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Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

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Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People say the US constitution doesn't allow secession of a state (as opposed to a territory) without a constitutional amendment. Congress granting a territory (or state, directly) independence isn't secession, whether or not it is allowed. Secession is unilateral, grants of independence are a different thing.

I don't know if that is the key difference here. Madrid insists they couldn't allow Catalonia to become independent even if they wanted to. Many people in Spain outside of Catalonia are resolutely opposed to Catalan independence, under any circumstances. By contrast, most people in UK outside of Scotland don't really care, and even the vast majority of those opposed to it would be willing to accept it if a referendum…

> Madrid insists they couldn't allow Catalonia to become independent even if they wanted to.

Which may or may not be a correct interpretation of the Spanish Constitution, but what the US Constitution does or does not allow regarding either secession or Congressional grants of independence is not really germane one way or another. They aren't even products of the same legal tradition such that analysis of one might be illuminating on the other.

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#422
post #403
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument of "I can secede from my home" is reductionist, simplistic and overall insulting to any group of people that want independence from the country they depend on or have fought for independence in the past. Most countries today are independent even though it was illegal for them to become independent before they did. Poland or Estonia would still be part of the Russian empire. Austria and Hungary the same c…

> why do people, outside of a territory, control the political status of this territory, going against international law? Because they are not outside of, they are part of. The rest is a made up fantasy which a bunch of nationalists have used to rile people up, create a "common enemy" and a "them vs us" narrative and gain power for themselves. This process is absolutely not new and has caused terrible harm throughout…

> Because they are not outside of, they are part of. The rest is a made up fantasy which a bunch of nationalists have used to rile people up, create a "common enemy" and a "them vs us" narrative and gain power for themselves.

No, it's just because they can. They are strong enough to do it.

Pro independence movements are orthogonal to nationalism.

> This process is absolutely not new and has caused terrible harm throughout history, yet here we are in the 21st Century, seeing Trumps and Brexits and all this bullshit again because we don't fucking learn.

I am sure Norway is hating that they split from Sweeden.

> The democratic means for eventual independence are HARD and SLOW because they HAVE to be. You should need a lot more than a loud voice and a molotov cocktail in your hand to push more than half of your presumed co-citizens out of their country against their will.

That's exactly why pro-independence Catalan movement has been asking for a referendum.

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#423
While currently Catalan separatism is a non-starter there are issues in the areas that they claim as theirs as the Valencians consider themselves separate to the Catalans.

It is the nesting doll situation of splinter separatist groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaverism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valencian_nationalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Countries

Ultimately reminds me of the Monty Python skit from the Life of Brian - The People's Front of Judea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that is the key difference here. Madrid insists they couldn't allow Catalonia to become independent even if they wanted to. Many people in Spain outside of Catalonia are resolutely opposed to Catalan independence, under any circumstances. By contrast, most people in UK outside of Scotland don't really care, and even the vast majority of those opposed to it would be willing to accept it if a referendum…

> Madrid insists they couldn't allow Catalonia to become independent even if they wanted to. Which may or may not be a correct interpretation of the Spanish Constitution, but what the US Constitution does or does not allow regarding either secession or Congressional grants of independence is not really germane one way or another. They aren't even products of the same legal tradition such that analysis of one might be…

Spanish opponents of Catalan independence repeatedly use the argument "Our constitution doesn't allow a part of our country to become independent; but in that regard our constitution is no different from those of many other countries".

So the question of what other countries' constitutions allow is relevant to the debate.

And the comment I was initially responding to was suggesting that the UK could only allow Scotland the choice of independence because it has an unwritten constitution. Explaining how other country's written constitutions could allow grants of independence to parts of the country is a relevant response.

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#425

Native speaker of Castillian Spanish here. IMO the most critical sentence in this judicial order was mistranslated by GitHub, changing our understanding of the government's request and casting GitHub's response in a more negative light (if you believe information and communication tools should be free.) The original language in the last paragraph is "...para solicitar la retención del contenido y los datos relacionad…

Native portuguese here. the confusion may arise from uncommon usage of the word. the word "reter" (portuguese for retain) can also mean "preservar" (preserve), but is more commonly used in a judicial setting. ex: An ISP is ordered to keep logs that would otherwise could be deleted at some point in time

The contents seem pretty clear to me. An investigation is undergoing, the spanish law that makes mandatory keeping logs (also exist in Portugal, 6 months min.) is referred and github.com was asked to keep this data.

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#426
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Spanish Inquisition did all that and much worse. How much Moorish blood remains in the people of Spain today? How many conversos did the Inquisitors burn at the stake, generations after their ancestors converted, on the strength of rumormongering by jealous neighbors? The Christian and Jewish traditions — clerics, holy books, writing systems, and all — survived centuries of Muslim rule. What today survives of the…

[flagged]

Anyone that checks out historical records will discover that there was no Inquisition in most of Europe. Also, they will discover that, after generations of increasingly vicious oppression — including conversion to Christianity at the point of a sword, kidnapping of the Moors' children, (the same genocidal practice used in the Indian School system in the US) — hundreds of thousands of Moors and Jews fled or were expelled, and that only tens of thousands returned.

Anyone that checks out historical records will also discover that the Moors and Jews represented a significant percentage of the population of Iberia before the expulsions, around half a million people out of a total of less than 9 million.

Furthermore, anyone that checks out historical records will discover that the Jewish ghettos were in fact established by Isabel and Ferdinand, the monarchs who also established the Inquisition and, a few years later, expelled the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and Moors from their lands.

One of the few true statements in your comment is that many empires, not only the Spanish Empire, have been founded on genocide. Among the other abuses of human rights the Spanish Empire also practiced, an abuse which facilitated that genocide, was state censorship.

We should practice neither of these abuses. Do you disagree?

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#427
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"retener" is indeed ambiguous, but in the sentence right before that paragraph they use "retenga" as "to withhold": > Además, se han creado otros repositorios con la misma información para evitar que el contenido se retenga. So I'm inclined to believe that the translation is correct. (I'm also a Castilian Spanish speaker :)

That's a good point. But this is not the actual court order, merely an explanatory letter from a police agency. The language is very "squishy". The preamble to the actual order, where the police explain the rationale, indeed uses the verb "retener" to mean "withhold/block". But the last sentence, if read alone, make more sense as "preserve." I believe this "squishiness" is no accident. We really need to see the actua…

Are you literally arguing that both the Spanish native speaker who made the translation as well as the Spanish native speaker who wrote the "explanatory letter" got the meaning of a Spanish word wrong? :/

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tightly integrated part of the economical and political system, the people elsewhere would also be severely affected. Why is it obvious that they get to break the system unilaterally?

The UK is tightly integrated into the EU economical and political system. They are breaking away unilaterally. The reason they can do so is that they wouldn't have entered in the first place if there was no instrument to leave again like this (Article 50). The Catalans never voluntarily agreed to be part of Spain as far as I know. They were essentially annexed a long time ago. And yet Spain says they have to stay no…

> The Catalans never voluntarily agreed to be part of Spain as far as I know. They were essentially annexed a long time ago.

When did that happen?

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is if a democracy can be called democratic if it's impossible/unlawful for minorities to secede. I also think that a secession wouldn't be the smartest choice, but that's a totally different matter. I don't think I'm in position to have a long discussion about this in english, but I thought about it and reached no conclussion. If I'm against the Catalan independence it's basically because of practical…

Yeah, economically it would be likely a disaster without quick integration into the EU on a higher level. That's another topic, why can't the EU sort them out? Or why can't they rejoin with Spain after trying and failing? I don't think that people would deal with a failure like that, they'd vote to rejoin, and the bond would be stronger afterwards. I think their movement wouldn't have gotten that much steam with a le…

> That's another topic, why can't the EU sort them out?

What do you think the EU should even do about this, based on which principles? To me this is entirely unclear.

There is no right to secede from a country, in fact, the territory is usually part of the identity of a country, also legally speaking.

Re: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

#430
post #359
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happened with the Estatut should not be a carte blanche to secede Nobody took a "carte blanche" to secede. The succession of pro-independence governments were put in there by voters. These governments exhausted all possible avenues with the spanish goverment, which refused to even talk about the topic. Catalan people were then asked explicitly whether they wanted it, in the referendum that's famous for the viol…

"Spain" did not put anybody in jail, it was the judges and there was a public trial, according to the rule of law, some politicians commited crimes are were judged accordingly, the way you phrase it makes it seem arbitrary when it was not.

Judges selected by the Spanish government.

If the trial was fair, why is the majority of the sentence an explanation about how fair they were? One doesn't need to explain how clean they are, they just need to be clean.

Why were policemen allowed to explain their fears, but not the defense witnesses?

Why were only some of the defense witnesses warned that omitting the truth would be considered perjury but no single accusation witness was? The Spanish politicians were really withholding a lot.

The minister in charge of taxes said, on the trial, that there wasn't an euro unaccounted for. So where is the mishandling of money? The law was stretched thin on this.

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