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Comment by pmarin | Hacker News Reader

It not the government but the judicial authorities, we have distribution of power. It's embarrassing that the title is intentionally misleading.

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The judiciary is part of the goverment and as you can see in the letters from China and Russia the Goverment is asking GitHub to takedown repos referencing laws too. That does not make said laws moral or just.

Yes the analogy is perfectly sound. Spain one of the countries with the highest score in index of democracy, with a recent constitution, with separation of power is completely the same as the plutocracy born of the post soviet collapse of russia and the authoritarian pooh regime of china.

I'm not aware of any index which considers Spain to be in the highest score (e.g. in the Democracy Index, it gets 8.08).

If you think the age of the constitution means anything at all, then I am scared. Countries that do well, like Norway or Australia, have old constitutions — it means they have practice. Some good, safe democracies, like New Zealand, don't even have a constitution at all. Most of the remainder have constitutions that are old but have been comparatively recently re-enacted to make some superficial change here or there. (In the top ten, Iceland, Finnland and Ireland are probably the countries with the genuinely youngest constitutions.)

And anyone who has seen the Spanish handling of this situation, who thinks that Spain has separation of power, deserves the completely abandonment of the rule of law that is just around the corner.

Distribution of power in theory, yes. If you're Spanish you very well know that's NOT the case.

And it's clear that this lack of separation is rooted in the minds of Spanish politicians and governors. Here's the Vice President of Spain basically threatening the Belgium Executive if the Belgium Courts don't extradite Carles Puigdemont

https://thediplomatinspain.com/en/2019/10/spain-tells-belgiu...

I specifically said regardless of the branch (I wrote regardless of whom) of government it is embarassing. A free people should have the right to protest. If this is aiding terrorism that is a whole other boat.

I think in some languages the word for "government" is used to refer to the executive branch or its head more directly, whereas in English it's often used to refer to its multiple branches.

Actually, in English the word "government" is used to refer to the executive branch in places that have the Westminster tradition. For instance, whereas an American might say "the administration condemned those who eat cheese with a fork", an Australian would say "the government has condemned those who eat cheese with a fork". (I think Americans are more careful about distinguishing the state and federal administrations compared to an Australian, who is generally pretty lax about such technicalities in between elections.)

>A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, often a state.[1]

>In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government

You are quoting from the English-language Wikipedia.

Contrast that with [0], which states "El Gobierno es el principal pilar del Estado; ... ejercicio del poder ejecutivo del Estado", the latter of which links to [1], which clarifies, "el poder ejecutivo es una de las tres facultades y funciones primordiales del Estado".

[0]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobierno

[1]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poder_ejecutivo

You seem to be talking about the meanings of some Spanish words, but the disagreement is about the meanings of words in English, which is not the same language as Spanish. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397278.

There's no real disagreement, just some folks seem to be unfamiliar with how much of the world uses these terms. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21396866 et al.

Indeed, I said as much in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21396745 and (a bit snarkily) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21396708.

Actually the shutdown is asked by the Guardia Civil, which is a police, not a judicial authority

Genuinely confused by these responses. But I don't really know anything about government in Spain.

Are the Guardia Civil and the judicial branch not part of the government in Spain? I mean, it's still the Spanish government right?

Just for context, in the US we have police and national guard and judges and prosecutors, etc. But we would consider them all to be part of the government.

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