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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Well, an activist's argument might merely be "you call fatness a disease to enforce your preferred aesthetic on society". My argument is that in addition, an activist calls fatness not-disease to enforce their preferred aesthetic on society

And my point is that they're wrong and this isn't a symmetrical situation.

If this was just about preferring or not preferring curry or fish and chips this symmetrical framing work. But that's not the discussion.

Which is why they would argue for medical or social interventions to remove the bad things about being fat,

But not the bad things I care about. The ambiguity in "bad things" is doing a lot of work here. They fight to remove social stigma. They have no answer to the unavoidable bedrock issue (health).

If they actually had a pill that made fat people as spry and healthy as thin people I would bet that our dislike would inevitably dissolve, just as it has for other situation where the downsides are purely social or we have otherwise mitigated the non-social ones (e.g. dreadlocks, unattached sex). But we aren't there.

So, in the absence of that precondition, you might as well say that I am trying to impose my aesthetic preference against smog and the corporation is trying to impose its aesthetic preference for smog.

In some sense, this can be said to be correct. But would you choose this framing? It misleads more than it enlightens.

In all of these cases, there has got to be a second value difference:

Not in this case. Because they haven't actually cleared the first hurdle (being fat is actually tied to real problems that don't boil down to people being mean)

When they invent the fat pill and people are still against fatness then this argument would work.