As someone who has no interest in the case (I haven't made any comment related to the case, nor read any of the discussions), judging from just the posts, I think Rolf's main mistake is that he forgot that one needs to be much more careful when arguing against a majority belief.

Wei, I hope you will excuse me for being a little blunt here, but it's pretty clear that both you and Anna Salamon have assigned far too much weight to the fact that Rolf Nelson is a big-shot SIAI donor who says the right words and hangs out with the right people, while (to you) I'm just some guy on LW with an obscure pseudonym. I mean, seriously, if two major posts on LW by a 1000+ karma user that attracted ~700 comments did less to get you interested in the topic than Rolf's negative-scoring rant...well, that's something you might want to think about.