Any perspectives on the Philippine election?
I’m pretty depressed by it. So I haven’t been following too closely. I just can’t handle it. Which is a pretty privileged position I guess.
A few unrelated thoughts.
- This is why accountability is so important. Marcos the older destroyed the country. Tortured. Murdered and looted.
There was no accountability. The family got to keep the money and stay part of politics. Albeit mostly in the north rather than on the national level.
There was no clear and established record of facts. No truth and reconciliation. The Marcos clan can now deny the truth and paint it as some glorious past. The “make Philippines great again” effect.
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In many ways this is a continuation of the Duterte regime. Although as a realignment of the oligarchs that will take the lead. The Marcos clan were central to Duterte being able to go national, outside of his base in the south. Duterte’s daughter was elected VP. And although they are voted on separately, there was clearly a deal about who would stand for what.
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This is really fucking traumatic for lots of my older friends and family. Theres a whole generation of older, educated Filipinos who fought and survived Marcos. They all have stories of arrest, going into hiding, losing friends, torture. My social media has been heartbreaking for months.
As an aside. My in-laws, are now quiet, lovely, slightly traditional but open older folks happily enjoying their later years. Under the Marcos regime they were absolute fucking bad asses. Way cooler than I will ever be, with stories that you wouldnt believe. Sadly, I haven’t heard most of them, and the ones I have arent mine to share.
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This memory and experience of the Marcos regime is largely isolated to the educated classes. For most others, living in grinding poverty, oppressed by a parade of petty rulers and local oligarchs, there was nothing particularly unique in the Marcos regime. It’s all been unrelentingly horrible for 400 years.
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This latter is why the Leni / Aquino liberal faction is failing. They offer competent government, democracy and a raft of sensible policies, while otherwise doing nothing to challenge the status quo. To well off, educated folks who remember Marcos, this seems like a no brainer, but to everyone else it’s a losing message.
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The right wing government in Australia lost the election last night.
Interesting election in that the greens and the “teal independents” won a lot of seats. The latter are socially progressive, almost exclusively female, conservatives. Standing on platforms of climate change and an anti corruption body.
The government will go to Labor. The traditional left wing party. However it’s not yet clear whether they have an absolute majority of seats, or will need to form a coalition with the greens or the independents.
The current prime minister scott Morrison conceded the election last night without a fuss, congratulating his opponent, with power being handed over quickly.
The new prime minister will be heading overseas on monday for his first official duties in a meeting of “The Quad” a loose alliance of India, Japan, Australia and the US" which is clearly about countering China.
Election went off without fuss. There were a couple of late shenanigans, but this was things like sending racist texts about refugees or some signs that weren’t properly authorized and were taken down.
I dont want to be smug, and Australia has its problems, but feels pretty good to be living in a functioning democracy right now.
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That’s sort of how I feel about living in the Cezch Republic. I mean there are definitely problems here but backsliding democracy ain’t one.
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The martyrdom of fungbunger has made it crystal clear in my mind: we need a way to mute America. Why? Because America has no chill. America is exhausting. America is incapable of letting something be simply funny instead of a dread portent of their apocalyptic present. America is ruining the internet.
America is the internet.
Being three hours behind the East Coast, late night Perth Twitter is a bit like the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones : a rag-tag collection of rejects trudging along the great slippery ice wall of infinite scroll while the realm sleeps.
Unfortunately, this means that we’re the first to witness the awakening of that undead nightmare otherwise known as “American discourse.”
Before I sleep, I’m witness to many nightmares: Brooklynites are gutting each other over the sanctity of the bodega, Louisianan astro-poets are putting the wiccans to the torch because of their ongoing “amethyst erasure,” someone from Minnesota has gone viral claiming that it is an act of “class genocide” to know that drinking water keeps you hydrated, a Florida DSA chapter is publicly imploding over the contested value of feet pics, a Washington Pos t columnist is loudly pissing themselves over a petty workplace slight, the bassplayer from a long defunct hardcore band is begging people to share the gofundme page for a single mother made homeless by a twenty minute hospital visit, while armchair experts debate the value of mask mandates as #1milliondead and #bidenbts trend in your sidebar.
America insists that you bear witness to it tripping on its dick and slamming its face into an uncountable row of scalding hot pies. You do more than bear witness, because American Twitter has the same kind of magnetic pull as a garbage disposal unit. A sick part of you wants to shove your hand in. You want to let the blades cut into your knuckles, if just to see if you can slow them down a little.
The greatest trick America’s ever pulled on the subjects of its various vassal states is making us feel like a participant in its grand experiment. After all, our fate is bound to the American empire’s whale fall. My generation in particular is the first pure batch of Yankee-Yobbo mutoids: as much Hank Hill as we are Hills Hoist (look it up!), as familiar with the Supreme Court Justices as we are with the judges on Master Chef , as comfortable in Frasier ’s Seattle or Seinfeld ’s Upper West Side as we are in Ramsay Street or Summer Bay.
I should not know who Pete Buttigieg is. In a just world, the name Bari Weiss would mean as much to me as Nordic runes. This goes for people who actually might read Nordic runes too. No Swede deserves to be burdened with thus knowledge. No Brazilian should have to regularly encounter the phrase “Dimes Square.” To the rest of the vast and varied world, My Pillow Guy and Papa John should be NPCs from a Nintendo DS Zelda title, not men of flesh and bone, pillow and pizza. Ted Cruz should be the name of an Italian pornstar in a Love Boat porn parody. Instead, I’m cursed to know that he is a senator from Texas who once stood next to a butter sculpture of a dairy cow and declared that his daughter’s first words were “I like butter.”
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David Frum had a piece on the election and if you asked yourself has David Frum’s foreign policy views change when he defected from the Democrats, the answer is no.
Here’s the title
The President Who Did Everything Right and Got No Thanks
And look we live in a polarizing world where people who do things right get voted out of office and clowns get elected and I don’t know much about the inner workings of Columbia so I can’t speak to why the ex president got voted out
But Frum’s recollection of Columbia’s history is that it’s all been FARC’s fault, even going so far at hinting that the right wing death squads were caused by popular discontentment with FARC
All of it reads like a Cold War jaunt where some some conservative writer gets paid by the foreign government or CIA to take a tour and write how the left wing movement are villains, the current right wing government is amazing, and the futher right wing psychopaths who are further taking hold are either lamentable or omitted completely.
The article ends with
That record made it no wonder that President Duque received such a fond goodbye from President Joe Biden on Duque’s farewell tour of the United States. In sharp contrast, President-elect Petro has made his career by exploiting his country’s social divisions, not healing them.
Lol.
Every time I try to watch that video, here or on Twitter, it freezes from :06 to :10, can’t really make things out
I see him being described as an ultra-nationalist conservative who does things like deny the coercion of WW2 comfort women, so what are we losing, really, if he dies?
From Guardian
- Abe is reportedly in heart failure , where the heart can’t pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. According to Associated Press, the term is sometimes used by officials in Japan to describe situations where victims are no longer alive, but before a formal declaration of death has been made.
- Abe has been sent to a hospital and appears to have no vital signs, according to a local fire department, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK has reported.
He’s dead. Just waiting for it to be official.
Shooter in the background moments before the assassination.
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Because you heard someone being described a certain way, you’re happy that they’ve been shot?
That’s a good way to go through life.
It’s a simple cost-benefit analysis. Poker taught me to think this way.
Reports coming in that the shooter was a former Japanese navel officer. Hence being one of the few in Japan who would even know how to handle a gun.
Looks like some kind of homemade gun.