Trick or Treat!! hehe, Kylee is obviously pissed. No trick or treating for him this Halloween season. hehe. BOO!
Archive for October, 2005
Look at this. They made a pumpkin into . a computer. And even showed the steps to make a pumpkin computer. What happens when the pumpkin rots?
A friend told me to plug this Purpose Driven Life Seminar based on the Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life book. It’ll be in Xavier School starting November 7 and every monday till December 17 . Download flyer for details. Discover the answer to life’s most important question:What on earth am I here for? It seems a lot of people attend this seminar. A friend gave me a copy of that book during my 18th birthday. I’ve always wanted to attend this seminar but when classes start , I don’t have the time for it anymore.
Yes! I have a new internet connection. A Smart Wi Fi, high-speed broadband internet service of Smart, a cellphone provider.
The service works by simply installing a Smart WiFi antenna at your home which is directed to the nearest Smart cellsite to give you the strongest connection signal possible.
There are so much trees around the house that the installers had a hard time getting a signal on the roof . Anyway, the hard part was the configration in the desktop. For some stupid reason, I had this spyware “new dot net” which had created a conflict with the configuration. After 5 hours of troubleshooting and when the installers gave up, it was my mom who thought of uninstalling it. Haha. Silly .
Well I got the cheapest plan (988 pesos a month) but still have my old cable connection and dial up for standby.
I got this as an email forward and wonder if it’s true.
Just sharing stuff about your mobile phone that could be worth knowing
1) Emergency number
The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112.
If you find yourself out of coverage area of your mobile network and
there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any
existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and
interestingly…this number112 can be dialed even while the keypad is locked.
Try it out.
Read the rest of this entry »
*NOTE: Copyrighted to me
Civil Society and the Public Sphere
Jurgen Habermas says that the public sphere is composed of private people transformed into a “public people”. Private people are from the economic world, who both own commodities and form the family. As a public people, they oppose or question the legitimization of public authority. They are referred to as public because their use of reason is “public”—it occurs in public, the public practices it, and they are usually opposed to the actions of public authority.
The public sphere is not necessarily a specific place; rather, it is a social environment that originated in the criticisms and discourse of the educated people or the civil society. In the eighteenth century, the institutions of the coffee house and the brothel was established as a place where people could critique art and literature based on their experiences as private people. The institution of the newspapers provided the discussion since the patrons of these establishments could read, allowing them to exercise critical thought.
Since newspapers often contained political articles, its readers began to criticize politics and this was critical into the transformation to political public sphere. Habermas says that this represents the private people who came together as a larger, public force to use their reason, to question and criticize public authority, and to let their ideologies be heard.
It is under this context where the rallies that occurred during the past week will be analyzed and understood.
Violation of Fundamental Rights
On September 21, 2005, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita announced that the rule of “calibrated pre-emptive response” (CPR) will be in force. It is basically a strategy for the Philippine National Police to use force against rallyists even before the rally itself has begun. Aside from this, Malacanang also passed a directive saying that protesters cannot hold a rally unless they have a permit from the city government.
The CPR and the no-rally-no-permit directive were met by negative reactions from the people, who believe that mass activities should be continued unsuppressed for various reasons. The most common reason being that freedom of speech and peaceful assembly are integral parts of democratic nations such as the Philippines, and rallying falls under these two rights. Another purpose of rallies is to demonstrate whom the government is really serving: the people or itself.
But the fundamental fear that lies in the heart of the rallyists and drives them to continue their demonstrations is that these two laws may actually be a prelude to another martial law. Article III, Section 4, of the 1987 Constitution says that no law “shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press, or the right of the people to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.” Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also says, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.” The CPR and the no-rally-no-permit directive clearly violate these—which was characteristic of the regime of Ferdinand Marcos.
Dr. Clarita Carlos, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines, says that the muzzling of these fundamental rights is antithetical to a liberal democracy and that the freedom to speak and peaceful assembly should be limited only when they infringe on the rights of others. The Commission on Human Rights Chairwoman, Purificacion Quisimbing, says that if the CPR is indeed “preemptive” rather than preventive of any violence, it is similar to prior restraint. She agreed that there are certain circumstances when permits are required, such as when there is a clear and present danger on public order, safety, convenience and health. However, she maintains that there should still be no prior restraint to holding mass activities, nor should force be used in order to suppress the rallyists.
Rationale of the Government
On the other hand, the government claims that the reason why they laid down the CPR policy is due to the fact that protest actions have proven harmful to national health, particularly in the Makati business district where multinational corporations, financial institutions, and the Philippine Stock Exchange are located.
The President’s spokesman Ingnacio Bunye also added that the preemptive calibrated response policy does not mean that the government is “poised for the exercise of martial powers.” People may still protest but the government just wants to keep its options of enforcing laws that will protect commerce, jobs, mobility, and the overall peace of the community. Pro-administration Manila city mayor Lito Atienza is in agreement with this. He says that the city of Manila has become stricter with issuing rally permits not because they wanted to curtail the rights of the demonstrators, but to protect them from any untoward danger and to prevent the disruption of daily life.
The Public Sphere and Civil Society in the Philippines
The government justifies the implementation of the CPR as a means to protect the rights of the protestors and to uphold the safety of the community in general. But regardless of whether their rationale is sincere or not, the execution of the CPR gave the government the final say as to who can assemble a protest rally. This, in a way, is a form of restraint on the rights of the people because it violates the constitutional provision of peaceful assembly without necessarily having a permit. If the public sphere is a place where the people can air their opinions and grievances so that the government may hear them, then the enforcement of these policies excludes the civil society from the public sphere.
On the other hand, the civil society is supposed to be composed of people who are educated and motivated by rationality. But in the context of a developing nation like the Philippines where incidences of corruption are common, not everybody who participates in these rallies join for the reason of questioning the authorities. Politicians who would benefit from the unrest caused by the rally usually pay some of the “protestors” to participate in order to make the gathering look bigger and more intimidating.
This begs the question as to the character of the people who are part of the civil society in the public sphere. While organizers of these rallies are obviously educated and passionate about criticizing the movements of the government, this cannot be applied to the rest of the crowd. People also have other motives for joining a rally aside from a political one; sometimes they participate because their friends dragged them in, or because they wanted to experience what being part of a rally felt like.
Thus, the concept of the public sphere cannot be applied to the Philippines in the strictest sense. It was mentioned earlier that the public sphere is composed of educated people who also own commodities and are part of the family. Certainly everybody who is a part of mass movements own commodities and is part of a family. But the fact remains that most people in the Philippines do not have access to education. Thus, if it is required that a member of the public sphere be educated and use reason as the basis for arguments, then the concept of the public sphere in the Philippines may be entire different from that of Habermas’.
However, the government cannot stop the Filipino people from staging rallies and expressing themselves, no matter what directives they implement. Perhaps the rationality and motives people who make up civil society will always remain doubtful. But the Filipinos will always retain the public sphere and make sure that their criticisms and opinions are made available for the government to hear.
Political Economy of the Sign
There is a billboard advertisement for Pond’s skin whitening cream visible from the bridge from C5 to Ateneo. Most of the ad space features the fair-skinned face of local celebrity Claudine Baretto and a declaration of how the transformation of her skin has transformed her life. On the lower left corner of the billboard is a picture of her, obviously younger self with darker skin and an unflattering smile.
Jean Baudillard’s political economy of the sign states that commodities do not exist to satisfy human needs; they create the needs through awakening desires in people in signs found in advertisements. Signs are meanings that imbue a product with myth, allowing people to be attracted to it. Thus, consumption becomes a systematic act of sign manipulation. Objects are altered to embody what people think can satisfy them, and they are codified to the extent that the objects are attributed to emotions. Once these objects become imbued with meaning, they can be manipulated by the capitalist in order to control consumption and consequently, increase profit accumulation.
In the example of the Pond’s whitening cream advertisement, the sign used is the implications of having white skin in Philippine society, particularly among the youth. Eurasian beauty has always been pervasive in Philippine society because their light complexion stands out among the brown-skinned Filipinos. Most of the models featured in teen magazines are half-Filipino half-Caucasian, and popular female celebrities usually have mestiza characteristics as well. The popularity of these personalities suggest to young girls that mestiza features are the standard of beauty. Since being Eurasian has to do with a genetic code that cannot be changed, the best a young, dark-skinned Filipina can do in order to obtain mestiza beauty is to buy skin-whitening products, which promise to give them the pale, “rosy-white” complexion mestiza girls have.
The primary emotion evoked from this advertisement is romance; the desire to become beautiful in the eyes of society is connected to the desire to attract an equally good-looking partner. The photographs of mestiza actresses and fashion models are often displayed in entertainment sheets alongside handsome, mestizo male models or actors. Like the Eurasian girl, the combination of Asian and Caucasian genes results in a male beauty considered to be handsome and desirable by most women. Even if these mestizas do not end up exclusively dating a mestizo, they are still the object of desire for most Filipino males because of their exotic beauty. Thus, the message given to young Filipino girls is that by buying skin-whitening lotions, the Filipina’s brown skin will lighten with time, making her unique and more attractive to males as compared to the average, ordinary-looking brown-skinned Filipina. This attraction will eventually lead into a romantic, fairy-tale relationship popularized by the TV shows mestiza actresses star in.
The clamor for romance and finding a boyfriend is rooted in the fact that Philippine society is still predominantly patriarchal, resulting in the persistence of traditional female gender roles. The place of the Filipino woman in society is influenced by Chinese tradition that marriage is the means for economic survival. It is also popularly believed that the natural conclusion of stable heterosexual relationships is marriage; thus, women in their late twenties who are still unmarried are often asked by less tactful relatives if they ever plan on tying the knot. In the context where the pressure to find a husband who will support the woman is always present, the underlying emotion indirectly provoked by the skin-whitening ad is one of social acceptance.
Jean Baudillard says that these objects are seductive in that they detract people’s attention from reality. The skin-whitening ad drives the Filipino woman to spend her spare money on lotions in the attempt to lighten her skin instead of using that money to address more pressing social issues, such as poverty. If every Filipino were to donate one peso a day to the poor, every poor person in the Philippines would have enough to buy for basic necessities, such as shelter and food. However, those who are concerned with their own vanity fail to give this reality a thought.
While these women are slathering whitening lotion on their skin, they also fail to consider fact that it takes more than physical beauty to attract a man. Although physical appearances do play a factor in the courtship game, it is not the be-all and end-all in determining the relationship’s success. But the allure of the advertisement deceives women into thinking that whiter skin can transform their lives by making them more attractive to men. They are concerned with this false reality and deaf to the voice of reason.
However, this can only happen to women who are susceptible enough to actually believe in the messages advertisements convey to the public. As long as we keep ourselves alert for the actual meaning behind the signs in billboards and commercials, we can prevent ourselves from falling into the trap of seduction and ultimately, alienation from the facts of reality and society.
