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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.

Something that Americans also adopted the instant the birth-control pill hit the shelves (hippies were famous for this- they said free love was natural for a reason, but every "all-natural" person exhibits profound ignorance of what technological advancement lets you see as natural, like how everything you eat has been specifically bred for gigantism). Being able to not get pregnant on a whim is a massively transformative technology; so is having so much food the poor only starve if they're explicitly trying to, for that matter (and the Germans invented the chemical process that makes that possible, too).

traditional religious morality

The foundation of traditional religious morality is not meaningfully distinguishable from "sex bad" (no other intelligent examination other than "Bible says it's bad"), so it makes sense traditions holding that viewpoint get absolutely bodied by the new reality that a good chunk of why it was destructive is now obviated. Some traditionalists have tacitly accepted this, but they won't actually say it for Overton window reasons.

The more intelligent traditionalists focus on "but a woman who has a body count is spiritually degraded" for that reason- if they had any better arguments, I think they'd be making them, but they aren't. So "vibes" (and "men want virgins", when they're being more honest- and I can accept that doing things that help men would make society better, but in a general sense rather than this specifically) is obviously the best they have.

I'm sympathetic to those for whom biology meshes better with first-century sexual norms, but they're too busy thinking with their other head in this matter. So putting them in charge in a context where technology has obviated most of the previous reality they cling to is (rightly) viewed by everyone else as destructive. (The same is true when you put women doing that in charge, but rejecting that is an even more cutting-edge idea.)