Bumppoman

On occasion, I am looked upon with disdain because I am a conservative. "You're too young to be so cynical," my mother constantly tells me. I suppose being a liberal is the cool thing to do now and has been for the past decade. Not since the sixties has America's youth influenced an election like the presidential election of 2008.

I have previously (and will continue until at least 2012) decried Obama as an under-experienced politician who won solely because of his charismatic speech, his race, and an electorate upset with (or feigning to be upset with) the previous administration. However, I will be the first to admit that the Republican Party is currently going nowhere. The prospect of Sarah Palin being nominated for president in the next election makes me shudder.

It is because of judges like this that conservatives are commonly misconceived as being old and uninformed. In the linked case, a leading conservative jurist, Richard Posner, has written that he is of the opinion that bloggers and more generally all websites should be forbidden from linking to other online content without the permission of the copyright holders.

It doesn't take Tim Berners-Lee to understand how this would destroy the modern internet. Imagine how you would find things without the assistance of Google. It is unlikely that Google would go out of business entirely but they could not be bothered to seek usage rights from the innumerable websites which they currently catalog. I would be unable to link to the article about which I'm writing currently. In fact, I would have to be careful how much I paraphrased it according to Mr. Posner.

Regardless of his intention (stated to protect newspapers from losing money for use of their content in blogs), Mr. Posner is misguided. At age 71, he lived approximately 55 years before the internet rose to prominence. He should not be blamed for his ignorance (would you feel comfortable discussing string theory physics?), but likewise, he should refrain from expressing opinions on that which he does not understand completely. It is because of people like this that conservatives are lambasted. Mr. Posner, and all like-minded persons, please reconsider your opinion so we have a chance in three years.