Reply #124: Don't be silly

[Febble]

Intellectual integrity does not demand nothing less than listing the solutions ASAP.

Often intellectual integrity demands the reverse, if the data are insufficient or the solutions unclear.

Look, anyone who investigates election integrity issues has to display moral and intellectual integrity themselves, clearly. The problem is that often people do not like the results of the investigation. That might be because they have serious reason to believe the investigation was corrupt or inadequate. In which case they need to make that case.

But what happens far too often around here is that people don't like the results of investigations and then attempt to smear the moral and intellectual integrity of the investigators. If you don't like the results, by all means critique the methods and interpretation of the results. Or, if you think the remit was too narrow, then critique the remit. But some of those of us who have actually bothered to investigate the election integrity issues arising from the 2004 election have come in for some completely unsupported crap from people found our conclusions differed from their own.

Speaking for myself, I am happy to defend, and even re-examine, my findings and interpretationin response to a serious critique. I expect ESI is as well. But this kind of innuendo - that somehow ESI were corrupt, or autorank's implication that those who disagree with him (including those who have examined the data in great detail) disagree with his own conclusion regarding the 2004 election are culpably complicit in propping up an illegal regime, make me angry. Progressives are supposed to be reality-based, right? If you don't like the study, critique the study before you cast aspersions on those who conducted it.