State-Society-Culture Dynamics

Because it HAS TO maintain its commitment to scientific surveying, inlcuding probability sampling, I consider the output of Social Weather Stations (SWS) as RELIABLE. This regardless of the political leanings of its head, Dr. Mahar Mangahas, who is known as critical of the administration. Both of these factors, to me at least, make its output also reliable. I highlight two important findings of SWS which might make light of the current dark mood prevailing on our (oh so) political minds. Admittedly, it makes us giddy expressing our peeves and (oh so) emotional observations on our current politics. A little memeing (is there such a word?) there, a little trolling here, a few well considered posts and commentary make our day. I know of some friends who log in to Facebook the first thing after relieving themselves in the urinal. And you have heard of course of that poor cabinet member who Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) claims almost did not sleep and kept to Facebook before he croak...

Go ahead. Scream “Superstition!” at the top of your lungs. I think that spectacular celestial events such as the total solar eclipse tomorrow (Asians will be in the night side of the planet when it happens, and therefore will not be seeing it) are reminders to us. “Calls for attention”, if you will. “Signals”, “beeps”, “alarms”...”warnings”? Celestial semioticists (astrologers for you who prefer it straight) don’t call them “signs” for nothing. Before anything else, here are the facts. The exact moment of the eclipse will be at 6:31 pm, Universal Planetary Time (Greenwich, UK), and Americans (the US) will see or feel the darkening of the sun as early as 10 am. The geographic details have been worked out and is being discussed all over the Net. I’ll try to download and post here the graphs and the GIF (copyrighted Sinclair 2000) of the path of the eclicpse by Strickling (posted at Wikipedia). Back to the “signs” now. On a purely observational level, they are noti...

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balangiga_massacre. Retrieved August 3, 2017 You think President Duterte is a ruthless killer of drug users, and a political dictator. Well, we can continue to debate this, and I think that for some time in the future, we will. But one very good thing for this President is that he is a Filipino, a nationalist who unlike the Filipino of Bulosan and Ileto, is a remembering Filipino. His SONA of 2017 included a request for the Americans to return the bells of Balanginga, attended by a retelling of the American massacre of Filipinos in Balangiga, Samar, an initiative that left me momentarily stunned at the deep sentiments of this man who is proving to be a maverick President. When this President remembers, he remembers “historically”, in the sense of a sociological fact, not merely “personally”, much in the sense of C. Wright Mills concept of social issue as against mere personal trouble. It is in this light that I...

Let's hear it from the LSE: Not punishment or revenge, but stone-cold sober calculations: the EU will drive a hard bargain Twitter Facebook LinkedIn WhatsApp Email Share Having triggered Article 50 of the EU Treaty, the British government officially kicked off the Brexit negotiations on March 29. Until today, both parties pretended not to give in and instead promised a tough negotiation strategy. Game theory offers one way of testing the reliability of these claims and allowing the negotiations to be seen for what they are: a strategically driven, tactical game in which each side attempts to realise their own interests, write  Berthold Busch, Matthias Diermeier, Henry Goecke, and Michael Hüther. From the perspective of game theory, the search for the optimal negotiation strategy for the UK’s exit from the EU can be stylised as follows: both players, the UK and the EU, simultaneously choose between only two negotiation strategies – one compromising and the ot...