Top story down in the "Opinions" box at WaPo today is the Happy Headline: Sunshine for the Virtual Town Hall. Now of course we have a certain reaction to the words "Town Hall," but the writer would like us to take it in the generic sense.

What does he want? He wants us naked. He thinks it will make us more polite.

What he wants is abolition of anonymity in comments. What he'd like is for everybody to have to sign their full, legal name to every comment, with anonymous, or more properly pseudonymous, commenting priviliges granted by the moderator when in the moderator's opinion the commenter is a whistleblower or otherwise Worthy and In Need Of protected status to speak freely. Sort of like when Republicans talk.

The example he gives is telling:

Imagine going to a meeting about school overcrowding in your community. Everybody at the meeting is wearing nametags. You approach a cluster of people where one man is loudly complaining about waste in school spending....You notice his nametag -- "anticrat424." Between his sentences, you interject, "Excuse me, who are you?"

He gives you a narrowing look. "Taking names, huh? Going to sic the superintendent's police on me? Hah!"

In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. anticrat424 is continually elevated to the podium, where he can have his angriest thoughts amplified through cyberspace as often as he wishes. He can call people the vilest names and that hate-mongering, too, will be amplified for all the world to see.

Got any straw left, Mr. Grubisich? I could use some to mix with the horseshit in the compost bin. Read more…

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I've been on the Intertubes long enough to have heard this story many times. Readers, share with us your own experience, we want to know if it's typical. I'm protecting the innocent and blanking a few details for the sake of privacy:

I went to a very respectable public school today. Had to wait for someone important to come see me while I sat alone - unsupervised, unverified but, I was detected for metal - with the kiddies. Surfed the web. Thought I would check out the Mighty Corrente Building. To my surprise - access denied! [so and so] Public Schools and Microsoft: A PC on every desktop and every one running Microsoft.

snip

[Corrente] is banned out of the [so and so] public school system too. Actually I tried a
good number of lefty sites and the only one I could get through to was,
iirc, Juan Cole.

snip

Just a note: a person close to me has a government/military job on
the east coast. Though he can view the Drudge Report at work,
Correntewire is blocked. Read more…