Imagine at some future time there was a complete list of all the things which could influence the expression of an arbitrary assemblage of genes. Call this collection P. At any time before this collection is made, there will be a subset Q(t) of P that represents the current list of all influences on genetic expressions. — fdrake

Hm, there's a bit of an ambiguity here, I think, already at the level of formulation: any genomic network is already a space of possibilities, such that some parts of the network may be active in any particular process of expression, while other parts may not be - and just which parts are and are not may be dependent on certain (regulatory) genetic and epigenetic conditions. This means, further, that what even counts as 'a' network is not fixed, and individuation is itself dependent on the parameters of any one investigation - what we count as belonging or not belonging to 'a' network (the space of possibilities), and by extention, what we count as 'a' network to begin with, is itself not something fixed in advance. Of course this is just the scientific process: fix the boundaries of the phenomena you want to study, hold all else equal, then poke around. When you ask then:

Can we tell at any time whether the set of properties is exhaustive, and that we have provided a spanning partition of P generated by the properties? If the set of studied gene expressions were fixed and finite, in principle this would be possible.

- The problem, it seems to me, is that even if we could get around the combinatoric issues, any exhaustive list of properties would be in some sense only so by fiat. And if so, I'm not sure how much we can milk the distinction between P and Q(t) to really speak about any demarcation between the biotic and the abiotic.

The other, intimately related, conceptual issue I see is that because genomic networks are complex, the activation or deactivation of certain parts of the network (via regulation) may alter the very possibility space itself: what was once an 'influence' which would never have been able to play a role in the expression of a certain trait, becomes an influence, or vice versa. And this change may have knock-on effects with respect to other 'possible influences' as well; things get confusing, I think, because at stake are second-order possibilities: 'possible possibilities', as it were. And again, at this point, I'm not sure how stable any distinction between P and it's subset Q(t) might be...

:D Awesome! Should be a pretty quick and fun read, alot of it is very 'practical' kind of advice where you'll be left wondering how political theory ever thought differently to begin with - or at least that's the hope.

Also - portal to mysterious realms of awesomeness will do just fine too :D

Ahaha, love it. Also because the book of Rosen's that I took that from has an entire chapter devoted to explaining just how limiting state variables are, lol (Life Itself). Will reply to your post about PWS (*shudder*) tomorrow. Need sleep.

That a biological system does not contradict any physical laws is one of the least interesting features of a biological system: the interesting ones concern its biology. — fdrake

One super interesting thing to bring up in relation to this - I might start another thread on this down the line - is in following Robert Rosen's contention that biology is, contrary to what is commonly thought, a more general science than physics, insofar as biological systems have a richer repertoire of causal entailments than do physical ones. Physical systems thus being a more limited field of study, even if they qualitatively make up more of the universe. This is one of those lovely thoughts, I think, that spurred me to study biology in some depth - want to know physics? Study biology! :D

If you cut one, or rearrange the organization of a set, and it doesn't affect the outcome (the expression of that trait), then it would be safe to say that that particular gene that was removed, or that particular arrangement of sets of genes that was rearranged, don't affect the expression of that trait. — Harry Hindu

May I introduce you to genetic redundency and genetic robustness, or more specifically canalisation, if we're talking about genes alone. They're dear friends, be nice to them.

The problem I have is with the idea of "biology alone". Biology is not a self-contained set of substrates, but a fluid dynamic between certain macromolecules and the environment in a series of physical processes- some described probabilistically, some perhaps more straightforward (and all of it it perhaps biosemiotically). Thus it isn't just DNA, but the networks that they produce to create more complex processes. The networks that you describe may be analogous, if we were to isolate it in a network mapping way, but it is its situatedness, along with other biological substrates like DNA, cells, proteins and generally all the macromolecules that are found in lifeforms, that make it biological. The evolutionary history of how these networks came about and its unique way of solving problems using its structural constituents to influence its growth and development is what matters here. — schopenhauer1

I agree! I spoke of 'biology alone' precisely in order to render the notion a bit ridiculous; that was the point of the expanded Waddington diagram, to show that it is impossible to speak, in any coherent way, of biology alone with respect to life. And you're also right that this means that what matters is the evolutionary history of any particular network, such that we can't say what ought to or not belong to any particular network in advance (isn't one of the marvels of evolution it's ability to hijack or incorporate the environment into it's dynamics?). But this, I want to say, has conceptual consequences for what we understand 'life' to be, and how fragile a notion it is.

Yep, these are supremely important questions, and what I'm trying to argue is that they cannot be answered in the abstract - one can only follow the developmental and evolutionary history of... whatever unit of analysis one would like to fix. One work that really helped me to get to grips with some of the conceptual issues at stake here was Susan Oyama's The Ontogeny of Information, which, honestly, everyone currently arguing in the 'Information' thread ought to be reading.

Awesome reply. Yeah, you're totally right that I've almost entirely ignored the cytoplasmic and intercellular contribution to the processes of gene expression, and that these things too, with all their myriad mechanisms, also have a deep and important role to play. But while you've refined the analysis so that we can be more specific about the genomic network itself - at this point one perhaps should simply call it a developmental network - the question about life which motivates the OP still, I think, remains unanswered. In fact I think it's rendered even worse! For while the OP operates with a very (much too) simplistic distinction between gene and 'environment', bringing the cellular context into it brings out the ambiguity of just what is meant by environment here: it is everything other than DNA? Or is it the cytoplasm? Or does it stop at the skin? In some sense, this question cannot be answered in the abstract: what counts as environment depends on the kind of investigation we want to carry out.

But just here is where the ambiguity over what then defines the boundary between life and not-life also enters into play, insofar as the topology between inside and outside (and this has nothing to do with the network topology we are talking about) becomes impossible to define (again, in the abstract). All you have, once again, is a developmental network largely indifferent to any boundaries that might be imposed form the top-down, as it were. Of course at this point it's tempting to do the scientific thing and simply follow the contours of the network itself: what does and doesn't make a difference to it in such and such cases? But then you get limit-cases like viruses which don't have the translation machinery for their DNA or RNA and need to hijack that of its host cells, or even - at the opposite end of the spectrum - life-support tech to sustain the body would would otherwise be unable to survive 'by itself'.

But because there's no a priori way to specify the limits of the biological here (one can only 'follow the system'), there's also no a priori way to rule out or in what should or shouldn't belong to any particular network. Life becomes not a problem of finding the right definition, but of finding the right 'application'. The question isn't "it this alive?', but 'it is fair to count this as an individual to which what we call life would or would not apply in the first place'? This is where one leaves behind the empirical and enters the realm of the ethical and the political. Evelyn Fox Keller gets at some of what I'm trying to bring out when she asks: "These terms are themselves ambiguous: what exactly is a gene, and what does it do? Even more troublesome is the ambiguity of the term environment. Do we mean it to refer to everything other than DNA, to the milieu in which the fertilized ovum develops, or to the factors beyond the organism that affect its development? Finally, there is also the question, contributions to what?" (Fox-Keller, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture).

Doesn't it have to do with something like negentropy? Life appears to go against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but it really isn't because its an open system that takes in free energy from its surroundings and produces heat and entropy back. Life is what is a negentropic open system. — schopenhauer1

The problem is that negentropy defines any type of organization, from whirlpools to star systems. That is, negentropy isn't specific to life, even as life counts as among the most magnificent examples of negentropic organization.

I guess that may be more at the biophysics level of definition. But, are you asking whether life needs to have some sort of material substance like genetic material, to be considered life or is it more about the arrangement of the material? And if it is the arrangement of the material, what makes it different from any other arrangement of material? I'm just wondering if you can break down your post into a succinct question as far as the question of life you are proposing. — schopenhauer1

I guess the basic issue I'm grappling with is this: a genomic network is essentially indiscriminate with respect to what it counts as among its nodes - from a network perspective, whether a node is a biological element (say, DNA) or not is more or less irrelevant. All a network 'sees' is relations, structure, and threshold values. Of course, genes are necessary to, well, gene expression. But on the other hand, genes are also entirely inert, and they would in fact do and be nothing without the extra-biological scaffolding which enables that expression to take place in the first place. Consider this expanded, mirrored version of Waddington's epigenetic landscape:



Here it's more clear that life takes place 'in between' gene and environment, or the biological and the non-biological, which makes its exact specification very hard to place. Perhaps I can put it this way: if one can't identify the biological alone with life (insofar as there can be no such thing, strictly speaking, as 'biology alone'), then how exactly are we to situate 'life?'. I don't think, by the way, that this question can be answered categorically. I ultimately think that this is a political and even ethical question, rather than a strictly empirical one, but I want to specify, on the side of the empirical, as it were, why this would be the case.

Where do ‘species’ fit in? Surely they rate a mention at least as ‘nodes’ in the network? — Wayfarer

The OP is mostly concerned with developmental dynamics rather than evolutionary dynamics (despite the thread title!), so at this point the 'scale' of the discussion is limited to individual ontogeny rather than species-level phylogeny. There is, of course, the stupidly interesting question of former influences the latter, but that's probably a bit outside the bounds of the OP itself. I will say though, that one can think of a species as itself an individual (that is, subject to processes of individuation), which can itself populate a node among a larger ecological network.

Yep, the less sociobiological pseudoscience, the better.

Yeah, biosemiosis fits into this insofar as signs serve to regulate the dynamics of both development and evolution and helps us to speak of 'directedness' in both, but I'm unsure how to triangulate that with the question of life posed in the OP.

Really interesting. You, Apokrisis, fdrake, and a few others are often discourteous enough to try to tie the simplifications we play with in philosophy to the irreducibly complex real world. — T Clark

Come now! Philosophy is no more or less rich than the 'real world' of which it speaks - you give it too little credit!

He wrote that the most important genes in terms of impact on the organism are often those that control the rate or sequence of expression of other genes. — T Clark

Yeah, Gould was among the greatest champions of those who were dissatisfied with the 'gene-centrism' of biology, but even then, he hewed closely to the idea that genes were nonetheless the only units of heredity relevant to organisms, when this is more and more no longer thought to be the case.

Scotus is my favourite all of the mediaevals <3

Lol, you're unfortunately unfamiliar with the entire point of the shoutbox, which is a random thread to say pretty much whatever in. It's a throwback to the old forum where there was an actual shoutbox for the purposes of 'shouting' things into the void. I would be worried if anything in the shoutbox was relevant.

I think you should start a thread on this : )

Yeah, have to agree, it's a very weird bit of armchair psychobabble as far as I can tell.

It's unfortunate, but we'll probably never know the rate of suicide among the Neanderthals or what they could have been deprived of in order to reduce that rate. — Ciceronianus the White

Their God given right to die at extraordinarily disproportionate rates despite clear life saving-solutions, no doubt.

I understand the relation between state and family the other way around. The labour of women - grandmothers - in extended families was cheap and experienced. Families survived because granny looked after the kids while mum and dad worked. But families had to become more mobile in order to compete in the jobs market, so they left granny in an old people's home and went to find another job. So the burden of social care went unmet, unless by the state. Hence childcare and old people's homes and payments for stay-home carers. — Banno

Hmm, I have in mind other criteria though, such as declining family welfare support, deepening asset debt lubricated by low interest rates (particularly over family homes), student debt (in the US, a family matter), the fragmentation of the Fordist family wage into precarious low-level jobs so that wealth has to be pooled, etc etc. Admittedly, I've not looked at investment flows into either childcare or geriatric care, although I wouldn't be surprised to see a withdrawal of the state from those sectors either.

The local Liberals are a leaderless rabble, reliant on a plebiscite to decide their policies. — Banno

What worries me though are things like the recent welfare drug test 'trial', taken straight out of the US playbook for punishing the poor, along with the (Labour supported) flood of 'security legislation', with the parliament house fence being its most egregious and depressing symbol. And don't even get me started on the barely existent energy policy, where what does exist involves doing everything possible to support a dying, dirty, energy form while subsidising foreign investment into a long-term economic black hole that will be the Galilee basin. Aghhhh.

Mmm, and the fucking liberals here - the party - actually believe it; hence their slow but obvious uptake of cancerous American political values into the Australian system.

The myth of the self-suporting individual strikes me as a potent source for this; in a world were each man (!) looks out only for himself, any common, shared wealth is abhorrent. Support structures that allow folk to get back on their feet after adversity never developed in the US, leading to what you describe as the "societal bottom (being) essentially kicked away". — Banno

Twas me indeed! The history of the public support arm of the US government makes for inordinately depressing reading. Not only because - despite the recent rewriting of history - the upswell against it has only been a relatively recent 'invention' - dating specifically from around the time of Reagan - but because policy initiatives like the New Deal and the Great Society reforms were trending in the exact opposite direction! That is, there was nothing inevitable about the current US malaise, and it was brought about by consciously instigated policy choices set into motion by concrete historical actors. In fact, much of the discourse regarding the 'self-made individual' has been something of an after-the-fact ratiocination that was made to justify policy, rather than motivate it. It was, after all, politically expedient at time when the Evil of Communism - with all it's collectivist ways - could simply be diametrically set against the virtue of the individual. To blame it is again to mistake symptom for cause, although at this point in history, it has become a cause where it was once myth.

Another point about the so-called 'self-sufficient' individual is that at the level of policy, it has everywhere only ever been invoked along with the necessity of family. The logic has been as simple as it has been brutal: having decimated the social state, the burden of social care simply shifts to the family, who is at every point called upon to sustain the 'self-sustaining' individual, without any hint of irony (hence the oft-forgotten second part of Maggie Thatcher's declaration that 'there is no society, only individuals... and their families'). The American obsession over 'good, strong families' is of a piece with it's neoliberal efforts to gut the social state and render hollow the demos, along with any political power it might have to act collectively.

From what I can piece together, the main issue was that the societal bottom was essentially kicked away after the economic miracle of the post-war boom, entrenching inequalities, stalling social mobility, and upwardly distributing the means of capital accumulation. The effects of these dynamics were themselves 'covered over' by the expansion of credit and a relatively well-functioning economy, but which nonetheless fueled rising household debt that was not, importantly, coupled with a rise in real average income, leaving households ever more vulnerable to contingent life shocks, and ever more incapable of doing anything about such shocks. Any wonder why the electorate is so 'angry?'.

And then of course, there's the racial component of America's fucked up social dynamics, with the above economic considerations differentially and disproportionally affecting black Americans, who, starting at the bottom of the social ladder after and because of slavery, have largely been forced to stay there as a result of that kicking-away of the bottom. Even the expansion of the credit market mentioned above was largely for the benefit of whites, who, because of their better economic position, were extended loans denied to blacks, which afforded them the ability to buy suburban houses while blacks languished in cities which have been chronically under-maintained and over-subject to policing - this 'white flight' feeding back into, and amplifying the very differential economic dynamics that led to it in the first place.

And from here, feedback loops have continued to amplify: differential geographic distributions have in turn allowed politics to peddle itself to like-minded and closed communities polarizing the political landscape and destroying the basis of democracy, leading in turn to identity politics which, far from being a cause, is a symptom of the political-historical dynamics of the US. And of course the fact that the US is ever more transforming into a plutocracy - with corporations now granted the standing of 'people', coupled with the systematic undermining of labor law and class action claims, and corporate donations essentially now being legal bribes - has more or less dismantled the public-oriented focus of governance in the US for the sake of private interests. And this being only the most rudimentary of sketches of American decline.

Trump is simply the logical outcome of years of the festering wound that has been American social and political dynamics, and I agree that Hilary's election would have simply prolonged the mis/non-recognition of these issues.

Government's ability to regulate or control suicide is limited. — Ciceronianus the White

This, as we like to say these days, is fake news. As the NYT article I linked to notes, one of the easiest ways to change the suicide rate is to alter the conditions of access to easy means of suicide - as with Isreal's decision in 2006 to prevent soldiers from taking their service weapons home on weekends, leading to a 40% drop in the suicide rate. Or the dramatic drop in the English suicide rate when ovens were altered so that you couldn't gas yourself to death quite so easily. Still, I agree that this kind of reasoning, which would demonstrably and effectively save thousands of lives when translated into policy, would be a 'nonstarter' in the US - this, on account of the fact that the US is a society of Neanderthals for whom the imagery of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' plays a larger role in its reality-divorced self-image than the necropolis of dead guys which far better marks America's celebratory culture of death and social decay.

When 60% of US gun related deaths - 60% of an already ludicrously disproportionate rate of gun related deaths - are suicides, the polarization of the gun debate into 'good guys' vs 'bad guys' is insulting even to stupid people.

There's something both hilarious and pathetic about the language of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in American discussions of gun regulation; as if their discourse can't rise above the level of children's bedtime stories and fairytales. Undoubtedly why the whole issue is a nightmare over there.

Giorgio Agamben - The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days
Eva Jablonka & Marion Lamb - Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life

Speaking for myself, I do find the OP hard to follow. Without necessarily commenting on it's substance - which is obscure to me - it does seem to rely too heavily on imagery and metaphor to make it's argument, which makes the exact steps in logic hard to follow. At the very least, I think the exact flow of how you get from A to B needs to be tightened and made more explicit.

Cool to hear from someone with a partner who is trans. — darthbarracuda

Haha, no, not mate as in partner, mate as in friend. Sorry, it's my Australianess coming through, where all friends are referred to as mate.

With respect to your point though, I don't see why one's relation to one's own body - perhaps the most intimate, inescapable, and literally visceral 'part' of oneself - is here excluded as vector of self-expression. Surely our very bodies are among the most primary loci of our ability to 'express ourselves'? And while I agree that it shouldn't be a 'requirement' to have a certain physical body in order to express oneself, I don't think trans people undergo gender change out of a sense of requirement (from whence would such a requirement issue?), but for, well, perhaps many reasons besides (desire, confidence, need, anxiety, longing, etc?).

Do you think a transgender person can ever fully believe themselves to be not of their natal sex? — darthbarracuda

I do. I'd even say that this belief can, and perhaps does in many/most cases compel them to seek their change in gender. I would ask though, whether it is the case that anyone 'fully believes' that they 'are' their sex. One of the reasons that gender is so fraught is that there's always, as much as we'd like to deny it, a kind of perceptive dimension to gender: 'be a man!', 'stop throwing like a girl', 'that's not very feminine of you...'. There's always, I'd argue, a kind of distance between who we are and what we are when it comes to sex (and not just sex mind you, but all forms of identity - but that's another story). You can take this as a kind of psychoanalytic point: that we're all constitutively neurotic about our own sexuality - but some deal with that neuroticism in ways different to others.

I'm saying that I think it is reasonable to believe that, given a choice, most people "feel at home" more around those who are similar to each other. And in some cases this is indeed a rational thing to feel - i.e. when a woman feels comfortable in a women-only restroom knowing that she is safe(r), surrounded by other women who feel the same thing. — darthbarracuda

I don't disagree with this, but on the other hand, I think this is largely a matter of habit and habit formation. I can only in truth speak anecdotally here: I've been lucky enough to have grown up in places where 'mixing between races' was not only common, but the norm. That is, had you only hung around people of the same race, you'd have been the odd one out. That I did grow up among such circumstances is itself, I acknowledge, a rather rare and even privileged thing, and I get that for someone who didn't share this kind of upbringing, the 'feeling at home' that I have may not be shared. But the point of course, is that this also works in reverse - the 'feeling at home' among people of say, a similar color, is as much a product of habit formation as the habits that formed me. Which leads me to my next point, also anecdotal:

A transman will not be accepted as a man because he is not a man. You can go through the "motions" of being a man, get sex reassignment surgery, physically appear "as" a man, but this will not make you a man. — darthbarracuda

I have a trans mate. For all intents and purposes, I, and everyone I know, treats her as a woman. Perhaps you might say she is 'not really a woman', but - to what end? She certainly finds a certain joy and liberation though her gender, and you're right, it does, in the end, reinforce the 'system' of gender. But, in this case, the relationship to gender here is a healthy one, even if it does involve, no doubt, a certain amount of struggle (and who doesn't struggle with their sexuality?). To some extent I don't think there is a one-size fits all solution here - gender, like race, is a site of continual struggle and self/other-negotiation. One imagines that there would be others still who would be better off without having to negotiate gender at all. But how do we weigh these conflicting approaches here? I'm not convinced one can come up with a categorical solution - in every instance it's our actions, and the actions of those around us who determine what a healthy 'gender environment' might be.

Prodding seems like the gentler option, but it can be somewhat of an editorial headache that also tends to drag a thread down: what if the discussion remains superficial? Do you delete it after people have invested their time in it? Or worse, what if one or two well reasoned responses get mired in a largely superficial thread? What if the thread becomes a mix of feedback discussion and questions about modding and rules? It’s messy, and frankly, it’s better for a thread starter to start things off on the right foot, even if it means simply giving it another go (which is not hard!)

And look, another reason was that a question like ‘is all math a lie?’ implies some kind of intentional deceit or dishonesty, with all the provocation that that entails. I’ve no problem with provocative questions when provided with some context, but thrown out there with some banal comment like ‘well, what do you think?’ - well, sorry not sorry but that’s going to go almost immediately. Certainly more so than something like ‘What does the Categorial Imperative mean? Thx’ (don't any of you dare...).

Yeah, the exchange itself is fascinating - the honesty and openess of it. I suppose what I was trying to get at - having read again some of the exchange - is something like what Amy says here:

"What I’m left wondering is this: maybe the fear, in all these guys, including you, Scott, is not so much that they will commit aggression — it’s that they fear they’ll be seen behaving aggressively, and that there’ll be a price for that. Which really makes me wonder what the hell is going on, because at that point I begin to suspect that it doesn’t really have to do with women, who once again become not-real-people in the scenario, but with how the men will be seen and fare."

It's this sense of occlusion, I think, that I'm trying to put my finger on; a kind of hurt or fear that almost self-generates, and feeds off itself, which in turn obscures other, non-self-generated problems. Perhaps yet another way to frame this is in terms of temporality: the difference between a fear of that which has happened, is happening, and a fear of what will (possibly) happen. To the degree that one can speak of a calculus of fear, I guess I'm trying to say that as a general rule of thumb, it's the 'has-happened' and 'is-happening' that ought to take priority against that which may happen, especially if we're trying to respond or act in the face of such fears, real as they all may be.

--

As an aside, I also very much liked Laurie Penny's response too, which was along the lines of - 'we suffer this too... and more':

"[Scott] Aaronson was taught to fear being a creep and an objectifier if he asked; I was taught to fear being a whore or a loser if I answered, never mind asked myself. ... Scott, imagine what it's like to have all the problems you had and then putting up with structural misogyny on top of that." source

The whole episode attests in general to unhealthy gender relations that can't be 'blamed' on any one gender or movement in particular, but is a matter of cultural atmospherics, almost, in which both sexes are get caught, in their own, specific ways. But again, the trick is in recognising the sources of each, and crafting appropriate responses.

Of course 'man' has an essence: man is essentially destined to the accidents that befall him, of necessity.

It was two lines, one of which was the thread title. Had it had a minimum of content like even your post just then fish, I'd have been fine with it. But a question dangling in the ether does not a thread make. Again, feel free to start a thread on the topic if it interests you. As a general rule, questions have stakes - the difference it makes if one were to answer it one way or another - and stakes can be - ought to be - expanded upon, especially here, on a philosophical discussion board.

If it's such an important question then there should be plenty for you to say about it beyond the two lines that was your thread. Feel free to try again with a bit more for people to chew on.

I deleted it because it lacked any substantive content for discussion.

Without commenting on transgenderism per se, I think it's too narrow to see gender as only oppressive. I think gender itself can be a vector of self-expression, to the extent that one can find joy in the expression of one's masculinity or femininity, to the extent that a gender may be as much as site of bonding, fraternity and empowerment as any other form of identification/differentiation. Which is not to say that gender is only this, but that it is, as it were, ambivalent between it's 'good' and it's 'bad' faces. The trick is in negotiating the concrete circumstances that one finds one's gender in.

I think Chu's examples are misleading and don't effectively make his case. He compares a man who felt bad to a woman who was raped. That's really not fair. Why not compare women to the men who die younger than women, commit suicide and are murdered more often, or get cancer more often. I really don't want to do the my oppression is worse than yours thing. To me, those are arguments from resentment and a failure of empathy rather than from reason and awareness. I think they are intellectually dishonest. — T Clark

I think that the comparison is unfair is exactly the point! Remember that Chu is writing in response to a piece by another person who is not complaining about the threat of dying younger than women, committing suicide more often, or being at a higher risk of cancer or violent death. He is responding quite specifically to someone who was writing about the - for lack of a better word - oppression he felt when having to talk or even interact with women in a romantic way. That's the context of the piece. In a different context I think it may have been appropriate to bring up the issues you mention. But in this one they would be very strange indeed.

I agree with jamalrob that all these forms of hurt are real and need to be taken seriously, so I'm not sure that the term "hypothetical hurt" is helpful but we should always make recourse to the concept of victimhood and recognize the difference between a true victim, one who suffers as the result of a clear and demonstrable injustice (like Amy or victims of gun crime) and a self-proclaimed victim, one who suffers as a result of a perceived injustice (like Scott and opponents of gun regulation). The hurt is real but the victimhood may be invented or relatively trivial. — Baden

Yeah, this is a nice distinction actually, a refinement that you're right, is probably more useful in thinking about this. It does make me think though, of another rubric by which to approach these general issues, which is the question of proportion. I think another, complementary way to assess claims to victimhood is by means of proportionality: one of the things that motivated me to think about these issues was the wildly out-of-proportion response to the suggestion that gun regulation ought to be tightened in the US - it was suggested, among other things, that any move in this direction would be essentially tainted by a nefarious motive to eventually ban all guns, or else make them impossible to access. As if this very motive itself was reason enough to countervail the actual mass death that has been occurring across the country for the last couple of decades.

(I imagine a set of balancing scales, with thousands of actual, real lost lives on one arm, and the hypothetical, almost entirely ephemeral threat of the loss or prohibition of guns on the other, and cannot imagine that the one could even remotely figure as a consideration over the other). Again, it's not the actual arguments that interest me so much as trying to refine my, uh, 'instincts for assessment' when it comes to arguments about social or political issues; what kinds of things I or we ought to pay attention to, the kinds of distinctions we place and the weighting we assign to each. Anyway, again, just hashing thoughts out in the process of discussing them.

The thing is though, that context matters; I have no doubt that Scott's feelings were real - all too real (as were your PTSD anxieties). He really did feel persecuted, belittled, etc, etc. Perhaps the brain chemistry might have even been the same, or at least similar to that of Amy. But it's equally important to acknowledge the differential genesis of those fears, which in turn require different responses when it comes to policy or attempts at redress. And it's this latter which I want to keep in view: my interest is not in assessing different 'kinds' of hurt 'in-itself', as a point of metaphysical categorization, as it were. It's in what kinds of conclusions we ought to draw from those differing claims to hurt.

Yeah that's fair - it's less a matter of dismissing such speculative hurt than putting it in its place, or seeing it for what it is, as it were. With respect to debates over feminism, one thing I've always been keen to emphasize is that gender issues for men are issues of feminism as well; hyper-masculinity, and the converse feeling of shame at not living up to it (for example), is as much a product of messed up gender relations as female hurt. I remember watching parts of the 'Red Pill' movie and thinking - 'these people ought to be feminism's allies, not their adversaries - they're fighting for the same thing!'

But that's not necessarily applicable in all instances of course. In the case of the same-sex marriage debate, there's little to no complementary there: the projected hurt to children is entirely made up, and it is being leveraged to enforce existing, real hurt. And of course, my not-so-subtle motivation for this thread has to do with the recent gun debates, where fear over imagined futures have been privileged to a hyperbolic degree in disproportion to the actual, life life disproportion of death by gun in order to cast aspersions over even over the vaguest mention of the possibility of regulatory measures.