What's interesting to me, in addition to the obvious major point, is how this process is taught: in private seminars. I have seen this in other areas involving

What's interesting to me, in addition to the obvious major point, is how this process is taught: in private seminars. I have seen this in other areas involving questionable practices, especially involving law enforcement. Training agencies put together professional seminars- just as any of us might take a programming seminar- and teach lessons that "improve" the officers' skills, but at the same time, in the privacy of the seminar, strain the boundaries of what's legal. That's the part that I find fascinating. In contrast to larger-scale fascist movements, in which anti-national behavior is spread from the top-down (I'm thinking of slave-era American and modern Arabic racism here or the classic example of Nazism), this type of nation- and rights-destroying behavior emanates from numerous, distributed "educational facilities." It's fascinating to me because there's no single identifiable point to put the finger of blame on, because the erosion happens so gradually, the damages to the common good take place in such tiny increments and because it's not motivated by a common, uniting goal (although law enforcement is the simulacrum), but by numerous distributed organizations motivated by making cash via the trainings and who motivate the participants the same way. It's as if multi-level marketing were getting applied to professional gang-banger training. And through the logic of "training seminar," why exactly not produce week-long seminars in gang-banging? It's not illegal to teach people how to break the law, there is a need in the form of customers who want to know how to do it and there is money to be made in educating others in the arts of carjacking, robbery and drug sales using slides, role-playing and case studies. It is up to the customer whether or not to make use of the information... One final point is that there is an implied escalation of consent in the "professional" veneer of the "training seminar." This happens due to our assumptions that 1. spending money on a seminar results in at least some useful information 2. information learned in a private seminar is not expected to be unethical or useless. This leads to training seminars on law enforcement (and several other topics) operating as an "offshore zone" where unacceptable behavior gets legitimized: The police chief could never train their officers to perform manipulative, borderline illegal practices, but he can easily sign off on a training where these practices occur and become part of their department[s repertoire. The kinds of conversations and education that could never take place in a public-supported institution such as a police station can easily happen outside the publicly-supported sphere, in the conference room of a hotel, led by a small, scarcely memorable, unaccountable training organization.