That's fair, and I wouldn't bet the bank on his predictions moving forward, but it's valid to consider what Diggler means for Silver's method. Diggler and Cafe.com are important as critics of the media at large. When what passes for journalism is some dudes making multiple predictions and asking you to choose the one that turns out to be closest to correct, that should be lampooned!

Silver wrote a faux mea culpa earlier this year about how he was wrong about Trump and Sanders and so on. My takeaway was that he apologized for inserting his own opinions where he claimed to use data. Isn't that what Diggler does?

If Diggler had bombed I most certainly would have heard about it - I was reading about him before all this 538 stuff, when he had a Hostage crisis in Russia[1]. However if that had happened we would just have a different but equally humourous narrative, perhaps blaming his family court issues, or some other nefarious plot :D

Really you're overthinking it, and you shouldn't feel the need to protect Nate Silver et al, they're completely unaffected by Carl (afaik they haven't even acknowledged his "existence") so don't worry about it

[1] = http://www.cafe.com/breaking-missing-journalist-carl-diggler...

That's exactly the point the Diggler parody is making about Nate Silver