His answers are all in the thread below.  I say he just danced around the issue to the point of once again suggesting that we may be a "hate group" after all.

Trying to have a discussion with him is maddening.  Just when you think you've got him on some point, he'll only answer one fraction of what he's asked and even that will be an obscure statement that doesn't quite hit the nail on the head.

Why does he do that?  I'll tell you why.  He does it because he doesn't know what to think (nothing unusual or wrong there) and -- here's the problem -- he's resistant to following the logical pathway wherever it may lead.  He can kind of see where it's going and he doesn't want to go there.

If you were to ask my opinion of Andries, I'd say that he is very committed to this viewpoint he has that, not being an ex-premie himself, he somehow has an inherently fairer and subtler perspective of Rawat than we do.  Of course he has no idea what that perspective is exactly, he can't articulate it, he sure can't defend it, but he just has it.  And he's not about to give that opinion up just by losing it in an argument.  Hence his evasiveness.

So what irks about this is that, long past the point where reasonable people should have accepted certain facts as true, Andries keeps letting slip how unpersuaded he is.  Oh but don't go to the trouble of trying to actually persuade him of such and thereby settle things. That's not what he wants and he's not about to play along.  He's frozen in that sincere, "open-minded" investigatory stage and he likes it there.  It gives him a nice, safe perch from which to argue with us -- a bit, nothing serious -- and argue with the premies left and right.  In those latter arguments, he can always say that he hasn't decided anything, he's a fair guy, the truth's in the middle, blah, blah, blah.  Whatever.  People have hobbies.  We spend a lot of time doing this.  Andries has his version.

Now here's the deal killer.  If we ever did decide to move on to another issue with Andries, in spite of the fact that he never satisfactorily addressed this one, I know of one which might put a stop to his shtick.  It's the one I started asking him about earlier in this thread.  Simply put it's this: given all the evidence before you, how do you compare the sincerity of the exes with EV and the premies who publicly support it?

Andries cannot possibly suggest that those jokers who he's wasted all this time with on Wikipedia are sincere in the way we are.  I'd be absolutely amazed to hear him even speculate aloud how they might be.  On the other hand, I'd be amazed if he tried to argue against our sincerity.  The importance of this issue is that it bears extremely heavily on the other one Andries pretends to be hung up on, who should he believe generally?

So, bottom line, to me Andries has not answered for his comments sufficiently enough to let the matter go.  I'd be willing to hold off discussing anything further with him until he gets back in there and does a better, less evasive job.  However, if people perhaps think he has dealt with his inflammatory comments more or less adequately, I'd ask him then to start talking about the relative honesty of exes and Rawat and his proponents. 

Andries, pal, you're going to have to come off that perch sooner or later.  Either that or give some reason why we're no more reliable than those same stupid premies you were just arguing with on Wikipedia.