>--- BrownBingb at aol.com wrote:
>
> > CB: Zizek seems to suggest a conspiracy theory here.
> > Anyway, I think it's
> > likely true to the extent that there have been
> > members of the national
>
>
>CB is right. It is posed as a conspiracy theory by
>Zizek. Zizek may be right but I can't quite accept
>it.
i haven't had a chance to completely read zizek. going out for some sun soon, so i'll read. i gotta say, though, that they _have_ to know what they are doing.
i'm in the information security business. my clients are big ass banks. one of the changes that resulted from 9.11 is that infosec and physical security depts are now working together--at least in this fotune 100s.
phew. while info security--and IT more generally--is really about control (as no Onan always reminds me), the culture of an infosec dept at least pretends that it isn't about it in an overt way.
walk out of that culture and start working with the phsycial security folks--which is what i've been doing lately--weeeeehooooo! Totally different and very obvious policing/cop mindset. Yeowsa!
anyway, I told Michael Perelman offlist that one of the things these physical security folks will say up front is this: Cops, security cameras, store detectives, catwalks, etc., these aren't to keep the shoplifters from getting out the door with the stuff. In the grand scheme of things, SLing is a small problem, nothing compared to employee theft. :)
The pretense--they admit this-- with this focus on outsider threats is to use it as a way to initiate security controls that appear to be to ward off outside threats when, in fact, the whole (at least A major) point is to mitigate insider security threats--and other related things that impact a company's bottom line which, in the infosec biz (and, it turns out, in the phys sec biz), are mainly stupid mistakes.
more later after i read zizek. at any rate, i don't see how this simple lesson, well-understood by the folks who perform private security for corporations, is not also well-understood by the admin.
also, Weber talked about this a good deal. Geo politics is about a nation-state acting on the world stage to impress the other nation-states--posturing. It is about threatening, cajoling, fucking with, dissing, etc. And, at the same time, those actions performed for the world stage are also performed for the homeland. yadda.
given the centrality of weberian political theory to political science, public administration/public policy studies/international studies... i doubt that this escapes them either.
whether they are doing it on purpose..... well, you see, -they- don't see it as depriving their citizens of freedom at all, do they? just as they don't see themselves of harming iraqi citizens. it's about liberating them. and what they may hope for the end results of this particular war for the homefront is all in the name of making the homeland safe for their version of democracy. there's no contradiction for the fuckers.
Kelley
spitting nails