“What a fool believes, he sees”
My Strategic Management professor was good at what he did. He has seen it all. Putting the finishing touches on MBA students in the classroom before they face their grilling in front of three professors. Part of this prep includes grilling students like they would in their big test At least once in your life when faced with a high pressure grilling and no logical, truthful answer comes to mind , I am sure you resorted to balderdash. It was at this point my professor replied with with the phrase “bola lang yan!”.
A phrase used to call out people bluffing in lieu of facts.
What got me amused enough to write this was something I heard in a sermon last night. It was said by a Jesuit. A cross section of the Ateneo community are so proud of the Jesuits, it is as if they are the only order that is infallable. The statement in the homily that caught my ire was “Even CNN is proud of the Filipino” . “ Stop right there !” as Ellen Foley sang in Meatloaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light. CNN is in the business of giving news reports and not in the business of dishing out pride. Yes there were some deserved words of admiration in the face of despair. That is very different from the phrase “CNN is proud”. That is one reporter relaying the difficult situation that people on the ground worked their way through. it does not excuse that counterfeit meme being circulated and worse being believed.
Resilence has the word silence in it. Something online pinoys know very little about.
For me the notion of the Filipino being waterproof is just bunk. The nebulous casualty report may beg to differ with the waterproof adjective. Some Filipinos during these trying times like to really believe they alone in the world have a monopoly on Mother Nature’s wrath. No other nation and no other country else has to live through it. I am telling you that others also do. You can Google it.
You may take my stance as negative since I hurt your sensitives. I hate it when people act like idiots out of a false sense of pinoy pride. The sense is false and the facts are false. This is what most people saw:
Notice there is no name of the person or the news program. Just because some KSP bothered to make it look convincing does not make it fact.
So that is what they decided to spread and even burn in their brain. In reality this is what really happened. CNN never had anybody say the adjectives in that meme. CNN as a group was not proud. Somebody who I assumed was pinoy decided to self compliment his own race on the CNN message board. Attributing his message on the board is akin to equating a Ricky Carandang dispatched troll’s comment on GRP as a comment by Get Real Philippines. A specific author and date should also be quoted.
This is just a message on the CNN board. That is like attributing a Malacanang troll’s comment on GRP as something said by GRP.
Attributing feedback on CNN as CNN”s actual comment makes as much as sense as trusting Kris Aquino to be totally objective about the 2010 election for President. Wait, that did happen? Sorry.
How can she be credible? What else is she going to say? Are we that dumb?
I have nothing really against Ateneans, my dad was one. Just like any school though sometimes the zealots need to be tamed just a little bit. Even Jack Ryan of Tom Clancy fame was a Jesuit apologist. The thing is Jesuits are known for being learned and thorough. This particular priest on the mass I attended November 30 2013 on that particular topic was not. Just caught up in the shallow euphoria of pinoy pride. I thought Pride was one of the seven deadly sins.
With an infinite number of facts at your fingertips, why do pinoys enjoy spreading bola so much?
A little bit of research would shown you what I am showing you now. I have made this point before that we have all the information we can get our hands on as long as we have wifi yet pinoys spread false pinoy pride stories like cholera. Pinoys have nothing better to do with their time and what little brains they do use.
Give it a few days and the story will morph into “He died saving the Philippines”.
Today’s undisputed story is the sudden death of Paul Walker. I love how timelines and this blog entry make it sound like he was risking his neck for the Philippines. I am not taking anyway anything from the loss of a human life but sounds like Mr.Walker lost his due more to the recklessness of the driver behind the wheel of a fast car than the Filipino tragedy we know as Yolanda. According to TMZ “ was in Santa Clarita for a car show to support the Philippines typhoon relief effort — and several of his friends were at the event … and the accident happened very near to the event.” I read in the same blog , the words “test spin”. Time will tell if that was really the case because tests with cars usually involve stunt drivers, crash test dummies and controlled conditions. I hope these guys are not associating test spin with test drive which is different. Dying in an accident in the vicinity of a fund raiser does not equate dying because of or for the fund raiser. If you want a much better example of somebody who lost his life in the service of a nation that needed help from a natural disaster then look up the death of baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente.
Other examples of pinoys spreading fiction all to feed the KSP beast within:
A fabrication that many pinoys spread as fact.
a) LeBron James holding up the Its More Fun in the Philippines sign- refer to this GRP blog.
Sign looks questionable, there is no video or audio to validate yet this hoax has lived among gullible pinoys for six years.
b) David Letterman allegedly makes Pinoys subject of Top 10 list
The title of the alleged list : “Top 10 Reasons Why There Couldn’t Be a Filipino-American US President” That is the only video available. Spliced together pictures of Dave and the list itself is animated with a fiddle playing. Since when was the Top 10 list like that? The actual list does not show up on anything officially Dave. There is no recording of Letterman saying it , no video or no audio nothing. Yet pinoys are so eager to believe it and so eager to vouch for its authenticity. Well, they believed Noynoy Aquino was their political savior so can you blame them? The list may be funny but that is the point. It is funny for pinoys and pinoys only. All those things mentioned in that list are too pinoycentric for middle America. I saw the fake Letterman claim this week and check out how long it has been making the rounds. 2007 in the Snopes discussion board. From my personal observation the one group in any community abroad who may be an expert on Filipino culture and will stand a stand at getting the jokes in this bogus top 10 will be the Catholic priests.
Apple did not make a lot of money in the last twenty years by giving premium products away.
c) Iphone, Ipad, Galaxy Unsealed Giveaway
The claim that if you like a Facebook post you will get a free expensive gadget that has suddenly become worthless because it is unsealed. If you believe that, there might be an opening in the Liberal Party with your name on it. The Liberal Party can get a Wharton graduate and suck all the grey matter out of him. If for some reason you are slightly smarter than Liberal Party standards then there is room for in Malacanang Communications Group. The elite get assigned to troll Get Real Philippines.
You know why he used this strategy?: 1) that is all he can do. 2) it worked.
As usual, many pinoys love the idea of something for nothing. Which is exactly their rationale for voting in Noynoy Aquino as president. The guy did nothing, we can’t tell you what he did EVER but he will make the BEST president. He is good! I can’t name one thing that proves he is good but he is good.
You have to ask yourself if the abundance of Noynoy memes are inspired by his genius and deft handling of his role as President?
Filipinos have a penchant for generating, believing and circulating bola. They also think they have some divine right to suffer and endure unique among other nationalities. Anything I wrote here always goes back to my central premise that KSP is the root of all evil. I have no idea why pinoys still have to resort to bola to prop up their sense of worth? These cyber myths live on and on despite the accessibility of a seldom used tool called Google. How can we progress when much of our interaction is based on making bola, absorbing bola or distributing bola? Get Real Philippines! Personally it all goes back to that search for pansin ( attention). For the pinoy, nothing will get in the way. Not research, not Google, not logic, not dignity, nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment