Nothing like a good old cherry-picked fiery comment out of the thousands of public messages Torvalds posts. Not to mention that you've sizably mischaracterised the 'meat' of his argument - which I find more offensive than hearing someone called 'full of BS' followed by an explanation.

Frankly, Linus is in the right here. There's nothing constructive about the initial tone of the post being made. It is a hostile question from the outset. He goes on to explain in detail the why of the answer. It's not a flame.

To bring this back to Lennart Poettering, I'd argue this is why community issues are hard to fix: there's far too many people who are happy to use efforts to stamp out really harmful stuff (threats of violence/death, flames and spamming/harassment) to instead try and knock down a prominent figure just because. It's a distraction that ultimately makes it irrelevant, and to boot ruins any forward progress to be made.