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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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without Natural Law I can retort "What's wrong with disease? Why should we value being healthy over sick? Sickness is just an arbitrary category that society puts on those who do not conform to it's expectations."

And we arrive at the bonkers ideology of fat acceptance.

I think a compounding (and also, maybe somehow, complementing?) factor here is that Natural Law is implications in the direction of morality and moral absolutism. In the same way that arbitrariness creates more chaos and leads to negative outcomes for society, moral relativism creates far more pain, chaos, and evil than it "defeats" through its message of radical acceptance. A dirty trick that a lot of intellectually dishonest folks play is to intentionally conflate something amoral with something definitely moral(istic). Take for example the fat acceptance movement...he/she isn't a bad person for being fat! Of course. No one is disagreeing here. But a doctor will tell you you are an unhealthy person for being obese. Unhealthy? How dare you.

But excessive moralism has always been a favorite safety blanket of folks of all stripes. People have always traded social status for anything and everything else for more than they ought to for all of time. Being "right" may, in fact, feel a million times better than being independent and self-sufficient.

But, to quote the noted bard, Tyga, "I don't want to be famous / I just want to be rich."