Wednesday, June 10, 2009  Names and Blogging... thoughts on the
outing of John Blevins  A lot has already been written on this
since Ed Whelan of the National Review exposed John Blevins, who
has blogged under the pseudonym of "publius" at the blog
Obsidian Wings. I'm not a reader of Whelan's blog or the one to
which Blevins contributed, but it hasn't been that difficult to
run across discussion of this in the blogosphere since Saturday.
The spat that ended in the outing apparently concerned
criticisms of Judge Sotomayor made by Whelan, and Bevins'
responses to them under the name "publius". Eventually Whelan
had had enough, decided that Blevins was abusing pseudonymity in
order to mount unfair attacks and criticisms, and should be
exposed. Whelan has been harshly criticized for outing Blevins,
and has issued an apology.  I'm not sure exactly what I think
about this, but I at least sympathize with Whelan, even if
exposing Blevins was the wrong thing to do. Brian Leiter offers
a great extended discussion on t