Australia's third most influential blogger named Tim

Seriously, Bahnisch and Parish cannot be considered as influential or even prominent. Not to degrade your moment, Tim, but neither can you. Blogging, as a rule, is all about slagging off your fellow blogger in as public a fashion as possible. I fail to see how that makes one prominent.

Really prominent bloggers can only be considered from a yet to be revealed cadre of writers who attract readers AND respect at the one time. Somehow, like journalists, I don't think that's a real probability any time soon.

I, for one, read AND respect Tim Lambert's writings.

Oh, and I the others too - even Tim B. when he is being civil Tim and not thug Tim.

David,

If I'm a thug, then how shall we describe thief-and-proud-of-it Lambert?

Lancet-chanting cluster monkey? Bet-losing election bumbler? Site pirate? Amoral, attention-lusting, web-burgling Comic Book Guy?

Oh, Lambert -- Webdiary is deleting comments. You know what you have to do.

Well deserved

Dear tim, it's a shame you still don't know what you are talking about. I didn't steal anything or copy anything. I set up a proxy like this one.

I've already been in contact with one of the webdiary people about the comment deleting thing. Unless the site owner is kind enough to publicize it, my proxy wouldn't do much, so I suggested they set up a Scoop-based system independent of Fairfax.

I'll happily publicize your Webdiary dupe. Go for it, Lambert! Fight the power! Quiggin is also pro-deletion; take him down, big guy!

You have to forgive Tim B. this current outburst of somewhat thoughtless violence, as he is preoccupied and working very hard.

Using his undoubted powers of persuasion at the Bulletin, Tim is currently organising a team of journalists to go to Iraq and redress the terrible distortions of history caused by the lib'ral meedja. History will thank him!

There is a rumour about that the lone Media Watch researcher has emailed Arthur Chrenkoff to say that if he joins the Bulletin team, s/he will go too.

Tim L: You set up a site whose sole purpose was to generate comments deriving from another's work. This is called plagiarism.

A comparison: someone hires Tim Lambert to give an academic workshop that includes a session of group discussion. You proceed to read someone's else's speech word for word and your listeners afterwards talk about 'your' remarks amongst themselves. That everyone might be in on the joke and know the speech wasn't yours doesn't forgive your unethical appropriation of a benefit from someone else's exertions.

The example you link to is a proxy of YOUR OWN site. What an utterly dishonest comparison. Your casuistry about this demonstrates why nobody should trust your alleged commitment to truth-telling.

...and so C.L gets his junior blairbot badge; but TB's Packer lawyers sadly have still to earn theirs.

CL, plagiarism is passing off someone else's work as your own. I did not do this. In the proxied version, all of Blair's posts were identified as being by him. You, however, plagiarized one of my posts when you set up a blog devoted to attacking me. I release all my posts under a Creative Commons licence -- you are allowed to freely copy them. I only have one condition -- that my posts be attributed to me. You did not so this, so your copy was illegal.
And no, the example I linked to is not a proxy of my own site. Is it your intention to convince my readers that you are entirely clueless?

I don't think he got that the page you linked to was the post, not the actual Malkovich generator.

Tim: unless some technical glitch occurred, a comment on plagiarism I left here last night has disappeared.

CL, my logs indicate that you previewed a post around midnight , but did not click on the P0ST button.

Sounds like something I'd do. Forget it Tim. Let's move on, hey?

CL, your response to the Lancet study was to make vicious and dishonest personal attacks on the researchers and on me. And since you seem to think that "dishonest" is a word you can randomly sprinkle into your posts to give them a bit of bite, I should note that by "dishonest" I mean that you wrote things that you full well knew to be false. And I think the Iraqis who have lost loved ones as a result of the war would have found the blog you set up mocking their deaths less funny than you did.

The blog you're talking about was filled with pictures of Lancets (the cars), Lance Armstrong (the cyclist), a cover of the Lancet and other Lance-ey stuff. A crappy Blogspot blog, it looked nothing like yours and wasn't called Deltoid.

Importantly, nor did it have a comments facility with which to either unethically gain benefit from another's intellectual property or wilfully hold him up to the ridicule of unsympathetic commenters. Plagiarism isn't merely the false claiming of authorship. It's also the unethical attempt to appropriate a substantive advantage from another's work. For how you described it and for what you left out, your portrayal of the blog was therefore dishonest.

"I mean that you wrote things that you full well knew to be false."

The blog also made no fun of Iraqi deaths but of your obsession with the Lancet. Please provide a concrete example of any words of mine or of any images that conveyed such a notion. By saying it mocked Iraqis for the deaths of their loved ones proves yet again that you are dishonest.

"I mean that you wrote things that you full well knew to be false."

As for my use of one of your posts for visual and symbolic effect, that was wrong of me and I apologise. The association of my name with your written work was a lapse in judgement. However, I'm prepared to waive the fee which such an association should attract, given the advantage it might conceivably have brought your way.

Finally, 'vicious' is an adjective best suited to someoe who delights in attacking his betters - like Blair and Chrenkoff. (And nicking their property, in the case of the former).

couldnt you have just previewed and not posted that last missive?

Response to "Do more guns cause less crime?"

It occurred to me as I was reading through your blog that highly charged political debates, like the gun-control issue in the US, can cause the same reliance on strongly held beliefs and clever hoax for support as the search for Big-Foot. Lott's assertion that, "If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack," is a good example of this. The belief of course is that an armed person under attack will almost always (or 98% of the time) be able to thwart it. As evidence of this he cites results from a national survey he supposedly conducted, but fails to produce any evidence that such a survey was ever undertaken. In other words he made the whole thing up to support his point.

Crypto-zoologists tracking Big-Foot have been known to use the same sort of tactics. One famous hoaxing, that most Crypto-zoologists thought to be genuine for many years, was the Patterson film shot at Bluff Creek, showing the creature walking along a sand bar. I think Patterson's problem was that he didn't mount an immediate campaign to discredit his critics; who knows, people might still think his evidence was valid as well.

I especially enjoyed the Wed, 11 May 2005 entry entitled, "Note to John Lott" where you expose a five star review he did for his own book on Amazon.Com. Just classic!

CA Bob

Lott reviews his own work
Do more guns cause less crime?
The Patterson Film Hoax

Since my name has been mentioned, let me say that I have no objection to someone reproducing my posts on another site for comments, as long as they acknowledge that it's:

(i) my posts
(ii) not my site

When I get time, I'll put up a Creative Commons license making this clear.

I delete abusive and obscene comments on my site and I think any blogger should feel free to do this. But that's because I want to maintain a civil tone on my site, not because I claim a right to censor comment on my posts.

Tim Blair,

Your site administrator, regularly deletes comments.