Deconstructing Duterte’s Superstardom (Or, DDS)

OF COURSE, the peso drop can be attributed to the rise of Rodrigo Duterte as the leading presidential candidate for May 9. (For the already jittery, relax, there is this piece of contradictory optimism.). Of course there are hidden Duterte accounts, according to perennial whistleblower and Manila Peninsula’s favorite guest,  Antonio Trillanes IV.

This is, after all, election season. Black propaganda is as common as empty campaign promises. And with Duterte’s remarkable rise in the surveys, it was but natural that Every. Presidential. Candidate. would try to pull him down. Fair enough. But you wonder if the spook tactics are a bit too little, too late.

After all, black propaganda, at this point, seems to have little chance of slowing down the meteoric rise of Duterte in presidential surveys. There is palpable truth to this.

The biggest and most comprehensive anti-Duterte campaign is being waged by Duterte himself. He’s backing himself into impossible corners, PR nightmares and indefensible inaccuracies, leaving himself with one out each time: If you don’t like it, don’t vote for me. Simple.

Here’s why you should watch Pacquiao-Bradley 3

THOMAS Aquinas—part-time saint, part-time philosopher—posited that God can be proven by  the argument of first cause. If I recall my theology or philosophy classes right, this is also called the cosmic or cosmological argument: that the existence of things cannot be an efficient cause of itself.

So for example, a Fraudulent Forger appears in a basketball league. One cannot simply assume that the Fraudulent Forger popped out of nowhere on its own. Something caused its being there. And Something Else prodded that Something to cause Fraudulent Forger to exist in the league. There is no reason to subscribe to Pop Theory; things do not pop out of Nowhere for no Cause or Reason. Everything starts from Somewhere.

Apart from a yawner of a bout against undefeated American Floyd Mayweather Jr. last year, the reason why people are mostly lukewarm about Manny Pacquiao’s fight against Timothy Bradley Jr. is because of his comments on same-sex marriage, which caused a firestorm—to say the least.

But applying the Aquinas argument shows that we are actually ganging up on the wrong person. Manny Pacquiao, the eight-division champion and the country’s most successful athlete ever, is not the person we should blame for the LGBT controversy.