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We did what we could to report on corruption and abuses of power. President Duterte gave Raper another name. He called us fake news.

I wrote about terrible things that happened because those things shouldn’t happen again. Then one day the man who would be president promised deaths of his own citizens. The terrible became ordinary, to thundering applause.

“The police said Pa has fought back. They said he was a drug dealer. They said they had killed Pa in self-defense.”

This all sounds too familiar.

Democracy, like murder, this is a simple word. I saw it as a general Goode opposed to a general wrong. By democracy, I did not mean the elected administration. The government, every government, failed often, was complicit often, was by and large incompetent, hypocritical, and out of touch. The democracy, I believed in was the nation, a community of millions who saw brutality of an evolution to be condemned.

I was born in 1985, five months before a street revolution brought democracy back to the Philippines. That year it seemed every other middle-class mother had named their daughter Patricia. Evangelista, my surname, common in my country, derives from the Greek euangelos, “bringer of good news.” It is an irony I am informed of often.

“That promise of intimacy was a distant thing, discussed inside a glass–walled conference room one winter morning, thousands of miles away from the heavy heat of a Manila under the gun.”

That. Is great writing. (And yes, what I have written is not.)

STOP! Stop killing each other! STOP, PLEASE! 😭

WHO IS GOOD?! IS ANYONE?

WELCOME BACK, LIFT!! Finally!

After a reading hiatus followed by a string of DNFs and some non-fiction, I feel ready to come back to the Stormlight Archive. Restarting Oathbringer tonight!

Reading this for a book club. I just finished chapter 10. I guess there are no standards for published books anymore, and decent writing is no longer necessary.

"That wasn't crude," Lift noted. "That was being poetic.
Ol' Whitehair said you can't be crass, so long as you're talkin' ‘bout art. Then you're being elegant. That's why it's okay to hang pictures of naked ladies in a palace."

“I miss mother”
“Nice, eh?”
Mik looked at her, frowning.
“We get to remember ours. That’s more than most like us get.”

Perspective. This is why reading is so important to me.

“I always tell my clients, ‘Don’t be a hero. Always find a worse villain.’”

The world of PR and Politics is antithetical to medicine. This read so far is entertaining, maddening, and straight depressing all at once. Why are there people like this? Author included.

“You ready?” “of course,” said Syl. “I’m not the one we’ve been waiting on.”

Dalinar did not fight for his life. His life hadn’t been his own for years. He fought for Gavilar. He fought as he wished he had all those years ago, for the chance he had missed. In that moment between storms – when the rain stilled and the winds drew in their breaths to blow – he danced with the slayer of kings, and somehow he held his own.

A fool is a person who ignores information because it disagrees with desired results.

He had a certain tempting arrogance. Not the haughty pride of a highlord. Instead, the secure, stable sense of determination that whispered that no matter who you were-or what you did-you could not hurt him. Could not change him. He was. Like the wind and rocks were.

“There are those among you who assume I will flee, or be broken, because of this attack. They do not know me as well as they presume. Let the feast continue, for J wish to speak with each and every one of you. The words you hold may mock, but if you must laugh, do it while looking me in the eyes.”

"Do I know you?" Amaram asked.
"No," Wit said lightly, "but fortunately, you can add it to the list of many, many things of which you are ignorant."
"But now I've met you," Amaram said, holding out a hand.
"So the list is one smaller."
"Please," Wit said, refusing the hand. "I wouldn't want it to rub off on me."
"It?"
"Whatever you've been using to make your hands look clean. It must be powerful stuff indeed."

OH

"You must not despise them," Navani said.
"I don't hate them."
"You loathe their excess," she said, "and you are close to applying that emotion to them as well. They live the lives they have known, the lives that society has taught them are proper.
You won't change them with contempt. You aren't Wit; it isn't your job to scorn them. Your job is to enfold them, encourage them. Lead them, Dalinar."

My confidence in who is good and evil...or at least right vs wrong, is dwindling.

Do not mistake me in assuming I value one woman's role above another. My point is not to stratify our society--we have done that far too well already--my point is to diversify our discourse. A woman's strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role.

I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. For some, it will be the role of a scholar; for others, it will be the role of wife. For others, it will be both. For yet others, it will be neither.

They ignore the greater assumption--that a "place" for women must be defined and set forth to begin with. Half of the population must somehow be reduced to the role arrived at by a single conversation. No matter how broad that role is, it will be--by nature--a reduction from the infinite variety that is womanhood.

What is a woman's place in this modern world? I rebel against this question, though so many of my peers ask it. The inherent bias in the inquiry seems invisible to so many of them. They consider themselves progressive because they are willing to challenge many of the assumptions of the past.

For glory lit, and life alive, for goals unreached and aims to strive. All men must try, the wind did see. It is the test. It is the dream.

If you want to understand a people, learn their weapons. The way men kill one another says far more about a culture than any scholar's ethnography.

Oh. NO.

I can’t speak for other countries, but this was not a good resource for the ABP peds rheum sub boards.