Btw, your Extra Joss hose-down idea is hilarious! rofl

@Monty Dean: That’s quite a question indeed. I think it deserves its own post, in fact. Here’s a clue: the Devil.

Within the context of the arguments you both wrote above, who can explain (sorry but this will digress from the article on top) why in hell Kris Aquino is all over the place, i.e., in all sorts of commercials? I mean, what does that say about us as Pinoys? What is the underlying trend there?

Second only to Sunshine Dizon (for whom GMA7′s preference I will also never understand because she’s in more places than Marian is), Kris appears to have sold her soul to the devil to become the Oprah-wannabe that she is today. So bakit nga ba? What’s the insight that I’m missing here?

(You might say maysado akong apektado, but really – I just don’t get it. I doesn’t give me a proper formula for success. Unless, of course, the message pala is that it takes a real freakin’ bitch to succeed (and even that is problem for me because I’m a dude!)

If I may overanalyze it a bit, it ain’t as goofy an idea as that Calcium-rich milk brand’s event that aimed to have women dancing like silly in the streets. For at least 2 different years they tried to run that event; the absence of post-event press release splatterings for both years tells us just how successful they were.

Just a moment ago I saw on C/S9 an advert showing people rallying again – this time for a bottled energy drink (clue: brand name is a word referring to a skilled Japanese warrior of medieval times). The advert shows the brand’s below-the-line people carrying placards saying fight fatigue. They were “rallying” at Welcome Rotonda (prolly hoping for free coverage by curious MEDIA).

Usong uso talaga.

Pax.

With no context to your assertion, there really is no other way to take it but literally.

Again, you can’t point to commercials as proof of a protest culture. These are made by creative directors, and reflect only their aesthetic vision, and are not necessarily signs of the times.

And that doesn’t even wash, really. Consider the ads for TM and the unnamed remittance service. These hardly cater to people “in the comfort of a starbucks with a wifi-ed laptop.”

The yoghurt and milk campaigns, on the other hand, target mothers and such, not your typical hotbed of radicals.

Your argument is pretty much based on an assumption.

Granted twitter and other social-networking sites have made it easier for people to speak out, this still doesn’t mean that protest has become, as you say, fashionable.

What percentage of tweets on your list are about dissent and dissatisfaction with the government? What percentage of tweets in total?

Also, we are not a protest website or even a political one. If you skim through the site, you’ll see that we’re not even a serious blog at all. So your assertion that this “is precisely a manifestation of protest culture 2.0″ doesn’t wash either.

That being said, none of us is going to gain anything from a long debate on this thread. You’ve said your piece, I’ve said mine.

If you want to get a final word in, that’s fine. But I don’t think this will end until one of us disengages, so how about we end this beef already?