Don't strawman me. I'm not equating modern protestors to segregationists in the extent to which they are violent, and you were the one to bring up MLK in the first place. I'm simply stating that acting like an asshole allows your opponent to easily dismiss you, and it allows the rest of society to write you off as an unreasonable. During the civil rights protests, one side was easily portrayed as the unreasonable and more violent faction, and they lost. Again, do you think the people in either of those videos are doing any favors for their cause? Who are they winning over?
Note that MLK never said anywhere that you've got to be smug and contemptuous and that he never forbade anyone to hold out a helping hand or open a listening ear across the aisle to succeed in his goal of equality.
He was uncompromising about his goals. He realised that he wouldn't achieve his goals through kindness alone, but through being more uncomprising than the opposition.
But he tried very hard not to be an uncivil, verbally or physically aggressive douchebag, he never demonised the opposition, and he was willing to listen to others. He just wasn't willing to compromise early.
There's a difference between the two.
In the worldview of the 60s southern whites, MLK was being an unreasonable asshole, they were not swayed in the slightest by his actions, and would've stomped him and his movement flat if there wasn't a convenient 3rd party available to bail him out. Then the history books would've added him to the latest litany of evil things done to poor innocent white southerners, alongside such classics as the War of Northern Aggression.
My point is that accusing your opponent of being more assholey than you is a basic tactic, and its a very successful tactic because those on your side want to believe it, and wishy washy moderates don't know what to think. So the assholes will cherrypick some youtube video of some unusually assholey SJW type, use it to smear the whole movement, and people like you will eat it up.
Remove the 20-20 hindsight where the Civil Rights Movement being successful, then being retcon'd as honey trumping vinegar. Look at the BLM movement, which is the latest rendition of racial conflict in society. Guess what is happening? Lots of assholes are doing their best to portray the BLM movement as more assholey than they are... and it works. Just like with feminists or any number of target groups. Even when they try to use soft language like MLK, their opponents always try to twist it into something that is not, and see things that just aren't there.
I don't advocate being unnecessarily assholey as the people in Bullmoose's youtube videos presumably were. But let's not pretend that SJWs are on the same level as the bigots they fight. And let's not pretend that there isn't a constant smear campaign to portray them as exactly that or worse. And let's not pretend that a lot of the 'bad' SJWs are the way they are out of unmitigated frustration and fatigue when faced with these tactics and figure that if they are gonna be treated as assholes no matter what they do then why should bother to be nice? I would try, but then again I haven't been fighting a culture war for decades, or experienced the nastiness of it firsthand...
Your arguments leave me wondering how reform movements are supposed to get started in the first place in your worldview. Bullying people into submission only works if you already have power.
To get big and powerful enough to bully people into submission, Christianity had to spend a long time growing in a world where Christians were a tiny and despised religious minority who got publicly executed to the cheers of approving crowds.
The 'powerful' really aren't, they are and have always been outnumbered. They survived by pitting the lower layers of the societal hierarchy against each other, by doing their best to indoctrinate respect and obedience in them, and when all else favors parting with some scraps of the pie in order to appease the masses. The rise of education and the middle class have forced them to increasingly rely on the last, which in turn limits their power further. Without education they wouldn't have gotten off from square one.
Again, this only works if you already have a power base, numbers if nothing else.
My point is, if people never change their minds except in response to massive social pressure, how did Christians ever get from being .001% of the Roman Empire to being 10% of it?
Christianity was simply better structured. It offered the common folk a better deal, was more accessible, made promises you couldn't disprove, etc etc. And yes it made an effort to convert people, unlike Judaism which was pointedly insular. But again this wasn't because Christianity was nice, anymore than more educated people are. It was just better adapted.
The Civil Rights Act won by getting the federal government to come down on the bigoted state governments like the proverbial ton of bricks. They did this by being disruptive and demanding enough that they managed to make the feds prefer them to the alternative.
Remember always that the goal of the government is not justice, its order and continuity. If you are a sufficient threat to that order then the government will either eliminate or incorporate you. Which they do is based on how many times you are willing to be thrown to the (non metaphorical in one case you cited) lions.
Speaking of I recently heard a hilarious piece in how the CRM planned a big march in Las Vegas, which had been called the Mississippi of the West, only for the powers that be there to promptly agree to the Moulin Rouge Accords (which was the only integrated casino at the time) and integrated the strip years ahead of the rest of the nation. Basically because they were like "we like making money, fine we'll integrate so you won't march and cost us lots of money".
I'm not sure saying that "white moderates are ultimately causing more damage to the cause of racial equality than the KKK" is exactly treating his opposition without any sort of demonization or contempt.
Man oh man how many renditions have we had of people getting snippy in this threads over either being compared to bigots, being accused of bigots, or being argued of helping bigots, often with a very flimsy relationship to what the person debating was trying to say or otherwise missing the point? A lot. MLK was tired of this shit generations ago.
Here's the thing. The argument you're basically touching upon leads to "literally every group in all of history has been doing things wrong whenever it attempts to use coercive measures to empower itself" which is incredibly absurd. "Peer pressure from powerful figures is by far the most effective way of convincing someone and most groups attempt to convince fence-sitters rather than their direct opponents" explains history, and almost all reform movements, far better.
That's an interesting view of history, but it doesn't really square with day-to-day, wherein bringing down the hammer on people is the absolutely least effective way to get people to do what you want.
That's more dependent on the size of the hammer. Society works mostly by threatening to hammer people and hoping that the threat is enough. By the time that threat isn't enough to dissuade most people, then yes hammering harder makes things worse, though society was probably already screwed anyways.
Moreover I might note that the smarter societies have learned how to get you to hammer yourself for them, or trick various blocs into hammering each other, or otherwise distance themselves from the stick they beat you with. Just look at how MRAs react to SJW talk about patriarchy, even though patriarchy is usually directly responsible for like 90% of the shit they complain about and not the SJWs.
