An American digital nomad sparked an
ongoing heated debate on Twitter after she wrote a thread about moving
to Bali, which didn’t sit well with many Indonesians who have accused
her of being culturally tone-deaf.
The thread, which may have been
intended as a guide to “how you can thrive in life,” starts out simple
enough: the woman said she decided to book a one-way flight to Bali with
her girlfriend after spending most of 2019 out of work. The island,
where she’s been for a little over a year now, is where she has built
her own graphic design business and where she lives for only US$400 a
month in a “treehouse,” which is peanuts compared to her US$1,300 per month Los Angeles studio.
The woman described Bali as a
“perfect medicine” for her physical and emotional health, and went on to
list the benefits of living here: safety, low cost of living, luxury
lifestyle, and acceptance towards LGBT people. She also shared her
positive experience as a black woman with the black community in Bali,
before wrapping the thread with a link to her US$30 e-book, Our Bali Life is Yours, which is “a guide breaking down how we did it and how you can do it too.”
The woman in question has locked her
account after the immediate backlash that’s been going on over the
weekend and well into this morning. The thread was met with sub-tweets,
thousands of replies and quote-tweets, where people called her out for
her privilege as a foreigner in Indonesia and pointed out how her guide
is basically a recipe for gentrification.
The thread was problematic for a
variety of reasons, including the irresponsible labeling of Bali as
“queer-friendly” despite the fact that members of the LGBTQ community in
Indonesia live in fear of persecution and are targeted by authorities
and conservative groups. Her idea of “low cost of living” also points to
a deeply entrenched issue that shouldn’t be brushed off when talking
about tourism in Bali, where a US$400 rent is affordable for a visiting
foreigner but the provincial minimum wage is only about US$177.
Furthermore, it’s rightly disturbing
that she would encourage people to skirt immigration rules to get around
the imposed travel restrictions during a pandemic, especially when
Indonesia is still struggling to keep the COVID-19 crisis under control.
With the nature of Twitter
discussions tending to go in all kinds of directions, Indonesians have
also been accused of perpetuating anti-blackness for calling out a black
woman. However, it’s worth noting that while Indonesia does have its issues with racism,
this particular controversy was never about race. It is not even the
first time that a foreigner has gotten flak for abusing their privilege
in Bali, often at the expense of local residents.
The woman’s thread compounds complex
issues surrounding Bali, including its model of unsustainable tourism,
which is illustrated with the province being the worst-hit economy
in Indonesia due to the coronavirus outbreak. There are also problems
at the official level, where authorities unofficially tolerate digital
nomads who stay here for prolonged periods without paying due taxes.
If anything, the viral controversy
has shown that Indonesians are more vocal than ever about these issues.
While official policy changes may take longer to manifest, ordinary
citizens are clearly not backing away from telling foreigners to check
their privilege.
I went to a bookshop and I got dizzy at the amount of books on stuff like “astrological feminism” “reclaiming womanhood through numerology” and all that shit…… One was called “cosmic fanny” or for my french speakers out there, “foufoune cosmique”. I think the fight against patriarchy is going really well
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
superimposing the destiel ending onto straight characters is a very fun thing to do i do recommend it. doomsday but rose just doesn’t really come up after that and the bbc aggressively insists the doctor was going to say “i wish you the best my very good pal.” han says “i love you” to leia instead before he gets frozen in carbonite. she doesn’t say anything back and they just don’t bother to rescue him and he’s not really an important character after that. mulder confesses his love to scully, then gets immediately abducted by aliens, followed by two episodes where scully solves the plot problems, eats ice cream, and then dies for unrelated reasons. that’s the ending.
