A Candid Report on JoeAm's Blog

The Society of Honor was JoeAm's hobby for two years. He was blogging to perfect his writing skills and gain an understanding of how Philippine culture is different from American.  He was having fun. He didn't care about readership.

In April of 2012, JoeAm got banned by Get Real Post. His motivation changed. He did not announce this. But it changed. Benigno changed it.

Joe is a competitor. He played basketball from age 7 until a few years ago when his knees forced him to retire. He played baseball from little-league through high school. He swam competitively. He was a ruthless spiker and blocker in college volleyball, a backhand deficient tennis player, and a lightening quick badminton player. He proved good at ping pong, pool, rock climbing, spelunking and chasing girls. He was a gross failure at anything dealing with ice, like skiing and skating, for instance. Don't ask about his sledding recollections; they are painful.

Joe learned that the win was found in the competition, not the score.

Here was benigno's parting taunt at JoeAm just before he gave JoeAm the boot:

• Hey I’ve got an idea, Mr Joe America. How about we run an online experiment that goes like this:
• (1) I put all comments of yours subsequent to this in the Spam queue.
• (2) You go off and get up on your soapbox elsewhere (say, somebody else’s blog, like yours maybe) and announce to the world how the Admins of GR Post don’t practice “free speech” here.
• (3) We both sit back for the next couple of weeks (or years) and see if:
• (3.a) anyone out there actually cares about what you have to say about our Admin practices here; and,
• (3.b) anyone of the regular commentors here in GR Post actually miss your presence and clamor for a reinstatement of your comments.
• I think the above little experiment will be good for a few laughs.

JoeAm said to himself, and no one else, until now:

"I know a poor sport when I read one. Okay, game on."

JoeAm took three decisions.:

• "I'll write every day so that readers know to check in on today's article, like reading the newspaper every morning."

• "I'll change my approach from grousing like benigno to accepting the Philippines as it is, and I'll support Team Filipino."

• I'll see if the GRP malcontents can take what they dish out.

Game on.

The chart down there shows page visit trends to JoeAm's blog.

What used to be 50 page-reads a day has become 400 page-reads a day. Yesterday was 462. Today is on a pace to exceed 600. That is still comparatively small, but readership is clearly up, and it is undeniably a thinking, well-read society. It is satisfying to note that it is also a polite society, in the main. Respectful. Classy. I believe that if you treat people with respect, they will return that respect, and that is pretty much the tenor of the blog.

Readership has assumed a life of its own. No matter what I write, the readers are there, 24 hours per day.

Comment is also more active these days. People come and go. I miss those who visited for a time then left, brianitus, Jack, Jim-e, but they have lives to lead, you know? And some new visitors become regular commenters. Johnny and andrew and DocB.  Edgar and Cha are cerebral anchors and have contributed their own articles. It is a flow now. Old friends occasionally stop by to drop off a comment (Attila, Greg, Mariano, J, patrioticflip, Angel). It's cool. A real society. Graduates and newbies and old friends popping in.

I appreciate the loyalty because I am confident I have offended all of you at one time or another. Maybe a joke that went wrong, or a criticism that was too strong or completely off base. It is a risk that I accept to try to write a somewhat edgy literary style.  I don't really intend to offend, and I think most understand that. Well, I don't mind offending Senator Sotto or benigno, two birds of similar feather . . . 

The blog has recently been featured in two popular newspaper columns and is being read by numerous opinion makers. One article even ended up with President Aquino, and I suspect he stops by now and then when he is winding down. If he can shop gun prices on Google, he can pop in to see what is on Joe's eccentric mind today. One of his communications people, MLQIII, has popped in and other notables now know Joe America.

Game on.

About a month ago, after popularity got ticked up by the newspaper articles, I asked, "what can I do to keep readership up now that people are aware of the site?"  I started getting more active in making comments at other blog sites. I just keep my mug shot and writing in front of people and hope they get curious or think, "oh, yeah, I read that guy a while back, I think I'll see what he's written lately".

And that has indeed produced a steady flow of visitors. I do this without prostituting myself, generally refraining from placing my own links in other people's blogs. Just thoughts that I hope contribute to constructive discussions on those blogs.

Andrew Lim has been instrumental in keeping the flow of comments coming by posting links and references in Facebook and other blogs. He finds an article he thinks makes good points and he broadens the reach of those ideas. He has brought over a lot of new readers.

I appreciate it when readers  do that, extending the reach of the articles and the dialogue attached to them. The comments are as important as the articles.

What are JoeAm's aspirations?

If given a choice between producing a popular, broad-reaching blog read by thousands or a quality blog read by  a couple of hundred opinion-leaders, I would most definitely aspire toward the latter. This readership would accept the views of an American blogger in the Philippines because it is the IDEAS that count, not whether the writer is American or Filipino. Readers would recognize it is the crossing of two different cultures that provides new insights. And this readership would appreciate word play, satire and quirky humor. Sometimes even off-color or irreverent humor.

This would be a readership that doesn't mind bending its own mind . . . or challenging JoeAm's.

It would be a readership that occasionally gets so fired up about a topic that the reader pens a long, thoughtful comment that builds depth and adds new perspectives to the discussion.

I do know that I aspire NOT to write a blog that is a pit of shallow, concealed manipulations and bitterness where tearing down others is misrepresented as insight.

I'd like to see JoeAm and readers continue to work at being genuine, a real society of honor, searching for important truths . . .searching for solutions, not just problems . . . and expressing thoughts in ways that seek to enlighten, amuse or inspire.

The competition is in the playing of the game.

Cheers. Thanks for being here.

Game on.

Ben Kritz: The Alien Who Shoots Straight

The blogging community in the Philippines is both diverse and small, rather like Hollywood, where all kinds of movies get made but you keep seeing the same faces showing up on the giant screen. John Travolta, Eddie Murphy and Robin William all showed up in dresses at one time or another. The Filipino blogging community is equally tight and equally quirky. Furthermore, relationships fall faster than mangos in a typhoon, both in Hollywood and the ph blogosphere.

Today I will focus on one Ben Kritz, who blogs as Ben K, and who has been pounding the blog typewriter for at least as many years as I have been in the Philippines, which is becoming a bunch.

I first encountered Ben at the defunct Filipino Voices community blog site. He quickly gained my respect because he could disagree with my newly arrived, half-baked opinions without calling me a moron, and if I happened to write something agreeable the next day, he would say so.  His own writing was blunt and intelligent even if occasionally, in my view, wrong.

Kritz Politics

The thing I like about Ben is that he has principles and sticks with them. When Bong V at Anti-Pinoy broke with AP editorial policy and into the realm of hypocrisy by deleting my comments, Ben, one of the three main guys at Anti-Pinoy at that time, put them back in.

Here's a bit of history. BongV, benigno and Ben K all marched out of Filipino Voices in a big snit a number of years ago because FV chose to moderate their comments. Many of the FV blog threads had deteriorated into personal pissing wars, and a couple of these characters could piss with the best of them. They marched off to Anti-Pinoy and started blasting Filipino Voices (they still ridicule the site today, rather like stomping on dead bodies) for its "censorship" and failure to support "free speech".

Well, the timeline shows all kinds of worms have turned since then. benigno and Ben K split from Anti-Pinoy after a blow-up with Bong V. I'm not sure what it was about, but it may have involved Bong V's ardent pro Muslim perspectives.

BenK went to benigno's Get Real blog site and they set out to promote that site as a popular voice of progressive thought in the Philippines. Ben K does many of the business articles on one of Get Real information platforms:  http://grbusinessonline.com/wp/

The final worms turned when Anti-Pinoy started deleting comments and Get Real started "spamming" contributors who irritated the authors, even if they did not engage in profanity or deal in personal insults. They just had the effrontery to disagree and be persistent at it.  Spamming is like blacklisting a contributor. It mars his ability to comment on other sites, too, not just Get Real. So benigno took it one step further than Filipino Voices, not only banning commenters but tattooing a number on their forehead as well.

I had been criticizing Get Real here at The Society of Honor for some time and that probably contributed to benigno's decision to eject me. I'm sure that President Aquino would like to spam the whole Anti-Pinoy and Get Real crowd, but he does not have the same autocratic right as a blog editor does.

Why Get Real Members Understand Filipinos So Well	Characteristic	Dysfunctional Filipino	Get Real Member
	Hyper-sensitive	X	X
	Thuggish	X	X
	Vindictive	X	X
	Hypocritical	X	X
	Rationalizer	X	X
	Blame-caster	X	X

I check in at Get Real every now and then to read and get some ideas. My "ideas" generally are to write something the opposite of what they are busy framing as intelligence.

I didn't really follow Ben K's writings.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, a slow day with no typhoons or dances to attend, I started doing a little catch-up reading and came across the most fascinating dust-up between Ben K and what appears to be a little cabal of Get Real  strategists back in late 2011. The cabal had evidently gotten together in 2010 to hatch the stance Get Real would take in its blogs and at Facebook. I have long thought that Get Real is an agenda-pushing blog site and this is testimony to that fact.

The cabal decided it would dedicate itself to pushing for re-writing the Constitution to get the economy rolling.  Translated, that means re-writing the Constitution to open the nation up to foreign investment.

Ben Kritz sans Helmet

The dust-up came when Ben K wrote an article at Get Real Business criticizing advocates  of such a Constitutional re-write for not being aggressive enough. Ben K is a free lance business consultant and I suspect he would become a very popular and rich guy if the Philippines opened up, so there is a reason he would like to see more aggressive action.

In other words, he writes to an agenda, as well.

Maybe we all do.

There is nothing wrong with being an advocate. There is something wrong with pretending to be one thing whilst doing another. Like relentlessly criticizing the President of the Philippines in the guise of being constructive agitators for an improved Philippines, when your real goal is to portray the nation as incompetent so that more people seek expertise and capital from overseas. Because then you get rich personally.

Alas, the little cabal of strategic thinkers took issue with Ben K's criticism, even though he did not mention them by name. If thinness of skin were to be measured by the thickness of one's blog comments, then these guys come with extraordinarily thin skin, because the words came flying, and the tone was downright snide and  nasty toward "Blunt Ben". The nerve of the guy expressing his ideas out loud.

Kritz Humor

Here was one of the comments made by a certain Orion Pérez Dumdum, who I would note writes an occasional blog article at Get Real:

You never indicated any interest in the movement, and it was quite clear from the assholic nature of some of your previous posts dissing the Movement (why the heck do you also need to be so assholic about it, Ben?)

Here is Ben K at his "assholic" best, as he wrapped up his criticism:

Beyond that, however, the current mild push for constitutional reform unfortunately seems more likely to fail than succeed, in one of three ways: either outright by failing to remove constitutional protectionism due to a lack of effort and clear goals; by failing to produce any significant economic gains (i.e. a significant increase or growth of FDI) from the removal of constitutional protectionism, due to a lack of focus on other critical reforms to the investment environment; or by unintentionally creating a condition by which strong vested business interests can increase their favored and protected status to an even greater degree, using the lack of constitutional guidelines for ownership and investment as an excuse to do so. To be fair, this is probably an unlikely nightmare scenario; on the other hand, there is nothing in the current trajectory of the reform advocacy that would clearly prevent it from happening.

If the significant and comprehensive economic reform the Philippines needs cannot be accomplished, for the potential investor it will be a regrettable missed opportunity; but for the country itself, the stakes are much, much higher. For everyone’s sake, most of all their own, those pushing for constitutional reform ought to think about rolling up their sleeves and approaching the initiative as real work.

Kritz Serious

If these guys get bent out of shape by that commentary, I'd hate to see what they would do if someone were direct and told them they were incompetent, the key measure of competency being that something is in Committee or is actively before the Legislature for votes. Clearly these cabal guys went Ampatuan on Ben K, reading him riot in a public forum (I'm sure they have his e-mail address, which they could have quietly used if they were not so needy as to engage in face-saving public showboating in the Philippine tradition).

Ben K responded that he thinks for himself, but of course there is nothing that can be said to calm a clan of ranting Filipinos out for blood. So Ben K properly went silent and let the rest of the diatribe go irrelevant.

What I find fascination is the existence of a cabal which identified the Get Real editorial slant in 2010, to advocate for a rewrite of the Constitution. Named by Orion as members of the cabal are himself, Arnel, Chino, Lester, and Anthony. Ben K was a member, too. A guy by the name of Eduardo R. Alicias, Jr., may also be a member. Here is Eduardo's take:

• Mr. Ben Kritz, an ALIEN! your ideas are welcome, but what gives you the right, the nerve to impose your ideas, let alone insult us or at least some of us Filipinos on our internal efforts/discussions to improve our own country?

That of course is the peculiar definition of free speech that says "you can say whatever you want as long as I agree with it." I guess Eduardo packs his own Humpty Dumpty dictionary.

Here is the full article and blog comments if you wish to read the glorious dirt yourselves:

• The Economic Liberalization Initiative and the Philippines: Path to Prosperity, or Road to Hell?

Do I trust Ben K? I trust him to be principled rather than personal. And one of his principles is to advocate for those people and activities that benefit him and his consultation business. He is anti-Aquino. He was pro-Corona.  He is consistently aligned with the Get Real agenda. Yet he is not a shrill, insecure hit man. He just pushes on, relentlessly and somewhat irreverently.

Do I respect that he toes the Get Real line so precisely? I don't agree with that line, but I respect that he can have a different take on things than me. He does not have to like that I see the Philippines optimistically, for he may believe it is misleading and overly rosy when poverty and ineptitude really suck. The interplay between the two views is where constructive output can be found. It is benigno's refusal to allow that interplay that makes him a dog among bloggers.

The main purpose of this blog is to recognize Ben Kritz as his own man, an independent voice who lives in the Philippines, works in the Philippines, and advocates passionately for issues he believes in. He is able to discern issue from personality. He is not needy. He speaks directly. He does not insist that you be his friend or even like him. What is important is the message, the idea, the action.

Kudos, Ben K. I hope you are writing blogs and stirring up thinking here for a long, long time. It's good for the Philippines.

Ben K's web site is found here: http://weatheronneptune.wordpress.com/

"Bloviating Ignorami", the Game

George Will, respected conservative newspaper columnist in the United States, coined a descriptor the other day that will live in infamy. He called "The Donald", that is, Donald Trump, U.S. real estate, gambling  and entertainment tycoon, a "bloviating ignoramus".

Well, I have a reasonably large vocabulary, but the term "bloviating" was new to me. I could guess it was not flattering from the context, but to be sure, I looked it up:

Bloviating Ignoramus

Bloviate (v): To discourse at length in a pompous or boastful manner

Well, for sure, that is Donald Trump. Stuffed up full of himself with his mouth running on about inane things (like questioning where President Obama was born) rather than substance, yet somehow believing the world circles at his feet. He wanted to run for president but declined when he discovered most of North America thought he was a joke. South America thought he was an idiot. Europe thought he was an ordinary American. Asia thought he was a bloviating ignoramus, but expressed it differently. In Chinese characters it comes out something like "big pig who eats his own shit".

So I have a word association test for you. I will shout:

"BLOVIATING IGNORAMUS!"

And you shout back the name of the first person you think of.

Here's a sample, if I shout it at myself.

"BLOVIATING IGNORAMUS!"

"BENIGNO!"

Get it? Just in case you don't, let me try another one. An example. It has to be different from the list-leader.

"BLOVIATING IGNORAMUS!"

"SENATOR SANTIAGO!"

Okay, I'm sure you comprehend the nature of the test. Your turn.

"BLOVIATING IGNORAMUS!"

"_______________________"