To the person engaging Jim on this issue:

I think a point should be made here that to the extent "self promotion" exists, no amount of self-promotion will amount to anything without a corresponding response from readers, right?

The problem is not that people have names (which allows us to more quickly reference someone rather than calling everyone "that person I know" or "hey you"), it is that people have a tendency to react in a specific manner depending upon the person named. If we like the person, know them, are familiar with that person's thinking and agrees with it, etc, these are things which impact how we judge what that person says. Does it blurr our judgement? Does it make us more likely to agree with what the person says, or less likely to think critically about what they say, than we might if we weren't familiar with them? Therein lies the problem, not in the fact that we all have names. If you find that knowing the identity of the author tends to influence your judgement about what they say, is the problem that they have a name, or that you are inclined to use your past knowledge and experiences with that person and their ideas as a way of predetermining your tendency to agree with what they might say?

Your brain uses all sorts of "short-hand" in life, and unfortunately very often we let this short-hand do the heavy lifting for us. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and some people are able to actively work at trying to avoid this problem and can be very successful at it. We could all wear hoods and alter our voices and never use names, dress identical and talk identical (lest speech patterns, accents, etc tip you off about who we are), and pray Harrison Bergerson never shows up. Or we could recognize that the problem is within us, and that what needs to change is not simplistic aspects of life that in fact can be very helpful (like having names) but rather our own value systems and how we choose to interact and how (or IF) we critically think for ourselves.

Chomsky and Churchill are very brilliant, contribute greatly to political discourse, etc, but are also in my opinion capable of being wrong and making gross errors of thinking and analysis. I try very hard to avoid assuming that either of them is automatically correct, and when I read something that I find questionable, I QUESTION it! The problem of cults of personality is indeed quite real, but ending the use of names (even if only in discourse) will not stop the problem, and we should avoid searching for easy methods of dealing with internalized issues of hierarchies.

The fact is, often who somebody is has a very real influence on what they say and why they are saying it. Suppose you are talking to a person who sounds very progressive, says all the right things about war and imperialism etc, and says they are rallying at a certain spot and they ask you and others to join them. Now, what they say sounds right and they've dotted all their "i"s, but you get there and it's a Dennis Kucinich For President rally, or an ANSWER rally (depending on how you feel about them...). Would you wish you'd known, would you feel taken advantage of and that they used the annonymity to hide their real intentions? Would it matter so long as technically what they "said", their "ideas" sounded right? Would the fact that they knew precisely what to say and how to say it to reach you and used annonymity as the best way to reach you be something that made you angry?

Theoretically, the argument that discourse would be better, and ideas weighed without prejudice if it were all annonymous, should then be applied to everyday life as well -- there is no rational reason, if you accept the argument, not to do so, since if the argument is valid then it would have equal value and the same benefits in day-to-day interaction. Or do you prefer to know who you associate with, do you prefer to hang out with people who share your interests? Of course you do, we all do. I don't say that I fail to understand what you mean, or that I don't recognize some benefits in annonymous posting and exchange of ideas, but I actually suspect your thinking goes deeper than merely in reference to annonymous posting of comments and ideas on the internet. You specifically refer to people like Churchill, and the issue of personality behind the ideas, and you speak of these things with disdain. I must assume, therefore, that you would also prefer books to be annonymous, interviews to be annonymous, etc. This really must -- or should -- be the gist of what you are really saying, otherwise how is the issue of "self-promotion" relevant here? Solve self-promotion and cults of personality and hierarchies by blogging unnamed? No, you are smart and have thought this through so obviously you mean to imply more than that.

In fact, this should (to be logically consistent) also carry over to interviews for news segments and so too to so-called specialists. Thus we'd have no way to know the validity of sourcing, if we lack any knowledge of the annonymous sources of information (I know, the media already relies on such sourcing, but I refer more directly to more concrete sourcing). We can't demand that people back up their information, provide sourcing, if it's all annonymous. Even links to websites supposedly supplying source information would be suddenly lacking if it were all annonymous -- how do you or I know the validity if the site and the sources are all annonymous?

It is also true that Chomsky, Churchill, and many others are notoriously good at documenting their cases and (usually) delving into an issue and studying it and then presenting their case with a stack of sourcing the size of "War and Peace". That's precisely why so many people trust them and give them at least the benefit of the doubt when reading/considering their ideas and analysis. And I do not at all think that's a bad thing. Do we not assess the involvement of activists around us by their actions, by their history of consistency in standing against injustice? Yes, we do. We get to know someone, we try to understand them, we watch them, etc and from there we can make our assessments. It is not that we should do this INSTEAD of weighing ideas on the merit of content, but rather that we can do BOTH. I know Chomsky's views and his history of consistency etc, and yes I agree with him much more often than I disagree with him. But I also make an attempt to read his work critically and to actually USE the sourcing he supplies to verify for myself that he's accurate or that his conclusions/interpretations are ones I agree with. I don't need him to hide his name or his face to compell me to do this, and I don't need anyone to do so for me to judge their ideas on merit. Why do you?

Okay, obviously we all at times fall prey to letting the short-cuts do the heavy lifting for us. But that's because we allow it to happen, period. We aren't going to change this world if we refuse to change ourselves as well, and I for one do not demand that the world change so that I don't HAVE to change. That kind of thinking is a mistake, in my opinion. There are times when even a Chomsky could and should and probably does choose to use annonymity -- maybe in chat rooms, for example. But annonymity is good in some instances and maybe not as good in others, and in my opinion undesireable in many.

Self-promotion sucks, sure, but I don't think that every time someone puts their name on something it is self-promotion. And I don't think every instance of you or I relying on name-recognition is bad, either (I use it a lot when deciding where or what to eat, for example -- is this product made by Coca Cola, for example? If so, I'm not drinking it). It's the times when this leads to hierarchies that concerns me, and really what seems to concern you as well. So we should focus on that, and how to get ourselves and others to change so that name recognition DOESN'T so often lead to short-cuts in our own critical thinking. Let's not simply replace one short-cut with another.