Catalonia and regional self-determination

But the reason Scotland would not have been allowed to remain part of the EU was precisely because Spain insisted it was that way to set a precedent in case of any such move in the Basque Country or Catalonia.

 

Not entirely true. The then President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso pointed out that there is no provision for this situation in the Lisbon Treaty, and one would have to be written in. Of course Spain would object, but even if it did not, there would not be an automatic process.

 

Spain has no one to blame but themselves for the result of that vote.

 

The problem is the ones who want to leave are three separate parties and none of them is the largest party, Ciudadanos won the majority with 37 seats and they're pro union, Junts per Catalunya and Catalan Republican Left both pro independence were the next two largest parties with 34 and 32 seats respectively.

It's a bit of a up *cough* creek without a paddle situation as pro independence got more seats (not sure on the vote share) but the largest single party is a pro unionist party so the election doesn't seem to have solved much.

 

It sort of does as very little has changed from the 2015 election, the three pro-Catalan independence parties won a majority of parliamentary seats - 70 out of 135 with 47.49% of the vote but their neither the largest party or gained a decisive victory, you can't claim that 47.49% of the people voting for pro-independence parties is a mandate for independence.

Basically you're back to square one with a near as dammit 50/50 split between pro-unionists and pro-independence.

 

I didn't say anything about not liking anything, i was merely stating a fact.

That 47.49% of the vote a majority does not make, that no one in their right mind could claim that either pro-unionists or pro-independence have a mandate to unilaterally decide the fate of the other half of the people.

However as you've brought up "the rules" there's also the rule that states the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation and until the pro-independence politicians work with other politicians to get that rule changed anything that could be seen as breaking that rule could see you being arrested for sedition.

 

Within legal means.

Let's see how well all those independent regional governments work together in terms of international trade, standards, and policies and stand up to bigger countries and big global corporations and deal with global economical and ecological issues.

Meanwhile if the IRA kicks off again, that will be entirely the result of the UK deciding to break away from the EU. But funny how the UK wants to hang on to its own union while arguing for sovereign independence from the EU.

 

As Nexxo points out, within the legal framework, laws aren't something you pick and choose depending on what ones suit you. If you want to challenge the state then you do it through the "system" and if you don't like or agree with that "system" you convince, persuade, and build support so you can get it changed.

That Spain should have nothing to do with it is just your opinion, that's not to say your opinion is wrong just that not everyone may share it, particularly, i would guess, Spanish citizens and fifty odd percent of Catalans.

Like i said if you, or anyone, wants to change that it needs to be done through agreed upon mechanisms otherwise you end up with anarchy, wars, and people losing their lives.

Very possible but history has shown us that seeking to change "the system" through violence never, or rarely, results in substantive, enduring change as all you achieve in doing is to throw away one mechanism for how society should operate with another.

 

That's because the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation is not something you can negotiate, you don't negotiate with a judge on whether you should fined for drink driving, if you think it's wrong to be fined you change the law, and the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation is exactly the same, like i said you can't just pick and choose what laws apply. You go through the agreed upon mechanisms that have been setup and change the law.

Also I'm not sure who the other stuff. International trade, global economies etc comment is directed at as I've not said anything about those, all I've said is if you want to change the system you need to change it from within, not from without, as attempting to change it from without just results in anarchy, wars, people losing their lives, and absolutely zero substantive, enduring change.

 

Well, Catalonia had its legal vote and now the issue is on the table the Spanish government will have to talk about it. No revolution or bloodshed necessary.

I look forward to people dumping their cars, their Netflix widescreen TV, their smartphones, supermarkets, internet shopping and modern medicine en masse.

The global economy is here to stay. You may get all nostalgic about the good ol' days but they are gone and they're not coming back (and for good reasons). Deal with reality, not fantasy.

No, it will just be a different world: one of conformity as well as community, parochialism as well as regionalism, hard work as well as honest work and a primitive as well as a simpler life. Everything has its flipside, kiddo. And you'd be the first one to hate it.

 

If the Catalans wishes to go their own separate way they have every right to do so. The Catalans are not Spaniards either, they are a different nation.

I see what you're getting at you raise a good point and you're not wrong.

We may actually have to ditch some of this digital stuff and go back to a more analog style of living in the end anyway, it's healthier too. Our current digital lifestyle isn't very suitable for us as analog beings.

But.

Most people are so attached to all these toys that they couldn't even imagine world without them, let alone go a day without them before they would start to climb the walls. Just look at how they interact with their precious phones. They are addicts.

With that said, ditching it all would not be possible, and not desirable, but I don't think you meant for us to go back to living in caves, but more of achieving a healthy balance in what has become an increasingly digital and detached society.

 

Half of them do; half of them don't. That's kind of the problem.

All my friends and colleagues love the idea of my harvesting honey from my own hives. They just don't relish the idea of having to cope with 30,000 stinging insects.

Turns out people love home-grown produce, but aren't too keen on shovelling horse manure and toiling in dirt. They love free range eggs, but not the whole cleaning out of chicken coops. Let's not start at butchering your own fowl and pigs. The thing about living a more healthy, natural and self-sufficient life is that it's disciplined, hard and messy work. It requires the learning of skills and rolling up of sleeves. Not seeing too many people do that. Most people don't even know how to use most features on their smartphones.

And of course some aspects of industrialised society are kind of nice: flush toilets, running water, electricity and broadband (soon to be a right, I hear!); hospitals and police and motorised transport and stuff. Don't see people wanting to give up on that. So yeah, balance is everything.

 

If you think that is a new phenomenon, I refer you to the history books. The average male needs to eat 2500 kcals. A Victorian labourer had to eat 4000-5000 kcals a day just to keep up with work demands. Life expectancy was in the low 50's, tops. There was no national health service, and no social welfare safety net. There was crazy inequality. And in the middle ages, most people toiled. Hard. I mean, beyond our comprehension. There was no such thing as citizens' or human rights. There was no democracy. And there was disease: You could wake up in the morning with a mild fever and be dead in the evening. Every decade or so a plague would come along and literally decimate the population --if frequent wars didn't finish them off first. Death in childbirth was 25%; child death closer to 50%. Life expectancy in the mid-forties.

Trust me, you think things are crazy unpredictable, fast changing and hard work now, get a load of the good ol' days.

Except that those machines are here to stay; renationalisation won't change that. The post-Brexit world will replace Poles and Romanians with robots, not Brits. Well-paid labouring jobs are gone, forever. And the good old days are not just gone, they never existed.

 

No, they just sit there and vote for Brexit and Trump so that they can get exploited even more by the establishment.

Seriously, what do you expect those people to do? Tell all robots and computers to leave the country? Overthrow the government and turn their Western civilisation into a battle zone like Syria for the next twenty years? Turn into North Korea? Because that's what a fully self-sustaining, fully employed, fully sovereign country looks like.

So dream on. I don't see the disenfranchised masses turning to growing vegetables in their own gardens and learning how to cook, keep their own chickens for eggs, mend their own clothes and fix their own appliances. I don't see them band together in local collectives, or get onto school boards and volunteer in those schools and teach their children the value of education and respect for their teachers and a belief that they can get ahead. I don't see them stop smoking and drinking so much and lose weight and improve their health.

I don't see the disenfranchised poor do anything that is within their power to improve their situation. I certainly don't see them getting organised and working towards that utopian society that you envision.​

 

Sure, I'll await the masses taking back control by voting for another term of Trump and the Tories. Because that'll really stick it to the establishment.

'Revolution' refers to a circular motion, not change.

 

And looking at history, the result was always the same: flawed system --> revolution and bloodshed --> another flawed system.

I mean, think about it: after all those revolutions in history, if they resulted in a better system, wouldn't we be living in one by now?

It's called 'revolution' for a reason.

 

You tell me: does it look like most people want a more simple lifestyle? So yes, frankly I don't see how a more regionalised system would work, and yes, until people become wiser, we're ****ed (which means, basically, that we almost certainly are).

 

And you asked how i can even get up in the morning being so pessimistic, if you ask me you're the one being pessimistic as you're literarily saying we won't make it past the next hundred years so let all go out and kill each other in a glorious revolution that will hasten the end of civilization.

And make no mistake it would hasten your supposed end of days scenario as all the time people are worried about losing their lives because law and order has broken down, all the time their worried about where their next meal is coming from, all the while their worrying about "other" things they don't have the cognitive bandwidth to care about things like being catastrophically blown up (act of god, something they can't effect), that the habitat is being destroyed by pollution (something beyond a single persons control), or that climate change is going to get them as all they care about is staying alive.

If you want people to address big issues breaking apart the old "system" isn't the way to go about it as the big issues take a back seat when you're living from one day to the next, you only have to look back to the days of the great philosophers to understand that if you want to get people thinking about and addressing the big issues they need leisure time, and that's not something people have in small, poor, and unstable communities.

People having "free" time to think about things and solve life's big problems is only something you find in large, rich, stable communities, you can't afford to have someone sitting around thinking about the cure to cancer when it's a matter of life and death if the crops aren't brought in on time, if you don't make enough weapons to defend yourself, etc, etc.

I mean do you really think someone like Stephen Hawking would still be alive if it wasn't for the community all contributing small amounts of their own resources to him and others like him who are not productive, in the traditional sense, members of society?

 

And those scientists, those climate conferences, that we're even aware of climate change in the first place is because of the very system you say should be replaced via a glorious revolution, it's only been through thousands and/or millions of people being forced by the system to contribute small amounts of their resources towards those scientists living expenses, the resources that the owner of the conference center wanted in exchange for allowing people to use the building, the cost of the equipment involved in doing climate change research, all of that has only been possible because millions of people came together as a large community and contributed a small amount of their own resources.

You are being pessimistic IMO as you've basically given up and want to destroy the very same system that enabled you to be aware of the "problems" facing society in the first place, without the system you seem to despise so much none of that would have existed, has Trump's isolationist, America first, ideology made the task of tackling something like climate change more or less likely? Is Brexit? Would Catalan independence?

And no i don't think when you say a simpler life you're talking about taking things back to the middle-ages, i guessed even you don't think we can turn back the tides of change, however i do think you believe that by breaking off into ever decreasingly smaller groups that somehow you'll improve things.

Also i don't think the world needs big centralized governments for the world to work, i believe that it's only through coming together as large organised communities that we can tackle the really big problems, it's only then that we can pool our resources and afford for people to dedicate themselves to solving those problems, it's only then when an action or solution has been decided upon that you don't have everyone doing their own thing.

Like i said do you really think someone like Stephen Hawking would still be alive in this new world order you've thought of, do you really think there would be enough spare resources available to enable someone to not contribute directly to your community?

 

There is so much wrong about that statement that I don't know where to start. You are basically trying to apply a bronze-age world onto present-day reality.

Good luck in getting millions of small, decentralised governments embracing their exceptionalism to work together and tackle big global issues such as pollution and climate change.