One sad thing about arguments is that dismissing them with ad hominems is incredibly effective. You can see this in the media all the time. "The Tea Party is ju

One sad thing about arguments is that dismissing them with ad hominems is incredibly effective. You can see this in the media all the time. "The Tea Party is just a bunch of racist, homophobic astroturf." "The OWS movement is just a bunch of anarchist hippies who aren't willing to get a job like the rest of us." Etc. These ad hominem dismissals are, logically speaking, irrelevant, but they sway people, often more than the actual merits of the the arguments. As a result, it is often frustrating when someone who is on the same side as you, and very visible, makes themselves such a lightning rod for them. I currently feel this exact way about OWS. It's a mixture of "I'm glad people care about fixing our broken financial system" and "oh no, they're going to make moderate America associate financial industry reform lazy hippies." Stallman is a tireless promoter of his ideology, and if you subscribe to the same then you would have to have mixed feelings about him because of this. His "weirdness" does some amount of harm to the cause because in the end it's always the moderates (who are most easily swayed by irrelevant things like parrots) who decide the issue. This is, of course, no reason to be uncivil to him, but it at least partially explains (though in no way justifies) the sort of behavior you see even from many who are predisposed to agree with many of his ideas.