Zed, I wish you were more polite. I bought that the Rails Ghetto thing was an act, but now I'm not so sure. The Mark Pilgrim post was a big turn off.
I wonder how much more of a positive impact you would've made if you had refrained from flaming Mark and just written LPTHW.
You have a lot of valuable insight, and you do great work, that could be distributed a lot more effectively by simply being less offensive.
When you're new to something, and it seems insurmountably difficult, you are faced with the question of whether you are awful at something, or if the teacher - for the sake of politeness - didn't do a good job.
Feelings may have been hurt, but he's prevented some, if not a lot, of people from being scared away from Python and programming.
His style serves a purpose, and it lets him cut the bullshit and reach out to people.
The people who wanted to learn programming and Python were the recipients of Zed's soapbox speech, not Mark Pilgrim.
LPtHW was created in the context, and the story of that context was laid out.