[Cryptography] Crypto Standards v.s. Engineering habits - Was: NIST about to weaken SHA3?

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Sun Oct 6 17:43:53 EDT 2013


On 2013-10-07 01:18, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> We are not at war with Iran.

We are not exactly at peace with Iran either, but that is irrelevant, 
for presumably it was a Jew that did it, and Iran is at war with Jews.
(And they are none too keen on Christians, Bahais, or Zoroastrians either)

> I am aware that there are people who would
> like to start a war with Iran, the same ones who wanted to start the war
> with Iraq which caused a half million deaths but no war crimes trials to
> date.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.   You 
can reasonably argue that we should not get involved in Israel's 
problems, but you should not complain about Israel getting involved in 
Israel's problems.

> Iran used to have a democracy

Had a democracy where if you opposed Mohammad Mosaddegh you got murdered 
by Islamists.

Which, of course differs only in degree from our democracy, where (to 
get back to some slight relevance to cryptography) Ladar Levison gets 
put out of business for defending the fourth Amendment, and Pax gets put 
on a government blacklist that requires him to be fired and prohibits 
his business from being funded for tweeting disapproval of affirmative 
action for women in tech.

And similarly, if Hitler's Germany was supposedly not a democracy, why 
then was Roosevelt's America supposedly a democracy?

I oppose democracy because it typically results from, and leads to, 
government efforts to control the thoughts of the people.  There is not 
a large difference between our government requiring Pax to be fired, and 
Mohammad Mosaddegh murdering Haj-Ali Razmara.  Democracy also frequently 
results in large scale population replacement and ethnic cleansing, as 
for example Detroit and the Ivory Coast, as more expensive voters get 
laid off and cheaper voters get imported.

Mohammed Moasddegh loved democracy because he was successful and 
effective in murdering his opponents, and the Shah was unwilling or 
unable to murder the Shah's opponents.

And our government loves democracy because it can blacklist Pax and 
destroy Levison.

If you want murder and blacklists, population replacement and ethnic 
cleansing, support democracy.  If you don't want murder and blacklists, 
should have supported the Shah.


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