Cowardly or convenient?
In light of Bubba’s outing and a few emails from folks on the subject, I feel the need to address this anonymity business. If you think this is the post in which I come clean, divulge a lot of stuff and reveal my alter ego, forget about it. Fat chance that will ever happen prominently on my blog for a few reasons:
1 – I don’t want my name associated with this site merely due to the big pain in the ass it could be. I don’t want people Googling me up and finding this place. I don’t want to meet people about town and have this ‘oh, you’re that guy’ conversation. I don’t want to turn away potential clients or other business people with whom I may disagree.
2 – I have a lot of guns. I don’t want someone figuring that they could track me down, break into my home, and score some stolen weaponry.
3 – I also, in the event I annoy the Hell out of someone, don’t want my family to feel the heat for this stuff.
People with this conception that I must be some anonymous shit-slinger out there hurling insults with no possibility of retribution who has something to hide are wrong. I try to keep it civil and clean and only occasionally call people idiots. I say nothing on this blog that I am ashamed of and I say nothing that I wouldn’t say to the faces of the people I criticize. Ask people who know me, I am pretty much an asshole in real life too. That said, there are plenty of people who know who I am (Bubba for one), including a local TeeVee guy. In the event I did something particularly stupid or grotesque, they could out me. I’m not completely anonymous but more pseudonymous.
Les (who also knows me) makes a very good point:
Anyone thinking of blogging anonymously should think about this situation and how they’d handle it. If you’re not prepared to do what Bubba did and reveal your identity when it’s being used as leverage against you, then you shouldn’t blog anonymously.
Indeed. But it wouldn’t be in a manner prominently displayed here. People who get criticized often (as in Bubba’s target in this instance) display a superiority complex over the fact that the person doing the criticizing is anonymous, as though that anonymity denotes a lack of credibility or something. Why? If someone is making legitimate points, address those points and not the fact you think some anonymous shit-slinger is hiding behind the keyboard flinging feces at you.
I noticed this in my pre-blog days when I commented over at the Metropulse’s blab. People would get snooty when I argued with them and fall back on the ‘oh yeah, well people know who I am.’ I don’t care who you are, I care about the point you’re making.
Or as Michael said:
I didn’t know until today who he is. But I know him through the quality of his blog. I could have found out. I know people who know him. I never asked who he is. I saw no compelling reason to out him. The question was even posed from time to time at the KNS whether we should try and out him, and the answer always came back to, “why?”
Also, let me alleviate this romanticized notion that I could potentially be someone important: I’m not. I’m just some regular Joe with a house in a subdivision. I’m nobody you’ve ever heard of. SayUncle is obviously not my real name. But SayUncle is very real and not going anywhere. I’m no coward and, in the event I get under your skin, drop me a line and we’ll talk. I got nothing to hide.
June 20th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
I would have gone with “smarmy bastard” over “asshole,” but that’s just me. 🙂
(For the humor impaired, I kid…)
June 20th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
Well said. I’ve never understood the obsession some trolls have with outing anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers. It’s one thing if the pseudonymous blogger is really Howard Dean, George Bush or Karl Rove. It’s quite another if the pseudonymous blogger is just some random guy whose name means nothing to 99.99999% of the population anyway. Anyone wanting to know where I come from can learn a helluva lot more by googling the name “xrlq” or even its common misspellings than they could by googling my real name. There are a lot more Jeff [MyRealLastName]s out there than there are Xrlqs.
June 20th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
I chose a nickname in order to prevent my comments from being confused with others. Similar to Xrlq’s position, “Jon” isn’t exactly rare.
On the “hiding” part – I’ve noticed a pattern that some people – a certain “Demo”-graphic, if you will – have a habit of attacking the messenger when the message cannot be refuted. Like, for example, if you ask a non “anti-administration” question at a Presidential Press Conference, then suddenly your identity is more important than the President’s answer. Not that I’ve got skeletons in my closet (pardon the pun), but I’m a logical creature and I don’t find that messenger to be of value unless it’s sworn testimony – in which case you need to know if the presenter is a convicted liar or a paid consultant (kinda similar 😀 ).
But perhaps that touches on another personality trait. Some people consider a person’s ideas and behaviors as individual elements. And other people accept a person wholly – if they agree with one idea or element of the person, then everything they do is accepted. And the reverse is true is well. In sports terms, no player on the other team can make a good play, and no player on the home team can have committed a penalty. Or if a person identifies with the character portrayed in a movie, then everything that actor says is then “gospel”.
I’m not in that camp.
/ramble
June 20th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
Coward.
June 20th, 2005 at 2:58 pm
All uppity and holier than thou since our outing, eh? 🙂
June 20th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Well said. I’ve sometimes wished I’d gone the anonymous route, but I’m just a 9-to-5er with a fairly unknown blog and no gun collection, so I never had the good reasons you and SKB do. Your kind-of-anonymity has never had an effect on my evaluation of your arguments.
June 20th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Outing the pseudo/anonymous is all about power. It’s about shutting down, not debating, the other. Plenty of folks like that on all sides.
Conley’s actions raise two important points not being addressed much. One, he claimed to have personal credit reports. I’m not sure if that’s a crime, but I’m pretty sure it’s a violation of the agreement Conley signed with his credit reporting agency. He should be reported to them and suffer *his own* consequences.
Conley threatened to use his paper to quash an enemy. Yes, it’s standard behavior for most papers or their reporters/columnists. But they usually just do it; they don’t announce it in public. It’s also a major ethical violation, at least in theory. That *should* be stirring up a massive debate on press responsibility.
There’s also the side issue of sending two giggly young women on an expense account in a rented vehicle (IIRC) to get liquored up in another city and report on it. The two woman want their readers to believe they drove drunk and smoked pot, whether they did or not. There’s all kinds of ethical questionability in this that Conley should be forced to address. At the least, I’m sure the car rental company involved might like to know what happened….
November 18th, 2005 at 10:15 am
[…] To the naysayers out there, I do not use a free service. I’ve been blogging for over three years anonymously. A lot of bloggers know who I am because I tell them. Several people at local media outlets know who I am because I’ve met them. Several of my friends know about the blog too, even though I initially never told any of them. When on travel, I try to meet other bloggers and when some travel to my neck of the woods, I meet them. My reasons for being anonymous are listed here. […]