Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

Also, what do you plan to do with the half of catalans who don't support independence? Oppress them perhaps? Neglect their culture and language? It's turtles all the way down

Unless the residents you vote to murder are also given the same freedom to secede and draw a border that excludes you because they do not consider your rule legitimate, this certainly would not be democratic.

Your analogy illustrates why a right to secede matters: It is the ultimate peaceful (if the right is protected) tool for those who feel disenfranchised, whether by being robbed off the chance to vote or because they are a persistent minority, to ensure that either their rights are protected because the government do not want them to leave, or that they have an escape hatch against a majority abusing their power.

It is saying "we no longer accept that this government legitimately represents us," and the right and ability to do that seems to me to be the most fundamental concept of democracy - but only if it is extended to everyone, which takes away the problems of your example; you and your six friends would have no rights to draw a new border that includes other residents without they too having a say, including the right to themselves secede if you do not offer them something they are willing to see as legitimate.

As such it provides an important incentive against over-reach and towards negotiated settlements that does not exist when there is no realistic mechanism for a minority to vote for their region to leave.

You can mitigate the need for a right to secede by giving sufficient protections for minorities against the choices of the majority; but whenever secession gains substantial support, that is evidence that whatever mechanisms are in place are insufficient.

To me, a government that feels a need to deploy police to stop a region from demanding independence is inherently illegitimate.

At the same time, I am all four having secessionists be made to understand the consequences, in that if you a house and decides your house should secede, then fine, but you e.g. have no inherent right to then be allowed to cross the border, or expect your new neighbouring state to provide you with any services, and you can expect them to act with force to protect the interests of any of their citizens resident on "your territory" who do not want to secede and who are not offered sufficient protections - including their own right to secede from "your state" and rejoin their preferred state.

In practice I think that taking such a right to secede to it's full consequence would minimize actual uses - anyone wanting to do it would need to take into account the problems of whether or not they'd e.g. end up with enclaves, eroded borders, exclaves, and whether they'd even end up with a contiguous territory of significance at all if they have majority support in a region but also lot of resistance, and would be forced to actually negotiate to solve such issues in a way that is not inherently detrimental to both sides. At the same time this would also apply to the state you seek to leave.

Look, I am not a layer. I have zero experience about how to redact a sentence or how many witnesses should speak in court. And I am really surprised of how many experts you can find in Catalonia.

But all these expert seem to ignore that these people can appeal their sentences if they don't agree with them. Spain, at difference of authoritarian countries, is subjected to international law. Do you accept these international courts or are they fascists too? Because if the whole world think that what these politicians did was wrong maybe, just maybe, you should consider that there is a possibility that what they did was wrong.

The Spanish government has made many mistakes, and I am very sure they will make many more, no matter who wins the elections. But the Generalitat cannot just take the law into their hands. Everybody knew it would have legal consequences. Most of them can be out early next year. Do you think this an injustice that deserve rioting and burning your city? That is what I would call an stretch.

The whole world is not thinking that what our politicians did, if they did anything, was illegal. There have been plenty of interventions about the sentence, most of the ones I've heard about are against it.

How justice works is to usually make the initial judgement on a low court and the recourses go to higher ones. Not on this, it was directly judged on the higher one and no recourse can be made about the judgement, only about how it was reached.

This ruling is not something that "deserves" rioting, it was the straw that broke the camel's back.

This is complicated, but let's say that the EU's arguments are all basically arguments for empires and they are happy to say so. Look at the recent speech by Verhofstadt where he praised empires and said Europe must become one. But that's nonsense. Literally all the bloodshed and horrors Europe went through in the 20th century were caused by attempts to unite it into a single empire. The bizarre lesson some people see in this is to keep trying.

Also, don't for one second think the EU is against nationalism or patriotism. They desperately chase both. Why do you think the EU has a national anthem? Why do it's supporters say things like, "we Europeans". The entire EU project is a project to craft a new form of loyalty to the state and a self-sense of tribal belonging. Those who don't think this new nation, with its so called "European values", is better than their current nations ... well, they're treated with contempt.

Finally, there are no problems to which the solution is empires. The world has more countries than ever, yet is also richer and healthier than ever. This correlation and trend can easily continue for long time.