I appreciate your offering an alternative perspective, but I disagree with almost everything you've written.

> By working the system and thinking really hard (well, by median american standards) his personal poverty line is probably a quarter of mine. That's how both of us live pretty well, despite him getting only about 1/4 what I do. He travels around the world about as much as I do, we both have similar goal of eating high quality food.

This sounds unreasonable and incorrect. I've read a lot of his blog and I don't think he has discovered some obscure loopholes or anything like that. He just lives very frugally.

I trust that you're a smart fellow, so I believe that if you were given the same base amount of money as MMM you could easily replicate his lifestyle. You know how to cook your own food. I'm sure you could figure out how to maintain your home and renovate it, especially with all the extra time you'd have to focus on that. If you quit your job, you wouldn't have to live wherever you're currently at, so if it's an expensive area you could move to a cheap area.

The only thing holding you back is desire. Your "poverty line" isn't at the same place as his because you don't actually desire the life he leads.

> He spends like a drunken sailor

I have to disagree with this as well. I don't think I could ever regard somebody living on at most $27k for a family of three in a medium COL city in the United States as spending like a drunken sailor. You'd have to change the usual meaning of that phrase. To me, this is just simply not true. It doesn't matter if he spends most of that money on just a small number of things important to him. The set of medium COL cities in the US is sufficiently well-defined that $27k for a family of three is under no circumstances spending like a drunken sailor.

> "I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol, and wild women. The other half I wasted."

This is a funny quote, but I disagree with you that it's actually practically useful. If you take it too literally, you'll realize it's just a tautology. This justifies any and all spending and therefore cannot possibly be a discriminating strategy for personal finance that applies to multiple people. But the exploration of such strategies is exactly the purpose of MMM's blog, so I think there's a bit of irony in relating MMM to a quote which, if taken too literally, undermines his own blog.

> The saga of the ice cream is a perfect example of sophistry as an attack mode.

Except it's not, because I wasn't attacking anybody. The ice cream "saga" comes up often because it shows a lot of people that they don't actually desire the lifestyle he and his family lead. It takes all the persuasive rhetoric of the site and really brings it down to reality, showing the reader what the lifestyle is really like.

People reacting strongly to that "saga" are, in general, not being judgmental at all, not on a personal level anyway. They're simply having the epiphany that this isn't the lifestyle they want.

> Plato telling the "allegory of the cave" and a bunch of people declaring Plato an idiot because they personally don't live in a cave and they use lightbulbs not camp fires, therefore the whole story and everything it implies is completely useless to everyone. That's a pretty good summary of the negative reaction to the ice cream saga.

This is all overly dramatized and, as I explained above, I don't think it's a good summary either. I for one have gained a lot of benefit from MMM's blog and regard it as having very high value, but I still don't covet his actual lifestyle. I've also never declared MMM an idiot. I wouldn't even consider myself a detractor, but I imagine that even among his true detractors very few would go so far as to call him an idiot or not appreciate any of the personal finance lessons he has to teach.