As you all have no doubt figured out, the newest phase of the combined MSM/GOP’s war on us great unwashed is to go after us because a number of us write under names that aren’t on our birth certificates. (I guess then Ben Franklin’s work should be discounted because he wrote as “Poor Richard” and “Martha Careful” and “Silence Dogood”.)
Sean-Paul Kelley at The Agonist respondeth thus:
When You–the MSM–Stop Using Anonymous Sources . . .
. . . bloggers will stop using pseudonyms, ok? Until then, stop lecturing us.
UPDATE: Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah has this to say:
The thing I hate most about the anti-pseudonym campaigners is they make some of the worst tendancies of my former discipline, LitCrit, looks sensible. Identity is not fixed first and foremost by a name; in the world of argumentation, it ties first and foremost the argument itself, and then secondarily to a bunch of things (like campaign donations and business affiliation) that a fixed name simply facilitates the discovery of. If your argument sucks, it doesn’t matter what name you append to it, you’ll be shot down under any name.
[…]
All of which leads me to conclude that the anti-pseudonym campaigners simply have no confidence in their own reading ability. That is, they apparently lack all confidence they could distinguish a crappy argument from a good one without the crutch of a real name–or that they could refute a crappy argument when faced with one.
Mercury Rising 鳯女 