I understand initially thinking it's completely orthogonal; I had the same initial misunderstanding. That's the utility of the mob boss analogy.
Imagine I sell weapons, legally and honestly, but also knowingly to "bad people". Suppose that those bad people acquire the money to pay me by doing things that you and I both agree are unethical (but perhaps legal, perhaps by a technicality), facilitated in part by the weapons I sold. We agree that, in this hypothetical, I'm contributing to unethical behaviour, right? So then, imagine that my contract with these bad people is in some way violated, so that I don't receive the full benefits I was entitled to, under the terms of sale of the weapons. Perhaps they were going to pay me over 4 easy payments of 99.99, and they defaulted after 2 payments.
I think many people would agree that it's kinda my own fault for entering into such a bargain with such a devil. Breck is expressing that they fall into this camp. It's a very common position. An idea that's distinct-but-similar is the idea that it might be unlawful or unethical to possess stolen property, especially if knowingly so, even if you definitely did not yourself steal it. It seems pretty easy to imagine breck saying "I'm not that wound up about jholman having oh_sigh's stolen property, but I definitely would have no sympathy for jholman if someone else were to steal that property away from him too".
As for the "breck must have no sympathy for anyone", you're not making enough of an effort. First of all, most writers write at an hourly rate, not for a cut of the profits, for example most advertising copywriters, most journalists, etc. Most painters sell paintings, not licenses, and while they tend to object to copying, most of their income comes mostly independent of law of copyright, because of cultural norms about what the worth of a painting is. As with the painters, so with most artists in the world. Etsy jewellers, for example, do not depend on copyright for their livelihood. Photographers maybe more true, and programmers, you're probably right. But you're wrong about the GPL; given what breck has claimed about their values, I can imagine two or three variations within those claims that are ethically consistent with the GPL.
But finally, when you say "basically, no sympathy for anybody", this is truly silly. Even if everything I said in the previous paragraph is wrong, all writers, programmers, and artists collectively, make up a pretty small slice of the world. Even in the developed world there are many industries that work primarily by making and distributing physicals goods where copyright is irrelevant, and in the developing world this is even more true. That's billions of people that breck can still have sympathy for.
I mean, once upon a time I believed some variation of what breck is claiming. I don't believe it any longer; I currently tend to believe that at least some copyright law is probably better for society than no copyright law. But they seem to be espousing it consistently.