European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 988

On November 04 2017 02:55 Godwrath wrote:
Thedwf loses me when he says the smart thing for Rajoy to do was to actually listen to catalonians and the let the referendum happen. You would need to define what the smart thing to do is first and why the actors should act accordingly. Everything i know tells me that doing what thedwf thinks Rajoy should had done (as reasonable i can think of it and not really far from what i think), was the stupidiest thing for him to do as the leader of the PP.

It's like asking a pear tree to give you lemons.

On November 04 2017 02:58 Gorsameth wrote:

You declare the referendum illegal. You try to stop/disrupt it without resorting to violence (big mistake Rajoy made) and then afterwards you simply declare it invalid (because it was illegal) and you ignore it.

On November 03 2017 19:52 TheDwf wrote:

No, they could simply ignore the referendum and disregard the results like the "dictator" Maduro did in Venezuela...

I find the number of people adamantly repeating "the law is the law" really alarming here. Do you people remember that apartheid, slavery, various racial laws or even killing your wife had she cheated on you used to be legal, and still are in some parts of the world? What about this Saudi blogger who is to receive 1000 whiplashs because he wrote that he was atheist? Are you going to tell me it's OK? In those situations "the law is the law" is such a poor, bland answer—LAWS CAN BE UNFAIR. Legality without legitimacy is not only a recipe for disaster, it's a cheap way to justify and ratify any State violence.

What happens in Catalunya is a political problem, and not a mere technical or judicial one.

On November 04 2017 02:55 Godwrath wrote:
Thedwf loses me when he says the smart thing for Rajoy to do was to actually listen to catalonians and the let the referendum happen.

You would need to define what the smart thing to do is first and why the actors should act accordingly. Everything i know tells me that doing what thedwf thinks Rajoy should had done (as reasonable i can think of it and not really far from what i think), was the stupidiest thing for him to do as the leader of the PP.

It's like asking a pear tree to give you lemons.

On November 04 2017 03:05 Godwrath wrote:

The problem is that you think he lost political capital by resorting to violence, when it's the oppossite. Internationally he also had his back covered, so i still need to be enlightened about what the smart move would had accomplished where Rajoy would end in a better position than he is today instead of worse by not going the hard line about it.

On November 04 2017 04:00 Godwrath wrote:
That's why i am asking you to clarify what constitutes as smart for you. If smart is being a good stateman, or if it is gaining political capital to continue in power unchallenged. When both things align it's great, but when they don't most politicians will find smarter to do the second. The PP losing voters in Catalunya means very little to them.

On November 04 2017 03:27 Nyxisto wrote:


Excuse me if I don't really consider Maduro to be the best example of good governance, all these countries are dysfunctional precisely because they politicise the law and apply it whenever they think it's reasonable to do so. (which of course means whenever it is politically advantageous to their own party). This is how you get third or second world politics, we shouldn't copy that at all.

And comparing the situation of Catalans to slavery is very weird.

You are absolutely right that laws are not morally just simply because they are the law, but they still need to be upheld, because they are impartial. That's what makes them valuable. And if you don't like them (and you aren't under direct threat) you should seek to change them first.

By the way even in countries like Saudi Arabia or other oppressive regimes gradual formal change, even if it takes a long time, is often more successful than outright defiance of the law.

On November 04 2017 04:00 Godwrath wrote:
That's why i am asking you to clarify what constitutes as smart for you. If smart is being a good stateman, or if it is gaining political capital to continue in power unchallenged. When both things align it's great, but when they don't most politicians will find smarter to do the second. The PP losing voters in Catalunya means very little to them.

On November 04 2017 04:22 Gorsameth wrote:

Sure, it might not cost them votes but it drove the people in Catalunya further towards independence rather then uniting the country.
That's him failing as leader of the government of all of Spain.
Focusing purely on your base and fucking over everyone else is how you get to shit like Trump.

The country is about in a bad of a state as it can be without actually an actual rebellion. Catalunya declared its independence and the government came in to arrest them and force back control.
There was a hell of a lot of room for improvement in what Rajoy could have done.

On November 04 2017 03:05 Godwrath wrote:

The problem is that you think he lost political capital by resorting to violence, when it's the oppossite. Internationally he also had his back covered, so i still need to be enlightened about what the smart move would had accomplished where Rajoy would end in a better position than he is today instead of worse by not going the hard line about it.

On November 05 2017 22:23 sc-darkness wrote:
Well, Spanish nazi government finally got the Catalan leader. So much for the right of democracy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41877858

When all this started I was neutral as a non-Spanish person but after seeing brutality, I'm against the Spanish government in this case.



The only reason Spain's government got any support is because the EU and all the regional powers need most of Spain on their side. It's called interests. I'm sure if you somehow get their honest opinion, no one will say they agree on brutality. Brussels have already indicated they're not ok with this in a diplomatic way.

Catalan jailed ministers suffered “unjustifiably vexatious” treatment, says lawyer

Alleged abuse includes ordering them to strip naked, playing the Spanish anthem on a loop, and handcuffing their hands behind their back

The lawyers of imprisoned Catalan ministers are to file a complaint over the “unjustifiably vexatious” treatment their clients suffered as they were preemptively sent to jail by a Spanish judge on Thursday, pending possible charges over the October 27 declaration of independence.

According to attorney Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, the alleged abuses police officers inflicted on his defendants include handcuffing them behind their backs, as well as forcing them to listen to the Spanish anthem in loop on their way to prison without seat belt.

Two ministers were ordered naked “as if they were drug dealers,” Alonso-Cuevillas said in an interview with Catalan public TV on Saturday. According to medical reports, deposed Justice minister Carles Mundó suffered injuries due to the handcuffs.

Spain’s political crisis peaked this past week as eight Catalan ministers — who had already been dismissed by the government in Madrid — were sent to prison on Thursday. They face charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds, among others. On Friday, Spain’s National Court issued a European arrest warrant for the deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and four ministers who are currently in Belgium.

"Get him on all fours"

As news of alleged mistreatment emerged, a Spanish newspaper posted a video showing Spanish National Police officers making fun of the ministers as they arrived in court. “When they get him on all fours, they’ll fix his eye,” said one police officer referring to vice president Oriol Junqueras. He referred to him as “little teddy bear.”

Alonso-Cuevillas labelled the conversation as “sad and outrageous.” The worst, he added, is that “I have not heard any official reaction yet. In any normal country, the Home Affairs minister would have resigned immediately.”

PDeCAT in Senate

The pro-independence PDeCAT party has indeed asked Spanish Home Affairs Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido to speak in front of the Senate about the alleged “vexatious treatment” by dismissed Catalan ministers. “How can the Spanish government justify these actions while boasting about their respect for legality?” said Josep Lluís Cleries, PDeCAT spokesperson in the Senate.

On a recent Saturday in Rome, several thousand angry Italians marched through the streets of downtown. They came to protest a bill that would grant citizenship to children born in Italy to long-term resident foreigners.

Sara Polimeno came from the northern Piedmont region to demand a stop to migrants.

"There's an invasion of Muslims imposing their religion on us," said Polimeno. "They have different customs and culture and they're upsetting all our habits. They're demanding too much. Enough!"

With economic crisis and a massive influx of migrants, extreme right-wing movements have gained ground in much of Europe. Italy is no exception. And seven decades after the fall of Mussolini's dictatorship, some neo-fascist groups are setting their sights on getting back into Parliament.

At the anti-migrant rally in Rome, protesters carried banners saying "Stop the invasion." They shouted, "Homeland, employment and identity, we will defend our civilization" — buzzwords reminiscent of fascist ideology.

Giovanni Orsina, a political scientist at Rome's LUISS University, says pockets of hardcore fascist sympathizers have long existed in Italy.

"This area of nostalgia," says Orsina, "of ideological persistence of fascism, today has more leeway [and] can use the new issues of migration, identity in order to grow stronger."

One neo-fascist group riding the anti-migrant wave is Casa Pound — named after the American poet Ezra Pound, a fascist propagandist during World War II.

Casa Pound has spearheaded violent actions against migrant housing and aggressive confrontations with migrant vendors on the Roman seashore in Ostia.

With a population of 230,000, Ostia voted Nov. 5 in a municipal election for its representative in Rome's City Hall. Casa Pound surged from 1 percent of votes cast four years ago to 9 percent.

Posters urged voters to "send fighters to City Hall" and said, "We put Italians first — first in housing, welfare and education."

With parliamentary elections next spring, Casa Pound is now aiming for a role on the national stage.

Thirty-two-year-old party leader Luca Marsella explains what it means to be a fascist today.

"It means to love Italy," says Marsella. "It means giving oneself to the welfare of our nation, to fight for the good of our nation."

Marsella's main rival, Franco di Donna, was 71 and recently withdrew from the priesthood in order to run for City Hall as an independent, though he only took 8 percent of the vote.

Some 50 people came to a park in Ostia to listen to di Donna, who for years ran the local Catholic charity, assisting migrants as well as homeless and impoverished Italians.

Di Donna says Casa Pound and other anti-migrant movements are fanning unjustified fears.

"Fears," says di Donna, "that migrants will steal jobs — jobs Italians reject. And fear that migrants will cause more economic problems — when it's taxes paid by working migrants that finance many Italians' pensions."

One week after the anti-migrant march in Rome, large groups of recently arrived foreigners were joined by thousands of Italians to rally in favor of migrants — under the slogan "Migration is not a crime."

Laura Marcheselli, 65, came from Florence to take a stand against racism.

"We can't build walls and close borders, when we were the ones who colonized, looted and destroyed much of Africa," she says.

Marcheselli says she feels society has become very brutal and the media is working hard to instill fear in people. And she is not very optimistic.

"I fear there are too few of us," she says with a sigh.

With the arrival in Italy of more than 600,000 mostly African migrants in the last four years, racist incidents and extreme right-wing posts on social media have surged.

The lower house of Parliament has approved a government bill that would ban distribution of propaganda, images and symbols of fascist and Nazi ideologies. Offenders risk up to two years in jail.

Emanuele Fiano, a member of Parliament with the governing Democratic Party, wrote the bill.

"This law doesn't punish a person who says, 'I'm a fascist or Nazi,' " Fiano says. "It punishes propaganda of ideas that are clearly against liberty and democracy."

Opposed by right-wing parties and the maverick Five-Star Movement, the bill is now before the Senate. But with just a few months left in this legislature, it's not certain it can become law before the next election campaign.

As the Friday edition of "Magyar Közlöny" states, the government supports the idea that e-sports should be acknowledged as a sport. To deepen the cooperation between V4 countries it will organize an e-sports championship.

The decree signed by Viktor Orban will make the "Egymillioan a Magyar Esportert Egyesulet"(Onemillion people for Hungarian Esports Association) eligible for a two million forint ($7472) support.

The government's decree does not name the games that will be played in the V4 championship.

European authorities are providing new details about a cloud of mysterious radioactive material that appeared over the continent last month.

Monitors in Italy were among first to detect the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 on Oct. 3, according to a fresh report by France's Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute, known as IRSN. In total, 28 European countries saw the radioactive cloud, the report says.

The multinational Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation, which runs a network designed to monitor for nuclear weapons tests, also confirmed to NPR that it had detected the cloud.

Based on the detection from monitoring stations and meteorological data, the mysterious cloud — which has since dissipated — has been traced to somewhere along the Russia-Kazakhstan border, according to Jean-Christophe Gariel, director for health at the IRSN.

"It's somewhere in South Russia," he says, likely between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.

Authorities say the amount of material seen in Europe was small. "It's a very low level of radioactivity and it poses no problems for health and the environment in Europe," Gariel says.

But modeling suggests that any people within a few kilometers of the release — wherever it occurred — would have needed to seek shelter to protect themselves from possible radiation exposure.

"If it would have happened in France, we would have taken measures to protect the population in a radius of a few kilometers," Gariel says. French authorities, he adds, will conduct random checks of foodstuffs from the region to check for possible contamination of agricultural products.

Ruthenium-106 is a radioactive isotope that is not found in nature. "It's an unusual isotope," says Anders Ringbom, the research director of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, which runs radioactive monitoring for that nation. "I don't think we have seen it since the Chernobyl accident."

The IRSN analysis suggests that the ruthenium did not come from a nuclear reactor accident. Instead, it most likely came from either the chemical reprocessing of old nuclear fuel or the production of isotopes used in medicine. Based on the size of the release, Gariel says, whatever happened had to have been accidental.

"It's not an authorized release, we are sure about that," he says.

A handful of Russian nuclear facilities are located roughly in the region where the ruthenium originated, including a large nuclear reprocessing plant known as the Mayak Production Association.

During the Cold War, the Mayak plant turned used nuclear fuel into material for nuclear weapons. The plant has been the site of numerous past accidents, including a 1957 explosion that rivaled the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Gariel says that while Mayak is a possible source of the cloud, there simply aren't enough data to conclusively link it to the release of radioactive material. He also says he has spoken to Russian safety officials over the past few days and that while they do not dispute his analysis, they are unaware of any incidents in the region in the past few months.

On November 12 2017 06:23 Sent. wrote:
The article is so biased and manipulative it's not even worth commenting.