Another example of why maximalist political hostility can be counterproductive. Leave an olive branch in sight, and you may work towards a mutually beneficial resolution, like the previous Iran nuclear deals. If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
The UN Human Rights Council just confirmed US blockade against Cuba violates human rights and international law, citing Article 33 of Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits collective punishment.[2]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
For what?
I also believe many of our current "allies" in the region should face similar sanctions in case you are wondering.
Interesting take, coming from a nation that has caused:
- 210,296 violent civilian deaths in IRAQ
- 500,000 civilians killed om Japan
- 70,000 civilians killed in Vietnam
- 46,000 civilians killed in Afghanistan
- 3,000 civilians killed in IRAN
- Threatened to exterminate Persians civilization, blown up bridges, killed children and destroyed civilian infrastructure
I think United States should be sanctioned.
Iran threatens that all the time "Death to America" so if they don't like someone saying it back to them maybe they should stop?
If you want to make these kinds of body count claims, well for starters Iran killed over 30,000 of its own people recently (who knows maybe they've killed tens of thousands more over the years).
Iran also made the Iraq war worse by funding insurgents, which opposed the US and the government of Iraq (which is doing much better now as a country than it was under Saddam anyway) so they are partially responsible for some of those deaths.
But let's continue with this logic. While we're at it why don't we sanction China? Common estimates suggest 10s of millions dead from the Great Leap Forward (no it's not any different when you kill your own people, arguably much worse). Dramatic repression in places like Hong Kong, and continuing to threaten democratic Taiwan.
Why aren't you clamoring to sanction China if you're going to bring up Japan and Vietnam? Well that's because your logic is unsound, never mind the continued hyper-focus on being critical of the United States only. Maybe all of these deaths are actually on the hands of Europeans who partitioned these gulf states in the first place. Why was France in Vietnam? Why was the UN in Korea?
But you can take a step back and ask, well, what's the guiding framework here?
Is it arbitrarily picking certain time periods to make a point? Why do we go back to "Japan" and World War II when Japan started the war and was massacring and colonizing people throughout east Asia?
Why wasn't Germany mentioned in the body count? Dresden is a popular one that comes to mind.
Why do we only focus on lives lost? Maybe America saved 10,000,000 Chinese from Japanese occupation so on balance we're saving lives?
Now you know why they shout death to America. Would you also like to know that al qaeda didn't just hate american "freedom"?
If you want the Iranian people to engage in a forever war against the West, this is the kind of attitude you must hold.
“Some arbitrary injustice done by dead people forever justifies us to do whatever we want” isn’t a viable political or culturally progressive route to go down. Vietnam got over it. Why can’t Iran? Do they need a nuclear bomb to get over it? Will they stop hanging gay people, helping Russia, and providing militia support to destabilize Arab countries once they get what they want (whatever that is)? What date or specific thing do they need?
Can anyone say?
Of course not. Because totalitarian regimes always have to obsess over past injustices, perceived or real, to drum up support for the regime so that it can continue to hold power against the best interests of their people. It masks their own failures, like Tehran running out of water because their government spent all their money bombing innocent people.
People often ask these questions as if they're unanswerable or as if any answer would essentially be arbitrary.
What you need to do is look at contemporary global systems of inequality and consider their roots. For this it would seem British imperialism is often a sensible place to go to, in this case almost certainly.
They definitely should. Sick of the double standards. And the "USA can do no wrong but this tech in others' hands will be bad" takes.
More countries turning away from the United States/Europe for good, this is another one of those cases of winning or without firing a shot.
Unfortunately, USA has never applied any sanctions equally against countries with equivalent human rights violations, which proves that "human rights violations" have never been the true reason for those sanctions, but only a cover story.
When I was young and I was listening the US propaganda emitted through "Voice of America", I actually believed a good part of it. Unfortunately, history has proven that practically none of it was true and many listeners like myself were too naive if they believed any of it.
Moreover, the so-called "sanctions" of USA are not true sanctions. True sanctions would identify a precise behavior of the sanctioned country that is the cause of the sanctions and USA would promise that the sanctions would be terminated whenever the sanctioned country would stop those actions. Those would be true "sanctions" because they would have a chance to alter the behavior of the sanctioned countries.
As it is now, no sanctioned country would change anything in what they do, even when they are "sanctioned", because they know very well that the official reasons for the sanctions are not the true reasons and whatever they do about "human rights violations" and the like will not influence in any way whether the sanctions will be terminated or not.
Many of the official reasons for various US sanctions are so ridiculous that I wonder how the US politicians are able to utter them with a straight face.
For instance, there are many Chinese companies which are sanctioned because they might provide services or products for the Chinese Army or for the Chinese government.
??? Of course they do that. Any US company that makes anything of value will also provide services or products to the US military and government. The same will do any company in any country for their military and government.
In reality, the sanctioned Chinese companies have always been those which make consumer products that provided too much competition for US companies, like those that make DRAM modules and SSDs, so we have to thank the US sanctions for the huge price increases that have stolen money from people all over the world.
Regarding "sponsorship of extremism abroad", that is also questionable. Iran has supported various organizations which want to fight against Israel, but Israel has remained at war since its creation and the reason why they are still at war and they have never made peace with their enemies is because this was the wish of the Israeli government, who prefers to be at war than at peace.
There have existed opportunities of peace for Israel, but whenever there were chances for peace the forces within Israel that are against peace have prevented it, e.g. by the murder of the prime-minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 or by the sabotage of the prime-minister Ehud Barak by Ariel Sharon and Likud in 2000.
As long as Israel will not implement an acceptable closure for the events from its creation and for their consequences, there will be people willing to fight against it, and because Israel has a crushing military superiority, the only form of fight are the "terrorist" actions. The existence of the "terrorists" is a choice made by Israel, more precisely by certain elites from Israel, for whom the continuous state of never-ending war has been extremely profitable.
I have worked for many years in Israel and more than 90% of the people that I encountered there were very nice people, but I have also seen some very bad people, who of course, like in any country, were concentrated in the government and in the management of companies, so they had much more influence than the majority.
I pitied a lot my Israeli co-workers, because they were exploited to a degree that would not be possible in most countries. Only USA might come close with its "employment at will", which gives disproportionate power to the employer.
In Israel, employees have to work much harder than in most other countries and nobody could protest against that, because that would be considered as unpatriotic, i.e. the priority for everybody is to work as hard as possible, to maintain the technological and military superiority of Israel, for fear that otherwise their neighbors would come and cut their throats. This kind of work discipline is of course very desirable for the owners of the companies, so for them it is good that Israel is permanently at war and under the menace of "terrorist" attacks.
The term "terrorist" is just an euphemism for enemies with which Israel is at war and with which it desires no peace. Moreover, even if there have been a lot of more or less innocent Israeli victims (but all have chosen willingly to be part of a military conflict), Israel has always succeeded to kill a much greater number of "terrorists" or persons related to them or persons who just happened to be close to them. Israel does not want to make any concessions for peace, because it reckons that peace will be obtained eventually, over the dead bodies of all enemies, but there is no hurry for that, because war is good for the economy.
In these circumstances, applying "sanctions" against countries who "support terrorists" has no legal basis, but it is just joining the conflict between Israel and its enemies, as an ally of Israel.
Of course any sovereign country may do this, but they should present it as what it is, i.e. as taking sides in a conflict, and not as something which has any legal or ethical reasons.
reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality
reddit.com/r/PoliceBrutality
Oh yeah sorry this is "wHaTaBoUtIsM" so it makes our shit okay
we eat eggs from the little end and they eat from the big end.
We can wholeheartedly disagree with the US's war on Iran without pretending Iran is a 'good' international actor. It's a rogue state and has been for decades.
Even if you don't care about how Iran treats its own population, you should care about how it treats others because one day it might be you.
Iran's ideology is expansionalist. They want to export their ideas far and wide. While also physically suppressing their opponents.
Since the emergence of two global superpowers after WW2, most armed conflicts were, essentially, between those two. Directly or indirectly. If the two could find a peaceful solution, the world at large had a good day. And for a while it seemed like we might be left with just one superpower, and so no conflicts at all. Only policing.
The whole "multipolar" spiel you might hear from powers that challenge this policing is what is going to result in a long and bloody struggle for world domination. It won't be like the world wars we remember, where most of the world had to choose one of the two sides. It will be a quagmire of more local conflicts with very volatile alliances and a lot more casualties overall. More like Italian city states.
It's necessary to police Iran and similar bad countries because if their challenge of the power monopoly succeeds, the world will be hurled into anarchy equipped with very deadly weapons...
There is only one country in the Middle East with an aggressive expansionist mentality, and it’s not Iran.
And what’s with the superpower commentary, you neglected to connect it to Iran and are you saying Russia is bigger than China?
I don't understand the question about Russia vs China: bigger in what sense? Geographically, it surely is, but that's not likely what you were going for.
To comment on expansionism: there are several ideologies in the region that seek to establish some sort of a "center of gravity" to attach more territory / resources to it. Islamic Revolutionary Guards is one of them, it's been "copied" by others s.a. various Hezballah organizations in different countries or Ansarallah. If eg. Hezballah wins in Lebanon, they will become a sort of a copy of Iran. Think like Warsaw Pact countries were "copies" of the Soviet Union.
Another such ideology / force is Muslim Brotherhood. Broadly, any Al-Qaeda affiliates belong there. This is a more popular / organic Arab thing as opposed to Islamic Guards, who are a foreign influence. They, however, lack a "center of gravity", but, potentially, they can take over Egypt as the current government is unpopular, while Muslim Brotherhood is. Eventually, there might be a popular revolt that will topple the current military government and then it's very likely that Egypt will try to expand its influence over the Middle East by violent means.
And there's a list of failures / non-threats, s.a. BAAS (Arab Communists, essentially): they used to be popular during the Cold War but now nobody cares about them. Wahhabi ideology that was propped by Saudis for a while, but now it's basically forgotten. Western liberal news like to mention "Greater Israel": this idea is about as popular in Israel as Scientology is in the US. It does exist in some form in the very fringe part of Israeli society, but it has zero chance of having a popular support. It makes the news domestically mostly because of how unrealistic and out of touch it is. It has about as much influence on Israeli foreign policy as Scientology does in the US.
As always, the question for the declining hegemon is whether a new order can arise peacefully or not. The UK managed to go peacefully in the end, but only after two brutal and deadly world wars sapped them of their remaining strength. Still, their acquiescence allowed them to retain an outsized seat at the table.
China doesn’t seem interested in becoming a unipolar hegemon, at least based on public statements and openly published policy/position papers, so perhaps they have learned that it’s bad to be the hegemon from watching both the UK and the US take it on the chin. Rather than the Yuan becoming the default international currency, it’s possible that Keynes’s Bancor (or something like it) may finally replace the notion of a singular reserve currency, which always fails in predictable ways.
Israel’s neighbors Jordan and Egypt have made peace with Israel and have had no issues since then.
You may have been misled by anti-Israel propaganda.
The governments may have, but I can assure you the average citizen of those countries haven't, as they still have morals and haven't got US funding to buy their morals.
Depending on who you are, Western CAs can come with some availability problems, but thanks to certificate transparency, you don't even have to trust the CA if you mostly care about security. Take a wild guess as to whether an Iranian CA will support that...
I'm not sure that isolating Iran in particular has much of an effect because countries don't want to be in Russia's orbit, China's orbit is Only Good for China, and so aside from a European-only/led system the best option would still be the current state/system.
The best solution to all of these problems is for Iran to just behave like pretty much all other countries, but in lieu of that and in lieu of us having a desire to really go to war in Iran, we're just going to have to take actions like this because we can't have this regime opposed to us and western values and pursuing nuclear weapons (prior to, during, and after JCPOA) but then enjoying the benefits of the American-led financial system.
If Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia want to get together and create their own crappy Intranet that nobody uses, well, more power to them. Hope they have fun.
> If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the evolution of these arrangements. There's a lot of nuance here, but the United States helped get China into the WTO based on the premise that they'd liberalize and then what happened? State-directed investment, banning of competitor products, subsidized over-capacity to deindustrialize other countries, artificially cheap currency to boost exports. Russia? They were part of the The NATO-Russia Founding Act and then decided they'd rather do war and stuff. Iran? Won't stop pursuing nuclear weapons for no reason (among other things), so now their economy is going to tank. So it's really the opposite. Even when you think about the JCPOA, let's say it wasn't torn up. Why was/is Iran still funding militant groups that are destabilizing other countries in the region? The west, not just the US mind you, did its damned best to include these specific countries into the western rules-based order, allowed gross injustices and breaches of good conduct, and still tried only to now itself be backed into a corner (Iran, Russia invading Ukraine, Chinese economic destruction) and has to finally respond.
As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
I remember your handle, ericmay, because you have been showing up in almost every thread about the tariffs or Iran and following this logic. Something Must Be Done, therefore Anything That Is Being Done Is Good. How dare you question if the Thing Being Done is actually against our interests? Do you not feel the warm fuzzy feeling of Something Being Done?
It's a frankly childish view of politics where virtue is all you need no matter the outcome. Time to grow up.
BRICS begs to dffer.
BRICS = Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
The main problem with sanctions is that it's the wrong people on the receiving end. Russian oligarchs and military businessmen have exactly zero problems managing their money, while ordinary people who flew russia into the EU - they face unsurmountable piles of unsolvable problems due to sanctions.
The only thing that would work is bribing the Iranian military (perhaps the non-IRGC part) like they did in Syria. Exile Iranians of course won't fight but they rather talk and demand that others fight.
It is clearly bad if the whole of Iran gets their own CA infrastructure which the NSA can't as easily spy on.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085559 (citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112 (citations)
(sysadmin/network admin/devops/infra engineer a lifetime ago, mostly familiar with what bootstrapping this looks like)
Sure, but that will require more than 20 people, 5 million USD and the sole will of the Iranian government.
As just one example, you can take a guess as to whether such a CA will support certificate transparency...
I guess you could say a loss is a loss ...
If it doesn't cost the US anything and is strategically in their favor (via weakening an opponent), I really don't see why they couldn't have.
On top of that, it'll make others find alternatives quickly, as has already been happening with e.g. payments and other critical infrastructures. What an incredible waste of soft power built over decades.
How's the support for X.509 "Name Constraints" these days:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-4.2.1....
Would restricting it to only dot-ir domains be a mitigation?
I think some servers do not send a copy of the root certificate to the client. In this case, what I described above might already be possible even if that feature has not already been added to existing implementations, as long as it does not require the installed certificate to be self-signed.
What would you suggest as an alternative? TOFU?
I could see that for local applications (e.g. making mDNS/.local and private IP certs TOFU capable by default would be amazing, and maybe even for some explicit hobbyist public TLDs?), but I don’t think I’d love it for my bank or email provider.
The main technical way I know of doing this would be by putting TLS public keys in DNS (DANE, RFC 6698), but then you have to make sure that DNS packets are not fiddled with, so you need to bring in DNSSEC.
It would be great to have a widely-recognizable pseudodomain out there where the names were key hashes. It would actually graft really easily into DNSSEC. The zone format doesn't have to change at all; you just declare that if the KSK hash matches the domain label under this specific TLD, you don't need to check upstream of that. Then you add a P2P protocol for getting the actual data, and start slowly pushing that protocol down the resolver tree to incrementally decentralize everything.
There is the problem of TLS and X.509 being used with centralized authorities like this, even though it is not inherent to TLS nor to X.509 (although they were designed to be used in this way). In some circumstances, you can get a copy of the certificate (which might be self-signed) from somewhere else and then check that it matches in this circumstances. In other circumstances there are other things that can be done (e.g. TOFU, which has a different set of problems, but also has advantages in a different set of circumstances). What the security requirements are will depend on the circumstances, which can also depend on the user's intentions; they should not have to depend on a centralized authority.
(There is the issue that a single X.509 certificate cannot have multiple issuers, though. There is also the issue that X.509 certificates cannot contain unsigned extensions (they could be added after the signature, but an implementation might check for additional fields after the signature and reject a certificate that has any). Although an alternative schema can be made (I have done so), it would not work with the existing protocols.)
There is no reason to give money to US middlemen for everything you do.
The whole of the EU should do this, too. I stopped using Internet banking after my bank moved from SMS Tan to hardware Tan generator (one of which didn't work) to forced mobile app. No thanks.
www.pagoefectivo.la
You select 'pay in cash' in the online checkout, walk to your neighborhood convenience mart, and they scan a QR code (or you give them a code if you don't have a smartphone) linked to your checkout session. It rings up the total, and you pay the clerk in cash. Once you hand over the cash and the clerk hits confirm in their POS system, the online store is notified instantly that you have paid, and your order moves directly into processing or shipping.
Accounting cash is extremely complicated and whether you like it or not, you will be forced to do an online transaction at some point.
Are you going to be wiring money across the country to buy stuff?
Instead of going back we should stop centralizing everything.
We are centralizing the internet with Cloudfare. We are centralizing mobile compute with Android/Apple
I don't want to be dependent on any of those platforms to access my bank
This is highly country specific. In many countries, (at least domestic) ATM withdrawals are still free.
> you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
What exactly does a compromised ATM do in terms of identity theft that a POS terminal can't do? Both can read your card, which today is not a big problem anymore, and certainly not yours or your bank's.
Also, they stopped capitalizing the "i" in "internet" some time ago. Wake up from the year 2000 already.
weak src: me, a citizen from a country with high inflation rates
People in many South American countries should be highly motivated to use crypto because fiat is usually damn shit.
I was motivated because cash machines were extremely crappy for a tourist (when you could find an ATM that even had any money in its cassettes). Argentina was a USD8 withdrawal fee plus the super shitty official exchange rate and half the time you could only withdraw maybe USD30 maximum so you maybe needed to do multiple transactions. I also had NZD bank fees and poor exchange rates from my own NZ bank added.
It was a total shitshow trying to use crypto. I would honestly have been better wandering around with gold in my pockets.
Crypto was high risk: dangerously unsafe. Also mostly unavailable unless you were really lucky. Complex. Massively taxed for recipients if they used anything that officially supported crypto. Arbolitos (street money changers) would take a 10-15% cut and it always felt super effing dodgy (felt like a risk of getting kidnapped).
I can't recommend it. There was no way to learn how to do crypto transactions safely, even though I have conversational Spanish.
Scary as all fuck. My kind of holiday, but I couldn't recommend anyone take those risks unless they're as stupid an idiot as me.
I'm mostly relaxed about countries taking advantage of me (or other tourists), but South America was so OTT that I mostly wouldn't go back. That said, I loved Brazil even though I can't speak a word of Portuguese. That's the only place I would make an effort to return to from my 3 months travelling in South America.
As for transaction confirmation times, there are cryptocurrencies in common use that confirm nearly immediately. The lack of your knowledge shows.
https://crt.sh/?id=22899279066 (Revoked: privilegeWithdrawn)
If I'm an entity such as a bank, I should be able to sign my own certificate and provide the public keys to my clients which then can use it to both encrypt communications and to make sure you are talking with the entity you want to talk to. Am I missing anything?
How does this part happen? How does the client know that the entity providing them with that public key is who they claim to be?
The role CAs play is to be a trusted identity verifier so we don't have to have millions of people driving around to do key exchanges in person.
I think the idea of a CA is good but it should be distributed somehow
CAs are quite distributed already. You probably have a couple dozen or even a hundred different root CAs installed right now, and you can install whatever ones you like if necessary.
All caches are just functionally useless layers..., so that's that.
You can give out the same claim over DNS directly without any extra third party involvement in the form of CA.
It won't do for all circumstances (as some other comments mention), but when it is possible, it would be a good idea.
I feel like not being able to use US CAs is just a cheap excuse to enact what they've wanted for a while. Same in Russia.
[1] Note that every civilised country should be a problem for Israel- but Iran is the only one that actually dares opposing it.
So it would be fine if they were against any other country engaged in genocide, but not against Israel because it's Jewish? Is that your defense of Israel?
> We want to live like ordinary people in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and be allied with them
You want to be allied with a genocidal state and the country that has forced you into poverty for the last decades?
In the same year:
Iran killed at-least 5000 civilian protesters.
Russia killed around 1,800 Ukrainian civilians.
5000 were killed in Sudan. 3000 in Haiti.
You are fine will all that (or will deny it), because you only care when the Jews are involved.
Their answer? They're now asking users to install root certs from the Russian ministry of communications. So it can now MITM all the encrypted traffic in Russia.
It's not that hard to find a CA in a more aligned regime.
Rolling your own MITM CA as a replacement just looks like something that was waiting for an excuse.
Another win for the US.
Trump is intentionally playing into Chinese, Russian Noth Korean, Iranian hands
They must be impeached/removed regardless of intent
Nobody voted for this