Month: April 2012

Disconnect

UP Diliman campus (Ederic Eder)
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In the 1960s the University of the Philippines’ being supposedly “godless” and its students’ being agnostics if not atheists was common lore among middle-class families thinking of where to send their children to college.

Among the reasons could have been UP’s being a secular institution rather than a religious one, and the claim, made through the media by adherents of “godly” education, alleging the infestation of the philosophy department of its then College of Liberal Arts with atheists, who were also accused of being communists.

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Part of the problem

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THE New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has once again ranked the Philippines third in its 2012 Impunity Index. The Index ranks countries all over the world on the basis of the level of impunity, measured as a ratio to population, of the killers of journalists and media workers in the previous year.

Occupying the number one place in the 2012 Index — i.e., it has the most number of journalists killed for which the perpetrators have not been punished — is Iraq. In second place is Somalia, followed by the Philippines at number three. Behind the Philippines in fourth place is Sri Lanka. In fifth place is Colombia, followed by Nepal in sixth, and Afghanistan in seventh.

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“Exceptional” indeed

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IF THE United States, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared this week in an address at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, is not provoking conflict with capitalist China, it has an odd way of showing it.

As the US spokesperson on global affairs — which from Afghanistan to Zanzibar the US thinks are ITS affairs whatever the local inhabitants may think — Clinton herself has repeatedly criticized China for censoring the Internet, suppressing criticism of the government and its policies, and imprisoning dissenters.

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