ENDLESS™ Legend 2 - Panopticon

Conspicuous Consumption

The Philippines was never an egalitarian society. Even before the Spanish arrived and doomed us all to their Christian hell, Philippine society was based on class. In time, nobles, freedmen, and slaves gave way to rich, not-so-rich, and poor. No matter the age, disparity will always exist.

The Philippines is hardly unique in this case. Disparity is the bane of all societies and in my opinion, managing inequality is the reason government exists. Ah, the "allocation of scant resources" - one of my favorite definitions of politics.

The smart people once tried to do away with  social classes altogether and it was a disaster. After the deaths of a few billions, mankind decided it would abide by a polite fiction instead. History was pronounced dead and from then on, people would simply believe that they were all equal. Any inequality was just a "work in progress" - a minor blip to be solved once we put the right systems in place and elect the right leaders. Eventually. Maybe. (Not really)

But in all seriousness, managing inequality should be the chief concern of any sane government interested in its own preservation. Inequality may be unsolvable, but the gap between the haves and have-nots should be kept as narrow as possible. If the gap is too wide, unrest and revolution follow. 

I don't think the Philippine government is doing well in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. The people are already taxed heavily and all that ayuda will eventually run out. 

If you can't solve a problem, all you can do is manage perceptions and make it look like the problem doesn't exist or isn't as bad as people think. Sadly, the government is failing to do even that. To be fair, it's hard to hide the problem of corruption when the capital gets flooded despite supposedly spending trillions in flood control projects. It's hard to hide inequality when the scions of the rich and powerful post selfies with luxury cars and handbags worth more than what the average Filipino makes in ten years.

This is what's funny to me. The government fears social media. Politicians are absolutely terrified by it. They're scared because they can't control it. What trends and what becomes viral is not in their control. That explains all the efforts to control it and to clamp down on vloggers and content creators in the guise of preventing misinformation. Yet, for all their fear of social media, these politicians and their larvae post all kinds of elitist nonsense and bullshit showing how rich and powerful they are. They can't help but play with fire and how can they resist? They crave attention and where else can you get it?

So what we have now is a growing name-and-shame campaign against the politicians and the wealthy. Their social media accounts are now targets for people's anger and scorn. Will anything come of this campaign? I don't know. Regardless, I am truly amazed at the lack of shame many of these spoiled assholes exhibit. In the good old days, flagrant displays of wealth would get you beaten and robbed if you were lucky or kidnapped if you were not. But I suppose since it's all online now, people feel free to show us their worst. Sadly, the technology to punch people through the computer monitor hasn't been invented yet.

All these displays of conspicuous consumption are dangerous in these times of public difficulty from the floods. Such displays during times of hardship are the kind that lead to unrest. Inequality was a serious matter regarded by serious people. The wiser rulers of the past knew this. There was a time when you donned the purple and a time when you donned the sackcloth. Perhaps it's time to bring back the old sumptuary laws, eh? No Chanel handbags and Gucci shit on Sundays or is even that too much to ask?

Butsekik - Yoyoy Villame

At Length

When I was in law school, I was taught to keep my answers brief and concise. When I did just that, I was told that my answers were too short and that I needed to "emphasize" more.

Story of my life: I'm told to do this and then do that. But I digress.

This wasn't new to me. As far back as high school, I was taught that sometimes you had to pad things out when writing an essay. It had nothing to do with the content of the material itself but with its appearance. You could give the most well reasoned and brilliant answer to a question as you possibly could but if it only filled half the page, it wasn't considered convincing. It had to look right. People feel mistrust and even anxiety when things seem too short or too lacking. Hence, there was always a need to add superfluous details and redundant statements. There was always this need to show that you were making the effort.

Effort and Money's Worth

A doctor once told me something interesting which I think is related. He said to me that sometimes, he gets patients who believe they have the worst illnesses imaginable but in reality have only minor ones that could be easily remedied. Hypochondriacs, they're called. He told me that even if the patient's illness would go away on its own or if simple changes in behavior would be sufficient treatment, he would always prescribe some harmless painkiller or vitamin so that the patient would get peace of mind and feel satisfied that they got their money's worth. It was a win for the patient and a win for big pharma. Everybody's happy.

I think back to my friend's anecdote when trying to explain people's aversion to short essays and laconic answers. Perhaps this aversion is because people feel they aren't getting their "money's worth". Money isn't necessarily involved, of course, but it's more of a feeling that the other isn't meeting you halfway or making an earnest effort to do the job asked of him. Now there's the rub. If the problem is one of appearance (the answer looks too short) , then what exactly is it that people want to see? 

People want things to be "worth it" and it is most unfortunate that the worth of a thing is equated with the effort that was made to produce it. Therefore, a five page essay is better and worth more than a two page essay. Worse still, effort itself is understood in terms of raw manpower or man-hours spent to produce it. A momentary stroke of genius is incomparable to marathon mediocrity. The teacher/boss wants to see you hunched over your desk and sweating. That's when he knows you're really working and earning the money's worth.  

Did your asshole classmate write five paragraphs? Well your dumb ass better write ten.

Awful Examples

When you think about it, this attitude is everywhere. There are many very weak criminal cases filed in court. Whether it's from a lack of evidence or a procedural flub, it's clear that these cases would never lead to a conviction and are a waste of time. These are cases where you wonder why the prosecutor even bothers at all. Yet they do.

I asked a friend of mine who's familiar with the prosecutorial service and the answer was depressing. There is this concept called "prosecutorial discretion". What it is is that prosecutors have to power to decide whether they should prosecute a crime based on their assessment on the likelihood of a conviction. In sane countries, prosecutors don't bother filing cases unless they're sure that their chance of securing a conviction is high. In the Philippines, prosecutors, I'm told, are loathe to exercise this discretion. They would rather file a bum case than do nothing since doing nothing means they're not doing their jobs. If the list of cases filed is too short, there's a need to pad it out to show they're making an effort.

The government wants its money's worth.

To the prosecutors, filing these cases is no skin off their nose. It's the courts that have to deal with the cases anyway  It's more important to be seen doing your job and making the effort. Did you know that whenever there's an automobile accident that results in a death, it's government policy to file a case against the other driver immediately regardless of the circumstances? The police also immediately detain the other driver too. It's important that the government is seen to be doing its job, that it's making an effort, and that you, dear citizens, are getting your tax money's worth.

Speaking of police, there have been instances where they just arrest people for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. This was a thing during Duterte's drug war where they would do "one time big time" operations and do mass arrests. If you happened to be near a drug den during their operation, they might just haul you in. 

I've always suspected that the police have a quota of arrests they have to make. It's a stupid thought but terrifyingly plausible. Who's to say how many crimes happen a month such that there would be a quota for arrests to make? Well, if the police aren't out there arresting people, they aren't doing their jobs, right? If the list of arrests is short, then they must be getting lazy. We need to pad out that list, no? Lengthen it a little to show you made the effort. 

The government wants its money's worth. 

The Mistake

I think where it all goes wrong is when we equate volume with substance. But in this modern, digitized, algorithm-based hellscape, nothing is real unless we have a number to measure it with. Hence, the obsession with word counts, actions taken, cases filed, arrests made, and other metrics. It's about the view counts, the likes, the dislikes, the comments, retweets, shares, etc. How will we know if there was an effort? How will we know if anything means anything unless there's a number that says it does?

Write more words. Make more content. It's not worth it if it isn't long enough. YouTube won't let you do mid-video advertisements if your video isn't at least eight minutes long. You need to make the effort. They need to get their money's worth.

So we have all this disdain and suspicion over things that don't seem big enough. Is it any wonder that AI came to be the next big thing in our time? What is AI nowadays but a means to pad things out with oppressive walls of garbled text and ugly uncanny images? 

Finally, there is meaning to our lives. After all, there's so much shit around us. We've padded things enough. We have our money's worth. 

The Empty

Another way of looking at it.

There's this superstition in some parts of the Philippines that empty rooms in one's house will come to be inhabited by something. It will be "natao-an". An entity will make its home in uninhabited rooms. It is the way of nature to make use of space for nature abhors a vacuum. 

It is my belief that people, Filipinos perhaps especially, have a fear of emptiness in both the physical and metaphysical sense. Most can't stand to be alone. Many can't stand the silence. That's why there's so much noise. So many words. So much effort. The vibrancy and commotion of life is a comfort. Life must be filled in every sense of the word. Anything to banish the void.

The more content the better.

Two men approached a philosopher and asked him, "Sir, what is the meaning of life?" The philosopher gave a simple reply, no more than a few words. One man frowned and asked, "That's all?" The other smiled and said, "That's all."

I think this is long enough.

Aphex Twin - Orphans

Impeachment 2025 Edition

It used to be that impeachment hearings were a big deal in this country. Now it's all quiet banal, isn't it? Especially since the impeachment hearing of Vice-President Sara Duterte appears to be bogged down by technical gobbledygook, the kind of legal minutia that people all too familiar with the workings of the courts can only groan at.

How did we get here? 

Way back in February, the House of Representatives sent the signed impeachment complaint to the Senate for hearing. The timing was awful. Not only was the complaint filed on the last day of the Senate's session, the midterm elections were coming up. One can only guess as to what the play here was. Did they hope to ram through the Vice-President's impeachment while they still had the numbers to do so? Did they have the numbers at all? Or was it meant to be a referendum on Duterte's political party? Perhaps the proponents of the impeachment thought that it would be a key issue that could draw voters to their side. Whatever the reason, it was clear that the Senate was going to sit on it until after the election, June at the latest.

The constitution mandates that as soon as the Senate receives the impeachment complaint, it must hold a hearing "forthwith". You don't need a legal scholar to tell you what the word means. Anybody can look up the meaning of the word under "f" in any dictionary. You know what also starts with "f"? Filipino time. Why do today what you can put off for tomorrow? Tsk, apiki na man, bai.

The impeachment of the Vice-President did, in fact, become an election issue. And the results of the election were interesting. The Duterte camp won slightly but nowhere near decisively. 

When the senators reconvened in June, they were very disappointed to find that the issue hadn't magically resolved itself.  Regardless, you would think that the Senate would be eager to hold the impeachment hearing anyway. Senators love to perform for their circus. They love to grandstand and they salivate for any opportunity to mug for the cameras. Yet, it became apparent that most of them were seized with a rare timidity. Why?

Politicians aren't stupid. Really. They're not stupid. They're smart in the way that matters in their particular field. One doesn't get into office without the acumen in navigating the uniquely awful political system in this country. To put it another way, Manny Pacquiao may have a room temperature IQ, but if you were to ask someone to teach you how to punch, who better than him? In our political system, you need a keen sense of knowing where the winds are blowing and strong survival instinct.

It's easy to guess why our senators don't want to go through with it. Survival instinct. The truth is that our senators love to bully people who are safe targets. Nobody cares if you browbeat the poor schmuck who's been suitably vilified by the administration and the media beforehand. They want safe targets. They want to perform only when there's a clear "go ahead" from the luxury boxes up top. In this particular case, there's no easy win to collect. Regardless of how you feel about the Vice-President, her party is still a force to reckon with -- a force enough to impose a cost if you go against them. Her daddy may be in jail and she and her siblings, collectively, may only be half as smart as daddy is but they're not beaten. Not yet. The recent election was proof of it.

Unable to muster the will to decide the issue, our senators decided that, instead of the usual ensemble performance, they were going to pull off a magic trick instead. In an unprecedented move, the Senate convened as an impeachment court, with red velvet robes and all, and forthwith decided to remand the matter back to the House of Representatives. Unhappy with the political football they were given, they decided to punt it back. Most found the ordeal anticlimactic and infuriating. I thought it was wonderful and hilarious.

We should have seen it coming. The moment they appointed the Senate President as the presiding officer instead of the Chief Justice, it was obvious they were about to do something amazing. No Chief Justice could have stomached the stunt they pulled.

Now the arguments. Does the Senate have the power to remand the impeachment complaint back to the House? Arguments can be made either way since the issue is so novel. Once the Senate convenes as a court, who's to say what it can and cannot do? On the other hand, the constitution mandates them to hear the complaint, not to issue interlocutory orders and other legal devices.

There will be arguments. There will be more arguments and still more. But more importantly, there will be no resolution. I think the plan is to procrastinate until June 30, when the new senators will assume their posts. What a relief it must feel for those outgoing.

When you're dealt a bad hand and you're unprepared or unwilling to stake out a position, there's no greater dopamine hit than a perfectly executed dilatory tactic. Who says these senators aren't good lawyers? 

Yoni Madar: Drum Solo Africa 13 Various Drums