Principia Politica

I think I stopped writing about politics and rants because the situation is so so bad that I feel there's nothing we can do except *redacted*, *redacted* and *I can get arrested by such comments*

Having said that, there's a number of things I see as evident, so fucking evident, that I'm infuriated when people don't see it, basic concepts really. And I feel I want to list some of those. So, here is some random rantings about core concepts:

1-People are shitty: A lot of political fights are based on saying "billionaires are shitty", or "public workers are shitty", or "immigrants are shitty". Let's close these fights with a simple basic concept, humans are shitty. Not all humans of course, but enough humans, especially if they find themselves in a position where they have extra power over someone else. Not saying all the groups I mentioned are shitty (well, billionaires are shitty without doubt yes), but because humans are shitty, you'll find shitty people in any of these groups. So, yeah, you'll find shitty immigrants, shitty LGBTQ+ people, shitty public workers, etc. Having said that, it is true that some groups accumulate more shittiness, but that's as I said, humans become shittier if they have power over others. So, billionaires are all shitty, yes, while immigrants tend to be much less shitty. The point is, you'll find examples of shitty people in any group of people, yes. 

2-Power corrupts: Another related point here is that anyone with power will abuse it, even if just a little. It's natural, it's human, and it's normal to a certain degree. Power can take many forms, lately most power is in the form of money, but it can also be political power, or power in the form of weapons, or an army. In any case, if you have power, this will corrupt you a bit and it's likely you'll misuse it at some point, even if just a little. However the problem is you can get used to abusing it till it's natural for you and you expect it. 

3-If you don't have power, people with power will trample you: Here's the main problem. No power means you don't matter to the people that have power. In order to defend yourself, you need power. But power corrupts, so gaining this power will make you more likely to be shitty, and given enough power (see: billionaires), shittiness is guaranteed. In any case, if you don't have power, you'll be squashed. Look at Palestine. People with power will totally kill you and go to sleep soundly and with no remorse. You need power to defend yourself from such things.  

4-Power attracts shitty people: This is another problem. For sure power corrupts, and you could be innocent, grab power and become more shitty,  but apart from that there's also the problem that shitty people will want to grab power, so they can be shitty to others, without needing to be corrupted first.

5-Company success based on benefit growth is impossible: This one is less generic, it's easy to understand and it's baffling not enough people get it, so let's explain it slowly and carefully: Currently the success of a company is based not on performance but on growth. So, it doesn't matter if a company makes 1M in benefit, what is considered important is that it made 1M MORE than last year. A company not growing in benefits is considered unsuccessful. This means, in practice, that companies cannot be successful, they'll always reach a tumorous size where they collapse on themselves. This is because permanent growth is not sustainable in any way. Let's take Netflix as an example: They grew subscription till everyone that could get a subscription had gotten one. This should be the pinnacle of success. However, this is considered a failure because they stopped growing. Their solution was to force family subscriptions into several singular subscriptions, increase subscription price and add advertisements. Because the benefit is not growing otherwise. So, in order for permanent growth considering there's a limited client supply, 3 things need to happen: 1-Decrease costs to minimum (which translates to paying no salaries or the minimum by law), 2-Decrease quality of product to least expensive one possible, which usually means reducing the quality (like, in Netflix: adding adverts,cancelling shows before they're finished,etc.) and 3-Permanently increase price of product. This makes it so there's a point that quality is so bad and price is so high you start losing clients, so company starts losing money, till company crashes. You can apply this to anything, for example clothing. The way to raise benefits is to make shittier clothes for the same price or higher price and pay your workers shit. So, you end up doing a shitty product for more, and because you keep paying less and less, people have shitty salaries, and with a shitty salary you cannot buy the shitty product any more, and then the company fails. So, the only way to make a sustainable economy is to not base it on growth, but on benefit: If at the end of the year you gain more than what you spent, that's good, that's a good company. Eternal growth is not possible and is actually against benefit, it's an economic tumorous cancer that eats the future and makes things worse for everyone. Structural growth because you're doing a good job and more people want to pay you for things is good, permanent growth "just because" is bad and stupid. 

6- Because of how companies work, even without the permanent growth thing, there's essential services that should not be tied to companies: housing, water, food, energy, healthcare, education and basic regional transport. These things should not be profit-dependant, because they're basic for human life, and because they're basic for human life, what price will you put to your life? In order to save your life, you'll pay anything that you have. Healthcare companies in the US know that, and that's the end result. Housing companies that rent apartments in Spain know that, and that's the end result. So, this list of minimum life necessities should never be based on a company, since a company will try to extract benefit on these things till the point were people will die or have terrible lives because they cannot pay it, as it's fairly evident in the world.

7-Governments, laws and some type of police and military are necessary: Some people think anarchist pacifist solutions can work. I don't. See the first point of people are shitty. An anarchist community will work for X number of people, and then X+1 will be a shitty person and they will ruin it. Even if the community can try and expel the shitty person, the thing is that when they're shitty they can be not evidently shitty, and the community will end up failing because the shitty person has taken control of enough members of the community to expel the ones against them. So, rules and laws are necessary, order is necessary, some way to police the people is necessary, and a way to defend the community against external aggression is necessary. However, these positions of control and power corrupt and attract shitty and violent people, and hence the problems that arise, but not having them has the same result, a shitty person can take control of the community. These things should be done ethically, but should be done. 

8-Some behaviours cannot be tolerated: Pope's paradox is real and applies to so many fields. Intolerant people cannot be allowed to participate in tolerant society, but also this should include people with no regard to human rights, people with no regards to being ecological and preserving nature, people with no regards about preserving other cultures, plus other such concepts that are basic to maintaining healthy societies. The problem is that who decides how the society works is usually a government, and the government has power and therefore may attract the same intolerant people, and then what can be tolerated can be defined by the intolerant government, which then bans tolerance and promotes intolerance. So, basically what's happening with Antifa, Trans organizations and Palestine ONGs in USA, UK, etc. Even with the existing problem, the initial problem was to tolerate certain behaviours as politically valid, when they're not.

9-When something threatens your life, violence is a valid response: Violence has been vilified a lot in the past half century, and with reason. Violence can be bad and terrible, indeed. However, it seems we have let shitty people monopolise violence. It seems only shitty people can have weapons, can hit others, can fight, etc. And we need to change the rhetoric about this. Same as with Pope's paradox, if we leave violence to shitty people, they will gain power and control everything. The social contract, which prevents violence, is based on the fact that we, inside the society, won't use violence to solve issues provided that we have good lives. That's part of the contract. The moment our lives aren't good, the moment we're repressed, subjugated, exploited, used and exterminated, that's a breach of the social contract, and this may require a violent response. If a factory doesn't comply with security practices and this kills and maims people, violence against the owners of the factory is a valid response. We should remember this.

I don't have a perfect solution to the problems I mention, but I wanted to list some of these and rant about them. A lot of issues and possible solutions can be derived form these basic premises, although I'm probably missing lots of other important points. 

For example, the problem with the cost of living is directly the result of  points 5,6 and 8. A house should be considered a basic thing, and places to live should be provided by governments. The moment we let companies control that, we're in the permanent growth situation and things just become shittier and shittier while being more expensive, and because of point 6 people will still try and pay for these till they cannot afford to live. At this point I think people should remember point 9, but seems like a lot of people don't, yet.

How to solve all this crap? I don't know. I think the best way is to redistribute as much power is it's possible. To do that we'd need to start by taxing, and then just seizing, the money big companies and billionaires have amassed. Which sounds a lot like a communist revolution actually, but the thing here is to remember that power corrupts. If you do such a thing without checks in place, you'll just change some bastards for some other bastards. I think the problem at the core of such revolutions is thinking the communist party, having achieved absolute power, won't result in points 1, 2 and 4, which is exactly what has happened in the past. Concentrating power into a person or party for them to solve everything never works because of point 2. 

So, given this impossible situation? I can only thing on permanent balances of power. That's the only thing that can make a working system that tries to not go to shit. 

Stuff like preventing people to amass money and resources as we've let it happen, that's for starters. But also, make more direct democracy, and avoid having glorious leaders and parties that will solve everything, because they will do shitty things for sure, and the only way to prevent this is if a majority of people can counter the shitty things they do. Avoid always for-life positions, limit mandates to limited times, have mechanisms to prevent judges from abusing laws, have mechanisms to remove people in positions of power, control police to remove fascists from their mist, have several different police forces that can audit each other and prevent some assholes from grabbing it for themselves, etc. And, for sure, seize billionaire's assets with no compensation. No one needs that much money and this is a clear case of 2 corrupting everything.... 

Disco Elysium: Hope in a defeated dying world

Sometimes I've mentioned before the discussions about games being art, and that some games are especially good at transmitting this. And today I wanna talk about Disco Elysium, which is such a spectacular example.

Disco Elysium is a game about communism, and how it failed. About a dying world. About second chances. About the past dragging us down and preventing us to evolve. About how there's major powers that are not letting us thrive. About the ridiculousness of purity culture and how we're our own worst enemy sometimes.  About insanity, religion, decadence, corruption and state violence. About resignation and resistance and about doing what you can instead of trying and failing to do everything. The game affects you deeply, takes hold of you and doesn't let you go. The game is funny, sarcastic, tender, sad, deep, profound. The game can be played in lots of different ways, and have different outcomes to different situations while being the same game. This game changes you.

The game itself is a kind-of roleplaying game with isometric perspective, where you can equip things from your inventory, click on things to inspect them and choose between options when talking or analysing things. You start the game and have to select how to split 12 points between 4 main characteristics, which have each 6 sub-characteristics. You can assign from 1 to 6 in each of these, without passing the 12 points total. This will stay like that in your game, but as you level up it's possible to increase sub-characteristics. These 24 different sub-characteristics determine how you interact with the world. Everything you do gets a skill check against one of those (at least, sometimes against several of those), and a dice roll plus your points in that sub-characteristic determines if you succeed or not. That's the whole game, you explore things, you talk with people, and you roll the dice (or it's done in the background as you speak) and, well, things happen and are narrated to you. As you finish quests and gain xp you can level up and either increase the points in a sub-characteristic or unblock a though process or remove a thought. Thoughts happen to you as you advance, and if you work on them they can give you special abilities or bonuses, plus they develop your thoughts as well. 

You start the game naked, on the floor of a hotel room with no memories. What is clear is that, 1-you've had some kind of auto-destructive binge that was the last straw in a chain of auto-destructive binges related to an ex-wife and 2-You're insane: the 24 sub-characteristics of you mind are talking to you, all the time, recommending things to do, giving you insights and their thoughts on all the matters. 

Soon after recovering some clothes and talking with people, you discover that you're a police officer, that you have a new partner that has come to join you today, and that there's a very dead body of a mercenary hanging from a tree behind the hotel, quite ripe after more than a week there. You need to find who did it and why, prevent the rest of the mercenaries from killing the union workers who they suspect killed the guy and try to put peace in this neighbourhood of this city, Revachol, the centre of the world, the cadaver of a region that tried to be communist and got bombed to hell and invaded by the coalition of the rest of the world. 

The world is dying, and so are you most probably, as you're an older guy that has abused substances too much out of depression and finally managed to get enough brain damage to somehow start from scratch and piece yourself together. 

What follows is an investigation in which you talk with everyone, you manage to influence local politics, you try to keep peace and really find the truth, plus to find some tether to keep you going and find beauty in the destroyed buildings and bombed areas, where you try to find inexistent animals, where you meet corrupt union leaders, good people, a fanatic liberal, the last few real communists that are too busy arguing and making pamphlets, old warriors, young drug addicts, fascists, assassins, strike-breaker scum, people lost in the edges of society and a mess of a city that feels alive and decaying at the same time. And also, you find hope. In little things, in recovery, in healing, and in revolution, in a way. Hope made from other people and from friendliness and collaboration. Hope as resistance from an uncaring world, against all odds and reasons.

This game is a statement. It's precious. It's a fucking work of art. And to really experience it you need to try it and discover what it contains by yourself.

This game is such a good political discourse that their creators got cheated by the publishing company and they lost the rights to their world and their story. They're not getting money out of it, so yeah, find copies, download it and play. Their message is important, the money for the publisher is not.

Disappointed but not surprised

I haven't written in a long time again, and also not about politics, because situation is shitty. But wanted to comment on a certain aspect of it. 

First, to say that the two majoritarian "independentist" parties, ERC and Junts, haven't done much at all lately. They've used elections just to get into power, get salaries, and then keep the status quo, making pacts with parties that, in theory, should never agree with them like PSOE/PSC and PP.

These two other Spanish parties have responded by betraying them at any chance too, so it's really really stupid that ERC and Junts still try to pact with them when there's solid proof their word is worthless and they will not fulfil what has been said. Although Junts and ERC are also very very guilty of that. 

So, people are pissed at these two independentist parties. The third big one, CUP, has acted much better in general while not being perfect, but has been added to the group for some reason(even though it never had enough power to act on much), maybe because people, once they distrust their original choice, apply the thought that "the rest are the same" when it's not actually true at all.

So now, there's an undercurrent of thought that these three independentist parties must be punished. And way too many people have decided that they will punish them by not voting at all.

That's the stupidest, STUPIDEST thing I've ever heard. 

For three reasons:

1-The less votes there are in an election, the more votes the right gets (and here I mean PSC/PSOE, PP and VOX. These three parties represent right-wing politics, from moderate on the first case to extreme in the second two ones).

Parties don't give a fuck that people didn't vote as long as they get representation. 

Basically, if there's 100 people able to vote and only 10 people vote, let's say, and they vote 4-PSOE, 3-PP and 3-VOX, these parties will not say "oh, why no more people didn't vote". They will say "oh yes, we won a lot of representation, we're the best!". And they will do whatever the fuck they want. And it will be BAD. 

These parties are the enemy of everything good. Simply put. Independentist or not, you should NEVER let these parties win at anything. If your actions are making their life easier for them, your actions are automatically BAD. 

2-Not voting doesn't give any power to your cause. 

If you want to change things, there's two options, revolution or voting for things that represent you in some way. 

To all these people that don't vote: will you automatically take arms and start a revolt in the streets? No? Then what you're doing is harming your cause. 

Nobody, nationally and internationally, gives a fuck about why you didn't vote. They only care about the people that voted. It's been proven time and time again. There's been lots of elections in the world where for several reasons people didn't vote that much. Nobody has ever commented. The final results were the only ones that counted, and that was taken as "the will of the people". 

I totally agree not voting should be considered as a bad sign. But nobody cares, so not voting will be ignored, and if something it will be considered as a fact that "independentism has lost strength, nobody wants it anymore". So, do with that what you will.

3-Dont vote for the parties that you don't like, but change your vote!

It seems like once there's a party that is yours, it's them or death. If they don't do a good job, lots of people stop voting altogether. A lot of people didn't change their vote from ERC to Junts or CUP or some other combination of this, they just stopped voting altogether. 

This is stupid! You don't like your last vote? Change it!

If people don't vote, less votes means more representation. Let's say that you have 10 people voting in total. 5 vote to ERC and 5 want to punish ERC. If the 5 that want to punish ERC don't vote, ERC gets 100% of the votes, so 100% of representation ->great success! We're on the right path, people love what we do!

Do you want that?

If instead, the 5 people that want to punish ERC vote Escons em blanc, CUP, PACMA, anything really that is not ERC, ERC gets 50% of representation ->they're punished. 

I will concede that there may be not many options available that seem good. But not voting will do NOTHING whatsoever to help you or your cause. 

See what the right-wing parties do.

They never, ever, miss a vote. That should give you a clue. 

Just walking

Happy new year! 

I didn't post many things nor many political rants lately because I haven't been inspired and things didn't change much since last time, and it's tiring to repeat how fucked we are and all that, and I'd rather talk about video games when I can, really. 

However, I thought I rant a bit anyway, just cause it's been a while, and apparently next year there's going to be some elections.

Instead of explaining Spanish and Catalan situation (it's shitty), I wanna talk about a quote, by Eduardo Galeano:

    "Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking."

This, beautifully said, is a very important point to make regarding progressive ideas and policies. Conservatives, fascists and totalitarians have it easy, because their preferred state is one of paralysis, of right reduction, of stasis, and therefore they're content with status quo, with dictators and idiocy, violence and repression and being brain dead.

Opposite to this we have the progressive parties.

And we have to be realistic here: they all suck. 

Of course they do. They try to defend progressive ideas but they tend to be too moderate, or with ideas too improbable or too hard, or too idealistic, or they may have corruption in their files (conservatives are corrupt by definition though, make no mistake here). They're falible and not good at their job sometimes, and they make mistakes. 

And none of them will be a perfect option. 

However, this means that what you should do is pick the least bad. What you should never do is to stop walking, to stop voting and participating in polítics. 

We're aware they're not perfect because no one can be perfect. We should strive for perfection and walk towards it, while accepting there's flaws we need to work on. 

Not participating in polítics is giving free reign to the other side. And the other side is evil incarnate. The other side will fuck you up, chew you, spit on you, burn the fucking world down and give the ashes to the rich. Never forget that.

Leftist and progressive parties are not perfect, but they're definitely less bad than this. We should demand perfection from them, but not to the point of punishing all of them out of being able to make changes. Because for sure the others won't be punished for being the abhorrent monsters they're used to be, that's their default, what people expect of them and what their voters want and support. 

And remember, we're just walking towards an impossible goal, the point is to get closer.

Conspiranoia

I've made a small research and it seems this is a term used more in Spanish than in English, were people usually just refer to conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless I like the term. 

During this period, I've not seen a lot of cases in my social networks, but there's an occasional one sometimes. And I cannot help but get nervous about them, but it's not much I can do. 

Conspiranoia would refer to this tendency to believe that there's dark conspiracies involved in certain world events.  Conspiracy paranoia, basically. And current events are easy to cause strange irrational reactions that make us believe such things indeed. However, applying basic logic can help diffuse these strange feelings, even if not everyone applies it. 

For starters, let's clarify that there has been conspiracies in the world, and even now I totally believe there's some conspiracies being executed. The thing is, they're conspiracies that make sense. For example, if you review the history of C.I.A., you'll see that yeah, they're bastards that have conspire to overthrow legitimate progressive governments in order to put right-wing corrupt dictators in the past. So yes, I totally do not trust any "official" occidental comment about South-American politics where USA and Europe are supporting some party in there that is trying to gain power, because more often than not they're trying to overthrow a legitimate leftist government. Venezuela is a mess and I'm not sure what to think about it apart that every side is bad in there, but I'm sure that the official opposition backed by USA is a corrupt right-wing piece of shit. Bolivia, I totally believe USA tried to remove Evo Morales and put some bullshit right-wing government that would let them steal the countries resources by bribing them. 

Same way, and considering how they don't want to release information about it, I'm totally convinced Kennedy was killed as an act organized by its own government and security agencies, because he was too progressive for their tastes. 

There has been proof about the surveillance that USA wants to apply to us all as revealed by Snowden. And there has been proof that, in Spain, there's a number of policemen, lawyers, judges and other law members, plus politicians and parties that are organized to lie, prosecute and condemn people that do not follow their right-wing fascists ideals.

So yeah, there are secret conspiracies in the world. Usually by right-wing fascist, by rich people, and by strong authoritarian powers. I will not talk about Russia and China because they don't hide it, so it's not secret they want to control their population and such things. They don't care as much about PR, and they're happy to point at the hypocrisy of other powerful countries that pretend to defend "justice" and other such concepts and then they do the same shit and try to justify it or hide it, like Spain with political prisoners as Russia pointed, or Spain with the police repression as China indicated too.

In general these conspiracies are "easy", usually. The surveillance one was a bit more complex, but we suspected it would be possible by just adding certain code to apps or by not sharing security holes in programs and such things. Other conspiracies are more in the sense of  "give money and weapons to this South American party", or "accuse this person of something so we can put them in prison", or just "kill this person". They tend to have a basic idea and with a clear objective that benefits certain people. Like, "this guy wants to prevent us from making money from this business that exploits people", so "we kill this guy, we scare others, we manage to make money exploiting people".  It's pretty straightforward, you can see the logic, it's basic.

We need to consider that people are idiots. Even powerful evil people. So, complex plans to achieve difficult weird objectives are quite unlikely, really. 

This virus is not a fucking conspiracy. The vaccines are not a fucking conspiracy. And for fuck's sake, the bloody stupid masks are NOT a conspiracy. 

Do I like to wear masks? No. Do I like to stay inside home? No. Is this some stupid "plan" to control us? Of course fucking not.

So, let's discuss some of these comments. 

-The Vaccine will control us and monitor us: Do you have a smartphone?  If you do, I can assure you that there's no need to provoke a global pandemic and to create a fake vaccine so they put a chip in us. We carry the chip every day, use it and provide information to it. I'm not saying different companies and organizations don't want to track us, but that there's a lot of easier ways to do it and they're already doing it in simpler ways. Also, most of us are not interesting enough for particular information, they just want "Big Data" to try to create models for prediction and control. Yes it's scary and not good, but vaccines and current situation has nothing to do with this. 

-The vaccine will modify our ADN: First, that's not how the ARN thing works. Second....why? What is gained by "modifying our ADN"? What basic gain will this provide to the organisers?? This enters the terrain of believing that someone has researched some way to modify our behaviour via ADN or some crap like this, which is just ridiculous and not worth mentioning.

-The vaccine is actually the illness and the thing that will kill us:  That's why before the vaccine people were dying left and right, correct? I mean, we're hiding at home for the shits and giggles, because before the vaccine everybody was healthy, yes? Actually scratch that, some people may believe this is the case. To that, please volunteer in a COVID ward in any hospital.

-The virus has been created in a lab by China/USA/Bill Gates/ Etc: First, virus occur naturally. Second, the people and countries you're proposing benefit from having big amounts of population to exploit, so they win nothing by killing it. Third, the people and countries you're proposing got hit nastily by it and are in shambles. For this to be some type of plan to destabilize the others, we'd need to accuse the country that has dealt with this better...which probably is New Zealand! Known conspirators for the fall of civilisation, of course. 

-Masks are "muzzles" that want to silence us / they make us breathe CO2 so our brains get smaller: Here it's just a matter of looking at people that used them before this, basically doctors and nurses and lots of Asian countries. They were doing fine while using masks and were using them to avoid transmitting diseases long before this. So, no, masks are a bit uncomfortable but they're not controlling you or killing you. And yes, if you don't use them you're certainly a narcissistic egotistical piece of shit.

-Confinements are attacks to religious freedom, they don't want us to to meet in churches/other religious meeting points: I mean, if you think you need to meet in crowded places yes or yes to practice your religion, here I'm not going to argue, please do so. But please don't meet anyone else outside this community of people, and when you catch pneumonia, please stay inside your house and don't cough at anyone else.

- The whole pandemic has been planned and it will create a new world order: So no, it hasn't been planned because there's several important business that have been hit by this and they would rather not have been hit, even if others are having more benefits now than before. And about the new world order stuff, look, there's already a war ongoing as I said before, where rich and powerful are trying to fuck with the rest of us, yes. But they want to fuck us by making us powerless and make us work more. Closing us inside houses or killing us is just not profitable long term. So just consider profit, this situation is not nice for them either. 

All these have this issue of complexity, strange goals and dubious benefits. However, there's a few things that may be true, because they fit with what we've mentioned before, simplicity and direct benefit: 

-Some vaccines are not being approved or bought, or they're stopped suddenly from being applied, because different governments want to give money to only certain companies and countries: Yeah, I totally believe that, and you can see it by which vaccines are being treated worse in which areas. 

-Going to work with public transport and working in an office is a much worse infection vector than they say: Indeed, but they have to pretend it's outside work that people get infected, or they'd be forced to force employees to provide teleworking, pay more for risks or temporarily stop activity, and the economy cannot deal with these things so they ban the "fun" time people may have while keeping the "boring" working part, when both are equally dangerous, because one produces money and the other does not.

After saying all this, I have to say I'm as tired as anyone about the situation. However, being selfish about it and defending it with a conspiracy theory is not helping anyone.

Goalpost moving

 Recently I've heard again that sentence of "The extremes touch", referred to political movements. I've discovered that in English, this is referred as the Horseshoe Theory. 

I really hate this sentence, because it's usually used by "moderates" to justify not taking the side of the oppressed, and I wanted to address it. 

I've commented before and I'll comment again, that we're at war with strong forces that are aiming for a big regression of rights and the funnelling of all wealth towards a little few. Part of this war has been based strongly into a constant moving of the goalposts.

By that I mean that the right-wing parties have pushed and pushed and pushed their ideologies to the right. "Moderates" consider that in any situation, the average approach is the most reasonable, and by pushing the right-side, the "Moderate" becomes really just Right-Wing. 

I am baffled why people eat this up all the time, or why would you think that anything outside of a radical change in the situation may really improve our general lives. Or by the fact that a lot of people that believe that a radical change is needed tend to go to the extreme-right side when it's organized by the same people that created the problems and want to make them worse. 

Anyway, this goalpost moving makes people forget what is extreme left and what is just moderate left. Plus people confuse the point of extreme left, and compare them with extreme right. 

Basically, any time you criticise extreme right, you're presented with: "Left equals Communism! Also so bad, killed thousands! Therefore, your argument is invalid!".

So, let's start by saying that yeah, dictatorships as seen in communist countries are bad. But they're bad because of the "dictator" bit. Someone or some group of people with limitless power that can do whatever they want is bad, period. You need checks and balances. We said that before with the police, and the same applies to the government. If you can do whatever the hell you want because you make the rules, you execute them and you judge people as per your whims, yeah, that's always bad, no matter anything else. This is not a political spectrum of anything, this is what happens in any situation you give that much power without balance to someone or a group of people, and it's always bad because people tend to abuse this power like a lot.

The core idea of socialism/communism? Less bad: We all share resources and provide for everyone so we have equity, and we don't let people hoard wealth. I mean, this is nice. The opposite of this is unfettered capitalism, which basically says that if you can become the richest person in the world, you deserve it, even if this fucks indirectly or directly with 98% of the rest of the population. Then it's a matter about how to implement it efficiently, and please remember that in the world, any place that has tried to apply such things more strongly has seen USA and their allies fuck them so very hard that it polluted any results. Also have in mind China is not communist any more, they just kept the dictatorship part and are now ruling a capitalistic hell-scape with a brutal social control.  

But I digress. What I also wanted to say is that people don't even know what is an extreme leftist any more. Extreme leftist would be to, for example seize all factories, all service providers (like water or energy), seize all fields owned by companies and not particulars, dissolve all companies by law and enforce them to be publicly organized, or seize any house owned by a company or that is owned by a particular that doesn't live in there and already has two main residences.

That's just a few policies that are extreme leftist. And I have to say that I agree with several of those (for example, the house thing or the energy thing). However, it's true that some competitiveness can motivate sometimes to do better things. So I'm willing to compromise and accept more moderate approaches, like limiting company sizes but letting small companies work and try new things in a capitalistic approach to competitiveness. 

Anyway, my point is that NO ONE currently is even proposing that. What most "left" parties are proposing is just some more regulation of the markets, plus dedicating public money to reduce inequality and taxing the rich (and just fyi, you're only rich if you could have afforded to do nothing all your life without anyone paying for you and would never had any issues buying food or paying for a place to stay. Anything else is just poor or middle-class, and in denial about the situation). 

I'd be perfectly happy with just seizing the money of rich people and turning it public, videogame-style: after your first million you cannot gain more money, it all goes to public funding, as if you were missing bytes to write the money you have. But again, the "left" parties are not even proposing this. 

They're just asking for small reforms that would benefit everyone indeed, but they're not like radical reforms, most of them. 

And even that is seen as suspicious by people, because it seems everyone thinks they're rich but temporarily poor or something, and the idea that the money you earned goes to a few that don't deserve it is such a strong instinct that people are like wary of these ideas. 

But, guess what?

YOUR MONEY ALREADY GOES TO THE ONES THAT DO NOT DESERVE IT AT THIS TIME!!

Or what do you think is happening when the right-wing governments give funds to big companies that are failing, like banks, and they don't have to return that? Or when they let rich people avoid taxes? Or hell, just producing value for a company that goes to their net benefit while you,as employee, never participate in that net benefit is exactly giving your money to the ones that do not deserve it! Left-wing policies just try to redistribute it more, which means you will see more of a return, while right-wing is letting the same 10 families that always had money to just keep having more and more money, YOUR money!

And again, the little measures that left-wing parties tend to propose are just slightly moderate! They're just saying "maybe we should not let markets do whatever they want to the point that a global crisis can be nice for them and then they may want to keep an ongoing crisis forever?" "Maybe we should regulate things somewhat?". That's mild! And no one with a sane mind should propose dictatorships anyway, and no one in the left is proposing that any more!

You know what also touches the extremes? The fucking middle! So, please, start thinking a bit more and realize that one side is not like the other, and what all these excuses are defending: they're defending the same people as forever, the ones that have power and wealth and want to keep it from everyone else.

PSOE/PSC is a right-wing party

After Catalan elections, a number of in theory progressive people keep insisting that JxCat is extreme right and PSOE/PSC is left-wing.

Among them, there's the En Comú Podem people and Podemos in general. And it's baffling that they're taking this attitude. I mean, they're currently ruling with PSOE, yes, so some protection is understandable. However, claiming JxCat is worse than PSOE/PSC in right-wing matters is simply not true. 

Let's just look at facts here, shall we? I'll just list their latest actions:

-PSOE has a big number of people in executive positions in the most powerful Spanish companies, and has legislated in their favour several times.

-PSOE reformed the constitution (together with PP) just once recently in order to include the clause that the country's public debt  must be paid first, before any other expense, in 2011

-PSOE increased the age of retirement to 67 years. 

-PSOE applied a labour reform that made firing cheaper, made it easier to fire people if a company is having loses, and allowed companies to bypass worker agreements if they managed to negotiate this with employees (while not having an even ground since the company has a lot more power). This resulted in a big decrease of job quality in Spain, plus created the perfect conditions to fire people that had better contracts.  

-PSOE defended not investigating the previous king of Spain and helped him exit the country as if that solved the corruption issues. They're also a big defenders of Monarchy as a good thing to have.

-PSOE is refusing to regulate the price of rent to try to stop it from raising indefinitely. 

-PSOE tried to rule with Ciudadanos (right-wing) before negotiating with Podemos (centre-left).

-PSOE made a pact with CIU in Catalunya to make corrupt healthcare organizations that control and privatized a big section of the healthcare market in here. The people in CIU that were part of this are currently in PDECAT and not in JxCat.

-PSOE has made pacts with PP to split important positions inside the tribunals and has been using the judicial system as a repressive arm of the state exactly the same way as PP. 

-PSOE has not removed recent laws promoted by PP that constraint freedom of expression and is using them to jail critics and repress different sections of the population.

-PSOE members are part of several economic circles that do not follow any democratic laws, are there with PP members and support more power and money for the economic elites. 

-PSOE privatized several public companies that were having benefits with the only objective to transfer this benefit to private owners. 

I will add that during the 15M protests that directly resulted in the creation of Podemos, a common slogan was "PPSOE" and "PP and PSOE is the same shit". This served to indicate that both parties were complicit in keeping the status quo where a few companies and rich people keep the power and society doesn't improve their well-being. PSOE may implement some social measures like defending abortion, promoting more equality for women, hinting at allowing euthanasia, or trying to protect LGBTQ+ rights, that is true, but that's about it. These two parties were correctly identified as the problem that is preventing Spain from improving the life of all their citizens, and Podemos until recently understood they had to defeat both to change things(Just a clarification here: PP is the same as Ciudadanos which is the same as VOX. All these are the same, so defeating PP in the past now means defeating these three parties so they never have power again). That is, until they lost support and realized they could not rule alone, and then they decided to try to associate themselves with PSOE. They forgot about one of the core principles of the protests, and now they're unable to create much change because of it, and are losing voters left and right because of it.

I would not vote for JxCat (too centre for my taste), but they've separated with their worst elements, now found in PDECAT, and they've voted for the following laws, to say a few:

-Tax big bank deposits

-Force energy companies to provide service to poor people. 

-Tax empty houses

-Forbid fracking

-Regulate apartment prices

-Forbid kicking out people from their houses

-Promote protections towards climate change and use renewable energies and good practices

Of course Spanish government and tribunals have annulled all of these because they considered them anti-constitutional or that Catalunya has no right in regulating these things or they created worse laws soon enough (like a national 0% tax on bank deposits) that made these invalid, so we couldn't experience this effect, but they're certainly a lot more to the left than what PSOE has been showing for a long long time now.

Any party that says JxCat is more right than PSOE/PSC is straight-up lying and not acting thinking about real left-wing policies, and this really undermines any respect and good reputation they might have before this.

Who guards the guardians?

In the last days, Spain has again done something repressive (big surprise) by jailing a rap singer. 

Let's not focus on that right now, although it's worth mentioning Spain is the country that has the biggest number of artist in prison. Yeah, ahead of Iran or Saudi Arabia or other places that are repressive dictatorships. And the European Union is not doing anything about it. 

Anyway, there has been protests in defence of freedom of expression, in Barcelona and other cities of Spain. And the police has answered with charges. In front of that, protestors have created fires and barricades to defend themselves, and now the main TV channels and newspapers that support the elites are crying for burned trash containers and making it equal than being beaten with sticks or losing an eye, something that has happened to a protestor when she was shot in the face with a special foam bullet.And I'll redirect attention to my other post of Declaration of War, and say that they expect people to just silently comply to everything bad and we're past that phase, and you can either support the repressed or be part of the problem.

In Valencia for example you could see that a protest was ongoing in a peaceful manner and police with riot gear just went against it at full force all of a sudden. And actually these images are similar to what happened during 1st of October in Catalunya when the referendum took place. 

In all these, police can do whatever they want. There's never any repercussions for them. They're supposed to avoid hitting heads, to avoid shooting in the face, to avoid creating panics or making situations more dangerous, they're not supposed to insult or say racist or sexist crap, etc. And they do, and nothing happens. 

Police is a problem. Society does need some type of mechanism to guarantee that you will not be robbed, raped, murdered, attacked,etc. and when these things do happen there needs to be a mechanism to follow them up, find the authors and deal with them, by re-educating/re-inserting them or, if that's not possible, locking them up. Society does need some type of protection against abuse. In most countries, it has been decided that there's a security force, like a small army, that should take care of that, the police.

However, then you have several other problems. First of the issues is what is a crime. There's evident ones, like if you are on a street and randomly decide to murder the next person that crosses you. Yes, that's a crime. But then, there's a lot of grey areas, like what if you were defending yourself from said murder and ended up murdering the attacker? It was self-defence, right? Well, some countries decide this is allowed, and some others say this is still a crime. And that's just an example that things are never that clear-cut and usually they need to be analysed in detail to understand context. Then there's the matter than robbing a food shop because you don't have food is considered a crime but raising rent to the point where your tenants cannot afford to eat is not, which also shows that crime can be quite subjective and the big powers can make it so their activities, while more damaging to society, are considered not a crime. 

Second of the issues thought, is that, who's going to check that this force is not committing crimes themselves? This is a very old philosophical question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians? If a police officer is a piece of shit that hits his wife, their comrades and friends will gladly stop him from doing so and arrest him, or will they cover for him? If the police decides to beat people up for fun and revenge, who's going to stop them from doing this? If the police is full of bastards, how do we clean  them from the system if we need the same police to arrest them or protect us from them?

In theory police itself should try to find its worse elements inside it and remove them, but why should they? They're being trained to support each other, trust each other and work together. Especially in sections like the riot police, they're trained to act like an army, like soldiers, and you cannot expect that this training does not produce a certain brainwash against reporting your fellow officers. Plus there's the fact that most people that join these sections are more than happy about not reporting them even before the training, but we'll get back to that too.

So, what are solutions to this? Sometimes police departments have what in movies call "Internal Affairs", which is a side that investigates police officers themselves and, of course, in most cultural works they're painted as "the bad guys" from preventing "good officers" from doing their job. Only that will tell you that they're probably not popular if they work well, and that they have huge pressures against them. Plus in the end they're part of the same force, they may have started working with the same people and have friends in there. 

In Spain, I'm not sure internal affairs exist, I think most forces just investigate themselves, but there's a curious kind-of alternative: We have different branches of forces. We have national police, sometimes regional police, and then we also have Guardia Civil, which is like a different force entirely that works also at national level. This solution was initially implemented to have an alternative force from the military, for all the wrong reasons (at the time the military had turned more progressive). 

This idea could work, if implemented properly: You have two forces that are independent, with different uniforms, different training, different circles. You divide the forced by region, so depending on the region one applies or the other, and you then make any crime that one does to be investigated by the other, plus having each other in checks so no one gets corrupted or does something bad, some type of friendly rivalry for being the best and more clean. Since they're not connected or part of each other, this would reduce the feeling of "betraying one of us" that lots of them seem to have. Spain hasn't implemented this correctly, of course, but it's something that could help. 

However, Police has also another problem, a third one, that is in the end the root of everything that's wrong with it: The profiles of the people that want to join and are accepted. In theory and in an ideal world, police should be formed by people that want to defend society from bad elements that live in it. Compassionate strong people, with a high moral compass, that even if they're not a judge, they can decide when someone is worth arresting or if it's better, for example, to pay for their meal once, or just warn, or well, really understand the situation and do what's best for society in the long run.

That's not the case at all, at least in Spain and in plenty of other places. Here the main focus is to find people that will obey commands. That's the most important detail. Then, people that will uphold laws regardless of if they're unjust or not. So it's better if they're not too bright or moral or they may see the problems in persecuting poverty without addressing the root causes. They have to be loyal people, loyal to their partners and bosses, not loyal to real legality or morality, but to the force. And in the case of the riot police, they have to be people that are happy to hit others. 

So, who then applies to these positions? Well, bullies. Fascists. Military fanatics. Violent people. And then you end up with forces made up of sexist neo-nazis that are quite happy to beat these progressive protesters, grope women as they arrest them and bully pacific people into submission. Or they're quite happy to ignore the openly neo-nazi that works with them because he's a "nice guy" and they have beers together later and he's a companion. And then it happens that when real dangers to society, when actual fascists are marching around saying we should kill all jews and leftists, these police officers are happy to defend them, because they're their friends. Hell, in Spain lots of times with different forces, in these fascist marches one force is defending the other force, because the other is marching but without the uniform, not officially.

And it's not me saying this. It's lots of ex-cops, ex-military, ex-security forces. There are people that joined these professions with real care and, when they protested about the situation, were directly expelled because they didn't "fit in" and such things. Which means that any good people left in there may disagree with these things but they're not willing to say it out loud either and accept it as something that just happens inside police. 

The power that these positions offer corrupts, and attracts corrupted and violent people, apart from people that just want to defend others. And for very long the elites have accepted the bad ones because it was useful for them to have mindless violent guard dogs that they could send to anyone that bothered them.

Not every police officer is like this and it also depends on what they do, if they investigate murders, are just information analysts, or are patrolling or riot police. However, there's way too many, it's not just a few, it's a big majority inside that prevents any real change. Most Spanish police worker unions are openly supporters of VOX, for example. Another example: a lot of domestic violence cases are caused by police officers themselves, in a proportion much superior to any other profession.

Recently two police officers in a bar decided to say sexual things to a 14-year-old, and when his dad protested they put him in the hospital. This case was so evident, so bad, that they have been arrested, but we'll see if they're really condemned. And when a similar thing happened in Euskadi, the police officers said the others were terrorists and they're currently in jail for terrorism, when they just defended themselves in a bar fight. 

The worst offenders are Riot Police, as I said. Riot police should be there to defend us from, for example, the fascists groups that were roaming the streets recently and hitting people. But the reality is that it's impossible for them to do so, for the same reason Spiderman can never be seen saving Peter Parker. Riot police shot live ammo against protesters, after the 14-year-old incident I mentioned before caused locals to go to the police station to protest. Riot police shot to the face a girl and she lost an eye, this week. Riot police hit people voting on 1st of October during the referendum. And riot police have again and again been abusive, violent, brutal without reason, not following laws themselves at all. And they've faced very little repercussion, or even being awarded for their "brave" service of hitting people in groups while wearing full-body armour.

Riot police as it is, should be disbanded in Spain. And the profile and philosophy of  police needs to be reassessed in order to have proper democracy, otherwise we'll keep having huge problems with them. 

Any party that says they're progressive should defend that and do it if they have the chance. Otherwise, they're not.

...and the results are in

 Let's comment on the results of the elections for a moment here now.

The results are...not bad. Could be better, but well. 

First of all, more than 50% of the total votes went directly to parties that support independence. This is a big deal, because Spanish unionist never got tired of saying that independence supporters were never winning by counting the total votes and not the total representatives, and ignoring that there was a party were the votes could go either way. Now, even without counting that party, it's clear than more than half of the people voted for independence. 

Of course now unionist will say participation was low, at only 53%, compared to the previous 80% which was a record. While participation was lower, it's true, the fact remains that we're in the middle of a pandemic and it wasn't the best moment to vote, we were forced by the Spanish tribunals thinking the results would be "good" for unionism. They were not, so yeah, fuck them, that's a problem they created in the first place. And make no mistake, if they had won, participation would have never been commented as an issue. 

Then, the "winner" party: PSC, with 33 representatives and a bit more votes but barely, than ERC, and they both have the same amount of representatives. Here we can see the lack of democratic culture so often found in Spain: They claim PSC won. And while PSC did get more votes than any other, they got less than 25% of the total votes. This means it's irrelevant which party has more votes, what matters is which parties can work together. And unless ERC betrays all they've said during the campaign, PSC just doesn't have enough support among the other parties to win or rule.  

The independentist parties won, with 74 representatives, out of 135. ERC has 33 representatives, barely had more votes than JxCat, but JxCat has 32 representatives and has conceded, ERC will have the presidency. CUP has managed to get a respectable amount of representatives, 9, and they can condition the government and its actions, which is always good. In summary, it seems like these three forces could rule. However, negotiating may be difficult, since they tend to be very aggressive with each other. 

Ciutadans has crashed beautifully to only 6 representatives. PP is even worse, with 3 representatives. This is amazing news, because these two parties are a bunch of lying fascists. However what's not so good is that VOX has gotten 11 representatives. People are crying about this, and for sure it's bad, but as I keep saying, Ciutadans and PP are also fascist. It just happens that, when your voting base is fascists idiots, they tend to prefer the party that is openly fascist. So, fascism didn't grow, it's still there at the same level as before. And make no mistake, a lot of VOX votes come from rich areas, that's the elites defending the fascist control over Spain. However overall, these extremist parties are doing so much worse than before: Last time they had 40 representatives in total, and this time they have 20.

PDCAT disappeared and has no representation, which I also think it's beautiful. This party privatized a lot of healthcare in Catalunya, voted against protecting the vote of people living outside Spain and are guilty of destroying public education and healthcare, which means they're guilty of plenty of deaths during this pandemic. Their support was inflated, and now that they had to defend themselves with no protection under some other name or cause, the real result has shown nobody wants them anymore.

En Comú Podem (ECP) didn't do very well and has only 8 representatives. As I said, their problem is that they don't get at all Catalunya, they say things like independentism is racist and excludes people, which are not true (apart from some idiots on twitter, and all sides always have a minimum of them, no side is free of that) , and because they don't get how society works here very well, they keep losing votes and support. What is a shame is that PSC voters should vote them instead, they defend much better the people that are voting PSC than what PSC will ever be able to do. Having said that, they insist again and again that PSC is left-wing, when it's not, and they're not considering CUP as another left-wing option, and they keep being quite hypocritical and misunderstanding everything. As long as they make these serious mistakes and they keep some questionable people inside the party, they deserve this too. 

So, the possible combinations are as follows: 

1-ERC+JxCat+CUP: The "easiest" option and more reasonable, with these it's possible to control the parliament and the government. 

2-ERC+JxCat+ECP+CUP: That would be weird, but ERC wanted to "open their hand" to ECP. Problem is ECP keeps repeating JxCat are right-wing extremists and cannot pact with them, but then again this is not true at all, JxCat are center-right at max, and more to the left than PSC actually. 

3-ERC+PSC+ECP: The preferred option for ECP and probably PSC too, ERC has given doubts they could accept this but lately they repeated they would never pact with PSC, so to do that now would be quite damaging to their image. 

4-PSC+ECP+C+PP+VOX: This one is the nightmare situation where the independentist parties would fight enough that they didn't agree to rule, and then ERC didn't vote against this for some reason/allied with this somehow and let this happen. Highly unlikely because it needs an independentist party to betray all their voters and that would be suicidal. This would also be damaging for ECP and PSC, since they would have to ally themselves with VOX, although they have allied themselves with Cs other times and they're also pretty fascists...

Overall, not bad results. Catalunya is moving towards a strong independentist center-left, where the Catalan "right-wing" is actually left from the "leftist" traditional parties in Spain.

Now expect the Spanish tribunals to start bullshitting and creating charges against the independentist politicians, it will happen soon enough...

Elections Once More

I'd like to make a little break from Resident Evil posts to talk again about Catalunya's elections. 

So, as usual, a judge decided that the previous Catalan President was unfit to rule because he put up a sign talking about freeing political prisoners before the Spanish general elections. Because apparently this was giving support to some specific parties and wasn't allowed. The whole thing is ridiculous but that's what happened. 

So, new elections had to be organized to select a new president, earlier than it should have happened and while in the middle of a pandemic, but these judges don't give a crap about that and would be happier if all Catalans just died, so yeah, they did this anyway. They will occur on 14th of February, but with the pandemic every party said to adjourn them till later. But again a judge decided that this was not legal and they had to take place. This is presumably because there's a candidate that the Spanish government is backing that has chances to have good results right now, while it's unclear if he will also have good results later, and Spanish judges are so corrupted that they're happy to oblige with actions that help the unionists and the status quo of Spain, still ruled by Franco's heirs in lots of positions of authority, like the higher tribunals of the Spanish judicial system. 

All quite normal for Spain, really. I think that the tribunals that decided it was ok to vote in a pandemic should be part of the organizers that sit and take the votes of people at the election points, since it's a very safe activity, yes? Of course they won't, but they totally should...

Anyway, people are tired, from the pandemic and from the constant struggle, plus of the fact that traditional parties that were supposed to advance in independence work have not done anything in 3 years. I believe independence is possible but it's clear some of these parties don't believe it anymore or are not willing to do what they say they will do, at least. In this situation a lot of people are afraid to vote or don't know who to vote or want to punish the parties and will not vote. 

This is bad. 

We must always remember that the most right-wing and conservative, because of their nature, will not doubt. They will go to vote thinking the pandemic is a scam. Or they will go to vote just because their leader has asked them to. Or they will go to vote for some other reason, but since right-wing is big about accepting authority without question, they will just go and vote for bastards. So if people that do try to think a bit don't vote, there will be an over-representation of idiots. And this is bad. 

So yes, go to vote. It sucks, it's dangerous, and the parties don't convince you. Doesn't matter, go to vote. Just pick your less bad choice. Or you'll be responsible for all the bad that the really worse parties can do.  

Now, a little summary of the parties involved:

VOX: The far-right wing party, they're openly fascist. Fascists should not be part of elections but in Spain they won and they're allowed. 

PP: The far-right wing traditional party that is not openly fascist but are fascist anyway. Founded by fascists, ruled by the children of fascists after some of them died, and used to steal public money without shame and maintaining status-quo. Again, in a civilized country they wouldn't be allowed to run either.

Ciutadans: Another far-righ wing party, not openly fascist but fascist anyway, although their focus is more on being ultra-neoliberals and fucking with workers as much as possible. Basically PP with a cleaner record in corruption, just because they didn't control much power yet and then it's hard to be corrupted if you don't have any, but would do the same as PP if they could. 

Now, wait a sec, you may say, you cannot accuse everyone, that is not following your ideals, of being fascist! 

Well, of course not. But these three are. Like, really. As I said, the members of these three parties and the founders very often had ties with Franco's old government, by being part of it or being friends with part of it or being relatives. These parties have again and again defended Franco's dictatorship, monuments and legacy, and have been again and again saying it was not that bad during this time and the real problem was the republic before that. And they pact together and rule together every time they can do so, in every region and city hall in Spain where they had enough votes for this. They're fascist, as clear as day, and they're in it together, just fighting to see who's at the top and can control the others and steal the most.

Let's talk about the not-fascists ones:

PSOE: Traditional Spanish party that is center-right. The problem is that they say they're center-left and progressive, and they're not. They're happy with certain authoritarianism, with helping the big companies and fucking medium and little ones, to support the king of Spain, and they've been for too long ruling too so they also have corruption, but in subtler ways. They have no word, have not fulfilled lots of pacts and acted on self-interest and for the benefit of the elites. And occasionally, they've given support to social causes, nothing too problematic for the elites but enough that they may appear as "progressive". PP-VOX-Ciutadans will punch you in the mouth and spit on you when you're down. PSOE will instead clap you in the back and stab you oh-so-politely when you don't expect it. In the end you're still hurt, but yeah, the style is different. The current Spanish regime and elite is maintained thanks to PSOE, giving legitimacy to them by defending them the same as the fascist trio but without being as over-the-top evil as them.

Unidas Podemos/En Comú Podem: New party that appeared as the counter for the traditional ones, but has been slightly corrupted by power and by including people from an old party too, Izquierda Unida. They're the best that Spain as a country can offer, but they're simply not enough. They have good ideas and good proposals, but they lack power to implement real changes without more votes in the rest of Spain. They have two big faults: 1-They want to pact with PSOE as if it was center-left when it's not, and PSOE will fuck them constantly because that's what they do with anything that is left-wing. 2-They do not understand Catalunya's situation nor understand that the right-wing parties in Catalunya are, at max, as bad as PSOE and in the same ideological compass regarding economy, if not more left-wing than PSOE. I wouldn't mind them ruling Spain, I think they would do a much better job than anyone else available with chances, but they're not perfect and fault 2 makes them not ideal at all for Catalunya. 

ERC: Traditional Catalan party, in theory left-wing but in reality very very very much center more than left at this time. They are in theory independentist, but lately they've been forgiving too much to PSOE's government, thinking that by being moderate they can attract more support to independence, but by doing this also recognizing that they don't want independence right away and something in the middle would work for them. This may attract some voters, but lots of other voters may feel repelled and betrayed by them now. Also, as I said, they're trusting they can pact with PSOE, but PSOE has shown again and again that whatever they pact, then they decide to ignore if it fits them better or protects the elites.

JxCat: Kind-of new party that resulted from a division inside the old Catalan party Convergencia. Convergencia ruled for many years here, was right-wing, corrupt and did quite bad things to the average person, especially when it comes to healthcare. When independence became popular they joined the train and tried to steer it towards more power for them. This failed because of the aforementioned corruption, I think. Since then they changed names several times (last official one was PDECat) while keeping the same people, with mixed results. In the end, a group inside that defended more democracy, transparency and real independence made a "coup" and stole this name, that they had used in the past, to create a new party. The old Convergencia is still participating but they've been forced to use their proper name, PDECat, and this other group now has the people that were more committed and more open to changes. This new party seems in the center, and it has defended proposals that are more to the left than PSOE (although this is not very hard). Still, it tends towards a more conservative vision of politics, that is true. 

PDECat: The party mentioned before. They may end up with no representation in these elections, and I have no sympathy for them. Their party did quite horrible things in Catalunya. They tried to hide under other names and ride the independence train to keep relevant but finally they've been forced out in the open and to go as they are, and I'm quite happy if they don't get results, as long as the voters go to some better independent party.

CUP: Left-wing party in favor of independence. They're called "radicals" in this current world where not putting your tongue up the market's ass as deep as you can is considered to be extreme and anti-system. They're irregular and change opinion often, but that's to be expected because they're based in voting things instead of having a single leader that decides everything. They're not perfect by far and some of their actions could have been better, but seems to me they're the less bad option of the bunch, if you favor independence and want society to improve somewhat.

So, they don't feel exciting elections but there's also this detail: Maybe clear independence votes will surpass 50% of the total votes for the first time. Other times the votes for Unidas Podemos could be counted either way, and unionists always considered them to be in favor of remaining in Spain, although the people voting them had a mixed opinion. IF the other independent parties get more than 50%, some people won't be able to say anymore that this is not something that a majority of voters want. I'm not sure anything else will be achieved, but it's something...

Declaration of War

 We're at war and we don't know it. 

 For a long while now we've been at war. And it's a world war. And we're losing it. It's a war with casualties from mostly one side only, but it's a very civic war. In this war, most of the time, it's not like someone will come to us and shoot us, oh no. That's not polite. In this war we lose little by little, our lives and our time. Although in some areas you do get shot, where the fight is in its worse shape. It's an asymetrical war, both sides are rather different in numbers and power. But it's a war nonetheless. 

This war has been raging for all our history. Sometimes there's calm periods and truces. Sometimes there's small victories. But lately it's going worse for us, after a period where it seemed we could achieve some level of victory, or at least a reasonable truce. 

 We've had recent battles in plenty of places. In Brazil, we lost to ignorance and stupidity, and because of its current culture it may take some time before any victories can be achieved. In Chile there was a recent stand off that gives us hope after a long period of darkness, but it needs to be developed and to grow into a victory, and it may not be one just yet. In Bolivia we won after almost losing an important battle. Hong Kong seems lost, the battle continues but the enemy is too brutal in there. In USA we were defeated so long ago nobody remembers our side, but lately there's been some movements towards a change, although it's still in its infancy, and the latest results are not really a victory. Poland was never in our side but maybe after the latest abuse some reaction will be triggered. I'm not informed enough to talk about countries in Africa but it seems there's been an ongoing change in there too, little by little, in some of them small victories for us. Turkey has been conquered after a period of hope, and we need to recover it but won't be easy. Russia had some chances but the opportunity was not taken. Most religious-based countries mark a huge defeat for us.

Spain was lost since 1939, and is still lost to this day. Catalunya has a chance to be a small win, but Spain will fight us to the death. 

One side is always the same: Fascism, dictatorships, unchecked corruption, economic power, religious power. The other is just the average person. 

The war is simple: Average people want to have nice lives. Lives where you do work, but you also have free time, health, friends, and where you can work with what you like. Lives where you can allow yourself presents, for you and your friends and family. Where you can have vacations and visit places. Where you can have moments of rest and calmness. Where you can believe whatever you want and no one imposes their views on you. Where you can retire and you don't need to die right away. Where people help each other. and where we can collectively decide things for ourselves. Then we have internal struggles about how to achieve these objectives, but that's the idea.

The other side wants to have these things only for a few of themselves, the chosen ones, and everyone else should suffer and die slowly to provide these things to them, It's a simple as that.

 Maybe this seems simplistic or evident. But what I want to remark, is that this is WAR. When people get kicked out of their houses, people DIE. When factories are closed down, people DIE. When hospitals are privatized and medicine is not affordable, people DIE. Those are casualties. When some rich or powerful bastard takes a decision to withheld resources for the common people, this person is PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the impoverishment, misery and death of these people. Same way I would be accused of not helping someone that was bleeding to death in my house if I ignored them and didn't call an ambulance nor did anything at all.

All this was to explain a few things regarding the current struggles:

 1-This war is all the same war. Catalan people wanting to vote and getting beaten by police is the same war as Hong Kong people wanting to decide for themselves and getting beaten by police. It's the same war as BLM in USA. Its the same war as medical professionals asking for more resources. It's the same war as workers asking for better conditions. It's the same war. So, support all of them and don't be blinded.

2-A lot of idiots are supporting the wrong side because in their little evil minds, they think they're part of the powerful side and that they will get better lives through it. The reality is that they will be squashed and discarded with all the rest, but since they will not be the first ones and the first ones are a group they don't like, they think this is good and later they'll be spared. 

3-Being neutral or equidistant, or "centrist" here means support to the powerful. As they say in Germany, a table with 1 Nazi and 9 people that let them be there is a table with 10 Nazis. And thinking the one doing the beating is the same as the one being beaten is morally abhorrent. 

4-Civility is not an option when it results in one side always winning because they're the only ones that can be nasty and violent and brutal while the other side is expected to put the other cheek and accept their fate and "be nice". Doing a "smart" economic operation that can force a building full of people to be kicked out to the streets should be responded with the same rage and pain that it has caused and the person responsible should suffer horrible consequences for it.

5-The current health crisis is making everything on hold, but we should not forget that we're at war, and you can see whose lives have been the most affected and who's reaping benefits from all this, and understand then who needs to be defeated. 

Any approach that doesn't take this into consideration, that doesn't understand this is a war, that doesn't understand that we're all going to suffer and die unless we turn the tide strongly to the other side will not succeed. To go back to USA, the current election results will not achieve anything at all, things will just get worse a bit more slowly in there, the important defeat there was in the democratic primaries and after that one the end result would be bad or horrible, but never good.

The "agree to disagree" and moderation is for cake, not for the worth of human lives. And Nazi Germany was not defeated with hugs and good intentions.

It's the end of the world (as we know it)

So, we're again in Interesting Times. And maybe we have had enough for a while.

Nevertheless, this has created an opportunity at least. Yeah, it's a horrible thing what's happening and it would be better if it didn't, but it's giving us lessons, really important ones. And I'd like to mention some of them, as I think about them.

1-In lots of workplaces, it is possible to work from home. This one is written from a privileged standpoint, of course, shops and industries and the primary sector is not included in this. But there's currently a lot of new jobs, based on services, where we have been forced to go there every day and stay there for a lot of hours, to be present just out of a certain old fashioned panic that if we don't have someone breathing on our neck, we won't work. Well, not the case, clearly. At the same time, there's meetings and such things that in the end were not as necessary as we thought and can be shortened or eliminated without that much problem. For sure in-person contact has its advantages too, but this should really made us rethink how we work, and try a more balanced system where maybe we can easily be home at least half of our time.

2-Really essential services are the primary sector, the food shops and the cleaners. Jobs like working in a supermarket or cleaning offices and houses should be better valued and paid nicely. Also better considered.

3-Healtchare must be public. Private healthcare that depends on profit has no advantage in dealing with this, because it requires a lot of resources and hours and it's overall too expensive. Also, public healthcare must be well-funded and have enough resources. And given this learning, I would go further: Just straight up ban and nationalize private healthcare companies. Also, if you're all for private healthcare and vote for parties that are against public one, it's only fair you refute any treatment nor help in public hospitals and facilities. Or reconsider your vote next time.

4-Capitalsim doesn't work. The system is totally broken and this crisis is showing its worst sides. Under pure capitalism, we would need to continue working right now, as we die left and right. Under pure capitalism, now people should just go hungry and starve and die out as they cannot work. Under pure capitalism, any business that was unable to function for this period should just close and disappear, or leave its employees to die out at least. This is neither a sustainable model nor a model we should want to keep. This needs to go. I'm not advocating for communism, but we must get rid of the idea that the market is great, when the truth is the market would see humankind destroyed in order to keep benefits. We have seen this before, in the people that lose track of the real world and require workers to do extra hours to finish a project that will ultimately have no meaning 2 weeks after completion. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit on this example, but this same attitude is the one where some manager considers that maybe people should just work, because the company needs it, without realizing this means people will die.

5-Related to this, we need to make people in power responsible for their actions. Managers who have disregarded warnings and asked people to work have killed people. Governments who haven't taken action once it was clear how serious the situation was and have not followed medical expert's recommendations are guilty of personally killing people. One thing is not knowing what to do, another very different is thinking that since your friend the banker prefers people to die than to close some of his business, you can allow it. Or allowing it out of some political agenda. This means you are killing people. And this is not the only situation when this happens: when a government allows banks to kick people out of their homes from unpaid mortgages, both the bank and the government are directly killing people. When a manager over stresses their workforce to the point of people having nervous breakdowns, they are directly killing people. When a rich bastard not only doesn't pay their taxes but also pressures the government to close public hospitals, they're directly killing people. No more fucking euphemism, if you do these things you're a killer, and you should not be allowed to get away with it.

6-Centralism doesn't work. Look, I think Spain is a failed project and I'd rather be left out of it. Maybe you don't think the same, that's fine. But what is undeniable, as we've seen in companies, countries and other organizations, is that when you centralize everything, when you try to manage personally more and more and more things, when you're further away from the real action separated by layers of responsible people, well, you have a less clear image of what is happening. In this crisis, hospitals and small towns or neighborhoods can know better what's the best actions to take. They can know better what resources they have, what do they lack, what to do. So you leave them be, unless they prove to be doing a bad job out of it. Then, if they lack things, if you have organizations over them you can manage that from such a higher level, and so on. But when you try to, basically, micromanage everywhere, that doesn't work. So let's not do that. From a government point of view, I believe regions should be more independent and able to take their own decisions, since they tend to know better their own needs. For example, now Spain has declared we can go back to work. This is idiotic and will cause deaths as the experts are saying (see point 5), but I'd say that for some regions it may be OK. However, should be managed region by region as I said, to see which ones can do it and which ones cannot.

7-Spain's traditional parties plus the right wing parties are useless. Right wing, we know, they're here to steal and lick their rich friend's anuses, and people can die as far as they care, we all know that. However, I hope it also helps to show that PSOE is almost as bad: they militarized the crisis instead of giving funds to healthcare, and since their members are professional politicians that don't know how to do things but know how to get paid from public funds, we've had the situation were resources are not reaching the people, or they buy the wrong things and millions are wasted, plus time is lost.

8-Left-wing parties do not deserve special protection just because they're considered left-wing. We made this mistake before with PSOE, letting it do things that were not left-wing just because we labelled it as the left-wing party. So, the same applies now to Podemos. They're part of the government even if they're not big enough to make some changes. I understand they're not able to criticize some of the government actions without creating a conflict, but that doesn't make them untouchable. We should criticize the fact that they let military to lead this crisis. We should criticize that they're not protecting workers by allowing people to work. And we should criticize their silence or their praise to the current government, when it's not right.

9-USA, UK and Brazil, as very capitalist and right-wing countries, are far from the worst of it, and it will be a massacre in there. Spain is already one because of several of the mentioned points, and forcing people back to work now will kill and numbers will grow again.

10-Catalunya's proposals have been a bit more smart than Spain's (because duh, it's not very hard to be), but far from effective, and one of the involved parties has also been de-funding public healthcare, and that's something we should not forget either.

There's plenty more things I could say, but politically speaking I find these are quite relevant...

Interesting Times

There's this English saying, with unclear origins (read more here), that says that there is this curse: "May you live in Interesting Times". Terry Pratchett used it in one of his books too. The idea, of course, is that the history moments that are most studied and explained are those of turmoil, chaos and strife.

We are indeed in one of these periods. and I'd like to talk about two subjects related to that, the election of a new President in Spain and the latest judicial verdicts and actions by the UE tribunals and parliament.

First, it seems finally a President has been elected in Spain. This President has been very difficult to elect, since the party he belongs to didn't have enough representatives in parliament to be elected on their own. This means the party needed to pact with others, and traditional parties in Spain are really against that. They're used to order around and dictate, starting from a clean majority, if possible an absolute one, to rule whatever they want, regardless of the program they had. This party, PSOE, is no different.

PSOE has been defended during this period as a leftist party, and the election of this president has been indicated as a triumph for progressive forces. However, this is totally false. For a long time now, all around the world, powerful forces (aka rich people and the newspapers and news agencies/broadcasters they buy) have been moving what is considered the centre of the political spectrum more and more to the right, to accept certain policies as "moderate" when they're clearly right-wing and conservative, and to promote neo-liberal economies. Because of this, PSOE is being considered as "left", but that's blatantly false (at national level at least. it´s different at regional or city levels).

PSOE has accepted authoritarian ways to rule, has maintained laws that restrict freedom of speech and has used repression as a tool while governing temporarily in this period without majorities. PSOE also reformed labour laws in Spain in favour of the big companies, have delayed retirement age and all around applied neo-liberal policies for some time now, refusing to act on things like house prices or bank control. PSOE has refused boats full of rescued refugees that were at sea. PSOE has done nothing to tax more or stop giving public money to the Catholic Church. Their attitude till now regarding Catalunya has been exactly the same as PP, the extreme-right wing party of Spain, of sending police and tribunals and twisting legislation to punish people. And so on.

The only thing that PSOE has done that can be considered more "leftist" has been defending abortion rights, defending LGBT+ rights and Women's rights, and proposing to legislate on issues like Euthanasia or drug use. While these are noble causes, these alone do not define a leftist party, and plenty of moderate or right parties in Europe nowadays defend some of these positions too, so it's not like revolutionary radical leftist of them.

What's more, PSOE had the chance of ruling with a true centre-left party, Podemos, since last elections, but because they're centre-right they wanted instead to pact with Ciudadanos (another right-wing party) or rule alone, which is why they repeated elections. Problem is they lost votes and Ciudadanos sank even more, so these two options were definitely not possible and they were forced to pact with Podemos instead and, all of a sudden, defend themselves as "progressives" when they're far from that.

Having said that, this is better than the alternative. The alternative was the three extreme-right-wing parties of Spain (yes, we have three of them, we don't have a "new extreme right wing" now, we always had it, it´s just now split in pieces and that's good) ruling together, but thankfully they have been fragmented and don't have a majority to rule even if they pact. PSOE alone will not do much, but since it will have issues governing, the fact that they need to pact and negotiate is a good thing. We will see if Podemos and the other leftist parties can twist its arm enough for them to actually act and do some progressive things.

There´s people in Catalunya that say that PSOE is the same as PP, and to let them rule is bad. This reminds me on the campaign started in USA to convince progressive voters not to go to vote Hilary using targeted ads, that infamous scandal. While I agree that PSOE is not good, the reality is that the possibility of the extreme right parties ruling again is catastrophic. I´m not sure whats the best course of action really, but seems to me a scenario where they need to pact with left and independentist parties is better than one where all right-wing parties ally themselves and rule.

However, as a final note: This government won't push leftist policies enough and will still pretty much protect the powerful. If you want real change, PSOE is not the party, you need to vote more left. There's several options there (which is a problem, when there's this fragmentation too), but there are better left options. It's a matter of selecting one. And yes, they're not perfect. The curse of the left is that there's no perfect ruler, instead of the right where this doesn't matter because you just obey your leader. But still, vote the best left option that there is, or change is impossible.



As per the second topic: The UE tribunals have ruled that three Catalan politicians that could not swear on the Spanish consititution because they were in exile or in prison are members of UE parliament, regardless of the fact that they could not swear on it becasue members are elected by people voting, not by posterior procedures, and therefore the Spanish tribunals cannot prosecute them without the approval of the UE parliament. Two of them are exiled and will join the parliament on 13th of January, and the third one is in prison in Spain, but this verdict makes his trial void (and would need, legally, to be repeated after UE parliament allows it).

This has been followed by the UE parliament ordering Spain to fulfil the law (indicating without explicitly saying that they need to liberate the prisoner), since the UE Tribunal is the highest instance and the Spanish tribunals need to follow it.

This links nicely with my previous post. The problem of how Spain reacted to the Catalan independentists is that it's not legal, it's not democratic, and in general it's not how a progressive democratic country works. Spain has acted like a dictatorship, has twisted laws, bypassed rules, done whatever they wanted however they wanted it, ignoring their own legislation and just going for punishment, revenge and blood. Anyone defending that doesn't understand about democracy, regardless of your opinion on independence, and that's something that I really hope that those who do not defend independence understand, finally, with he help of Europe: Every Single Time that Europe tribunals have been involved, since they're really independent and democratic, Spain has been shown to not follow the law and to act incorrectly. Every time. And there's more to come, once other sentences reach UE tribunals too.

What's more: For all the ones that say they defend legality: As per the law, this prisoner should be freed and given access to UE parliament. I'm not going to say all laws are just, because I've previously stated that you should always question them, because dictatorships also have laws. But if you're not hypocrites, now you should defend his liberation, and ask Spain to follow the law. Or ask for the Spanish Government and the Spanish Tribunals to be accused and judged, same way you asked for the Catalan politicians to be judged.

Or you truly, really, believe that Spain is a better democracy with a better judicial system than all the other UE nations combined?

Time for questions

So I haven't written in a while, especially about politics, because mostly the current situation can be summarized by screaming to the void at top volume for 4 hours....but I'd like to try to explain some things.

You probably have seen that the people that organized a referendum in Catalunya have been condemned by Spain to lots of prison years. And that people here got tired of this crap and started to protest in a more hardcore way, blocking roads and stations. And then police started to beat people up, and people responded by barricading and setting things on fire, and we're still in this situation.

So, let's start by saying that Barcelona is not a war zone, you can live perfectly well here unless you're right next to some  very conflictive point. So, yeah, newspapers are exaggerating the situation to make it look so much worse than it is.

However, it's bad what's happening yeah. And it's bad only when police act. Otherwise, there are no issues. So, police is doing a horrible job, because they're supposed to keep the peace, but instead they're guaranteeing there's problems and chaos. Police is used as a punishment for protesters instead of trying to establish normality, and it shows.

Anyway, I'd like to try to explain that what is happening should horrify a lot more people than it does, and why.

So, let's say you're not pro-independence. That is fine, each person can have their opinions. You feel that Spain is a nice country, or you feel that Catalunya will do better with Spain, or you're against Spain losing Catalunya. Or some other reason like that. That's fine, I repeat. But even then, there are things that I believe concern you.

The Spanish government and judicial system condemned people to lots of years for organizing a vote,  debating it in parliament, trying to organize a protest and declaring "independence" without any real chance to back it up for real, kind of symbolically. That's it. That's the summary.

Now, you may say, "oh no, but the vote was illegal/declaring independence was illegal". Well, first of all, that's debatable, Spanish laws could be interpreted either way about this. Second of all, laws are not pillars of morality. Laws are rules written by governments. Dictatorships have plenty of laws. If something is illegal, sometimes it's good to also ask yourself, why is that, and if it really should be. As mentioned before in other posts, to assume all laws are just and good is dangerous, submissive and can give birth to horrible monsters like Nazism and Stalinism. And well, when is a vote something that should not happen, really? Why voting is so bad? Could you ask yourselves that? You may say that all of Spain should vote, which is fine, but then why not get the region's opinion first since we're at it? Doesn't it sound...fishy, that you cannot even vote? Today it's this topic, but tomorrow it can be another important one (like reducing CO2 emissions or transitioning to green energies) and the result may be the same, "oh it's illegal to vote about this!". This is a slippery slope, really. It's ok to vote but only if you like it? That's the thing here?

Then you could say it was not the vote, that it was the independence declaration. Only thing, it was symbolic. No administrations changed control. No infrastructures were taken. No efforts were made to change taxation mechanisms nor implement any type of real independence. The declaration was made and then nothing was done to implement it. While I could accept that declaring independence is illegal under the current constitution, the point is that it was not implemented. So, with no effort to do it properly, they should be condemned to lots of years just because they said it?

Then you could say it was the protest a few days before where some police cars were vandalized. Which is true, but the people condemned didn't personally do it either, and they asked for tranquility and peaceful protesting at all times.

Then on the trial, the main argument about violence happening in Catalunya was to say that 1-Screams and looks of the people were "violent" and 2-that the police brutality was the cause of organizing the vote. The first argument means that "violence" can be anything now, as long as the people in power decide something is violent. So you cannot protest against anything that you consider unjust, because it's "violent. The second point is the same defense rapists use, "she was asking for it".

Also on the trial, it was not allowed to use videos or images that contradicted the witnesses statements. They were shown later. So no witness could be considered false and to be removed from  the trial during the trial itself. And there's a lot other things that happened during it that plenty of international organisations have condemned, saying that it didn't guarantee proper rights. I mean, I understand you may be against independence and you didn't like the fact that people tried to vote about it, but isn't it...troubling, how forceful it was? The Spanish government disagreed with the idea, accused people and then proceed to not follow their own laws and checks and balances to make sure these people would be condemned. Isn't it worrying this can happen, regardless of who's being tried and for what?

This was a vengeance, plain and simple, not really a justice matter. Isn't that something that should not happen at this levels, inside the justice system, regardless of your political believes?

Then there's the matter of  the following protests. Of course there has been protests, and there's been people organizing them. They have been disruptive, they have been intense and they have been a lot of them. Well, guess what, that's how all protest that achieved something have worked. That's how we got the 8-hours workday. That's how some other regions and colonies gained independence. So, that's how protests work, they're disruptive or they're useless. Did they put bombs or killed people? No. Did they use firearms? No. Did they enter into direct fights with the authorities? Well, some people have, but the vast majority haven't, and the ones that have are mostly using it as defensive strategies. There has been burnings and fires, yes, and it's not good they happened, but not with the intention to harm others, just to protect from police charges. The thrown objects are bad, ok, but again, these things have been more as defense from charges.

Well, this is now being considered terrorism (not a joke). And again, let's say you agree, those stupid pro-independence bastards are bothering you. Thing is, next time you want to protest because you have a shit salary and rent is being controlled by investment funds that want to make you pay a lot more? Forget about protesting. Any demonstration, any type of road blocking, any type of disruptive action can and will be considered terrorism. Don't you think this is worrisome? That it's establishing precedents? That real democracies should not consider this terrorism?

Let's also talk about the police charges. You can also say that police tell protesters to leave and if they don't they should be hit and arrested because they're not following the law. But then, police are hitting people on the head, on the neck, on other areas where it's clear in their procedures that they cannot hit. Isn't it a problem that the law doesn't apply to them then? Isn't it curious that rubber balls are banned in Catalunya and police used them anyway? Doesn't make you wonder,  that police can arrest anyone in the street,beat them up, jump on top of them, touch them (to women usually), and that's all fine? Is police above the law? And then, why is wrong to defend from them also not following the law? Are you ok with all this because "they would never do this to me, why would they?". Because this is for protesting, for demonstrating, with ideas that are not the officially approved ones. Should you be hit in the head for not running away fast enough when police charges to make people move? Is this proportional? Is ok to beat anyone in the area just in case, even people that are leaving?

And following also this topic, isn't it weird that fascist have been running around Barcelona and beating people up, and in these cases there has never been police beating them or stopping them? Or that when unionist, let's say, have slapped pro-independence people in front of police, police did nothing whatsoever? Isn't it a problem how friendly police is with fascists? And also the same fascist, how friendly they are always judged when they beat someone up and such things? Similarly when it's about rapists that belong to police forces, as shown in La Manada?

Then, considering all this, and consider how the Spanish government refuses to talk. About anything, really. Isn't it strange that no one on the Spanish side is willing to sit down with no pre-conditions, and try to see what can be agreed on or what can be done to improve the situation? Not saying agreeing to anything, I'm just saying to talk.

I will also add for those that put both sides at the same level, do you think it's the same to hit someone and to defend yourself from someone hitting you? Is it the same to control police charges than to have some people among thousands that do fight back? And even then, do you think it's at the same level, police charging and people protesting? An organised force beating civilians is the same that a few disorganized violent groups? And given the last images, is it ok that police infiltrators are trying to rile up these people so there is some fights and some chaos? Do you think it's the same to organize a voting and send police to beat people up? Do you think it's the other's side fault when, during a negotiation, one side just says "No" without further comments and proposals?

Also, consider this: It has been proven that the Spanish government, in the past, has used police to try and incriminate people, accuse them, make sure that minimum you get big news about it by filtering information to the press, prepare charges, etc. Doesn't this concern you a bit? Doesn't this makes you doubt the whole judicial process?

I keep adding: Spanish tribunals are usually decided by the two main parties that are in charge of all this repression and that have alternated ruling the country for the last 40 years. A lot of these judges have been members of the party "in the past". A lot of these judges have clear preference with a certain political spectrum. There's even some that are the same ones that were ruling during Franco's dictatorship, they never moved or were never removed from the position. Isn't that something to make you wonder about the quality of Spanish judicial system?

Just to finish, there's Catalan politicians that left the country and are staying in Europe to internationalize the conflict. Spain has send extradition orders to several of them. Don't you find it curious that Germany and UK and Belgium have, in general, ruled that the detention orders were wrong/didn't apply? Don't you find it disturbing that, in places where there should be separation of powers, the Spanish government is threatening diplomatically other governments about the outcome of a trial in their respective country, which is made by the separated judicial power? Do you think it's normal that the Spanish judges have only asked for the detention of certain people, and that they have withdrawn the petition depending on the political moment?

Now that there's other protests in the world at the same time: do you trust China's and Chile's Governments regarding their actions and declarations with their respective protests? Whatever are your thoughts about independence, don't you see parallelisms between all three cases and how police and governments are acting? Do you disagree with how Hong Kong people is being treated when they protest certain laws? Do you like that Chile protesters have been shot?

Do you still think independence is the problem here? Do you still think it doesn't apply to you? Do you still think Spain is being fair and just with their reaction? Do you still think that, when the time comes, your protests will be treated differently because yours will be just and necessary?

Do not defend independence. If you don't want it, that's ok. However, wonder what is at stake here, because it ain't about the independentists.