Extremely long rant ahead
It is sooooo telling of how fucked we are as a society seeing the comments and how people are generally responding to the San Jose National High Shool Shooting Incident.
I keep seeing comments after comments saying how "we need to lower the age of criminal liability" how "the youth lacks discipline" how "the law protects criminals" "we need to be harder on youth" when no??? That is such a reductive and short-sighted view on things.
Everyone who has the same sentiment is OUT OF TOUCH and you need to keep up. Long gone are the days where you can "punish your kid into goodness (if it even worked but that's a whole other can of worms.......). The boomers, gen-xers and even some millenials thinking like this needs to realize that is not an issue of law, order, and discipline, this is an issue of IDEOLOGY.
I was invited to talk at the graduation rites of my former SHS and the main point of my speech was the importance of Media and Information Literacy in the rise of AI, conservatism, and anti-intellectualism. I chose that subject because around the time I was preparing my speech, I saw a twitter post about how 7 students were arrested after a planned attack on their school around Feb-ish. They were noted to have Neo-nazi and SS accessories and quotes. Apparently, the students were allegedly influenced by members of an online gaming community (they say roblox/discord but idk if that's true) where they were essentially radicalized into incel/red-pilled/right-wing ideology.
The San Jose National High School Shooters are members of a TCCLarping community (TCC is True Crime Community) which are essentially stans of criminals as well as another DatingLapring Community which essentially promotes incel ideology. In this case, they most likely are fans of the columbine school shooters in USA. One of the shooters is seen wearing a KMFDM T-shirt, the same one as the Columbine shooter. This isn't the first time the Columbine shooting was replicated (it was actually a huge internal sociological phenomenon called the "Columbine Effect" where the shooting was replicated multiple times in different countries) but was the first time replicated here in the Philippines.
Now at this point, if you're still reading you either; 1. know what i'm talking about and where I'm going with this (and periodttt love that for us) or 2. you're fucking confused as to what the fuck i'm talking about and I get it.
I'm betting most filipinos kinda have a vague idea of who adolf hitler is as well as what he's done but not neccessarily the weight of him. By extension, if they don't know the person, what more the ideology of the person???
If I go to someone in the streets and ask them to define nazism and fascism, they most likely can't or the very least, only have an extremely superficial definition of it.
Now one might argue that this is a feature, not a bug of the Philippine Education System (that's for another time.......) but the only thing I'm certain of is this gap in knowledge is intergenerational and across the economic strata.
Of course superficial knowledge would result in people interacting with these ideologies superficially. They view this as a joke at best, and at worst something that would be in their favor. And that's the joke of it all. A brown skinned south-east asian larping as a neo-nazi...........
Right-wing ideology is in and filipinos don't even know what it is. So how can they solve a problem they can't even name. Incel, manosphere, tradwives, stoicism, anti-sjw, anti-woke, edgelord, dark humor, looksmaxing content is the unnamed unseen, unspoken, unheard problem facing everyone today.
During my speech, I told graduating students to identify dog whistles in the content they consume and be critical of the media they interact with. But now I realize I was a step short. I never really considered what ideology they themselves support.
Admittedly, it is idealistic and naive of me, but I always thought that everyone is born left-wing but because of propaganda and the environment they are raised in, they then become right-wing. It certainly was the case for me, I remember asking my parents when i was a kid why can't the government just give everyone houses and jobs maybe have a giant cafeteria so that everyone can eat. My dad told me that was communism. I asked ok??? Why can't we do communism??? And I never really got a satisfying answer.
Then enter 2010s to 2016s where the "sjw-owned" compilation content and became the defining cultural war at the time (which I'm pretty sure the person reading would not know but please educate yourselves). Admittedly, they did influence me to hold right-wing views at the time but if you're a highly critical person, who questions everything and reaches at the root of a problem instead of patchworks, then propaganda can only hold you for so long.
Around the time of the shooting, a transwoman named Bella Lutap was found brutally murdered in a canal. I saw lots of comments essentially praising the murder and saying she deserved it. Those very same people are calling for the school shooters to be given the death penalty. And it's a serious matter but I just have to laugh at how unaware they are at the fact that both instances of crime came from the same root.
Instead of doing internal work on their ideologies, they just want to patch it over with punishment for the perpetrators. No need to dig deeper.
Justice is blind, but so is violence and hate. Right-wingers may believe that violence they promote only affects minorities but no. It may not be now, it may not be at the same degree but it is gluttonous. And it will consume everything in its wake, including the people supporting this ideology like an ouroboros.
If you're still here thank you for taking the time to read and I urge you to take the time to meditate and ask yourself, what do I believe in?
What ideology do I support?
What ideologies can i understand?
What ideologies do I draw the line at?
Why do I support that ideology?
Do self-work with your politics because critical thinking is the best and only weapon we have against the beast of fascism
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