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ThrustVectoring comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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And furthermore, that umbrella of ideas is a moving target anyways. Social justice movements have fighting X-ism as a terminal goal, so when they run out of X-ist things in a community to fight, they move the goalposts until there are X-ist things to fight.
I don't think that's necessarily an accurate assertion about "social justice movements" as a whole. It seems to me that almost all* of the X-isms that social justice movements attack are real, legitimately undesirable power imbalances and prejudices. The fact that they have yet to run out of such X-isms to fight probably says more about the typical structure of human societies than it does about the social justice movements.
*Obviously there are some pathological examples, like otherkin &c, although these are not particularly mainstream
IMHO, feminism has flat-out won. Women have the vote, they have reproductive rights, they have no-fault divorce, they have a majority of the collegiate student body, and they have equality of opportunity. Single, childless women who live in cities make more than their male counterparts. Wife-beating has been vilified. Society is hyper-vigilant about domestic violence.
What's left for feminists to fight for are pretty much non-issues in comparison - especially given the institutional, social, and organizational power they wield. They're still fighting for the rights of women, sure -- but that's more because they don't have anything else to do with themselves.
Street harassment takes some of the fun out of life.
Getting rape and murder threats on line really does distress and distract people, and it seems to be much more likely to happen to women.
I do think that street harassmeent is a serious issue. I however only have anedcotal reports. Can you point me to some statistics that describe the situation on a more general level?
Is it mainly an issue of the big cities where people don't know each other? How do different countries compare against each other? How many cases of street harassment does the average woman experience per year?
The founder of an anti-street-harassment website conducted "two informal, anonymous online surveys".
"Informal, anonymous online surveys" do not produce useful data.
Well, ours have produced data that's useful at least for questions relating to LW. So I'm not going to say it's impossible. But if you're trying to answer a political question...
Perhaps we should add questions that measure street harassment to the next Lesswrong survey?
We're no less demographically skewed than your average feminist site. More, probably.
I don't think it belongs in the survey, but it might be worth doing as a separate project.
A fair point. But then, imagine 4chan becoming interested in an online anonymous survey about sexual harassment... X-D
The chance of a 4Chan raid is the least of your worries, really. I don't know where the links in the ancestor were posted, but you could end up with anything from bad -- a bunch of random demographic filters that are next to impossible to control for -- to terrible, roughly the equivalent of surveying a Young Republicans meeting about Barack Obama's economic policy. Except ten percent of the attendees are only there for kicks and will answer every question with "fish".
They produce at least a little data. This one is admittedly filtered in a bunch of ways, both by internet access and interest in street harassment.
Still, it at least implies that there's a good bit of street harassment, and it's fairly frequent but not constant.
The survey says: "Nearly 95 percent of female respondents were honked at one or more times and 40 percent said they are honked at as frequently as monthly."
This survey raises the question of what distinguishes those 5% of woman who were never honked at. Is it something like physical attractiveness? Is it about the locating at which the woman is living? Walking around with a confident posture?
If one considers this a serious issue than I would expect that someone has data that answers the question.
If I read about honking, it also not clear how seriously to take it. Sure it's not fun if someone honks at you, but it's not a big deal.
Then there are "sexist comments". If good deconstructivist can label a lot of comments as sexist. You could label the act of open a door and saying: "After the lady." as a sexist comment. I would where I now what the terms means.
It wouldn't surprise me if some honks at women aren't noticed by the woman they're directed towards, and some honks are taken to be harassment that are directed at someone else.
It would take some work to design a good survey.
The key term is "useful". They produce some data, but it's likely to be misleading, primarily because of self-selection bias. So, no, you can NOT conclude that "there's a good bit of street harassment, and it's fairly frequent" on the basis of putting up a survey on a web page and keeping it there for a month or two.
Actually, there is a lot left for feminists to fight... but most of that is in other countries. Female genital mutilation being the most obvious example.
Two problems with that.
First, all humans are naturally selfish. My own hurt thumb feels like a greater tragedy than someone else being killed. In the same way, a sexist comment somewhere on internet feels like a greater issue than someone being mutilated on the other side of the planet, if the former is about me and the latter isn't. It's the same reason why Occupy is more popular than Effective Altruism; both are about people who have more giving to people who have less, but only in the former you are included in the list of possible recipients.
Second, there are political alliances, because the more applause lights you put together, the more applause you get. Unfortunately, at some moments some of the applause lights get in conflict. How can you believe "female genital mutilation is evil" and "all cultures are completely equal" or even "all native cultures are noble and perfect" at the same time? Let's rather focus on the non-issues which avoid these paradoxes; you can always safely speak about the evil of the white hetero cis males.
Maybe we need another movement that will care about eradicating female genital mutilation in the world. Even if doing so requires saying politically incorrect things.
Oh, okay, I think I understand your original comment better now. I thought you were criticizing the constant move towards "new" X-isms to fight against. (i.e., moving from race to LGBT). I think it's possible that feminist groups wield power disproportionate to the egregiousness of what they are now combating, serious though implicit sexism can be.