On fairness, balance and the worldwide Interwebs

Noemi Dado wrote about a video that recently made the rounds that claims facts about the Cojuangco-Aquino family. It's a treasure trove of biting accusations, dubious data and water-cooler fodder. You can watch it here.

The merit of the video is another matter. All I'll say about it here is that it looks like propaganda to me, so I won't accept what it says at face value.

I hoped that Ms Dado would have, too, especially since she wrote the post for BlogWatch, a reputable online "citizen media" site that, in theory, should be fair and balanced. In fact, she said on Twitter that she wrote the post in the interest of fairness and balance.

However, when you look at her post, you can tell where she's leaning towards. She begins with "Thou shalt not be ignorant," then proceeds to reproduce, in full, the description of the video, which explains the motivation behind it and where it sources its facts. After posting the entirety of the description, she inserts excerpts of comments about it by historian Xiao Chua. Not the entirety of Chua's Facebook note, just the first few paragraphs. In fact, the body of Chua's reaction, which Dado excluded from the post, largely disproves the arguments of the video, but she makes no mention of it. This is followed by a long list of tweeted reactions to the video, the overwhelming majority of which were approving of it.

You'll have to read her post yourself, but I think you'll find that she herself approves of the video. The tweets she posted about the issue reveal her stand, too.

Fielding criticism from bloggers, she said she posted about the video in the name of fairness and balance. Her aim, she said, was to present all sides. But the post itself betrays a lack of will on her part to keep the discussion fair. Furthermore, her tweets, more than anything else, challenged the Cojuangco-Aquinos and their supporters to disprove the video.

Of course, we all have our own personal biases, human as we are. But the lack of balance in Dado's post, which (I will repeat) she wrote in the name of fairness and balance, is a disservice to her readers and to the discourse on the matter. She says she presented both sides, but instead she presented one of them, then inserted excerpts from the other. Inserting Chua's comments was a nice gesture, I guess, but I think it was a cop-out, a token act. It didn't balance her discussion of the issue.

I pointed this out to Dado on Twitter (in much fewer words, obviously), and she said, "Well if you think I was not balanced, maybe you can make a blog post about it and share it here instead of splitting hairs." She suggested I curate my own Twitter reactions, and added, "Sorry na lang if that is all I found. Verify it yourself." I found her response disappointing, especially since I only pointed these out to her because she had written the post in question for want of fairness.

In short, she said she was fair, and I (and many others) begged to differ. The discussion kind of disintegrated from there.

Praybeyt Benjamin is crap. That's why it's SRO.

Let's be honest: Praybeyt Benjamin is crap. The roundest character in the film is probably the protagonist, Benjamin (Vice Ganda), a gay guy who enlists for military service in his father's stead—and that's not saying much. The conflict of the story is plopped before us bluntly; it is ridiculous by any standard, but we agree to work with it, accustomed as we are to the silliness of our contemporary popular cinema. The story progresses so predictably that throughout the entire screening in the provincial standing-room theater I watched it in, people were yelling their (mostly correct) guesses at what would happen next. The climax, the denouement, even the bloopers as the closing credits roll: it's all crap.

If you know this already but are planning to see it anyway because you want Vice Ganda to make you laugh on the silver screen, let me save you money and break your hopes this early. She manages to make us laugh for some time, but it all gets tiring eventually. Oo, nakakatawa, eh ano ngayon? It's nothing that we can't see on Magandang Gabi Vice.

So banal was the film that midway through I tried to make out what it was trying to contribute to the national dialogue on gender roles. Easy enough, I thought. Benjamin saves the day for his grandfather, who loathes him because of his sexuality, and earns his approval. So, ha! Just because you're queer doesn't mean you can't do stuff. Sure. It's not like the LGBT community in our country is hiding in a cave somewhere and needs approval of this kind. Vice Ganda herself is an example of accepted, even celebrated, homosexuality; Boy Abunda would be another. There is much more to be done in the way of raising awareness for the LGBT cause, of course. It's just that Praybeyt Benjamin does not measurably help things—not by a long stretch.

A still from Mike De Leon's Alpha Kappa Omega Batch '81

But I guess we knew that already, didn't we? No one walks into a Praybeyt Benjamin screening expecting a performance that would send the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on a plane to Manila to beg the cast to attend next year's Oscars. As Filipino moviegoers, we interact with our local contemporary popular cinema with copious doses of digression. We know that our plots are thoughtless and our characters flat. With some exceptions, our films are exercises in selective blindness: we pick out the good stuff and push the rest to the background. "Good stuff" in itself is subjective, of course, but—yes—we digress.

I wonder if we're still on the way to the level of cultural consciousness that does not permit Praybeyt Benjamin standing-room screenings, or if we took a U-turn somewhere along the way. In Film class we looked at a couple of Mike De Leon works, and spoke quite a bit about his contemporaries, and they were always discussed with such reverence that it made me wonder why there isn't so much talent to slather praises on today.

Do you ever think, when you watch a Star Cinema or Viva Films flick, that you're wasting your money? When do you think will we start having to think that less often?

The difference between the iPhone 4 and the 4S? A free iOS app.

Apple announcements are probably like Election Day for technology journalists in the United States. They're much hyped, well-anticipated and preceded by lots of controversies and rumors.

For Filipino gadget geeks, every time Apple comes out with something it's like Christmas morning. Apple usually makes announcements in the morning, Eastern time, which means 1am Philippine time, when everyone is too asleep to be bothered with a gadget announcement. The moment we wake up, though, we rush to our laptops and check all the liveblogs we bookmarked in advance, excited to see what Steve Claus left for us under the tree.

Steve retired earlier this year and sadly passed away on Wednesday. Apple was apparently informed of its co-founder's imminent demise, as its headquarters "went dark"over the weekend preceding Jobs's death, Robert Scoble quotes "a guy I know at Facebook" as saying. Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs as CEO, and his team had iOS apps and a "new developer platform" to announce, but we got none of that on Tuesday.

But Jobs wouldn't have wanted anything to come to a halt because of him, so Tim Cook went up the stage and announced the iPhone 4S on Tuesday. Steve Jobs deserves a separate post; here I'll talk about the 4S.

The 4S retains the form factor of the previous generation, except that GSM users might wonder why there's an extra notch on the upper left side of the phone, above the Mute key. Apple changed the antenna structure so that the phone can support both GSM and CDMA networks, removing the need for separate models for different networks. The 4S packs a new dual-core processor and an eight-megapixel camera, up three million pixels from the iPhone 4. This confirms the theory that Apple makes major upgrades to its iPhone every other year, and releases relatively minor upgrades in in between.

However, Apple always manages to include something stellar in the minor upgrades to entice customers to buy what would be an otherwise unchanged phone. Remember when they came out with the 3GS? It sported the same form factor as the 3G that preceded it, except with a few speed improvements, multitasking and Voice Control. The speed improvements weren't so noticeable; multitasking on the 3GS made the phone lag. But Voice Control was a dream. You spoke stuff like "play Here Comes The Sun" or "What time is it?"into the phone, and instantly the song would play or the time would be told to you. All told, it wasn't enough reason to replace a one-year-old phone, but for many Apple users who were on the fence about an upgrade, it was probably all the convincing they needed.

Similarly, the A5 chip isn't really a big leap from the A4 chip on the iPhone 4 (in fact, I don't imagine I'll ever need anything faster than the iPhone 4 for my daily needs). I barely flinched at the 8MP camera—I can take photos just fine with my iPhone 4 and all of the five megapixels it has to offer.

But Apple took the voice control technology one step further with Siri, which they demonstrated the hell out of during the iPhone 4S announcement. Siri is like a tiny personal assistant fairy that lives inside your phone. Tell it to "set a meeting for 4pm on Tuesday at the Conference Room" and an appointment is automatically added to your Calendar. Saying, "I'm craving for a burger in Quezon City" will give you a list of hamburger places in your city, ranked according to Yelp ratings. Tell it to "text Kathleen I'm on my way," and it instantly sends an SMS.

People are buzzing about Siri all over the Internet, but those who don't really follow technology won't know that Siri was actually a free (FREE!) iOS app DARPA helped develop. It went live on the Apple App Store on February 5, 2010, and Apple bought the company on April 29 that year. Siri hasn't received an update since the purchase, but it stayed on the Store, available for download.

And then, the iPhone 4S keynote happened. Before it started, Siri was still free for downloading by anyone; by the time it was over, Siri had been taken down. Those who downloaded the app before it was pulled offline will still be able to use it until October 15. From then on, everyone who doesn't have an iPhone 4S won't be able to use the technology.

Basically, Apple bought a company (for an undisclosed, but my guess is pretty hefty amount) to make its users get a brand new, $199 phone to enjoy a feature that previously cost nothing.

Is Siri enough reason to fork over as much as $399 for the 64GB iPhone 4S and throw away your perfectly fine iPhone 4? Granted, Siri is much more integrated into iOS now that it's a feature instead of a third-party app. Many pedestrian users have probably been won over again and again by the use cases Apple demonstrated in the keynote. But I don't think anyone who isn't a power-user businessman-type can justify a 4S purchase if he already has an iPhone 4. The Voice Control feature that's available now for iPhone 4 and 3GS users works perfectly well for most basic commands, such as playing songs, dialing numbers and asking for the time. If I want to book a reservation in a restaurant, I can just ask Voice Control to call the place, and I can speak to a human to reserve a table. I don't need to buy myself a new phone.

Then again, Apple probably knows there are quite a few people out there who have both a lot of money and an infinite love for everything Infinite Loop. Those people will probably populate the lines outside Apple Stores once the iPhone 4S goes on shelves. The rest of us know the real story: the iPhone 4S is just an iPhone 4 with one fewer available app.

These are the times we live in.

Tonight I thought I'd stop by AS on my way to dinner to find out what was going on. They're having a cultural night, with performances from various artists that depict the history of the struggle of the university and its students.

What an auspicious way to spend the night before the university makes history once more. Tomorrow, UP students and administrators will walk all the way from Quezon City to Mendiola, along with other state and private universities, to signify their opposition to Noynoy Aquino's abhorrent policies. They will march in opposition to yet another hefty budget cut the national university is poised to sustain. They will march in opposition to cuts to the budgets of state tertiary schools. They will march in opposition to Aquino's gross underfunding of the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) and of public health in general.

Simply put, UP will march all the way from Diliman to Mendiola because our President has neglected his responsibility to his nation's youth and people too gravely.

Frankly, I do not think Aquino will be shaken in the least by tomorrow's demonstration. His policy—to gradually drop quality tertiary education from the list of his government's responsibilities—has been rock solid since last year. No matter how resonant our call is—and more fundamentally, how crucial quality college education is to the development of a nation—he will probably not listen to it.

But what will matter is that he will know that we know what he is doing. He will know that we won't forget, neither will future generations, and neither will history. He will know that even as he has not been in power for two years, we already know what he will be remembered as: the President who shirked his responsibility to the nation's future.

UP is on strike.

Starting yesterday, the University of the Philippines Diliman went on strike to oppose the Aquino government's continuing neglect of its responsibility to state universities and colleges.

San Juan Representative JV Ejercito paid a visit to the AS steps, where youth leaders, UP officials and some of his fellow congressmen spoke for greater state subsidy. He said more than 100 lawmakers have signed a manifesto supporting the call for state support for tertiary schools.

Student Regent Kristina Conti said such a manifesto, though nice, is really an empty gesture because there isn't any overt action accompanying it. Sure, you want more financial support for state universities, but where's the money?

Kabataan Partylist Representative Mong Palatino, meanwhile, said that however determined Congress might be to increase the budget of SUCs, Aquino will still have the final say. Even if both houses of Congress agree to add to the budget of state schools, when the budget bill reaches Aquino's desk he can still choose to veto such additions. This is why it's a good idea to pressure Malacañang and the Department of Budget and Management about state subsidy for SUCs, he says.

In 2010, Aquino said, "We are gradually reducing the subsidy to SUCs to push them toward becoming self-sufficient and financially independent" because they had the "ability to raise their income." By income-raising ability, he probably means leasing public lands meant for academic use in shady and nonbeneficial deals, or shifting the burden to supposedly state-funded scholars by charging them higher tuition and laboratory fees.

The sad truth is that Aquino's outlook on quality state-supported tertiary education in the Philippines is this: "I don't give a shit." He does not care about training and creating our future engineers, social scientists, artists, journalists, filmmakers and novelists. He does not care about securing the country's industrial, cultural and social future.

He does not care about the future of this country.

His communications team will, of course, say that he does, and will point to his myopic programs—the Conditional Cash Transfer and Public-Private Partnerships—as evidence. Perhaps some will believe their drivel.

But those of us who know what's really at stake, who really understand why there is such an uproar over Aquino's admitted policy on quality tertiary education in this country, know that he has no sense of history, that he has a complete lack of ability to see beyond the horizon. Any president who looks at quality college education as an unwanted burden on the state does not understand what quality college education really means, especially if that president went to a private university and is a rich haciendero.

It's only been two years since his ascent to power, but we all know that for all the history and prestige he used to climb to the top, he will be a forgettable president.

We will not forget.

I'm Dean and I am for an intellectual Reproductive Health debate.

I really don't care anymore if you're for or against the Reproductive Health bill. The debate has rotten to such a level that I'm willing to talk to anyone about the bill so long as they don't drag "moral" or religious arguments into the discussion. So long as you don't quote the Bible, the Koran or Oprah Magazine on me or invoke your favorite saint or the friendly creature that lives in the tree in your backyard, we're good.