Posted by Andy Dingley on 10/02/06 00:10

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> Thank you for making it clear that your messages deserve no further
> attention, due to your cowardish accusation that you throw hiding behind a
> fake identity.

"Yucca", you're a bloody idiot.

Doesn't the notion of "online persona" mean anything to you?

I've never met either you nor Miranda. For all I know, you're _both_
middle-aged truck drivers who like to hang around anime chatrooms
pretending to be kittens. Without tracking down the staff lists of
Finnish academia, you are no real to me as an opaque identifier than
Blinky the Shark. All I can say for sure is that you know far more
SGML arcana than I ever will, SpaceGirl's defence of Dreamweaver is one
of those lifestyle choices that I respect more than I would ever
condone, and I doubt very much if Blinky is any more a shark than I am
a wombat. However all three of these are long-established and
consistent personas. As far as "on-line reality" ever goes, they're
real and they've presumably got a single real person behind each and
only one of them. That's a _huge_ distance away from Random J. Troll
who pops out from under their bridge and asks how to use <table>s to
set margins.

Additionally, online anonymity has been around pretty much as long as
Usenet. Spoofing has been there since kremvax. Neither of these are
_any_ reason to disregard someone's posting. It's a content-based
peer-reviewed anarcho-meritocracy, or at least as close as we ever get.

Get some sense of proportion.

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