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Comment by tigershark | Hacker News Reader

Are you from Philippines? From what I know people there are quite happy of Duterte work despite the overzealous rhetoric. If you are in US I can't see how can you criticise him given that death penalty is quite widespread there and a lot of times the trial is a farce especially if you are black.

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I'm writing this from the Philippines. The problem here is that this country has a very weak commitment to rule of law, even though the Constitution of 1987 is based on the US Constitution. The big difference though, especially with regard to the large number of extra-judicial killings that have been carried out under Duterte's administration and with his approval, is that the victims were killed without a trial at all. Say what you want about the US death penalty and the fairness of it, but you cannot be put to death in the US by the government without a trial and legal representation. The Philippines glorifies vigilantism and "banana leaf justice" (because the murdered victims are often covered with a banana leaf or a piece of cardboard with "pusher" scrawled on it) Whataboutism doesn't change that.

I heard a series of "on the street" interviews with Filipinos recently and one was with a couple, one of whom approved of Duterte and one who did not. When the guy, who approved of Duterte, was asked about extrajudicial killings he said something along the lines of "yes, that goes overboard sometimes. Aside from that he's good."

That attitude is even more unsettling to me, somehow. "Aside from all the murders he's committing, things are going well."

As far as I know he didn't commit any murder, do you have proof of the contrary?

Are you denying that there have been extrajudicial killings, or are you denying that the person who gives the order is responsible? Just curious.

> but you cannot be put to death in the US by the government without a trial and legal representation

I agree with you mostly, but um, if you pay attention our cops shoot and kill thousands of people per year, many of them unarmed. And we have a president that was lauding this practice (and praising Duterte). We're nowhere nearly as bad as Duterte, but we're heading in the wrong direction.

> shoot and kill thousands of people per year, many of them unarmed

Closer to one thousand, 10% of whom were unarmed (that 10% includes all the cases where police believed the victim was armed when they actually weren't; believed the victim was reaching for a weapon; believed the victim was using a car as a weapon; cops killing their wives/girlfriends while off-duty; etc.).

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... (filter by "Classification" to see only gunshots)

Cops 'believe' everything is a weapon.

Granted.

One innocent person killed by police is one too many. Especially when they are acquitted every time.

you cannot be put to death in the US by the government without a trial and legal representation

You shouldn't, but you can certainly be killed by someone working for the government. You need to check this out, even though the video footage is disturbing to say the very least: http://www.newsweek.com/police-release-graphic-video-officer...

> Are you from Philippines? From what I know people there

Is his argument invalid if he's not in the Philippines, but yours isn't?

> If you are in US I can't see how can you criticise him given that death penalty is quite widespread there

Because maybe he doesn't support the death penalty in the US either.

> and a lot of times the trial is a farce especially if you are black.

As compared to the trials in the Philippines? Here's what it looks like:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/ro...

My wife is from Philippines, I go there pretty much twice a year, I know a lot of people from Philippines, so maybe I understand their situation a bit better than the countless keyboard warriors that write here without even having put a foot in the country...

This is literally textbook Soviet-style whataboutism.

1. Assert people are happy with the system

2. Ask "What about the civil rights movement in the U.S.?" to deflect from human rights abuses

You're defending a guy who brags every chance he gets about murdering several guys. Are we supposed to believe that footage of him is fake?

Let me guess, you support Trump, too? I never would have guessed that so many of my fellow Americans were such authoritarians. I knew there were some, of course, but it looks like they may comprise around 30-35% of our population. Tough times ahead for the liberty-minded...

Look, I get the appeal of Duterte. I'm sure that a large percentage of Filipinos are happy with his behavior. That doesn't mean it's right.

Finally, tu quoque is not a very good verbal defense tactic. Most people disregard it other than the people who already agree with you. Most famous example of this technique is Stalin's use of "and you are lynching negroes" [1]. He wasn't wrong, but that didn't mean he wasn't also carrying out political murders on a massive scale. It's just poor rhetoric.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

We've seen a lot of footage from your media that were edited. How do you explain that?

So you maintain that Duterte has not bragged about committing extrajudicial killings?

The US has problems with criminal justice, but let's not even compare. Duterte is not even on the same league.

German people were happy with Hitler too. And the US had death penalty in the 1930s.

Do I need to have lived in Nazi Germany to talk about the crimes of the Nazis?

I'm not from the US and I'm a vocal critic of US governments, past and present. But even if I was American, the actions of the US government wouldn't be something it was within my power to change and wouldn't be relevant to what Duterte is doing.

Adopting the rhetoric of the Stalinist USSR isn't helping your case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

You need at least to know something about the things that you speak about. I can't really stand people that feel entitled to babel about everything without having the slightest idea of the subject they are discussing.

Well, as I said above, I'm in the Philippines, and I'm here to tell you that it's rather troubling what's going on here from a civil rights perspective. Hundreds of journalists have been killed here since the era of the Marcos administration, and the Philippines (and Pakistan!) are among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

that's because a lot of journalists here can be paid. this is a fact. for example, a certain mayor in my city doesn't want to pay his electric bills so what he did was pay journalists to write black propaganda about the president of the electric company to destroy his reputation. and when that wasn't enough he paid the news commentator of an infamous radio station. this happened a decade ago.

For someone who likes to make such broad assertions you don't make any effort to substantiate them. And you're implicitly condoning murder as a response to journalistic corruption. How do I know you're not being paid?

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