As improbable as it seems Netflix is having an influence on political discourse in the Philippines. Remember this photo showing Duterte watching Django Unchained on Netflix?
There is nothing wrong with watching a good movie or show. The problem is when fiction begins to influence one's political or world view. Remember during the martial law hearings before the Supreme Court when Justice Bersamin was worried that scenarios like those in White House Down and London Has Fallen could come true if martial law were lifted?
“How can the republic survive if there was another kind of threat worse than rebellion or invasion,” a Supreme Court Associate Justice asked Tuesday as he noted that President Rodrigo Duterte’s martial law is already emasculated compared to that of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
“Oh I watched so many movies like White House has fallen, London has fallen. These are very terrifying realities that could happen in a few years’ time,” Bersamin said, adding that the framers crafted a constitution “that constricted the use of the ultimate power to actual invasion and actual rebellion.”
“What if these [movies] become a reality,” Bersamin asked.
https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2019/09/filipinos-and-movies.html
Then there was Senator Lacson who, after watching a show on Netflix, actually introduced legislation inspired by that show.
Legislation loosely based on a popular Netflix political thriller called the “Designated Survivor” have been filed in the Senate and the House of Representatives to deal with such a situation.
In the show, actor Kiefer Sutherland plays Housing and Urban Development Secretary Tom Kirkham, who is hidden away during the State of the Union. He was thrust into the US presidency when the Capitol building is bombed during the address, killing the president and everyone in it.
The Philippine proposal is called the Presidential Succession Act, referred to simply as the designated survivor bill.
Sen. Ping Lacson wrote the Senate version of the bill, while Quezon City Rep. Precious Hipolito introduced the House counterpart proposal.
Lacson told reporters on Thursday that his proposal was inspired by the Netflix series.
https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2019/09/filipinos-and-movies.html
Lacson is back in the news telling us all that a movie he saw on Netflix has influenced him to now be against the death penalty.
Senator Panfilo Lacson now says that if he is elected president in the 2022 national elections, he will no longer push for the death penalty despite previous statements advocating for the reinstitution of capital punishment.
Asked about how his opinion about the death penalty changed, Lacson attributed this to a movie on streaming site Netflix, which talked about an activist who set himself up for a crime just to prove that innocent people could be punished.
He says that his running mate, Senate President Vicente Sotto III, also shares his views.
“In the course his (Sotto) perspective changed. I’m like that, I’m also a convert. Did you know, did you watch ‘The Life of David Gayle’ on Netflix? "I watched that, that activist, that's where he set-up himself," Lacson told reporters in a media forum on Thursday.
"He was not the one who killed but he set-up just to prove that the innocent man could be executed," he explained.
Lacson admitted that in the past, he has been a stern advocate of the death penalty for certain crimes like plunder, high-level drug trafficking, law enforcers proven guilty for planting evidence, and other heinous crimes.
But the Netflix show changed it all, Lacson claimed, who is now saying that saving the life of a wrongly accused person is more important than executing a criminal.
"That changed my attitude, my outlook, and my perspective on the death penalty. I am also an author, I have been infinite several times, I have even included the plunder and then the various crimes as heinous crimes, which should be punishable by the death penalty, ”he explained.
"But then I realized that it is more important to save the life of an innocent person who has been convicted so that we can execute someone who is really convicted and really convicted. "When I weighed it, I thought it would be more important to save the life of a wrongly convicted person," he added.
Are we really to believe that Senator Lacson, who was once Chief of the PNP and who admits he has written numerous articles advocating for the death penalty, had never considered that an innocent person could be wrongly convicted of a crime and placed on death row until he saw The Life of David Gale!?
This 2003 film starring Kevin Spacey as an anti-death penalty advocate who conspires to get himself executed for a crime he did not commit to show how bad the death penalty is because innocent people could be executed is one of the most ridiculous and convoluted films ever made. It is right up there with Crash which, to the consternation of everyone, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2006. Roger Ebert thought The Life of David Gale was so stupid that he gave it zero stars.
The secrets of the plot must remain unrevealed by me, so that you can be offended by them yourself, but let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein.
I am sure the filmmakers believe their film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-life-of-david-gale-2003
Unless you are a small-brained normie there is absolutely no way you can walk away from this movie thinking that it is anything like a coherent argument against the death penalty. Sadly it is true that there are and have been innocent men on death row for years. There is a documentary streaming on Netflix titled Fear of 13 which is about this very subject.
The Fear of 13 is a 2015 British documentary film. It tells the story of Nick Yarris, who was convicted of murder and spent 22 years on Death Row in Pennsylvania. He was released in 2004 when DNA evidence proved he was innocent of the crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fear_of_13
There are actually a whole lot of documentaries about wrongly convicted people. The Innocence Project has a list. Surely a few of them are streaming on Netflix. But no. The one film that changed Lacson's mind is the impossible fiction titled The Life of David Gale.
There is absolutely no problem with the death penalty just as there is no problem with incarceration. The problem is a corrupt justice system which allows innocent people to be convicted. It is a multifaceted problem involving overzealous prosecutors, corrupt judges, incompetent defenders, and many other factors which I will not be discussing in this article.
Did Panfilo Lacson, as an officer in one of the world's most corrupt police organizations, not think about these things? Did he not consider that people could be wrongly convicted or wrongly accused? It is absolutely ludicrous that Lacson has changed his mind about the death penalty because he saw The Life of David Gale and thought it had a great message.
You know what else is absolutely ludicrous? That the DFA got so upset over a Netflix series called Pine Gap that they asked the MTRCB to demand they delete two episodes. The reason? Becasue in those two episodes there is a map of China's 9-dash line.
Netflix Inc has removed two episodes of spy drama "Pine Gap" from its streaming service in the Philippines, after the Southeast Asian country rejected scenes involving a map used by China to assert its claims to the South China Sea.
The Philippines on Monday asked Netflix to remove certain episodes of the six-part Australian series, saying the map depicted on the show was a violation of its sovereignty.
The second and third episodes of the show were no longer available in the Philippines by late Monday, with Netflix announcing on its platform that those episodes had been "removed by government demand". It did not elaborate.
After a thorough review, the Philippines' movie classification board has ruled that certain episodes of Pine Gap were "unfit for public exhibition", the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said in a statement.
Earlier this year Netflix removed "Pine Gap" from its services in Vietnam following a similar complaint from the country's broadcast authorities.
The Philippine films board, acting on the DFA's complaint, handed down its ruling on Sept.
It was not clear why the decision was only made public now.
The board, according to the DFA, noted that the appearance of the map was "no accident as it was consciously designed and calculated to specifically convey a message that China's nine-dash line legitimately exists".
The board believes that "such portrayal is a crafty attempt to perpetuate and memorialize in the consciousness of the present generation of viewers and the generations to come the illegal nine-dash line," the DFA said.
The last two paragraphs of that article are very important. The DFA is claiming that the inclusion of a map showing the 9-dash line legitimates China's claim. This is an outright lie. While that line is shown in a map in the background there is nothing to indicate that it conveys "a message that China's nine-dash line legitimately exists." Here is some dialogue from the offending scene in episode 2.
Episode 2 12:28
Jacob: Is the Rha Two in Chinese territory?
Gus: Which is disputed territory.
Eloise: Well, they’ve been saying it's theirs since 1948.
Jasmine: Actually, according to them it’s been theirs since 3,000 BC. They just went to sleep for a hundred years and everyone just took it off them.
Gus: They still lost the court case.
Eloise: Well, these are the Fiery Cross Islands. Where China’s built a navy base.
Gus: And I love the way they just "take" islands.
Does that dialogue sound like they are giving legitimacy to the 9-dash line? Of course not. And that kind of banter goes on throughout the series. How about this screen cap from episode 3 saying point blank that China ignores international law?
Episode 3 25:16 Will China retract its territorial claims in the South China Sea or continue to ignore the decision of the International Court that America has sworn to uphold?
Did anybody at the DFA or the MTRCB actually watch the show? I mean the entire show which is not very kind to China. In this show China is the enemy. If they had watched the show they would know that every single episode except the first one mentions the nine-dash line or shows it on a map. But for some odd reason only episodes 2 and 3 offended them enough to be removed.
The reason the 9-dash line is shown on a map in this show is not because the creators of the show are giving it legitimacy. It's there because China considers it legitimate and these analysts at Pine Gap are monitoring China. It's really that simple. China rejects The Hague ruling and acts in accordance with their claims. They really do see that line as legitimate and one cannot ignore that fact. That is why they continue to build island bases within that area. But the Philippines does not care about that. Instead, while Duterte calls the International Court ruling just a piece of paper he will throw away, the DFA and MTRCB boldly claim that some silly Netflix show which got bad reviews and shows a map of the 9-dash line in two episodes, it actually shows up in five episodes, violates the Philippines' sovereignty.
One idiot, the executive director of the MTRCB Jose Benjamin Benaldo, even calls the removal of these episodes a victory for the Philippines.
“After a thorough review, the Board ruled that certain episodes of Pine Gap are ‘unfit for public exhibition.’ The MTRCB also ordered the immediate pullout of relevant episodes by its provider, Netflix Inc, from its video streaming platform,” the DFA said in a statement.
In its decision, the MTRCB underscored that “under a whole-of-nation approach, every instrumentality of the government, whenever presented with the opportunity, has the responsibility to counter China’s aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea to assert the Philippines’ territorial integrity.”
“And we’re very happy Netflix has done that. This is another victory for our country,” Benaldo said.
"Another victory?" The only victory so far has been the initial ruling against China. Since the day that ruling was handed down it's been loss after loss as the Duterte administration refuses to even attempt to enforce that ruling. But who knows. Maybe now that these two episodes of a Netflix show depicting the 9-dash line have been removed so only Filipino viewers cannot see them, just maybe China will stop its island building program and vacate the West Philippine Sea.
