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After Catalonia's leader missed a deadline to clarify the government's stance on an independence referendum, and missed another deadline (Thursday calling for an unambiguous renouncement of the independence referendum, the Spanish government plans to strip Catalonia of its autonomous status:
Spain was preparing to impose direct rule over semi-autonomous Catalonia after the region's leader Carles Puigdemont declined to categorically renounce an independence referendum, the prime minister's office announced Thursday.
Spain's government said it would hold a special Cabinet meeting and "approve the measures that will be sent to the Senate to protect the general interest of all Spaniards."
At the Cabinet meeting, the government would invoke Article 155 of Spain's constitution allowing it to strip Catalonia of its self-governance. That would take effect on Saturday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's office said in a statement.
Madrid had given Puigdemont a 10 a.m. (4 a.m. ET) deadline to clarify his government's stance on a non-binding declaration of independence passed by the regional legislature following a successful referendum on secession. But the Catalan leader insisted on keeping his options open, but that wasn't good enough for Spain's government, which had insisted on an unambiguous "no."
Bloomberg reports "Merkel and Macron Have Spain's Back as Catalan Crisis Escalates":
European Union leaders offered their support for Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy as he prepares to suspend the powers of the Catalan administration to clamp down on its push for independence. EU chiefs arriving for a summit in Brussels on Thursday said they backed Madrid and stressed that the issue of Catalonia's independence was a domestic one for Spain.
"We're looking at this very closely and support the position of the Spanish government, which is also a position that's been adopted across parties," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Of course this preoccupies us, and we hope that there can be a resolution on the basis of the Spanish constitution." Asked whether he supported the Spanish government, French President Emmanuel Macron said "always," adding that "this summit will be marked by a message of unity of its members in regards to Spain."
Also at BBC, The Guardian, and EUObserver (opinion).
Previously: Spain Trying to Stop Catalonia Independence Referendum
Police and Voters Clash During Catalan Independence Referendum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 20 2017, @04:05PM (12 children)
Not only is that true everywhere, but everywhen as well, far back into history, and no reason to suspect anything short of complete global self-annihilation will prevent it being such far into the future.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday October 20 2017, @04:44PM (9 children)
Thus, it is completely reasonable to expect a dystopian sci-fi like future. Not just being cynical. Or crazy. But realistic.
The difference between now and the past is that our conflicts will tend to be, or expand to be global. And our weapons too powerful. Our (and other) leaders' skins too thin, temperaments too adolescent, and launch codes ready to tweet. So maybe an extinction level event. Amusingly, it would just be more of the same. Just the grand culmination of humanity from everywhere and everywhen.
As Jeremiah wrote in the O.T., the heart of man is exceedingly wicked and desperately sick and who can know it.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday October 20 2017, @05:00PM (6 children)
We need to send some monuments out into space, like we did with the "golden records" on the Voyager probes. But unlike those, which totally whitewashed humanity, we need to show the unvarnished truth of our societies, and what caused our downfall, so that the archeologists of future civilizations will be able to understand how we destroyed ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday October 20 2017, @08:19PM (5 children)
Yeah, that's a realistic project.
You assume things are different any where else? Why would they be? All life is competition to survive. From lichens on a rock to entire civilizations. More likely "future civilizations" will face the same issues long before they get out into space.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday October 20 2017, @08:35PM (4 children)
It *is* a realistic project. We made golden records in the 70s, so obviously it's been done before. And we put them on probes which left the solar system, so that's been done before too. I don't think we even need to go that far; just launch a few landers with some more realistic golden records, and have them land on the Moon, Mars, and Ceres. Hopefully alien explorers will find these and be able to use them to document the downfall and destruction of our species, as there might not be sufficient surviving artifacts on Earth when they get to it. As for "facing the same issues", any alien explorers finding these things will either not have had these problems, or figured out how to overcome them, or else they wouldn't have been able to achieve interstellar travel, so I'm not sure what your point here is. I'm not trying to save alien civilizations from our fate (that really is unrealistic, we can't even get to the next star system yet), my intention is simply to help future alien exo-archeologists understand our failed civilization. A big dump of Wikipedia on some type of corrosion-proof medium should do it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 20 2017, @09:53PM (1 child)
We could just put something on Triton or Pluto if we wanted it to survive the Sun becoming a red giant.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday October 20 2017, @10:00PM
Yeah, those are probably ok choices too, but I thought Pluto actually had active geology; I want something to sit there for up to a couple billion years without being hurt by natural processes. But as for the Sun becoming a red giant, that's really a little beyond the timeframe I'm thinking of. Once the Sun becomes a red giant, there won't be an Earth left for the aliens to investigate the ruins of, so it becomes a little pointless.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 23 2017, @04:16PM (1 child)
It's like Yes and No about being a realistic project.
Yes, it's realistic that we could actually launch it.
But the purpose of doing so may be unrealistic. "The Great Filter" may be that intelligent civilizations destroy themselves because their technology and weapons grow faster than both biological and social evolution. So all intelligent civilizations destroy themselves during their World War III.
Thus, while we could launch a record of our existence, and the unvarnished truth about us, there may not be anyone to read it. And there may never be anybody to read it. The universe itself has a finite life. And it has a much shorter period where it is habitable by intelligent life. If nobody found our new Titanium plack, because nobody ever reaches the level of technology for interstellar travel, then the only possibility of it being read is that it (eventually, and by pure dumb luck) happens to land (and survive re-entry) somewhere that there beings who recognize it as an object created by a technological race1.
So yes, and no to it being a realistic project.
1But maybe that is how it would ultimately succeed. Warn some other poor hapless race of what we did to ourselves. Even if the odds of anybody benefiting are astronomical against.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 23 2017, @05:51PM
"The Great Filter" may be that intelligent civilizations destroy themselves because their technology and weapons grow faster than both biological and social evolution. So all intelligent civilizations destroy themselves during their World War III.
This one seems pretty ridiculous to me, just like the idea of there being no other civilizations. There's 1 trillion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and several trillion more in nearby Andromeda. We're now finding that exoplanets are very common. Planets with habitable conditions conducive to evolving life may be much more rare, but there's still trillions of chances there just in those two galaxies. So even if there is a "Great Filter", the idea that ALL civilizations destroy themselves just doesn't make sense; nothing with astronomical numbers like that ends up all-or-nothing. There has to be at least some small percentage of civilizations that avoid this fate.
So again I disagree. Given the 1 trillion stars in the galaxy, sure, the odds are poor that one of these small number of civilizations that avoids the Filter will find it, but the possibility is there. Plus, if a civilization manages to avoid the Filter, and is also an exploratory species, they'll probably build lots and lots of long-range probes, so they'll just be limited by transit time, but they should find us eventually, or what's left of us. If we build these landers to be easily found (perhaps with some large reflective array that unfolds on landing), then chances aren't so bad that my golden records will be found, eventually. Remember, the ETs have literally billions of years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 20 2017, @05:45PM (1 child)
There won't be dystopia, don't worry. They will keep pushing us till we had enough, and we will just kill all the baddies. Happened before, will happen again. The magical time you seem to think is the norm is just the brief phase in-between the purges.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 23 2017, @04:25PM
What if there is a dystopia, and the madmen have enough power that nobody can overthrow them?
Even in the peaceful Democratic Republic of North Korea, where everyone just loves their Dear Leader, and believes the government information1 about the outside, nobody has actually managed to overthrow that madman. Because their blissful existence is all unicorns and rainbows.
So maybe you are naive to be so optimistic to believe that such a madman on a global level could be overthrown. The cycle of purges may end. Or it may not, it may just be cycles of purges within the same dystopian existence by the dystopian madman suppressing potential revolts. There may not be a rebel alliance. There may not be interstellar travel. We may just end up confined to this planet in a dystopian nightmare2.
1aka, lies
2lest you think my outlook is totally depressing, it is not. I subscribe to the outcome in the book of The Revelation in the bible. I want to be on the winning side. Spoiler alert: we win
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday October 20 2017, @04:57PM (1 child)
Exactly. And it's sad, and shows exactly how hypocritical people (and leaders) really are. After all, all these developed nations espouse their "democratic values", but one of the core values of democracy is the principle of self-determination. If a group of people isn't even allowed to govern themselves, and instead has to answer to some group of outsiders and pay taxes to them them, how is that democracy? It isn't. So we have "democratic" nations which act clearly against the very principle of democracy every time some well-defined group of people (Catalans, Kurds, etc.) stands up and says "we're sick of these these other people running our lives, we want independence". Even worse is that the biggest gorilla was itself *founded* by a war for independence, but generally speaks out against the idea.
On top of all that, when these separatist European movements make noise about independence, they don't even want *full* independence and sovereignty, they still like the idea of the EU and want to remain part of that union, and probably also the NATO military union. But the EU would rather keep the status quo and preserve the power structures in place rather than work for the good of their constituents by helping these groups reorganize into political structures they prefer. Long-term, it'd really be better for the EU, in my opinion, if they promoted the break-up of their larger members into smaller states (to ease internal tensions), while keeping them all within the EU fold, so that they didn't have the problem they have now where the largest members are setting all the policy and basically bullying the smaller members.
Honestly I see this a lot like marriages: if your spouse doesn't like you, won't sleep with you, and trashes you to all your friends, and wants a divorce, is it better to force him/her to stay married to you, or to just let them go?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 20 2017, @08:24PM
Which democratic nation are you referring to?
The closest approximation to a Democracy is said to be Switzerland.
Nobody else officially claims the title.
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