#nation-state

[cyber-sec]

Supply Chain Attacks, FortiBleed, and SocGholish Takedown Define a Turbulent Cyber Week

North Korean and Russian-linked operations dominated the week as Operation Endgame dismantled SocGholish infrastructure, FortiBleed exposed tens of thousands of Fortinet credentials, and supply chain attacks hit npm, JetBrains, and WordPress ecosystems amid active exploitation of critical flaws in Oracle PeopleSoft and Cisco SD-WAN.

Source: CyberSecBrief – Weekly Briefing

[fountainpenchess]

What makes disability a problematic concept for Jasbir Puar is not only its relation with capitalism but with nations’ attempts to distinguish themselves from others and valorize their past. Which impairments are deemed worthy of entitlements depends on the state’s pursuit of political legitimacy. To determine who is recognized as disabled is to ask who is entitled to resources. As such, disabled bodies can be capitalized because disability entitlement guarantees economic and social inclusion. In other words, disability determination demonstrates both how a state simultaneously legitimizes some bodies and delegitimizes others, and what the consequence is of making such a distinction. Throughout the twentieth century, the distinction between the deserving and undeserving guided U.S. disability policy. The government did not cover those in need, but those who “deserved,” mainly maimed veterans and maimed workers (Scotch 2001; Adams, Reiss and Berlin, 2016). Other people with disabilities fell into the category of the undeserving, who were thought to incur impairments through self-destructive habits such as alcoholism.

— the concept of debility written by chiayulien

(I think the author should also consider that even people who are universally recognized as disabled are often neglected access to resources according to different circumstances. There's no actual guarantee of economic and social inclusion most of the time, it's usually is only present in the politician's discourse but not in material reality.)

[zwischenstadt]

Just as the existence of continents is determined by political societies, within political societies racial forms of being are determined by the government.  One of the major sites where the government- acting in the name of the state as a membership organization- has intervened to define the meaning of race as well as specific racial identities has been marriage law.  Current governmental racial classifications all follow from the legal history of racial classifications.  The state does not treat racial identity as amenable to synchronic reassessments.  Rather, one's race is the race of one's ancestors, which is always what the state announces was the race of one's ancestors

Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State

This touches on something described in Dialectic of Enlightenment, but not illustrated necessarily so well: In order to perform its instrumental reason, the modern state has to invent mythological reasons for why it does what it does, which it then must necessarily start to believe.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to the nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervour that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation’s power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.

...

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”  

-  Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted in David Bromwich, “Self-Deceptions of Empire.” London Review of Books, Vol. 30 No. 20 · 23 October 2008

[feelingpolitical]

Modern narratives of time focus on the nation-state and its predecessors, such as colonies, cities, and empires. This narrative of the nation-state as anchored in deep time carefully constructed by scholars legitimizes that particular political entity. It has been important to feminists that the deep time of the nation-state is composed almost exclusively of the deeds of men. Historical existence over long stretches of time has thus produced believable and gendered societies, constructing men as its actors and women as its invisible supporting cast, or simply as invisible. The gendering of historical time provides temporal depth to this very young political institution, making it look inevitable and part of a liberal history of progressive improvement. ... In the masculine time out of which history is constructed, the movement is toward political modernity. The movement from tradition to political modernity can lead to the comparison of repetitive household time with the forward thrust of national and industrial time

Bonnie G. Smith, “Temporality,” in Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Disch and Hawkesworth, p. 984-85

[cyber-sec]

Fake IT Worker Network Fuels DPRK Cyber Operations

A DPRK-linked fake IT worker network uses VPN services, residential IPs, and freelance platforms to conduct covert employment operations and bypass sanctions controls. Infrastructure tied to domains resolving to multiple IPs shows connections to Gmail, ChatGPT, and Workana during remote work impersonation activity. Traffic patterns indicate distributed laptop farms supporting persistent infiltration and financial evasion efforts.

Source: Team Cymru

Read more: CyberSecBrief

[cyber-sec]

Iran–Israel Conflict Spurs Cyber and Economic Risks in Southeast Asia

Escalating hostilities between Iran and Israel place Southeast Asian networks, financial systems, and energy infrastructure at increased risk from pre-positioned state-sponsored attacks.

Source: CloudSEK

Read more: CyberSecBrief