Thoughts on policy toward North Korea
So the UN has put even more stringent sanctions on North Korea. I don’t see where that is going to force North Korea into abandoning its nuclear and ICBM arsenal and development. At best the sanctions slow the nuclear program by limiting access to hard currency.
Maybe, maybe, a more adept US administration could persuade North Korea into joining the Test Ban Treaty. They could commit first to no atmospheric testing, which would essentially cost them nothing since they haven’t been conducting atmospheric tests. However, more competent administrations have tried and failed to contain North Korea using negotiated agreements.
Absent a US-Russian-Chinese agreement to go in and denuclearize North Korea by force, the US has to accept that North Korea is a nuclear state and has no intention of denuclearizing, ever.
North Korea looks at states like Ukraine and Libya which did denuclearize, and later saw their governments overthrown by US-backed coups, and this doesn’t look like a good scenario to them.
Engaging in a florid war of words with the North Koreans, with insults like “Little Rocket Man,” is a spectacularly bad and unwise strategy. They are on the paranoid side of insecure, so we should be as stolid and predictable and imperturbable as possible. Enduring a million “dotards” is better than enduring a single nuclear strike on the US or its allies.
China is most concerned with a break-up of NK with loose nukes and a huge refugee crisis on their borders, and that would be a horrible situation. The US needs to not squeeze NK so hard that it collapses into warlords or a Mad Max-like anarchy.
The best option I can present is make the best of a bad situation. Treat them like Pakistan, more or less. If the US simply refuses to give NK a seat in the club of nuclear powers, it loses all chances of NK ever adhering to customary law, and it invites NK to make some kind of demonstration, which could go hideously wrong in a number of ways.
Copyright © 2017, 2018 Henry Edward Hardy
Comments on ‘Net Neutrality’
I sent the below to some friends when asked to join a letter advocating “Network neutrality”:
I am generally opposed to any federal or state regulation of what internet service providers can do vis a vis routing and BGP, packet prioritization etc. I do think that telcos should continue to function as common carriers, and that all commercial ISP’s should be required to reveal their packet prioritization and bandwidth clamping as part of consumer protection regulation, rather than being allowed to use the “up to 1.5 megabytes per second fast” kind of formulation in advertising.
There is no capital-I “Internet”. And there has not been since the NSF backbone shut down April 30, 1995. There is merely a loose association of networks who have agreed to share traffic over RFC-documented protocols. Each of the networks is entirely autonomous and self-governing.
It is the autonomous, voluntary, and self-governing aspects of the internet which are most important to preserve, not “net neutrality”. Internet freedom means that we allow other people to do things on their network which we personally don’t like (and may not allow on our network).
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code”
–Dave Clark, “An Input/Output Architecture for Virtual Memory Computer Systems”, Ph.D. dissertation, Project MAC Technical Report 117, January 1974
Networks belong to the people who own them. There is no reason that I, as a person who owns a network, should have to pay for additional bandwidth charges to say, backhaul traffic for AT&T or Google over my network if they are not clients of mine, or that I should route their packets over my net at all if I don’t want to. Nor should I have to give a non-subscriber equal priority on my network as say, medical imaging facilities for a customer.
“Net neutrality” is a shibboleth; I think we should avoid using the term and talk instead about “common carrier” status for the telcos and large ISP’s and voice carriers.
Links to previous stuff I have posted on my blog regarding “net neutrality”: https://scanlyze.wordpress.com/?s=net+neutrality
I am posting the above comment also to my blog, https://scanlyze.wordpress.com/
–HH.
Autonomous System (wikipedia)
Copyright © 2009 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 Henry Edward Hardy.
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