For example, I don’t think he is supposed to be taken literally when, during his recent visit to Beijing, he told his predominantly Filipino audience that he was inclined to form a triumvirate with China and Russia—“against the world.†That sounds more like a line from the 1974 song “You and Me Against the World,†than a serious foreign policy statement.
Anyone who proposes anything like that must be out of his mind, or is patently ignorant of the complex relationship between China and Russia, or completely misunderstands the nature of the contemporary world. Mr. Duterte could be any of these. But, I prefer to think he’s just joking. Perhaps he may even be only half-joking. Because of its barefaced absurdity, the statement retains its plausible deniability.
“When people talk,†observes the psycholinguist Steven Pinker, “they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role-playing, sidestep, shilly-shally, and engage in other forms of vagueness and innuendo. We all do this, and we expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for plain speaking, for people to get to the point and say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.â€
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