Duterte - "Corrupt journalists will be killed"

He shoots from the hip...."BS to them"

"I never signed that!" - so every treaty signed and ratified by the Philippines is worthless?

I have to admit that he does have a point. I Feel that the UN has been pretty useless for decades. Too much talk and too little action.

Duterte doesn't kow-tow to anyone.
Trump says what he thinks, and he likes Putin too.
Interesting times.

http://www.rappler.com/nation/135253-no-more-press-briefings-president-duterte

His minders don't trust him in front of the Press any longer.

Good decision, but if a man cannot be trusted to talk to the Press, what may he be trusted with?

Sorry to have to say this, Andrew, but you are making a mountain out of a mole-hill. He will still get his message out and in his own way. He has chosen a means of speaking directly to the electorate with him having full editorial control by by-passing the partisan press who could distort his message. And if you think that he won't in future be giving press interviews, he will. He is his own man and won't be told what he can and can not do - or say. He has been doing a similar thing in Davao for at least the last six years where he has his own TV show on Sunday mornings.

I am only sorry to be missing tomorrow's party: promises to be quite an event!

He seems to be somewhat tired and emotional in that clip.

No, no, that's vintage Duterte. Seen similar many times on local TV. Don't let appearances or his mannerisms fool you!

It would appear from statements made by Bong Go, Duterte's executive assistant that it was Duterte himself who decided that he would use PTV4 as his news release vehicle, not his staff. The decision apparently only affects TV and not print media who will still be invited to press conferences but only PTV4 will be able to broadcast them. ABS-CBN and GMA are to be excluded for the time being due to their partisan reporting.

He does bring some fun to the proceedings

Please do not shoot the messenger!

I don't speak Visayan so rely on my wife to translate whatever Duterte says (on TV) and I trust her to do so accurately. When his words are translated into English by news journalists and stories assembled, many of those journalists take points totally out of context. This may be down to laziness or be deliberate and is often the case with interviews that are conducted by text message, the contents of a single text will be printed standalone whilst those that came before and after it - and which may put the "used message" into context - are ignored.

In Davao, drug offenders are offered a simple choice: rehab or jail and indeed Davao is the only city in the country where drug addicts can receive treatment and rehabilitation free of charge. There is a long-standing policy in that city whereby anyone who uses an offensive weapon - whether or not they actually use it - is fair game to be shot at by the Police who are trained and instructed to wound rather than kill. But if a criminal shoots at a Police Officer and wounds or kills him, then the Police can shoot to kill. There is, however, no bounty paid to the Police but they are slightly better paid than elsewhere, their guns have bullets, they have body armour available to them, working two-way radios, helicopter backup and fuel for their vehicles; other Police forces may lack one or more of those facilities. In short Davao's Police are well resourced and supported which contributes to the city being the safest in the country.

Elsewhere organised crime gangs are far better resourced than the Police but Police Officers and others including local politicians, prosecutors and judges are paid-off so that the gangs can go about their business with impunity. The Police have been promised a huge pay rise but that will take quite some time before it is fully-implemented.

Davao City's Chief of Police will become the country's most senior Police Officer and what I believe Duterte actually announced was that his offensive weapons policy would be applied countrywide and because many PNP Officers accept bribes, he has to counter that with his own offer of 'tea money'. Hence the "bounty" which has been reported as a licence to kill by scurrilous scribes. But I read that Duterte is considering an immediate doubling of PNP and PAF pay rather than introduce a bounty system nationwide.

In fact Duterte's initiative has been pre-empted by Mayor-elect Tomas Osmena who upon election announced that he would pay bounties. As you can see from this Facebook entry, he has kept to his word:

Extract from Osmena's Facebook page which has more than 250,000 "likes"
​

The PNP in Cebu City have confirmed killing at least 15 drug suspects, including Secretaria and his group, since May 24. All those deaths occurred, the PNP insists, because the suspects fought back, and that there were no illegal killings.

There is a fine line between enforcing law and order and acting like a tyrant. Filipinos trust Duterte to do the former but if he becomes the latter, then my voice will join those who oppose him.

Mark sees Honest Rod the Good Mayor, who is much misunderstood and quoted out of context by what some of my pro-Duterte Filipino friends see as a Huge Liberal Conspiracy in the media.

Such as this:

http://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/opinion/who’s-afraid-of-leni-robredo/ar-BBtPS11?li=BBr8Mkn&ocid=iehp

Quelle dommage! Sacre blue! Zoots alors and other expressions of faux outrage!

Oh dear, poor Leni, a bright young thing supposedly denied a Cabinet job simply because she is a Liberal. I've news for you: she has an automatic position in Duterte's Cabinet by dint of her election as Vice President. That he has not given her an additional portfolio is his choice - and his alone. I may be wrong but I don't believe that Binay held a portfolio additional to that of Vice President in Aquino's administration right up until the former's resignation (from the Cabinet) last year.

Your intense dislike of Duterte is, I believe, predicated purely on the fact that he garnered 6.6 million more votes than your man despite posting your (friends') assertions that Duterte would be a "spoiler candidate" whose campaign "would go nowhere". This is heightened by your (friends') total opposition to Duterte appointing some of Arroyo's people, dynastic enemies of the Aquinos and the Liberals. You were in fact quite neutral towards the Mayor of Davao until it became apparent that not only was he standing for the Presidency but that he might go on to steal the crown from Roxas.

You are obsessed with him. I am not.

Binay held the same Cabinet posts under Aquino as his predecessor, Noli de Castro, had held under Arroyo, until he resigned, with the addition of special responsibility for OFWs.

Thank you for the correction, Andrew. I knew about De Castro's extra responsibilities but I was uncertain as to whether or not Binay had any. Not that his OFW brief did him much good; most apparently elected Duterte.

With the tacit help of fearfull men and hypocrits Oss thus it ever was

This is in the London Review of Books, this week.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/neal-ascherson/hopping-in-his-matchbox

It's a very good read. One of my Filipina friends, Tina Cuyugan, cited it on her Facebook page. The point that she is making will become clear as you read.

Thinking further...

In my twenties, I visited Hamburg regularly on business. I was calling on the old established Hamburg tug and salvage company Bugsier Reederei und Bergungs AG who like Luzon Stevedoring were clients of my employers, the London firm of maritime lawyers Constant and Constant.

Bugsier were delightful people. I fell in love with them and with their city, and one of the things I liked about Hamburg was the wide green spaces. Only later, visiting my friend Martin Schulz, did I realise that Hamburg owed this town planning to the Royal Air Force's firestorm bombing of the port city.

Now, the reason for all those horrible bombing raids - aimed at the civilian population, because the RAF had realised that its bombing was always inaccurate, was simple bureaucracy. Britain had set out, at vast cost, to build a huge fleet of heavy bombers, intended as the only form of retaliation available to an island nation fighting on its own, and having built them, the Government could either admit a very costly blunder, or use them. The fact that everyone knew that bombing was inaccurate was turned into the horrible theory of " area bombing"; Britain's very own war crime, because that was easier than not using the bombers that we had built.

This led me to a general theory of bureaucracy as a force in human affairs. Bureaucratic processes are immensely dangerous, and the danger is very seldom recognised in time, because we are taught to look for "leaders" who display "leadership".

Tina's point is that the German bureaucracy "worked towards" what it thought Adolf Hitler, a lazy and sloppy thinker, might perhaps want, and this, not anything special in the psychological make up of Hitler, was responsible for the later excesses of Nazism. Generations of historians were looking in the wrong place.

The German bureaucracy under Hitler is discussed in this article but the same goes for the Russian and the Chinese bureaucracies under Stalin and Mao, and on a smaller scale this explains the behaviour of the many admirable technocrats who served Marcos.

Let's not let it happen again.

Edited to add:

I will now get in quick and cite Godwin's Law before Mark does. Yes, I know I have just referred to Hitler. I am not saying that Duterte is another Hitler, nor was Tina. She was pointing out that his habit of sloppy thinking is OK in a mayor but is dangerous in a President who is surrounded by ambitious and capable bureaucrats...

Any response other than to point out that you have broken Jenkin's Law and by so doing, lost the argument, could result in my untimely and involuntary exit.