thought digest, 06.29.22  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

	Open in browser I don't understand freedom of religion. thought digest, 06.29.22 Katherine Dee Jun 29 Huis te Vraag cemetery in Amsterdam Credit: A Course in Dying Greetings from the Netherlands! Before anyone gets mad at me, the title is clickbait. Anyway, I forgot to bring an AC adapter, so I have been mostly unable to write. It’s been a strange blessing: I still tweet too much, but this is the most real vacation I’ve been on since 2017. My vacations are always pockmarked by work—I’m never able just to do nothing. I feel very lucky that I have mostly done nothing in Amsterdam.   Everything is much slower in the Netherlands. It’s syrupy, and there’s no indication that it’s because people have more joie de vivre or have mastered a more sophisticated way of life, the kind of thing the most pretentious among us say is foreign to Americans who eat fast, walk fast, do everything fast, and appreciate nothing. It feels like everyone is sleepwalking. People linger in crosswalks and doorways, not because they’re talking to people or whatever, they’re simply unaware that the next thing to do is to cross the street or the threshold; at museums, everyone seems unaware that the expectation is to migrate from one piece to the next, and I don’t understand how pedestrians aren’t colliding with bicycles at every intersection. And who knows, it’s possible, maybe likely, that none of these people are Dutch; they’re all tourists, the same people who annoy me back home. Perhaps I am slow like this. But I missed a train in the suburbs on a quest to get an Indonesian dessert because a woman about my age stood in the middle of the sidewalk for at least a full minute, blocking the door. At any rate, I am having a nice time. It’s nice to leave my house; it’s nice that the sun doesn’t set until 10 pm, and it’s nice that Amsterdam is an explosion of very beautiful parks. plz share Share Here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about during my time here: Twitter’s new autoblock feature. During my first night here, I discovered that I had been auto-blocked by a prominent journalist from a low follower/low following locked account. What is autoblocking? Autoblocking is a feature exclusively available to a select group of beta users who have access to another feature called Safety Mode. Autoblocking is precisely what it sounds like. If somebody replies to you—even from a private, locked account, that is, one whose posts you can’t see unless you’re following it—and Twitter deigns that response ‘abusive,’ then that somebody will receive an automatic block for seven days. In my case, I got it for some pretty mild criticism, for an audience of under a hundred, about a journalist with half a million followers. It’s unclear to me how tech companies will be able to square breaking up echo chambers (supposedly a priority in our post-Trump, post-Roe, disinformation-rich landscape) and the oversensitivity of their users. The Internet is full of things you don’t want to hear, and features like ‘autoblocking’ make eliminating those things even easier. On the one hand, I get it: if I could autoblock people the once-a-quarter I get dogpiled for my appearance and have the option to unblock them once they’re over calling me ugly automatically, I probably would. Plenty of people whose takes I otherwise really enjoy have gotten the block from me simply because I couldn’t handle seeing another person remind me of the obvious. How I can still like their content if they’ve been mean to me? Because on the other hand, trolling is impersonal, even when the subject is persistent. When people say this or that about me, it’s not about me the person, it’s about me, the avatar. It’s better I accept that now than defer it to later. The same goes for anyone. Being hated is the cost of admission for a large following, and there’s no way around it. Nobody is a protected class; it’s not worse for women than it is for men, and it’s not a human right to remain un-bullied online. Community standards are all well and good, but if Twitter wants to root out bullying, they’ll need to go a shade further than “Safety Mode” and change the site’s incentives and user interface. But I’m of two minds on it, clearly. Someone recently sent me a tweet exchange that went something like, “Nobody has to see you a particular way,” and a reply that said, “Yes, they do.” I sense that tension is a critical component of today’s social problems. The internet forces you to repeatedly hear unkind truths about yourself, even if you don’t want to hear them. It also equips you with the tools to delude yourself—to move from simply avoiding cruelty to naming any incongruence between how others view you and how you view yourself as a uniquely terrible type of bullying. I might be over-intellectualizing the autoblock here, but it seems like one more tool in that toolbox: you’re not even allowed to personally, privately, to an audience of four friends conceptualize me as anything other than what I see myself as.   Share Default Wisdom Freedom of religion. A dicey argument I’ve been making since the overturning of Roe v. Wade is that freedom of religion doesn’t make sense to me. This is one of these things that’s dying to be misunderstood and that I’m neither articulate enough nor studied enough to express properly. The kind of thing naturally attracted “I can’t believe you’re being a contrarian on this one” DMs from well-meaning but nosy liberal friends. What I mean by “freedom of religion doesn’t make sense to me” is that how we talk about religion in the United States undermines what religion is. The concept of “freedom of religion” doesn’t square with being a person of faith, not when you really think about it. Religion is not an etiquette where you can wrap your mind around other people being on a different page than you are on any given issue. It’s deeper than, "Jane asks me to take my shoes off when I enter her apartment, I don’t agree, but I’ll do it, so long as she doesn’t judge me for keeping mine on in my home.” Especially on an issue as serious as murder. These beliefs aren’t ones you can try on and take off like it’s nothing. You can reasonably expect someone to ‘get over’ that you don’t think Christ is your or anyone else’s savior. It is a different story to ask them to change their definition of murdering an infant. If you genuinely believe that abortion is murdering infants, then you will be horrified by any instance of it happening. I understand why you, the Reader, may not think this is what abortion is. I’m also not saying that this is what I think. I am saying that the “freedom of religion” argument feels flimsy. Instagram stories about how in Judaism, life doesn’t begin at conception aren’t going to convince a Christian that abortion isn’t murder. If anything, it’s going to make them think that Jewish people endorse murdering babies (by the way, it should go without saying, but I feel like I still have to say, obviously, Jewish people do not endorse murder). So, what do you do? It feels like all you can do is: A.    Argue why they should not want to protest (what they view as) ongoing murder. B.     Re-define ‘murder.’   This is a more complicated issue than anyone’s willing to let on, and I’m not sure how we reached a place where the media consensus on abortion is, “It’s a no-brainer, abortion should be legal.” How could it be so simple when there’s no shared ethical foundation in the States? “Do not murder” in itself isn’t a shared value—arguably, making something like insulin unaffordable for some is a form of murder. See what I mean? Anyway, I’m getting a little too weed-smoking Redditor here, so moving on to some trend forecasting...   subscribe? Subscribe now A new type of leftist. Here’s a knee-jerk opinion I have close to no proof for the amorphous group of commentators, podcasters, and personalities that the Press named “the New Right” (despite there already having been a New Right whose texts had been re-popularized in 2014 and 15) fumbled the bag. I was one of those people who genuinely believed that we’d see a robust right-slanted counterculture be commodified into, at the very least, the mainstream media, with its core talking points sanitized and its aesthetic re-packaged and sold to teenagers, who could then go on and scandalize their parents with it. I’m less confident about that now. My gut feeling is that it’s been de-fanged and it’ll return to belonging to a niche. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend reading this Vanity Fair article. I think part of the reason this happened was there were just too many strange bedfellows, and not only strange bedfellows, but people who were on the Right because they were not Left. It’s this latter group who were most visible: not the Dissident Right ecosystem, but rather, their imitators, the intermediaries between them and the Press. These intermediaries might be somebody who dilutes Bronze Age Pervert to merely a right-coded fitness influencer (which he obviously is not) to sell a product or lifestyle or a podcaster who affects reactionary beliefs to differentiate herself in an over-saturated market. Still, they are not somebody ‘closer to the source.’ They are ideological tourists. So what’s next? Here’s where I’m placing my bets: I think the stronger personalities in the New Right milieu will shift their content to be more about media/tech criticism. The genuinely right-wing people will remain right-wing, but those who had no vested interest in a rightist world or who valued being a capital-p Personality over advancing any particular political goal will be more focused on tech’s impact on us without a straightforward program attached to it. I can envision a time where the type of Dimes Square pseudo-rightism once copied by teenagers is eclipsed by a self-conscious engagement with body/mind dualism through the lens of NFTs or something. We’re already kind of there, I just don’t think some flyover state teenager knows what a Milady is yet. Anyway, you know what I’m trying to say here. Out with the pretending to be Catholic, in with “the medium is the message”-posting. As for what I think their foils will be… Well, I think I was right that wokeness as we know it is hitting a wall. It’s out of gas. I still believe that trend analysis, past and present, has a real future. People would much rather hear post-mortems about fashion or specific color palettes than how to decolonize your vocabulary. But I also think that we’ll see a new type of self-critical leftism as a reaction to the excesses of wokeness. I am imagining a new genre of think piece: a microwave dinner version of existing right-wing criticisms, with a new and improved recipe to make it optimally palatable for people who drank the wokeness Koolaid. I think this will be distinct from the Dirtbag Left in that it won’t be overtly political, and distinct from people who shifted from center-left to center-right after a brush with cancellation. Anyway, take this with a pinch of salt in every direction. My thoughts on this constantly evolve, and to my dismay, I am not psychic. Anyway, I want to write much more, but we’re already at 1,800 words here and I’m not certain that any of these 1,800 made a lick of sense. Hopefully, I’ll have more for you next week. Leave a comment Like Comment Share You’re a free subscriber to Default Wisdom. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. Subscribe © 2022 Default Friend 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe