User blog comment:XelNecra/Anonymity - The Source of all poison?/@comment-50.53.139.17-20130128034247

"I am well-behaving and have nothing to hide."

The absolute worst argument ever created. And here's why:

You have no idea what tomorrow will bring. What is acceptable now may not be so tomorrow. We have tens of thousands of laws not to protect people but so that when an opportunity arises for individuals to persecute someone they can find some law that they've broken and use it against them. History has repeatedly shown this to be true. This is why anonymity is so vital - it allows the merit of the speech itself to be heard rather than the speaker self-censoring in worrying about retribution.

It also enables an imbalance in which those who don't question things and don't rock the boat are preferred over those that do. So long as you follow our rules, do what we say and don't ever question us, you can play. But the moment you step out of line and don't act in our prescribed manner, you'll get in trouble.

That was all more of a broad moralistic reasoning - now I will be more specific.

You're talking about passports, registration, fees... Mentioning "misbehaving" - do you not realize how despotic this sounds? You want to create red tape, that WE have to pay for, to control us. How about we just be allowed to control ourselves? You really want us all to pay for our own nanny? You want to encourage us to act like children by treating us all as such?

And regarding anonymity and this site in particular, personally, I have found many of the registered users on here to be arrogant, unyielding, unhelpful, insulting and overly defensive. Does that mean they all are? No. Some of them have been incredibly helpful people. But that applies equally to the anonymous users. Many of them have provided very useful information, sometimes much better than what the registered users have had to say.

What this all comes down to is that each person needs to hold themselves accountable for how they act because they need to intrinsically realize what that affects. And creating some big brother organization to do it is an invasion of privacy, creates needless red tape and will cost us much more in the long run.