By Reyshimar Arguelles On Sunday, the country was caught off-guard when Facebook users found one or more accounts bearing their names. These duplicate accounts lacked profile pictures, friends lists, and content, indicating that they were created only recently. At first, students and alumni of the University of the Philippines reported instances of dummy accounts. Later,
June 9, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles A great man in a wheelchair once said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” To make this digestible for the common joe, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address tells us that that fear is bad and being smart enough to avoid it is good. Being afraid makes
June 4, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles Ever since it came into existence, the United States has been portraying itself as a beacon of democracy and fairness, a utopia where power rests in the common people and not in an arrogant monarch whose head could be easily chopped off. But after Manifest Destiny, the annexation of Hawaii, Vietnam, Guantanamo
June 3, 2020
iddle By Reyshimar Arguelles In the aftermath of supertyphoon Yolanda in 2013, the public demanded from the Aquino administration an accounting of the money that went towards relief and recovery programs. In 2017, the Marawi siege also initiated calls for transparency over the Duterte administration’s plan to rehabilitate the city. And now, we have the
May 28, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles Hong Kong has met fresh tensions recently when thousands of protesters took to the streets to oppose a new security law proposed by the People’s Republic of China. The measure is everything you would expect coming out from the depths of Hades. The measure — which is said to be rolled out
May 26, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles Is it just me or are governments so essentially corrupt that they can get away with just about anything? Then again, who wouldn’t get blinded by the idea of handling absolute power and doing the most idiotic things disguised as public service? Perhaps the best thing that has happened to us during
May 21, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles With the country deciding to ease up its CoViD-19 measures, people seem eager to return to the way things were before the pandemic happened. There is talk about travel goals, business plans, and everything else that could have been accomplished had our friendly Red neighbor across the pond acted responsibly. To many
May 19, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles This week, a public school teacher was arrested by the National Bureau of Investigation for tweeting a P50-million bounty on the President’s head. He had deleted the tweet before authorities collared him, but screenshots of it were distributed online. Social media users called it crass, inappropriate, and a quicker way of throwing
May 14, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles The temporary closure of ABS-CBN courtesy of the “decent” people of the National Telecommunications Commission has opened up discussions on press freedom. Actors, news anchors, and everyone else chiming in with the issue are making the same old pronouncements about protecting free speech — as though free speech hasn’t been under attack
May 12, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles What is there to say when social media is flooded with legal analyses and people trying to outdo each other in intellectual contests. If we were in the 1930s, everyone would be in cafés and bars discussing society’s gradual descent into authoritarian madness. Even so, we would not be doing that in
May 7, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles The rationale of universal healthcare is not that difficult to understand. The term “universal” describes the need to make quality healthcare accessible to all, especially those who are hard up. But how is better accessibility attained? For the World Health Organization, such a system ensures “people have access to needed health services
May 5, 2020
By Reyshimar Arguelles It has been weeks since the world was put into lockdown. Now that hard-hit countries like Italy, Spain and France have decided to start the gradual yet agonizing journey towards what many have called the “new normal”, people now think that the days of CoViD-19 are numbered. There have been widespread recoveries
April 30, 2020