‘Hat of the Day - Tim Lambert Xrlq
Anyone who reads blogs and is familiar with John Lott has probably heard of Tim Lambert, too. He’s the Australian blogger who aspires to do to John Lott what Clayton Cramer did to Michael Bellesiles. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do a very good job; while Cramer uncovered overwhelming evidence Bellesiles’s fundamental research was fabricated, the best Lambert has been able to do is to uncover a few really stupid things Lott has done on a few isolated occasions. The rest of his rebuttals consist of gratuitous attacks on Lott personally. Lambert seems to be on some kind of “jihad,”* so the next time you encounter an op-ed by Lott in any major newspaper, be sure to scan Lambert’s blog for a “liar, liar, pants on fire” rebuttal, with an occasional adult argument thrown in here and there for good measure.
As annoying as this “everyone who disagrees with me is liar” routine may be, I’ve largely written it off until now, figuring that it derived either from Lambert’s personal phobia about guns (a charge he denies), or perhaps some kind of personal “crusade”* against Lott himself. Apparently, I was wrong. Judging by this comment thread on Reason, concerning the British government’s asinine view that it can charge wrongfully convicted inmates for the cost of room and board, impugning his opponents motives is this guy’s MO.
Lambert gives away the game in his first comment (the 6th in the thread), which reads:
I think Mackay’s article is rather dishonest. The victims of miscarriages of justice aren’t getting a bill for their imprisonment. Blunkett is just trying to reduce the amount of compensation they get. Mackay tries to make it look like they are not getting compensation but just a bill.
Note that in Tim’s world, Mackay’s article couldn’t possibly have been “incomplete” or even “misleading” - just “dishonest.” What this says, in effect, is that deep in our heart of hearts, we all know that he is right about everything, so anyone who voices disagreement with him must be lying. But just in case that first comment didn’t drive that point home, he followed it up another the following day (26th in the thread). This one said, in relevant part:
I did not say that it was OK. Whether the compensation was fair would require information that was deliberately and dishonestly omitted from the article.
OK, Tim, we get it. You think there’s a huge difference between making a lame argument to justify merely charging a wrongfully convicted inmate for room and board, vs. making the same lame argument as a pretext for taking back some of the compensation you “deliberately and dishonestly” pretended to award him for his wrongful imprisonment. I’m not sure why you think that difference is so important, but hey, it’s a free country (well, mine is, anyway). Even if I were to grant that this distinction is meaningful, I don’t see how this distinction would be so self-evident and so obviously central to the issue that no honest journalist could possibly have seen it differently.
The real kicker, though, is that this time Lambert wasn’t just a jerk, he was also factually wrong. He had expended a little less time bashing Mackay for writing a “dishonest” article and a little more time actually reading the damned thing, he would have known better than the information he accused Mackay of “deliberately and dishonestly” concealing is right there in the article:
It wasn’t until two years ago that [Paddy] Hill was finally awarded £960,000 in compensation. However, during the years since his release, while waiting for the pay-out, the government had given him advances of around £300,000. When his compensation came through, the £300,000 was taken back along with interest on the interim payments charged at 23% that cost him a further £70,000.
I’m not exactly sure what “it wasn’t until two years ago that X” means in Australian. In American, and I believe, in English as well, it means, inter alia, “X happened two years ago.” As to the placement of the paragraph, it was deliberately and dishonestly hidden in plain view, right there in the sixth paragraph (out of 33). Regular readers of Patterico’s blog (and if you don’t, you should), are familiar with the power of the jump, whereby a paper pushes inconvenient facts to the end of the article, where almost no one will read them. Pushing a key point “all the way down” to paragraph 6 probably does not qualify, however, unless the target audience is known to have Attention Deficit Disorde
*Note to Patterico, Lileks and Hewitt: my use of quotation marks around the words jihad and crusade in this context is merely intended to indicate that the words are used figuratively rather than literally. Nothing contained herein should be construed to imply that Lambert himself would use these terms to describe his own paranoid rantings. The smart money says he wouldn’t describe his own paranoid rantings as “paranoid rantings,” either.
UPDATE: After an extended discussion, Lambert has convinced me that the issuance of this award was inapppropriate. I remain convinced that some of his charges against Lott are flimsy, and that all (one) of them against Mackay are bogus, but none of this adds up to anything comparable to what has prompted me to bestow the coveted ‘Hat of the Day award to others in the past. Accordingly, I hereby revoke Tim’s prize, and award it to myself instead, for having improperly awarded it to him in the first place.
23 Responses to “‘Hat of the Day - Tim Lambert Xrlq”
OK, you’ve issued your challenge, and I’ve met it. Now, it’s your turn. This entry wasn’t really about your flimsy claims that John Lott is dishonest, but rather, your completely unfounded assertion that Neil Mackay is. Defend that. If it has anything at all to do with this irrelevant stuff about Lott, by all means explain why. The only common thread I see between the two cases - and the only reason I brought up Lott at all in this context - is that in both instances, the same little boy cried wolf.
March 18th, 2004 at 10:00 am
Hey, now. Watch the ADD cracks.
March 18th, 2004 at 3:23 pm
Ahh, the ostrich defence. Pretend the evidence doesn’t exist. You managed to avoid engaging with any of it. To take just one really easy example, Mary Rosh claimed that Lott was the best professor that I ever had, but you pretend that it wouldn’t have made a difference if he had posted the same thing under his own name.
And if you had actually paid attention to what I have written you might have noticed a difference between when I point out that something Lott wrote is an error (like in the phrase “coding error”) and when I accuse him of dishonesty. An error is not necessarily deliberate, while dishonesty is.
March 18th, 2004 at 4:19 pm
An error is not necessarily deliberate, while dishonesty is.
Nice to see you finally recognize that. So why on earth does the coding error appear on an entry titled “John Lott’s Unethical Conduct?”
And, more importantly, for the third time, even if 100% of your allegations about Lott were true, what the devil does that have to do with your baseless swipes against others such as Mackay?
March 19th, 2004 at 5:58 pm
I did not “finally recognize” the difference between an error and dishonesty. I have been careful to make the distinction from the beginning. It has been your extraordinarily careless reading of writings that has mixed them up and you are the one who has (I hope) finally recognized the difference.
Dishonesty is a subset of unethical behaviour. Even though Lott knew in April that he had made the coding errors, he refused to acknowledge their existence until August, ducking all questions about them and continuing to put forward results based on the miscoded data. Apparently, you don’t see anything wrong with this.
And, when Mary Rosh claimed that Lott was the best professor that she ever had, there was no dishonesty? Is that your position?
March 21st, 2004 at 11:50 am
You’re right Tim, everything is someone else’s fault, not yours. It’s my fault that your web page, which you touted in the first comment, accuses Lott of such “unethical conduct” of “present[ing] results … when those results were the product of coding errors.” It was extraordinarily careless of me to take that assertion at face value, rather than read into it that Lott must have known the results to be erroneous at the time. Even the page it referenced (also authored, conveniently enough, by you) contains allegations which, if true, would prove nothing more than that Lott knew (as did anyone else who was paying attention to the controversy at the time) that Ayres and Donohue believed the results to be erroneous. That Lott himself later acknowledged as much does not mean he privately agreed with them at the time, as you seem to be suggesting.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. It’s also my fault, I presume, that your entire site reads more like a “get Lott” site than like a remotely evenhanded effort to get at the truth. For every potentially serious charge (e.g., coding error, if known, or Mary Rosh, regardless), there are dozens of silly hair-trigger charges (e.g. anonymous reviewing other people’s works, which Amazon allows), and potentially serious ones based on little or no evidence (e.g., anonymously reviewing his own work to bolster its rating - based on no evidence beyond the fact that in each hand-picked case, the anonymous favorable reviewer happened to live or work in the same major metropolitan area that Lott did at the time). A few of the charges are not even credible on their face: why on earth would John Lott give a bad review to a book by Gary Kleck, whom he has cited favorably in the past?
I suppose that if I were to follow every link from Tim Lambert to Tim Lambert, then maybe, buried in their somewhere, I would find evidence of some “private” conversation in which John Lott tells a trusted friend something along the lines of:
Yup, Ayres and Donohue got me dead to rights on this one, but I’m still going to milk this “guns and crime” thing for a few more months until the general public catches on. Oh yeah, those Amazon reviews? Damn I was clever, wasn’t I? Too bad I wasn’t clever enough to make up some other fake name, or at least pretend to be an anonymous reviewer from some city than the one I resided in. D’oh!
Who knows, after hours of researching Lambert’s links to Lambert, I might even find a link or two to to an external, corraborating source. But there are only so many hours in the day, and frankly, if I cared that much about the Lott controversy, I’d be more interested in researching sites that at least sound as though the person maintaining the site is making a good-faith effort to get to the bottom of the situation, rather than merely attempting to throw everything and the kitchen sink, and see what, if anything, will stick.
As to Mary Rosh, I’ve already said that stunt was unacceptable. I don’t know what special significance you attach to the “my favorite professor” part, one way or the other. Creating a phony persona was bad. Doing so by casting that persona as a starry-eyed student doesn’t make that any better or worse in my book. I for one am no more likely to believe the results of any professor’s reseach solely because an ex-student, real or imagined, tells me that Prof. So-and-So was his/her favorite professor. Are you?
Since this is now the third time in this thread that you have changed the subject from Mackay to Lott, can I safely assume that you recognize you were full of crap when it came to Mackay?
March 22nd, 2004 at 5:55 am
When I use the word “error” with the dictionary meaning and you somehow fail to understand, the fault is yours, not mine. I see that you are continuing with your ostrich defence by refusing to look at the evidence against Lott. You don’t have to look at it if you don’t want to, but you should not misrepresent it.
It would only have taken Lott about four minutes to verify that the data was miscoded. How long do you think it takes to look in a table and see that a value was zero instead of 1999? He corrected the data on his website but it was four months before he publically admitted that the data was miscoded. During that time he continued to advance results based on data that he knew was miscoded. Here’s what Ayres and Donohue had to say about Lott’s conduct:
Although he refuses to acknowledge this fact, we showed in a recent article published in the Stanford Law Review that when the coding errors in his own data set are corrected, his own regressions show no such drop in crime. Lott tries to distract the readers by stating that our study illustrating his coding errors was only published in a law review, rather than in a peer-reviewed journal. But since Lott knows that merely correcting his errors did eliminate his finding, it is dishonest for him not to concede the fact. How can we assert that Lott knows that we correctly identified coding errors in his data? Because he had put his data set on his own web page before we found his errors, and he has now gone in and quietly corrected the errors that we identified. Lott should put an end to the charade and acknowledge that his own most recently published regressions, when corrected, offer no support for the more guns, less crime hypothesis.
Using Mary Rosh to praise Lott as the best professor she ever had goes beyond creating a persona and is a dishonest use of such a persona. Would the statement have worked if he had posted it under his own name? Clearly not. Does this make “Mary Rosh” more effective at propounding Lott’s research? No, but he was doing it for a petty ego boost. Another example is that even though Lott had failed to get tenure, Mary had promoted him to chaired professor. And even though Lott admitted that his use of Mary Rosh was “wrong”, the very next day he was posting again using another pseudonym.
You misrepresent the evidence on the book reviews. It is not just based on the location of the reviewer but on the writing style, the review dates, and the fact that he wrote some of them under the names of his pseudonyms Mary Rosh and Washingtonian and the names of his children maximcl and sherwinrl. You have some other explanation for this? I explained carefully Lott’s reason for panning Kleck’s book but you ignored all of this. And no, his reviews of Kleck were not acceptable at Amazon. They were deleted when Kleck told Amazon about them.
I stand by my comments on Mackay. We’ll get to them when we finish discussing the first paragraph of your post.
March 22nd, 2004 at 7:08 am
Look, I’m not disputing that some of these charges are serious. I’m simply stating that from reading your site, it’s difficult if not impossible to tell which. Assuming all the additional facts you state here are accurate, then I agree that those charges are serious. I also agree that making Mary Rosh into a starry-eyed student makes that personal a cheap ego boost; I just don’t see it as a very big deal in terms of academic ethics. I feel the same way about calling oneself “Professor Lott” while pretending to be someone else. Pretending to be someone else is bad, but having that person call you “Professor So-and-So” is par for the course. I got called that when I was a TA, despite having corrected my students repeatedly. So if I were going to pretend to be one of them, or a layman, or almost anyone else, of course I’d call me “Professor X,” not “John M. Olin Fellow X.” But that is largely immaterial because I wouldn’t do something like that, and Lott shoudln’t have done so, either.
Can we finally put the Lott thing to rest and get to Mackay’s “dishonesty” in including the statement you accused him of excluding from the article? That accusation, not anything relating to Lott (except as background), was what prompted this.
March 23rd, 2004 at 8:45 am
You wrote:
Look, I’m not disputing that some of these charges are serious. I’m simply stating that from reading your site, it’s difficult if not impossible to tell which.
Actually you did not simply state that at all. You called my site “paranoid rantings” and claimed it was mostly gratuitous personal attacks on Lott. You then proceed to call me “Timmy”, “Tim the Great”, “Dim”, “Timwit”, “Timbecile”, “a jerk” and “Dim Lambert”. You also used the category to call me a moron and the title to call me an asshat. That was nine gratuitous personal attacks on me in one single post. I have 383 posts on Lott. In all of those posts not once have I made a personal attack like those you made over and over again against me.
The “additional facts” I stated here are all available on my blog and they are not hidden away. You just never bothered to read them. Lott’s claim that he was a chaired professor was dishonest. He knew quite well that it wasn’t true. It was only a little thing and it didn’t gain him very much but that is actually very telling about his character — if he lies about little things that hardly matter then he is likely to lie about big things if he thinks he can get away with it.
Now, as for Mackay, he was rather dishonest because he wrote something he knew to be untrue, saying that Hill got a bill instead of compensation, when Hill did not get a bill but did get compensation.
March 23rd, 2004 at 10:02 am
Your point is well taken as to names like “Dim,” “Timbecile,” etc. These names were inappropriate, and for those I apologize. They’ve been removed. “Jerk,” however, has not been and will not be removed. I’m sorry, but accusing Mackay of dishonesty without any justification whatsoever, not once but twice, was acting like jerk. So that term stays. So do “Asshat” and “Moron,” which are regular features/categories on this blog. Show me some real justification for your charges about Mackay, and I’ll gladly substitute my own name in the heading for yours, but even then, the labels themselves would stay put.
As to your repeated statements about Mackay, I’ve already pointed out the paragraph in which he made it clear that the prisoners got compensation. The word “clawback” is an additional clue; you don’t claw something “back” that you didn’t hand over in the first place.
As I read the article, it seems pretty clear that the prisoners in question got both compensation first, and a bill later demanding that some of this compensation be returned. Do you have any evidence that this is not true?
March 24th, 2004 at 3:13 am
From the BBC story :
The Home Office wants to deducted the sum as payment for his keep in jail and is challenging Mr O’Brien’s High Court victory last April.
In that case, Mr Justice Maurice Kay ruled that a Home Office decision to deduct “saved living expenses” in compensation payments had been mistakenly applied.
Lawyers are now battling to overturn that decision at the appeal court.
Is that clear enough for you? They haven’t sent out a bill — they are appealing a decision that said that they could not make a deduction from the compensation payment.
March 24th, 2004 at 7:33 am
As to O’Brien, that’s true. However, after re-re-reading the Sunday Herald piece I have to back off on my previous comment slightly. The only ex-inmate Mackay clearly said was sent a bill was Robert Brown. Vincent Hickey is a stretch, as Mackay says nothing about his case beyond quoting Hickey himself in saying that Mackay quotes Hickey saying that a hunger strike would have gotten him a smaller bill. Neither of those two is mentioned in the BBC article, which is limited to O’Brien.
Show me evidence that Brown was in fact sent a puny compensation at the end, rather than a bill to recoup a portion of the compensation he was previously awarded, and I’ll concede that you had at least located a factual misstatement in the Mackay article. So far, you haven’t done that. Even if you do, it’s going to take more than that to justify your claim that this alleged misstatement was deliberate, or done with intent to deceive anyone.
In fact, I’m not even sure why you think that difference is so important. Both articles make it clear that the government pays compensation to wrongly convicted inmates, and both articles make it clear that the government wants to claw back a portion to cover room and board costs. Whether the government steals the money before or after it pays out the base compensation, the principle is exactly the same.
March 24th, 2004 at 9:08 am
Mackay doesn’t just say that Brown got a bill. He says that they all get a big, fat bill:
WHAT do you give someone who
March 27th, 2004 at 12:49 am
Mackay doesn’t just say that Brown got a bill. He says that they all get a big, fat bill
This just keeps getting better and better. Now Mackay is a liar because you and he disagree over whether the amount of a bill justifies its characterization as “big” or “fat?” Give me a break.
You are right, though, that I should have read the articles a little more carefully. Had I done so, and anticipated your last argument, I would have noticed that the Mackay article doesn’t actually come out and say that anyone was sent a bill, as you previously said, and as I previously conceded. What it does say is that Brown “is now facing a bill of around £80,000,” which is fully consistent with your claim that Brown has not yet been sent any bills, but could receive one depending on the outcome of O’Brien’s appeal. It’s also impossible to tell from the two articles whether the cases are even linked; the Mackay article is silent on that issue, while the BBC article doesn’t mention Brown at all. For all I - or you? - know, Brown may well have been sent a bill, totally independently of this case, to which he is not even a party.
I will give you credit for one thing, though. John Lott’s latest piece has been on the web for two whole days now, and during that period you have refrained from accusing either him or NRO of “deliberately and dishonestly” misspelling the name of Gilda Radner’s famous character, Roseanne Rosannadanna, or “deliberately and dishonestly” mixing up that character with Emily Litella, the real source of the time-honored “never mind!”
March 28th, 2004 at 8:03 am
No I did not say that Mackay was rather dishonest because I dispute whether the amount of a bill justified calling it “big”. As I have explained over and over again to you, THERE WERE NO BILLS SENT. Mackay was well aware of this but sexed up his story by writing (my emphasis):
“WHAT do you give someone who
March 28th, 2004 at 10:52 am
Saying that we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq is a statement with which I disagree. Saying that it was all about oil is factually incorrect, as today’s oil prices bear out in spades. Granted, some of demonstrators who chanted that phrase may have honestly believed it, but I don’t believe for a minute that the organizers did.
Nice dowdification of the above Mackay passage. Your version suggests that bills were sent. The original, being prefaced by “Well, if you’re David Blunkett…,” makes it clear this is the position Blunkett advocates, not the status quo.
As for examples of you accusing people (including, but not limited to Lott) of dishonesty over trivia, here’s a recap:
- Mackay on bills sent vs. amounts debited - not necessarily true as to Brown, but a distinction without a difference even if it is. Not serious.
- Lott pretending to be Mary Rosh - serious.
- Casting Mary Rosh as a starry eyed student - not serious.
- Anonymously reviewing own book to boost Amazon ratings - serious.
- Pseudonymously reviewing rivals’ books to lower their Amazon ratings - almost as serious
- Anonymously reviewing rivals’ books - not serious.
- Calling Steve Levitt “rabidly anti-gun” - only marginally more serious than attributing a famous Gilda Radner quote to the wrong SNL character.
As to your last piece on Lott, the safest assumption is that I’ve not read it, unless you are referring to the recent blog entry on laser pointers, in which case I have no opinion on it one way or the other. Giving credit where it’s due, I will say that your last entry on gullible gunnies was spot on as to the new case. You may be right as to the merits of Tony Martin’s criminal conviction. Nevertheless, his case still doesn’t make the Brits look too hot over all. Regardless of Martin’s culpability, his assailant should not have been allowed to sue him, and no one should be denied a pre-parole visit on such specious grounds as posing a “danger to burglars.”
March 30th, 2004 at 8:07 am
You wrote about the “no blood for oil” slogan:
isn’t the slogan also dishonest on a second level? I don’t know the stats, but I’d be very surprised if more than a handful of the “peace” protesters are also opposed to strict fuel emissions standards, which encourage people to drive smaller, more dangerous cars. So much for the idea that we shouldn’t trade blood for oil.
I’m pretty sure that people using the slogan are not thinking about your alleged implications on fuel emissions. But you call them “dishonest” merely for not agreeing with your interpretation. You call people that merely disagree with you “dishonest”. I do not.
I did not “Dowdify” the quote. The full quote says the same thing. Here is the full quote (appearing under the subeading
“Blunkett charges miscarriage of justice victims
March 30th, 2004 at 9:32 am
To my mind, “no blood for oil” effectively communicates two simultaneous messages:
- The war I’m protesting is primarily, if not exclusively, about oil.
- Human life is so sacred, and the idea of saving or obtaining oil so mundane, that it is never appropriate to sacrifice any human life to preserve or obtain any amount of oil.
Without #1, the chant makes no sense as an anti-war slogan; indeed, it would almost be better suited as a pro-war rejoinder, as if to say “That’s right, we are shedding no blood for oil. Regretfully, some blood is being shed for bigger and better things, but none for oil.”
Absent the absolutism of #2, the best available argument is one straight out of The Onion: “trading blood for oil is just dandy, it’s just a question of how much blood we’re trading for how much oil.” That is, essentially, the argument many of the “no blood for oil” folk resort to when confronted with evidence of safety issues. I suppose it is even possible that the projected blood-to-oil ratio of the strictest emissions standards imaginable is lower than the projected (or actual) blood-to-oil ratio of the war against Iraq, but it doesn’t really matter since no one is arguing that position anyway.
Of course the protesters are not thinking about both the war issue and the safety issue at the same time. That’s not the point. The point is that while arguing against a cause they oppose, they pretend - for purely rhetorical reasons - to attach a higher value to human life than they really do. Again, this is not true of all protesters, but it is true of many.
If you didn’t think the Mackay statement was particularly serious, then why did you post two comments calling it “deliberately dishonest” (as if it were possible to be inadvertently dishonest), rather than one simply identifying it as “incorrect,” “not the whole story,” or even “misleading?”
I’ll admit, it would have been much more entertaining for Mary Rosh to have been a disgruntled ex-student who thinks Lott is a crotchety, nerdy, mildly annoying guy who does crappy research. That’s a bit much to expect, however. My point is that if a scholar is going to bolster is credibility by improperly pretending to be someone else, the way to do that is to cast himself as another, respected scholar, not as a starry-eyed student who everyone knows is too young and naive for her praises of his scholarship to mean anything.
I don’t know anything about “Washingtonian,” but that doesn’t even sound like a real name. For reasons that should be obvious, I don’t object to anyone using a nom de plume that does not purport to be anythying else.
Color me dense, but I fail to see the moral distinction between anonymously “reviewing” a work and anonymously “panning” it, unless by “pan” you mean “deliberately give a work a worse review than you think it deserves.” The distinction I conceded was not between reviewing and “panning,” but between up-front, “I’m not going to tell you who I am” anonymity vs. potentially deceptive pseudonymity. I blog pseudonymously myself, of course, but I do so under a name no one with an above-room temperature IQ would mistake for my real identity. That’s why I’m OK with “Washingtonian” but not “Mary Rosh.”
As to Levitt, I did follow several of your links, though perhaps not all of them. Frankly, I was more than a little un-impressed by the paper you presented as “proof” that Levitt wasn’t anti-gun after all. That paper wasn’t even about guns, but pools. Was there another, more substantive counter-argument that I missed?
Anyway, this thread has gone on way too long already, so I’m going to pull a Bill O’Reilly and give you the last word. Meanwhile, I’m revoking the “asshat” prize. I still think your assessment of Mackay was unjustified, but it’s definitely not in the same league as the crap that has prompted such “awards” in the past, which include:
- a pharmacist who refused to sell morning after pills to a rape victim
- a woman who knowingly adopted someone else’s dog and the “Humane” Society that went along with it
- a blogger who accused me others of racism for opposing gov’t benefits to illegals
- a police chief who pressed charges against a homeowner for lawfully defending himself with a handgun
- an anti-war protester who couldn’t decide whether to root [in the non-Australian sense of the word] for the soldiers, or for the terrorists their successes resulted in political demise of George Bush
Like I said, the “prize” is gone, and the last word is yours if you want it.
March 30th, 2004 at 10:10 pm
Congrats to Xrlq and Tim Lambert. Although heated at times, their discourse has led to a grudging admiration of the defense of the other’s position and recognition that said position could be formed and maintained without the use of psychotropic drugs — even if the other side is still wrong.
No explosives were attached to teenagers, no innocents were slaughtered, and nobody was jailed on trumped-up charges during the course of this discussion.
Further, despite being on Xrlq’s blog, the information has not been sanitized and both sides of the argument are still available for reference and perusal.
Let’s hope that Xrlq and Tim can have a beer together someday — but more importantly, let’s realize that this entire discussion could not have taken place under Sharia, in the USSR, in China, in Iraq under Hussein….or, in fact, in a horribly huge chunk of the world today.
So raise a glass to the blogosphere, where “asshat” and “jerk” are acceptable ways to say, “G’day” and “do you have a defensible opinion?”
March 31st, 2004 at 8:59 am
Hats off to Xlrq
A couple of weeks ago Xlrq wrote about me:
He
April 1st, 2004 at 9:52 am
Damnum
Apparently some think this is an April Fool’s joke. I guess I should have waited until tomorrow to respond but I am just so upset. C’mon, he’s mean. He’s so mean that sometimes he has to chastise himself. And he’s…
July 11th, 2005 at 11:25 am
[...] Last year blogger Xrlq dismissed my criticism of Lott as “paranoid rantings” and “gratuitous attacks on Lott personally”, calling me “Dim”, “Timwit”, “Timbecile”, “a jerk” and “Dim Lambert”. [...]
March 17th, 2004 at 4:01 pm
Mr Xlrq somehow forgot to link to my criticism of Lott, making it harder for his readers to see how inaccurate Xlrq’s description of it was. Readers interested in making up their own minds can go here.
Here’s a challenge for Xlrq: find one case where I called Lott dishonest, and mount a defence of his conduct. And just to be clear here, calling me names does not count as a defence of Lott.
March 18th, 2004 at 12:21 am
The instances in which you’ve questioned Lott’s honesty, ethical standards, etc. are too numerous to count. Rather than attempting to chronicle them all, let’s just use the four examples on the page you linked to:
Translation: Lott conducted a survey in 1997, was too careless to back up his hard drive, and lost all the data when it crashed. Another possibility, and one that fits much better with your overall agenda, is that the 1997 survey never really occurred, and he simply made it up. That could be true, but that’s hardly the same as it being “almost certain.”
Sez you. There certainly were coding errors in the first study, which were subsequently corrected, but I’m not convinced that the entire “more guns, less crime” thesis rests on those errors - certainly the later editions suggest otherwise. No matter. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that coding errors accounted for everything. Even then, there’s no evidence - none that you’ve cited, anyway - to suggest these errors were intentional. Absent that, your accusations of dishonest/unethical behavior simply do not hold up.
Clearly, that was a stupid thing to do. Ultimately, however, “Mary Rosh’s” arguments, like those Lott advances under his own name, stand or fall on their merits, not on the name under which they were offered. It’s not as though there is a real Mary Rosh out there, and Lott bolstered his credibility by exploiting her good name.
Perhaps there’s more to this “probably” than there was to your earlier assertion that Lott “almost certainly” made up the 1997 survey whose results just happened to gibe with those of a subsequent survey whose existence no one doubts. If there is, however, the pages you link to don’t bear it out. The immediate link is to a page written by you, which entitles it to zero evidentiary weight in and of itself. That entry simply claims, without citing any sources, that Lott “is widely believed” [nice strategic use of the passive voice there] to have been the anonymous person who accused Steve Levitt of being “rabidly antigun.” A few Google searches yielded more non-evidence, such as Brad DeLong’s brilliant observation that no one who is biased against guns could possibly observe that pools kill more far more kids than guns do - which is true - while writing an article about pool accidents, not guns. In the same thread, we find your even more amusing astonishment over the fact that a blogger would dare to suggest there is no evidence to support DeLong’s creative theory, when gee, he links to … your blog! Yeah, there’s the smoking gun. Right. Next time you rely on such transparently circular logic, do us all a favor and at least try to build a larger circle. Building one this small merely insults the reader’s intelligence.