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A point I've argued many times but usually fail to convince.
"Most American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, which allows employers to hire, fire and promote for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. "
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As academic Corey Robin notes in his book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, employers have wantonly exercised this power, and the judiciary has repeatedly upheld this despotic state of affairs. The courts have backed employers' right to fire their workers for such non-work related reasons as “carrying on extramarital affairs; participating in group sex at home; having children out of wedlock; smoking on the job; wearing, in the case of off-duty male police officers, an earring; and carrying on relationships and friendships with coworkers or employees of a competitor.”
"Robin’s thesis is simple: ignore the Right-wing taxonomy. Conservatism–despite the seemingly incompatible respective ideologies of free-marketeers, slavers, neocons, neofascists, Buckleys, Federalists, Bloombergians, traditionalists, Tea Baggers, Randians, McCarthyists, libertarians, Birchers, Goldbugs, Jesus Freaks, J .Edgars, pro-lifers—has been, in reality, firmly united behind a single mission since the French Revolution: the creation of new regimes of privilege and domination in the face of democratic threats."
Drones are changing the dynamics of warfare in very scary ways. They make oppression much easier (and cost-effective).
"And here it seems to me that there’s a bizarre and surprising way in which Dennett comes very close to Zizek and Badiou in his discussions of freedom. It seems to me that the work of Zizek and Badiou is primarily motivational. Where, for years, we got Continental social and political theory after theory demonstrating all of the ways in which we are secretly determined by forces behind our backs such as the secret machinations of language (Lacan will go so far as to say we’re “cuckold” by language in Seminar 5, that language uses us rather than we using language), or power or “social forces” or economics or any of the other sundry forces that invade our lives, where theory has paralyzed us with self-doubt, leading us to wonder “are these truly emancipatory aims and practices or are we just reproducing ideology?”, Zizek and Badiou have everywhere sought to cultivate the belief that we are free, that we can act, that we can decide. For them– and they’re right –the belief that we can choose and act is every bit as important as actually acting and choosing. And if this is the case, then this is because without that prior belief we never will choose or act (Zizek is quite explicit on this point throughout all of his writings)."
"I believe this is what Zizek is getting at with respect to Assange. The radicality of Assange’s act is not what he revealed to us, but that he revealed it. Everyone knew that the government is corrupt, that it was covering things up, that it was making shady deals with corporations, etc. Yet this was never spoken… At least publicly in the media. What Assange did was re-mark this knowledge, inscribing it publicly. He attacked the key ideological prohibition upon which contemporary governmemts are based: speaking about their corruption. "
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The logic of the re-mark thus works through subtraction amd grafting, pulling something that is already inscribed yet repressed into presence. Consider some more familiar examples: an abusive alcoholic father and a gay son. In the first instance, everyone in the family knows the father is abusive and alcoholic, but it is never spoken or talked about. One day a distant aunt visits and, at dinner, after the father has behaved horribly, she casually remarks “you know he’s an abusive alcoholic, don’t you?” Even though everyone in the family knew this, they are nonetheless shocked and scandalized. The gay son is anfavorite popular example of this logic as well. Everyone in the family knows the son is gay, yet it is never spoken and the son himself doesn’t conceive himself this way either. One day a teacher, believing this was common family knowledge, says something about his homosexuality, shocking everyone.
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All the scenarios for shutting down the American internet involve some degree of collusion between the government and private companies who provide internet access to millions of people in the U.S. But could the government really make AT&T shut off your network and phone? Wouldn't that be illegal?
For now, as long as the president doesn't declare martial law, it would be. There are a number of laws that protect internet service providers from government control. But that could change very soon. Several bills have been working their way through Congress that would give President Obama "kill switch" control over the internet during a "national cyber-emergency."
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