Loud and Clear

I want to make a very short post about the famous referendum.

The results were from 43% of the voting population. However, 770.000 votes where stolen by spanish police. This means 57% of people actually voted (even with the repression).

Being very conservative and using the percentages found in Barcelona, which is the less pro-independence region, of those 770.000 votes we can assume 89.93% of those are "yes" votes. Adding those to the total gives around 2.736.000 votes for "yes", which represents 51.5% of the total population. If we do same calculation assuming the percentage of the most independentist region, we get 96% of "yes" from those 770.000 votes, which means the total gets to 52.38%.

For comparison, the "sacred" spanish constitution was approved by a 61% of the total voting population that lived at that time (and by the way, most of the current population never voted on it).

Anyone doubting this result or considering it not legitimate enough, i'd be happy to do another one without the repression and the police beating voters and scaring people away.

Meanwhile, goodbye.

Argumenting

Things are getting tense in Catalunya.

The Government has approved a law to organise a referendum on Independence on 1st of October which proclaims Spanish legislation cannot touch it. Spanish government and tribunals have reacted by indicating that anything referendum-related is forbidden and that the law is suspended.

There's more details, but well, the most probable outcome at this point seems a vote happening on 1st of October nevertheless, where "yes" wins.

The Catalan laws were approved with questionable procedures that limited the possibility to debate them....but then again it was done like this because Spain was indicating that even debating such things was illegal, and therefore there were no other options.

In all this mess, several newspapers have started a misinformation and lying war against independence, while several people have made articles or comments where they attacked the referendum.

And in all that, what I have not ever seen are arguments about why we should not vote, or vote "No", that could stand on their own. So I want to comment on some of the arguments said and why they're bullshit....but I also want to point out that there are arguments, valid ones, and it's just mind-boggling that people that I though were smart are not mentioning them....

1-Because it's illegal:

-This one is the first thing that lots of people mention that are against the referendum, and it's really really stupid. For starters, its legality is a matter of interpretation. However, let's say it was clearly and without doubt illegal. So fucking what? As lots of people mentioned, legality is not an indication of morality or ethics. People say that one should respect the law in a democratic country, but I disagree on mindless obeying. First question to ask regarding anything illegal, is to ask why is it illegal. Is it morally or ethically wrong? Is it harmful? Is it plain stupid? If you check this, it's rather evident that some laws make perfect sense. You cannot rob, kill and/or rape because it's ethically terrible. You are not allowed to do drugs because it's a danger for your well-being. Of course there's already shades of gray, and for example maybe rather than forbid drugs for that last one it is better to control and regulate them..this could be debated, and that's why some laws are a must, but others can be debated. Why is a referendum illegal? Because it would leave the integrity of Spain int he hands of Catalan people. And why is this bad? Well, here is where it fails. The only reason this is bad is if you believe in frontiers, in countries, if you feel patriotism for Spain without any other reasons than being Spanish and feel personally insulted by the though of Spain not having some piece of land that was theirs before. I consider patriotism idiotic, since where you are born is a rather random thing to be proud of, it's the same as being proud of having 5 fingers, as if you are personally responsible for them. A referendum is also illegal if you believe people should not decide things, which is antidemocratic as hell. And there's plenty of things that were illegal and should not have been, like women voting. Legality cannot limit ethical causes, and if that's your main reason, what should change is the law.

2-Because it's nationalistic propaganda/patriotism, which as you said it's rather stupid.

-First of all, Spanish nationalism is SO much worse than Catalan one. Second, while there may be some people that really want to be independent because they don't feel Spanish at all and are really really proud of being Catalan, this is also patriotism, which is stupid. However, if you check the general opinion among independentists, the nationalism aspect is not that important compared with the chance of self-governance. Currently, Spain's government and institutions are a cesspit of incompetence and corruption, unable to do much apart of behaving like a corrupt dictator, with the novelty that they do so in group. This is fairly evident for anyone not suffering from brain damage, and that includes a big chunk of the Catalan people, who want to get rid of that and be able to promote a better management and better laws. Lately a lot of progressive laws that could have improved life in Catalunya have been suspended or nullified by creating another law that supersedes them. The problem is that in Spain at the moment we do have a lot of brain-damaged people apparently, and the main parties that are corrupt, dictatorial and useless keep getting votes, so there's no clear solution for Spain. A clean break from that sure would solve the issue for Catalunya.

3-Because in the context of the European Union it makes not sense to put more frontiers, and in general frontiers are stupid.

-Indeed, frontiers are stupid. For example, the Spanish frontiers are not allowing refugees and are also kicking them out back to the sea on the heat of the moment, something that has been declared as illegal by international right. Controlling such frontiers in Catalunya would not be to close the region to the world, but to open it a lot more than what Spain is allowing.

4-Because it's right-wing propaganda and it will become a dictatorship/neo-liberalist hell worse than Spain (so what you say about making progressive laws or opening frontiers won't apply).

-The independence moment is really transversal, and if you check any demonstration or statistic you will see that people of all ideologies are supporting it. What's more, this movement has forced the traditional right-wing party of Catalunya (which disgusts me) to move toward the centre and become much more progressive (but I don't trust them at all still and I know they have corruption, but not as bad as the Spanish one). Also, the parties that have always been more supportive of a referendum and independence have always been more on the left side of the spectrum.

5-Because it's left-wing propaganda and it will become a lawless/communist hell like Venezuela

-Again, the movement is transversal and you can see that a lot of ideologies are involved. It is true the left has more supporters in Catalunya and inside the independentist movement, but the left parties involved have been very calm and rational in the last years while ruling, promoting more social justice and never advocating for pure anarchy, trying to follow a model more north-European if anything.

6-Because the law of the referendum and its conditions have not been agreed with Spain.

-This one is the most used by people more in the middle/undecided, or against the referendum as it is but not against the idea of voting/doing something political to solve the issue instead of just illegalizing it. The problem here is that this depends on Spain. Spain has a tradition of being authoritative and is not used to negotiate much. Let's be clear: The left lost the civil war against fascism because there is a lot of fascists tendencies in Spain, a lot of patriotism for the wrong reasons, and there's only one accepted way to be Spanish, and since then things have not improved greatly about this topic. For a big group of people, Catalunya is not Spanish enough, instead of thinking that Catalunya is another interpretation of Spain, as valid as any other. The current government has the support of such people and any negotiations would be considered as weaknesses. That's why in the last years the Spanish Government has never even considered any negotiations, and has just said Catalunya should shut up and behave, basically. The Catalan government has offered to negotiate until the last minute, but Spain has never offered or proposed anything. So, how can this be negotiated if one of the parts negotiate by saying "no, end of discussion"? Some of the people defending this argument say that this is now, but that we should work to change this dynamic, and vote to put into power people more open to negotiations. The reality however is that with the latest election results we are very far from having a big majority of parties open to that. One of the parties currently not ruling that is defending this argument or proposing other solutions ruled for 8 years and did nothing of the sort, so their promises feel pretty much empty. Asking to pact is asking for people to wait maybe 40 years while renovating the parties, to reach an unknown situation where maybe things improve...or maybe they don't. People defending this option are way too optimistic about it, I think, based on previous experiences. However, I can understand to a certain point people defending this.

7-Because independentism excludes and divides people.

-This one I've heard it from several newspapers that I thought were better than this. This argument, similar to the patriotism or frontier argument, assumes or tries to tell that independentism is about Catalunya being isolated and defending "proper Catalans". However, this is easily disproven by the fact that there's a lot of independentist that are immigrants and children of immigrants. This movement has always been inclusive, and you can see that people in Catalunya just love it when newcomers integrate. One of the best things that Catalan government has promoted since Franco's dead is the fact that, to be Catalan, you just need to live and/or work on the region, and this attitude is clear in all the movement. Most of the divisions come from the unionist side's attitude, where statistics show that the emotional component of feeling Spanish is the most common reason to want to avoid independence, and therefore tend to act in more emotional and extreme ways (although lately it is true there has been some extremism on each side)

8-Because Catalunya will be kicked out of EU.

-First of all, as long as people remain Spanish (which is an option available), they will be part of the EU. As for the theoretical new country, you don't need to be in the EU to have some of the benefits of the EU, as Switzerland or Norway show, but also it's unlikely that EU will not manage things to include a rich region that would be in the top tiers of GDP compared with the rest of European countries.

9-Becasue Catalunya will become poorer.

-Of course if Catalunya becomes poorer, EU may not want to accept it. However, the general consensus is that industry and business in Catalunya is strong enough that there are 2 likely outcomes: If Spain negotiates with Catalunya, Catalunya's economy will rapidly grow from the start. If Spain penalises Catalunya, Catalunya's economy will have problems for a short-term period until it regulates the situation and then it can grow at medium-term.

I could list more reasons that I heard these days, but most of those are over-simplifications of the situation or just plain wrong. The only one that might kind of work is number 6, but it ignores reality too much....which brings me to one reason I have not heard yet, but it is actually good, and I'm surprised no one has mentioned loudly yet, that I know.....

10-For solidarity towards the poor Spanish people that will be left with the brain dead, conservative and corrupt Spanish traditional parties.

Now this is a reason I can get behind to defend not separating. Catalunya is a very progressive area compared with the rest of Spain. The current vote estimation for Catalan elections indicates that  around 60% of the people would vote a party on the left spectrum. Checking the results of the last Spanish elections, Catalunya gave around 2.100.000 votes to parties from the left-centre. In Spain in total, there were around 11.700.000 votes to parties from left-centre. Almost 18% of the total votes for the left came from Catalunya, while the region represents only 14% of the total votes in Spain. Losing those votes, even if you also lose the votes of the Catalan right, means it's much harder to implement changes on Spain, especially since the party that seems to really want to change things in Spain (they're not perfect but so far they're at least trying) was the most voted party during these same general elections in Catalunya.

Basically, separating from Spain is a bit like abandoning any hopes of changing it. It's admitting that the system is too corrupt, too biased, to change it from inside. It's a bit like admitting defeat. And it's leaving all this great nice Spanish people more at the mercy of a group of bastard.

However, there's an alternative approach to this. Spanish politics are stuck in a bad place, for too many years. Breaking from that would be traumatic yes, and would leave the progressive side weaker in Spain. Nevertheless, maybe that's what is needed to make people in Spain react, and see the old parties for what they really are: A bunch of useless corrupt assholes.

Maybe a shock therapy like this can put some life into this old and outdated system....

Finally Seoul

In theory part of this blog was to talk about trips, but in the end I keep making rants^^'. Oh well...

I wanted to explain that, finally, after a long time living in South Korea, I have visited Seoul.

Seoul is not that far from Gangneung, but it is at an annoying distance: 3 hours by bus, more or less. 3 hours is enough that going there and back during the same day seems a waste, and therefore it's something to do during a weekend. Thanks to a different number of activities at work, for a long time we didn't have weekends free, and also there was people we knew around here and we didn't feel like organising a trip to Seoul during those moments.

The end result is that my first trip to Seoul happened on May 2017, 7 months after arriving to Korea.

The trip and organisation itself was not as dramatic as it seemed, and it's rather easy. It is a bit expensive, being a big city, but after the initial trauma was over, I´ve been there 2 more times and plan to go back from time to time.

The city itself is huge, and visiting every corner is impossible, but I did manage to see a couple of different neighbourhoods and places. There is a quite wide river that divides it into two sections, connected by bridges but pretty far away form each other. Apart from that, there's lots of hills and little mountains in this terrain. The combined effect is that it feels as if Seoul is just  a combination of little towns linked between themselves with roads and subway.

The subway lines, by the way, are quite good and extensive, and make it easy to move around (which is a great difference from Rio, of course). We didn't use them on our first trip, but we moved around with them on the others.

The city itself has plenty of big streets and buildings, in areas that seem a bit cold, financial-district style....but then you turn a corner a find a small grid of little streets and houses full of bars and restaurants. The result just increases this "island" effect of each city section, the sensation that there are lots of small independent areas interconnected.

One of the most famous places we visited is Itaewon, which is the "tourist" neighbourhood. In there for the first time in South Korea we saw plenty of other foreigners on the streets, and of course lots of clubs and bars. It's a pretty small area for the concentration of locals it has, and since it's on a hill its streets are narrow and very steep. It has a great selection of foods, and after Gangneung we took the chance and ate some occidental things, which were pretty good. Korean food can be nice, but well....

The city also has plenty of shopping malls and shopping streets, and it's populated enough that it does get a bit stressful and crowded in those areas. Still, it is curious to see that between these malls there is still a lot of small food carts and street shops, with very traditional things that seem to clash with the occidental brand shops.

As part of my second visit, I went to a festival called Ultra. It's an electronic music festival, which is not my thing really, but once I was there I loved the atmosphere, and it also allowed me to visit the Olympic Stadium (for 1988 Olympics of course).

It doesn't matter the location, festivals always have this nice feeling around them, of having a big party with lots of people and enjoying the experience. Here it was no different, just with more Koreans and their peculiarities^^. I did see that there is a lot of USA military people around, both in the festival and in Seoul itself, something that is surprising to me (even if it's a known fact). And I can see that USA has a big influence in lots of details, in Seoul and South Korea in general....

All in all, though, Seoul left me with conflicted feelings....

On one side, I feel it lacks a bit of...soul. Identity. I felt it has nothing special to offer, that it's just a city...it's a feeling hard to express, but well, that's my impression. It's not bad at all, it's just...unoriginal? I know, that's too much to ask for to a city, probably. Maybe it's just that it seemed to me, more than a cohesive city, a collection of small towns in a very big area. I'm sorry to my Korean friends for saying that, but that's the impression I got.

On the other side, it is a big international city. After (happily) living in Gangneung for a while, to go back to such a place, full of movement and life and things to do, is refreshing and interesting and exciting. I enjoyed my visits there and I definitely want to go back often while in this project.

Time To Go

Things in Catalunya's politics are reaching a nice boiling point.

I realise now that I did not explain in my last political posts that in Catalan elections, the independentists won but not by a big margin enough to be comfortable declaring independence, and that after some in-fighting and decision-making, they decided to defend again a referendum. However, this time they want it more concise, more serious, and the important part: Binding.

So, if "Yes" wins, they will apply it.

This is not that easy to do, as anyone can figure out. Forming part of a bigger country means that you have a lot of laws and regulations and public spaces, contracts, public workers, etc, that are actually controlled by the bigger government. Leaving that cannot mean that you don't have all these things from one day to the other.

Therefore, in order for a referendum to be binding, you need to think about these things, and if they're achievable. And so far we're told that these things are being prepared, yes, to make sure a theoretically new country would continue functioning after independence.

In order to perform the referendum, the Catalan government has tried to negotiate with the Spanish government. However, Spain has big democratic problems, which translates to the fact that they're really REALLY scared of letting people vote. I'm not talking even scared of "Yes" winning, I mean that they think voting is the problem here.

The ruling party's official twitter posted that the Catalan government should stop the referendum and instead listen to the people.  That's not a joke or an edit, they said that, publicly, and didn't realise how mind-numbingly stupid this was.

Anyway, the Catalan government has been quite clear in this: Spain can negotiate conditions regarding the referendum,, but the referendum will happen. If they don't negotiate , the next step will directly be to negotiate terms of independence. And that's the other thing, as I mentioned before in other posts, with the current numbers it seems pretty clear the "Yes" would win in the referendum.

Of course the Spanish government has refused to negotiate and is just suing everybody they can in the Catalan government for trying to defend illegal ideas, basically. That's the smart argument they're using. They also have a number of police agents and politicians actively trying to find dirt, or invent dirt, on Catalanist parties and the Catalan government.  Again, this is not a conspiracy theory or a joke, several reporters and investigators have discovered such a plot to try to condemn Catalan politicians that defended independence, and they have conversations and audio files that show precisely that, with police and politicians saying the local Prosecutors will fine-tune the case so they can have one.

The whole thing is such a clear abuse of power, lack of judicial independence and lack of democracy in Spain that it's amazing Europe is shutting up about it mostly and, at max, just mentioning they're "concerned" about Spanish authoritarian tendencies.

And the root problem is that, in Spain, the fascists won the war. They won it long ago, they grabbed power, and never released it. The transition to a "democratic" state was done to soften the regime, and indeed Spain is more democratic now...but the people in power are still pretty much of the same ideology, especially in the ruling party.

How can you explain otherwise that this ruling party protests when a city wants to change street names that references and honours the dictator and his friends?

How can you explain otherwise that this ruling party funded for years the organisation named after the dictator, which existence is based on defending his ideas and legacy?

How can you explain that there is a memorial to the dictator where he's buried, and time and time again when somebody says to move his body and, in this way, not make it in his honour, this same ruling party doesn't allow it?

How can you explain that when a teenager makes a joke about a prime minister of the dictator that was killed in a terrorist attack, she gets condemned for ridiculing the victim? The "victim", that imprisoned and executed people for purely political reasons.

If that was not enough, this same party has, every day, every single day, some member accused and/or condemned for corruption. Every. Day. This party has been formally accused, as a party, as a whole, for illegal funding.

And they still win elections. Not by a lot maybe, but there's a core group of people that always vote them, and I'm talking about around 8 million people, close to 33% of the total voters.

That's unacceptable.

And let's not mention the rest of the Spanish parties, because the situation is not much better especially regarding corruption....but the current ruling party, that's the worst. By far. In all fields.

Do you know why in Spain we don't have a new, far-right, emergent party, like in so many European countries? Well, in case it was not evident, because we are the first ones. We had the far-right party since the dictatorship and afterwards, and it's our current ruling party.

We cannot tolerate that.

And for once, it seems the Catalan government agrees. They may have their ulterior motives for it, but the reality is that there's now a group of politicians and rulers in Catalunya that want to go all the way until the referendum, even if it means they get condemned by Spain in the way there.

If everything goes well, on September/October, the Catalan region (where this ruling party has its worst results) will vote to decide if we want to be independent. And you know, independence from that? Yes, I want it, very VERY much.

The Problems Of Leadership

A friend told me I should write sometimes about USA,and especially after the last months, there's plenty I could comment or rant about...

However, there's too many fronts currently to comment on all in a structured matter in a single post...so I won't really comment on it yet.

Instead, I will rant about something I realised recently and deeply troubled me. It is somewhat related to USA, but I started to think about it regarding Spanish news.

Basically, we humans have a big problem regarding our leaders.

I don't mean that our current leaders are problematic (although that may be true for most), but that our relationship with leaders is rather wrong....

Let me elaborate.

In Spain, as most of you probably know, there has been for some time now a number of organizations and parties that have its origin on demonstrations and protests. Some are older than others, but they are groups that tend to be very democratic, with members voting and encouraging participation. In several cities they created their own party brand, usually using some word that means "together" or "possible" or both. Apart from those there's also Podemos, which is a new party at the state level that defends similar ideas and was created as well from demonstrations. A bit apart but also relevant and much older we have the CUP, a catalan party that defends independence but also very progressive ideas and full democracy (they always vote for any major decisions to take, and simple majority wins). Finally there is also related organizations defending certain rights (like the platform for mortgage victims, or PAH, that tries to stop in any way,including making human  barriers, cases where people are forced to abandon the house they live in becasue they cannot pay to the bank).

There's more,  but that's a good initial representation of rather democratic organizations.

Anyway,in Spain the traditional parties (who are corrupt as fuck regardless of theoretical ideology) laughed about these new parties and organizations, saying they had little support.

However,after some elections,the traditional parties are no longer laughing.  Oh no. They're afraid.  Becasue these new ones are gaining a lot of suporters.  So what did they do? They attacked their leaders. They started to try and find dirt on them, ridicule them, ask them to be ethical paragons when they themselves are far from it, slandered them, associated them with terrorists, etc.

This shows a way of thinking about what a leader is that matches perfectly with conservative ideals.  Conservatives are happier with strong authorities,and strong authorities are achieved when you have one person ruling the others. The Leader. The idol to imitate and compare yourself to it. The untouchable party members that is smart and handsome or pretty and is always right.

The leader decides for you what is good and what is bad, so attacks to the leader are attacks to your whole party.

So,they do the same with these new organizations. And it's stupid. Becasue these new organizations are very democratic. If one of the founders is an hypocrite, the organization just needs to get rid of it,but the ideals and thoughts of the group should not change heavily just becasue one person is gone. And the decisions are voted,so it doesn't matter if some founder fucked up some decision,it's a common thing.

However,now the sad part comes. Attacking the leader kind of worked sometimes. Becasue these progressive parties, even if they defend democracy, also tend to fixate on a leader to guide them. People who support these organizations do not realize either sometimes that it doesn't matter who's leading becasue it's a group effort. So the leader is also always right and handsome or pretty and all that in here too,and the end result is that the discussions are sometimes not which idea is best,but who said what, as if we cannot support good ideas from 2 different possible leaders....

Of course the national media has also always emphasized this,becasue it's a nice way to undermine the same efforts these organizations are making to bring politics to a more accessible area, where everybody participates. I remember some execrable articles from a newspaper considered from the "left" spectrum where they are taking about "schism " in one of those new parties just becasue 2 of the leading people are debating different postures,which will then be voted....

All this was to point to the fact that we delegate too much on leaders to take our decisions for us, to form opinions. We as a species tend to fixate on the person,and not on the idea behind. Therefore, we tend to defend stupid ideas if the right person has mentioned them.

This is a problem, becasue it means we tend to accept the fallacy of Authority, to believe that everything a person says is true just because of the person.

What we should be doing is considering ideas. For sure if we don't uderstand the idea we should delegate to someone with expertise, but we should always be a bit careful about that.

For example,  an old male Nobel -price winner in physics taking shit about homosexuals should be shamed and ignored. He may know about physics but he's still an intolerant old man. We do not publish on the newspapers when someone 's grandad does the same,so if he's not taking about his field of physics he should not be considered as any kind of authority on such topics.

On a more subtle way, let's say a political leader that you like has a program with 10 points. You agree on 9 of them and are ambiguous or dislike 1 of them. So,the fact that they may have a bad point does not invalidate the other 9. In the same way, the fact that 9 of these points are good it is not a free pass for the 10th point. Complaining about the 10th point does not attack the first 9,and defending the first 9 does not protect the 10th.

Becasue the important thing is ideas, and that's what we should be supporting and scrutinizing. In politics in particular each one should choose representatives that match your ideology better, but again this is not a free pass for them to do whatever they want,and we should discuss problematic concepts and fight them if we think it's important, no matter how much we agree on other points.

Conservatives sees this as a weakness, and lots of otherwise progressives believe this rethoric.

We should be smarter than that.

We will never have perfect leaders, and we never should consider them to be so.  And the faster we get used to this the faster we can act on their bullshit....