Always best to go out on a low note.
RT:
The Philippines’ controversial leader Rodrigo Duterte has said that he will not run for vice-president of the country in the 2022 election, but will instead retire from politics altogether.
Duterte, who has been president since 2016, is ineligible to seek another term in the next year’s presidential vote.
His ruling PDP-Laban party instead nominated the 76-year-old for the position of vice-president.
But Duterte announced on Saturday that he won’t be running for VP, saying that he had made this decision in response to the “public’s wishes.”
“Today, I announce my retirement from politics,” he said, appearing at the Commission on Elections center in capital Manila alongside loyalist Senator Christopher ‘Bong’ Go, who was registered PDP-Laban party’s candidate for vice-president instead.
“The overwhelming… sentiment of the Filipinos is that I am not qualified and it would be a violation of the constitution to circumvent the law, the spirit of the constitution” to run for the vice presidency, he insisted.
Duterte’s decision to exit the race could clear the way for his daughter Sara Duterte-Carpio to run for the top job in the country.
Duterte-Carpio earlier said that she wouldn’t be seeking the presidency because she had agreed with her father that only one of them would participate in the national election on May 9, 2022. Duterte’s absence from the ballot could therefore now allow her to enter the race.
Incidentally, the 43-year-old replaced her father as the mayor of Davao City when Duterte became the Philippines president five years ago. She also served as the city head between 2010 and 2013.
I lived in Davao in the late 00s. Sara is Rody. There is no difference.
So if you like being locked in your house and force-vaxed, vote Sara.
If not, I think it’s time to give Manny a shot.
I loved Duterte and I was probably his single most vocal English-language supporter. I liked that he was over-riding the judicial system and slaughtering drug addicts.
But then came the virus hoax, and Duterte used the fact that he’d removed all the organs of Republicanism to force people into their houses and then try to force vax them (he failed to force vax a large portion of Catholics who resisted).
This was a learning experience for me, which I am fully willing to admit. I haven’t really had any significant changes of basic understandings since the first 18 or so months when I started this website at the age of 28, but the closest thing to such a change was when Duterte went full virus hoax.
I have never been “anti-freedom,” and think that the fake right-wingers who claim “freedom is bad” are either deranged morons or FBI informants. But I have had a good amount of respect for authoritarianism, and strongmen doing what needs to be done to protect the country.
I lived in the Philippines and I knew how bad the drug problem was. (In particular and more or less exclusively crystal meth, for anyone wondering.) I thought it was a fantastic idea to just slaughter these people, and the thought that 1% (or likely much less) of those killed were innocent did not bother me. It was a crisis in the country, and collateral damage is collateral damage.
But then the virus hoax came, and Duterte went completely insane. He locked down the entire country, something which has led to starvation among every other problem.
And you might be saying: “oh well, democracies did the same thing, so this isn’t related to authoritarianism.”
Well, it is in the Philippines. Before Duterte, there was effectively no real law in the Philippines. It was a more or less 100% free country, like a kind of Wild West situation. The only way that the virus hoax was possible in the Philippines was that Duterte had transformed the country into an authoritarian state to fight the drug war, and then that system was used to fight a fake virus and try to force vax people.
I already understood the importance of freedom. But this Philippines debacle really made me move up “freedom” on my scale of importance. You must have FREEDOM, and you cannot ever sacrifice it – at least not completely – for any reason.
Duterte could have declared martial law and deployed the military to deal with the drug issue. It wouldn’t have been as efficient. But allowing him to simply start ordering police to execute people, completely bypassing any form of basic law, was wrong.
If you allow this sort of thing, you are playing Russian Roulette, and with Duterte, the Flips got their brains blown out, Deer Hunter style, when Duterte bought into this virus hoax.
This issue of freedom is a philosophically complex question, because I fully understand that the families who were living with the violence of the drug state before Duterte were having their freedom to live a normal and safe life restricted, and that by opening up the program of mass extra-judicial killings, Duterte gave these families freedom they didn’t have by making their neighborhoods safe.
But I mean – he also banned smoking. In Manila bars. It’s the single most air-polluted city outside of India, and he banned smoking in bars. (He also restricted gun rights.)
We should have known when he did that that things had gotten out of control.
I don’t have a clear conclusion here, other than to say that right-wingers who support total authoritarianism are stupid and childish. If there was ever an excuse for this system, it was Manila circa 2014. But we now know that led to lockdowns, starvations, and forced vaxes.
I am hereby endorsing Manny Pacquiao over Sara Duterte.
That will clearly be yet another disaster – Manny is not a genius, and has a lot of kind of weird views – but the Philippines is always in some state of disaster. What it will definitely do, however, is remove this authoritarian lockdownism and vaxism.
And before anyone says “this third world stuff doesn’t relate to white countries” – that is bullshit. I can’t really go into it for at least another decade or so, but I lived in Davao, and I knew a lot of people involved with the Duterte provincial government, and I was well liked. The discussions were identical to any on any right-wing forum. I believed in this, which is why I supported him so adamantly. I now see that this kind of political thought can lead to total and complete disaster – lockdowns and forced vaxes.
Obviously – obviously, obviously, obviously – democracy also can and actually always will lead to that. Total personality cult authoritarianism is better than Western democracy, for sure. I’m not arguing that point. But this is all complicated, and people who simplify it are doing it because they’re stupid and/or emotionally incapable of dealing with complexity. Or in the case of the neo-Nazis who supported Anthony Fauci and vaxes and lockdowns – such as Richard Spencer and the rest of his crew – they are FBI operatives, who prey on people who are stupid and emotionally unstable.
You should have been suspicious when you realized that neo-Nazis were endorsing a gang of Jews.
You have to have freedom.
God made us free, and our governments have no right to take that from us.
Note: Don’t expect these articles to get better any time today.