Tim Lambert accuses many different online personalities of being John Lott. Xrlq is unconvinced. While Lott has a history of using internet pseudonyms (yeah, I’m one [...]

3. The answer is that you are full of crap. You can’t move from Swarthmore to Washington and from Washington “at the same time,” in real life or on Amazon. And you have no proof Lott posted any reviews on Amazon at all beyond the one for that boxed set. The fact that all of the reviews of Economist123 fka JL (maybe) changed at once proves nothing beyond the fact that all reviews associated with the profile that is now called Economist123 are in fact associated with the profile that is now called Economist123.

4 1/2. Are you being deliberately dense? Jessica Cutler didn’t adopt the name “Washingtonienne” solely because she worked in Washington. She did so to conceal where she really was from. If Lott followed Cutler’s logic, he’d have called himself “Pennsylvanian” instead. And if anyone did use a profile like that to describe Lott favorably, you’d doubtless be touting that as proof that he’s John Lott, too.

5. Yes, as a matter of fact, it is impossible that Lott would inadvertently log on to the JL/Economist123/Washingtonian2 account anytime after 1/1/02, when he posted a review under his real name. And yes, the switch back would have had to have been inadvertent for your theory to be remotely plausible, as neither as neither the real John Lott nor your little fake friend has posted a single review since then which the real John Lott would have had any reason to keep anonymous.

6. Maybe your ISP works that way, and for all I know, maybe all Australian ones do, but mine sure as hell doesn’t, nor did the one I had at my prior residence three years ago. I’ve been blogging since 12/02 and using Sitemeter since 1/03, and have never had a problem excluding my own page views from their count, using a system that takes your current IP address and replaces the final octet with a wildcard. This very weekend I’ve experienced massive outages, with the service down for hours on end and returning only intermittently. I’ve also been instructed by my ISP to power cycle my modem twice, and done the same on my own two more times, establishing a fresh connection each time. Yet, for some strange reason, the IP address associated with this here comment is exactly the same as the one associated with my first in this thread. All a strange coincidence, I’m sure. Or, better still, “made up.” Right.

Yes, we have come full circle, but no, that doesn’t mean I’ve run out of arguments, only patience. You can only hide the ball and move the goalposts so many times before you either “win” an argument by wearing the other side down (as you did last time) or you lose it big by exposing yourself as either a dupe or a fraud (as you did this time).

Last time I called you those nasty names based on some initial impressions, which I had neither the time nor the resources to prove correct, and thus had little choice but to presume incorrect when challenged. This time, you’ve provided all the proof I lacked, and more. In light of that, I hereby retract my earlier apology. I do appreciate you reminding me to re-file the current entry under “morons,” however. I really mean that.

3. Yet another evasion. I think it is now over a dozen times you have evaded this point. It’s very clear that you have no answer. The changes were Washington -> Swarthmore -> Washington. And they all happened at the same time. At the same time as the changes to the location of Lott’s review of Malcolm’s book. Are you seriously trying to argue that some other economist with initials JL, with a writing style the same as Mary Rosh and an uncanny familiarity with Lott’s work was shuttling between Swarthmore nad Washington just like Lott. And also was posting reviews to Amazon. And changed his location when he posted a new review at the same time as Lott. And then this mystery JL economist deleted his wishlist within minutes of my pointing it out. If he’s not Lott, why would he do that? You don’t have an answer, do you?

4 1/2 You admit that Washingtonienne adopted that name because she workede in Washington, but you insist that isn’t possible that Lott would use the same Washingtonian even though he worked in Washington. Right.

5. My “wacky” theory is that if you review a book on Amazon you will likely use the account you used for your previous review because that is what Amazon automatically logs you into. Your claim is that this is “impossible”.

6. Apparently you now think you can make up “facts” about computers and fool me with with your fabrications. ISPs do not always allocate you IPs in the same /8 range. IPs are in short supply and that would be a very inefficient scheme. They have a pool of IPs that they allocate from. I haven’t moved or changed ISPs in the past two years and my IP has changed many times. Even the first part of the IP has varied: sometimes it has been 211.x.x.x, sometimes 220.x.x.x.

And now, since you’ve run out of arguments, you are turning to abuse. In your original post 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. I see we’ve come full circle.

3. Do you even know WTF Swarthmore is?! People move there from the greater D.C. area all the time. Lott, by contrast, has never moved from D.C. to Swarthmore, only in the opposite direction.

4 1/2. Of course she was. The whole idea behind that name “Washingtonienne,” which she isn’t, was to stress that she worked on Capitol Hill, while keeping everyone guessing what state she hailed from. Had she called herself Ohioanne her identity would have been much more easily detected. Just this morning my wife, who is unaware of this discussion, was asked if she was a Californian. Her answer was “no,” without even having to think about it, despite having lived here 9 years and despite her being the one who wants to stay.

5. Impossible that he forgot he had an account in his own name, despite having updated it around the same time he supposedly used the other account to review his own book. The only way your wacky theory would work is if he had deliberately set up one account for purposes of being himself and the other for purposes of pretending to be someone else. He wouldn’t have simply “forgotten” about that. You were right about the date of the review; I goofed and copied the date that the boxed set came out. However, the correct date, 1/1/02, does not make your forgetfulness theory any more plausible, given its proximity in time to Non-John’s 12/13/01 review of Franklin Zimring’s book.

6. I don’t have the time, energy or frankly even interest to investigate every wild accusation you’ve made in full. I would be interested in knowing the truth behind the present one, but it’s clear you either unwilling or unable to discuss it honestly. First you claimed to have a bunch of incriminating IP addresses that all pointed to Tom H. Then you had to be asked twice to produce any IP addreses at all, and four more times after that to reveal any alleged to be associated with Tom H. And now you are trying to tell me that Tom H. used two different Comcast accounts, despite having previously told me only one was used by Lott in his alleged capacity as Tom H. And no, cable providers do not change any part of your IP address except the final segment when you disconnect and reconnect. If 69.143.109.93 were to turn off his cable modem and turn it back on, he might conceivably return as 69.143.109.92 or even 69.143.109.89, but there is no way he would come back as 69.143.118.XX And turning off his computer wouldn’t have any impact on his IP address at all.

Within the span of a single thread you have now lied or deliberately misled readers in at least six ways. First you “dowdified” an attribution to make it look like a signature. Second, when called on that you changed the topic to a wish list no one other than you has ever seen. Third, when called on the absence of proof for that, you suddenly “discovered” a copy of the list you’d supposedly had all along. Not even a screen shot, which at least requires a fair amount of skill to forge, but simple HTML, which anyone can easily edit to make it say anything. Fourth, when called on that, you falsely accused me of accusing you of forging the document – not that you’d have anything to complain about if I had, given your pattern of assuming the worst of others. Fifth, you attempted to change the subject to irrelevant details too many times to count. Sixth, you stated as fact that Lott had posted under multiple accounts, despite having no evidence to support that claim beyond some hocus-pocus “style” analysis, which amounts to little beyond the mere usage of the word “comprehensive.” [UPDATE: most of this paragraph was lost on the original posting, and has since been restored from memory, a few hours after Lambert's response below.]

Either you are too both too myopic to recognize a troll jerking your chain and too arrogant to admit you’ve been wrong, or you are every bit as dishonest as you accuse Lott of being. Either way, your opinions are utterly worthless. Have a nice day.

3. Another evasion. The changes were Washington -> Swarthmore -> Washington. And they all happened at the same time. At the same time as Lott’s revie of Malcolm’s book. No doubt you will evade this again. And no “many people” do not move from Washington to Swarthmore. Swarthmore only has about 5000 people and there aren’t many reviews at Amazon from Swarthmore. In fact, my list contains every single one by “a reader from Swarthmore”. And all of them changed at once to a “reader from Washington”. Are seriously trying to argue that was coincidence? Seriously?

4 1/2. He doesn’t claim to be from DC. You think Washingtonienne was claiming to be from DC?

5. “Impossible”???? It is impossible for him to use an account that he used several times before as opposed to one he only used once? (Yes once, he posted that one review in 2002, not 1999.)

6. If, you look at my post that lists all of his sock postings you might notice that they were not all posted on the same day, but over a year. And guess what? People sometimes change ISPs. From September to December 2004, Tom H was posting from the speakeasy IP and there were frequent visits to the Lott posts (and just the Lott posts) on my blog. After there was not a single visit from that IP. It seems that Tom H swtiched ISPs because instead there were visits from the first Comcast IP and posts by Tom H from that IP. One interesting feature was that the first visit of a day was not to the front page but to the comments of a post about Lott that Tom H and Bob had commented on extensively. Clearly Tom H had booked that page and used it as an entry to my blog. All visits from this IP stopped on April 15. On April 17 frequent visits started from the second Comcast IP. The very first hit was to Tom H’s bookmarked post. There have been frequent visits from that IP since then — he visited the post about economist123 about a dozen times on the first day it was posted.

ISPs sometimes change the IP assigned to you if you turn your computer off. Between April 15 and April 17 Tom H upgrade his computer to MaCOS 10.3.9.

7. The wish list that was deleted was the one associated with the washingtonian2/economist123/JL account. It was not some other wish list.

It’s good to see that you have struck out your false claims about the content of Lott’s book. Now, how about you strike out your false claims that Lott would not make spelling mistakes like washingtonian2 did?

3. You haven’t “explained” anything. I know full well that your handle change when you change your location. When I posted my own review of MGLC I didn’t call myself Xrlq, nor did I live anywhere Rancho Santa Margarita. The fact that somebody moved from D.C. to Swarthmore is unremarkable. Many people have moved in that direction, while Lott himself has not.

4 1/2. Nice try. I said he wouldn’t claim to be from D.C., which he isn’t. I never said he wouldn’t claim to be in D.C., which he is. If you quit your job tomorrow and moved to Canberra to work for some think tank, I would expect that you’d update your Amazon profile that you were now in Canberra. I would not expect you to change your handle to “Canberran,” let alone “Canberran2,” unless you had some other, deeper connection to the city.

5. Impossible. He may have only posted one review under that profile, in 1999, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t “used” that profile since. Common sense dictates that he must have accessed the account at least once after that, as he had no connection at all to Washington, D.C. until 2001 – just about the same time as the other guy reviewed MGLC. Your theory that he promptly forgot his password and ditched his real account within months of updating it is beyond silly. I’ve forgotten my own password on Amazon plenty of times, and never had any trouble at all getting it back.

6. Of course I know what a conspiracy is; I was just trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. While it is theoretically possible that one person might have both a Speakeasy DSL account and a cable Internet account from Comcast, it’s less clear why anyone in his right mind would want to. It’s even less plausible that a single person would have two separate cable Internet accounts from a single company (69.143.118.89 and 69.143.109.93). If you had alleged that the “sock puppets” were separate individuals working in concert, that would have been far-fetched but at least theoretically possible. Instead, you’ve asked me to believe John Lott was in two separate locations at the same time.

7. That’s not an answer. If any wish list was deleted, it was the one associated with John Lott’s real profile, not the one you are attempting to peg on him. That Maxim Lott, or someone claiming to be him, posted a comment on the Speakeasy account is irrelevant. I’ve already addressed the possiblity that Tom H. is the spook; if he is, expect more comments from his IP address under names Johnny Lott, Mary Rosh, Economist456, Washingtonian69, HelloTimLambert, or what-not.

Now that you’ve asked me to believe that a single person viewed your site and posted comments from two separate Comcast accounts during the same period, it’s up to you to explain how that’s even possible, let alone probable. Either that, or admit you were wrong, and that you owe an apology to Lott, me, and everyone else you’ve carelessly smeared as a Lott fanatic and/or “sock puppet.”

3. How many times do I have to explain this? When you post a review and give a location, ALL of the reviews posted from that account change to that location. Lott wasn’t aware of that — I certainly wasn’t until I tried an experiment. He posted a perfectly innocuous review of some Mac software and put down Swarthmore as his location. He didn’t expect his MGLC review to switch to Swarthmore. What is more, the same thing happens to all the anonymous reviews posted from that account. These don’t appear under the account name, but they do (or did — Amazon seems to have changed this) appear with the location of the reviewer given. This gives us a way to identify who posted these anonymous reviews. If they change locations at the same time and in the same way they come from the same account. As I explained several times before, the review of Joyce Lee Malcolm’s book that Lott signed his name to exhibits the same Washington -> Swarthmore -> Washington pattern. That means that the Malcolm review that Lott signed his name to was posted from the economist123/washingtonian2 account. You will no doubt try to evade this fact yet again.

4 1/2 In his review Lott gives his location as Washington DC. I thought you said it wasn’t plausible that he would do this?

5 He only used the John R Lott account once, but he used the other one for several reviews, including the JL Malcolm one that he signed his name to. If you accept a cookie, Amazon logs you straight into your account. So if you post a review/buy a book the next time you will do it from the same account unless you take the trouble to log out and log back in to a different account. He may well have forgotten about the other account or lost the password.

6. Do you even know what the word “conspiracy” means? Who has alleged that Lott conspired with somebody? Lott used one of sock puppets to post a link to your blog in that Crooked Timber thread. Like Mary Rosh, you defend Lott way way past the point at which any rational person would concede. Like Mary Rosh, you say you’ve met him and praise his abilities. If people mistake you for one of his socks, well, that’s your fault.

7. Economist123 was already tagged with washingtonian2. “JL” was another piece of evidence that pointed strongly to economist123 being Lott. Which is why he deleted the wish list. If economist123 isn’t Lott, why would he delete the wish list? Well?

Maxim Lott also posted from 66.93.100.155. Are you going to claim that is another coincidence?

In your previous comment, you referred to the Freakonomics review as “another” Economist123 review, despite the fact that this is the one we were discussing all along. If in your mind Freakonomics was “another” review, what did you think the original one was?