Seems Duterte means business.

Here`s what I think his strategy is in order to keep his promise of wiping out drug cartels and the drug problem here..
Scare the Fu**** be jeezers out of them from the off!!
He did that from the start of his election campaign..How many surrendered and documented since???
An unprecedented amount!!
We have a Kubu near us that was full of Shabu users..Everyone knew what they were up to for a good few years.. Now??? Back to red horse!!
I even sent them over a bottle yesterday..
They are scared ****less and I dont blame them!

I appreciate your point. And its often tempting to support a hard line when you see immediate results.

I don't deny that people have surrendered. But at what cost? It's a big deal to take away someone's life, to take away all that they will ever be, and Duterte isn't God. To simply announce that drug dealers and drug users deserve death is taking it too far.

I am sure that you will agree that an alleged criminal is not a criminal, he is innocent, until he is proven guilty.

So he shouldn't be killed or threatened with death.

When an alleged criminal is tried and found guilty, he still has the right to the punishment that society has approved as being appropriate via a process.

The Philippines doesn't have the death penalty. And no-one has the right to deal out death in summary justice in the name of the country, without formally consulting the country first.

The only places that this sort of thing happens, is in a dictatorship. Which was my first point. That the line between leader and dictator becomes blurred once a leader ignores the law.

I dont agree.. The term "extrajudicial" applies to any killing that is not brought down by a judge duly authorized by a government justice department.
As you say there is no death penalty here at present so ANY murder or killing that goes unsolved is an extrajudicial killing..
I attended the mass of a German here that was murdered in that way by drug users and I could tell you about many such incidents..
These cases were never heard about in the senate,and not even in the lower courts as the Police didnt even have the killings correctly entered in the blotter!!
What`s worse was that most murders were not even in the local press...I know as I have scanned the online press sheets and hard copies.
The international human rights lot?? Ha ha.. Forget it!
Its very easy for those living a superior life with a superior justice system in the first world to point the finger at 3rd world developing nations but come and live here for a few years and look at how your perfect perspective begins to change.

We are looking at this from different viewpoints.

Were I in your position, living in the Philippines, I would probably support a tough stance on law and order and it's not surprising that you do.

I have a number of times considered buying a beach resort and how I might react to fishermen destroying the coral looking for food, whilst I wished to preserve it for my divers (for example).

You're up close and personal with the problem, and that leads you to disregard the rights and wrongs of it, or at least believe that the wrongs are justifiable.

You just want things to be better for you and yours and OK at any cost to others. It's a natural human emotion. But it's not the way that a complex society should be run.

So. Your young daughter is 19 and in the prime of her life. She is at university. You are worried. You know that they do drugs there in some quarters. You love her dearly. She is the apple of your eye. Your baby girl. You say to her before she leaves to return for the next semester. Darling, be careful. I will dada, she replies and off she goes.

As she waved goodbye you swore to yourself that you would kill any man that harmed her.

Mid semester she meets a boy. He comes from a wealthy family. A couple of years older than her. She is besotted with him. He does drugs. A bag or two of heroin a week. She did not know he did drugs, but by the time she finds out it is too late as she is head over heels in love with him. She didnt know that he sold a portion of what he bought on, to fund his habit.

Unfortunately, one day she gets caught up in a trademark killing spree. Wrong place, wrong time. Somebody had pointed him out.

To some, another job well done by the new regime. A price worth paying. But she is your baby girl. Or was.

Then what?

Would you still advocate extra judicial killing by the state?

..and now we have some acknowledged common ground.. please let me ask.. Can we stop with the expletives. We have ladies on the forum and it's offensive.

So where do you live now?

Well the NY Daily News is simply quoting the Guardian's "story" which in turn takes as its source AFP's news wire, as did every other media organisation that ran that story. It is alleged that Duterte said those words in a slum area to an audience of 500 after his inauguration ceremony. It's more than a fair bet that there would have been many scribblers accompanying him and reporting on the events of the day and what he says. So, how is it that AFP is the sole source for this incendiary statement? Sorry, it is not credible that only the AFP scribbler heard Duterte utter those words. I am very wary of single-source stories such as this.

I agree with most what you say here. And we should remember that Duterte was elected in a landslide victory with more people voting for him than for any of his predecessors. After the corruption and cronyism of recent administrations, they've voted for a hard man, a dictator even; a lot of the older folk actually want a return to the Marcos era.

but it is for the future generations that the foundation stones and building blocks need to be forged, by what means the landslide vote has determined.

How phrophetic! Think it was the head gasket.

Thanks for getting the gentleman to edit out the profanities and threats. I thought for a moment I was being confronted with the death squad itself.

hmm. Not being a journalist I didn't realize that papers quoted from each other without checking the story independently. If all the reports indeed come from a single source then you have a point. However it seems unlikely to me that all the stories about the United States and the United nations expressing concern are also untrue and straws tend to show the way the wind blows..

here is another perspective on the drug problem:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/25/asia/philippines-police-knock-and-plead-drug-operations/

..and paying off terrorists is never a good idea:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/philippine...an-hostage-duterte-reveals-by-mistake-1578117

Time goes by. You are expecting your daughter's body back home for burial. You hear from her boyfriend's family. You hear yourself saying that you want revenge and the boy is the focus of your attention. Then you hear from his family. You are angry with them and then they explain that their son, like your daughter was an innocent boy, that went to university and got caught up with the wrong people. Visits to the cafes outside university started off with alcohol, progressed to soft drugs and so on.

You begin to wonder. He came from a good home.

Meantime your wife and younger daughter and relatives are distraught. Their world has caved in. Your younger daughter says "why daddy", "why did this happen?" "Why was my sister killed in this way - she was innocent".

You think of your gun in the bedroom. You had sworn that you would kill any man that harmed your daughter. Your focus now turns to the perpetrator.....

I must be missing something important.

Which (banned) user do the mods think that @FreddieB is?

My name is Frederick.

My wife has just applied for a spouse visa, as I explained in an earlier post. We await the outcome.

I disagree with extra judicial killing. Apologies for the offence.