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

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

Apparently I haven't taken my OCD medications, and therefore I'm
looking at this and responding.  I mostly looked at diffs between -04
and -06.  Still speaking just for me.

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 05:27:53PM +0200, Niels ten Oever wrote:
> I am curious to hear whether you think these adaptations help address some of your issues. 
> 
> Suggestion, comments, discussion, and pull requests are always welcome:

In §1, I do not find economic impacts described in RFC 613.  I find
RFC 3271 to be a bizarre reference, and very hard to justify given the
way cited here.  I am totally mystified about how RFC 101 illustrates
early community members making political decisions.  I'm having a hard
time hooking up most of these other RFCs with this claim, too, and I
wonder if it isn't the same question-begging I've raised before: just
because a thing has somehow been the implication of a political
process does not actually show that the thing is _itself_ political.
If the entire approach is simply to take BramanII thesis as proven,
then state that and get rid of all the other supposed support here,
which is inadequate to prove the point and is obscure enough that the
reader needs to do the work of chasing the references anyway.

The reliance on the definition of Internet Standards in §2 is going to
yield a rather underwhelming conclusion, since an awful lot of the
Internet runs on stuff that isn't Internet Standard.  This includes
HTTP 1.0, 1.1, and 2, so it's not like it's a little gap.

In §5, the claim of "general agreement" is empirical and has nowhere
been demonstrated that I can see.  And this discussion is _prima
facie_ evidence against the claim.

In §6, again things that are presented as "conclusions" are really
just positions that are not actually argued for in the text.  This
conclusion basically says that if you accept Russell, then the
use-context counts.  But unstated here is the acceptance that Russell
is right and also that therefore the use-context counts.  That's
literally what's at stake in the discussion, and the I-D has not
proven any of this at all.  The entire section continues to beg the
question.  Either make an argument somewhere for this conclusion, or
just take it out.

I'm unlikely to have another train ride soon where I get to look at
this again, so please don't take my future silence as agreement (or
disagreement).  It's just silence.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]