It's not about names and identities in the big world, ebbie, and he/she/it knows that perfectly well. It's about making it harder for people to distinguish between different posts - for example is the anti-Nader GUEST Date: 02 May 04 - 05:42 PM really the same as the ostensibly pro-Nader GUEST Date: 02 May 04 - 04:29 PM? And which if these, if either, is the rather unpleasant one at GUEST Date: 02 May 04 - 05:18 PM ?

A good working rule is, never reply to them, never address them directly, and work on the reasonable assumption that noone who was actually interested in the discussion, rather than playing silly games, would go in for that kind of nonsense.

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It's true enough that votes in themselves do give a candidate or a party a certain authority, even where they don't add up to getting elected. That's why Nader is running, to remind people that there are millions of people out there who aren't represented, and whose views are casually dismissed, and that the USA has a system of elections in which money buys power, and that that undermines your aspirations to have a genuinely democracy.

But the trick is to find ways of achieving that which do not land your country and the world we share with four more years of a seriously deranged and dangerous regime in Washington that threatens us all. And that isn't particularly difficult - but it does require a sense of priorities when it comes to picking fights.