Learn to read before you go correcting Greg Laden, dumbass.

Funny you should be the one to ask, Mr. Sock! Perhaps it is you!!!!

Huh? That was Paul W. who actually asked the question.

Sloppy, Greg, very sloppy.

But seriously, no, I’ll make a case of it if I get sufficiently annoyed. Otherwise not worth the bother.

Well, mostly. I guess it wouldn’t be cool if you can connect a sock puppet up to a meatspace name. Sometimes its legit to post as a sock puppet, just to say something pseudonymously for the usual good reasons.

Hmmm… but then, sometimes people might have other evidence, e.g., from other blogs, that they could use to track things back to meatspace identities. That would suck in cases where people aren’t seriously abusing pseudonymity, just mostly using it sometimes.

I guess I’d be inclined to warn people that abusive sock puppetry (or flesh puppetry) is not okay, and that such pseudonymity may not be preserved.

(And email suspected abusive individuals first, to get them to stop. After that I wouldn’t worry too much about outing them as puppets, or inadvertently outing meatspace people.)

Do you privately warn people when you notice that sort of thing going on?

George, yes and no. Normally, yes. But there is a third sort of activity, what might be called “fleshpuppets.” At least one currently active commenter on this blog does this, and a while back we had a guy here doing this all the time.

Who?

That’s the sort of thing that I think it’s perfectly kosher to point out.

This is where you call your buddy up (or more likely send an email) and say “log onto this URL and make a comment that says, roughly, this or that, and I’ll buy you a beer next time I see you.

Fleshpuppets.

I am not very comfortable, however, defining something as not enough or enough when it comes to punishing others. Does not feel right to me.

For example, if Bernie Madoff was simply revealed to be a con artist, but never prosecuted because of some technicality (maybe exclusionary rules), nobody would say he didn’t get off “scot free”—that would be the prototypical case of getting off “scot free.”

(We wouldn’t generally have a chance to even apply the term if it was never revealed that people had done something wrong! If merely having offenses revealed itself counted as punishment, saying somebody got off “scot free” would be self-refuting.)

Things are different on the intertubes, where the stakes are so bizarre and pseudonymous reputation is often relatively highly valued, so there’s a gray area there, but I think it’s quite reasonable to say that it looks like “William” will get off scot free, if he’s not even exposed by his real meatspace name.

By the same token, exposing him by real name would count as punishment—and not as getting off scot free—which it generally wouldn’t in so-called “real” life. (IMHO)

Odd, that.