Newsletter: September 2024

Autonomist faith

🔍 I am exploring the concept of the soul in Confucianism. The artificial narrative would have us believe that this question is firmly settled; namely, that Confucius did not believe in an individual soul. Yet I find Thomas Wilson's "Spirits and the Soul in Confucian Ritual Discourse" to be convincing. Do you know more about this than I do? Please, contact me.

🛠 In preparation for researching compatibility between Jainism and Autonomist faith, I am building a reference list that will guide me through the many questions I'm sure to have about a religion I have not encountered. If any readers have experience with Jainism and would be willing to mentor me on this adventure, please get in touch.

Kinship Secretorum

😷 I've noted recently that the State of North Carolina (USA), the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) and the Nassau County in the State of New York (USA) have all enacted bans on wearing masks in public. Those governments join governments in US states like Ohio and Florida which have dug up old anti-masking laws to intimidate people and compel them to reveal their bodies and identities in public, even if they don't want to. Other elected officials in other governments in the USA are expressing interest in having their own mask bans.

One tenet of the Kinship is that I must accept responsibility for choosing privacy expressions that protect my body and my identity appropriately for whichever context I am in at the moment. I cannot opt-out of existing in the physical world nor moving among public places. Making the choice to protect my body and identity using an action, such as covering my body, is a choice that I, or anyone, might make, anywhere we didn't feel safe. It's a choice I would be most likely to make when I am in an unprotected public place. The idea that some government agent would criminalize this basic choice — the choice to protect my body and identity when I feel unsafe — is a clear violation of personal autonomy, as well as a violation of the tenets that we hold sacred in the Kinship. 

If any of our Kin live in the USA under a government agency that is violating our beliefs in this way, please let me know so that we can work together to protect you. 

Privacy

👯 I'm reading Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society by Anita Allen. This is a book highly referenced by scholars and those who care about privacy. Published in 1988, my impression so far is that Allen is a soul who is clearly communicating realities that are inspired and profound.

😧 Police in Essex copied biometric information from every unprotected person that walked by their mass surveillance vans in Harlow on September 15. This is a violation of a soul's ability to exist in the world without having their private biometric information stolen and then used in ways they never chose.

The group responsible for this violation justified it by appealing to the public's fear of crime, and they perpetrated the violation by coercing the trust choices of the people who were caught up in the mass collection. Souls walking by were given no choice except to "trust" those official agents who were invading their bodies and identities. This false and fake "trust" is no different than prison guards claiming they may do whatever they wish with prisoners, because prisoners are required to "trust" the guards.

Aenorium

👢 I tried to start a new subreddit about privacy, and posted a little content to it (Reddit recommends starting with 10 posts, I got to 3). I started setting things up, when both the subreddit and my account were apparently banned. I don't know why! It's likely that the humans over at Reddit have given up control of the site to algorithms and automated decision-making.

What if the authorities in our cities did the same?

Stay private,

AƎ