Comment by tptacek

> I didn't even notice a "punching down about mental health" thing. You wrote a long comment, I skimmed it.

That tracks, okay. It’s the weekend and I’m a nobody on the internet. Thank you for talk the time to continue to engage with me.

> Your allegation that Filippo and Matt Green are antisemitic is ludicrous.

That isn’t an allegation that I am making, you are misunderstanding and misrepresenting my statements. My comment even disclaimed that this probably isn’t intentional, merely that it is one read of that meme. My core point is this: posting that meme is unhelpful in a thread about Bernstein’s supposedly harmful behavior. Maybe you think it’s a funny joke, I don’t.

Either way - funny joke or not - it certainly isn’t a healthy discourse for “the community” to call someone names and to dismiss them as some kind of unhinged conspiracy theorist.

> I didn't say Bernstein had his ass handed to him.

Indeed, I did not claim to quote you there. I am characterizing your words into what I understand as your point. Let’s call this “the sore loser discourse” - it is repeated in this thread by others. It seems to be implied by my read when you say: “…he opted to participate in was corrupted by dint of not prioritizing his own designs.” I preemptively acknowledge that I may have misunderstood you.

What do you mean to convey by “dint of not” roughy? Don’t SPHINCS+ (Standardized in round three) and Classic McEliece (still in the running) count as prioritizing his designs? Also, what is wrong with participating in this standardization process? He seems to be unhappy with NIST before, and during the process, and with ample cause. By participating, it’s clear he has learned more and by winning parts of the competition, he’s not a sore loser.

If he wasn’t a part of this competition, people would probably dismiss his criticism as simply being outside. It’s harder to dismiss him if he is part of it, and even harder when his submissions win. It isn’t a clean sweep, but it’s lifetime achievement levels for some people to have a hand in just one such algorithm, selected in such a process. He has a hand in several remaining submissions as far as I understand the process and the submissions.

> I said that he wrote thousands and thousands of words about his reasons to mistrust NIST (not just here but elsewhere, and often),

So you note he has been saying these things for a long time. On that we agree.

> but still participated in the PQC contest,

You go on to note that he then participated in the process. He is documented in his attempts to use the process tools to raise specific issues and to try to have them settled by NIST as promised, with transparency. NIST has failed to bring that transparency.

Confusingly (to me anyway) your next statement continues with a contradiction:

> raising these concerns only at its conclusion

Which is it? Was he constantly raising these issues or only raising them at the end (of round three)?

Alternatively I could read this as “at its (the blog post) conclusion” which would be extremely confusing. I presume this isn’t what you meant but if so, okay, I am really missing the point.