his absolutism also causes people to see BSD as a "problem", a
    "social failure".

If some people think that, they did not get it from me.  I do not call
BSD either of those things.  I say that releasing free software under
a non-copyleft free software license is basically good (i.e., not
evil), but that using copyleft is better. 

    recently we saw theft of BSD to GPL, and a large part of the
    GPL community thinks there's no problem with that, that the
    BSD community is being "petty" to make an issue out of it.

I don't think it is wrong in general to relicense code from BSD to
GPL.  However, in some cases I think it is more useful not to do so,
in order to contribute changes back to the original BSD-licensed
project.

If such an issue arises for a GNU package, and people think it is not
doing the most useful thing, I will look at the issue and then if
necessary discuss it with the developers.

However, if such an issue arises for a program which is not a GNU
package, I will not get involved unless the developers ask me for
advice.