Moonshooter

That seems like a fair reading and appeals to my goal of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Thanks for suggesting it. I was worried I might have accidentally framed my post in a way that discouraged gp from responding.

This seems like dangerous glorification of intellectualism. The intellectual communities of the world are not inherently moral because of their intellect. That even intelligent people can commit heignous acts is one of the oldest tropes of the 1940s (with good reason). I might just be misunderstanding your points, in which case I apologise, but what you've discussed don't seem to actually relate to whether or not Trotsky was a part of the intellectual communities of his time.

>Be the change you want to see.

This is such important advice across so many aspects of life in general! It's easy to support a movement that's already started to to gain momentum. Something I think about still from my college days is actually from a sociology class I took as an easy requirement filler (something to do with gender studies, I forget the name).

Summarized, there's rarely a reward for being the vanguard who blazes the trail. Sometimes you might even be penalized because your methods to break into the limelight were extreme and are now hobbling your movement's mainstream appeal. The class's talking point was that there were women who fought their whole lives for the right to vote but never saw it happen or even begin to happen. But their work served to inspire activists of a later generation who went on to succeed. Sometimes we have to plant a garden knowing we might not see live to see the flowers bloom.

Clearly software is a different beast but we too, as an undustry, have things which are mainstream or valuable now but which once upon a time had only their visionaries to fight for them.