This is too complicated even for the margins of the blogpost, but the situation in Spain is pretty messed up. There's a weird bias against regional independence movements premised on the idea that they're somehow fake. Nobody really speaks Scots or Welsh or... but they do. Also people speak Catalan. Sure everybody in Catalonia speaks Castilian, too, but outsiders don't get that a second language is still a second language, even if you are fluent in it. You can be fluent in a language without being adept at it, and there are things (like university admissions) which require people to be adept.
Language isn't the only issue, of course. Catalonia has been a distinct region for hundreds of years. But the important issue is not "is independence good or bad?" Not my judgment call. Probably not yours, either. But the crackdown from Madrid on free speech and assembly related to the independence movement is obscene. It's bad.
