antikoan

 |::| Sunday, May 05, 2002

 |::| Verisign -- Because You Didn't Need That Good Night's Sleep, Anyway...  11:53:53 AM 

Dean Allen @ Textism has asked help to set us up the Google bomb on Verisign, in response to some of their latest acts of gross incompetence with regard to managing domains. (Other citations on Daypop / Verisign Googled -- not much action so far, I fear, though I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find the results a little skewed....)

It's a quintessentially libertarian tactic, and for Leslie's sake (and mine) I hope it works, but the real fix has to be Verisign fixing their broken practices -- or simply being driven out of business and their registrations turned over to more responsible vendors. Instead, I fear this will expose the weakness of a system driven by popular action. Verisign may be made up of arrogant putzes, but they've got tremendous resources and a history of dirty-dealings, so I won't be at all surprised to see them come out of it smelling like a rose. Governing from below is a great idea; unfortunately, the fact that there is an "above" will probably always subvert that ideal.

This story hits me on so many levels. On the one hand, as a domain registrant, I live in (mild, for me) fear that someone will hijack my domain and start getting all my email. On another hand, there's just the rich irony of it all: anyone who's been watching the playoffs (hockey or basketball) has seen the continuous loop Verisign commercial that's supposed to make you feel secure by flashing their brand on the screen.

Yeah, right. Anybody in the business has known for years that Network Solutions has always been not merely incompetent, but also arrogant. I'm just now learning, though (not having had to buy certificates before) that Verisign was always just about as bad. Which, I suppose, made it a marriage made in heaven. So I get a certain ironic paranoia from those ads, especially after reading about Leslie Harpold's troubles, knowing that, should I make a clever enough (and just clever enough would be clever enough, it seems) enemy, I can lose my domain thanks to their incompetence.

What does this do for Verisign's relations with their customers? Well, oddly enough, I think most CIOs (who are mostly finance guys used to letting the size of their assets get them ahead) won't bat an eyelash. Their Verisign reps will nudge-nudge, wink-wink and hint strongly that it's exactly what an artsy little anarchist deserves. (Hey, I'm not describing, just predicting.)

On the other hand, non-finance CIOs, and CTOs, and IT Directors (since IT's climb to C-level seems to have slowed with The Market) will smile and nod, all the while wondering how quickly they can migrate away from all their Verisign dependencies.

Or so I can hope. Much as I don't want to see more people lose their jobs, it would do my heart good to see Verisign fail.

 |::| Meet the New Maccabbees (Sunday morning meditations)  10:11:49 AM 

Via Daypop, some observations on judgement of moral worth and America's place in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What amazes me (thought it shouldn't) is that our media so readily forget what passed before -- that so few Americans have any idea that so much land has been confiscated over such a long period of time. ("Before There Was Terrorism" [Daypop Top 40 / Other Citations via Daypop]

Christison begins with the matter of moral clarity: We find our own in the fact that we are fundamentally incapable of placing anyone (except us) who might oppose the state of Israel on the same moral footing.

This difference in perceptions of the essential morality-the "worthiness"-of those on each side is and has always been fundamental to how policy is made in this country. Marc Ellis, a Jewish-American political scholar and professor at Baylor University, recently put it this way: speaking of progressives in Israel and in the American Jewish community who always used to be open to the Palestinian perspective but distanced themselves from the Palestinians after the peace process collapsed, he says that the underlying assumption of virtually all of these progressives, when push comes to shove, is that Palestinians are not quite equal to Israelis. "Any political empowerment of Palestinians must be limited and monitored by Israel," he said-because, ultimately, "Palestinian history and destiny are secondary to Jewish history and destiny."

And, later:

But we don't care at all about guaranteeing Palestinian existence, and even more significantly, we don't care, or even seem to notice, that Ariel Sharon is actively attempting to destroy the Palestinian nation.... If you doubt that, listen to what Sharon himself has written in his autobiography. Although he was raised, he said, to believe that Arabs and Jews could live side by side, his parents believed and taught him that "without question" only Jews had rights over the land. "When the land belongs to you physicallythat is when you have power, not just physical power but spiritual power." Everything Sharon has ever done in his career, and in his year as prime minister, has clearly been directed at guaranteeing this continued Israeli physical and spiritual control of all the land of Palestine.

In other words, it is not possible for a Sharon government to ever negotiate in good faith.

But all of this is really entirely consistent with our Puritan descent. "Secular humanists" of all stripe resist the notion that our nation was founded on religious principles, but in important ways, it was. Oh, to be sure, our state was founded by men who respected religious freedom immensely; but no nation is identical with its state, totalitarian pipe-dreams notwithstanding. The core ethos of nation, in fact, was born out of the worldview of a few groups of stern, censorious descendents of Calvin, who saw no inconsistency in judging the world by their own moral standards, and then failing to meet those standards in dealing with their own moral inferiors.

What's remarkable is not that the Puritans and the Pilgrims were any different from most other cultures of the world in that regard; it's that they elevated their pursuit fo double-standards to an explicit virtue and then managed to instill it deep within the bone and sinew of what would one day become the most powerful nation the earth has ever known.

Indeed, though, one could argue (and I'm sure I wouldn't be the first to do so) that this rabid intolerance came from the same place as the relatively good parts of Judaism: It's famous tolerance for the mis-deeds of others; its ultimate Hillelist reliance on judgement over dogma. That was born of necessity, into the same people who spawned the Zealots and the Maccabbees, and who committed mass-suicide at Masada.

I've heard a lot of nonsense lately, from people I once might have expected to know better, about the unique affinity of Islam for terror; such accusations conveniently forget that Jesus brought not peace but a sword, that Maccabbees and Zealots once slaughtered those of their own who did not support them, and that, more recently, the Irgun proudly slaughtered non-combatants in their own, morally-sanctioned cause.

Similarly, there's a lot of nonsense comparing Sharon to Hitler, Israelis to Nazis. The better analogy is far less evil, and so far less simple: The Israelis are in fact much more like the Romans, who believed that their destiny was given to them by their ancestors and their sweeping success across their known world was merely proof of that destiny. Their tools were as varied as those of the modern Israelis, preferring co-optation and subversion to violence, but not ashamed to burn and kill as the need arose. The Romans, like the Israelis, needed no synthetic dogma to support their sense of superiority: They felt it in their bones, they were bred, born and raised to it.

And just as the Romans drove the Judeans -- the prior-day Palestinians -- to progressively more violent and desperate approaches, so do the Israelis goad the modern Palestinians. This time, though, the Romans have atomic weapons.

Another (and obvious) analogy springs to mind: South Africa, where eventually some sort of equality seems to have been possible. But there is a crucual difference between the two cases: In South Africa, at least, Pik Botha and Nelson Mandela both prayed the same prayers to the same god, and -- at least, in name -- shared the same ethical ideals. Such, I fear, it will never be possible to say of the Israelis and Palestinians.