conuly

Any attempt to make serious social change requires both extremists and moderates. The extremists do two things: (1) call attention to the problem in a way that's very difficult to ignore or brush off; (2) open up space for the moderates to push for less-extreme solutions which will sound more "reasonable" by contrast with the extremists' demands.

To use a less-fraught example, PETA is a bunch of assholes. But a lot of people have stopped wearing fur, and some have stopped eating meat, and there are a lot more regulations now about the treatment of animals used for medical research, and there's a LOT of pushback against (frex) cosmetic companies using animals for testing. And the progress we've made would probably have been significantly slower without PETA out there screaming and making jerks of themselves. People say, "Well, they're loons, but y'know, they've sort of got a point about this particular thing."