tripu @tripu@qoto.org
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
In the #amnesty situation in 🇪🇸 #Spain, both “sides” have embarrassing individuals in their ranks:
https://twitter.com/AMADSDEGAULA2/status/1728841977037455730
https://twitter.com/catholicarena/status/1729636895141794108
Note to self on the sate of 🇪🇸 #Spain, 2/2:
Note to self on the sate of 🇪🇸 #Spain, 1/2:
If you really need to get your news about what’s going on in 🇪🇸 #Spain (#PedroSánchez, #Puigdemont, #Catalonia, #amnesty, #amnistía) from none other than #TuckerCarlson, by all means do.
But please read this short thread as preparation — for context, nuance and balance:
[1/7]
Plan for a warm Saturday morning
My point of view about the situation in #Spain (/cc @admitsWrongIfProven):
“The gouvernment that brought you good things for the people”
Err… sure. What government does not bring at least some “good things for the people”?
“I heard nothing negative about them in terms of caring for the people”
Not sure I understand. One does not need to hear anything specific to know that in a democracy of ~48M people millions of voters think that the government is not “caring for the people” properly, much, or at all.
In this case: I think this government “didn’t care” much for the youth (transfers of wealth from younger generations to boomers in the form of public pensions, massive public debt and a two-tier job market), for men (a divisive strand of feminism), for women (ditto, cf trans issues), for immigrants (several scandals about that), for entrepreneurs and freelancers (populist rhetoric against wealth and corporations), for the middle class (tax hikes), for students (our PISA scores are shameful), for the Sahrawis (they abandoned them to appease Morocco), or for truth and science (too many examples to cite).
“The only violence i heard of is […] not the catalans”
There has been very little violence from any side, fortunately. (But lots of hatred.)
The crimes that will be erased now are mostly non-violent ones: rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds.
“An amnesty seems a good idea to keep the peace”
Roughly half of the population here disagrees. Recent History has proven otherwise: the more that institutions have appeased the separatists and made concessions to them, the more radical and defiant they grew.
“Fascists will never keep peace”
I agree. Those whose crimes will be erased, those who signed the deal with #PedroSánchez, are fascists. As you say, they will never keep peace. For years they have been trying to silence dissenters, banning certain ideas, appealing to nativist ideas, encouraging hatred towards other Spanish regions, attacking minorities and the individual, expecting groupthink, bending the facts and distorting History, and glorifying the idea of a nation.
@tripu Hmm, so the gouvernment that brought you good things for the people (like menstruation is recognized as a reason to not work) is still in pl...
“With the international press playing a misleading ‘neutral’ role in all of this, when not tacitly acknowledging Catalan independence as a just cause, […] I often feel frustrated when well-intentioned friends of mine outside Spain ask me about the situation here. […] I lament that the picture my friends are forming in their heads is that Barcelona is a new Tiananmen Square and Spain some kind of banana republic, and that the separatists are fighting for basic human rights against an authoritarian state.”
— your truly, six years ago.
If you’re confused or curious about what just happened in #Spain with regards to #Catalonia, this summary written in 2017 might be useful.
Spain is, by the way, arguably a healthier and most robust democracy than the US, Israel, Belgium, Italy, Portugal or South Korea.
Explain to me again why I should care about “the news” when #news #media have a vested interest in pushing my buttons, their analyses are so biased, and their priorities so skewed.
About #priorities, case in point: today, major #newspapers in 🇪🇸 #Spain imply that by far the most important #news (as measured by real estate occupied on their front pages) is
what one person
who is the head of a federation of
one sport
in one country
says at a press conference about
one incident.
That incident was not a crime. That person is not an influential leader or thinker. There is no international conflict involved. Nobody died, or is going to die, or is going to survive, depending on the outcome of this.
Yesterday I donated 10% of my gross earnings of last year (job 1 + job 2 + stock dividends) to #AyudaEfectiva (that’s the #EffectiveAltruism -aligned #charity in my home country of 🇪🇸 #Spain).
As always, I’m very happy to do that. I feel it’s “the least I can do”.
«Contra la concesión de #indultos a los condenados por sedición en Cataluña, en apoyo al Poder Judicial, atacado por el Gobierno Sánchez, y en defe...
So we’re moving to a new, more spacious #flat soon, and I want to have a political world map covering an entire wall. That’s been a desire of mine for a while.
Does anyone know a place online to order such a gigantic poster? Or, do you know where I could find a very high-res #map of the world that I can chop, print, and stick on the wall piece by piece?
(I live, and will continue to live, in the #Madrid metropolitan area, #Spain.)
Quite interesting. 2022 report of Reuters Institute about the relative #audience of #media #outlets in 🇪🇸 #Spain:
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2022/spain
Also, Political Watch applies the Ad Fontes Media methodology to the Spanish landscape and comes up with this report about #bias:
https://politicalwatch.es/blog/political-watch-publica-primer-media-bias-chart-espana-2021/
Interactive version here:
The #OECD’s “Better Life Index” seems to correlate (even) better than #GDP with subjective well-being:
https://2ndhandecon.substack.com/p/perhaps-i-treated-you-too-harshly
My own country 🇪🇸 #Spain ranks no. 21 in BLI:
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/spain/
I’d love to see it used more widely, and more work on this and other metrics of #wellbeing and #happiness.
La vergüenza del #decretoley, que siempre fue una vergüenza, es una vergüenza aberrante y miserable con este #gobierno:
https://civio.es/el-boe-nuestro-de-cada-dia/2022/07/07/decretos-ley-desde-1996/
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
