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Spain's Crackdown on Catalonia Includes Internet Censorship (internetsociety.org)
Spain's autonomous Catalonia region wants to hold a referendum on independence next weekend. Spain's Constitutional Court insists that that vote is illegal, and has taken control of Catalonia's police force to try to stop the vote. They're deploying thousands of additional police officers and have seized nearly 10 million ballots. And now the Internet Society has gotten involved, according to an announcement shared by Slashdot reader valinor89: Measures restricting free and open access to the Internet related to the independence referendum have been reported in Catalonia. There have been reports that major telecom operators have been asked to monitor and block traffic to political websites, and following a court order, law enforcement has raided the offices of the .cat registry in Barcelona, examining a computer and arresting staff.
We are concerned by reports that this court order would require a top-level domain (TLD) operator such as .cat to begin to block "all domains that may contain any kind of information about the referendum."
We are concerned by reports that this court order would require a top-level domain (TLD) operator such as .cat to begin to block "all domains that may contain any kind of information about the referendum."
If you start condoning Internet censorship for political reasons (for example, what has been going on with the Daily Stormer), it will never stop where you think.
The "Daily Stormer" was not censored, they just weren't supported by businesses. If they were censored, they wouldn't be back online and being hosted by some company in Iceland.
Is it too much to ask of mods to grasp the truth of content before modding it? (mod me down, "-1 oww, my feels!")
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The Spanish party that is currently in power, the Partido Popular, is an indirect decendant of the Franco regime. Franco repressed would-be secceeders too, so thsi reaction is no surprise.
How strange, as far as history goes Spain did not exist 500 years ago. Are you speaking about when Catalonia was united with the Aragon crown? That was a dynastic union where a Catalan baron inherited the Crown of Aragon. I would put the inflexion point in 1714 where Catalonia sided with Charles of Austia in the spanish succesion war and lost against Philip V who started a very repressive policy against catalans. Also, I find quite ironic that they call the independence movement as nazis when most of them are spanish fascists that revere Franco's Spain.
And who gets to decide who the Nazis are, me or you?
Neither of you. The Nazis are obvious: they're the ones calling for things like shipping Jews to concentration camps, building a wall, carrying a Confederate flag, beating the crap out of people you don't agree with, that sort of thing.
If you aren't carrying a tiki torch in a rally or running people over with your car, there's a good chance you aren't the Nazi. We'll just have to wait and see what you do the next time––
Yeah, they just wanted to go their way by main force, seizing the lawful property of the Federal government without negotiations or agreement, and keep their peculiar (read human bondage) institution in place.
Shhh. Don't tell the Southern "historian lovers" that. They think their ancestors peacefully minding their own business when some alien army came charging in from the North.
The vote was already illegitimate; this is just going to slant it further. They already tried a non-binding "referendum" in 2014 with predictable results: 80% pro-independence (even though fair polls show more like 40%). The only way to have a fair referendum is to do it in a way that is approved and legal; the moment it becomes dodgy in any way, it severely biases the results because of course participation is going to be severely skewed towards people who want to vote yes.
This is why the central government only really has two choices: they can either support a completely legitimate referendum (whether this can actually be done legally or not based on the Constitution is unclear), or they can wholly suppress attempts. They can't allow an illegitimate referendum to go through because the result is going to be obvious and not representative of the citizens' will. The pro-independence regional government has stated they intend to declare independence within 48 hours after a "yes" victory; this would be ridiculous in this case given that result would in no way be accurate with the current circumstances surrounding the referendum.
(Note: I don't approve of the censorship part, just trying to explain what is going on.)
...and no, there is no censorship involved.
Catalonia is not a colony.
Catalonia has been always part of Spain, and a very important part. This was already so when the province of Hispania was created under the Roman Empire, imposing a layer of latin culture and roman institutions on top of the existing Iberian tribes. After the downfall of Empire, the visigoths ruled all of the Peninsula as a single kingdom for more than two centuries. The small christian kingdoms and principalities that from 711 to 1492 fighted the muslims were at times also fighting each other, but the general trend was that of strengthening alliances and uniting forces under the same religion, not unlike other places in Medieval Europe.
Catalan counties were already integrated in a larger unit (the Kingdom of Aragon) in which different languages (such as castilian and catalan) already coexisted for two centuries before the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs. They no doubt kept their identity, but the same could be said of every other region. Asserting that those small medieval kingdoms survived into today's regions with zero intermingling, thus conforming clearly separate and distinct societies, is simply untenable.
In the heyday of the Spanish Empire and till the 19th century, catalans (and basques, BTW) were not just part of the thing, but a *leading* part of it. You can find lots of catalan surnames in Hispanic American countries, many of them in well-to-do families (check out the names of some well known distilleries such as Bacardi, Brugal, Barceló, if you don't mind my alcoholic references).
With the historical digression, I just wanted to point to the fact that there have been no borders inside Spain for many centuries. This is not some country with huge differences in racial/ethnic aspects, or torn out by religious strife. The interrelationships are deep and extended in time. At this point it's difficult to define exactly who is catalan or not. Is it just being born in today's arbitrarily defined administrative region what makes you catalan? Are you catalan if your parents were not? Are you catalan if you don't speak catalan? Are you catalan if you do speak catalan but don't live in Catalonia? The top 10 most frequent family names are the same in Cat and in the rest of Sp. Catalan is the first language of 36% of people living in Cat while Spanish is the first language for 46%. Catalan exports to Germany, to put an example, are less than half of those to its neighboring autonomous region of Aragon. Who gets to vote in a referendum?
The fact is that since 1978 Sp has been a highly decentralized country, much more similar to federal Germany than to centralist France. Cat, being one of 17 autonomous regions, has had for almost 40 years plenty of effective "independence": both an autonomous government and parliament, capable of passing their own laws within a large margin, as long as they don't undermine the general interests of Sp as a whole, which doesn't seem so unreasonable to me.
If you ask me, this autonomy has been used to put the emphasis on the difference. Autonomous administration has reached all aspects of civil life, to a point that the presence of national institutions are scarcely felt, and the words "país", "nació" are used all the time to refer to Cat and not to Sp. There's a huge part of the population whose first language is Spanish, yet it is not possible to study primary nor secondary school in Spanish (due to the official policy of "linguistic immersion"). Regional governments have spent a lot of money and effort in building their image, uniformizing and boosting the usage of catalan language, confering dignity to their institutions, projecting an international image, etc. etc. The regional PM is paid almost twice as much as Rajoy - not bad for an "oppressed nation"!
At the same time, complaints about things that don't go well are targeted to a ghostly oppresive presence, the "State", the "Central Government". The idea of Spain is ass
Since the last referendum, the federal government has passed the clarity act. Has to be a clear super majority rather then 50%+1. Quebec leaving also means amending the Constitution, with an amendment that requires 100% of the Provinces agreeing. There also will need to be a discussion of how much territory Quebec can keep. What they entered Confederation with? Or what the Feds bought from the Hudson's Bay Company. Of course the natives won't want to go either and they're a Federal responsibility.
Quebec leaving is not as simple as the separatists have preached.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The only way it is illegitimate is because the Spanish government has said they won't abide by it, but it can still be a legitimate referendum for the self-rule and in the eyes of the world.
Except, you know, the independentist regional government's own poll that puts the split at 49.4% against/41.1% for independence.
Seriously, you guys (as in the vehemently pro-independence crowd) just delegitimize yourselves by going down to Trump's "biggest inauguration crowd" level. This is obviously a contentious issue and the population is pretty much evenly split. An independent Catalonia would screw over half of Catalonia's population as much or even moreso than the status quo screws over the other half. Yes, this is a difficult problem, and yes, you have every right to campaign for independence, and yes, a solution that magically pleases everyone would be great, but it certainly isn't an open-and-shut-case.
was willing to arrest public servants in order to proceed their goals
I am starting to get a bit tired of explaining clearly misleading ideas (honestly denoting a quite bad basic understanding about how a big proportion of democracies are expected to work) about what I don't really care. Let's see if I need only this one comment with you.
- Rajoy personal power like the one of all the remaining presidents in Spain since Franco is virtually inexistent. Even though his party has the majority in the parliament, he wouldn't be able to do too many things on this front if the opposition (e.g., the socialist party, its left-center counter-part) wouldn't approve it, but they do. In fact, all the parties in Madrid (+ some of them taking advantage from the situation to attack Rajoy a bit), the other regional governments, most of media and public figures (including the ones in Catalonia, traditionally associated with the independentism) don't agree with how this situation has evolved. At the moment, this process seems to be exclusively supported by some of the people voting these parties, by the official regional resources and by what seems a relevant international misinformation campaign.
- All this process has been declared illegal by the highest court regarding all what affects the constitution. Just in case you don't know it, the judicial system is independent from the government. The Catalan government ignored that declaration + all the associated orders to stop that process (public servants not obeying orders from a court = acting illegally!). A court from Catalonia (independent like all the other courts and only linked to the aforementioned highest court because of their common interest in applying the law in Spain) ordered to arrest some people from the Catalan government because of being apparently misusing public resources. If a court tells you that you cannot do something, but you don't obey that order, the police (or "guardia civil" a police-like body) might come and arrest you.
- Rajoy, well I guess that the internal affairs ministry (because again: Rajoy's power is very limited), decided to perform certain actions to make sure that the so-far-disobeying regional governments starts acting according to the law. But they didn't make any decision because they feel like doing it or to repress anyone's freedom or to comply with their fascist goals as you and others imply. They are simply one of the parts of a more complex mechanism formed by: parliament (issues laws and decides), judges/courts (make sure that everything is compatible with the laws) and president/ministries (perform the specific actions to ensure the two aforementioned outputs to succeed).
- All what I am describing in this post is how most of modern western (European) countries work. All this could be known by virtually everyone after performing a quite simple research/learning. All this doesn't matter to me at all for two reasons: firstly, I am not Catalan/live in Catalonia/have nothing to win/lose with whatever happens in Catalonia; secondly, I don't care too much about politics and, mainly in Slashdot, I have zero interest in discussing about these issues. In fact, I promised myself (+ publicly, via posting it here) to try to avoid non-technical discussion in Slashdot as much as possible. I couldn't refrain myself this time because of reading so many extremely wrong posts. Lesson (re-)learned: from now, I will make an extra effort to ignore this kind of threads, no matter how much nonsense I see.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.