Duterte, Citing Hitler, Says He Wants to Kill 3 Million Addicts in Philippines

[Elheru Aran]

Time for an extended trip overseas perhaps?

[Simon_Jester]

And I think this thread should just stay where it is. For gripes to be shared.

I for one am definitely listening.

I'm sorry you have to go through such a terrible time. Almost everybody deserves better than this.

[Dragon Angel]

Yeah... This sounds like Hell on Earth. Be safe, Shroomy.

[mr friendly guy]

Isn't Shroomy a nurse. Australia is always looking for foreign medical stuff. If its starting to become unsafe Australia might be a place to look into for a "working holiday."

[Broomstick]

Plenty of Filipino nurses in the US, for that matter, and a lot of other places. It's a very portable skill.

[Zaune]

I'd suggest the UK, but in the present political climate that wouldn't be much of an improvement.

[Broomstick]

The thing is, if you're a nurse your job skills are in global demand, you have more options to move to other places than many other people do.

[Zixinus]

Just because you can do a job that is needed elsewhere does not mean that it is easy to move to another country. It is a rather expensive risk and leaving a country means leaving friends and family behind.

[Broomstick]

True.

Having such a skill merely makes it possible to move elsewhere. It does not make it easy.

Lacking such a skill, though, means you do not have that option.

[Prannon]

Shroom, if my sig says anything, it's good to have you back in any capacity. I would like to add my voice to those sincerely hoping that you stay safe.

[Flagg]

Why should Shroom have to leave? He's not the asshole.

[Simon_Jester]

Are you joking?

[LaCroix]

Why? Because the world would be a poorer place without him around...

Stay save, Shroom!

[Shroom Man 777]

I don't want the people who put "DUTERTE" and "CHANGE IS COMING" stickers on their fucking Humvees to get the satisfaction? Because I know people who, after voting for the guy, are saying things like "ffffuuuuck better move out of the country" even though they were warned that he was a shit choice... that he himself in his campaign was being cheered for (rhetorically) promising to fill Manila Bay with corpses.

What are they gonna do? Remove those stickers from their Humvees... and put them on their traveling suitcases as they go for extended vacations to Europe? They're not the ones who are gonna get hit by this because they sip their fucking frappuccinos and live in gated communities and drive around in stupid Subhuman Utility Vehicles. (Sure, I am not mentioning a lot of desperate people who put their hopes into Duterte... who got duped and some of whom are now becoming victims of this war on the poor... blood and circuses that he does to gain political capital... on the very same people he's actually harming.)

I don't want them to win. (And the Marcos apologists too who are just dancing in the moonlight.) Especially when I know deep in their hearts lots of them are regretting their choices and I guess subconsciously that's why they're actually verbally lashing out at people who are bothering to speak out against this. It's like the metamorphosis of the whole alt-right redpill rhetoric against "It's these damn SJWs!" because I actually know some idiots were even like "oh no SJWs are here!" when university kids were demonstrating against the street killings. The backlash against the protests were mostly not even "fucking SJWs" but were... deranged caricatures that equated "no summary killings" and "human rights pls" to... people somehow siding with the criminal syndicates while somehow being against the police (you know, similar to those anti-Black Lives Matter idiots who somehow think protesting against systemic discrimination and violence means that people want Simon Phoenix to murder-death-kill John Spartan and the rest of Future San Francisco's namby pamby police department... Demolition Man reference...)

People are bitching because there are young educated people who are bothering to speak out against people being killed - people from the lower economic classes that others would just automatically judge as dregs and addicts and pushers and criminals who had it coming.

For fucks sake.

I wanna be there to just shit on these total tools.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh and apparently in one of the recent weeks, there was a wake in a nearby chapel and apparently he was also a supposed thief and a supposed user who got killed.

And someone told me that the guy who got killed a few blocks away? Supposedly it was actually cops who did him in, in his own house, after they previously caught some other person who told them that this guy's a dealer.

...and another source told me that these people are operating on a quota.

[Lord Revan]

This is starting to sound more and more like this guys is intentionally trying "burn down the house" by screwing up the nation so badly that if there's any survivors after his regime has ended they're too few and don't have the resources to to do anything but die as anything resembling a working nation has been utterly destroyed.

[K. A. Pital]

It would take much more than this to destroy a whole nation-state.

[Lord Revan]

It would take much more than this to destroy a whole nation-state.

I know, that's why I said "trying".

[madd0ct0r]

No. not at all. He's binding people to him. The killers, whether policemen or vigilantes, now have a rock solid reason to ensure he stays in power. The citizens have a rock solid reason for not drawing attention to themselves, don't rock the boat, self censor anything that could draw the wrong attention. As shroom says, the next stage is attempting to smother people around you. "My son is out protesting. I think he's right, but more than that I want him to survive the next decade. So i undermind him and lock him down. At least he's safe right?"

All of this builds towards the cult of personality, and the dull acceptance that tomorrow will be very like today, so better keep your head down and support the status quo, lest the status quo visit you in the dead of night. It's the confidence trick to end all confidence trick, and the only long term solution will involve imperfect justice, with a lot of these murderers being allowed off in the name of a brighter future.

[Broomstick]

Why should Shroom have to leave? He's not the asshole.

Shroom should not have to leave.... but it's good to have options.

What can I say? My ancestors choose life in permanent exile over remaining in place and dying. I sincerely hope it does not come to that.

[Shroom Man 777]

The nation-state doesn't have to be "destroyed." That's a too optimistic view, some kind of refuge in audacity and some cathartic "end" of it all. The more pessimistic view is that this just becomes the new normal, a degradation and continuation of the pre-existing violence, oligarchic-impunity, inequality, and state-sanctioned violence that was already occurring in the past administrations (but to differing degrees and certainly without the head of state's blatant endorsement... at least the honesty and candor and relish is appreciated? We finally see ourselves for what we are?) and an acceptance of it.

And... I previously linked to a piece quoting Duterte saying that he cannot dissociate from the Marcoses because his father was a Marcos man... apparently it was an incomplete quote because right before that, he outright said that his campaign was bankrolled by the Marcoses. Ugh.

"Sino sa inyo ang nag-suporta sa akin? Ilan lang? 4, 5, 6? Wala akong barangay captain, wala akong congressman, wala akong pera. Si Imee pa ang nagbigay. Sabi niya inutang daw niya. Si Imee supported me."

["Who amongst you supported me? How many? 4, 5, 6? I had no barangay captain, I had no congressman, I had no money. It was Imee [Marcos] who gave. She said she's loaning it. Imee supported me."]

Imee Marcos is the daughter of Ferdinand Marcos. Once, back in the 1970s, during a gathering, some student activist [ Archimedes Trajano] stood up and directly questioned her - in her face - as to why she was qualified to be in the leadership position of this student organization.

Her security detail then took him away and killed him.

Birds of the same feather eh.

[Flagg]

Are you joking?

No. I mean practically, yeah it's probably safer to leave if he's under real threat. But from a moral standpoint? He's not the asshole, why should he have to abandon his home and his country because some thug prick took office and ordered mass summary executions of <insert undesirable to said asshole here>?

[Shroom Man 777]

You're a dick Flagg but you've got balls.

Duterte and the rest of his ilk can't be allowed to win. We can't give them, or let them have, anything more. He and people like him around the world - either through the systematic buckling of the neoliberal paradigm thus the resulting discontent that they, through parallel-evolution, are harnessing simultaneously... or through some loose but semi-coordinated movement (he has professed his love to China and Russia... for some reason people are saying Putin is somehow assisting Trump's campaign... is this just Russophobia or is there something else to it?) - are gaining ground. People can't allow them to go further. People like him are the result of mistakes, global mistakes, local mistakes, post-colonial mistakes, islander regionalistic mistakes in the case of Duts, etc. But ugh. Like Farange, they emerged from discontent over the pigfuckers but what they'll do is something worse than pigfuckery. We're all gonna be porkchops when they get through with us.

As a consequence of his stupid Mugabe/Idi Amin/Chavez-like rhetoric that makes me, a guy who got a Murcan militarist jingoist fuckface to wish I get super-herpes before he threw racial slurs at me, wince and grimace. While his fanbase are sharing such insightful critiques of US policies from fucking Assadists. Jesus Christ. This is loathesome.

Meanwhile people I know, Chinese-Filipinos, who've gone abroad are playing this model minority card and being fucking Uncle Toms drinking the anti-immigration and "what racism those whiny minorities and irritable people of color are shouting about nothing" kool aid. Utterly disappointing.

[Simon_Jester]

I think there is a pattern beyond the Russophobia, though it's not a thing centered on Russia.

There were people who said 1991 was "the end of history," that democratic capitalism had won out over dictatorial communism. They were very, very wrong about at least half of that statement. Because dictatorship doesn't evaporate, it just... evolves.

There is a type of thuggo-capitalist dictatorship that works very well from the point of view of the global elite, not as well as a 'tame' democracy but a lot better than an 'un-tame' one. It survived the fall of fascism by becoming anti-communist and survived the fall of communism by ingratiating itself with the US-dominated world order. It helped that within the US there are plenty of powerful men who would honestly be more comfortable and happier in such dictatorships.

Putin's been operating on that basis for nearly twenty years. Marcos used to; Duterte does now. Trump in the US is trying to, with less success for a variety of reasons.

Men like this... they look each other in the eye, and they get a sense of each other's soul. And they recognize the similarity, the emptiness and inability to respect or value other humans. And they help each other. Because they all know that they are in some sense powerful aliens, ruling over a truly human humanity, through force and trickery.

Once upon a time, a lawyer fell off a boat into deep water and was in grave danger. And a shark swam up, and gently gripped him, and brought him to shore like a dolphin, and released him in shallow water, and he was saved. And the people ran up to the lawyer, asking "How did you survive? Why didn't the shark eat you?"

And the lawyer replied... "Professional courtesy."

[Shroom Man 777]

I recognize the duality in which China, Russia and other states espouse their multipolar world order for legitimate understandable reasons (NATO betrayal in the 90s-2000s) as insurance against intervention and intrusion.

But we also all know that they also do this so that in their order there will be the whole "mind your own business" state of affairs when it comes to the domestic matters of these countries. On one hand, they are afraid that human rights issues will be used as a pretext for Western hegemonies' strong arming... but on the other hand, it is precisely because of this that we see and are frustrated by the UN and other bodies' lack of ability to do much about horrible things going on across the world.

The West isn't blameless and in a way, it brought about a self-fulfilling prophecy. The resurrection of the belligerent Russia boogeyman was, IMO, largely on their hands. Russia's return to great power status, it's pushing its weight around, etc. was inevitable... but it didn't have to be like this.

Anyway, as Slavoj Zizek said, this is the spectre of PUTOGAN. The Putins and Edrogans and other such type of strongman rightwing psychofucker, toxic masculinity irradiating entire countries. How ironic that now they've put aside their little tiff and are sort of reconciling.