Just so everyone here has the full picture: the source linked — Assemblea Nacional Catalana — is not a human rights watchdog, an international observer, or a journalistic outlet. It is the main pro-independence criminal activist organization in Catalonia. Citing them as evidence of Spanish human rights abuses is a bit like citing the murderer's wife as an impartial witness.
For context, Spain is a full constitutional democracy, subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, with a free(ish) press, independent judiciary, and regular elections — none of which Assemblea itself disputes, because it participates in all of them. The events OP is referencing (the 2017 independence referendum aftermath) were reviewed by European courts, and the outcomes were, shall we say, not quite the narrative Assemblea sells on its website.
If there are genuine, documented human rights concerns, I'd welcome impartial sources from the Supreme Court or the ECHR.
What I'd push back on is treating a political lobby's own press releases as neutral reporting. You should do better than that here, OP.
Or to put it another way: Catalunya (Barcelona and surroundings) is one of 3 Spanish regions that want to break away from Spain, not counting overseas territories. And yes, the population really wants this: there was a referendum and the outcome was: 92% want out of Spain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Catalan_independence_refe...
(why? Let's be honest: Catalunya would benefit enormously from independence, but when the economy goes well, as it did from 2001-2007, they're fine. After that the situation worsened again. The situation is simple: Catalunya has a much better economy than Spain and could maintain government spending, whereas being part of Spain, they need to cut social spending)
The Spanish government has violently repressed this, attacked the people, arrested politicians, tried to threaten other EU nations with invasion (yes, seriously, the current government has a few "rough edges", even if I would agree if someone said that any other party would be worse) unless they arrest Catalunya politicians (then did nothing when they told them to go f themselves), and this mostly with the agreement of regular Spaniards.
Given what is happening in the EU (10+ years of slowly but unrelentingly worsening economy) the situation is slowly worsening again.
That referendum result is quite debatable, since the legal situation meant most people against it simply didn't vote. While in the past it was close, nowadays polls strongly suggest a comfortable majority against independence: https://www.democrata.es/politica/39-catalanes-apoya-indepen...
I agree the Rajoy government's handling of this was very problematic, but the rest of this isn't really accurate. And the morals of the economy argument is terrible - the rest of the country needs us, so we should cut them off? The same argument would apply for Barcelona cutting off the rest of Catalunya. It's not a good direction.
You forgot to mention that some of the people behind the catalonian independence movement met with Russians who even offered military support if they went ahead with a proclamation of independency. I think we should all move on from that bizarre situation.
... and the currently in power party in Spain, while they have publicly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine, also argues passionately against EU sanctions against Russia, and has consistently increased LNG imports from Russia (meaning already years ago, it's not a reaction to the Hormuz situation)
Oh and both are pro-China too. I guess they're trying to open the next huge can of worms preemptively. Why wait?
So, yeah, I doubt Ukraine is happy with either side in this conflict, and Catalunya separatists are a somewhat more desperate than Madrid. Doesn't really change anything about the conflict.
Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information, to give the people better tools to identify it (like X's community notes), and to educate the general population so they will have better critical thinking.
Restricting freedom of speech is never a solution. How long until dissenting opinions are censored because somebody labels them "disinformation"? Who watches the watchmen? etc.
I'd rather live in a society with full freedom of speech and disinformation from State actors than have only 100% accurately vetted news.
> Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.
That seems to be the American definition.
We don’t all have binary systems for our views and politics, and some of our democracies are doing better than than US despite our apparent lack of free speech.
It’s not even the American definition. We have many exceptions, particularly using speech to cause violence or physical harm in various ways. I’m also confused by American free speech absolutists because that’s not a thing here and essentially never has been.
Of course this is all hypothetical at the moment, as the current administration doesn’t seem to care much for the law.
Community notes typically kicks in after the tweet has already gone insanely viral. It’s not useless, but I wonder about its effectiveness.
I see your point about free speech but I think it has to be more nuanced. For example, where has continuing stupid anti vaxer debate left the Americans?
>> If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information
So what you argue is that we should build good bots to counter the bad bots right? and all this in a "secret" to avoid suspension by the tech companies. This looks like playing stupid games.
The disinformation in this era can basically shadow any kind of legitimate "counter-disinformation".
To make the game fair we would first need lockdown the internet content on citizen ID authorization so that we can identify if the free speach spread is actually published by a real person or some chinese bot pretending to be a single European mom with 3 kids.
This is not something anyone wants so I think the current trade off of court orders to take down content is legitimate and the best approach.
Cloudflare, the tech companies and US government likes the absolute free speech like everything else (i.e. free market) as long as it serves their interests. I wouldn't be surprised to see Cloudflare proudly repelling some "chinese propaganda attacks" and frame it like a cyber security win instead of anti-free speech action.
I've made thousands of dollars just by following the Pelosi tracker on X. Most of the time a stock soars just on the effect of a congressman buying that stock.
Just buy QQQ. She doesn't have a magic strategy. In fact, she probably underperforms given how long she is in tech and how leveraged her trades are (people forget she's married to a venture capitalist).
That is wild! I cannot believe that is allowed. Retail investors using options is always a "gambling strategy"... or in her case probably _near_ insider information.
... why wouldn't that be allowed? They're basically just doing an options-structured version of buying on margin, which you yourself can do; using options limits their downside risk. What "insider" information are you even talking about?
People keep talking about how wildly Pelosi beats the market. You could beat Pelosi! Just go all-in on NVDA. Max out your margin limit to do it. So long as tech stays on a bull run, you're a genius.
Of course, you'll eventually lose your shirt. This is the problem with "the Pelosi tracker" stuff. Your risk tolerance is not that of the Pelosis: Paul Pelosi has spent decades in venture capital and they've allocated a small portion of their portfolio to very long bets on tech. If tech craters, they're fine. You aren't.
It's hardly about a company having a "right" to stop you from saying anything, it's about what your reaction to life events says about you.
If you get fired and your reaction is to go to your blog and whine about losing email access and not being able to deliver a talk that you had prepared for x time I, as a prospective employer, am going to draw some conclusions about your personality that won't help you get the job I'm offering.
Yet another reason why I don't connect appliances to the internet. My TV is plugged to an Nvidia Shield, and that's the device that gets online, since it was designed for that.
No, you can't. You can import whatever you are allowed to import, regardless of it's legal status on the original country.
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