Guest Contributors on disquiet

public health

“These are signs of government’s pandemic machinery in trouble and a nation in danger.”

March 23, 2021 by
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by Senator Ralph Recto

(Public Statement)

Hindi lang change oil, change engine and driver na rin

COVID is fast and furious while the vaccine rollout is slow and sputtering. These are signs of a government’s pandemic machinery in trouble and a nation in danger.

Hindi lang change oil ang kailangan, mukhang change engine na rin.

If after a year, the current one is not bringing us to where we want to be, then it is time to build a better one.

It is time to expand the membership of IATF, to include those in private business with superb managerial skills, such as those who have been running companies with a million moving parts with efficiency and precision.

Under EO 168 that created it, leadership of the IATF remains an all-government affair, chaired by the Secretary of Health with the Secretaries of the DFA, DILG, DOJ, DOLE, DOT and DOTC (now DOTR) as members.

The private sector also has no permanent seat on the table in the National Task Force for COVID-19, the command center that is headed by the Secretary of National Defense.

To cite one skill set, the war against COVID requires logistics experts who supply a customer base numbering in the tens of millions, like that bakery in Laguna that every day brings millions of pieces of perishable bread to store shelves from Aparri to Zamboanga in a matter of hours.

Kung may reinforcement man sa IATF, huwag lang po sana MDs—mga Military Dati—kasi quota na po ang sector na ito.

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human rights

“It is time to bring back sanity and restore reason.”

February 3, 2021 by
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by Atty. Neri Colmenares*

OPENING STATEMENT
on Cluster 4 Issues
During Oral Arguments on the Anti-Terrorism Act of 202
02 February 2021

Your Honors, I was assigned to argue that various sections of RA 11479 violate, inter alia, the constitutional prohibition against bills of attainder and ex post facto laws.

At its core, the Anti-Terrorism Act is today’s oppressive and arbitrary legislative vehicle for the attribution of guilt and the imposition of punishment essentially without the need for trial and conviction by a court of law.

And that is the essence of a bill of attainder – a law that inflicts punishment without judicial trial.

Firstly, Your Honors, the law is intrinsically invalid because it suffers from overbreadth and impermissible vagueness. The law punishes any act, including acts which were perfectly innocent when done, for as long as the Anti-Terrorism Council, acting as roving law makers and star chamber judges, imputes vaguely defined terrorist intentions and purposes on the suspect.

After all, who would know what acts are encompassed by a law that penalizes “any act” intended to “endanger another person’s life”? or “seriously interfere with critical infrastructure”? Worse, the act need not even actually result in “endangering” a person’s life. The mere naked imputation that it intended to “endanger” a person’s life would suffice.

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disinformation and propaganda, social / media

Distraction to demobilize movements

September 15, 2020 by
D

by Arjan P. Aguirre

For decades, scholars in social movements have been struggling to know why and how movements mobilize. Their earlier works have been useful in informing us about the importance of social problems and how and what type of “collective behavior” and calculated “collective action” would emerge to address them. Subsequent scholars have also looked at the relevance of “resources,” “opportunities” to intervene, and the existing “political processes” for the emergence, changes, and decline of movements. Later on, a new breed of theorists offered claims and theories that focus on the role of “identities,” schema of ideas or “framings” and their alignments, “emotions,” among other things, in understanding contemporary social movements.

In terms of demobilizing movements, many social scientists have already informed us of how “state repression,” patronage politics, and “resource curse,” to name a few, tend to counter the growth and expansion of movements through sheer physical violence, unequal political access, control of resources, etc. These works were valuable in telling us of how contemporary movements struggle to survive or remain relevant especially in facing a powerful government, counter movements, and other stakeholders in the society.

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the environment

The 160 year old science on Manila Bay that people need to know

September 11, 2020 by
T

by Benjamin Vallejo Jr.

That citizens have noticed the pile of white dolomitic sand off Manila Bay’s Baywalk promenade is good news. It only means many citizens are now aware of the value of Manila’s seafront and that the national government and the city government have taken steps to enhance it.

There was always a beach there. Old photographs dating from the Spanish colonial era show a wide sandy, low slope reflective beach, reflective means to beach scientists, a shore in which waves are dampened and make the beach safe for recreation. It was safe enough that the Spanish era Ateneo de Manila in Intramuros taught its students to swim approximately where Manila Ocean Park is now located.

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arts and culture

Ekis: The gigil over Filipinx

September 9, 2020 by
E

by Tuting Hernandez

The x in Filipinx is rooted in the 1970s English neologism Mx., an alternative to Mr. and Ms. for people who do not identify with neither Mr. nor Ms. By analogy, this morphological process was extended to Latinx and folx and more recently to Filipinx. Analogy (or what some might derisively call gaya-gaya o nakiki-uso) is actually a very productive linguistic process. Some of the regularities in languages are because of analogy.

The label is not meant to replace existing identities. It was coined as an alternative to Filipino/Filipina for those who do not identify with this binary. It also carries with it the histories, relations, and alliances of those who choose to own and identify with this label — histories that are unique and have long diverged from the histories of other Filipinos in the Philippines and in diaspora; relations that are their own, forged in communities that are different from ours; and alliances borne out of the political need for visibility in a struggle that might be far from our everyday life.

And this cannot be denied. Who are we really to deny the identity (and with it the label) of a group who is trying to assert itself amidst the threat of erasure?

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