Josh Marshall wrote: Jack Shafer has a very good and fairly Shaferly piece in Slate about the Lee Siegel brouhaha. Or, to be more specific because there are several, the one in which he got his TNR blog deep-sixed for toasting, adoring and defending himself in the guise of the commenter "sprezzatura". Shafer's point or his question is simply: what exactly did Siegel do wrong? Everyone's anonymous in a comment thread. Why can't he be too?

I hate to think this of joshtpm, but does he understand the internet? The way I understand it, this was sock-puppetry. For the classical display of sock-puppetry, see the Mary Rosh portion of the John Lott Wikipedia entry. This is what Siegel was doing and the key component here that Josh misses is that this is done online. Credibility is all in to a blogger which I know joshtpm understands. But it's all bloggers have besides the power of their words.

Because the internet makes it so easy to hide your identity (to a casual observer) you get a code of honesty that has developed on message boards and forums everywhere. Sure you can suspect someone to be lying about who they are, but it takes so much time to fact check EVERYONE that you have to assume they are telling you the truth. That's how the system works and it's what enables Wikipedia to be humanity's greatest legacy. Sock-puppetry flies in the face of this. In his desire to battle the blogofacists Siegel is intent on discrediting the medium itself and that's why he needed to go.

Leaving comments on your own blog as someone else is not only dishonest, it's pathetically lame. You can say what you want even if its mind numblingly stupid, LGF and Malkin do it all the time. The sock-puppetry of sprezzature makes Lee Siegel a bad person who kills the internets and it makes him unworthy of any further attention online. Ever.

That's how it works online.

A minor point: You can be anonymous in any comments thread but your own. If the thread is started by YOUR writing, if you respond in it you have an obligation to put yourself out as the author of the original piece.