Over dinner (which I cooked), mother blurted out that the ML-like implementation was needed because people were "pasaway"

I said: "The Duterte regime has no right to need anything more."

In 2016, it inherited a relatively stable economy, with an improved credit rating, and a landmark judgment to leverage foreign and regional policy.

Before 2017 ended, PDP-Laban was bolstered by a vast supermajority in Congress of newly-sworn members. After 2019, no opposition candidate won for senator.

The legislative branch was his.

By 2022, when Duterte's term ends, he would have appointed 13 of the 15 Justices of the Supreme Court, without even accounting for minmaxing appointments. He could appoint more.

The courts are his.

His cabinet is stacked by yes-men and retired generals, some of them with little to no credentials to their ministry. But enough of the old brass should guarantee military influence, maybe.

And his people? Fractured by deeply polarizing Facebook politics.

The U.S., which normally acts as some meddling hegemon, is too busy with its own idiot in power.

So when he says,

"I NEED MARTIAL LAW"

what lawful power is lacking to let you execute your job properly? What hindrance could there possibly be?

Why did we need to incur such a huge debt to fund our countermeasures against the global pandemic, when in the first place it was your government that slashed the health budget?

How could we afford such an extravagant sports event for the ASEAN when we can't even guarantee the health and safety of our people?

What will martial law, passed in blackletter, accomplish that you could not already do?

Or as the thousands of lives lost to your rule, haven't already done?

I'm no expert, I'm not an insider. It's just how it seems. Duterte is one of either two things:

Either he is deeply paranoid for accountability against international courts, or he is deluded enough to think his legacy is worth preserving.

To the first, it would depend on the state of his health: will he have much of a life left for justice to oversee?

To the second: we all look forward to forgetting you.

I do not know the numbers, but I read somewhere that we are close to finishing debt servicing for the plundered Marcos wealth?

And now, we have billions to pay back, for the debts this government incurred.

I recall in 2016, in the DDS euphoria, when the old guard of PDP-Laban rallied around the late Sen. Nene, because a cause close to his heart was a key advocacy of the Duterte campaign: charter change.

Remember that? Remember that "Draft Constitutional Committee" that held presscons? Remember the old men in heated debate about the Grand Old Questions of charter change?

Duterte took them for a ride.

Remember when Duterte said "YeS I aM a CoMmUniST" and they would play videos of him shouting "MABUHAY ANG NPA"

And all the contrarian edgelords said OMFG that's so cool~~~

And our masses, they saw elites quaking at this. So they loved him.

Duterte took them for a ride too.

And this 2020, we're seeing it all again: a cash dole-out program innocuously being renamed S.A.P., countless GO pages going up on Twitter, the concerted Big State effort to muddle personality and nationalism.

This is the New Normal they want.

2016 was a watershed year for me, for our politics. I remember being awash with grief, and dread, and an anger I could not yet name.

I started a lot of fights, mostly online. I thought it was the way out. But you just become part of the noise.

And then for a while, I thought the "real" job was to be persuasive, creative, open-minded. To change minds. But that underestimates the depth of algorithmic politics. It fails to take into account behavior and identity.

That kind of thinking presumes there is a dearth of information, from which people are kept from making informed and rational decisions.

Just typing that already feels like a joke hahaha

People's minds are already made up. We are already divided. All that's left for Duterte and his circus is to conquer and rule.

But it's not all hopeless.

The politics that divide us were drawn out of us. It says a lot about Duterte if the only way he can rule the country is if half of it is in a shouting match and the other half is apathetic.

If Duterte's regime is firing on all cylinders to promote their New Normal, we all know that's untenable. I don't care how much money you throw at Mocha and her fourth-rate bloggers. Polemics can only go so far.