IN his recent best-selling books “Sapiens” and “Nexus”, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari expounds his central thesis: That mankind’s ability to cooperate in large numbers, even if they do not know or meet each other as in primitive societies, is because they share stories, fictions, which include religions, legal systems and even economies.

“These create a nexus of meaning that binds societies together,” Harari noted.

Zoom in to the most important level of social organization in the modern era, the nation. Harari’s insight was earlier advanced by Benedict Anderson, the late Anglo-Irish political scientist, historian and scholar of Southeast Asia, in his 1983 pioneering book, “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.”

Anderson defines nations as “imagined communities” because members of a nation will never know most of their fellow citizens, yet they feel a deep sense of belonging and connection. “This sense of unity is constructed through shared myths, symbols, language and media rather than direct personal relationships,” Anderson explained.

IT is one of the biggest hoaxes among false historical narratives: the claim that the 1734 map drawn by Jesuit missionary Pedro Murillo Velarde depicted Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masinloc) as part of Las Islas de las Filipinas that was a Spanish colony, and therefore what was ceded to the US in 1898 as Philippine territory included it.

The hoax is one of the five fallacies* widely disseminated by the Americans and their puppets here to create Sinophobia in the country, each of which I will debunk in this series. I dare Antonio Carpio, the main purveyor of these lies, and the robotic Jay Tarriela to disprove my assertions.

This Scarborough-is-ours narrative has been spread since 2017 principally by former justice Antonio Carpio and repeated uncritically by journalists and diplomats. It is a cleverly manufactured lie.

THE strategy by an expensive law firm to dismiss a prominent personality’s cyber libel conviction on the claim that the prescriptive period — the period up to when a legal action may be filed or instituted — has expired, may sound legalistic and compassionate, but it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of both law and logic.

The argument disregards the nature of the internet, the deliberate structure of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, and the continuing damage that online defamation inflicts. To uphold such reasoning would not protect press freedom; it would reward irresponsibility and encourage the very abuse of digital platforms the law was designed to prevent.

Cyber libel is not ordinary libel. It is a new offense defined under Republic Act (RA) 10175, the Cybercrime Prevention Act, which explicitly raises the penalty for libel committed “through a computer system” by one degree higher than that under the Revised Penal Code (RPC).

TOURISM Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco should do the honorable thing: resign. Under her watch, the Philippines’ tourism recovery has stalled while every Asean neighbor — Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia —…

WELL, the truth in essence is that the criticisms are brazen propaganda fake news, accepted as true by the naïve and intellectually lazy, and spread most recently by Makati Business Club Executive Director Apa Ongpin.

I’m glad though that there has been a revolution in media that we call social media, which has encouraged intelligent people to disseminate their research and analysis, spreading truth to counter the biased reportage of traditional media.

There are several factors that allow such social media commentators to write very truthful and accurate analytical pieces. First, they’re not subject to potential and actual censorship by the big business owners of traditional media. Second, most of them are not full-time journalists, and are professionals and in fields (academic for instance) that have given them the intellectual tools and body of knowledge to be able to write knowledgeably about an issue, instead of believing what ruling-class propaganda says. And third, unlike newspaper opinion pieces that are required not to exceed 1,200 words because of the obvious space constraints, social media commentators can write more words (at least on Facebook) to fully explain their views, with the only constraint being their calculation of the reader’s attention span.

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s disapproval rating of 44 percent as of September, as reported by the PulseAsia pollster, may actually be worse, and may have even touched 20 percent more — the level former president Estrada had which, together with massive demonstrations, gave the military establishment the excuse to tell him to resign.

Political scientists have long known what pollsters rarely admit: when the subject is a head of state, approval ratings are systematically inflated — by as much as 10 to 20 percentage points. Or applied inversely, becomes deflated, which means roughly that much worse scores in his disapproval ratings to correct because of that bias.

That is, if Pulse Asia reported that 44 percent disapproved of Marcos’ performance, his actual rating would be 10 to 20 percentage points more, 54 to 64 points — a loud get-out-of-there-now number.

I SUSPECTED the day President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordered the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) created that it was his move to divert the investigations and public attention over the ghost flood control scam away from his culpability.

Just two weeks after the ICI was set up, Baguio Mayor Benjamin Magalong, a former veteran police investigator who had been exposing corruption in his region, resigned after that unpleasant Palace spokesman claimed he was just an “adviser,” not an “investigator.” Why should she make that distinction?

Magalong got the message: the Palace doesn’t want him to investigate to its end the ghost flood control corruption. Sources claimed Magalong was set to investigate the flood control projects in Ilocos Norte, where the Discaya couple’s companies accounted for P2.7 billion of the projects. Another construction firm owned by a Marcos ally also cornered much of the projects there.