Possible defence: criticizing specifically people and organizations of similar views can be more cost-beneficial. If you write a giant article entreating people of similar-but-not-identical position, and that article tweaks their views and massively increases their instrumental rationality, it's much better, than if you write dozens of articles addressed at your political enemies, most of whom will never read it or will never get convinced. For example, you have communist friends who are mostly correct on social issues, but are completely wrong on dialectical materialism, their organizations are polluted with death spirals, their discussions are counter-productive because of wrong usage of words, etc. It would still be more productive to direct them to LessWrong, to explain reductionism, to teach them how to use words and reasoning, how to avoid cognitive and organization failure modes, than to try to bring neo-nazis, Christian fundamentalists, New Agers or even generic consumerist Philistines up-to-date from scratch.

This of course assumes that writing a giant critical article is actually a productive way to change someone's mind. Obviously, hateful feminist anti-LW/anti-nerd rants are doing a bad job of convincing us in their points, because most of those writers have never read Dale Carnegie, let alone Cialdini. But they write angry rants anyway, because that's how they get, as Russians say it, “the feeling of fulfilled duty”, a warm fuzzy.

"A heretic is someone who shares almost all of your beliefs. Kill him." - Some card game

There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the "us versus them" dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the "us" side is falling apart.

Upvoted for that.