In activism for a philosophy (in my case, a form of secular-liberal marxism), there are a number of things we should focus on.

The basic goal of most such activism is to attract people to one's ideas. This attraction is not a yes/member versus no/enemy distinction - in our movement (and probably other movements as well), we have two other concerns. We may be inclined by biology to think in-group versus out-group, but by philosophy, we should reach further. First, we should understand that while we are predisposed to think of our philosophy as an indivisible unit, it is in fact not so. Philosophies are collections of ideas, positions, styles of reasoning, etc. Our commitment to a whole (to the extent that our philosophy is a coherent whole) is not alien to our commitment to the components. We should be satisfied if our activism leads to people accepting parts of our outlook - not as satisfied as were they to accept more parts, but barring rare and tactically unusual circumstances, we should be pleased with shifts towards some of our perspective, both because their being nearer to our perspective usually will make them more inclined to move closer to the sum of our views, and because we think these components have merit independent of their place in our broader philosophy. Second, we should focus on building philosophical depth to people's commitment to the ideas of our cause. This should not be a commitment to particular movements, as a focus on that can lead to the actual cause being ill-served. Depth of commitment incorporates both the styles of thinking that lead people to our perspective and the particular facts and ideas that the style uses. A commitment to our cause because of values and philosophy is more valuable than a commitment to our movement because of temporary trends in one's mental life or social ties. When people join our movement or cause because of deep commitment, we should welcome them and involve them in broader discussions on the shape of the movement. When people do so for other reasons, we should make a serious effort to deepen their connection, if necessary changing their mental habits and sharing our ideas (this should take place through discussion, presentation, etc). Those that are with us for shallow or temporary reasons merit special attention both because they are more likely to leave later (their ties are fragile) and their lack of ties will lead them to conclusions and actions that are more driven by their type of connection to the movement/cause than the movement/cause itself.

Convincing/persuading of others towards our views is delicate. It must be done with an awareness of human nature, and it must be done in a way consistent with our ideas of personal growth and virtue. Means of convincing or persuading that create only weak ties to our cause are less valuable than those that create stronger ones - deep philosophical-style arguments are not appropriate for most people, but the intuitions and foundations of our ethical system are suitable for all audiences. The creation of a power dynamic between people is inappropriate - the nuances of our perspective require that many aspects are determined for oneself (some philosophies are more or less friendly towards divergence), with only the core elements of our identity being convergent. The care required from the process of convincing stems from our (possibly evolutionary) psychology suggesting much more simple boundaries of friend and foe. In primal struggles, one uses all one's resources at one's disposal to enable one's tribe to destroy others - deception, sloppy thinking, an inclination to immediately use brute force when possible, subjugation, taunts, these are tools that may have served the species at points in the past, but do not serve us well, and our inclination towards them is something we must struggle with in advocacy, philosophy, politics, and related fields. Our goals are to both continue our personal growth and to convince others, and we must adopt tactics that are suitable for that and less suitable for primal struggle. An awareness of human nature and persuasion should act as a foundation for defining our tactics.

Mockery as a tactic is occasionally useful - if there are strong cultural or legal norms for relatively free expression, mockery is helpful for damaging an image of a person or group. This tactic is effective at reaching those who are not actually members of the mocked group - generally those who recieve the mockery most directly are galvanised against the mocker. In the end, we would like to convince everyone we can, so we should be wary of this. We must also recognise the role that pride and status plays in people's life - although when there are multiple worldviews striving for dominance some tension is inevitable, we should recognise that tactics and phrasing that evoke ingroup/outgroup or injure the pride of others may act as barriers to their persuasion, just as too enthusiastic a welcome should they change their mind might make them feel more strongly they're betraying who they are as a person. The path to persuasion we should generally use is to grease the path towards our views and make people moving towards them feel like doing so is not a big deal. Dissecting bad ideas and bad philosophy is useful. Insulting them is less so (although catharsis sometimes leads us to that - struggles between instinct and the proper path), and insulting those that hold these views is something we should do our best to avoid (sometimes this is very difficult). Being able to patiently show someone their ideas do not make sense or the better aesthetics of our ideas (even in the face of insults) is always valuable. Intelligent mockery of their ideas is less useful, as one is really arguing to convince a common audience, not the theoretical opponent. Insults of their ideas is not useful, while insulting them directly is harmful. In this context, we understand insults to be things said with a primary intent to cause emotional distress/shame in another (spit words - words/phrases meant to express contempt for a person or an idea that are injected into a statement that could've been phrased another way, are closely related). People might feel insulted by things that are non-insults, e.g. "I don't think you're being honest with yourself" or "you have devoted your life to something that is false", but we should not shy from them (even as we realise that the actual expression of these things should be handled carefully). Our best general tactics are to be philosophically careful (reigning in or criticising allies as needed), have the facts, know our philosophy and be able to discuss it, and to range (within each individual) from nurturing and gentle to polite-but-firm in our dialogue with others. Our personal integrity should be such that we can admit errors and mistakes, express our unsureness about some areas of our thoughts, and our behaviour should be such that we can interact positively with most people who don't share our ideas. In these ways, we can hope to at least partly reach everyone, we can support a high level of political discourse, we can avoid enflaming people which we could potentially persuade, and we can build a worthwhile community.