More thoughts on the Strike

Jonah Goldberg had a suggestion that he posted yesterday, the day before The Strike:

Very soon Wikipedia will go dark for a day to protest something called SOPA. During this event — future historians will call it a “knowledge eclipse” — no one under the age of thirty will know how to confirm or disprove a statement of fact.

It’ll be awesome.

Tomorrow you should go up to a 20-something and tell them things like “the fern is the world’s most popular carnivorous plant” and “Henry VIII invented the internal combustion engine, but kept it secret to protect the environment” and they will have no choice but to believe you as they will have no idea how to use, never mind find, a “reference book.”

Cats have gills, Larry Storch was the 37th president, the 48-53rd floors of the Empire State Building contain the real White House, the pre-internet Wikipedia took up 700,000 floppy disks, Al Gore was once the Vice President of the United States: True? False? It doesn’t matter. These are just a few things you can tell these kids today and they’ll have to believe you. What choice will they have?

Why didn't I think of that?

The Strike

Much is being made today of the "strike" by many websites, including Wikipedia, to go "dark" in protest over two bills pending in Congress.  Richard Fernandez writes at PJ Media that this may just be another useless gesture:

But one or two day ‘strikes’ aren’t going to do much as a long as the forces which are creating a gargantuan and intrusive state are at loose.  The administration may simply wait the ‘Internet strike’ out and try again until they get what they want.  An activist government wielding ever-growing tools of central planning has its own dynamic. The rise of favored groups is an essential feature of a highly regulated economy.

The process is often simple. Find a bogeyman — corporations will do — and by “fighting it” get the power to pick winners and losers whether in health care, finance, energy and the Internet.  And soon all problems will be ‘fixed’.

Mister Bear doesn't have enough readers for a strike here to be more than useless.  So I stayed "light" today.  Read Fernandez's complete article for more thoughts on the inevitable governmental urge to control the Internet.