Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

Why are you moving the goal? That's not a nice tactic. I've not expressed the Spanish practices as non-democratic or fascist, so I should not have to show an international condemnation for them in these words.

In a shallow search I've found this, from just before the trial [0] Iceland, and Scotland, ask for democratic solution. Couple of quotes: "The Icelandic Government has called upon their Spanish counterparts to look for a negotiated solution, emphasising the need to respect human rights.", "Scottish minister reiterates support for “the people of Catalonia to determine their own future”". February 15th 2019.

I've heard interventions on the EU parliament to talk about the issues, but it was voted against.

On the other hand I've seen no country saying that Spain is doing great with their police. Almost the opposite, with China saying that Hong Kong police are better than Spanish police and the press is the other way around [1].

Then, again, the appeal to the sentence to international courts will do nothing. The appeal, even if it prospered, it would do nothing against the ruling, at most it would ask a revision of the trial [2]. And that's from a pro-independence source, so you can imagine what others might say.

[0] https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/13862/iceland-becomes-... [1] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1168214.shtml [2] https://www.naciodigital.cat/noticia/189638/exvicepresident/...

> pro-independence parties are majority in the parliament

Spanish democracy is malapportioned: Basically, rural voters get more of a say than urban voters. The pro independent parties have a majority in the Spanish parliament for the same reason that Republicans have a majority in the US Senate: Americans and Spaniards prefer havoc and civil war to democracy, so they'll do everything they can to make sure their parliaments are illegitimate. It's worked for them both before.

> Polling someone about something implies one of the results is perfectly possible.

Both results of asking Catalonia whether or not it should start negotiating with Spain as to what independence would look like are completely possible. It's up to Spain to accept that possibility, though, not Catalonia.

> There are no "fair" negotiations to be had. Spain has nothing to gain.

Internal stability, an end to social unrest, and doing the right thing, by letting people govern themselves, is not something to gain?

You shouldn't block your spouse from divorcing you in a broken marriage, and you should generally not keep people who want to leave, in your country.

> What happens next time someone wants something illegal according to country laws and constitution? Negotiate every time?

Generally speaking, when there's a large demand in a democracy for an unjust law to be changed, the correct thing to do is to, in fact, change the law.

> What about the 40% (just to fit the math) that want the independence in Barcelona? Aren't they to Barcelona what Catalonia is to Spain? Should they splinter from Barcelona? How many times do you splinter? How long until you say "well I think we have enough"? And when you do isn't that arbitrary and hypocritical?

That's the whole point of going to the negotiating table, in good faith. To discuss the options, to figure out how edge cases will work. If Barcelona wants to remain in Spain, I see no reason for why Catalonian secession should have to include it. Catalonia can then make the choice of whether or not it wants to secede without Barcelona. It will probably choose to not do so, and you will solve your problem without turning to violence and repression.

Of course, this requires negotiating in good faith, which seems to be anathema.

I explained why I mentioned the Inquisition in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21401525. "Portraying the Catalans at the right side of history" is not the reason I brought it up, nor could anyone plausibly believe that was the reason. Furthermore, I called the Catalan separatists "nationalist clowns" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402190 and predicted that their success would bring "dark days" to Catalunya. Both of these comments were posted before yours. Your attempts at amateur psychology are laughably incompetent. I suggest you engage with the substance of what I wrote instead of seeking the flimsiest excuses for dismissing it by insulting me.

There is a thoroughly-substantiated and fairly comprehensive list of library burnings at the link in the comment above yours that you have apparently failed to read. Nearly every single one of them was committed by a government; one of the few exceptions was committed by Nazis.

The argument you are using here could as easily, and as falsely, prove that heart attacks do not kill people; it reads like a satire of illogical reasoning from anecdotes. "My heart attack didn't kill any people. There's a person right across the street from me, and while she's ugly, she's not dying of a heart attack." Still, about one out of five humans eventually die of a heart attack, and when libraries are burned, nearly always a government is the culprit.

Moreover, the entire reason we are discussing governments burning libraries is an attack by the current Spanish government on GitHub, an electronic library that is one of the greatest libraries humanity has ever created; among its endless collections of worthless trivia, it contains comprehensive repositories of mathematical, algorithmic, electronic, chemical, and physics knowledge, amounting to a substantial fraction of what humankind can be said to know.

This attack perhaps does not amount to a burning of a library, only a bookshelf within it — and a failed burning at that, since evidently the information has been preserved intact and remains available. But it takes a particularly extreme kind of arrogant foolishness to interpret that situation as demonstrating the nonexistence of the menace rather than its omnipresence.

In short, your vicious comment is simultaneously intentionally insulting, diametrically opposed to well-documented objective facts that you knew or should have known (which is to say, it is a lie), and very poorly reasoned. You should not have posted it.

> Well, as both Americans and Spanish might say, "we had a war to settle that issue." The U.S. have been a republic (what you call a "democracy") for the entirety of their history as a nation, and yet unilateral secession is clearly forbidden.

That's not a fair analogy. If Texas decided, tomorrow, that they wanted to pursue independence, I'm reasonably confident that at no point would the federal government dismiss the state government, arrest their members and throw them in prison. They might say, "We're incapable of having any discussion on the matter until a bill passes the US Congress permitting us to negotiate" or "We'll negotiate, but terms cannot be settled and finally agreed to by us; we will need a constitutional amendment" or "Sure why not". (The US President is, after all, the president of the United States, and so their agreement is tantamount to the consent of the states. Moreover, if US federal power is withdrawn from Texas by the order of the US president, legal or not, such that it takes a revolution to regain it, it's fair to say it's happened, whether it's legal or not.)