Just another reminder that even on blogs like this one that currently allow commenting without registration, nothing is really anonymous. Nor should it be.
Yesterday I asked Abdur-Rahman M to send me the IP address of the person who was dishonestly posting antisemitic comments at his site using my name, and he emailed it to me today, for which I’m grateful.
Lo and behold, the same person has two accounts at LGF, one of them already blocked, and the other registered and confirmed but so far unused; presumably holding it in reserve for some kind of future sneak attack. The second account is now blocked as well, of course.
lgf: The Immigrant Muslim Syndicate (CAIR, MAS, Etc.)
Turns out that the commenter was an anti-Semite who posted really hateful, death-advocating anti-Palestinian comments at LGF in an attempt to make Charles/LGF look bad. You can register for a site under a fake name, but there are ways to track you and connect the dots available even to the lowly site owner, much less to the gubmint. Nobody’s really anonymous when you get right down to it. And that’s a good thing, because our behavior when we think we’re anonymous is too often deplorable.
Cassandra at Villainous Company notes,
But the faceless nature of the Internet encourages us to do things we would never dream of doing in real life.
And then we are surprised when some people get offended by acts or statements which would be considered unequivocally offensive, had they been encountered in real life; by things I’m fairly certain none of these commenters would dream of saying if they were face to face with live human beings in a real conversation. Except that blogging IS a conversation.
With real, live human beings. And none of the age-old social conventions, taboos, emotions, differences between the genders changed just because you’re on the Internet instead of standing on the street corner.
That’s why this advice from my comment policy is something I wish people would live by:
If you’re not comfortable with your boss or your grandmother reading it out loud in public, maybe you’d better reconsider what you’re writing.
Added: That said, we certainly don’t need idiot laws like this:
The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.
Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.
If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.
An attempt, as Allahpundit suggests, to join O’Reilly in the Pinhead Club? Or just another clueless n00b? It’s one thing to desire more civility and quite another to mandate it.
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