Every once in a while a minor kerfuffle erupts in the blogging community. The kerfuffle du jour happened over the weekend between Ed Whelan at National Review and publius at Obsidian Wings. Over the past month or two, they have traded some barbs over legal matters, primarily related to Harold Koh and Sonia Sotomayor. They were trading some heat, but nothing especially over-the-top, I think. But Whelan had had enough, so he outed publius’ identity as John Belvins in a post at National Review. He begins his post by writing:
“One bane of the Internet is the anonymous blogger who abuses his anonymity to engage in irresponsible attacks.”
First off, ignoring anything else you might think (like whether the attacks were irresponsible or not), Whelan is wrong to call him anonymous. The correct term is pseudonymous. That is, Blevins used a pseudonym on his site, and was the only person to post using that name on that site. Anonymity implies much less accountability than that. If you think publius is an idiot, you could always say so, and criticize his writings, and be attacking a specific person, just one whose real name happened to be undisclosed.
Blevins gives his take here, and his reasons for using a pseudonym seem pretty reasonable to me. He is a newly hired – and untenured – professor at a law school, and wanted to keep his identity secret, especially since he teaches law and blogs on political matters, including the interface of politics and law. I think Whelan comes off remarkably immature, as he wrote in an email to publius:
“Now who’s the hitman, you coward and idiot.”
The conservative Ed Morrisey, of Hot Air no less, offers the following, with which I agree except for the first four words:
“Ed’s a great blogger, but I think he let Publius get too far under his skin, and he reacted poorly in outing someone and risking their professional career. Outing Publius didn’t do anything to advance Ed’s argument, but made him look vindictive and petty instead. Bloggers should worry less about the anonymity of bloggers (which isn’t a “bane” at all) and respond to the arguments instead — or ignore them.”
I think that about sums it up: thin-skinned, petty, vindictive.
Part of the reason this interests me (and Stendhal), of course, is that we ourselves are using pseudonyms on this very site. Stendhal’s reasons might be slightly different from mine, but I’m pretty sure we both have a rather simple desire to keep our work lives and blogging lives separate. It’s not because we want to lob cheap attacks in an unaccountable manner, nor is it because we say anything that is particularly controversial.
As an additional note, a number of bloggers have started off with a pseduonym only later to reveal their identities. This is common for a blogger who becomes more widely read. Nate Silver, the math genius behind www.fivethirtyeight.com, started off posting under the name poblano at Daily Kos, and then at his site, only later revlealing his name in this entertaining post here. If Stendhal and I ever make it to the Big Leagues, perhaps then we will quit our day jobs and reveal our names. Until that day comes, it seems reasonable to me to preserve our status.
As a teacher, I think the pseudonym is almost always necessary to protect students’ privacy. Although I do not discuss students on the blog often, my identity becoming known would put their privacy in jeopardy as well.
And even though many people reading this do know my “true identity,” the pseudonym does offer me some level of separation between my job (in which I attempt to remain steadfastly non-partisan and apolitical) and my blogging life (in which I do not).
[...] 9, 2009 by Linus Yesterday I wrote about Ed Whelan outing the identity of a blogger known as publius who posts on Obsidian Wings. In a [...]