I haven't backed down from that stance. It's still the case. There remains no upper limit on how much force Spain can use to put down the Catalonian indepedence movement. None.phlapjackage wrote:Ok, as was said before by Kaelik(?), I'm glad you've backed down from the position of "this is WAR!" and that it was ok for the police to start shooting people. Now it's just an illegal assembly/protest.
Discussions of fair punishments and cruel and unusual punishments and so on and so forth continue to miss the point. Deciding on what constitutes a just punishment is something to be decided in a court. The Catalonians are not in a court. They lost in court and have refused to submit to its ruling. Now it's just an enforcement issue. The executive is now simply going to use as much force as it requires to enforce the law or they run out of resources.
If the police tell you to disperse, you either disperse or you fight. In several places in Catalonia, the separatists chose to fight. I think it's obvious that most of the people who made that choice did not understand the implications. And it is equally clear that most of the people in this discussion thread don't either.
If you choose to fight rather than disperse, the police will beat the shit out of you. If they don't think that's sufficient, they will start shooting you with rubber bullets. If they don't think that is sufficient they will shoot you with real bullets. If they don't think that is sufficient they will call in military vehicles and shoot you with bigger real bullets. They will stop escalating when they think the job is done or they run out of money. That is how it works. The state has a monopoly of force, and it maintains that monopoly by being willing and able to escalate its use beyond anything you could wield or even imagine.
Now the fact that it works this way is completely orthogonal to the question of whether the laws being enforced or the people they are being enforced on are right or wrong. But it fucking always and everywhere works this way, and if you can't or won't accept that, that is your naivete becoming a problem for your ability to process past, current, and future events.
-Username17