On Anonymity, Moderated Fora, and Usenet

"Michael" wrote in message
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On Jun 9, 3:11 pm, Dudley Henriques wrote:
Yes, by all means let's take a look at some of the advantages of an
unmoderated Usenet forum..........like this gem for example, posted
yesterday by some idiot posting here on this Usenet forum using a false
name.

There are no unalloyed benefits. Everything has a downside.

I'm going to take off on a tangent. There was a very good movie made
years ago - it was called Gideon's Trumpet. It was about the landmark
case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that established the precedent that the
accused was entitled to a lawyer, whether he could afford one or not.

It was made into a movie because it made a good morality story.
Gideon was innocent, but was wrongly convicted because he had no legal
counsel.

No movie will ever be made about Miranda v. Arizona, even though the
miranda rights against self-incrimination are perhaps more
fundamental. You see, Miranda was guilty as sin (and admitted it
later). He brutalized a little girl. And he went free.

I'm glad that the justices of the supreme court made the decision they
did - to limit the power and authority of the police to extract
confessions - even if that meant that in this one case, justice was
not done and a guilty man went free. Often it doesn't go that way.
The long term benefit of a freer society with more limited police
power is often hard to see in the short term - when an innocent person
is brutalized, and the offender remains unpunished. Hard cases make
bad law. But this time that didn't happen.

Of course my tangent was only marginally relevant. One can't really
compare the right not to incriminate oneself to the privilege of
speakig anonymously - and yet there is value to the analogy. In each
case we make a tradeoff between a more orderly community and a freer
one.

Whenever there is a freedom - any freedom, including the freedom to
post anonymously - it is a certainty that someone will abuse it.
There are those who believe that the solution is to create authority,
to create rules, to limit the freedom (in this case moderation) - and
thus limit the abuse. And then there are those who believe that rules
in general are a bad thing, and authority is not to be trusted. And
never the twain shall meet.

Those are the extremes, and as always there is a continuum between the
extremes. There is also a continuum of options online. There is a
level of authority - or anarchy - to suit any taste. Just don't
pretend that by increasing authority, you lose nothing. If you
consider the tradeoff acceptable - well, that's your choice.

Michael