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You are here: Home / A quick note on the publius outing

A quick note on the publius outing

by DougJ|  June 8, 20091:12 am| 82 Comments

This post is in: Assholes

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Ed Whelan, the man who revealed the identity of publius, is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as many have pointed out. It should be noted that Jeff Rosen’s wife works at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Reader Interactions

82Comments

  1. 1.

    Pooh

    June 8, 2009 at 1:14 am

    Interesting…nice catch.

  2. 2.

    DeadlyShoe

    June 8, 2009 at 1:19 am

    Is anyone shocked? I mean I banged my head on the desk when I first read this, but I wouldn’t say I’m shocked.

  3. 3.

    ninerdave

    June 8, 2009 at 1:32 am

    Ed Whelan’s a piece of shit. That’s all. Ethics: lawlz, also.

  4. 4.

    Brick Oven Bill

    June 8, 2009 at 1:47 am

    I’ll make the argument that employees of educational institutions that receive taxpayer money are not entitled to privacy. They may express their opinions, but their opinions should be subject to review and approval by the taxpayer.

    After all, this is the people’s money. And I have been permanently banned from that particular forum for keying in the two words ‘Monkey Butler’.

  5. 5.

    srv

    June 8, 2009 at 1:50 am

    The Nazis exposed various enemies.

    If the Nazis learned their ethics from Hitler, and Whelan learned his ethics clerking for Scalia, what does that make Scalia?

  6. 6.

    JR

    June 8, 2009 at 1:53 am

    In related news, Rudy Giuliani will be running a new think-tank dedicated to fighting municipal corruption, Mike Huckabee will be chairing the new Panel on Squirrel Protection and Preservation, Michael Brown will be running the Center for Disaster Preparedness and Response, and Newt Gingrich will head the Foundation for Defending Marriage.

  7. 7.

    Anne Laurie

    June 8, 2009 at 1:59 am

    I think it was Calvin Trillin who suggested that any politician, pundit, or think-tank employee speaking in public should be required to wear patches prominently identifying the individuals, corporations and/or foundations giving them money over the previous five-year period. Trillin thought it improve the cheerfulness, as well as the probity, of the Senate well to have speakers emblazoned with corporate logos like NASCAR drivers. Appending such a sponsors’ list to the end of every op-ed would also brighten the pages of the WSJ and the NYT (aka ‘The Soiled but No Longer Completely Grey Lady).

  8. 8.

    Gold Star for Robot Boy

    June 8, 2009 at 2:00 am

    @Brick Oven Bill: publius’ employer is private, dumbass.

  9. 9.

    Martin

    June 8, 2009 at 2:02 am

    I’ll make the argument that employees of educational institutions that receive taxpayer money are not entitled to privacy. They may express their opinions, but their opinions should be subject to review and approval by the taxpayer.

    Even when they aren’t speaking on behalf of the institution? I’m an employee of a public educational institution. On what grounds do taxpayers need to know that I think you’re an idiot? Do they need to review and approve this post? Can I tell my daughter than I love her without the review and approval of the taxpayer?

    Bill is worried about the government monitoring his thermostat, but he has no problem stripping my 1st amendment rights well beyond North Korea levels.

  10. 10.

    Zam

    June 8, 2009 at 2:07 am

    @Gold Star for Robot Boy: haha nice catch

  11. 11.

    Martin

    June 8, 2009 at 2:08 am

    @Brick Oven Bill: publius’ employer is private, dumbass.

    Virtually every higher education institution receives taxpayer money. They may not receive student fee subsidies, but they certainly participate in student grants, research grants, and a zillion other taxpayer revenue streams.

    USC is California’s largest recipient of Cal Grants. MIT is probably one of the largest beneficiaries of NSF grants.

  12. 12.

    burnspbesq

    June 8, 2009 at 2:08 am

    @Martin:

    Bill is worried about the government monitoring his thermostat, but he has no problem stripping my 1st amendment rights well beyond North Korea levels.

    And this surprises you? Why?

    Personally, I think Bill is Bart DePalma, Trollius Extraordinarius, commenting here under a false name for reasons only he knows.

  13. 13.

    Beauzeaux

    June 8, 2009 at 2:09 am

    I see Whelan was formerly Scalia’s toady. That explains a lot.

  14. 14.

    TenguPhule

    June 8, 2009 at 2:09 am

    I’ll make the argument that employees of educational institutions that receive taxpayer money are not entitled to privacy.

    Okay then, I want Assrocket and Doughy Pantsloads private addresses posted publically. And I expect BOB to be in full support of this.

  15. 15.

    burnspbesq

    June 8, 2009 at 2:13 am

    Burkean bells, indeed.

    Somewhere, Edmund Burke’s immortal soul is looking at the assholes who are dragging his name through the mud, and reconsidering his previous belief that he was in Heaven.

  16. 16.

    Brick Oven Bill

    June 8, 2009 at 2:16 am

    I just made the Obama argument Martin, and when the money runs out and the regime changes, this argument will be made against you, sure as I’m sitting here.

    You probably are expecting some sort of pension.

  17. 17.

    Martin

    June 8, 2009 at 2:28 am

    I just made the Obama argument Martin, and when the money runs out and the regime changes, this argument will be made against you, sure as I’m sitting here.

    I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

  18. 18.

    BDeevDad

    June 8, 2009 at 2:32 am

    Has anyone predicted when all of Whelan’s private info will be posted to the web. The internet has a way of biting back. Not that I endorse this.

  19. 19.

    burnspbesq

    June 8, 2009 at 2:46 am

    @BDeevDad:

    Hopefully never. When you wrestle with a pig, two things invariably happen: (1) you end up covered with mud and (2) the pig likes it.

  20. 20.

    Brick Oven Bill

    June 8, 2009 at 2:46 am

    There is a saying that if you take the King’s gold, you fight the King’s wars. The influence of the King was designed to be blunted by the Bill of Rights, which assigned power to the individual, and removed it from the King.

    Giving back that authority is a really bad idea, in my opinion. Especially if you are relying on a government pension from a benevolent King, whose power is transient. For the young people, I’d stick with professions involving things that are grown, mined, or built.

    I concur with Whelan, who is a prick, that Publius is a coward. Publius assumes the name of the Federalist authors, and then sits there silent as a man is silenced for keying ‘Monkey Butler’. Publius is scared of Hilzoy.

  21. 21.

    Zuzu's Petals

    June 8, 2009 at 2:50 am

    Edit: Never mind.

  22. 22.

    Patrick

    June 8, 2009 at 2:51 am

    @BDeevDad:

    I give it about 30 more minutes

  23. 23.

    Blue Raven

    June 8, 2009 at 2:57 am

    @Brick Oven Bill:

    I concur with Whelan, who is a prick, that Publius is a coward.

    OK, then, Bill, time to prove you aren’t a coward. And I’ll do the same.

    My RL name is Brenda Daverin.

    What’s yours?

  24. 24.

    Martin

    June 8, 2009 at 2:59 am

    Especially if you are relying on a government pension from a benevolent King

    No, I’m relying on an employment contract, like every other contract in this nation – like the contract you have with your bank and your investment funds, like the contract printed on your money that allows you to exchange it for goods and services.

    And my benevolent king is a Republican, and has no direct influence on my pension because my employer was smart enough to break out of the state general fund and operate as an independent contractor. What does any of this have to do with the privacy of a blogger not speaking on behalf of their employer?

    And can we violate the privacy of every employee of every company that takes taxpayer money? That’d be virtually every bank, every defense contractor, pretty much every construction contractor, agriculture company – pretty much anything grown, mined, or built. Hell, that’s probably the employers of at least half the people working in the country, if we work it all out.

  25. 25.

    Brick Oven Bill

    June 8, 2009 at 3:12 am

    Publius is a coward for not standing up to Hilzoy on matters of principle. It makes it worse that he is in the business of law and takes the name that he does. The Internet being what it is, I’m out there, but you’ll have to earn it Brenda.

    That would be the same type of contract that the State of Indiana pension fund, and a whole bunch of others, had with their Chrysler and GM bonds, if I am not mistaken Martin. This is one reason that I am a personal fan of the 5th Amendment in particular, and the Bill of Rights in general.

    We perhaps find ourselves in agreement?

  26. 26.

    bago

    June 8, 2009 at 3:22 am

    Obviously since any recipients of public money are morally obliged to disgorge their identities, let’s publish the full name and address of anyone involved in the Enhanced Interrogation Program. Hell, let’s publish their social security numbers, as there’s no way to be sure of who they are unless they reveal their government issued identity.

    As an Engineer working for government agencies, I am sure that BOB will be revealing his full contact information because he is if nothing a very intellectually stalwart man.

    Funny comment from the MeFi thread:

    Mr. Whelan brings a quiet dignity to this matter the likes of which I have not seen since the popular girls’ lunch table in seventh grade.
    posted by Countess Elena at 8:49 AM on June 7 [37 favorites]

  27. 27.

    Spiny Norman

    June 8, 2009 at 3:24 am

    Shorter BoB: i m so pwnt.

  28. 28.

    Martin

    June 8, 2009 at 3:27 am

    The Internet being what it is, I’m out there, but you’ll have to earn it Brenda.

    Then you are a coward if that’s your reasoning.

    That would be the same type of contract that the State of Indiana pension fund, and a whole bunch of others, had with their Chrysler and GM bonds, if I am not mistaken Martin.

    We perhaps find ourselves in agreement?

    No, because corporate bonds are not guaranteed and default is the risk you take. Now, I’d happily agree that holding a substantial number of GM or Chrysler bonds in the pension fund is a stupid idea, but holding some and having them fail isn’t a problem. If it’s that much of a problem for the Indiana pension fund, then their fund manager made a stupid decision to not be better diversified. That’s the problem of the board that oversees that pension fund, not Obama’s.

    I suspect that Indiana got into this problem because they saw the automakers as part of their state economy and decided to support them. That, of course, is totally the wrong approach. If they default, then no only do you have all of those lost jobs which impact the state, but you’ve compounded the damage by screwing the pension fund as well. It’s why you should never invest your 401K in the company that employs you – better to lose your job and keep your retirement, than to lose both.

  29. 29.

    Jrod

    June 8, 2009 at 3:27 am

    We’re still waiting to learn your real name, BOB. How can we be certain that you’ve never taken a single penny of taxpayer money unless you reveal your identity?

    By your own standards, that’s only fair. Cough it up, or you’re a hypocrite. It’s that simple.

  30. 30.

    MarkusB

    June 8, 2009 at 3:34 am

    Never mind.

  31. 31.

    Chaoticgnome

    June 8, 2009 at 3:46 am

    Whelan seems to have bypassed Godwin’s Law and found some new bonus stage.

    If you ‘out’ your opponent you have not only admitted to losing the argument but revealed yourself as unfit to argue with.

    If this happens again we’ll have to refer to it as Whelan’s Law.

  32. 32.

    Xenos

    June 8, 2009 at 4:10 am

    What is the appropriate response to Whelan?

    I would propose an old fashioned shunning. Nobody links to him, or to any entity that employs him, except through a source like media matters. Whelan is such a minor figure that it won’t make much of a difference, but the precedent should be set. And it should be named after him, of course.

    “Woah – NRO got Whelaned again!”

  33. 33.

    kid bitzer

    June 8, 2009 at 5:14 am

    this does resolve one mystery, though.

    now that i see what a deep loathing ed has for anonymous slander, i can understand why he went ballistic on that rosen piece smearing sotomayor.

    i mean, all those articles he wrote, calling rosen a “cheap, cowardly hit-man” for publishing that smear.

    and then, when he outed each of rosen’s anonymous sources–well, at the time i have to say i thought it was a bit over the top. i mean, if a former clerk wants to bad-mouth a judge on the down-low, who is ed whelan, i asked myself, to publicly expose that person, possibly ruining their career in law?

    but that was before I understood ed’s deep and principled objections to influencing public discourse without using your real name.

    i mean, publius got off light, compared to what whelan did to rosen’s anonymous sources–tracking them down, printing their names, demanding that they either retract their slanders against sotomayor or provide sworn testimony supporting their claims.

    yeah, ed got all kinds of harsh on those anonymous, cowardly hit-men. but then, that’s just the kind of principled guy he is.

  34. 34.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    June 8, 2009 at 5:19 am

    @Chaoticgnome:

    If you ‘out’ your opponent you have not only admitted to losing the argument but revealed yourself as unfit to argue with. If this happens again we’ll have to refer to it as Whelan’s Law.

    Perfect.

    As an argument in the Blogosphere grows longer, the probability that the one who’s losing it on the merits will resort to acts of personal vindictiveness approaches one.

  35. 35.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    June 8, 2009 at 5:31 am

    @kid bitzer:

    Not to mention that Publius wasn’t cited as evidence against Whelan, or having any personal experience with Whelan, but was only voicing an opinion of what he’d read online.

    In other words the reason that Rosen’s hit piece abused anonymity was that as it quoted, as hard evidence about somoene’s professional reputation, people who for all we know he could have simply invented.

    Even if Whelan had condemned Rosen (and he didn’t, which I realize is your point) the same logic couldn’t be applied to Publius. Unless Whelan’s charge were that he believes that Publius didn’t exist, pseudonymically or otherwise.

  36. 36.

    SGEW

    June 8, 2009 at 6:34 am

    From Ed Whelan’s “response”:

    “. . . I don’t see why anyone else has any obligation to respect the blogger’s self-serving decision.”

    Apparently, the Ethics and Public Policy Center eschews the deontological branch of ethical theory.

  37. 37.

    Xenos

    June 8, 2009 at 7:05 am

    @SGEW: None of those fancy European abstract ethics for Whelan — just pure American applied ethics for him.

    (edit) Wow. I was joking there, and had an impulse to check out wikipedia, and yes, there is a branch of formal casuistry call ‘applied ethics’ that derives principles from desired factual outcomes. Snark is beaten by real-life cretinism every time.

  38. 38.

    SGEW

    June 8, 2009 at 7:12 am

    The Ethics and Public Policy Center was established in 1976 to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.

    Ah. There’s a clue here, methinks.

  39. 39.

    Terypat

    June 8, 2009 at 7:34 am

    I just emailed [email protected]

    Good Morning Ed You Are an Idiot

    I feel good lol

  40. 40.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    June 8, 2009 at 7:40 am

    @SGEW:

    established in 1976 to clarify and reinforce weaken the bond separation between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition church and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues state.

  41. 41.

    bago

    June 8, 2009 at 7:47 am

    @kid bitzer: That’s some prime grade-a beef right there.

  42. 42.

    arguingwithsignposts

    June 8, 2009 at 7:52 am

    @SGEW:

    to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.

    Can we get some public policy think-tanks in Washington to have names that, you know, actually mean what they represent. the EPPI is about as bland a name as you can think up. How about the Christianist Policy Institute?

  43. 43.

    Comrade Baron Elmo

    June 8, 2009 at 8:09 am

    If this happens again we’ll have to refer to it as Whelan’s Law.

    SERIOUS win.

    Fellow minions, we really need to pitch in and make this expression as common as muck throughout the blogosphere. I can think of no more fitting punishment. In fact, this needs to be inserted into Whelan’s Wikipedia profile immediately, if not sooner.

  44. 44.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 8:17 am

    @kid bitzer:

    You win the thread.

  45. 45.

    Michael

    June 8, 2009 at 8:19 am

    Way back when (an eternity of internet years ago), there was a group of us (that were then oriented) on the right that noticed that the fringiest folks just loved to go after and publicize the private data of folks. What they seemed to love most was doing it to folks they deemed to be RINOs, but nobody was really safe.

    We flipped that around and nailed several in that constellation.

    They’re a bunch of fuckers

  46. 46.

    aimai

    June 8, 2009 at 8:31 am

    In about five seconds Whelan is going to read this post and start bitching about how John is invading Rosen and his wife’s privacy. Remember–tit for tat is only ok if you are a republican.

    aimai

  47. 47.

    SGEW

    June 8, 2009 at 8:33 am

    DougJ, prepare to be outed.

  48. 48.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 9:08 am

    @SGEW:

    DougJ, prepare to be outed.

    Or else, prepare to be defamed by an anonymously sourced hit piece.

  49. 49.

    JM

    June 8, 2009 at 9:11 am

    I wonder if John Cole has any correspondence with Whelan that he’d like to share?

    I wonder if Andrew Sullivan has any correspondence with Whelan that he’d like to share?

  50. 50.

    slightly_peeved

    June 8, 2009 at 9:15 am

    I find it strange that so many people claim that adding a real name automatically adds gravitas to an argument. I used to post comments under my real name, and yet no matter how well crafted they were, I was never taken seriously; in fact, I was generally treated as a figure of fun. I tried to give more details of my background, such as my occupation – tool fitter – and people treated me with even further derision.

    Yours sincerely,
    Richard P. Willywhacker IV

    (Seriously, though – my sympathies to Publius. That really sucks.)

  51. 51.

    dan robinson

    June 8, 2009 at 9:16 am

    I don’t see what the big deal is about some anonymous blogger being outed. It’s the Internet and the outing is bound to happen sooner or later.

    I don’t know publius or the punk who outed him.

    Next?

  52. 52.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 9:20 am

    @dan robinson:

    Well, that’s because you’re a pig-ignorant douchebag. If you weren’t a pig-ignorant douchebag you’d understand why it’s a big deal.

  53. 53.

    slightly_peeved

    June 8, 2009 at 9:21 am

    (deleted)

  54. 54.

    Lee

    June 8, 2009 at 9:26 am

    You’ll also notice that Ed does not even allow people to email him from the Corner.

    His name on the articles is not a link like other writers (I did not check all of them, I did notice some were links to email addresses).

    Working on the wiki article now….

  55. 55.

    Michael

    June 8, 2009 at 9:28 am

    Sort of off topic, but it is another publius.

    Warner Todd Huston is worried about an invasion of privacy from government coverage.

    http://www.publiusforum.com/2009/06/08/hello-governmentcare-goodbye-personal-privacy/

    Do you want your government to know that you have bowel troubles? Do you mind if the president can discover if you have erectile disfunction? Would you be out of sorts if your local Congressman could discover if you’d had an abortion? How about if your state comptroller’s office or your governor could discover if you’d had breast implants? Well, a vote for Obamacare is a vote to give away your personal, private, maybe embarrassing medical information.

    Was he this worried about the insurance company database with loose security that compiles all of this data on you and can send it anywhere? Was he this worried when that Kline asshole was digging into abortion records in KS?

    Doubt it.

  56. 56.

    dan robinson

    June 8, 2009 at 9:29 am

    Johnny Pez says:

    Well, that’s because you’re a pig-ignorant douchebag. If you weren’t a pig-ignorant douchebag you’d understand why it’s a big deal.

    Whatever.

  57. 57.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 9:31 am

    C’mon, Lee, Ed Whelan is an important man. He uses his own name when he blogs! He’s way too important to bother with petty “comments” or “emails”. Who cares what a bunch of dumb peasants think, anyway?

  58. 58.

    IndieTarheel

    June 8, 2009 at 9:32 am

    @JR:

    In related news, Rudy Giuliani will be running a new think-tank dedicated to fighting municipal corruption, Mike Huckabee will be chairing the new Panel on Squirrel Protection and Preservation, Michael Brown will be running the Center for Disaster Preparedness and Response, and Newt Gingrich will head the Foundation for Defending Marriage.

    This just in: Sarah Palin has been tapped to oversee the Consortium for Reproductive Health.

  59. 59.

    pat

    June 8, 2009 at 9:43 am

    Who funds the Ethics and Public Policy Center?

  60. 60.

    bago

    June 8, 2009 at 9:45 am

    On a more serious note, Wehlan went full retard on this one. He claims to loathe anonymity in first baby-eating sentence, and then names the FUCKING GODDAMNED NAME THAT DOESN’T WORK IF YOU ARE ANONYMOUS.

    A = A (argue that Randians!).

    NO = no (means no if you are a Patton fan.)

    NYM = NAME (some basic Latin that you might want your Lawyer to understand. Cum Laude. Just Sayin.)

    I’ve said it before and will say it again, we not only need a sarcasm tag, we need a tag for the sound that Zorak makes when blinking.

  61. 61.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 9:57 am

    @dan robinson:

    Whatever

    Well, I thought I might try to explain to you why screwing someone over was a bad thing, but then I decided to just go with the gratuitous insult instead. I figure I’ll have as much chance of getting through to you either way.

  62. 62.

    Lee

    June 8, 2009 at 10:05 am

    Here is the wiki

    Whelan’s Law

    Please start sending it around to blogosphere. See if we can get it as accepted as a Friedman Unit

    Edit: Feel free to edit and clean it up. It is my first wiki page

  63. 63.

    dan robinson

    June 8, 2009 at 10:12 am

    @61

    Oh, I wasn’t insulted. See, I went and read your blog. Nah, I wasn’t insulted in the least.

  64. 64.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 10:25 am

    @dan robinson:

    To coin a phrase, whatever.

  65. 65.

    Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill

    June 8, 2009 at 10:27 am

    @Lee: Entry’s already busted by Wikipedia editors (not me, although I do edit and monitor some entries on there).
    You might want to try Urban Dictionary.

  66. 66.

    Lee

    June 8, 2009 at 10:36 am

    lol I did not think it was going to last long.

    It was worth a try.

  67. 67.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 10:39 am

    Nah, you might just as well create an entry on your sister’s wedding. The Powers-That-Be at Wikipedia are consumed by the desire that it be Just Like A Real Encyclopedia.

  68. 68.

    Xenos

    June 8, 2009 at 10:48 am

    FWIW, publius holds out the proprietor of this blog as a model of principled snark in the comments at Volokh.com. I never noticed him in the commentariat peanut gallery, tho maybe he has an even more scandalous nym hereabouts.

  69. 69.

    Lee

    June 8, 2009 at 10:49 am

    I have always wanted to give posting an article a try, figured this was as good an reason as any for a first one.

  70. 70.

    Hob

    June 8, 2009 at 11:01 am

    I was wondering how long it would take for BOB to bring up the terrible injustice of how he got banned from Obsidian Wings. Short version: BOB developed a really strange one-sided feud with another commenter and kept repeating stuff that he figured would drive this guy nuts – for no other reason, i.e. trolling in its purest form – and said flat out that that’s what he was doing, and ignored repeated warnings. So they banned him – not for his Muslims-are-gonna-getcha shtick, or even the “Jews are genetically defective because they’re too nice to Arabs” bit, but for letting everyone know that he was just there to be an asshole. And in his mind, that’s censorship.

  71. 71.

    Johnny Pez

    June 8, 2009 at 11:03 am

    @Lee:

    Suggestion: find some work of fiction that you particularly enjoy that doesn’t already have an entry.

  72. 72.

    Lee

    June 8, 2009 at 11:09 am

    @ Johnny Pez

    Thanks I’ll give that a try.

  73. 73.

    SGEW

    June 8, 2009 at 11:09 am

    @Hob: Ah, memories. Good times.

  74. 74.

    Hob

    June 8, 2009 at 11:10 am

    @Bill E Pilgrim: Exactly. For Publius to be “irresponsibly” “abusing” his pseudonymity, he’d have to be taking advantage of it to support his argument somehow. Whelan is kind of a reverse example: if you do know who he is, his statements about Sotomayor become more self-evidently absurd, because (as Volokh and publius pointed out) it’s just impossible that someone with his legal experience could believe the dumb things he’s saying. So you can see how Whelan might slightly envy the idea of a name with no baggage. Except that if he had written the same shit under a pseudonym, he still wouldn’t have a good argument; he would just look like another dumb guy who doesn’t understand what judges do.

  75. 75.

    Interrobang

    June 8, 2009 at 11:45 am

    I’ve had the same consistent pseudonym online for twelve years. My pseudonym has more online street cred than whatever permutation of Ed Whelan’s legal name Ed Whelan is using today. And actually, my pseudonym is more linked to my identity than my legal name would be, given that of the people I know of online who have the same legal name as I do, one is a fairly famous British actor, and one is a relatively well-known fantasy artist. So if you were looking for me online without using my pseudonym as a hint, you’d get an awful lot of noise in your peanut butter signal.

    Which is reason number ∞ why Whelan is off the mark here.

  76. 76.

    Xenos

    June 8, 2009 at 1:12 pm

    (deleted… utterly incoherent today. picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue.)

  77. 77.

    Xanthippas

    June 8, 2009 at 1:27 pm

    I find it strange that so many people claim that adding a real name automatically adds gravitas to an argument. I used to post comments under my real name, and yet no matter how well crafted they were, I was never taken seriously; in fact, I was generally treated as a figure of fun. I tried to give more details of my background, such as my occupation – tool fitter – and people treated me with even further derision.

    That’s exactly true. Why is that the case? Because the blogosphere is largely about the quality of ideas, not the person behind them. It’s true that some well-known people leap into the blogosphere and immediately acquire 10,000 readers, but a whole hell of a lot of noted bloggers have worked their way out of the blogosphere background just by being really good bloggers that people like to read. That’s not to say that your background won’t add some weight and credence to your arguments; but it won’t necessarily do so, and it’s not really a requirements.

    And because the blogosphere is about words and ideas, it doesn’t matter if you’re anonymous. Even anonymous bloggers will get their blogging ripped by other bloggers and commentators if it sucks, which is why it’s disengenuous to try and say that somebody’s weaseling out of accountability by being anonymous. Most anonymous bloggers are trying to protect things that are important to them like their families and jobs from the douchebags out there who will send emails to your employer and hunt for private info on you, and they do it BECAUSE they’re not famous or influential enough to be accorded some measure of protection.

    So basically, “outing” a blogger means you’ve completely lost the argument, and you’ve committed about the most ass-holish thing you can do on the internet short of posting someone else’s private info for everyone else to see.

  78. 78.

    Zuzu's Petals

    June 8, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Looks like Whelan has spewed more self-serving BS on the topic. And – surprise! – his NRO pals are defending him.

    Bleccch.

  79. 79.

    Anne Laurie

    June 8, 2009 at 4:54 pm

    I was wondering how long it would take for BOB to bring up the terrible injustice of how he got banned from Obsidian Wings. Short version: BOB developed a really strange one-sided feud with another commenter and kept repeating stuff that he figured would drive this guy nuts – for no other reason, i.e. trolling in its purest form – and said flat out that that’s what he was doing, and ignored repeated warnings. So they banned him… for letting everyone know that he was just there to be an asshole. And in his mind, that’s censorship.

    To be totally fair, many “religious” people believe that being an asshole is one of the tenets of their faith. From his contributions here BOB would seem to understand it as the major tenet of his personal relationship with the divine.

  80. 80.

    brantl

    June 8, 2009 at 4:56 pm

    Divine asshole-ishness, that’s BOB.

  81. 81.

    asiangrrlMN

    June 8, 2009 at 5:50 pm

    @brantl: Heh. That’s funny. I wrote a blog entry about the pseudonym debate after AKM was outed by a snotty Congress person in Alaska, and it echoed much of the thoughts written here today. I blog under my real name, but I use a variant of this pseudonym when I post on other blogs. I have been for years. So, when I linked from the Mudflats to my blog so people could read what I wrote about the outing, I posited that most of them would find my blog credible because they knew me as asiangrrlMN on the ‘flats. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know my real name because they knew ME through my writing.

    To me, I don’t give a shit who hilzoy is in real life, or any of the other pseudonymous bloggers because I evaluate their merit on what they write. Ed Whelan isn’t trustworthy to me because he writes shit. Jonah Goldberg who says only important people have the right to blog under a pseudonym (yeah, wrap your head around that one) is untrustworthy, too, and I don’t care that I know his name.

    In part, I tend not to care about a person’s title or credentials in general (although, there are exceptions to the rule, of course) because I would rather judge someone’s writing on its own merit.

  82. 82.

    Xanthippas

    June 8, 2009 at 6:44 pm

    I’ve had the same consistent pseudonym online for twelve years. My pseudonym has more online street cred than whatever permutation of Ed Whelan’s legal name Ed Whelan is using today. And actually, my pseudonym is more linked to my identity than my legal name would be, given that of the people I know of online who have the same legal name as I do, one is a fairly famous British actor, and one is a relatively well-known fantasy artist. So if you were looking for me online without using my pseudonym as a hint, you’d get an awful lot of noise in your peanut butter signal.

    That’s another good point. Google my name, and it’ll take you 1,000 hits to find anything about me. Google my pseudonym and-thanks to the fact that I’ve been commenting/blogging under it for five years now-you instantly find about 10,000 links to comments and blog posts I’ve written. My pseudonym is my brand, and just because it would take you a little work to figure out who I am doesn’t mean I won’t vouch for anything I’ve written at some point in the past.

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