 73-year-old leader has ordered soldiers to shoot female rebels “in the vagina,” made inappropriate comments about his female Vice President’s legs, joked about raping Miss Universe, and equated having a second wife to keeping a “spare tire” in the trunk of a car.

“When he says these things, he’s sending out a message to all men out there that ‘I get away with it, so you can,'” says Inday Espina-Varona, a 54-year-old journalist and one of several co-founders of the #BabaeAko movement. Translated as ‘I Am Woman,’ the social media campaign began in May after Duterte declared that the next Chief Justice of the Philippines could not be a woman.

Link: http://time.com/5345552/duterte-philippines-sexism-sona-women/

Pagkatapos ay lumapit ang mga alagad kay Jesus at nagtanong nang walang ibang nakaririnig, “Bakit hindi po naming mapalayas ang demonyo?” Sumagot siya, “Dahil nakaupo pa siya sa Malacañang.”—Mateo 17:19-20

“Twisted logic is the tendrils of an evil spirit.”

“A partial truth is always more dangerous than unalloyed truth or a varnished lie.”

“When you do not say what you mean, you cannot be trusted in anything you say.”

“Anyone who lies is doing the devil’s work. It is his telltale signature.”

Link: https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/07/politics.html