@kolpak I’m not sure if you disregard Atletico or included them into ‘Madrid’.
(poor sufridores)
There have been winners of the Spanish league outside of Real and Barca before, Atletico did it a couple of years ago.
It’s just that the majority of the time these two are on the top of their game. (Barca winning almost every year over the last decade I think)
The choice Spanish people had to make after Franco’s death was: do you prefer this Constituion + Monarchy or do you want dictatorship? I would have chosen Monarchy established by Franco and the current Constition too! But now many Spanish people and not only Catalans think this Constition needs to change and maybe ti’s time to talk about it. But for PP’s it’s impossible to do so…
Presumably all these supporters of Catalan independence also support the Crimean vote to break with the Ukraine?
and Kosovo, Abkhazia, Transniestria, South Ossetia, etc.
I think there are serious arguments for the Crimea to be (not independent) part of Russia. Check out the stuff Peter Hitchens has written about this.
Ho hum…
There are a lot of fake news (bulos in Spanish), at the very least, the tweet by Inés Arrimadas (which the Mail reports) has been debunked. As explained in the article, some images of fascist images have been claimed to be taken at the demonstration, when it wasn’t true.
My feeling is that the Mail echoed some false rumors (such as Arrimadas’ tweet) and then went on to comb the demonstration to find some right extremists. It’s obvious that the British right has an axe to grind in this matter.
The Far-Right has got to be the most overblown “problem” of this century. Those people have almost no political representation in the West, no one wants to be associated with them and yet I constantly hear about this “movement”. I see people wearing socialist and communist signs at every single protest in Montreal and yet when I read the news, every journalist discusses the growing Far-Right movement…
It should be no surprise that there were some fools at the Barcelona protest, but let’s not forget that Spain has no right wing parties (The PP has no ideology), two major far-left wing parties (the PSOE under Sanchez is somewhat similar to Corbyn’s labour), and yet the Daily Mail chooses to discuss the far-right. Fair enough???
As ftornay correctly stated, The Daily Mail and UKIP are going against the EU out of spite on this one and it makes them look awful.
I have spent a ridiculous amount of time listening to Russians and Ukrainians discussing the Crimea issue and the Russian argument would pretty much justify the Brits and the French coming to “save” us Canadians if, god forbid, things were to go South here by occupying us.
I understand that Crimea will never return to Ukraine and that Petro “The Chocolate King” Poroshenko is a Putin-like despot, but this doesn’t justify annexing part of your neighbour’s territory. That people actually argue and try to justify rebellions lead by government officials is beyond me.
Well, I’ll say it again: I myself have no strong feelings on this issue. I don’t support either side.
As for the Mail article being “fake news”…well who knows? They say their reporters personally witnessed some of the stuff in the article. Are they a bunch of dirty liars? Maybe, maybe not? Open question who to believe, I guess…
That being said, I would be very surprised if there were not some ideological grandchildren of the Generalissimo to be found among the ranks of the Spanish Police and military. That is NOT to say that I think these people are anywhere close to a majority, or are representative of the institutions as a whole. But perhaps it only takes a few rotten apples to make a whole barrel smell foul?
BTW, the same is (unfortunately) most certainly true of the British Police and armed forces! Only recently several British soldiers were put on trial here for being members of a banned violent neo-Nazi group. I agree we shouldn’t blow the thing out of proportion, but these arseholes do exist.
“I agree we shouldn’t blow the thing out of proportion, but these arseholes do exist.”
Sure they do. But the far-right is still dead. I would love for the media to discuss the dangers associated with the ridiculous amount of communists among our youth and academia.
I think I didn’t make myself clear. I said that a part of the article (Arrimadas’ tweet, e.g.) was fake news. I don’t know about their pictures and what I speculated is that they went around looking for the few extremists in the demonstration. Then they wrote the whole article about that piece of information. It’s a case of some fake news (again, Arrimadas’ tweet, very easily identifiable as bogus if the Mail had any interest in being accurate) + extreme cherry-picking. I didn’t imply that the photos themselves were fake, although some fake images have circulated in other media.
I wasn’t in the demonstration but it seems that there were very few extremists and their participation was discouraged by the organization.
You’ve always been great at humor, but not quite so much at metaphors. There were no swords at the demostration )))
I guess it’s more that I hate “mit den Wölfen heulen” as Reinhardt Mey would put it. That’s why I especially dislike nationalism (including Catalan independentism), which is usually much fonder of “Fahnen schwenken” than Spanish constitutionalists are:
There was a serious point in there too: I am far more likely to be persuaded by reading your posts here than by seeing a bunch of angry people making noise in the streets - even if they don’t (literally) carry swords and cudgels! 
hi
I’m very flattered, thank you for your words, Jay
An action plan (“hoja de ruta”) of the independentist movement has been found . It shows that the intented to create a conflict and provoke the government’s so as to advance their agenda:
Even 90% out of 43% is about 38.7%.
It is not the majority. For me it means the referendum was almost ignored by the voters.
Explanatory video with a very obvious bias, but facts, last I heard, remain facts.
