Let’s do a little bit of math. Take the total number of official state sanctioned extrajudicial killings under President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Finished googling CHR, Human Rights Watch and Rappler figures yet? Great! Now take the number of Botox shots Kris Aquino takes “to get rid of her migranes”. Put the two figures together and what do you get? Thirty four! Yup! There is zero official state sanctioned extrajudicial killings under Duterte’s war on drugs and Kris Aquino takes 34 Botox shots for her migrane attacks. If you came up with the correct answer then you are a mindless barbaric tool who is easily fooled by a crass murderous thug. You don’t deserve the yellow Kool-Aid cup that is exclusive only to the intelligent decent class. That’s it! You are voted off the island of the morally righteous!
The problem with the jaundiced Duterte bashers is that their cognitive dissonance simply kicks in every time they encounter facts, arguments, ideas and values that are contradictory to any narrative or beliefs they hold sacred. It is within President Duterte’s prerogative to allow the burial of former President Marcos’ remains at the Libingan ng mga Bayani? Duterte is a Marcos puppet! Duterte’s pivot towards better relations with China would be more economically advantageous to the Philippines? Duterte is a traitor and a lapdog of the Chinese! Rappler lost it’s SEC registration because it violated Philippine law? Hell no! It is because Duterte is a dictator who is stifling press freedom and dissent! The insanity is simply mind boggling it actually gives the term DDS a new meaning! Duterte Derangement Syndrome is so encompassing that logic and sense gets thrown out the window just for the sake of holding on to the narrative that the Philippines is in a dark era under Duterte and the Filipino people cannot possibly afford another 4 years of the kind of tyrannical and hypocritical rule under him.
Consider the type of logic I recently came across at from a jaundiced rabid Duterte basher. This guy, much like the dime a dozen anti-Duterte nut inflicted with this mutated strain of DDS, got an instant orgasm upon coming across a Rappler news article that highlights the promotion of a DOJ prosecutor responsible for the dismissal of drug charges against suspected drug lords Kerwin Espinosa and Peter Lim. With all of Duterte’s vitriol and threats against drug lords and this fresh development, this guy suggests that the Filipino people are being fooled. Because of this, this guy seems to suggest that Filipinos, cannot afford 4 more years of being under the current deceptive administration (he asserted that he personally cannot). The problem with this argument is that not only is this guy applying double standards, his argument is also logically flawed.
Typical of jaundiced Duterte critics is their silence or limp outrage on the PNoy administration’s scandals and misdeeds. For instance, they never asked if Filipinos can afford 6 more years of Noynoy’s incompetence after the Luneta massacre. They never asked if Filipinos can afford X more years after every case of incompetence, corruption and negligence. The very same people who crucified the late Chief Justice Renato Corona (who was impeached for filing an erroneous SALN) are defending Chief Justice (on leave) Ma. Lourdes Sereno who actually failed to file her required SALN for a number of years! Sometimes I wonder if these people are even capable of arguing on principle given how myopic and jaundiced their worldview is.
Even granting that having double standards is not exclusive to Duterte critics (any partisan mindset is susceptible to this), one can easily spot the lack of intellectual substance in their logic. For instance, how sensible would it be to question whether Filipinos can afford 4 more years of being fooled by the Duterte government because of what happened in the release of 2 drug lords as described in the Rappler article? Not very sensible if we really think about it. It does not really matter if the Rappler article contains truthful facts, what matters is whether the facts support a truth claim or not! That is exactly the problem with yellow adherents who merely argue using the “if the facts are correct dogma”. Subscribing to such a simplistic principle is tantamount to making a judgment on who the killer is merely based on a victim’s chalk outline on the ground! Jerry Seinfeld joked about it quite well. He goes:
I don’t even know how it helps to solve the crime? You know, they look at the thing on the ground… “aah his arm was like that when he hit the pavement. That means the killer must’ve been Jim!”
Yup, these people seem to be incapable of differentiating factual statements from value judgments and they also seem to be ignorant of the necessity of the bridge premise.
Consider this. Person X is told that he ought to donate one of his kidneys so that his brother can live. When asked why, he was told that if he didn’t, his brother will surely die. So what’s wrong with this? Well, for one, saying that he ought to donate one of his kidney is a value judgment. The reason given for why he ought to do so was a simple fact. The factual statement is that if he didn’t donate the kidney, his brother would die. Does this seem like a perfectly good reason for Person X to donate his kidney? No, at least not by itself. You see, the person urging Person X to donate one of his kidneys jumped directly from a factual statement to a value judgment. He seems to think that this factual statement alone supports the value statement and shows it to be true. But it only seems like a strong reason because he is assuming something else. He is assuming that it is better for Person X’s brother to live than to die.
Yup, that is an assumption. It is assuming that it is really better for this brother to live than to die, and if not donating the other kidney would allow him to die, then Person X ought to donate it. But notice something. That value judgment simply doesn’t follow from the factual statement alone. By itself, the fact that not donating the kidney to the sick brother would allow a preventable death tells us nothing about what ought to be done. You need an in between assumption. If we had a different assumption, this factual statement might not make the value judgment true at all. Suppose this person asserting Person X ought to donate one of his kidneys concluded that because of some highly unusual circumstance, it would be better for his brother to die peacefully. Maybe the sick guy is an Adolf Hitler who has caused millions of death and would continue to do so if he survives the ordeal. With this, the factual statement would no longer be a reason for thinking that the value judgment is true. If it was better for this sick brother to die and if donating Person X’s kidney would cause his sick brother to live, then Person X ought NOT to donate the kidney.
The point is, that factual statements alone is not enough to give us an adequate reason for thinking that a value judgment is true. There is always a bridge premise. To show that the value judgment is true, we must not only show that the supporting factual statement is true, we must also show that the bridge premise between the factual statement and value statement is true.
So, is it enough reason to question if we can afford another 4 years of Duterte government (or even promote the idea of ousting the current government) based on the dismissal of the case of the 2 drug lords? Sure, while it is true that the 2 drug lords’ drug cases have been recently dismissed by Duterte’s DOJ we don’t really know the details of the case that resulted in its dismissal, do we? Do we know if it was even the prosecutor’s fault or did the police give incomplete and weak evidence that tied the hands of the prosecutor? On the prosecutor’s promotion, do we even know if the Lim and Espinosa case dismissal have anything to do with it? What was the process and the criteria used in the promotion of the prosecutor? The Rappler article seems eerily silent on that and Duterte critics seem to conveniently take that out of the equation. Do we even know if these suspects are going to be charged again (with a stronger case)? So there may be things that we do not know about that may invalidate the value statement (or conclusion) that Filipinos cannot live another 4 years under a Duterte government. The argument simply does not have an adequate (if any) bridge premise to support the jaundiced Duterte bashers’ contention.
For yellows, it doesn’t really matter, does it? So long as Duterte is put in a bad light and that the “Marcos-Duterte bad, yellow-disente good” narrative holds, sound logic can go to hell. Anyway, for them when all else fails – they can always resort to bashing and mocking Mocha Uson.
(Photo credit goes to http://8list.ph)
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