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EDSA People Power Revolution (1986) - New General Megathread for the 24th-25th of February 2025

On this day in 1986, U.S.-backed Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos fled the country after days of millions protesting in the streets following rigged elections. The uprising is known as the EDSA, People Power, or Yellow Revolution.

Ferdinand Marcos had initially assumed power through a popular election in 1965. However, in 1972 he declared martial law during his second term, citing the threat posed by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and other rebel groups, effectively gaining dictatorial powers.

Marcos and his allies embezzled billions of dollars in state assets while the government persecuted and killed dissidents throughout the 1970s and early 80s, enjoying support from the U.S. In 1981, then Vice President George Bush commended Marcos for his "adherence to democratic principles".

In 1983, exiled opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino attempted to returned to the country, but was assassinated after landing at Manila International Airport. The shock of this event, alongside an economic crisis, compounded public anger, and civil resistance grew significantly in the following years.

In response to this pressure, Marcos announced that a snap presidential election would take place in February 1986. Ninoy Aquino's widow Corazon served as the main opposition candidate.

Official results from the election saw a victory for Marcos, but the vote saw widespread instances of fraud and intimidation, resulting in a walkout of workers at the national election monitor and a condemnation from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines.

Both candidates claimed victory, and Aquino called for civil disobedience and boycott of media and companies which supported Marcos. The "Reform the Armed Forces Movement", a group of dissenting military officers, plotted a coup, but were arrested by authorities.

On February 22nd, the Archbishop of Manila urged civilians via the Catholic radio station Radio Veritas to gather on a stretch of the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, (commonly known as "EDSA") in order to help to supply and support rebel officers.

Over the next few days, crowds ballooned, with approximately 2 million participating in total. Marcos ultimately backed down from using lethal force to disperse the crowds, and, faced with growing military defections, fled the country on February 25th, 1986. Corazon Aquino was inaugurated President the same day.

Although Marcos' dictatorship was brought to an end and the Philippines has maintained liberal rule as the Fifth Philippine Republic, extrajudicial killings and rampant corruption continued through Aquino's rule and beyond. Less than a year later, 12 people were killed by state forces in the Mendiola Massacre, when police fired on a farmers' march in Manila.

Researcher Mark John Sanchez writes: "In the years since 1986, the legacy of the People Power Revolution has remained uncertain...The agricultural and economic reform that many Filipinos hoped for in a post-Marcos world did not come. Peace talks with the Communist Party of the Philippines dissolved and leftists continued to be maligned, attacked, and hunted."

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310 comments

  • Playing Cyberpunk 2077

    Gotten kinda bored of the plot, currently running around killing random cops for xp

    See something weird on the ground

    Scan it. It's fresh blood.

    There's more.

    Follow the trail of blood.

    Thinking that I've stumbled into some kind of emergent or hidden quest

    Scanning every other object in the vicinity, looking for clues

    Find a body with a "broken katana"

    Spend an hour looking around the body for another clue.

    Finally give up and look it up.

    Turns out that was it. That's the whole entire Easter Egg.

    Every time this game threatens to get interesting it disappoints me.

    • That game gave you the greatest gift it can give, a few minutes where you didn’t have to hear the Cyberpunk 2077 dialogue. One thing that drove me a little crazy was people going “yeah the world is shallow and it’s currently buggy, but the plot is great so wait until it’s patched” and it’s just 30 hours of the most cliched dialogue on earth.

      Anyway, enjoyed it overall, I did a mantis blade/katana play through, and the charge ability basically turns you into a sci-fi horror monster 10/10

      • I've been enjoying it overall. After the blandness of Avowed it's really hitting the spot with its open world jank and lots of options. I started out doing a sniper build but I've switched over to being a full time stealth netrunner optic camo chick, basically triggering every single item in every room I walk into to explode and then taking out the guards in the chaos, it's great.

  • Americans are total socioptaths, snivelling cowards who lack what it takes to change anything that matters, or both. (I and i presume most other posters here fall into the "Snivelling coward" group)

    Honestly at this point I just kind of hate everyone and the tedious inevitability of human history. I loathe being stuck in the middle of all this, and I wish it'd all just end already.

    • This too shall pass

      • Not within my lifetime, I fear. They say to plant trees you'll never see the shade of, but what the hell am I supposed to do with the remaining 60 or so years of my life when i'm not doing that set-up work? I'm so thoroughly repulsed by everyone and everything that I want nothing to do with any of it.

  • Fuck work and corporate bullshit. The company I've been working for for the past few years is slowly but surely shitting the bed, and I've seen the writing on the wall for a while already. They've appointed like 10 new top-level managers and C-whatever-O roles that I hadn't even heard of five years ago to try and sort out the mess (obviously to no avail). Why couldn't they being replaced by AI instead? All they do is have ChatGPT do their "jobs" anyway while they pretend to be important. Fucking sick of this shit.

    So anyway I started blasting out job applications here and there a couple of weeks ago and this week I have an interview for a job that pays well enough that I could work 4 days a week for the same salary that I have now. I could have a whole extra free dedicated communism building day a week!

  • Me as a kid: Man, everyone in Pokémon is so weird. What kind of desperately lonely person goes on a hike and just externalizes their inner monologue to the first person they see? Let alone an entire world of such people, ha!

    Me now:

    • Replaying Sapphire you get the impression they live in a post scarcity eco friendly society where money is just for hobby stuff.

      Everyone is just bike riding, hiking or swimming or hanging out. Most barely care about pokemon battles either.

      • Just thought of this but what if pokedollars are specifically for trainers and can only buy Pokémon stuff and it's just part of how the Pokémon league works, like chips in a poker tournament except they aren't exchangable

    • me, whose entire personality is solo hiking and oversharing at work:

  • When I hung out with cats a few days ago, one of them walked across my lap and meowed at me, except her meow was so quiet it was like a creak. She was demanding I pet her so I pet her pretty constantly for the whole time I was there, and whenever I stopped she gave me the most accusatory look and I automatically said sorry and started again. She was five years old, which surprised me because she looked small enough to be an adolescent kitten. She had the funniest combination of being so small and quiet but so demanding at the same time.

  • Another moment from my current play-through of Cyberpunk 2077: I was heading to a fast travel point after doing the quest with the monks and I heard these cars revving and went to check it out. It was a pretty cool emergent scene actually - a huge crowd of people, a road flare, two cars getting ready to drag race. I took a spot in the crowd to watch.

    Then the race started, and the cars bumped each other, and the entire crowd immediately went into "flee from combat" mode. They ran towards the two cars, which were now stuck on each other, a bunch of people in other nearby cars drove off in random directions, some hitting each other, others ramping off the nearby low wall and going right into the water, and still others plowing into the stampede.

    Holy shit I laughed for five entire minutes.

  • I want a sequel show to Cowboy Bebop that has nothing to do with bounty hunters or gangsters or anything like that. Something like DS9, that would show more of the worldbuilding and history and politics of this future.

  • Re-establishing relationships after almost a decade family means I finally understand why I ran away lol.

    It's all good though, I see them 1week a year at max and I'm glad I rebuild those bridges but every once in a while they will say shit that I just cannot comprehend, a complete disregard for other human beings. It does break me a bit tbh but also reinforces my view that the western middle class is completely detached from reality, no matter what degrees they have (of anything, it just reinforces the walls they build around themselves.)

    Anyway just needed to get this of my chest, it's been going around in my head for a while.

  • Ctrl-c'ed in the middle of an Ubuntu upgrade AGAIN. I definitely should have known better this time, but it's definitely a major design flaw to have an upgrade system that fails in an unpredictable way and with no warning if you hit a button combo. Especially when the upgrade system drops you into an multiple different unfamiliar file editors/viewers.

    At least I knew how to recover it this time.

    • but it's definitely a major design flaw to have an upgrade system that fails in an unpredictable way and with no warning if you hit a button combo.

      It is wild, considering the default file system in Ubuntu is ext4 which isn't copy-on-write (they used to have ZFS but I guess they got cold feet). Get ready to fsck your evening anyway if any of the dozens of bad things that can happen do happen.

      Fedora is solving this issue with their atomic desktop (with things like Bazzite) and their full transition to a COW filesystem (btrfs) which I believe is the future if Linux is ever going to get out of the perception of being a hobbyist OS (even Windows doesn't update their system libraries one by one). Personally I use NixOS for this exact reason, package management should always be isolated from the running system and always be transactional.

      • Yeah, building everything and then just symlinking the newly built generation + restarting systemd services is so much cleaner. I tried the ZFS + "Erase your darlings" setup on one of my devices, although in hindsight I should have just used btrfs since it's in-tree. When zfs.latestCompatibleLinuxPackages got deprecated, I had to roll back to a previous kernel version which didn't have some AMD p-state improvements that came in the more recent kernel, that was mildly annoying. Maybe I'll try bcachefs sometime if I feel risky.

    • they don't have a trap for that? like, no "are you sure?" prompt whatsoever?

      i've had cli executables just not respect ctrl-c at all. firefox solves the kill misinput by allowing me to turn on an option to catch accidental ctrl-q's when I'm ctrl-w-ing. this is a solved problem. is it just inertia on strict principles? i.e. we respect the competence of the user and refuse to bubble wrap anything whatsoever for user speed? even if that's the case, make the prompt a toggle.

      • No prompt at all. I got to the point where it was said I had some large number of packages that weren't available for 24.04 and the prompt was like, "Is this ok? Yes/no/view list of packages". So I selected view list and it dumped me into a file viewer with no visual indication of how to close it(and a different viewer than the one to view config file diffs used earlier in the upgrade process). My brain immediately went to Ctrl-c.

        The first time I made this mistake it was much earlier in the install process and was a bigger mess to fix. This time all I had to do was apt autoremove and readd a few sources removed at the beginning of the install process.

  • I woke up this morning to find that I have eye bags. I've not been sleeping too well recently but I've slept worse in the past, so it's a surprise to see them now.

    Anyway I think eye bags are really attractive so I'm not complaining

  • I need to unveil my take about performers, because there have been enough discussions where they were brought up.

    Nobody's time is worth more than 100x that of another person. I don't care if you're a singer, or a sports star, or a surgeon, no one is really that developed that they deserve to be paid over 100x what the lowest-paid people make. If the federal minimum wage is 7.50 an hour, that means the maximum full-time earnings should be $2,250,000 if you're pulling 60-hour weeks. And honestly, this should be extended even further and applied across national boundaries, but to make this argument a national context should suffice.

    Sure, maybe these high salary (or elite gig) workers are not really exploiting anyone in making the money from tickets and contracts, but this disparity/concentration can only exist in the context of economic structures where a small minority control the flow of remuneration.

310 comments