[Community-Discuss] Correction to my previous email

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Paul Hjul has posted to this mailing list a number of well-reasoned
and eloquently articulated arguments that are more than sensible,
and with which I agree wholeheartedly.  The quotes below are not
among them.

In message <CAF4kYpvN-OqTh1-jbC5Kctg4vC6Wum62DtP8aYj+VJ9+V6Kbrw at mail.gmail.com>
Paul Hjul <hjul.paul at gmail.com> wrote:


>Hopefully the Board and management will quickly

>make it very clear that partnership in "building Africa's digital future"

>means collaboration of a global nature. It means devising consensus and

>action that is aimed at promoting a true digital future and distancing from

>the deleterious xenophobic and regionalist attitudes and discourse that

>flares up.


Paul, this is the second time that you have injected these dual epithets,
"xenophobic" and "regionalist" into the conversation here.  I personally
feel that these terms are both distracting and beneath the otherwise
admirable level of your discourse.  Further, I am not even persuaded
that the term "regionalist" even is an epithet, even though it is clear
that you intend us to interpret it that way.

What is the opposite of "regionalist"?  "Globalist"?  Assuming so, I would
be more than happy to debate you, ad infinitum, on the question of whether
"globalism", writ large, has or has not improved the lot of the lower
classes globally, and specifically in the third world, or whether its
primary economic effects have been to make mega-billionaries even richer
to the point where they can now commute to space via their own private
rocket ships.

Paul, if you're going to trumpet the beneficial effects of globalist
capitalism, then you had best be prepared also to defend its less
desirable effects as well.  Is it right or proper or fair that a
poor sharecropper in Kenya should go hungry or that his daughter
should lose an eye for want of a surgeon, all because speculators in
New York have decided amongst themselves that the global price of
bulk coffee should be cut in half this week?


>This brings me back to the fact that the best way to manage the risk which

>is plaguing the organization is to get as much dispute resolution handled

>outside of potentially organization shattering litigation.


So you are in favor of unilateral disarmament on the part of AFRINIC?
You want them to go cap in hand to all three of the parties that are
current suing them and beg for a negotiated settlement in each case?

Maybe we should make you the next U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.


>The membership

>simply do not know how many litigants there are knocking at Afrinic


Objection your honor!  Speculative.  Calls for a conclusion not based on
the facts in evidence.

I might as well speculate that there are just oodles and oodles of people
and companies lining up, as we speak, to sue -you-.  (How do we know
there aren't?  Can you prove that there aren't any such?)


>but it

>is quite clear that there are several cases that need to be handled

>appropriately and to date the organization has crafted an environment

>favouring a litigious approach.


I'll be blunt.  That is utter rubbish.  AFRINIC did the Right Thing by
reclaiming blocks of IP addresses which had been -provably- stolen from
its free pool.  Two of those thieving companies sued, apparently based
on nothing other than bogus disinformation that they themselves had
manufactured out of their... well... out of thin air.  Nothing AFRINIC
did in either of those two cases consitutes "crafting an environment
favouring a litigious approach".  That is an utterly false, disingenuous,
and slanderous claim with no basis in fact and I encourage yoy to retract
it.

More recently, AFRINIC, acting on information that none of us has yet even
seen, made a decision to reclaim a great deal of IPv4 space from a different
party.  In the wake of that decision, THE OTHER PARTY initiated legal action.

Once again, your narrative of AFRINIC "crafting an environment favouring
a litigious approach" falls flat in the cold light of day and the actual
facts.

I'm damn glad that you are not the CEO of my bank.  It seems that if you
were, and if the place got robbed, you would just throw up your hands and
say "Oh well! Boys will be boys!"

If the bank got robbed three times in a row, you would blame it on the
bank and urge the bank president to sit down in arbitration with the
various robbers.

We've seen this kind of thing where I live. Not recently but in the past.
Some people occasionally claim that women who have been molested have only
themselves to blame because they were wearing skirts that were too short.
Blame the victim.  We don't do this too much here in the U.S. anymore, as
the practice has been well and widely discredited.  The blame now properly
goes to the perpetrators, NOT to the victims.

Let's be clear about who, exactly, has "crafted an environment favouring
a litigious approach".  AFRINIC is currently facing three legal actions
against it.  Who initiated each and all of those?

I'll give you a hint.  It wasn't AFRINIC.

What AFRINIC has done may be right or may be wrong, but AFRINIC is not
the party that has initiated these legal actions, two of which, at
least, are based on some of the most provably outrageous frauds ever
conceived by the mind of man.

It seems however that you want AFRINIC to sit down amicably with those
thieves and negotiate with them so that they each get to keep half of
what they have provably stolen.  Doing so would only add disgrace to
dishonor, and I, for one, sincerly hope that AFRINIC does not do so.


Regards,
rfg