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Comment by kuu | Hacker News Reader

And your reply shows how selfish you are.

As the majority does not want to do as I want, I take my way, without any other consideration.

Even the catalan people is not supporting this as a majority, you're ruling without considering the 50% of catalonian people.

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NB: The Scottish independence referendum did not allow the rest of the UK to vote. It was considered a matter for the Scots alone.

Arguably this wasn't fair. Splitting a country in two affects everyone, so why couldn't everyone vote? But if the rest of the country could vote then there'd not have been even a tiny hope the SNP would have accepted the results. In fact, they did not accept that they lost anyway, even when voting was restricted to Scotland. But it's easy to understand why the referendum was designed the way it was.

Ironically it might be that these days the rest of the UK would kick Scotland out, if they were given a vote. It's not necessarily true that everyone cares about the Union.

The majority of the British Empire would not have supported the right of the American colonies to secede. Does that mean it was wrong of them to do so?

Should the Americans have instead pursued their cause in Parliament, where they were unrepresented?

The difference here is that Catalonia is an integral part of Spain, not a colony. They are perfectly well represented in every institution, and have in fact had a central role in most governments since the end of the dictatorship. Both situations are totally different. And, by the way, they did not only break Spanish laws in their road to independence, they also broke the rules of their own regional parliament, laws they had created.

I don't know that it's obvious that the people outside of Catalonia should have a say in Catalonia's secession (which would mean it wouldn't matter what the majority of Spain wants, just the majority of Catalans)

Somewhere else in this thread someone mentioned that 90% the vote in Catalonia was 90% for secession, and included half the population. It seems unlikely to me that of the half that didn't vote, more than 90% are anti-secession.

Keep in mind, I don't live anywhere near the area, so I can't get a gut feeling that someone from there might be able to get.

It was an illegal, explicitly forbidden referendum that voted 90% for secession. That anyone even bothered to turn up, just to vote "no" is a small miracle. So, yeah, it seems very likely to me that >90% of those who didn't vote at all would have voted against.

For more than 50% of the population to oppose secession, you'd need a voting turnout of ~90%, and for all the people who had not previously voted before to vote against secession. (50% turnout with 90% for secession -> 45% of voting population voting for secession)

Are voter turnouts normally that high in Spain?

The referendum was totally out of control. I will always condemn the violent response of the police that day, but the referendum was a total nonsense. You can easily find images of boxes left on the street and people "voting" without any control. And the counting (and whole organization) was done by those who wanted independence. You cannot trust those numbers.

There were regional elections on December 2017 and the independentist parties put together got 70 seats of 135 (less than the 72 they had before). More recently, in the elections for the national government this April, they only got 22 seats of 48 (some of the independentists refused to participate in Spanish elections after declaring independence, but turnout was still very high, more than 75%). The independentists never talk about these numbers, only the 90%. And I think that, many of them, seriously believe they are the 90%.

> Somewhere else in this thread someone mentioned that 90% the vote in Catalonia was 90% for secession, and included half the population.

That's a lie. The current catalonian separatist government got about 50% of the votes from the catalonian people. 90% of secession it's just not true.

I don't see how it's selfish. If you believe that something is wrong, it's your moral imperative to try to rectify a situation, regardless of what others think about it.

> regardless of what others think about it

This is why it is selfish.

I agree. but I want to add that selfish doesn't mean wrong. Or even ethically wrong.

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