Deltoid

Donald Luskin has a weblog mainly devoted to criticism of prominent economist Paul Krugman. I have found it to be a good example to help guide my criticism of John Lott's work. A good example of how not to do it, that is. Luskin indulges in frequent name-calling: for instance he called Krugman a "nervous, stammering, shifty-eyed, twitching, ill-tailored, gray homunculus" and Brad DeLong a "pudgy dweeb". He frequently uses ad hominem attacks on Krugman, for example, calling him "Shorty" and posting Krugman's teaching evaluations. How does the fact that Krugman is short prove that he is wrong? Reading stuff like Luskin's makes you more likely to think that Krugman is right---if there were actual good arguments against him, then maybe Luskin would have offered those instead of the ad hominems.

I've done my best to avoid Luskin-like behaviour here, both because it is wrong and also because it is counter-productive. If I slip up, I hope my readers will let me know.

There is an obvious word to describe someone with such as intense interest in someone else as I do here and Luskin does on his blog and that's "stalker". For example, here's Kevin Drum:

I thought the fact patterns indicated that Lott was lying, but Tim, the acknowledged expert in Lott stalking, was more cautious.

and here's Glenn Reynolds:

Donald Luskin is stalking Paul Krugman---claiming that Krugman is feeling the heat over errors in his columns (Luskin calls them "lies"), but still blowing smoke.

All good fun, you would think. But now Donald Luskin is threatening Atrios with a lawsuit unless he removes a post about Luskin entitled "Diary of a Stalker". The premise of the letter from Luskin's lawyer is that Atrios (and presumably everyone else who referred to Luskin this way) accused Luskin of committing "the crime of stalking". This is obviously false, but presumably the real threat is to expose Atrios' real identity.

I think that bloggers, whatever they think of Krugman, might not approve of Luskin's behaviour. If they don't, a simple way to express this disapproval would be to refer to Luskin as a stalker, as I do in the title of this post.

Update: Half of the folks on my blogroll have blogged on this. Naturally, everyone is critical of Luskin. I've followed Mark Kleiman's suggestion and delinked Luskin. If you want to see what he says on his blog (not recommended), you'll have to find it yourself.