If I were the Liberal Party, I’d be congratulating myself. After five years they have successfully dumbed down public discourse, selling us the true, the good, the beautiful about matuwid na daan, making us believe that it is all we need, handling criticism and crises via spin, always using notions of anticorruption and transparency to respond to anything at all. (more…)
If there’s anyone that I am now afraid might win the 2016 elections—because who knows what kind of electorate we have at this point—it is Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.
Yes, there are pros and cons for all the presidential candidates and the possibility that each will win. But what Duterte promises are such simple, commonsensical things. What he promises are things that all presidential candidates should be promising, and they should be promising it with a progam to back it up. A holistic take on peace and order and public safety that need not fall back on action star rhetoric, and need not mean committing every human rights violation imaginable. (more…)
I was never sold on the idea of the Davao Death Squads executing and salvaging “criminals.” The notion that it is the failure of the legal process that has encouraged the existence of the DDS, the idea that it is the failure of the law to bring these criminals to justice that justifies these extrajudicial killings, just does not fly with me. (more…)