Stay classy, Philippines:
The newly elected Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, urged a crowd of about 500 people on Thursday to kill drug addicts, according to the Guardian.
“If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful,” he told people in a Manila slum he was visiting after taking his presidential oath.
Duterte has not shied away from making other rather shocking requests to the public. Early last month, the former lawyer and mayor made similar comments urging citizens to fight crime by turning in and even killing suspected drug dealers.
“If a drug dealer resists arrest or refuses to be brought to a police station and threatens a citizen with a gun or a knife, “you can kill him,” Duterte said in a nationally televised speech in early June. “Shoot him and I’ll give you a medal.”
But in what seems to be an escalation, the 71-year-old president is now suggesting that the responsibility for the country’s drug problem rests with addicts themselves and that killing them would be good business for funeral parlors.
“I assure you you won’t go bankrupt. If your business slows I will tell the police, ‘Do it faster to help the people earn money,’ ” he told the crowd.
I could say a lot of things, but I won’t.
There are a lot of people in a lot of places electing a lot of terrible leaders.
If the people of the Philippines start following this advice, however, I want Rodrigo Duterte in the Hague immediately. And, until he’s securely docked there, I expect a full embargo of his country. Give him the full Iran treatment. This man should be no ally of the American people, or any other people for that matter.
Couldn’t agree more. This guy runs a country? That’s fucked up.
Has he endorsed Trump yet?
For that matter…has Trump endorsed him?
Wait for it.
AG
In fact, I hear Duterte’s on Trump’s VP short list.
Trump says he wants a fighter, right? Someone “skilled in hand-to-hand combat?”
So nu?
Who else?
Not a U.S. citizen?
Trump will argue “Neither is Obama.”
Game on.
AG
Agreed. Good on you for saying so loud, clear and early.
Someone who screams this loud has his own demons.
10-1 it’s either substances, or people, that he personally abuses in private.
The drones keep droning.
Can we have Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al as well please? Or does international law only apply to foreigners?
That’s what they call American Exceptionalism. Laws don’t apply to us because God.
And of course that’s the exact reason the US isn’t a party to the International Criminal Court, because the Bush administration was afraid something like that could happen.
Well since he used the Hague’s institutions to beat China yesterday in a historic win, he should have no complaints about their judgement.
Duterte has been president for less than two weeks. This case goes back to the 1950s, and the particular PCA tribunal was constituted in June 2013, when Benigno Aquino IV was president. Duterte is supposed to favor more friendly Filipino-Chinese relations than Aquino did, the Chinese government has welcomed him enthusiastically.
Except that whole water scooter phillipines flag thing.
African nations have just about neutered the ICC court.
I would argue it was a design flaw. The inquisitorial court is tooooooooo slow to keep up with political shenanigans of the elites. It should have used the adversarial court, which was used in most war crime prosecutions of the 20th century. It also has more acceptance in the general culture from exposure through film and books, imo.
The ICC is crippled first and foremost by the refusal of the United States to participate because we’re too exceptional to surrender any of our sacred sovereignty. (The same phenomenon helps China defy the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the current South China Sea debacle, since the decision is based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Bill Clinton signed but Congress refuses to ratify–China laughs and says if the US doesn’t have to obey the law neither do they.)
Something is wrong with this thread: nobody has yet written that Hillary Clinton is exactly like Duterte.
Who is it that decides whether the Phillipines military responds to China in the Spratlys?
We now have two powder-kegs sitting at the edge of Eurasia before you even consider Kim Jung Un. Ukraine on the west and Phillipines to the south.
And warhawks in the bipartisan national security consensus in Washington.
What possibly could go wrong?
it isn’t the Philippines starting this fight. China is determined to provoke its neighbors and the US with its bogus claims to “islands”.
Given that the guy joked about raping an Australian missionary, none of this should surprise anyone.
require waiting until someone acts on that disgusting incitement?
The disgusting incitement alone is insufficient to bring him up on charges? Cuz that would be good!
(Obviously, no scholar of International Law, here.)
He should have been sent to The Hague long ago, given the activities of the Davao Death Squad that murdered or disappeared between 1,020 and 1,040 suspected drug dealers between 1998 and 2008, during the 30-odd years he was mayor of Davao City, doing the same kind of incitement:
With some backing from then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (under the most recent president, Benigno Aquino IV, the violence has eased). Duterte is a truly dreadful person.
This.
He’s been a very bad guy for a long time. His ‘career’ is very well know in his home country, as he has been a very prominent politician there for decades.
Yet he was elected to the top spot. Things must be very bad there.
.