Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-05.txt

Niels,

This post is a perfect example of one problem that I have been complaining 
about.  If everything that is ever touched upon by any politics is thereby 
itself "political", then your point is true (though, I submit, trivially 
so).  But you haven't actually shown that claim, and any time anyone 
objects to this point you simply trot out some authority to say, "But it is 
so true." But the argument is basically over whether those authors are 
right. So it's either begging the question or fallacious appeal to 
authority or both.

Best regards,

A
--
Andrew Sullivan
Please excuse my clumbsy thums.

On September 23, 2019 05:44:33 Niels ten Oever <mail@nielstenoever.net> wrote:

> On 9/21/19 4:18 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>>
>> Hiya,
>>
>> On 21/09/2019 15:13, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>>> Again, let's take the example of SSL, which was designed by Netscape
>>> for its own market purposes and became a de facto standard because
>>> Netscape had the dominant browser and people wanted to interoperate
>>> with it. What's poltical about that process?
>>
>> To be fair, there was a lot of IETF politics around
>> Netscape and Microsoft related to that and IIRC TLS
>> was only called that as part of an explicit compromise.
>>
>> I think Eliot's examples (and NTP, which I raised)
>> are maybe better examples of less/apolitical standards
>> and protocols than SSL/TLS.
>
> Time, and its standardization, is a very political project. Going back to 
> Aristotle (Physics iv 10-14) there is the difference between Chronos and 
> Kairos, where Chronos became the number to measure motion (kinesis). There 
> have been many other perceptions and measurements of time, that were able 
> to exist next to each other, but as part of the colonial project, the 
> European concept of what time was, was made the universal standard. That is 
> why Greenwich Mean Time (in Great Britain) is used as a standard for the 
> whole world.
>
> There are also many stories about the development of timezones, and their 
> consequences, the way in which time helped shape labor, life, and how it 
> altered complete societies.
>
> I am not making a value judgment about this re-odering, but I am trying to 
> show that NTP, which helps synchronize to a specific time regime, on which 
> a lot of computing depends, helps promulgate a specific, and political, 
> ordering.
>
> This book on the topic is quite interesting:
> https://www.amazon.com/Colonisation-Time-Studies-Imperialism/dp/0719082714
>
> Best,
>
> Niels
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Niels ten Oever
> Researcher and PhD Candidate
> DATACTIVE Research Group
> University of Amsterdam
>
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>
>
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