Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-04.txt

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 03:32:17AM +0000, Mark Perkins wrote:

>  some protocols are developed by groups of people (commercial, academic, non-profit, etc), which are clearly embedded in a political context which constrains/directs their development of protocols; in this case, the protocols can clearly be seen as 'political' as well as 'technical', some more so than others.

That formulation repeats the equivocation between "_x_ is developed
through a process that includes politics" and "_x_ is political".  I
guess it is no longer clear to me what "_x_ is political" means.  But
it seems pretty clear to me that such a conclusion could be used for
all sorts of mischief.

Look, the US state of Indiana once considered a bill that was supposed
to have a method to square the circle and that imputed a value of
π≈3.2.  Does this mean that the value of π is political?  Well, yes,
in some trivial sense: it has been the subject of a process that was
itself entirely political.  But that does not mean that the value of π
is political in the ordinary sense of "_x_ is political" or that it
would be in any way appropriate to try to use the legislature to
settle once and for all the correct way to calculate diameter.

I think the manifold sense of "_x_ is political" is obscured rather
than clarified at least in §6 of the draft.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]