Stupid I Wish I Was Hot

I talk frequently about how ignorant most Global North citizens are about the immigration policies of their own and other countries. When my husband and I (Global North citizens of different countries) got married, we had conversation after conversation with people who assumed that by producing our marriage certificate we could simply become residents of each other’s countries— and that we could not be refused residence in each other’s countries, as separating a husband and wife could surely not be allowed. 

More interestingly, a lot of people seem to refuse knowledge about immigration, perhaps because it can’t be integrated into some deep and important picture of the world that they have. My parents can’t make themselves believe that my British husband would get in trouble if he overstayed his visa “just a couple of days” in the US, or that I (an American) would ever get deported from the UK, no matter what the circumstances. This is not only because they believe that British and American citizens, as Global North citizens, are specially exempt from the systems that are “meant” to regulate other kinds of people, but also because fundamentally they believe that government and its processes are rational and just. They must believe that government and its processes are rational and just, because otherwise their whole picture of the world— the means by which they understand it— would collapse.

This is all fairly simple and obvious. What is not so simple and obvious is the way that their privileged ignorance, the hothouse resilience of their fantasy world, is part of a mechanism through which the “work of knowing” in our society is outsourced to the underprivileged. (The privileged do not have to know in a way that disrupts their fantasy, because not-knowing has no consequences for them.) This is an interesting dynamic, because many postcolonial theorists (Sara Ahmed, Dipesh Chakrabarty, etc) have explored how the Global South is typically portrayed as that-which-is-known-by-the-Global-North, and therefore as not capable of knowing. So what does it mean that the tools of regulation remain in the hands of the Global North, but that the knowledge of regulation is a burden borne by the Global South? There is an element here of knowing as knowing-your-place, for sure— learning to be interpellated as the illegal and the undesirable. The knowing that is happening also constitutes the production of the illusive “just and rational” world that sustains the Global North. I’m interested in the way that the dehumanization of the Global South therefore serves to sustain the rational and just Human and humaneness of the Global North. There’s an abjectification that is necessary for this— as anyone who has experienced universal healthcare knows, more just and equitable care/distribution of resources often means that more privileged people get less-nice things than they have been led to expect, so if they want to continue to enjoy the same standard of living allowed them by unjust and non-equitable care, they must rationalize this somehow. And how does one rationalize having been, by chance, born in the right geographic area? One can’t. One must, instead, believe that this is not how privilege is allotted, which required not-knowing that this is how privilege is allotted. 

If covid hadn't happened I would've had a foursome by now

I think it's very funny how many people on tumblr can't recognise how much they abuse thought-terminating cliches when discussing veganism

freaks in my DMs…. 😑

i look at beautiful women and their men and just know there’s something inherently wrong and different about me

god ugh i wish i wasn’t so fucking ugly

freaks in my tumblr dms GO AWAY

i am also vegan because cattle farming is the main cause of amazon deforestation and illegal land seizures fom indeginous brazilians

i am also vegan because the shrimp industry enslaves and abuses migrant fishermen from south-east asia

i am also vegan because animal agriculture is one of the main drivers of climate change, which most affects the poorest on earth

i am also vegan because european fishing vessels are systematically stealing fish from somalian waters

i am also vegan because we could directly feed an additional 1 billion people with some of the food we feed to livestock animals

i am also vegan because animal agriculture is a main driver of antibiotic resistance, which killed 1,27 million people in 2019

i am also vegan because i believe it is wrong to exploit the planet and the most vulnerable populations for the sake of sensory pleasure

i bet in heaven they're still on 3g phone service because they have to purify all the technology of sin but in hell they've got fucking 7g just blasting terabytes worth of the hottest demon porn right into your prostate