E-Martial Law

Yesterday was the declaration of e-martial law. Yesterday will be remembered in history as Sept. 21 The Sequel. Future generations will declare Oct. 3 a holiday, to commemorate the death of digital democracy in the Philippines. After all, we love to celebrate the bad things that happen to us, such as the execution of Jose Rizal, the fall of Bataan, the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, and of course the declaration by Ferdinand Marcos of Non-Virtual Martial Law.

Before that fateful day when the thought police will hack my website and incarcerate me, along with millions of Filipinos, for liking, tweeting, retweeting, posting, and sharing, I want to put down in black and white what I believe in. Philippine STAR is both physical and virtual, but it is my column on its website that will cause Big Brother to invoke the libel provision of RA 10175, otherwise known as the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.

I believe that President Noynoy Aquino does not want to curtail our freedom of expression.

I believe that the legislators who passed the bill, except perhaps for one glaring exception, have no intention of curtailing our freedom to point out cases of plagiarism, stealing, lying, corruption, jueteng money flowing through the corridors of power, forgotten criminal cases, fake academic records, inaccurate SALNs, KKK, and the like.

I believe that the Supreme Court in all its newfound wisdom will not act the way it did during the days of Ferdinand Marcos, when it allowed dictatorship to ruin our country.

I believe that Santa Claus will come down my chimney, even if I do not have one, because, Virginia, it is more fun in the Philippines.

It was indeed always more fun in the Philippines, until that silly, stupid, jurassic, uncalled-for, malicious libel provision was inserted at the last minute in a bill that was supposed to help our country back on its feet again. We could have been the world’s digital power, until we threw away the ball with three seconds to go.

I believe that the road to e-martial law was paved with good intentions for our lucrative call center industry, but as It’s More Pun In Da Philippines puts it, the best laid plans of mice and men often go aray.

In order to distract myself from the imminent danger and prior restraint that now prevails over our Bayang Magiliw, I reprint some non-libelous facts I picked up from the Web. In order not to be accused of plagiarism, I have taken pains to put the original Google-searchable sources in parentheses.

“The majority Catholic Philippines is the last officially secular country that does not have civil divorce for the whole population; Muslims, however, are granted divorce rights as per their religion.” (wikipedia.org) This means that, strictly speaking, we have divorce in the Philippines.

The average Filipino adult reached only Grade 8 (Second Year High School). This is actually not bad, because the average Filipino adult is more educated than the average citizen of France, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, China, or India. (nationmaster.com) Why worry about our drop-out rate, when all these other countries do not?

The Philippines ranks Number 21 in the world in average Intelligence Quotient (IQ). This particular statistic has been discredited by scholars, but it is still heartwarming to hear that Filipinos are considered to be more intelligent than people in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Equatorial Guinea. Unfortunately for our ego, more intelligent than us are citizens of Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, South Korea, and Singapore. (photius.com)

Simply put, the Philippines is not competitive. You cannot claim to be competitive if you finish 69th in a race. (weforum.org)

The Philippines is the 129th least corrupt country in the world. That is small consolation, since our neighbors, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Vietnam, follow the “matuwid na daan” more than we do. (transparency.org)

The Philippines is among the top 20 users of the Internet, with 33.6 million people using the Web (out of a population of 97 million, most of whom are children anyway). (internetworldstats.com) No wonder there is such an uproar about RA 10175. The majority of voters are online, favoriting posts and tweets against a couple of notorious VIPs. By the way, I love the way the English language acquires a new word (like “favorited”) online every day.

There are 51,795,000 mobile phones in the Philippines (as of 2007), ranking us as the 17th country in the world in terms of mobile phone usage. (infoplease.com) This statistic, however, does not take into account that many Filipinos have more than one mobile phone or have dual SIM phones, or that used and/or stolen mobile phones can be bought in malls.

In 2009, the Philippines sent the most number of text messages per mobile subscriber per month in the world, beating South Korea and Japan. (thedailyblend.net) Do the Latin alphabet and jejemon have something to do with this? Or is this merely a result of UNLI?

Beyond these, I sayeth naught, lest I be silenced. As we used to say during Real Martial Law, however, it is better to be silenced than to be silent.

Retweet away, fellow netizens! The Philippines does not have enough jails to hold 33.6 million libelers.