#fuck you marcoses

[clooverhoover]

I am absolutely fucking disgusted with the Philippine governments support for Israel and genocide. We Filipinos stand with the Palestinians. Never again means never again for everyone.

[not-so-rosyyy]

this 2024 US elections is giving me severe war flashbacks to the Philippines 2022 presidential elections where we all thought for sure a woman who was a public servant and human rights lawyer would win because of the staggering amount of people supporting her both online and offline in rallies and how her candidacy inspired grassroots door-to-door campaigns funded by and led by thousands of passionate citizens all over the country (literally unprecedented for any candidate ever)....only for her to be defeated by that dumb son of the dictator who murdered dissenters and looted our nation five decades ago.

but anyways! i'm really hoping for the best and rooting for Kamala to win. because as someone living in a country whose socio-political and economic conditions are tied closely to the US, i don't even wanna think about the ramifications of Trump 2.0 on my people and the rest of the world.

[sforzesco]

lmao this is a re draw of a sketch I posted back in december

regarding the antony-cassius dynamic here

Cassius and Brutus: The Memory of the Liberators, Elizabeth Rawson

anyway, @ Cassius: Antony's not obsessed with you because of Caesar and tyranny, he's trying to (redacted) you

society6 | ko-fi | twitter (pillowfort, cohost) | deviantart

[thewhizzyhead]

brb gonna speed run my way into launching my musical theatre career through making a musical about Philippine student activism especially in the context of the marcos administrations (yes both the 1970's and the 2020's periods) just to fucking spite the fucking "here lies love" musical and all the fucking marcos propaganda in the world tanayfuckingdana

[villainesses]

FUCK THE MARCOSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[motziedapul]

I'll stop making overt political statements on the Hi Nay Podcast when my life and the world I live in stops being a dystopic fascist nightmare but in the meantime fuck the Marcoses and Free Palestine, Israel has been committing genocide for months and fuck you we're not pretending it isn't happening. Israeli and American arms and military tactics are actively being used against Filipinos and my motherland is a hypercapitalist militarized fascist state being picked apart by the active imperialism of the USA and China.

It's all the same struggle, always has been.

[appleflavoredkitkats]

i watched a white man review here lies love and the way he summarizes the plot makes me hate the musical. when he describes imelda as a politician who started out as a "poor girl" who grew up into the rich political villain she is, it's wrong. when he says that governments like hers have been as evil as it was from before her and after, it's wrong. the way ppl argue for hll saying they become informed and when they summarize it they're Not lol

making the marcoses the topic of here lies love is not a bad idea, dont get me wrong. i think a lot of haters hate it for the wrong things, so i'm gonna explain why i hate it: since hll is described to be a lot of filipino theatre fans and celebrities' first exposure to filipino culture and history, it is dangerous because the nuances and true horrors of the marcos regime cannot be fully portrayed. due to its nature of being a narrative + it being presented in mostly imelda's perspective already removes the opportunity to showcase how Bad it was for the people in martial law, because she was not physically present within places where people were murdered, assaulted, ethnically cleansed, etc.

people tell me that this musical is there first exposure to filipino history, but they will "research more after because of it". what a pity to make a simplification of filipino to be your first exposure. you acknowledge you're going to read more resources after, but why didn't you do that first? i've already complained about many historical portrayals of this musical.

i admit i need to watch the musical through a bootleg or something just so i can get a full review, but from the songs i've listened to and the way they advertise it, i don't think they still get the political nuance of the marcoses LOL. i could get more into it, but the reason the marcoses are a spectacle is for how much Bad Political Shit (eg., new line of political dynasties, the INTENSE crony capitalism, indigenous genocides etc.) they've initiated, and hmm so far no person i've seen who's watched this musical Know Any Of That. why do they need to know that if this is a "historical" musical? well because it ain't history for me at least. it's happening, and thorough explanations of the political sphere is Needed to explain how bad it was and how bad it still is. and even if i personally didn't watch the musical yet, i've read native filipino reviewers review the show and they express the same concern of diminishing the political weight of the marcoses.

maybe in an older historical musical, you can make your little fanfiction storylines where everything's happy and lovely, but i guess, for me personally, if you portray the most awful politician i know who is still Alive and Influential, you have the responsibility of not bastardizing viewers' perception of her reign.

remember when i said the musical is factually incorrect for portraying imelda as poor? yeah well that small "mistake" is actually a big propaganda tool used by imelda to garner sympathy. btw, followers of imelda are so fucking cult-like to the point that my cousin says her relatives were kicked out of ilocos (the place marcos is from) for supporting leni. if the musical is able to make this mistake, then i'm sorry if i have to assume the musical gets other shit wrong.

i am so tired of americans try to explain to me why this musical is so good. like thanks, it's closing now so bye sister

[themagical1sa]

I remember hearing about the Filipino protests for ceasefire within Palestine.

I remember being glad to see the protests being done in solidarity with our fellow oppressed — having had a history of being colonized and all — and then, my father begrudgingly says, "Ang dami-dami na nga nating problema dito, nakikisawsaw pa kayo sa gulo!" [Tagalog: we already have so many problems here, but there you are joining in their chaos!]

I was immediately pissed — was it so bad to show our solidarity with Palestinians in our own land? — but, even in the moment, deep down, I knew my father's response was some form of valid. We can barely live in our own country still neck-deep in poverty as the corrupt manipulate their way into plundering the masses. I mean, if the 2022 national presidential elections was any indication, we were all fucking cheated systemically! We're living in a damned nightmare woven for decades upon decades by the rich and powerful, like the Marcoses.

A Facebook user once posted in a political discussion forum that we're living in a failed democracy. When I saw and stared at the post, I realized... yeah, we really fucking are. Putangina.

My father's comment about Filipino protests for Palestine implies a lot of valid points — we're in our own kind of hell, and we really should be striving to better ourselves first before we call help for other people... and yet, at the same time, I can't deny that, at least, in my head, heart, and soul, I'm fiercely chanting From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

I hope that one day we'll all see the day when we're all finally free — free from oppression. Free from corruption. Free to live and just be.

I hope that one day, we'll all be free.

[nablah]

again. dictator musical fans. maybe if the marcos era interests you so much, read up on Lualhati Bautista, Primitivo Mijares, Pete Lacaba, among others?? want a white guy since thats all you can listen to anyway? WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT who was one of the few white anthropologists (or only?) to ever fully integrate in an indigenous Filipino community and yet was jailed for """communist sympathies"""

fuck you! ask me! wooOoooo a living filipino woOoOOoo granted its not as dramatic but my grandfather wasnt even a filipino citizen when they jailed him for BOWLING.

try to humanize the marcoses after you've actually fulfilled your interest in the marcos era.

[queerava]

w // politics vent

[kcterincs]

how the fuck did people sleep last night

[char-lotteral]

It still baffles me to know that despite how conservative and religious the Philippines is, a huge majority of the population still chose to support a man who is known for his crimes, his impunity and the countless bloodshed that he has caused during his dictatorship

[apopcornkernel]

to all the people telling bbm supporters to "just live with what you've done" — shut the FUCK up. many bbm supporters were manipulated by the marcoses' vast, decades-in-the-making disinformation campaign. a lot of them don't know what really happened during martial law because our country's education system failed them. THEY DON'T KNOW BETTER. SHUT THE FUCK UP AND HAVE SOME EMPATHY. you should be blaming the marcoses, the dutertes, all the corrupt officials, but NOT your fellow filipinos*, who are suffering alongside you, and will CONTINUE to suffer under a bbmsara administration. shut the fuck up. all blame to the marcoses.

* this does not include people who know what the marcoses have done and will do, & still voted for them. fuck them

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A(nother) massive Swiss banking leak

Look, there’s been another massive banking leak, this one from Credit Suisse, showing complicity in laundering money for the world’s greatest monsters: human traffickers, despots, criminals. They’re calling it Suisse Secrets.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/20/credit-suisse-secrets-leak-unmasks-criminals-fraudsters-corrupt-politicians

They had to call it that, because Swiss Leaks was already taken, for the 2015 UBS leaks that revealed UBS’s complicity in the same fucking thing.

As Jeffrey Neiman — lawyer for the Credit Suisse whistleblowers — told the Guardian, “How many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?” I’d add, given that this rot extends beyond Credit Suisse to UBS and undoubtably further, “How many rogue bankes do you need to have before you start having a rogue banking system?”

The friend who emailed me about this wrote, “After so many of these, I am accepting that these leaks don’t matter, and that those in power don’t actually want to fix the system. Sunlight isn’t doing any disinfecting at all.”

He’s not wrong, but that’s not the whole story.

The problem isn’t the transparency, it’s the inaction.

They money laundering revealed in Suisse Secrets abetted the worst criminals on Earth, like Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who looted $5b from his people and laundered hundreds of millions (or more) through Credit Suisse. Abacha is in good company — CS also laundered for the Marcoses and their bagman, and other looters from Syria to Madagascar.

Also mafiosi, killers, human traffickers, embezzlers, fraudsters, corrupters and worse. The facts laid out in the Guardian story (and stories in partner outlets like Süddeutsche Zeitung), there is no question that Credit Suisse knew whose money they were handling, and knew just how dirty it was.

What’s more, the reporting makes it abundantly clear that Swiss banking secrecy is designed and maintained for the express purpose of laundering this blood money. Despite Swiss officials’ claims to have ended banking secrecy, the country is still a rogue state, a criminal haven. It’s not only failing to end money-laundering, it’s encouraging it: Switzerland is broadening its banking secrecy law to allow it to punish whistleblowers who reveal the nation’s role in global finance crime:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-banking-secrecy-exclusive/exclusive-swiss-prosecutors-seek-widening-of-secrecy-law-to-bankers-abroad-idUSKBN1D01CI

To my friend’s point, we kind of knew all of this. The leaks — SwissLeaks, LuxLeaks, IRS Files, Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers — keep revealing that the marble facades of the world’s greatest banks are holding back oceans of blood and misery:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#transparency

We haven’t done anything about it.

Yet.

500 new billionaires were minted in 2020. Then it got worse. There’s a new billionaire being minted every 17 hours:

https://www.dw.com/en/forbes-a-new-billionaire-every-17-hours/a-57135443

Behind every great fortune is a great crime:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/09/fortune-crime/

It’s a nightmare and it shows no sign of ending.

Knowing about it isn’t enough. But knowing about it is a start.

The knowledge we’ve gained from the reporting on these leaks — reporting at great expense and risk, which has resulted in a journalist’s assassination — isn’t the reason for the inaction.

Indeed, if the action ever comes, it will be because of this reporting. You can’t solve a problem until you know it exists.

A truism of the free/open source world is that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” That is, with enough scrutiny, a solution will emerge.

That idea came under enormous strain with 2014’s Heartbleed Bug. It turned out that a widely used free/open piece of web-server infrastructure had a longstanding bug, just hanging out there in plain sight. The code was there for anyone to scrutinize, but no one had looked hard enough to find it.

https://heartbleed.com/

That was a wakeup call for the community. It wasn’t enough to simply publish sourcecode for important infrastructure. We had to build and fund systems that would audit that code. Having the code where anyone could see it would make their job easier, but the job wouldn’t do itself.

We got lucky with Heartbleed. The good guys found it before it was ever exploited in the wild, and they coordinated a massive, global upgrade that patched the majority of webservers before the bug was disclosed.

But we didn’t get so lucky the next time. When the Log4j bug was discovered last November, it was already too late. We’d hit snooze on Heartbleed’s wakeup call and holy shit had we ever overslept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell

Competent, serious people are worried about the vulnerabilities presented by the software that underpins our digital world, but none of them argue that the problem with that software is that it’s available for inspection. The problem is that we don’t inspect or act on it in a systemic, coordinated way. We don’t take it seriously.

We should take it seriously.

The problem isn’t that we know about these deep and worrying flaws. The problem is that we’re not doing anything about them. Knowing these specifics — whether it’s Log4j or SuisseSecrets — is the necessary, but insufficient condition for change.

These leaks are claim-checks on the people who sold us out. Someday, we’ll collect on them.

Image: Ready.gov (modified) https://www.ready.gov/floods

[gabrielle-was-here]

This is how the Marcoses and Dutertes manipulated Filipinos into forgetting our own history and whitewashed their crimes and human rights injustices.

Citizens like the caller -- Josh, who sold us out for 2.5 Million Pesos a year.

Fuck you, Josh. Hindi ka Pilipino. Wag mong sabihin a job's a job kung ang trabaho mo ay nakatulong sa paglimot ng libo-libong namatay at tinorture sa rehimen ng mga Marcos at Duterte.

[appleflavoredkitkats]

so far, all the support i've been seeing for here lies love on tiktok, twitter, and reddit have ALL been written by non-native filipinos, which infuriates me.

all these posts are the same, saying that the show does not glamorize imelda and that they and their families walk out of the theater disliking her. sure, okay, that's good! but not everything is ABOUT you, fucking twats. a lot of native filipinos (and a good few informed fil-ams!) have multiple problems with this musical that specifically affect us, and nobody is fucking listening. while this does not comprise all filipino americans, i am very fucking pissed that a good portion of fil-ams have been the ones most vocal about supporting this musical, using their filipino title as a means of merit.

but i've got news for you bud: the problems with here lies love more directly affect native filipinos. i'm not saying that fil-ams cannot be affected by issues in the philippines, but i'm saying that. the priority of opinion SHOULD be given to NATIVE FILIPINOS. we are the ones under the marcos regime, we are the ones living in the damages he placed in our systems. when WE tell YOU that this musical can be dangerous propaganda, unintentional or not, then LISTEN TO US.

what americans understand of disinformation campaigns is NOTHING compared to the philippines. i have learned in my history class last semester that other countries are using us as their standard for disinformation. my country is a cesspool of gatekept education, internet manipulation, and fraud. when i say that it is dangerous for a musical like this to exist, i mean it. people can use it here to promote the marcoses (who are still in power!). it is DANGEROUS.