He is certainly attacking ESR's character, but I think that the old mantra that we should always address an argument and not the person delivering it isn't entirely fair. The strongest reason for this, in my opinion, is that most complex systems can't be thoroughly analyzed with any objectivity, because it's impossible to consciously process all the available data; there's just too much going on. So whenever somebody argues about a complex system, there's a very implicit part of their argument that involves which data they choose to present. A bystander who's trying to follow (and validate or invalidate) a logical argument can't always tell if the choice of data is unbiased, and of course looking at all available data takes the bystander as much time as it took the arguer to formulate the argument in the first place.

So USUALLY what an unbiased observer will do is proceed with caution: see what the arguer's point is, see how it fits with the observer's intuition (because this is the same as appealing to the observer's subconscious, which in most cases has processed far more data relevant to some issue than has their conscious mind), and see whether the data seems overwhelming enough that its conclusion couldn't be the result of biased data selection on the part of the arguer. But this method often fails. Without formulating your own opinion by immersing yourself in data, you just can't be sure whether you're looking at a legitimate picture of an issue. That's why whenever I hear a convincing argument about something complex, I only provisionally believe whatever I've just been convinced of. And that's why an argument's author actually matters if the argument relates to a sufficiently complex system.

Now, arguments about simple (by which I really mean "completely specified") systems aren't victim to this weakness -- mathematical proof, for instance, can actually be really verified by an observer without the observer doing the same work that the discover did, as can many logical arguments in the hard sciences.

But what ESR is trying to show here is that some particular set of scientists committed scientific fraud. This is a) a value judgment and b) depends substantially on context.

So I think that it is not only reasonable but very much a good thing that ieure pointed out that ESR is a nutjob. Now I know that even if I find his post compelling, he has no intellectual honesty and the data he's showing me have been carefully selected from the unimaginably vast amounts of data in the world because they happen to support his worldview. Maybe he's still right -- but ieure's post is still very much relevant.