So... When Do I Get To Blog From Jail?

.:The Patriotic Filipino Strikes Again!:.

Pretty proud of my new Bio blurb on The POC, considering how much time and effort I put into constructing those five brief sentences.

Anyways, here they are...

Marcelle Fabie (Pronounced "Fa-bee-yay".), who blogs on www.mistervader.com, is a man who embodies the two greatest characteristics of a Patriotic Filipino: he is patriotic, and he is Filipino. As an upstanding individual of strong moral fibre (i.e., he doesn't get laid), he puts the "grit" in "journalistic inteGRITy." Hard-hitting, fearless (except when it comes to Rick Astley), and unbelievably opinionated, he stands for truthiness, justice, and the Filipino way. He has a Pulitzer, a Nobel, an Oscar, a Grammy, and five other weirdly-named pet dogs.

He is also a notorious satirist.

And of course, this comes with a new article that I hope you'd check out.

.:I Wish More Rants Were Less Hate-Filled And More About Epic Winning, Like Charlie Sheen. Too Bad, This Isn't One Of Those...:.

Warning: profane language, possibly triggering language regarding child abuse being treated like a non-issue as well.

Normally, I like me some rational discourse, but today, I am angry. Seething, even. If you wanted someone who will take you by the hand and care about your itty-bitty feelings, go read Marocharim. I am not going to coddle idiots in this post. I will simply be the egalitarian I normally am and hate everything. This is not your regular well-reasoned, polite post.

And you know why not? Because saying it politely before has already fallen on deaf ears. I cannot be bothered to educate people who are shocked that I find child abuse offensive and are not only being Willie Revillame apologists, but child abuse apologists as well at this point. Gasp! Child abuse is bad? Who would have thought?!?

But then, how could I be surprised? We live in a society where rape seems to be half as much the fault of the victim as it is the perpetrator (How often do we ask what a murder victim was wearing?). We live in a society where people go "focus on the real issues instead," as if child abuse isn't an issue. We live in a society where people think that if everyone is having fun, then abuse didn't exist. We live in a society where people think that lousy parents giving their consent to their child performing like a macho dancer on national television makes a child performing like a macho dancer on national television okay. We live in a society where we're willing to look the other way for one man's sins just because he donates money to charity.

Well, screw you, because I don't care about your stupid rhetoric or your attempts to derail from the issue. The issue is pretty clear: Willie Revillame has been a smug, self-important douchebag for a long time already. It didn't matter if 71 people were killed for the sake of his brand of "saya at pag-asa," so long as he kept on bringing it. With each victory he scored, he grew bolder and bolder, to the point where he now believes that he is above petty things like the law and notions of decency and appropriateness.

And it's gotten pretty sad when a guy like me, who is far from a moral guardian, already feels compelled to call out someone and say, "duuuuude. That's not cool. At all." The line between acceptable and unacceptable can sometimes be so fine, but even though Willie Revillame and his ilk pushing their luck all these years has allowed for that line to be blurrier and blurrier, it should become pretty obvious when someone has outright crossed it.

Last Friday, in a 25-minute tirade that showed Willie Revillame was every bit as capable of judging the people whom he insists are judging him, all the while employing Ad Hominem attacks, Ad Misericordiam, red herrings, appealing to fear, appealing to some mysterious showbiz fraternity rule, appealing to a class divide, veiled homophobia, splitting hairs between child labor and child work, attacking a woman for being childless, asking at least two National Artist shoo-ins what they have done for this country (LOL, seriously?!?), persecution complex, using "entertainment" as a justification for his puerile means, lawsuit threats on everyone on Twitter who bashed him, assorted silencing tactics in aid of muddying the issue even further, and in the case of accusing ABS CBN and even PNoy himself, plain conspiracy theory nutjobbery.

Did I miss anything else? I wouldn't be surprised, to be honest, but that's a pretty extensive list of logical fallacies and silencing tactics I have observed Willie Revillame using for years upon years while his fans yay and cheer behind him and then boo and hiss those against him. If you wanted a good primer on logical fallacies and their non-bearing on arguments, feel free to read this post.

Apparently, in the minds of Willie Revillame's apologists, their hero can do no wrong. Oh, let's forget that nobody should be untouchable and beyond criticism. Let's assume that anyone who dares dislike their lord and savior Willie Revillame is merely jealous of him.

Jealous?!? Of what?!? Why would I be jealous of having the opportunity to alleviate poverty through the power and influence I yield all over this nation and fucking it up that same opportunity every single day I fall back to giving dole-outs instead? Why would I be jealous of being regarded as lecherous and being worshiped for the lie I have perpetuated about myself? Why would we be jealous of committing child abuse on national fucking television?!?

And don't you dare tell me to calm the fuck down or to lighten the fuck up! I know all too well how child abuse feels like, because I lived through it, first-hand! Try being force-fed your Magic: The Gathering cards or being sucker-punched in the gut or being sent to places you have no idea how you're going to get home from.

Hell, let's not even talk about physical abuse. Try being constantly berated for years that you're the black sheep of the family while you're consistently on top of class all because you're smarter than your pathetic excuse for a stepdad. Try being the subject of endless potshots at the dinner table when all you wanted was to enjoy a quite "family meal." Try having the Bible used and misused to cow you into thinking that all of this is just fine and dandy, and then being forcefully told to shut up because he's the authority in the "family" when you use the same Bible to disprove his backwards ideas.

If I could give up only one of these types of abuse, I'd have gladly taken twice as much physical abuse over the undeniable demolition job that jackass put on my sense of self-worth over years upon years of verbal and psychological abuse.

These are real issues to me because I lived through them, and I can only hope that no matter how snarky or smarmy I can get, if I were to have a kid, I would never subject them to any form of abuse, and make sure to prepare them for the eventual attempts at abuse that will come from without. I will make damned sure that when my child is home, that home is a safe place.

So go ahead, I dare you, you douchebag: sue me. Sue me for taking you to task for something I have personally gone through: a miserable nightmare for years that you just flippantly dismissed as a non-issue. Go ahead! Sue me! And tell me to lighten up, too! Tell me that my years of experience in an abusive household is nothing and I should just "get over it" and fucking move on. Tell me that there are "bigger issues" than child abuse, I dare you!

I know this comes as a surprise to you, dear Willie Revillame and dear Willie apologists, but not everyone complaining about Willing Willie do so dahil inggit lang sila kay Willie. Some people are angry because they actually have valid reasons to be angry about having an asshole make light of something that is by no means a trivial matter.

So really, Willie, good riddance. Go ahead and take your two-week vacation, then please do all of us a favor and decide to make it permanent. I don't need you coming back to tell me some more how I'm too uptight about a situation I went through myself and having you trigger me all over again.

Oh. Was I being inconsiderate about your feelings on being called out for being a child abuse apologist? Did I hurt your feelings because of how I said my piece just now? Good. Because you sure as Hades were being inconsiderate about my feelings when you made light of child abuse. Don't expect me to extend the same courtesy you couldn't be bothered to extend in the first place.

So if telling you that I don't find child abuse funny makes you want to sue me and send me to jail where I can finally ask Ms. Lea Salonga for an autograph, then lock me right up and throw away the key. I just wanna know if the jail cell has wifi.

Logical Fallacies 101 (Part 4 Of 6): Argumentum Ad Populum

.:Logical Fallacies 101 (Part 4 Of 6): Argumentum Ad Populum:.

So just because everyone is doing it, this makes it right?

Logical Fallacies 101 (Part 2 Of 6): Ignoratio Elenchi and Argument By Dismissal

.:Logical Fallacies 101 (Part 2 Of 6): Ignoratio Elenchi and Argument By Dismissall:.

So what?!?

On Gods With Feet Of Clay, And The Filipino Dream (Or,What I REALLY Wanted To Say About Manny And Willie.)

.:Gods With Feet Of Clay:.

The past couple of weeks has been an exercise in rationalization for a culture built upon deifying celebrity and elevating them far above and beyond the standards by which we expect of mere mortals such as ourselves.

Some of the issues seem petty when you look at it, really. A famous celebrity announces that she is leaving the very thing that has made her famous in the first place, and instead of having people wish her well, some of her fans actually feel betrayed, as if suddenly, what she wishes to do with her life no longer takes precedence over what her fans want her to do.

Couple that with the fact that she probably isn’t even leaving but probably setting up for something else, and you can see how the overreactions from certain people, practically calling her a traitor to a cause that doesn’t even seem to be a particularly earth-shattering cause to give up your hopes and dreams over in the first place, becomes rather silly. Maybe even pathetic.

The power of celebrity exists. There is no point in denying that. But just as we cannot allow them to be anything more than human by virtue of their celebrity, neither should they be anything less than human by virtue of their celebrity. They have their own lives to lead, their own choices to make, and if we truly support them or believe in them, we must realize that we have no right to demand from our celebrity to abandon their own wishes just to cater to our every whim.

And one guesses that’s exactly what is at work here: a very disheartening gap between the idol and the worshippers, a chasm that is ever-widened by how much slack we are willing to cut our personal heroes so long as they continue to entertain us and cater to our every whim. And how that gap is made even more insurmountable when the inevitable betrayal happens, our vicarious hopes and dreams shattered in the failure of our erstwhile beloved god, turning the altar we once worshipped upon into the pillar we wish to scourge them upon in the blink of an eye.

And yet, through it all, they will move on and not really give a damn about what we think, say, do, or feel. When we realize that we have lived through someone for so long that we’ve forgotten to live our own lives, what happens? What do we do with ourselves, then?

The Fists Of Fury

As I wrote in my article on Manny Pacquiao, there is no question that he is one of the greatest boxers of all time. He is, without a doubt, the best one of this decade, and he has been more than well-rewarded financially and socially on the back of his fifty-two hard-earned victories inside the boxing ring. Nobody can take that away from him.

Sports heroes tend to get a pass in a lot of things. It’s rather easy to see, and it was quite fortuitous I was reading Michael Leahy’s book while I was thinking about this. It put a lot of things into perspective for me and allowed me to step back and look at the bigger picture. In the sporting world, it doesn’t matter if you philander, gamble compulsively, get into fights, or heaven forbid, rape someone. So long as you persist in your winning ways, all is forgiven.

Is this right? Of course not. But you see, it’s understandable: what does a basketball fan care about what his idol does in his bedroom? That’s not a part of the game, and that’s irrelevant to how many points he can score in a game, or how many assists he can dish out.

What people are forgetting is that nobody was critiquing Manny Pacquiao, the boxer. They were critiquing Congressman Manny Pacquiao, the guy who was not doing his job when he really should have, by not properly casting his vote for or against the impeachment of the Ombudsman.

Being a boxing legend does not excuse him from being a lousy congressman. The ever-predictable Paclanders are too busy blaming @momblogger not only for the embarrassment caused by Pacquiao leaving Twitterlandia, but even for his choice of words. And then they had the nerve to say that he meant it in jest, so lighten up.

Lighten up? Really? Lighten up?!?

Weren’t you the same people who refused to lighten up when Alec Baldwin made an off-hand joke about Filipina mail-order brides? Weren’t you the same people who refused to lighten up when Teri Hatcher made a joke in a comedy show about Filipino med schools? Weren’t you the same people who refused to lighten up when Chip Tsao made a satirical article that was making deliberately inflammatory statements to expose the bullying tactics of mainland China? And now you’re telling people to lighten up? Really?

Look: you can’t dictate how other people should feel. If they took offense, they have every right to take offense. And as a Congressman and as someone who has been trying so hard to maintain a certain modicum of role-modelness, Manny should have known better than to make a flippant statement like that. You don’t get to dictate what should be or shouldn’t be offensive to people and then dismiss them by virtue of your own thick-skinnedness because you’d take any insult from your lord and savior Pacquiao as a validation rather than a slight.

Manny Pacquiao’s recent misadventures were not the fault of the people who called him out on Twitter. It was the fault of a man who chose to run for public office when clearly, he had more pressing priorities than the welfare of his own district.

There’s nothing wrong with being a boxing legend, but there’s something wrong with shirking on one’s responsibility and then expecting everyone to just understand. No, not everyone understands, nor are they required to. Unlike you, Mr. Pacquiao, we can’t just take a month or two off work if we feel like beating a Mexican up for $20M. Your deficiencies as a congressman are not beyond question, because how well you punch has nothing to do with how well you lead your constituency.

So to those Paclanders who can’t get this into their heads: all the people on Twitter ever did was to tell a man to do his job. The one he ran for public office for. I think it’s ridiculous that anyone could possibly obfuscate the issue just because he’s a boxing legend. If he didn’t want to do his job, he shouldn’t have applied for the job in the 2010 elections to begin with. The tone argument is beside the point, and does not erase the fact that Honorable Pacquiao is still not doing his job.

How many of us here can fully expect to be praised for not doing your job? I sure can’t.

Willieng Pawns

It was an issue I felt strongly about, albeit I recognized I was relatively powerless in comparison to the originator of the news to me, Aileen Apolo, or the one whom I passed the news onto, MomBlogger. When I saw Jan-Jan’s video, I was shocked at how callous everyone around him was. The kid was crying. He was frightened. And yet, despite all of that, Willie Revillame did not show any signs of easing up on the kid, and still made him do his schtick, which proved extremely disturbing, as the kid gyrated like “a macho dancer,” as Willie Revillame himself put it.

I have despised Willie’s shows for years already, although he isn’t the only one whose tacky and trashy programming I’ve despised. It’s ironic how much more heart a Jerry Springer ripoff like Amy Perez’s Face To Face has, compared to a show like Willing Willie, that’s supposed to be giving joy and hope to the Filipino masses. Fabucelles shares my sentiments, to say the least.

We’ve heard that line a million times before: nagpapasaya lang kami at nagbibigay ng pag-asa. But at what cost does this joy and hope come?

Ridiculously long snaking lines for hopefuls who wish to get into the TV studio for a remote shot at riches, some of them doing this routine for weeks: weeks that could have instead been spent actually looking for a productive job instead of hoping to get a crack at that money tree Willie has been bandying about?

People of all ages selling their dignity for a few thousand bucks, then once the well has run dry, they’d run right back in line to do it all over again?

A fatal stampede, resulting in the deaths of 78 people. So much for “saya at pag-asa” for 78 lives snuffed out due to poor planning and terrible logistics?

Are all of these sins placed solely upon the head of one Willie Revillame? Of course not. But he is the man fronting the show that has showcased this kind of exploitative behaviour more than any other show, not only as its main host, but as one of its top producers. He is a control freak who would lash out at a cameraman who is so much as out of place, as a perfectionist and a consummate workaholic. Nobody can take that away from the man.

In fact, let’s give credit where credit is due: he has probably given out more money through his sponsors than any three to five different local charitable institutions you can pick at random, combined, almost all of this money going to the poor, the downtrodden, and ultimately, the desperate.

Unfortunately, it’s precisely that desperation that has allowed Willie’s blinded fans to give him a pass on anything he has ever done. With each victory he scores atop his unimpeachable soapbox, Willie’s confidence has turned into outright smugness, knowing full well that he has more clout than anyone willing to call him out on the mockery he has made of the Filipino masses.

The ends do not justify the means. Otherwise, it would be okay to lie, cheat, and steal just to get money. Entertainment is never an excuse for crass behaviour and lewd sensationalism. Giving hope and helping others is never going to wash away the blood of the 78 lives snuffed all in the name of this hope and help. If you made your officemates laugh in the pantry all the time, will that save you from getting fired if you embezzled the company’s money? Can your good intentions undo the hurt you have caused with your thoughtless actions?

And yet again, people tell us to “lighten up, it’s just a TV show!” Really? Really?!? Just a TV show that has resulted in the deaths of 78 people (Let’s not play coy here: Willing Willie = Wowowee.)? Just a TV show that has made it seem like exploitation and child abuse are just normal things we should come to expect from Philippine television? Just a TV show where people sell their souls for a few thousand pesos, yet not really elevating their lives afterwards? Really? That’s it?!?

No, you douchebags! It’s not just a TV show. It’s a mirror of the kind of society we live in that is not only on the verge of tolerating the abuse of a child on national television, but even making it his fault that he got treated like that, because that’s what he wanted to do when he auditioned! Woooow!

Allow me to educate you for a moment here. When Willie said that it was Jan-Jan’s idea to dance like a macho dancer, Willie has resorted to Victim Blaming, a phenomenon where instead of placing the blame squarely on the offender, we instead point to the victim. If, for example, a woman gets raped, it’s not the rapist’s fault: it’s the woman’s fault, because she dresses too “sluttily”, or she led the rapist on. What kind of backwards thinking is that?!?

Jan-Jan is six years old. The people screening him were far older than that, and Willie’s what? Forty-something? These are people who should have known better. Instead, after seeing Jan-Jan dance the way he did, Willie asked him to do it again, and again, and again! Where’s the concern there? Or is this because it causes so much “joy” and “hope” to see a desperate kid dance like a macho dancer for a few thousand bucks? Ang saya-saya ko naman makita yan! I’m sorry, but I can’t get off of Schadenfreude from a six-year old kid.

And the parents? They’re okay with it? So Jan-Jan has lousy parents, who tolerate having a kid who can dance like a macho dancer for the entertainment of people. Does that suddenly just absolve Willie Revillame? Really? It does? Or is that less an absolution of Willie Revillame, but also an indictment of Jan-Jan’s parents, putting them in the same police line-up as Willie and the vultures backing this mockery of a show?

In all honesty, it’s sad that instead of a call for unity, we’ve had people saying those among us indignant now are hypocrites. Let’s ignore the fact that only now is social media finding the clout to get things done, compared to even just a year or two ago, when it was just next to ignored. Let’s ignore how many celebrities are now on Twitter, whereas they were nowhere to be found online just last year. Let’s ignore that this is a catalyst for action, and not just a knee-jerk reaction of hypocrisy. Let’s even ignore that there is a huge gap between fully consenting adults dancing sexily for a living and a six-year old dancing sexily for a one-time windfall.

Common sense has flown out the window. Iya Justimbaste is probably laughing now, pointing at the folly of the Filipinos who make up excuses for the imperfections of their gods like Pacquiao and Revillame.

Newsflash: they were never perfect. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you will realize that they should be held accountable for their shortcomings when it does worse than just affect themselves.

Our gods have feet of clay. It shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, and it shouldn’t be our fault that we are just pointing out the truth. The truth hurts. The sooner you can accept it, the sooner we can do something about it.

This was never about rich versus poor. Don’t let the Pacquiao’s, the Estrada’s, or the Revillame’s of the world fool you. These people are far richer than any of us so-called rich people, to begin with. It has always been a question of the willingness of the Filipino person to do the right thing and correct the wrong thing, no matter how inconvenient it might be.

Throw away everything and boil down to the essentials, and then ask yourself with all honesty: is it truly impossible to help people without resorting to sexy dancers, exploiting sob stories, and fatal stampedes? And if our answer is “no, it’s not impossible,” then why the Hades are we tolerating the status quo?

Think about it.