A Facebook user has called out everyone busily engaging in name-calling as it only serves to create further division and hate among Filipinos.
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Gideon Lasco said making generalizations does not accomplish anything at all.
“Calling 16 million voters stupid; 4 million drug users as ‘subhuman’, immigrants as ‘rapists’, gays as ‘worse than animals’; single moms as ‘na-ano’…what do these statements have in common?” Lasco wrote.
“They are generalizations that not only box people into categories, they ascribe negative characteristics upon an entire group,” he added.
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Making such statements only serve to “widen divisions, further misunderstanding, and exacerbate hate,” he said.
Lasco added that while we can always disagree, it should be done “without disparaging an entire group of people.”
“Surely we are allowed to register our strong disagreement with people who espouse a view contrary to ours. Surely we should reject misguided ideas, and be very clear about where we stand. But surely there is a better way to do this, without disparaging an entire group of people,” he said.
“Indeed if only people would stop generalizing about each other, the world will be a better place,” he added.
Some anti-Duterte’s do have the tendency to call Duterte voters “stupid.”
President Duterte himself called drug users as people who are not human. In August 2016, while slamming human rights groups for raising concerns about the killings in the country, he told them to look back at their concept of human rights.
“These human rights (advocates) did not count those who were killed before I became President. The children who were raped and mutilated [by drug users]. That’s why I said, ‘What crime against humanity?’ In the first place, I’d like to be frank with you, are they (drug users) humans? What is your definition of a human being? Tell me,” Duterte said, as quoted by Inquirer.
Just recently, Senator Vicente “Tito” Sotto III was slammed for commenting that DSWD Secretary Judy Taguiwalo, as a single mom, was “na-ano lang,” adding that it was how Taguiwalo’s situation would be described in street language.
“In the street language, when you have children and you are single, ang tawag doon ay ‘na-ano lang,’” Sotto said.
Taguiwalo then responded, saying, “Mr. Sotto, I teach Women’s Studies so we respect all kinds of families, and that includes solo parents.”
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