DUTERTE'S 5-D CHESS TRUMPS CHELSEA'S DECONTEXTUALIZED MORAL SIGNALLING

by Daniel Barge

Despite her mother f**king up so badly in last year's election, it's obvious that Hillary Clinton is now being groomed for some future presidential run. There are lots of puff pieces everywhere, and she's been ticking the marriage, children, and church boxes necessary to seem like a "normal human being" to normal human beings. A senate seat will be made available at some point, and then all the stops will be pulled out to get her into the White House.

At least that's the rather obvious plan.

Also, she's trying to keep her social media profile high by feeding her 1.68 million followers little pearls of her "future presidential" wisdom, including her oh-so-important opinion of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who is engaged in a massive internal war against drug gangs and ISIS. Just recently ISIS seized part of a city and beheaded the chief of police. But apparently ISIS and drug gangs are not the problem. Duterte is.

Clinton tweeted:

"Duterte is a murderous thug with no regard for human rights. It’s important to keep pointing that out and that rape is never a joke."

The second part of this was a reference to comments Duterte made to his troops when he actually told them not to rape women, but kind of said he would back them up if they did. What Clinton did not understand is that Duterte was employing the psychological technique of the "double bind" in order to control his troops without dampening their fighting spirit.

Here is a reasonably good explanation from Wikipedia:

"A double bind is...[a] dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, and one message negates the other...Double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s. Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them both difficult to respond to as well as to resist. A double bind generally includes different levels of abstraction in the order of messages and these messages can either be stated explicitly or implicitly within the context of the situation, or they can be conveyed by tone of voice or body language."

The use of double binds in this way shows that Duterte is a subtle and sophisticated leader, who will energize his troops without unleashing them. Clinton as a mere woman has no inkling of how that kind of masculine group dynamic works. All she hears are "offensive" words that trigger a point-and-sputter outburst of decontextualized moral signalling.

But no biggie for Rodrigo. He hit back at Chelsea during a speech to naval officers and their families on Wednesday.

"These whores, they hear 'rape.' Like Chelsea. She slammed me. I was not joking, I was being sarcastic. Listen to the speech. I do not laugh at my own jokes. I will tell her. When your father, the president of the United States, was f***ing Lewinsky and the girls in the White House, how did you feel? Did you slam your father?"

Duterte also referred to the rapes committed by American soldiers in the Philippines and Japan, before returning to Clinton:

"You Americans, like Chelsea, be careful because you live in a glass house. I repeat, when President Clinton was fucking Lewinsky, what was your statement or your reaction?"

To Chelsea's butthurt fans this just sounds like Duterte being dirty, but his meta-point is to remind everyone that Chelsea is only saying stupid things about issues of which she has no understanding because she's part of some stupid American political dynasty and is being fast-tracked. Conjuring up the picture of her father getting a blow-job in the Oval Office from an intern, while her mother silently fumed, is the shortest route to getting that point across.

Admit it, that is the picture that is in your mind now; not the one of Chelsea as "her own woman."

Forget about Trump. It looks like we have a new contender for 5-D chess grand master. Duterte is no longer the "Philippine Donald Trump." Instead let Trump aspire to be the American Duterte.

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