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”.

This year I noted that Lott had signed his name to a review of Freakonomics using the same Amazon account that he used for a five-star review his own book. Over the years the account name had changed from JL to washingtonian2 to economist123. Xrlq leaped to Lott’s defence, calling me a moron and asserting that I was “either a dupe or a fraud”. He argued that washingtonian2’s review of Lott’s book could not have been written by Lott because it contained spelling and grammatical errors and because it “betrays a shallow understanding of the substance of More Guns, Less Crime.” Here is the paragraph that he based this on (”sic”s added by Xrlq):

This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. It provides extensive evidence on waiting periods, the Brady Act, one-gun-a-month rules, [sic] concealed handgun laws. For some gun laws this is the only study available and it is important to note how many academics have tired [sic] to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even bothered to try and challenge his work on one-gun-a-month laws and other gun control laws.

Xrlq claimed that

As one who has met Lott in person, I can assure you that he has a much better command of the English language than Economist123 does.

and

One-gun-a-month laws are not a major focus of the book; in fact, to the best of my recollection Lott’s book doesn’t mention them at all.

If you look at the posts that Lott made as Mary Rosh you can see that just like economist123 he made frequent spelling and grammatical errors. And while most people aren’t aware of it, Lott’s book includes an analysis of one-gun-a-month laws. Only a reviewer who was very familiar with Lott’s work, like, uh, Lott would mention this. In fact, none of the other reviewers mention one-gun-a-month laws. But Mary Rosh did so repeatedly. For example, in this post:

As to the list of people you put down, notice that none of them one [sic] result that contradicted Lott’s work on the Brady act, waiting periods, or safe storage laws,[sic] one-gun-a-month rules.

So the two arguments that Xrlq raised (spelling/grammar and familiarity with Lott’s work) ended up confirming that Lott was the author of the review. Other evidence that Lott is washingtonian2 comes from the locations given at Amazon for the reviews. The location given for each review at Amazon.com is the location given for the last review posted from that account. That means that if a new review from a different location is posted, all the previous reviews posted from that account simultaneously change to the new location. We can use this feature to work out which reviews were posted from the same account. The location shown for washingtonian2’s review of More Guns, Less Crime changed from Washington to Swarthmore and back to Washington. At the same times, a review of Guns and Violence: The English Experience also changed from Washington to Swarthmore and back to Washington, so it was posted from washingtonian2’s account. And we know that this review was written and posted by Lott, because he signed his name to it. Note also that Swarthmore only has about 6,000 people. How many economists with intials “JL” are likely to be living there?

Undaunted by all of this, Xrlq came up with some more arguments as to why washingtonian2 totally was not John Lott.

First, that Lott would not have used the pseudonym “washingtonian2″ for his review because:

I don’t find it plausible that anyone who neither hails from Washington nor lives there would call himself “Washingtonian” solely because he recently took a job there.

I pointed out that Lott had called himself “Washingtonian” at Freerepublic.com. Xrlq said that it was “much more plausible” that these postings had been made by some prankster who knew that I had accused Lott of posting washingtonian2’s review. This was after I had carefully explained that those postings were written before I made the accusation. If I was a prankster and I had a time machine, I can think of better pranks to pull.

Second, that because Lott had another Amazon account in his own name, it was (and I quote) “impossible” for him to have used a different account for his review of Freakonomics. He hadn’t used that account for over three years and had been using the washingtonian2 account for all the reviews since then, including the review of Guns and Violence: The English Experience that he also signed his name to. Impossible for him to continue using the same account? I don’t think so.

Next, Xrlq disputed my findings in The Case of the Vanishing Wish List. Within minutes of my posting that washingtonian2/economist123’s Amazon wish list was titled “JL’s wish list”, the wish list was mysteriously deleted. During those few minutes, one of the IPs that Lott was using visited that page. Xrlq demanded proof that Lott was using that IP.

Here it is: From September to December 2004, one of Lott’s sock puppets, Tom H, was posting from a Speakeasy DSL IP (66.93.100.155), which according to Geobytes is located in Washington DC. Also posting from that IP were another sock, Bob H, and Maxim Lott (Lott’s son). During that time there were frequent visits from that IP to the Lott posts (and just the Lott posts) on my blog. After December, there was not a single visit from that IP. It seems that Lott switched ISPs because instead there were visits from a Comcast IP (69.143.109.93) (located in Arlington VA, right next to Washington DC) and posts from that IP by Tom H, Bob and yet another sock, Gregg. The first visit of a day was not to the front page but to this post about Lott where Tom H and Bob had commented extensively. Clearly Lott had bookmarked that page and used it as an entry to my blog. The browser used for all of these visits was Safari under MacOS X 10.3. Oddly enough, one of the reviews that washingtonian2 posted was for MacOS X 10.3.

All visits from this IP stopped on April 15. On April 17 frequent visits started from 69.143.118.89, another Comcast IP also located in Arlington VA. The very first visit from this IP was to Lott’s bookmarked post. It looks like the lease on the previous IP expired while he was upgrading the OS, because now the visits used Safari under MacOS X 10.4. There were frequent visits from that IP after that – he visited the post about economist123 about a dozen times on the day I posted it. 69.143.118.89 visited my page in the short interval between when I linked to JL’s wish list and when it was deleted. Note also that Comcast provides one IP per residential address, so all these visits came from the same house.

Faced with this evidence, Xrlq just made up his own facts about IP numbers:

cable providers do not change any part of your IP address except the final segment when you disconnect and reconnect.

This is untrue. It easy to find Comcast customers who have had their address block changed.

Now I know what some of you are thinking—Xlrq uses a pseudonym, is a fanatical Lott defender, claims to have met Lott and been impressed, calls me names, and even has a five-star review of More Guns, Less Crime. Is Xrlq another one of Lott’s sock puppets?

Well, he isn’t. The writing style on his review is different from Lott’s. He is not very familiar with Lott’s research. He blogs about things other than the wonderfulness of John Lott. His IP number is from California. His Amazon wish list shows that his real name is Jeff Bishop. (No it’s not a secret.) Notice how that for genuine Lott sock puppets all the evidence points to Lott, but for those that are merely Lott fans, there is plenty of evidence to show that they are not Lott.

Update: Just as “JL’s wish list” was replaced by “Economist123’s wish list” when I pointed it out, in another one of those uncanny coincidences that Xrlq insists means nothing, “Jeff bishop’s wish list” has been replaced by “Xrlq’s wish list”. And they say history never repeats.