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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.
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.
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 actions 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 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...
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.
BRICS begs to dffer.
BRICS = Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
Why would that matter?
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.
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.
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?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ir
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.)
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)
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 ...
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.
As for transaction confirmation times, there are cryptocurrencies in common use that confirm nearly immediately. The lack of your knowledge shows.
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?
It won't do for all circumstances (as some other comments mention), but when it is possible, it would be a good idea.
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.
All caches are just functionally useless layers..., so that's that.
https://crt.sh/?id=22899279066 (Revoked: privilegeWithdrawn)
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?
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.
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