One would understand Yellowtards — even intelligent ones — getting behind “exposed” blogger Jover Laurio. She’s got an impressive list of connections to a who’s-who of Liberal Party (LP) honchos which, for people who are not much into thinking things through, is enough validation of her “credibility” as an “influencer”. Even people one would normally regard as “smart” are predisposed to lemming-like behaviour and succumb to that mentality.
Back in May 2016, we saw a precedent to this bizarre Filipino worship of “saintly” but dumb people. In my article “The mystery of why otherwise intelligent people support Leni Robredo” I observed how “academic intelligence does not seem to be a strong contributing factor to the soundness of one’s political choices and positions”.
The mystery of intelligent people latching onto the latest “prayerful” Yellowtard “martyr” packaged as the most recent “victim” of “oppression” continues as is evident today in the way the usual suspects — Jesuit-educated “men for others” of the tony university up that hill, the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) — have put their weight behind Laurio’s plight going as far asinviting her to be an honoured guest at a journalism forum last week. The same Ateneans who swooned over the prayerful “vice president” now lap up the trending Yellowtard sound bytes that have made Laurio the latest postergirl of heroic “fighters of oppression”.
As I wrote back in May…
My theory is that the higher up you go in society, and the further into the circle of “polite” society you immerse yourself in, the less you talk about politics. Thus in the spirit of keeping things “polite”, some of us actually do ourselves and our immediate circles a whole heap of disservice by avoiding real conversations — often ones that necessarily involve impolite talk.This is a plausible explanation to the mystery of why chi-chi Atenistas and a whole bevy of high-horsed “data scientists” and “astrophysicists” support Leni Robredo. Robredo is the polite choice. For that matter, the Liberal Party, as they’ve in the last couple of years branded themselves around the now-discredited Yellow political persona that characterised the last 30 years, is regarded as the only polite political choice. As such, it is the easy choice for those who are too lazy to think.
Replace “Leni Robredo” with “Jover Laurio” in the excerpt above and the theory still holds. Indeed, whilst there is abundant rah-rah social media noise surrounding Laurio’s “courage” to write anonymously for Pinoy Ako Blog (PAB) and lots of words of encouragement to ensure she “keeps going”, there is very little in the way of an actual sober evaluation of the nature of themessages and the soundness of the ideas she articulates (if you can even call it that) in her blog posts on PAB.
What exactly are the ideas that Laurio conveys via the work she publishes on PAB?
Evidently, subjecting PAB to critical evaluation is simply too hard for most garden-variety Yellowtards. Thinking, after all, is not a strong tradition in Philippine political discourse. But it requires quite a stretch of the imagination to find it in me to excuse the intellectual laziness in the way these “men for others” of the Ateneo let pass the glaringly-evident intellectual bankruptcy of Laurio’s work in PAB and allow it to disgrace the brand of their alma mater. An even more confronting question we could ask of Ateneans is whether it is really just intellectual laziness at work here, or is it more of intellectual dishonesty?
Rather than be the true thought leaders they are expected to be, Ateneans have become mere followers. They have, yet again, collectively assumed a comfy prayerful position before the latest golden calf put up by the Yellowtards before them. There is no courage in conforming to the dictates of an oligarchy that had created the very status quo that had been so dysfunctional as to have angered enough Filipinos to elect Rodrigo Duterte their president. When one has become intellectually-dishonest as a matter of habit, it becomes difficult to grasp the irony in that.
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