On Xrlq’s Name-Calling Habit
Jul 14
This comment by “slickdpdx” sums it up nicely:
You’ve definitely got the upper hand in the argument, but you’ve gotta admit that “Timbecile” and “Dim Lambert” are both pretty good (if uncalled for and patently false!) Maybe xlrq should get a full time job writing jokes for elementary school age bullies.
Hee!
(For samples of such name-calling, simply go to xrlq.com, where I’m sure you won’t have to look very far.)
#1 by Xrlq at July 14th, 2005
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“Hee” is right. I’m sure you have never made an intemperate remark about anyone, including any that you may have retracted, apologized for and deleted a few days afterward. I’m also sure that if, God forbid, you had committed such a horrible and vile act as that, you wouldn’t consider it the least bit petty, unseemly or below the belt for that individual to dredge it up a year and a half later just to score a cheap political point on an unrelated subject. Right?
#2 by Tim Lambert at July 14th, 2005
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Xrlq fails to mention that he later unretracted the insults and withdrew his apology. Since then he also called me a moron, a nut, and scum. Nor did I bring them up in an unrelated subject. Xrlq issued those insults in a post attacking me for daring to criticize his hero, John Lott, and I brought them up to help show my readers that he is a strong supporter of Lott, as well as to show them what sort of person he is.
#3 by Xrlq at July 16th, 2005
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Translation: the insults themselves are long gone, except in Lambert’s own subsequent comments and posts harping on them. However, when Lambert started acting like a jerk again a year and a half after the fact, it became clear that maybe the original insults weren’t so far off base after all. Since then, I have blogged a couple more times about Lambert’s antics, using the appropriate categories each time. And the claim that I issued the original insults in response to criticizing my non-hero John Lott is a lie, plain and simple. The post was about is baseless attack on someone else, on an unrelated issue, and referenced Lott only peripherally. But Lambert keeps trying to change the subject and make it about Lott.
Also note that Lambert’s selective outrage over year and a half old insults appears to be limited to names directed at him. Most of the names he accuses me of calling him are simply category names, none of which were designed specifically for him or anyone else in particular. Indeed, he didn’t seem to have any objection at all when my bile was directed toward someone he didn’t much like, either.
#4 by Tim Lambert at July 16th, 2005
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His second comment to a post about his name-calling habit and Xrlq calls me a jerk and accuses me of lying. Thanks for proving tgirsch’s point!
#5 by Xrlq at July 16th, 2005
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Tim, you seem to have confused me with Tgirsch. He opposes name-calling in principle; I don’t. I oppose gratuitous name-calling, which is why the words “timbecile” and “Dim Lambert” exist only in your comments and on your blog, and not on the original blog entry from which they’ve been scrubbed for a year and a half. This despite the fact that they referred to points you had accidentally-on-purpose overlooked, which were obvious enough to the casual reader that only a dim person or an imbecile would be justified in failing to grasp them. If I had that post to write over again, the juvenile terms would be gone but the spirit would be the same: this guy’s analysis of Neil Mackay’s piece is so transparently bad it could only have been made by a person who either is an idiot or is playing dumb.
Bad puns on anybody’s name would be out, if for no other reason, then because we’re still wasting ones and zeros in a meta-discussion over them rather than the substance of the original post, which you never did address satisfactorily. But some names do fit, and frankly, when you dredge up antique, long-gone comments just to score a cheap political point against an anonymous blogger whom out also out for no good reason but to harass him, then I’m sorry, but you are acting like a jerk, and that needs to be said. Out loud.
Similarly, when you repeat an untrue statement, the falsity of which has been pointed out to you repeatedly in the past, at some point it stops being a “mistake” and starts being nothing more or less than a bare-faced lie. You’re not above accusing others of lying, so it takes more than a little chutzpah for you to take umbrage over having the word applied to you now, when that’s precisely what you did.
Sometimes the truth hurts, but in my case, at least, there is an easy solution. If you don’t like being called a jerk, don’t act like a jerk. If you don’t want to be called a liar, then don’t tell lies. It’s really that simple. And if you want to set a general “no name-calling” ground rule, fine, but then you’d best adhere to it yourself (as Tgirsch, to his credit, has generally done). You can’t call one person “crazy” or “really stupid and immature,” accuse three others of lying and/or dishonesty, and then cry about name-calling when a fraction of your own invective ends up being directed back at you.
#6 by Tim Lambert at July 17th, 2005
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Here is the entire paragraph that Xlrq is complaining about:
I included his gratutous personal attacks on me because of his false claim that my criticism of Lott was mainly “gratuitous attacks on Lott personally”. Now Xrlq has offered the justification for his conduct that all he is doing is directing back to me a fraction of my “invective”. If that were true, he should be able to find many many examples of my invective and gratuitous personal attacks directed at Lott. But he can’t.
Xlrq, I don’t believe your claim that your attack on me had nothing to do with my criticism of Lott. You have frequently cited Lott and stubbornly defended him and clearly do not want his work discredited. If you fail to make a persuasive case you are not justified in accusing someone who is not persuaded of lying. Perhaps in your own mind you think your arguments are so wonderful that no honest person could disagree with you, but it ain’t so.
#7 by Xrlq at July 18th, 2005
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If Tim Lambert tells you it’s noon, step outside to check your shadow. If he tells you I cite Lott a lot, presumably for purposes more substantive than merely to poke fun at Lambert himself, be sure to verify that also. You could type something into the search window on my blog, but hey, maybe I just hid a bunch of pro-Lott posts to make a point. I don’t have that kind of power over Google caches, though, so feel free to Google the search terms “+lott -lambert site:xrlq.com” just to see how frequently I have cited Lott on substance rather than merely to smack Lambert around. Out of the 2,388 entries I’ve posted in over 2 1/2 years, you’ll find a whopping nine (count ‘em, nine) links on the front page, the rest of which Google omits as “very similar” (as indeed they are - but don’t take my word or Google’s as to their similarity - go ahead and sample a few of those, too).
Once you’re satisfied that the nine in question are the real deal, follow all nine links, and you’ll find that even that number is inflated, as only five actually say anything about John R. Lott, and only one of those - the entry dated February 10, 2003 - actually relies on his research for anything. Even there it’s tangential, consisting of a perfunctory mention of Lott’s name alongside that of Gary Kleck, whom Lambert has praised in the past. If John R. Lott were to stand up tomorrow and confess to every one of Lambert’s crazy theories and more, I suppose I might have to make the minor change of deleting Lott’s name from that entry and relying instead on Kleck alone, but the meat of that entry would be left undisturbed, and the other four would require no editing whatsoever. Two are actually two separate references to a single, throwaway entry (one to the individual entry and the other to the monthly archive that contains it) in which I observed without further comment that Lott had written a spirited defense of something other than guns that go bang (fireworks) and the other two are false hits which do relate to Lambert but don’t contain his name (one is the comment thread to my entry responding to the one linked to here, the other, an inline trackback from that same entry). The remaining four don’t have anything to do with John Lott at all; three are about Trent Lott, and the fourth merely involved Google finding John Lott on my blogroll.
Yup, these are the musings of someone whose whole world would come crashing down if Lott’s research were discredited, all right. Or maybe not? I report, you decide.
#8 by Tim Lambert at July 18th, 2005
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Here are just some examples of the stuff you’ve written about Lott:
#9 by Tim Lambert at July 18th, 2005
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Here are just some examples of the stuff you’ve written about Lott:
Plenty more where those came from.
#10 by Xrlq at July 19th, 2005
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I didn’t know we were talking about the prehistoric days of Usenet, but what the hell. The last example was from 1998; the others may be a bit newer, but it’s a safe bet none where posted after 2002, as I generally abandoned Usenet when I took up blogging. Did I quote Lott back then? Obviously, yes. Does that have anything to do with what I’ve been blogging since 2002? I think not. Is that a reason for me to really, really, really want Lott to be right? Hell no. Spend more time searching for stuff I posted on Usenet (1993-2002), and you’ll find me saying all kinds of crap I don’t subscribe to today. If Lambert’s case were nearly as strong as he thinks it is, this would be no exception, if for no other reason, then because the silly theories Lott’s detractors leveled then were not the same ones Lambert levels now anyway. They were equally scattershot, equally “righteous” in their aims, etc., but mutually inconsistent. The closest thing I heard back then to a sock puppet theory was the mirror image: a Lott detractor was convinced that the guy claiming to be John Lott was really somebody else, and when I emailed him a confirmation I’d received from Lott, he concluded that *I* was somebody’s sock puppet, too. So you’ll have to pardon me if I’m responding to Lambert’s expose like someone watching a bad sequel to a worse film he’s already seen, even if half the people in the theater are wowed by what appears new to them. If it quacks like a duck…