GetRealPhilippines.COM

The latest Pulse Asia popularity survey

17 ноября 2009 г. в 1:04

According to the latest Pulse Asia survey relevant to the coming 2010 presidential elections in the Philippines, "presidentiable" Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III along with his sidekick "Mar" Roxas are tops in the race. Their report Filipinos' Preferences for the May 2010 Elections from the October 2009 Ulat ng Bayan national survey concluded that

PRESIDENTIAL RACE: Senator Benigno C. Aquino III leads all surveyed presidential hopefuls/presidentiables by a big margin. The reason most-often cited in expressing a voting preference for a possible presidential candidate is the latter's clean public record ("malinis") or, alternatively, not being corrupt "hindi kurakot"

As expected, the report made waves all over the Philippine blogosphere. At Jolog Central, the eminent Ellen Tordesillas regresses back to her facts only reporter roots and hardly adds any editorial value to the report she posts. She does provide a PDF document of the report downloadable from her own server which turns out to be no more than a generic media release loaded with statistical detail issued by Pulse Asia.

I credit Reyna Elena for sparing us a bit of trouble by stripping off much of the quaint "analysis" around the "survey" to reveal its kernel:

1.) Noynoy Aquino 44%
2.) Manny Villar 19%
3.) Chiz Escudero at 13%
4.) Joseph Estrada 11%
5.) Gilbert Teodoro 2%

As the title of his post already states: "Noynoy maintains big lead"!

* * *

Before we go on, let's set a baseline and start with a hypothesis to describe what possibly could be the whole point behind these "surveys" which are undertaken, at great cost, by Pulse Asia and so gleefully dissemintated by so many channels of mass communication.

These surveys are published by the Media and dissemintated by "bloggers" as a service to the general public.

(Let's forget for now the vast amount of money made by the "mainstream" members of our little family of mass communicators)

Like Tordesillas's news report, Reyna Elena's post is long on dissemination (as Pulse Asia requests of the recipients of its media releases), but quite short on thinking-added-value.

Fortunately it takes a bit of an elementary exercise of asking the right questions to tease out some nuggets of insight into how consumers of "surveys" such as this, think. Thus according to Elena, these surveys...

[...] can also be used by candidates in a lot of ways. An unpopular candidate could change his strategy or work on his platform, hire PR people, perform better in debates and even hire paid hacks to increase his popularity because polls can sway public opinions.

Indeed I agree. Popularity surveys are very useful to politicians as tools for fine-tuning their campaigns. They are practically indispensible, much the same way as a speedometer is an essential device in motorists' on-going efforts to avoid getting speeding tickets.

On the other hand:

How exactly do the voters benefit from these surveys?

Where is this "service" provided to the public? From the perspective of the voters, what do they gain from the information in these surveys in terms of tools they could use to evaluate their options?

For me it seems that knowing "Noynoy Aquino 44%" ergo "Noynoy maintains big lead" leaves voters none the wiser about whether that guy is qualified to lead and govern our lot. For that matter, neither are we any more cluey on which among the rest of them are.

What we do find that the non-politician sector of the public is left with is a bit more disturbing:

Publication of popularity metrics like these induce a bandwagon effect.

It's Advertising Trickery 101.

Millions of labanderas testify that Ajax or Breeze (or whatever detergent you subject your hapless servant to) does the job! Or so the old advertising formula goes. Substitute "labanderas" with "voters" and "Ajax" or "Breeze" with whoever happens to come out on top in these "surveys" and you will catch my drift.

Score so far:

Traditional politicians - 1

Clueless Pinoy voters - ZERO

Pulse Asia - laughing all the way to the bank.

GetRealist take on things: Priceless.

Six months to go and the only challenge of consequence around here remains unmet: Platform, plez™

[This article is also published on AntiPinoy.com. Make this article available to your Facebook friends by clicking on the "Share" button at the upper right hand corner of this article then select "Post to profile".]

The official campaign period: Does it even matter?

14 ноября 2009 г. в 3:52

[...] our political practice is more oriented towards coalitions; and the coalitions, too, require time to hammer out a common platform as the basis of uniting to support specific candidates. The broader the coalition, the longer and more complicated the consensus process required to arrive at a platform becomes.

In making the above assertion, the Noted Blogger, Mr. Manuel L. Quezon III, attempts to excuse (1) the continued lack of focus on issues in the National "Debate" leading up to the 2010 Presidential Elections and (2) the embodiment of that intellectual bankruptcy -- a lack of published platforms among the most popular candidates of the moment. But in doing so he unwittingly makes an observation that begs an even more fundamental question about Philippine politics:

Why does Philippine "political practice" favour coalitions -- ones that need to coalesce out of the woodwork of undifferentiated stand-for-nothing groups, "parties", and "movements" at every election?

It's like our politics re-inventing the wheel every six years. In effect, the ideological and philosophical pool is wastefully re-developed from virtually nothing in the months leading up to just about every election. Nothing is carried over from the past -- none of its hindsight and therefore none of its learnings. And that assumes that there are ideologies and philosophies that underlie these shape-shifters to begin with.

The real point to be highlighted here, therefore, is the answer to the above question:

The Philippine "political practice" favours coalitions because there is no collective philosophical framework in our society of sufficient substance to encourage the endurance of stable political parties over time.

Coalitions are election winning machines. The point of their existence (at a given moment) is hinged on a specific short-term goal -- to win an election. In the corporate setting, coalitions are the equivalent of committees or ad hoc project teams (in contrast with the permanent organisational units like departments and divisions that have long-term significance to the enterprise). Coalitions shift in shape and composition to adapt to the landscape of winnability of the moment. As such, a society whose most noted political "experts" debate on winnability rather than on issues and whose voters vote with their gut instead of their brains is not surprisingly cursed with a political system "oriented towards coalitions".

So the Noted Blogger continues...

[...] you cannot have a platform if you are a leader without followers and the association of leaders and followers is the party or coalition; and that coalition or party has to coalesce before it can unveil its platform.

Makes sense, doesn't it? That is, if one imprisons their thinking within the context of what makes sense in the sort of "democracy" a backward society like the Philippines practices.

Quezon also implies in that blog post that the onus is on those voters who want to carefully evaluate their options to trawl through piles of disparate transcripts of public statements made by candidates in interviews and debates over time and piece them together to form a picture that they can use to make their evaluations. He embeds several Scribd documents to serve as examples of sites that could be mined for nuggets of information to add to one's progressively crystallising personal picture of what a candidate stands for -- or so the theory goes.

Excuse me, but I beg to differ. It should be the other way around.

Why don't the voters do themselves a favour and demand that the politicians do that job for them? Rather than politicians dish out disjoint sound bites piecemeal and expect the voters to collate useful information from them, why don't these politicians step up and collate a comprehensive document articulating in a coherent and structured manner the positions they take across relevant matters and present that to their constituents? In such a way, the process is reversed. Voters would take that document and use it as a BASELINE for assessing whether the chatter dished out by politicians during their campaign is consistent with it.

As a person aspiring to lead a people, a presidential candidate should put the structure out FIRST and then use it to frame and guide the chatter in his subsequent campaign. We as voters need to STEP UP and DEMAND that our politicians do it this way. Why should voters be the ones scrounging around for pieces of the puzzle and connecting the dots? The onus should be on politicians to come up with a written and published document of connected dots.

Elections are about the future. So therefore candidates should take a prospective regard for his candidacy instead of a retrospective one -- which means running on a real platform that describes what he envisions will happen over his term.

So much for being an apologist for what is but a mere symptom of the underlying disease -- our society's intellectual bankruptcy. in bringing to light this underlying disease, consider now if the coming of the start of the "official campaign period" even matters.

[This article is also published on AntiPinoy.com. Make this article available to your Facebook friends by clicking on the "Share" button at the upper right hand corner of this article then select "Post to profile".]

Philippine theocracy vs gay rights

13 ноября 2009 г. в 3:17

Who is outraged by the Philippine Commission on Elections' (COMELEC's) rejection of the Ang Ladlad organisation's bid for accreditation as a political party on "moral" grounds? Ang Ladlad (roughly translated in the context of homosexuality: "the coming out of the closet") is an organisation advocating the rights of homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgenders in Philippine society.

The news site of ABS-CBN reports that...

In a ruling dated November 11, the Comelec said that although the party presented proper documents and evidence for their accreditation, their petition is "dismissable on moral grounds."

Page 5 of the ruling states that Ang Ladlad's definition of the LGBT sector as a marginalized sector who are disadvantaged because of their sexual orientation "makes it crystal clear that the petitioner tolerates immorality which offends religious beliefs."

The document quotes passages from both the Bible and the Koran (taken from internet site www.bible.org) that describe homosexuality as "unseemly" or "transgressive."

The Comelec goes on to state that accrediting Ang Ladlad would pose risks for Filipino youth.

"Should this Commission grant the petition, we will be exposing our youth to an environment that does not conform to the teachings of our faith," the ruling stated.

What exactly does the COMELEC mean by "our" faith? Last I heard, the Philippines is a secular state with a doctrine of separation of church and state well ingrained in its Constitution. If so, what then is the source of this definition of "morality" that the COMELEC applies in this recent pronouncement? Should state agencies be in the business of referring to the articles of "faith" of any religious dogma for that matter in its officiations?