My point is that the upper-class is fighting a different war and being divided from others by nationalism and protecting a war-mongering police state from other middle-class folks is retarded.

There's a bigger game that's being played: making the internet safe for commerce. The Jester is not playing that game, he's going to be playing the "middle-class squabbles" game that distracts people from the bigger game.

uh there's no conspiracy theory, what I say is in plain sight. Who benefits from the DMCA, PATRIOT ACT, TSA patdowns, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Surely not us who are in the middle class.

I like the ad hominem though, keep it coming.

You are, nonetheless, attributing to malice what could easily be attributed to incompetence.

After decades of this kind of stuff, you have to start attributing it to malice. I'm pretty young but even I know about the CALEA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L...) from 1994.

Seriously, at what point can we start attributing things to malice? Attributing such large things to incompetence is kinda scary; we're hiring or voting for morons. That doesn't frighten you?

You ever hear the one about how you can't possibly make someone understand something if his job depends on not understanding it?