WRT: the Bali story

No matter what your position may be, you need to be clear on the stakes and the circumstances here. It's really easy to minimize the scope when you're defensive of something.

It's never "just one couple" becoming expats. Even her thread alone showed that.

You encourage your friends to join . You show how you are able to leverage a combination of American passport privilege and manipulated economic discrepancies to your advantage. Fast forward two-three years, you have a whole community of people that have taken hold.

And *that* is what her thread was encouraging. It is not a passive behavior. It *is* active exploitation of meager community resources, without consideration of how it harms people locally and what that means for the indigenous Indonesian population that has been suffering.

It is hard to uphold the Black asylee argument when you are still utilizing American resources to maintain a classed lifestyle in a country that is both directly affected by the US and has an average living wage far below what you are bringing in.

We can discuss what ethical participation in the global south should look like. But that is a *discussion* with acknowledgement that there are institutional structures that afford people an easier experience, by default. and it comes at cost.

Can you imagine being queer Indigenous and seeing expats tell their friends that their country was "queer-friendly" without acknowledgement what allows them to get away with that like did we even get into THAT part