If Richard Stallman is quietly berating us somewhere, he can go fuck himself. Part of educating the masses is being a person who people want to listen to. If he failed at that, he's no better than anyone else, and perhaps far worse, because of all the lost potential.
Part of being intelligent and shrewd is listening to the words that people say, and judging arguments based on their merit. The idea that Stallman should go fuck himself for not dumbing down or tarting up the message enough for you to pay attention to him makes you the asshole, not him.
In my experience, telling people to do something hard (open source, keep privacy, etc.) in the face of a barely perceived danger (government is coming to get you) is kind of a hard message to get heard.
Aside from that, I didn't mean to seriously suggest that he's out there passing judgement on us so much as I was attempting to acknowledge how hypocritical we are for having disregarded his message because of his eccentricities. I think your statement, that he should actively try to be more popular for us to care, is further proof of how wrong we are to be that way.
In an ideal world, your response would have made a perfect satire of how Americans are likely to react in the face of the responsible elder telling us to eat our proverbial vegetables. That is isn't saddens me.
Speak for yourself. Stallman is a massively influential thinker that has indisputably changed the world positively. A lot of the world has reshaped itself to attempt to resemble Stallman's dreams. His contribution was to have the dreams and to share them in material ways, and he didn't even owe us that.
You're in the bizarre position of criticizing him for being right. You're expecting Stallman to figure out a way to market to you, rather than expecting yourself to figure out how to evaluate arguments and evidence rationally. Think about that for a minute, and then explain to me why that wouldn't make more sense.
You seem to think I'm the one who has a problem with him. I think he's always been dead on, and don't disagree with you in the slightest about his vision.
Where our expectations start to misalign is the part where he's been ignored because he doesn't know how to be a consummate human being (let alone marketer), and you say it's everyone else's fault. Idealism is fucking useless.
